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ACORN Deserves an Apology, Too
Like Sherrod, the hard-working group was railroaded with doctored video.
Shirley Sherrod has her job back and a presidential apology. ACORN is still waiting.
The cases are remarkably similar. Both Sherrod and ACORN were demonized by highly edited videos appearing on right-wing websites and widely publicized by Fox News and conservative radio hosts. In both cases the mainstream media and the federal government rushed to judgment without seeing the full unedited video. Within hours, Sherrod was fired. Within days, Congress cut off federal funding to ACORN.
The Sherrod and ACORN cases are similar in another way. Sherrod's full speech makes clear that over the years personal experience had taught her that the key issue isn't race but class. It's "not about black and white" but "about those who have and those who don't."
ACORN thought so too. For over 30 years ACORN was the nation's preeminent and arguably its most effective poor peoples' organization. Its membership of 400,000 was led by poor people of all races.
ACORN confronted those who have on behalf of those who don't, earning it the undying enmity of conservative administrations. The first President Bush's Department of Labor convened a grant jury to investigate ACORN. It found nothing. George W. Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, fired several U.S. attorneys who refused to prosecute ACORN after they found no evidence of voter fraud.
ACORN persevered. When regulators under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush failed to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, ACORN and other groups conducted their own studies. They identified banks with patterns of discriminatory lending. A combination of bad publicity and picketing and sit-ins at corporate offices convinced many banks to reconsider and begin to make loans to creditworthy borrowers.
ACORN was as alarmed at lenders who foisted bad loans on households who couldn't afford them as it was at lenders who refused to offer good loans to households of color who could. It was one of the first groups to sound the alarm about the subprime mortgage industry. ACORN unsuccessfully beseeched Congress not to deregulate an increasingly irresponsible banking sector.
Early on, ACORN blew the whistle on predatory lending. In 2000 it began a national campaign to combat the unscrupulous lending practices of Household Finance Corporation, one of the nation's largest and most aggressive subprime consumer lenders.
In 2008 John Atlas and Peter Dreier illuminated the remarkable range of activities ACORN chapters were involved in by listing recent local news stories. The stories described a campaign to save working-class housing in Brooklyn, voter registration drives in Las Vegas and Orlando, a demonstration against predatory lending in Pittsburgh, and an effort to expand health insurance in Texas. There were stories highlighting ACORN's key role in a new national coalition of unions, consumer and religious groups to fight for universal health care, plus programs to rebuild storm-destroyed homes and save others from foreclosure.
The media were quick to condemn ACORN's alleged misbehavior, but they've been extraordinarily slow to report on independent studies that have exonerated the organization. Investigations by two state attorneys general uncovered no illegal behavior. According to the GAO, all complaints filed against ACORN with the Federal Elections Commission were dismissed. Six FBI investigations into alleged voter fraud by ACORN employees were closed without indictments.
This March a federal District Court ruled that the law Congress passed cutting off ACORN's federal funding was a bill of attainder, a type of law specifically prohibited by the Constitution because of the Founding Fathers' fear that a powerful and vindictive federal government could single out a single individual or organization for penalties.
That same month ACORN, abandoned by its former admirers and bankrupt from having to fight multiple politically inspired investigations, closed its offices. Several states have begun to re-establish ACORN-like organizations. The Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) is one example.
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20 Comments so far
Show AllACORN was an extremely successful organization working with the poor. They engaged people to improve their lives as noted in this article. They were also an important political force that registered 1 million voters for the 2008 election.
The right wing wiped them out.
Now there is a need for an ACORN for the middle class. What they did needs to be done in our society to combat the takeover by the corporations.
For those who want to learn what they did and how they did it, I strongly recommend the just published book by John Atlas entitled “Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.”
there is no middle class
there is only the proletariat and capital
How on earth are you going to overcome all that denial by workers who have been convinced they have been advancing into the middle class over the generations?
How on earth are you going to overcome all that anti Marxist/ anti communist prejudice amongst the American populace?
There are many American workers who believe that because they now run their own business providing their own labor on a contract, they are no longer workers.
There are many workers who own some shares who therefore have been led to believe they are part of the share owning ruling class.
There are many workers who believe that because they had an education giving them "knowledge capital", they are no longer workers but capitalists.
Worse still there are people who think they are "workers", like Empire_America here, who think that people with some "knowledge capital" are no longer workers.
.
ACORN made enemies for years via housing rights and living wage campaigns. *Any* movement for the poor is going to attract amazing hostility.
That said, anyone know if ACORN is planning civil litigation against not only the government, but Breitbart and that psychotic fratboy as well? I'd donate to that cause in a heartbeat.
There is a civil suit in San Diego concerning illegal activity by O'Keefe. I don't know about any hope for a verdict against Breitbart in any future litigation, but with O'Keefe, I would guess there's not enough wealth to bother with a suit involving money.
I thought the comments in yesterday's Star Tribune were interesting. The right-wingers had no idea that there was any controversy over the video.
I think Morris's point would have been better made with a bit of detail about the unedited video.
Right. Even people reading here like OneAndDone don't seem to know about the ways ACORN has been lied about.
Any organization that provides service without profit MUST be crushed in a Fascist country. Catagorize and profitize everything and F^CK the poor! Now that is the "Real America"!
America a fascist country? So how are we getting away with writing all of these seditious comments with complete impunity? If this is a fascist nation shouldn't we already be in jail?
Try saying some of these "seditious" things in many of your local communities, instead of here on-line and see how far you get. Most of what gets said here can be ignored as it is clearly preaching to the choir, except you can bet we are all on some databases preparing for the time when the "shit hits the fan", in which case millions will be picked up just as huge numbers were in places like Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, various Central American countries etc when the US ruling elites thought it was time to move pre-emptively.
Our President is a Republican, therefor when these issues came up, his office was quick to act in his parties interest. He lied to us to get the Presidency,and he is no good at hiding his true alliance. When these things happened the Whitehouses' true colors came out. Oh well, we have been falling apart for quite some time. Acorn, was a good, and was a much needed service, and that is why they were illiminated. I wouldn't be surprised if they pissed off the Comander in Chief, and we don't know about it. So the President had them silenced.I'm just messing around...
Darth Obama is a Republican? What color is the sky on your planet?
You're just not on THIS planet.
Weird. People have some exotic and bizarre theories about the demise of ACORN. The simple fact is that they were taking Federal funds to aid voter registration but they only registered Democrats. That is a misuse of the funds and they SHOULD have been cut off. There are plenty of other examples of illegal use of taxpayer money. But to say that ACORN should get away w/ illegal acts because they did other good things or because other people and organizations are doing things just as bad or because they're cronies of the President is ridiculous.
You obviously don't keep up with the news or only watch Fox.
"Weird. People have some exotic and bizarre theories about the demise of ACORN."
It really gets old, how the right wing, because reality doesn't provide a good foundation for their nonsense, have to time and time again create their own reality and fail to ever check to see if what they're saying has any factual basis. It's weird that a doctored, dishonest video, shown on endlessly on cable TV, on right wing radio, the very video that was the impetus behind ACORN's underfunding by the government (by the way, the action was determined by the courts to be illegal and unconstitutional) is "some exotic and bizarre theory". It's exotic and bizarre in the same way that pointing out that gravity exists is exotic and bizarre.
The problem with your pathetic argument is of course that if you applied that ridiculous standard to all groups that receive government money who would be left? The freaking government admits they can't account for a large percentage of the Iraq war expenditures. Paul Bremer's CPA in Iraq can't account for a single damn dollar. What about Blackwater, and similar firms? They still receive government money and have kind of committed multiple, massive human rights violations. Hell, they just received US government money and are under investigation for trying to work with and get paid by the human rights violating Sudanese government. Should we apply your standard to them? How much have the right wing said about groups like that, or the missing (billions) of war funds, the missing CPA money? Why don't you test your little brain, and google "ACORN cleared of wrongdoing". At most you'll find a few workers at ACORN acted illegally and were fired as a result, there is NO evidence at all that ACORN as an organization is guilty of systematic corruption or illegal behavior. They're guilty of helping the working poor and people of color, which is why you'll apply standards to them you would never accept for groups you agree with. The bible would call you a hypocrite for that mentality. I'd call you much worse. I believe in karma, when it comes back onto people like yourself it won't be pretty. It might even be at the hands of a poor working person of color. Wouldn't that be ironic.
Absolutely not true, OneAndDone. ACORN did not 'only register Democrats'. I registered to vote with an ACORN worker outside of a supermarket in 1992, and he did not ask me my party affiliation nor whom I planned to vote for, and I'm white and was dressed in a sportcoat and tie at the time. I observed the same man and another woman from ACORN registering others that day and on other occasions, and they did not ask for party affiliation nor what candidates the registrants favored. ACORN committed no illegal acts of the sort you describe when registering voters, as the lack of successful prosecutions attests.
If ACORN is above board, then why did they remove some of their board members that wanted the books to be audited to find out where the money was spent? ACORN still refuses to let anyone look into their financial records.
Follow the money.
Arkie, you've been reading too much right-wing blather -- you're wrong as well. The GAO went over ACORN's books and here's the result:
"A report by the Government Accountability Office that reviewed ACORN's federal funding at the behest of Congress found little grist for the mill for politicians or right-wing bloggers looking to bash the now-defunct advocacy group for the poor.
"The 38-page report surveyed over 31 federal agencies, probing how ACORN used federal funds and whether adequate controls on spending existed.
"The report found no evidence of fraud, lax oversight or misuse of federal funds.
"In fact, the report discovered that ACORN had adequately accounted for spending $40 million worth of major and minor grants awarded by the federal government to the group since 2005 to combat a variety of problems afflicting poor Americans, including lead poisoning, housing discrimination and lack of adequate job training."
-- From "Congressional Report Clears ACORN of Wrongdoing -- After Group Forced to Disband," Raw Story, June 15, 2010.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0615/preliminary-report-clears-acorn/
Also:
"CRS [Congressional Research Service] notes that as of October 2009, ACORN had been subjected to at least 46 federal, state, and local investigations. And too many good Democrats were swept up in the witch hunt hysteria, moving quickly to defund ACORN based on the rants of Beck, Bachmann, and Boehner.
"One who rose above the fray was New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler who courageously spoke out against House legislation as unconstitutional for singling out ACORN for punishment--known as a "bill of attainder." Last month, the federal courts agreed with Nadler's opinion."
-- Katrina Vanden Heuvel, "Despite the Facts, the ACORN Witch Hunt Continues," The Nation, Jan. 5, 2010.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/144964/despite_the_facts,_the_acorn_witch_hunt_continues/
48 separate local, state and federal investigations, all of which required by law that ACORN open their books, cleared the organization of any wrongdoing.
Arkie, Fox News and the right-wing media have been lying to you.