People’s Pundit Daily previously reported on the ObamaCare sign up acting as a Democratic voter registration drive, and now the disgraced radical ACORN founder is back.
A group of former ACORN radical operatives is suspiciously signing people up for ObamaCare, allegedly collecting taxpayer cash for their work, despite Congress’ efforts to cut the organization and those associated with it out of the political sphere.
Wade Rathke, the infamous ACORN founder and Obama foot soldier, recently blogged about attending a meeting where the group discussed and planned outreach efforts under the Navigator program. His original group ACORN, founded in 1970, once employed Barack Obama as a community organizer. The group went bankrupt after a journalist’s undercover operation caught employees telling clients how to cheat on taxes, which forced lawmakers — many reluctantly — to cut off public funding, and consequently caused the donation well to run dry.
The United Labor Unions Council Local 100 stated last month that Rathke would be involved in a multi-state drive to help people register for ObamaCare. Wade Rathke, apparently, has managed to weasel his way back into the government’s wallet, even though in 2009 he was in a scandal and banned from receiving taxpayer funds.
Dan Epstein, who is the executive director of Cause of Action, a non-partisan watchdog group based in Washington stated, “At a time when our government has ceased functioning due to an appropriations gap, it is ironic that America’s tax dollars are being doled out to an entity whose poor stewardship of our funds was well-established by Congress.”
The government handed out $67 million in Navigator grants to assist the controversial rollout of ObamaCare. It is not clear whether or not Local 100 received a grant of its own directly, but they have set up a help center with Southern United Neighborhoods, which can indirectly funnel government assets. Coincidentally, the Southern United Neighborhoods’ so-called “charity,” which was founded in 2010, just so happens to consist of several former ACORN members, whom are ready to “navigate” people around ObamaCare.
Epstein said the ban on funding to ACORN-related groups was mysteriously dropped and stated that there is little oversight as to who gets Navigator grants. Rep. Tim Murphy R-PA, who heads an oversight committee investigating the Navigator grant program, said several grass roots groups are getting in on the program, despite having no track record — or, in the case of the ULC, having a poor one.
He blames what he called a rush to implement ObamaCare. “With the administration rushing to hand out billions of dollars for the health law to countless groups, the potential for fraud and abuse is exceptionally high,” said Rep. Murphy, who also currently serves as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. “The law’s rollout has been a disaster, and we will continue our aggressive oversight of Navigators and all grant recipients on behalf of the American people to ensure taxpayer dollars are not misused or wasted.”
Matthew Vadum, author of “Subversion, Inc: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers,” said that neither the group nor Rathke can be trusted with Americans’ sensitive information, such as the deeply sensitive information that will be collected during the ObamaCare enrollment process.
“ACORN is also infamous for hiring felons without bothering to do background checks, storming hospital emergency rooms and city council chambers, using voter fraud to turn graveyards across the nation into Democratic electoral strongholds, using mob violence against bank executives and other shakedown targets, and for ruthlessly exploiting its own employees and going to court to seek an exemption from minimum wage laws,” Vadum wrote.
