With ACORN Paying The Salaries, The Progressive America Fund Providing The Framework And The Working Families Organization Paying For Lobbying, The Working Families Party Expands Nationwide

With the 2009 New York City election results, the Working Families Party proved itself the most potent new political force in the city and state. But the success has been building for years—as has an ongoing effort by leaders of the Working Families in New York to expand the party's reach around the country.

Together with like-minded activists in other states, they have poured money, effort and inspiration into the Missouri Working Families Committee, the Connecticut Working Families Party, the Oregon Working Families Party, the Washington Working Families Coalition, the Massachusetts Working Families Organization, the South Carolina Working Families Party, a Maine Working Families effort, the Delaware Working Families Party, the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, the California Working Families Party and the Nevada Working Families Party—all of which have risen and fallen in various forms in recent years. And the Vermont Working Families Party is about to start coming together, with several town caucuses already underway.

According to multiple interviews with the people involved in other states, the expansion of Working Families parties has been overseen by Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Working Families Party and Working Families Organization, and Larry Moskowitz, the national labor coordinator for the New York WFP.

Moskowitz also serves as a WFP state committeeman from Upper Manhattan and has been listed as a contact for the Progressive America Fund on tax forms filed with other organizations.

Moskowitz was also one of the people listed as assisting a January 2008 report by the Progressive America Fund's subsidiary, the National Open Ballot Project, entitled, "Technical and Cost Considerations of 'Fusion Voting' in Oregon and Maine." Listed with him as assisting with the report are Joanne Wright, a former ACORN employee who was the treasurer of the Progressive America Fund, and Clare Crawford, the ACORN deputy political director for national organizing who not long after the report came out identified herself in government testimony in Oregon as the national director of the National Open Ballot Project.

That report lists a National Open Ballot Project advisory board which includes Bertha Lewis, who is the CEO of ACORN, a co-chair of the Working Families Party, an initial director of the Working Families Organization and a former treasurer of the Progressive America Fund. Also on the advisory board is Melissa Mark-Viverito, a former Service Employees International Union (SEIU)organizer who had WFP and ACORN support in her 2005 election and 2009 re-election bids to the New York City Council.