One of the more interesting threads to come from the Jefferson County Dispatch is the unmasking of what appears to be front organizations designed to mask where taxpayer funds will go. I say appear because it is possible these companies have other headquarters and registrations in other states, and they were just sloppy in how they filed paperwork in Missouri, but considering the uniqueness of the names and the players involved, it's with a high degree of certainty that the financial arrangement between Jefferson County Dispatch and Forefront Organizing is exactly as it appears - an attempt to send money to a group in order to mask the ultimate beneficiaries. First, there is no incorporation I can find for Forefront Organizing. All that is available is fictitious name registration. That's the kind of thing you do for a sole proprietorship. Was $186,000 given to an individual, or a company? Let's see.
This is the MO SOS registration for Forefront Organizing. It is filed in July of 2009, and it bears Mike Dalton's name. If you find it strange that a company with no formal presence in Missouri and no apparent full time staff other than Mike Dalton was able to wrangle almost $200,000 from Jefferson County taxpayers with minimal oversight, you'd be in good company.
Frontline invoices provide two addresses in Washington D.C., but these are houses, and there is no record of the company registering in D.C. either. Both addresses register residential abodes, one sold in November, the other a temporary residence.
More on those addresses when appropriate.
So with no back history for Forefront, how does POWER make the claim that they are 3-0 in organizing campaigns for Forefront? Two explanations appear. The first is that POWER works for Mike Dalton, and the name of the "company" doesn't matter.
You might remember the name of Frontline Organizing. This company registered a fictitious name in Missouri in 2007. This name should sound familiar because it's the name used by Mike Dalton when Bob Sweeney introduced him to the Big River Ambulance District. Name changes aren't illegal, but one does have to ask why Frontline had a name change to Forefront and if any business had been conducted under this name prior to the giant contract awarded by Jefferson County Dispatch.
Mike Dalton is Frontline Organizing, but Mike Dalton is also Forefront Organizing. And in both cases, Bob Sweeney is involved in the decision making process whereby Mike gets big fat contracts to dole out to SEIU and ACORN workers.Forefront's only other clue online is in noted communist Glenn Burleigh's LinkedIn profile:
Organizing Director
Forefront Organizing
(Political Organization industry)
March 2007 — January 2008 (11 months)
I oversaw the organizing staff. We worked on various political contracts, with a mix of candidate and ballot issue campaigns.
It would be interesting to find out just exactly how Forefront Organizing was doing business in 2007 when they didn't file in the state of Missouri until 2009. I wonder if there are any tax implications for doing business in this manner?
But that's not the end of it. POWER Union is Mike Dalton's creation. Internet Archives show Mike Dalton running the POWER union prior to Joe Holt taking over, and a researcher from Arnold unearthed a change in fictitious name registration where Mike Dalton cancels his ownership of POWER's name and passes it on to Joe Holt in, wait for it, March of this year.
Man - this stuff can leave you dizzy
Here is the WhoIs for http://www.powerunion.org/. Note it lists Mike Dalton as the registrant, created on March 17, 2009. Power Union used to be called http://www.union-power.org. Guess who ran it?
Mike Dalton, and Elston McCowan (he of the Kenneth Gladney Purple People Beater fame).
Mike Dalton is POWER. He passed it on to Joe Holt in March of this year.
So now we're left with a puzzling series of questions about why Mike Dalton keeps changing his company names and affiliations, and yet seems to be able to secure new contracts with new business names.
It's not an easy thing to get anyone to part with $186,000. It's even harder when you're not even a registered corporation in the state of Missouri, and yet you exist long enough to pay a veteran communist organizer to help you run campaigns.
One has to ask - did the Jefferson County Dispatch do anything to look into the backgrounds of these folks? Did they investigate the company at all, or was it entirely based on recommendations? If there were recommendations, who gave them? Was it Ed Kemp and Bob Sweeney? And did they get any money from that encounter? How exactly does one person with a history of using different organizational names and no state business record get Jefferson County to give him $186,000?
This has gone past the curiousity of how money was pushed to organizers, and begins to fall under the umbrella of state audits and notification of law enforcement of possible law breaking.
The Topix Thread for High Ridge has been a lively source of chat, but as of today, all of those threads have been deleted by political allies of the current board. That's not going to be enough.
A reckoning is coming.
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