Socialist Versus Progressive

Floor Speech

Mr. KING of Iowa. I very much appreciate you recognizing me to address the House of Representatives and you today. As we near the close of this week and I listened to the emphatic presentation of the gentleman from New York and the more low-key, but I think equal conviction, presentation of the gentleman from Minnesota, it caught my ear that the gentleman from New York gave us a definition of socialism. He said, Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. I'm going to tell you that I believe that is a closer definition to communism than it is socialism.

Yet, I think the people who are the self-professed socialists in this country know who they are, and I think we should know who they are. They are the members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Web site dsausa.org is the central source, the most important and influential source of socialist thinking in America.

They write in there--and I have a whole series of documents since the gentleman made the statement about what socialists are. I have spent a little time probing around in this Web site location. And I find out some things in there that I think the public should know, Mr. Speaker.

It tells about the organization. It says that, We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit. Socialists reject private profit. Now that didn't seem to be what I heard the gentleman from New York say.

They also reject alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, which certainly I also reject, environmental destruction and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, and a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality and non-oppressive relationships, like having to work ``for the man.''

These socialists have a difference. On the Web site dsausa.org, there is a link that opens up and it says--first, it leads with, We are not Communists. Now I have always been very suspicious of any group that would start out with: I'm not a Communist. But the Democratic Socialists of America, that's how they start it.

They say, We're not Communists. Communists want to control everything. They want to nationalize everything. They want to nationalize not only the major corporations, the industry refining industry, the automobile manufacturers, the banks, the insurance companies, the lending companies. The Communists want to do all that and they want to nationalize small business: the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, to keep it simple, Mr. Speaker. That's communist by the definition of the socialists on dsausa.org Web site for the Democratic Socialists of America.

They also contend on those Web site links that they are a political party and they do support candidates, but they just don't actively ask them to carry around with them the socialist label. You'll find at the Web site dsausa.org that the people who are their candidates are labeled themselves and by the socialist Web site as progressives. That would be the blue posters we saw within the last hour. The Progressive Caucus. And we wonder what progressives are.

Well, they are socialists. They have a far bigger influence on this Congress than the public is aware. There are 75 members of the Progressive Caucus that are

listed on their Web site.

Now, there was a time that you could have gone to the socialist Web site and opened up the link and read down through the list of the members of the Progressive Caucus who are, every one of them a Democrat in this Congress, and every one is claimed by the socialists as being the legislative party and arm of their political activism.

You cannot disconnect progressive and socialist. You can't give them a different definition. And if you wonder about the heritage and the genesis of progressives, their Web site was hosted by the socialists up until a few years ago. And when it became known publicly that the socialist Web site was actually managing the progressives' Web site--and you can go down the list: Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Stalinist, Communist, Socialist, Progressive. You see where I've gone. It's less egregious to be a progressive than a socialist. So they took another step away.

Socialists took a step away from communism because communism had a bad name. And they stepped away from it and they defined themselves differently and put it on their Web site. They said, Well, we're not communists because we don't want to do all these things. But they also say progressives are socialists. They're our people. And they used to host their Web site. Now the Progressive Caucus does their own Web site. But they advocate directly from the legislative agenda of the social Web site. Facts easy to find at dsausa.org.

Now what does a socialist do that's different than a communist? That's the question. Communists want to nationalize everything. They want to control the means of all production. They want to nationalize the corporations because the corporations aren't running consistent with their belief. And they want to also nationalize the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Small business. That's communists.

Socialists, right on their Web site, speaking presumably for the progressives as well, that they're anticorporate. They don't want to go nationalized to small business because they believe that small business can actually function okay without being repressive of the worker and can produce hair cuts and set up beer upon the bar and maybe hand you a sandwich out through the deli without them having to be involved as government in any means except to oppressively tax the profits that come. And then if you set up a sandwich store and it turns out to be a sandwich chain and it gets big enough, then they're going to want to nationalize it.

That's what socialists do. They want to nationalize corporations, large corporations. And it's all in the Web site. It's not a mystery. We have to do our reading. Dsausa.org. That's the socialist Web site.

When the gentleman from New York says, There's a difference; they're not socialists because they're not calling for controlling the means of production, well, I have to say, gentlemen, your names are on the list. I read it in the Web site. It's there. It exists. It's a matter of fact.

When you're anti-free enterprise, that puts you in the camp of the people who are on the hard core left. It's a philosophy that's been rejected by Americans.

By the way, you can also go to this Web site and read in here, dsausa.org, the people who advocate and support the progressives in this Congress and have not been repudiated by any progressive that I know of. You can also go to that Web site and you can see the agenda they have about nationalizing the major corporations in America. The nationalization of the Fortune 500 companies, for example, is written about on the Web site. They say, though, that they don't have to do it all at once, not in one fell swoop, that it can happen incrementally.

So you have an active political party with 75 Members in the House of Representatives and one Member in the United States Senate, a self-professed socialist, Senator BERNIE SANDERS, who are part of a movement to nationalize major corporations in America. And now we've elected the most liberal President in the history of the United States. And what has he done?

He has in the term that he has had so far, and this is only September, he has nationalized three large investment banks: AIG, the largest insurance company in America; Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; General Motors and Chrysler. Eight huge entities nationalized and now under the control of the White House.

And how did he do that, and how was it brought about, the economic crisis, the crisis that Rahm Emanuel said we should never let go to waste? The President and others utilized the crisis to nationalize the largest entities they could get their hands on.

I recall looking at a picture of President Obama standing next to Hugo Chavez, and they asked what I thought. I said, well, my reflection is that there are two huge nationalizers here. Hugo Chavez has been nationalizing right and left in Venezuela, but in the previous 30 days, he had only nationalized a Cargill rice plant, a Minnesota proud, privately held company, and nationalized that rice plant down in Venezuela. He simply said, I don't like the way you are running your rice plant; I will run it. And they will decide what the production is and what the people get paid that work there, and what they are going to pay for the product, and they will take their margin out that goes in to run the Government of Venezuela.

Well, what is going on with General Motors and Chrysler and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG and the three large investment banks, what is different about that? You are paying back TARP funding. That is one thing. But you have the President of the United States involved in, or at least his direct appointees, involved in the day-to-day management, for example, of General Motors. The President fired the CEO of General Motors, don't forget. He hired his CEO of General Motors. He put in place all but two of the board members of General Motors. And then he appointed a car czar who didn't hold up to the standard, apparently, because he never made a car or sold a car. I suspect he had driven and ridden in them. But the car czar didn't quite meet the standard and so he appointed a new car czar.

And the CEO of General Motors admitted he was on the phone with the car czar sometimes multiple times a day. That is not what you would call disinterested. I wish the President took as much interest in ACORN as he did in General Motors. If that would happen, maybe we could get the President to the position where he would have a public comment on ACORN, after we have watched this saga unfold from across the country.

The films on ACORN have emerged in Baltimore; here in Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and then San Diego, California. The pattern that we have seen, people posing as a prostitute and as pimp walking into ACORN's headquarters in each of those five cities and proposing that ACORN help them set up a house of ill repute so they could funnel teenage girls, young girls into child prostitution. And what did the ACORN people do in each of those five cities? They helped facilitate this. They helped facilitate child prostitution, setting up a house of ill repute. It was a promotion of prostitution of children.

The first film I saw that was in Baltimore, there were two women that were telling the young girl who was posing as a prostitute and the fella who was posing as a pimp how they could best circumvent the law in order to get it done, how they could best circumvent the tax laws, and how they could game the taxpayers, all under this process, telling them how they could qualify for the earned income tax credit. If you make $96,000 a year, just report $9,600 a year, then you will get the earned income tax credit, which is a check from the Federal Government out of the pocket of the working people in America into the pockets of somebody running a prostitution ring advocated by ACORN.

And they told them, If you are going to have 13 prostitutes, you really should just claim three of them as dependents. And if you do that, then you can qualify for the child tax credit, which is a thousand dollars a year.

So that counseling at ACORN that came about spontaneously after they rummaged around through their records to come up with the right kind of label for these young girl prostitutes and to call them performing artists, and that would fit, and you could game the Federal Government, circumvent, defy the law, break the law, and not only turn your house of prostitution into a profit center, but also be able to draw down funds from the Federal Government.

These are some very effective people at taking our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker, when it comes from them as a matter of instinct how you game the system, how you avoid taxes and cheat the government, and how you reach into the Federal coffers, the people's money, and draw that down for your own.

What a corrupt demonstration was taking place in Baltimore and in the other cities. But in Baltimore, the women who were working in there, the two women that were working at ACORN that were telling the young girl posing as a prostitute how to bring in young girls, 14-year-old girls plus or minus a year, how to bring them in, how to get this done and how to game the system, these women, I don't know if they were mothers, the ones working
for ACORN, but I could hear children playing in the background in the tape as if they were right behind the wall. The door was open behind them into presumably another office, and you could hear children playing in there.

Could it be in the middle of raising children we have people who are advocating for child prostitution? Could it be that the children who were making the noise that we could overhear on the tape, could they have been the actual children of the women who were advocating child prostitution as representatives of ACORN? I suspect that is the most likely scenario, although I haven't confirmed it.

That is the part that bothers me perhaps as much as anything else, that a worker for ACORN that could be a mother that had children within earshot could be advocating for child prostitution. And what would be the difference between bringing a girl in from El Salvador, bringing in a baker's dozen of girls from El Salvador illegally, put them up in a house of ill repute with money borrowed by the advocacy and the brokership of ACORN housing, we presume, to help fund and set up the capital base and loan that would be a business enterprise? And what happens when those kids that we could hear playing, what happens when they get to 13 or maybe 12 or 14? Do the ACORN workers just turn around and funnel them right into that house and put them to work?

The lack of outrage on the part of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the people who have for years railed against child labor and have pushed so hard for child labor laws, 75 of them voted to continue funding to ACORN. Seventy-five Members of the House of Representatives voted to continue funding for ACORN even though the tapes in five cities confirm absolutely that there is a culture of that type of corruption, child prostitution, within the doors of ACORN.

Who could imagine that out of 120 cities where ACORN has a presence, that they were able to do the sting operation on all of them that were helping to facilitate child prostitution or susceptible to doing that. I can't imagine that they went to 115 other locations and the people at ACORN said, Get out. I don't want to have anything to do with illegal behavior; and, by the way, I am going to call the police. We don't have any evidence that happened anywhere except Bertha Lewis told us that, who has consistently given us misinformation over the media airwaves. Mr. Speaker, I think America needs to

know that she is the CEO, in effect, of ACORN, known formally as ACORN's chief organizer.

We have a great big problem in this country, and the biggest part of this problem, in my view, that undermines our country the most is not the child prostitution component. That is the most repulsive, but the biggest problem is ACORN's involvement in corrupting our election process. They have, for election cycle after election cycle, been complicit in false or fraudulent voter registrations. They bragged that they had produced 1.3 million voter registrations in the last cycle. That is on a document that they are using to raise money to go down and protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.

The document that they are using as a fund-raiser says we registered 1.3 million voters, and we need you to write us a check so we can continue to go in here and try to intimidate people who are standing up for the rule of law. That is how I would interpret it. They didn't produce 1.3 million registrations. On closer analysis, the number comes down to be less than half a million. But they did produce, by their own admission, over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, false or fraudulent. To be more precise, voter registrations turned in.

Now imagine, the integrity of our vote. The franchise that every voter has is predicated upon the integrity of the voter registration rolls. That's why we register voters. If we didn't care how many times people voted, we wouldn't register them. We would just say, Go ahead and go vote. If you think you are an adult, walk in there and do so as many times as you like. But we do care. One person, one vote, and that is all that can be allowed, and we can't allow the process to be corrupted and we can't allow people to vote in multiple jurisdictions. One person, one vote per election. That's why you have to declare your residence. That is why you have to register, and that is why we have to go through the voter registration rolls and verify that they are legitimate registrations.

By the way, if you don't care about that, if you don't care about the integrity of the election process, you might be, Mr. Speaker, among those kind of people that would advocate for things like motor voter registration. Or if you go in and get a driver license's, they will say to you, Do you want to register to vote? That person might answer, No comprende. It happens thousands of times in America. People get a driver's license, whether or not that is legitimate, and they sign here, now you are registered to vote. That happens thousands of times in America. All they have to do is assent to that. Yes, there is a check box that asks if you are citizen. But if they can't understand the language, how could they possibly know that they are checking the right box and that they are guilty of perjury if they put down the wrong information? We know this happens tens of thousands of times in America. I suspect the number is a lot larger.

Why would an organization promote fraudulent voter registrations--I'm talking about ACORN--and why would they brag about it?

I can only come to this conclusion: If you can corrupt the voter registration rolls so badly that they didn't have any value any more, then anybody could vote and the election process would be who can herd the most people through the most polls the most times, and that is kind of the logical progression of it.

Who can imagine that with over 400,000 fraudulent registrations that we didn't have a fraudulent vote take place in America? ACORN would tell you that. Well, we may have gotten a little overzealous in our voter registrations, but we didn't have any fraudulent votes.

Please. With 400,000, why did you spend millions of dollars to register voters if there was no advantage, if you didn't think that you could game the system?

I will submit they benefit from confusion, especially in close elections, and I believe they benefit also from fraudulent votes. And when you have a fluid registration system, then you can have people on buses that go back and forth across State lines, jurisdictional lines, county lines, and vote multiple times. Once the ballot is cast, there isn't a means by which you can go back and prove it unless you have a video camera sitting in the polling place and you can show the full act of someone walking into the polling place and acknowledging their name and address, going in and voting, and seeing the same thing take place with the same face in another place. This is almost a perfect crime. In the means of trying to actually catch them, you really need confessions.

As we went through the election process in the year 2000 when there were all kinds of allegations that were made, Mr. Speaker, I sat for 37 days and drilled down into this and chased every rabbit trail I could find on the Internet. I was on the phone and I had a network of communications on my e-mail, and I found example after example of stealing elections. That happens to be the title of John Fund's book, who will be speaking in this Capitol shortly.

I found example after example, 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations turned in by ACORN, and still we can't pass a law that requires the person that hands those registrations over to the voter registrar, and in my State it will be the county auditor, we can't require them to identify themselves so that at least when it turns out to be fraudulent you can go back and say, Well, that was Sally Smith or Joe Jones that did that, and here's their address and here's their identification document when they turned this in.

And it's because there has been a concerted effort to undermine the integrity of the ballot box. And it isn't every Democrat, but that's where the chorus comes from, that's where the arguments come from, that's where the push comes from.

Now, that's not just Motor Voter that took place under Bill Clinton back in the nineties; we've got same-day registration taking place all across America in many, many States, including mine, same-day registration.

My Governor, Governor Culver, was Secretary of State; and in the middle of an election when he was Secretary of State, he advised people, If you don't know what precinct you live in, if you didn't get around to voting or changing your registration if you moved, or if you just moved in, don't worry about that, go to a polling place wherever you can, find one and go in there and vote. And we'll just call it a provisional ballot if anybody calls you on it, and we'll sort those ballots out later.

Can you imagine? We have 3 million Iowans, and I don't know the total of votes, perhaps 1.5 million, thousands of them went anywhere that was convenient and asked for a provisional ballot and cast it. And the ability to sort that all out and argue over the integrity of them, it overloaded our system.

Now, I come from a State that is the first-in-the-nation caucus. We have the great privilege to have the first bite of the apple to make a recommendation to the rest of America on whom we would like to see nominated for each political party, Democrats and Republicans, first-in-the-nation caucus. It's a high responsibility to maintain a high level of integrity. We were first-in-the-nation caucus, last in the Nation to certify the vote because our then-Secretary of State, now Governor, gave information to the voters all across the State that they could just go anywhere, further corrupting and confusing the system.

Now, add this up; Motor Voter registers anybody that will agree when they're asked, Do you want to be registered to vote. Who's going to say no? Especially if you think you're in the country illegally, you don't want to say no--you might think it's a responsibility to assent to registration.

So we've got Motor Voter registration, we've got same-day registration where somebody can just drive across the board into, name your State--Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin all come to mind--drive across the border, walk in, register to vote and vote on the spot. You don't have to prove residence to speak of. You maybe have to have somebody attest to who you are. There's a limit to the number of people that the bus driver can bring in and attest for, but it corrupts the process, Mr. Speaker.

And so I'm watching this country, this country that I love, this country that I was raised from the standpoint of, Eat your cold mashed potatoes, there are people starving in China. You've been born in the greatest Nation in the world and you hit the jackpot because God chose to have you born here in the United States--and I'll say especially in Iowa, from my perspective--a Nation that had never lost a war, that stood proud, that stood for freedom, that had the blessing and the gift of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration and the Constitution and the rule of law and all the pillars of American exceptionalism.

This great Nation that went through manifest destiny from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, settled a continent in the blink of a historical eye. And we did it founded upon the values that are in our Declaration and our Constitution and our values of faith and our work ethic, with these unlimited natural resources, low or no taxation, no regulation when Americans settled this continent.

We built a culture and a civilization built on--I'll use the Superman term, ``Truth, justice and the American way,'' and now I am watching it corrupted in the electoral process by an organization like ACORN. Four hundred thousand fraudulent voter registrations turned in, and still they count them when they brag about how many they registered, they count the fraudulent ones too. It's like saying I made $2 million last year, but not bothering to mention that you stole $1 million from the bank. That's the equivalent of their brag.

Now, we saw what ACORN did in five cities when confronted with child prostitution rings and illegal immigration. They promoted it, and they said, Game the system and you can get a check from Uncle Sam in the process. We've seen what they've done to corrupt the voter registration process and the election process. We've seen them get involved politically as a partisan organization over and over again. Nobody in this country believes that ACORN is out here to get out the vote for Republicans. They are a partisan organization that gets out the vote for Democrats. They are the machine. They are the foundational machine across the country that gets out the vote for Democrats. We all know that, but it can't really be challenged.

And so as I look at their activities, and I understand that they say--well, I guess they changed their definition a little bit, 501(c)(3), that's what it says on a press release I just picked up, Mr. Speaker. There is apparently some intention that the IRS is going to take a look into ACORN. The first thing the IRS needs to do, Mr. Speaker, is take a look at ACORN's corporate filings and verify that they are a 501(c)(3). 501(c)(3) is a not-for-profit status, and if you violate that not-for-profit status, then your income becomes taxable.

And so I'm suggesting--no, I'm stating flat out--ACORN is a partisan organization, a get-out-the-vote organization for Democrats. They take millions of dollars and use them for partisan purposes. They were hired--an affiliate was hired by President Obama to get out the vote for him at the cost of--if I remember the number exactly, it was close to $832,000. There is strong evidence that the President's fundraising list, once people maxed out to him, it was handed over to ACORN so they could use it to raise money.

We know that they've drawn down at least $53 million in Federal tax money that will be posted on the 990 form as grants from government; $53 million since 1994. I suspect the number is a lot larger. But if anybody would like to come down and defend ACORN, I would welcome you to come down and do that. If anybody thinks anything I've said here is even marginally factual, let's fine-tune it just a little bit. But I'm standing on the solid ground of fact. And the facts are this; 501(c)(3) organization, self-professed--it's in the press release, it has to do with the IRS now talking about investigating similar organizations, not specifically ACORN.

But if you're not for profit, it also means you're a nonpartisan, and you are barred by law from participating in partisan activities. Partisan activities would be, Mr. Speaker, advocating for a particular candidate or political party. So, working on a campaign, putting up yard signs, door hangers, running ads that advocate for candidates--especially by name--would all constitute violations of the not-for-profit status and make their income taxable.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I have here an interesting little picture. And the good part of this picture is that I don't have to wonder about the source; this is a picture that I took. This picture was taken in early July,

before the Fourth of July. This is a picture of ACORN's national headquarters. They're at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. I walked up to the door. The door looks like a jail cell. It's got a glass business door entry behind it, but it's black bars and welded steel with an outdoor lock on the outside. This is the most fortified building in the neighborhood. This is the second or third story where you see the bars here yet in the second or third story.

Mr. Speaker, right behind the glass at the national headquarters of ACORN is a poster here and it says, ``Obama '08,'' a campaign poster for President Obama proudly displayed in the front window of ACORN's national headquarters. I don't know how you could get any more definitive evidence that it's a violation of the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, no partisan activity if you're going to hang a partisan campaign sign in your window and leave it there, let's see--6, 7, 8 months after the election, it's still there. Does anybody imagine that it wasn't there before the election? And by the way, if anybody wonders if this is real, they can see over on the right-hand side, this hangs outside the glass, this is the ACORN banner, the ACORN logo, it's their logo on there. They fly that flag like we fly Old Glory.

So here's the flag, the glory of ACORN, the ignominy of it all, and here's the Obama poster. There are other posters behind there; I can't verify that they are Obama posters; it doesn't matter. This one is in the window. They're advertising for a political candidate. It's clearly a violation of the law. And it's blatant and it's open--and curiously, it's unnecessary. How sloppy can they be?

And so I think I've tied together the corrupt election process, the corrupt promotion of child prostitution rings, and also illegal immigration, which, out of the San Diego office especially, when the ACORN worker said, you've got to trust us; we have to work with Mexicans, I can bring people in through Tijuana, we'll help set this up for you. Child prostitution, violations, and then clear violations of voter laws.

In fact, there have been as many as 70 convictions for voter registration violations of ACORN employees. ACORN, as an entity, is under indictment in the State of Nevada. In the last couple of weeks they have put out, in the State of Florida, 11 warrants for arrests to pick up ACORN employees for voter registration violations. They did pick up 6 of the 11; the last I saw the news there were five still on the loose. And that was before the prostitution emerged from the film that was taken by the two intrepid reporters--whom I'm quite pleased and proud that they have done what they've done.

And that's not all, Mr. Speaker. If we continue on with ACORN, I would say here's another major concern of ACORN's involvement, and that is the practice of shaking down lenders, especially within the inner cities. Back in the seventies--it was either '77 or '78--Congress passed an act called the Community Reinvestment Act. It was an act that recognized a practice that I reject. It was the practice of red lining, as they called it--taking an ink pen and drawing a red line around a neighborhood in a city or several neighborhoods in the city. Banks that were loaning money for real estate, home mortgages, and commercial property identified that property that had its value going down, and they defined it. And it happened to also be inner city property.

Often one could index race with that declining value of property and the red lining. If it turned out it was a racial conclusion, it was utterly wrong. If it was a business conclusion purely, then it could be justified. But Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act that set the stage so that banks were then given an incentive to make loans into those communities where they had previously not been making loans. That was a direction of Congress to try to fix an ill that I believe at least was, in significant part, a wrong that needed to be corrected.

But ACORN exploited this. They were founded in 1977 or '78, as I said, and they began seeing the opportunities with the Community Reinvestment Act. And I don't know their involvement in getting the legislation passed. I suspect they were there at the table when it happened, but I don't know that. But I do know that they went in and shook down lenders and demonstrated outside the banks and intimidated the banks into giving money to ACORN. Not just in the first round of this. This wasn't, Give loans to the people in the inner city, it was, Write a check to ACORN, and we'll go away. Sometimes they would go into the lender's office, push his desk over to the wall, surround that lender and intimidate him, yell at him, shout at him and make demands, and eventually the intimidation tactics worked because banks wanted them to go away. So sometimes they wrote the check and sometimes they went away. Oftentimes they came back after a passage of time and began the process all over again.

Now, one demand was the shakedown that compelled--well, gave a strong incentive for--lenders to write the check to ACORN. That helped fund ACORN. You've also heard of this taking place from other organizations--Rainbow/PUSH comes to mind. They wrote the check to get ACORN off their back and then ACORN went away. And then they came back. And they did that over and over again. At a certain point, ACORN then demanded that the banks loan money into the neighborhoods that ACORN specified. They did their own red lining. They drew their red line around and said, You loan money into these neighborhoods or we'll come back and we'll protest so your customers can't get through the door. And so banks began loaning money into those neighborhoods and showing their records to the ACORN representatives, and now they're influencing a business practice. That's stage two.

Stage three is the lenders. In order to get ACORN off their back after they came back over and over again and escalated this, demanded money, demanded that loans be made into ACORN's red line district, then the next one was to grant ACORN a block of funds to be brokered into the communities of their choice, giving them more and more power.

This kind of shakedown undermines the free enterprise system, and it gives power to people through intimidation rather than market principles or moral principles. In fact, it is utterly corrupting in a society, and I can't draw a moral distinction between an ACORN shakedown, a Mafia shakedown, or a shakedown that might come from Hugo Chavez or some strongman in some other country. ``You will pay the protection or you will not be in business.''

I wonder if Cargill refused to pay protection in Venezuela and that was why Hugo Chavez nationalized the rice company down there, the rice plant in Venezuela earlier this spring, in about April.

So this is some of the pattern of ACORN's activity, Mr. Speaker, and it isn't, by any means, all of it. In fact, Wade Rathke, who was the founder of ACORN and was their CEO up until about a year ago, has a brother named Dale Rathke. Dale Rathke embezzled $948,000 and change from ACORN. It is a matter of public record. They found out about it within ACORN and covered it up for 8 years. They covered up a crime, a felony, for 8 years. And in order to solve the bookkeeping problem, they took money from donors and money from pension plans and backfilled the hole in the accounting which was created by the embezzlement of the brother of the CEO who helped cover up this crime. Then it erupted and finally blew up to the point where Wade Rathke was pushed out of ACORN--or I should say, off to the side of ACORN. They're still players today. He and his brother are both engaged in, let me say, community organizing. Activist community organizers, people who read the book by Saul Alinsky, people who read Cloward-Piven and now people who are writing their own book, the Rathke brothers.

Mr. Speaker, we need to clean up this mess that is ACORN. This Congress has a responsibility. We know it now. I offered an amendment to unfund ACORN back in 2007. It did not have a lot of support at the time. Today we have seen this Congress vote to unfund ACORN, and we've seen 75 Members--every one a Democrat--vote against unfunding ACORN. We know what our duty is. Our duty is oversight. It's our constitutional responsibility, Mr. Speaker. And we need to use all of the tools in this Congress to drill into ACORN, to get to the bottom of it, to bring the truth and the facts out. That will require, with all of these resources we have, in the House alone--and I call upon the Senate as well to engage in this. But in the House alone, we must have a full committee investigation and hearings by the Judiciary Committee, taking a look at the voter registration fraud that we know exists and look at it on a national scale. And from this, we need to drill into ACORN and pull out all of the rotten apples that are in there and shut down everything that is questionable. If there is anything left that has any integrity, I don't know what to do in that situation because I don't know how there would be any entity within ACORN that is not stained by this. But the Judiciary Committee has an obligation to investigate where there are violations of the law and where there are violations of voter registration and election fraud. That's our responsibility in the Judiciary Committee.

Government Reform--and this has been headed up very well in Government Reform by Congressman Issa of California--needs to look into this from the standpoint of: how is government tied into this; what does it do to corrupt our government; what about all the tentacles of ACORN that would reach into government; how many places are they working in cooperation with government? And let's sever all of those relationships. That's the Government Reform component of this. To the extent that we can overlap and cooperate, we should do so committee by committee.

We need to go into the Financial Services Committee. Chairman Frank needs to come all the way around to
cleaning up ACORN. He was not here for the vote that would have unfunded ACORN. He had a couple of different announcements. But the most recent announcement of his intentions was that he would have voted to shut off funding to ACORN. Well, we can speculate if we like. But, Mr. Speaker, to verify the position of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, we'll have to see what he does with ACORN. Will Chairman Frank investigate? Will he use the powers of the gavel and the staff that he has in Financial Services? Will he work with the ranking member of the Republicans to drill into ACORN and go back and pull out those pieces that he put in himself over the years in this Congress that set up the scenario by which ACORN still today--let me say it this way: still today, ACORN is looking at categories of as many as $8.5 billion that they could tap into of Federal tax dollars. Our tax dollars, Mr. Speaker. Altogether, $8.5 billion in categories. That is money that's within the Community Development Block Grant, a low-income housing grant, and the stimulus package. Those three add up to $8.5 billion. ACORN, as far as anything that has been signed into law today, would still qualify to go into those funds.

The chairman of Financial Services, Mr. Frank, has been involved in setting up the language, setting the stage. And it's not a practice of just this year. It's a practice of each year that I have been aware since I have been in this United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. So let's see if the chairman of the Financial Services Committee uses his gavel to investigate and provide proper oversight, with all the resources that he has at his disposal, working in full cooperation with Republicans on our side of the aisle and staffs working together. Let's see if that happens.

The Judiciary Committee needs to do a full investigation and hearings. Financial Services needs to do a full investigation of ACORN and hearings. By the way, when I say ACORN, that's a general term for ACORN and all of their affiliates, 361 of which have been identified by the Government Reform Committee in the report that was put out July 23 by the Government Reform Committee and Ranking Member DARRELL ISSA. The Judiciary Committee and the Government Reform Committee need to investigate ACORN and all of their 361 affiliates.

We also need to ask the Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Rangel--who I recognize has his own problems in this Congress, but this is an opportunity for Mr. Rangel to redeem himself as chairman. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee needs to commence a full, all-out, full-court investigation of ACORN and all of their affiliates and use the tools at his disposal, the power of the gavel and the subpoena ability that that committee has to bring in ACORN and examine their taxes and also to turn the pressure up and direct the IRS to do a complete audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. The only way to get a clean bill of health is to put them all through, let me say, the fiscal physical, that is, a complete analysis of all of the funds that come into ACORN and all of their affiliates. Chairman Rangel can bring that about, and certainly he needs to work in cooperation with the ranking member on the Ways and Means Committee. I'm pushing very hard that we get this done.

I have named three committees. We have Judiciary, Ways and Means, Government Reform, all of them need to commence their investigations. We need the House Admin, who works in cooperation with the voter election laws. They're the ones that brought about the HAVA act, the Help America Vote Act. They need to be involved in this working in cooperation with the Judiciary Committee. We

need to bring the Appropriations Committee into this. We need to examine every dollar that's been appropriated that may have gone into the coffers of ACORN and their affiliates. How did that money get used? Was it matching funds? And how does it go down into the States?

All of this needs to happen out of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and we need the IRS doing a complete forensic audit of ACORN and all of their affiliates. And we need the Department of Justice doing more than just an Inspector General's investigation to determine if Justice has written checks to ACORN or their affiliates and whether there's justice in Justice paying ACORN and their affiliates. If the limit of Justice's scope of justice is, did they actually pay somebody that was violating the not-for-profit laws, and did they use it for partisan purposes, that's pretty narrow.

ACORN wants to examine themselves and audit themselves. That's laughable that we should accept the idea that ACORN has appointed someone to audit themselves. It's a joke. But we do have the Justice Department who has said, We want to audit ourselves too with respect to what money we might have sent to ACORN, so that they find it before someone else finds it. Then they can make their press release and say they've cleaned it up and sworn off and washed their hands of ACORN--like the Census Bureau finally did? For the second time, by the way. They put out a press release 3 months ago. After we turned up the pressure, they said, Well, we won't be hiring ACORN to do our Census. We turned up some more pressure, and when they saw the prostitution film, they put out another release that said, We have now finally--for the second and perhaps final time--severed our relationship with ACORN. Well, if you have to do something twice, who would believe you did it the first time? And then if you do something once, who is going to believe that that actually got done the first time? They will do it over and over again. Justice wants to look at it and wash their hands of ACORN, but I don't see them moving towards a complete investigation at the Department of Justice, which we must have, Mr. Speaker. The scrubbing that's taking place on the Census and now the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury has said that they no longer want to work with ACORN. ACORN was helping out with tax forms. So maybe they're going to rely on TurboTax instead. But they no longer want to have the relationship with ACORN because they're too hot a political potato.

These aren't things that these departments didn't know before. I have known this for months and, much of it, years. Yet we couldn't penetrate the minds of the Census Bureau until we beat on them through the media. We couldn't penetrate into the Department of the U.S. Treasury until the prostitution films came out. And the Department of Justice only wants to examine far enough to determine if they have written checks to ACORN and then what those checks were for, if they were legitimate or not.

It doesn't look to me, Mr. Speaker, like this administration is determined to do this forensic analysis. In fact, if you would draw a line down through the middle of the piece of paper--you could draw it figuratively right down this aisle, Democrats on this side, Republicans on this side--Democrats, as a party, beneficiaries of ACORN; Republicans on this side, a lot of them who are not here, are victims of ACORN's partisan activities. They've already lost their elections. They aren't here now, and many of them are not coming back. But that same line can be this: who has consistently called for the cleanup of the corrupt ACORN, the criminal enterprise ACORN and all of their affiliates? It's been people on the Republican side of the aisle who have done that, the survivors. Who has finally made some little mouse noises about cleanup of ACORN? Well, it's been Democrats. And it's been people who have redirected--it would be Chairmen Frank and Conyers who have called for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to take a look at ACORN and write a report. Well, CRS doesn't have the authority to go in and actually do a criminal investigation or a tax audit. They don't have the authority that these chairmen have themselves. If they want to get to the bottom of it, they don't have to ask anybody. They call for hearings and an investigation, and they levy their subpoena power, and they do that. But instead, they would like to redirect the American people into believing that calling for a CRS report is somehow a substitute of a congressional investigation. It's not. The Justice Department should be doing a complete, thorough criminal investigation, working hand in glove with the IRS. Instead, it simply announces that they're going to take a look to see if they've written checks to ACORN and then react accordingly. The U.S. Treasury finally takes a position that they don't want to have ACORN cooperating with them in helping out with taxes.

These are all of the weak things on this side. These are redirections. These are straw men. They are red herrings. They don't have substance to accomplish what we need to get accomplished, which is clean up ACORN. On this side, we've called for substance for a long time, and we haven't cracked through because the people on this side hold the gavel, and they were determined to protect and defend ACORN until the political heat got so hot that all but 75 of them voted to stop Federal funds from coming into ACORN.

That's what's taken place, Mr. Speaker. Those are the facts. They cannot be denied. By the way, we need to ask some questions about why the chief organizer of America has not had a statement to say about ACORN, except for his statement on the Sunday talk show circuit; when asked about this, he said, Well, it's really not on my radar screen. It's not the most important thing before America. So I'm not really paying attention to ACORN.

Really, Mr. President? This is the star of ACORN. He is the lead chief organizer. He is the person who told the people at ACORN, I will invite you in, and we will be setting the agenda for America, even before he is inaugurated as President of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN. He is the man who was an attorney for ACORN. He is the man who trained ACORN's workers. Remember what he said before the election to his people: ``Get in their face. Get out, and get in their face.'' Does that sound like what was happening around the lenders' desks when they were capitulating to ACORN's intimidation of the shakedown? ACORN's activists got in the lenders' faces. The President said, Get in their face.

He worked for ACORN, trained ACORN's workers, headed up Project Vote. And Project Vote is integral to ACORN. You can't separate the two, and there are people who are labeled Project Vote and ACORN who concur with that.

Then on top of that, the President of the United States, as a candidate, hired ACORN to get out the vote. And then the evidence exists that his donor list was transferred over to ACORN. Once it was maxed out and they couldn't write another check in the Presidential campaign, the list went over so ACORN could raise money on that.

This man's not interested in ACORN? He's ambivalent about it? That's what he told us just last Sunday. Curious. He could inject himself into police operations of a professor of Harvard, Officer Crowley and Professor Gates. He can inject himself into that and have a beer summit, but he can't pay attention to what's going on when things are melting down around him?

This man stands at the top of ACORN. He's the man that directed that the Census be pulled out of the Department of Commerce and put into the White House. This is a man that hired ACORN to help hire individuals to work for the Census. And he's not paying attention? Do we think Rahm Emanuel is running this country or President Obama, or is it just Chicago politics? I think it's all of those things, actually, Mr. Speaker. But the President cannot deny knowledge of what's going on.

The United States Senate voted 83-7 to shut off funding to ACORN housing, Senator Johanns from Nebraska's amendment. That sent a resounding message. It shook through all the media. I'll bet you even Charlie Gibson knows about that one. And shortly after that, the House acted; and we had a motion to recommit that, if it functions the way we'd like to have it function, would shut off funding to ACORN. 345 Members of the House of Representatives voted to shut off funding to ACORN; 75 voted to defend ACORN, but there were a couple of them that wanted to change their intentions after the fact.

Chairman Frank wanted to change it. He wasn't here. He had a good excuse. He got to redefine his vote after he saw the politics of it. No allegations. Those are just the facts. Chairman Conyers said even though, let's see, whatever side he was on when he voted, he meant to vote the other way. I don't remember very many Members having to explain any votes in that fashion. I don't get to use that excuse. Maybe once in a career, not multiple times on a single issue by multiple Members of Congress.

But this man, Mr. Speaker, has a deep abiding involvement in ACORN. His history goes back to it. At the genesis of President Obama's political life, there he stands with ACORN, and he walks with them all the way through. It isn't my supposition; it's his own assertion, that ACORN was with him from the beginning. He's been with ACORN all of the way through, and one of the affiliates that he headed up was Project Vote.

There still are 360 other affiliates out there. We need to audit Project Vote. We need to audit the other 360 affiliates. We need all of the tools of the IRS and the Department of Justice. We don't need a lame little announcement that Justice is going to go look and see if they maybe wrote a check to some bad people and they'll correct that. We need to have them drilling into everything. And we also need every committee that has jurisdiction in the House of Representatives doing the examination of ACORN.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota.

Mrs. BACHMANN. I'm so grateful for the gentleman from Iowa and the comments that he's been making regarding ACORN and the situation that they find themselves in.

One thing that we have seen from the American people in a recent Gallup survey is that today, at the highest level ever in the history of our country, more people believe that government is wasting money than at any other time in modern times. Today the American people believe that the government wastes about 50 cents of every dollar. And as if these activities were bad enough that the gentleman from Iowa was speaking about, the stunning STEVE KING of Iowa, I think, Mr. Speaker, one thing we recognize is that the American taxpayer should not be paying for these activities.

Now, this is stunning. This truly is a stunning feature, that you have an organization that's been the recipient of about $53 million since 1994. And you have a photo, I noticed, a poster, of the President with an ACORN emblem on his shirt. Since President Obama, who formerly was the attorney for Project Vote, yet one of the many affiliates of ACORN, since that time, he has made available to his patron, to ACORN, he has made available to them $8.5 billion.

And if a bill that went through this House actually passes, that would be $10 billion that is available to this organization, who we have seen has been furthering the trafficking of illegal aliens, minor girls into childhood prostitution and child abuse. This is unconscionable. And this same organization has been educating individuals that they should take their money and bury it in a tin can in the backyard rather than paying taxes.

And we're giving this organization $10 billion in tax money? How could this be? No wonder that the American people are saying, at the highest time ever, that they believe 50 cents of every dollar is wasted.

We need an investigation, I believe, Mr. Speaker, into that fact. Do we know how much of our tax money is being wasted? The American people think it's 50 percent of every dollar. Perhaps it is if you have $10 billion going to an organization like this.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentlewoman from Minnesota. And I'm looking forward to some future comments with regard to this as well.

The waste that's there is a significant part of all of this. But another one is just the lack of conscience and using Federal funds to do something of a partisan nature and do so with impunity in a completely cynical approach that we've known for years were designed to produce this result.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. I will introduce the DSAUSA documents into the Record.

The Organization

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. DSA's members are building progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly socialist presence in American communities and politics.

At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. We are activists committed not only to extending political democracy but to demanding democratic empowerment in the economy, in gender relations, and in culture. Democracy is not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism--a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.

In this web site you can find out about DSA, its politics, structure and program. DSA's political perspective is called Where We Stand. It says, in part:

We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.

We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.

DSA has a youth section, Young Democratic Socialists (YDS). Made up of students from colleges and high schools and young people in the work force, the Youth Section works on economic justice and democracy and prison justice projects. It is a member of the International Union of Socialist Youth, an affiliate of the Socialist International. The Youth Section meets several times during the year. More information is available from YDS staff.

This web site also includes an extensive set of resources, including bibliographies, pamphlets and links to information on socialism and U.S. politics in general.

Please join DSA as we work to help build a better and more just world for all.

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Where We Stand: The Political Perspective of the Democratic Socialists of America

PREAMBLE

At the beginning of the 20th century, a young and vibrant socialist movement anticipated decades of great advances on the road to a world free from capitalist exploitation--a socialist society built on the enduring principles of equality, justice and solidarity among peoples.

At the end of the 20th century, such hope and vision seem all but lost. The unbridled power of transnational corporations, underwritten by the major capitalist nations, has created a world economy where the wealth and power of a few is coupled with insecurity and downward mobility for the vast majority of working people in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Traditional left prescriptions have failed on both sides of the Communist/socialist divide. Global economic integration has rendered obsolete both the social democratic solution of independent national economies sustaining a strong social welfare state and the Communist solution of state-owned national economies fostering social development.

The globalization of capital requires a renewed vision and tactics. But the essence of the socialist vision--that people can freely and democratically control their community and society--remains central to the movement for radical democracy. Those who the collapse of communist regimes, for which the rhetoric of socialism became a cover for authoritarian rule, as proof that capitalism is the foundation of democracy, commit fraud on history. The struggle for mass democracy has always been led by the excluded--workers, minorities, and women. The wealthy almost never join in unless their own economic freedom appears at stake. The equation of capitalism with democracy cannot survive scrutiny in a world where untrammeled capitalism means unrelenting poverty, disease, and unemployment.

Today powerful corporate and political elites tell us that environmental standards are too high, unemployment is too low, and workers earn too much for America to prosper in the next century. Their vision is too close for comfort: inequality of wealth and income has grown worse in the last 15 years: one percent of America now owns 60 percent of our wealth, up from 50 percent before Ronald Reagan became president. Nearly three decades after the ``War on Poverty'' was declared and then quickly abandoned, one-fifth of our society subsists in poverty, living in substandard housing, attending underfunded, overcrowded schools, and receiving inadequate health care.

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Towards Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice
[By Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman ]

THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST VISION

Democratic socialists believe that the individuality of each human being can only be developed in a society embodying the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity. These beliefs do not entail a crude conception of equality that conceives of human beings as equal in all respects. Rather, if human beings are to develop their distinct capacities they must be accorded equal respect and opportunities denied them by the inequalities of capitalist society, in which the life opportunities of a child born in the inner city are starkly less than that of a child born in an affluent suburb. A democratic community committed to the equal moral worth of each citizen will socially provide the cultural and economic necessities--food, housing, quality education, healthcare, childcare--for the development of human individuality.

Achieving this diversity and opportunity necessitates a fundamental restructuring of our socio-economic order. While the freedoms that exist under democratic capitalism are gains of popular struggle to be cherished, democratic socialists argue that the values of liberal democracy can only be fulfilled when the economy as well as the government is democratically controlled.

We cannot accept capitalism's conception of economic relations as ``free and private,'' because contracts are not made among economic equals and because they give rise to social structures which undemocratically confer power upon some over others. Such relationships are undemocratic in that the citizens involved have not freely deliberated upon the structure of those institutions and how social roles should be distributed within them (e.g., the relationship between capital and labor in the workplace or men and women in child rearing). We do not imagine that all institutional relations would wither away under socialism, but we do believe that the basic contours of society must be democratically constructed by the free deliberation of its members.

The democratic socialist vision does not rest upon one sole tradition; it draws upon Marxism, religious and ethical socialism, feminism, and other theories that critique human domination. Nor does it contend that any laws of history preordain the achievement of socialism. The choice for socialism is both moral and political, and the fullness of its vision will never be permanently secured.

END

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