Protestors on Steroids? Inside ACORN & SEIU's 'Muscle for Money' Program

As an update on the SEIU & ACORN partnership, the Washington Examiner is running a Special Report on the SEIU's "Muscle for Money" program. According to the Examiner:

Corporate and political officials who defy workplace and community organizers risk being made objects of scorn by bright red-clad protestors in public and private, courtesy of an activist union and its close allies in the nation’s most controversial liberal non-profit advocacy group.

It’s officially called the “Muscle for Money” program within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where it was started, and unofficially by the same name among activists of Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN).

ACORN is under investigation in at least 14 states over voter registration fraud allegations stemming from the 2008 presidential campaign. The group endorsed President Barack Obama, despite federal laws barring partisan political activities by tax-exempt groups.

Muscle for Money includes multiple techniques for creating highly aggressive, organized efforts both to pressure businesses and officials to support the activists’ agenda or to discredit and intimidate opponents of their agenda, according to present and former ACORN members.

SEIU has funded Muscle for Money activities in the past and continues to finance corporate shakedown efforts across the country as part of this program. SEIU locals 100 and 880 have been identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site.

That information has since been removed from the ACORN web site, but U.S. Department of Labor LM-2 financial disclosure forms show over $600,000 in transactions between these same locals and ACORN operations in recent years.

[Emphasis added.]

Further on, the Examiner states:

Some of the more prominent Muscle for Money targets to date have included the Carlyle Group, Sherwin-Williams, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty Tax and Money Mart, according to Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee and now an ACORN 8 member.

“The idea is to go to private homes where wives and children are present and stand outside so the family members of a company official could be harassed and subjected to intimidation,” said MonCrief. “Protestors would also go to company functions like banquets where they would be as disruptive as possible.”

For more information on the SEIU, go here. For more information on the ACORN 8, go here.

As a post script: Last month, the Examiner also reported that ACORN is changing its name and attempting to silence its critics.