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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

ACORN Paying Occupy Wall Street Protesters

I wonder: would this outlay of funds be considered tax deductible? And are the homeless who’ve been recruited and employed being given an opportunity to unionize? FOX:

The former New York office for ACORN, the disbanded community activist group, is playing a key role in the self-proclaimed “leaderless” Occupy Wall Street movement, organizing “guerrilla” protest events and hiring door-to-door canvassers to collect money under the banner of various causes while spending it on protest-related activities, sources tell FoxNews.com.

The former director of New York ACORN, Jon Kest, and his top aides are now busy working at protest events for New York Communities for Change (NYCC). That organization was created in late 2009 when some ACORN offices disbanded and reorganized under new names after undercover video exposes prompted Congress to cut off federal funds.

NYCC’s connection to ACORN isn’t a tenuous one: It works from the former ACORN offices in Brooklyn, uses old ACORN office stationery, employs much of the old ACORN staff and, according to several sources, engages in some of the old organization’s controversial techniques to raise money, interest and awareness for the protests.
 Sources said NYCC has hired about 100 former ACORN-affiliated staff members from other cities – paying some of them $100 a day – to attend and support Occupy Wall Street. Dozens of New York homeless people recruited from shelters are also being paid to support the protests, at the rate of $10 an hour, the sources said.

At least some of those hired are being used as door-to-door canvassers to collect money that’s used to support the protests.

Sources said cash donations collected by NYCC on behalf of some unions and various causes are being pooled and spent on Occupy Wall Street. The money is used to buy supplies, pay staff and cover travel expenses for the ex-ACORN members brought to New York for the protests.

In one such case, sources said, NYCC staff members collected cash donations for what they were told was a United Federation of Teachers fundraising drive, but the money was diverted to the protests.
 Sources who participated in the teachers union campaign said NYCC supervisors gave them the addresses of union members and told them to go knock on their doors and ask for contributions—and did not mention that the money would go toward Occupy Wall Street expenses. One source said the campaign raked in about $5,000.

Wait, the same teacher’s union that would financially benefit from Obama’s “Jobs Act” is helping gin up hatred of “the rich” so that Obama can sell that very same “Jobs Act” and demagogue the GOP as defenders “of the 1%”?

The hell, you say!

Message to all the useful idiots: you are sleeping in tents, covered in your own filth, in an effort to promote the very kind of corporatism and liberal fascism that you are ostensibly against. Only the beneficiaries are public sector unions and a centralized authority, not the corporate fat cats whose cartoon versions you’ve been taught by rote to hate.

Ironic, isn’t it?
(h/t JMF)
source ProteinWisdom

For more related, go to: ACORN linked to Occupy Wall Street protest, says DC watchdog