Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

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The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN is, according to their website, "a non-profit, non-partisan social justice organization" [1], yet has been mired in the controversy connected with the collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the fall of 2008. ACORN was created as a community organization responsible for registering voters and soliciting donations. It was founded by organizers of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) [1]. The group considers itself the nation’s largest community organization and has the full support of then Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama. ACORN is a partner of the liberal coalition America Votes. [2] American Votes is a coalition member of the Shadow Party. [3]

Contents

Founding organization

George Wiley's community organization, National Welfare Rights Organization, forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America’s unjust capitalist economy. The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. Wiley then sent one of his young lieutenants, Wade Rathke, to Little Rock, Arkansas, to launch a new community-organizing group: ACORN. At that time, ACORN stood for the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. Rathke expanded it into a national organization replacing Arkansas with Association. Their People's Platform reads, “We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom . . . . We have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor.” [4]

In 2008, a lawsuit filed in August by two board members accuses ACORN founder and former chief organizer Wade Rathke of either concealing or failing to properly report that his brother Dale embezzled around $948,000 from New Orleans-based ACORN and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. [5]

Consumer advocacy

Acorn now operates in more than 100 cities with a national budget of $37 million. [6] Also, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods with dues-paying members exceeding 120,000. [7] Despite what is stated on its official website ("To maintain independence, ACORN does not accept government funding and is not tax exempt" [2]), this left-wing liberal group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers under the guise of consumer advocacy and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance. The rest of its' money coming from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.[8]

Support for gun control and illegal immigration

ACORN legally intervened in an unsuccessful attempt to defend Jersey City, New Jersey's local gun control ordinance, which was struck down December 13, 2006 in New Jersey state court as a violation of state law pre-empting stronger local gun ordinances.[9]

ACORN has held frequent rallies in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants and against enforcement-only bills for dealing with the illegal immigration problem. According to their official website they list four demands on immigration, the first of which is "A path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States" (in other words, amnesty).[10]

Big businesses

ACORN opts for undisguised authoritarian socialism, as when it proposes that “large companies which desire to leave the community” be forced to obtain “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation." ACORN promotes ideas like “sustainable development,” which would limit the growth of suburbs—so businesses and individuals can’t flee just beyond the city limits. One of ACORN's highest targets is big businesses, dubbing them, “irresponsible.” This means any financial institutions that supposedly hinder the minority poor from getting the capital needed for home buying and business start-ups.[11] ACORN strongarms financial institutions into to providing risky loans to the undeserving. In 1998, Acorn activists disrupted Federal Reserve hearings on the proposed Citicorp merger with Travelers and then later protested Citigroup's acquisition of Associates First Capital Corp. Eventually Citigroup signed an agreement to provide mortgages through Acorn counseling centers, including home loans to undocumented aliens in California. [12] They protest and picket banks mergers until they are paid off. The banks see it as the cost of doing business. One of Acorn's real intentions is to help its public-sector union allies. ACORN argues for the "Living-wage." By artificially raising the cost of outsourcing until it is just as costly as work done by government employees, "the living-wage undercuts the incentive to privatize." This is a tactic used against Wal-Mart preventing the opening of stores in low-income Chicago neighborhoods. ACORN's living-wage campaign is more likely to benefit unions than the poor. [13]

Barack Obama

Liberal lawyer Sandy Newman founded Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution. Newman hired Obama in 1992 to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The effort's motto: "It's a Power Thing." Under Obama's leadership, he trained ACORN members in Chicago. According to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars; in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns. Obama also sat on the boards of the Woods Fund (with William Ayers) and the Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers. In 1996, Project Vote's tax returns show it paid ACORN more than $4.6 million for campaign services and Citizens Services more than $779,000 for legal and administrative services. [14]

Federal Election Commission reports show ACORN-affiliated Citizens Services Inc. got $832,598 from the Obama campaign for get-out-the-vote work during the primaries. [15]

GOP

Amid a widening probe into voter registration fraud by the liberal group, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said “All federal funding to ACORN must be stopped.” [16] In addition, "..further evidence that this group cannot be trusted with another dollar of the taxpayers’ money. House Republicans took at stand recently to cut off funding to an ACORN slush fund created by their [Democratic] allies...but now more must be done.” The congressman's Web site notes that in the recently passed financial bailout package, Republicans “stripped out special-interest earmarks for trial lawyers, labor bosses and thinly-veiled political organizations like ACORN..."

RNC Fact Sheet

Tom DeLay writing for the Washington Times says "Organizations like America Votes and ACORN are so closely tied to Democrat politics that they might as well be arms of the party apparatus." [17]

Voter Fraud

ACORN tactics are starting to reveal a pattern of unethical behavior across the country and they have been implicated in voter fraud schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12 other states. The group’s vandalism on electoral integrity is systemic.

Past Issues

  • The Wall Street Journal noted: “In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained ACORN’s practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.”
  • In March, Philadelphia elections officials accused the nonprofit advocacy group of filing fraudulent voter registrations in advance of the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary.
  • In July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including “Leon Spinks,” “Frekkie Magoal” and “Fruto Boy Crispila.” Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October.
  • In 2004, ACORN registered illegal immigrant Nuradin Abdi. He was the suspected Ohio shopping mall bomb plotter from Somalia, according to the Columbus Dispatch. [18]

2008 Presidential Elections

When ACORN is questioned regarding their tactics, they reply with an attack of their own, voter suppression. Teresa James, an attorney for ACORN affiliate Project Vote says, "they don't have the resources," to catch all fraud. However, ACORN has the money to air commercials nationwide. In it, blaming racism and vote suppression, not ACORN. [19]


  • Nevada officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names. Among the bogus monikers: names of former Dallas Cowboys players.
  • Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected thousands of registration forms ACORN had turned in from its drives. On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 of the applications were no good - tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen. At least 2,100 of the applications turned in were rejected.[20]
  • ACORN vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from phone books and forged signatures. According to a local paper (the Northwest Indiana and Illinois Times), "Large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style" and "apparently the organization's canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid." The fake registrants include dead people and underage kids. Also, there were 5000 more voter registrations in Indiana than voters.
  • Milwaukee, Wisc., officials discovered at least seven felons employed as voter-registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. (State law bans felons from such work.) They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter-registration cards. The state GOP accuses the group of trying to get dead, imprisoned or imaginary people on the voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN's Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle. 26 ACORN workers are facing criminal investigations.
  • In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple, copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. The Miami Herald reports: "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."
  • In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people got free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling in some prospects. Homeless including felons were registered with an undocumented temporary address. [21] Also, Christopher Barkley claimed that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they'd already signed up. He had registered to vote "10 to 15" times after canvassers for ACORN relentlessly pursued him and others. A subpoenaed voter of Cuyahoga County, Freddie Johnson, 19, filled out registration cards 72 times over 18 months [22] On October 14, 2008, the Buckeye Institute filed a RICO suit against ACORN for vote fraud.[23]
  • In Pennsylvania, The Allegheny County district attorney said Thursday that criminal charges could result from nearly 100 fraudulent voter registrations submitted in the Pittsburgh area. [24]
  • In Michigan, Oakland County election officials found more than 33,000 duplicate registrations, about two-thirds of new applications since August and ACORN canvassers submitted most of those applications. [25]
  • Evidence has surfaced that ACORN and Barrack Obama are intimately linked. The article, “Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign,” which appeared in the Winter 2003-Spring 2004 issue of Social Policy magazine, was written by ACORN organizer Toni Foulkes. The full article is available here.

FBI Investigation

The FBI plans to investigate the group. "It's a matter we take very seriously," FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton told the Associated Press. "It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely." [26]


It was believed that ACORN has helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote, told the New York Times that the real number of newly registered voters is closer to 450,000. About 400,000 registrations were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons including fraud. [27]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Obama, ACORN, and the churches SperoNews, October 7, 2008
  2. ↑ America Votes - Partners
  3. ↑ Discover The Networks
  4. ↑ ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities City-journal.org, 2003
  5. ↑ Missing ACORN Funds Spark Lawsuit, Power Struggle AP, October 17, 2008
  6. ↑ Acorn Squash WSJ, August 26, 2006
  7. ↑ ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities City-journal.org, 2003
  8. ↑ THE PRO-BARACK VOTE-FRAUD DRIVE NY Post, October 8, 2008
  9. ↑ http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1166448999875 "N.J. Judge Voids City's Gun Control Law", Charles Toutant, New Jersey Law Journal, December 20, 2006
  10. ↑ http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=16966 ACORN official website position on illegal immigration
  11. ↑ ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities City-journal.org, 2003
  12. ↑ Acorn Squash Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2006
  13. ↑ Acorn Squash Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2006
  14. ↑ Obama camp downplays ACORN payments Washington Times, October 10, 2008
  15. ↑ Obama camp downplays ACORN payments Washington Times, October 10, 2008
  16. ↑ De-Fund ACORN, Republican Leader Insists CNSNews, October 10, 2008
  17. ↑ DELAY: The Democrats' Shadow Party Washington Times, November 5, 2008
  18. ↑ Minutemen Muster Nationally to Foil Illegal Voting NewsMax, October 30, 2008
  19. ↑ [http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/122345478771640.xml&coll=2 Voter-registration can't be totally fraud-free, group says} Plain Dealer, October 08, 2008
  20. ↑ http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/?p=1443
  21. ↑ THE PRO-BARACK VOTE-FRAUD DRIVE NY Post, October 8, 2008
  22. ↑ [http://www.nypost.com/seven/10092008/news/politics/nuts__132771.htm NUTS! HOW ACORN GOT ME INTO VOTE SCAM] NY Post
  23. ↑ http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/?p=1502
  24. ↑ ACORN may face new charges in PA ObamaAcorn.com, October 10, 2008
  25. ↑ Obama camp downplays ACORN payments Washington Times, October 10, 2008
  26. ↑ De-Fund ACORN, Republican Leader Insists CNSNews, October 10, 2008
  27. ↑ ACORN Numbers Vastly Exaggerated NewsMax, October 24, 2008
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