Who is Robert Creamer and why is he in the news?
During his show today, in the midst of an extended attack on progressive activist Robert Creamer, Glenn Beck claimed that Creamer had “no problem completely ripping off the non-profit entity that he’s working for.” Beck later added that the progressive movement was “the people that [Creamer’s] stealing from.” This isn’t even close to right. Creamer pled guilty to federal bank fraud and tax charges in 2005 due to his handling of Illinois Public Action, but no one ever alleged that he had stolen money from the group. Creamer had been “writing checks on accounts without sufficient funds to cover them while moving money between accounts and playing the so-called float to prevent the checks from bouncing,” but doing so in order to keep the nonprofit from failing, not in order to steal from it. In fact, the judge in the case reportedly gave Creamer a lesser sentence than prosecutors had sought “because no one suffered ‘out of pocket losses’ and Creamer acted not out of greed but in an effort
Robert Creamer has been a political organizer and strategist for almost four decades. He and his firm, the Strategic Consulting Group, work with many of the country’s most significant issue campaigns. He was one of the major architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security. He is a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, change America’s budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform. He has also worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level. Creamer is married to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois. Arianna Huffington calls his recent book, Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, a master’s class in electoral politics. Sources: http://www.huffingtonpost.
