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The former national chief organizer of the advocacy group ACORN has launched a new left-wing group aimed at carrying on ACORN’s radical un-American agenda, as predicted by WND author Matthew Vadum.
Bertha Lewis, who last year called the tea party a “bowel movement,” has launched the New York-based Black Institute. The group’s agenda is almost identical to that of ACORN, which filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in November, but with a focus on African-Americans.
Lewis helped to execute ACORN’s 40-year plan to transform America into a socialist country, according to a stunning new book, “Subversion Inc.,” by award-winning investigative journalist Matthew Vadum.
Vadum, senior editor at Capital Research Center, a think tank that studies left-wing advocacy groups and their funders, has assembled the information from nearly three years of research and hundreds of interviews.
The Black Institute focuses on redistribution of wealth, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and “environmental justice,” all of which were priorities for ACORN as well.
The group is staffed with individuals long associated with ACORN.
Labor lawyer Arthur Schwartz, a partner in Schwartz, Lichen & Bright, P.C. in New York City, is on the board of directors. Schwartz was ACORN’s counsel.
Mary Sobecki, a program officer with a left-wing charity called the Needmor Fund that funded ACORN for years, is on the group’s board of advisers.
According to Vadum’s book, Lewis came up with the idea to create a black leadership institute last year as ACORN was in its death throes as an organization.
Lewis is known for her strident speaking style and her in-your-face approach to dealing with enemies. The former squatter first got involved with ACORN after leading a successful home invasion aimed at gaining title to an unoccupied property.
No stranger to controversy, Lewis can be seen on a new video speaking at a church in New York and singing “Walmart sucks! Walmart sucks! Walmart sucks!” ACORN has long despised Walmart because it was never successful in unionizing the Arkansas-based corporation.
The ACORN successor group in New York, New York Communities for Change, has also been fighting Walmart’s plans for expansion in New York City. The new group is housed in the same office in Brooklyn that served as headquarters for ACORN.
Lewis received some unwanted publicity in April 2010 when a rant she delivered before the Young Democratic Socialists found its way onto YouTube. YDS is the youth arm of the radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is closely tied to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of left-wing Democratic lawmakers in Congress. In the video, Lewis gave a rambling speech in which she praised radicalism and harshly criticized conservatives and corporations.
Although ACORN leaders, like all those inspired by the late founder of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, typically resist the “socialist” label because they realize the term carries a negative connotation in American culture, Lewis openly embraced socialism, according to Vadum’s book.
“First of all let me just say any group that says, ‘I’m young, I’m democratic, and I’m a socialist,’ is all right with me,” Lewis said. She said to applause that the tea party movement, a grassroots reaction against the big government policies of the Obama administration, was a “bowel movement in my estimation” that is associated with “racism.”
The book reports that Lewis also seemed to predict that America would soon enter a period of violent upheaval.
“Right now we are living in a time which is going to dwarf the McCarthy era,” she said. “It is going to dwarf the internments during World War II. We are right now in a time that is going to dwarf the era of Jim Crow and segregation.”
As ACORN began its decline after undercover videos showed its employees encouraging prostitution and tax evasion, investigators in Washington, D.C., and Louisiana began digging.
According to the book, investigators in Louisiana believed that for months Lewis had been involved in a “civil war” between the group’s New York, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., branches. She had also been hoarding ACORN’s remaining assets. Investigators believe the group had about $20 million in cash spread out over 800 bank
accounts and that ACORN affiliates held $10 million in property.
Outside of ACORN, no one seems to know where the money went.
Because of the potentially criminal activity documented in this explosive book, copies of “Subversion Inc.,” by Matthew Vadum have been sent by the publisher, WND Books, to all 535 members of the House and Senate in hopes of prompting further investigation of ACORN and its tentacles.
