US bishops’ agency suspends ACORN funding

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US bishops’ agency suspends ACORN funding

October 20, 2008

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has suspended funding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) following reports of embezzlement, according to CCHD executive director Ralph McCloud. The CCHD has given over $7.3 million to ACORN projects in the past decade despite concerns raised over the years by the Wanderer Forum Foundation, the Capital Research Center, and others.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=820

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ACORN (CORRECTED) Oct-16-2008 (650 words) xxxn

CCHD ends funding to ACORN over financial irregularities

By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The Catholic Campaign for Human Development suspended funding a nationwide community organizing group after it was disclosed June 2 that nearly $1 million had been embezzled.

Funding was suspended for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, popularly known as ACORN, because of the financial irregularities, said Ralph McCloud, executive director of CCHD, the U.S. bishops' domestic anti-poverty and social justice program.

"We're not funding them at any level," McCloud told Catholic News Service Oct. 15.

The suspension covers all 40 ACORN affiliates nationwide that had been approved for $1.13 million in grants for the funding cycle that started July 1, 2008.

McCloud said the suspension came soon after his office learned that ACORN disclosed that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization and its affiliates in 1999 and 2000. Dale Rathke stepped down from his position with the organization in June when the matter became public; no charges were filed against him. Wade Rathke stepped down as the group's lead organizer at the same time but remains chief organizer for ACORN International LLC.

CCHD has hired specialists in forensic accounting to investigate whether any of its grant funding has been misappropriated, McCloud added.

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http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0805268.htm

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other links -

http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/Foundation%20Watch%20October%202000.pdf

http://www.wandererforum.org/publications/focus025.html

From CRC Archives: Our Profile of the Massive Waste of Money Known as the Annenberg Challenge

We were covering the massive waste of money known as the Annenberg Challenge long before anyone had heard of its Chicago chairman, Barack Obama, or its Chicago co-founder, real life terrorist-turned-educational terrorist William Ayers.

The article appeared in the March 1998 issue of Foundation Watch. The plain text of the article, extracted from the cobweb-covered archives in the catacombs of the Capital Research Center, is below.

Note: There might be some errors below because we are using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the old file to plain text. As we find errors, we will correct them. If you wish to cite this report, you should rely on the PDF version linked to above.

Lining the Pockets of Bureaucrats:
Annenberg's Misguided Effort to Save America's Schools

by Patrick Reilly

On December 17, 1993 President Bill Clinton hosted a White House ceremony at which he announced what was billed as "the largest single gift ever made to American public education:" a $500 million, five-year school reform effort launched by Walter H. Annenberg and his Annenberg Foundation.

http://www.capitalresearch.org/news/news.html?id=662