Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

This is imported from the Conservapedia article as it appeared 27 January 2022.

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
Formation	1970
Interest of	Hannah Giles, James O'Keefe

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is the name of an umbrella group with offices under various names through the United States. These left-wing activist groups describe themselves in various cities as a "non-profit, non-partisan social justice organization" geared to helping the poor achieve jobs and control over their communities. The group purports to advocate higher minimum wages, access to affordable housing and increased voter registration in low-income communities, though many charge that they often focused on voter registration in swing political states like Ohio.

ACORN was founded in Arkansas in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a veteran of the Maoist oriented Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Bill Clinton helped promote the group in Arkansas in the 1970s and 1980s and across the nation in the 1990s to support his election bids. The group is famous for its institutionalized corruption. From 1992 to 2004, Barack Obama ran leadership training sessions and was an attorney for the group in Chicago. The organization was one of the biggest supporters of the revolutionary Occupy Wall Street-movement. Stanley Kurtz calls it "the largest radical group in America," working "to take over the system from within, rather than futilely try to overthrow it from without."

In 2009, the Baltimore group was accused of assisting the set up an underage prostitution ring involving more than a dozen illegal immigrant girls, among other illegal activities. ACORN was also mired in controversy connected with the collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the fall of 2008. In response to the scandals, the name 'ACORN' was withdrawn from local offices across the United States and local chapters adopted new names adapted to the local environment. However the organization's national structure remains intact.

History

ACORN was founded by organizers of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).

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.”

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. Upon learning of the actions of Dale Rathke, ACORN received an anonymous donation of $1 million to cover the difference and keep ACORN functioning. It was later learned that the donation came from Drummond Pike, the head of the Tides Foundation which is known for laundering money to left wing causes.

ACORN considered itself the nation's largest community organization. It was a partner of the liberal coalition America Votes. American Votes is a coalition member of the Shadow Party.

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.

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.

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."

ACORN supports Obamacare.

2010 United States census

In March 2009, it was disclosed that ACORN would play a role in recruiting workers for the 2010 census. This raised several concerns regarding ACORN's past history of voter fraud and, along with oversight of the census being moved to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, raised questions about the fate of the census' historic non-partisan nature.

After a video surfaced showing ACORN members trying to cheat the IRS, the Census Bureau decided to cancel their involvement with the 2010 Census count. It is reported that the group will still receive funds from the government branch Housing & Urban Development.

Voter Fraud

See also: Democrat voter fraud and Ballot harvesting

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.

2004 elections

• 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.” Acorn workers have been convicted of fraud in Wisconsin and Colorado.

• 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.

2008 presidential elections

When ACORN was 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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. 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 On October 14, 2008, the Buckeye Institute filed a RICO suit against ACORN for vote fraud.

• 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.

• 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.

• Evidence has surfaced that ACORN and Barack 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 New York Times admitted in May 2009, that prior to the presidential election it killed a story involving corruption allegations with Acorn that might have hurt the Obama presidential campaign. The admission came from a column by Clark Hoyt, where he describe the allegations against the Obama campaign and Acorn as "nonsense."

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 designed to preempt stronger local gun ordinances.

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).

Marxism

See also: Marxism and Revolution

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. 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. 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. A standing joke within the community organizing movement is that ACORN stands for Advance Communism Or Receive Nothing.

Alleged 'consumer advocacy'

As of 2006, Acorn operated in more than 100 cities with a national budget of $37 million. Also, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods with dues-paying members exceeding 120,000. Despite what is stated on its official website ("To maintain independence, ACORN does not accept government funding and is not tax exempt" ), ACORN 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.

Campaign to establish a 'living wage'

According to Steven Malanga, a contributing editor at City Journal, the "living wage" is the group's most successful local issue.

However, Stanley Kurtz argues that, "Unfortunately, instead of helping workers, Acorn’s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed most."

"Though Acorn touts living-wage laws as a way to lift the working poor into the middle class, the vast body of academic work on wage laws shows that they end up hurting the poor by forcing businesses to eliminate some low-wage jobs. Acorn's own leadership understands this principle perfectly. When California regulators sued Acorn for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, Acorn argued that this would endanger its mission—because it would have to hire fewer workers."

Scandals

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles under cover

Prostitution

ACORN tried to help elect Obama in 2008, but nearly a third of the 1.3 million voters it registered were rejected as fraudulent.

In Sept. 2009 Fox News showed videos from Andrew Breitbart of ACORN workers in several cities, including New York, Baltimore and Washington, giving advice to two conservative undercover investigators who posed as a prostitute and her pimp. The two activists were James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles. During the sting, they said that they wanted to buy a house and run it as a brothel with underage teenage girls smuggled in from Central America. Happy to help, ACORN staffers gave practical advice on how to evade taxes and conceal the nature of the illegal business. The result was Congress voted to defund the group, the Census cancelled their contract and ACORN eventually declared bankruptcy.

Wikipedia - ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy

Subprime mortgage scandal

Main article : Financial crisis of 2008

In 1991, ACORN members took over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis of 2008. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively. As a New York Post article describes it:

"A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report it on your tax returns." Credit counselling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor's Business Daily added:

"The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama."

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."

Embezzlement

A group of dissident members has been seeking a federal investigation of ACORN for alleged criminal violations stemming from an embezzlement scheme that has rocked the organization since 2008. They call themselves The Acorn 8. On January 7, 2009, they released a 24-page document demanding federal investigators to look into fraud, embezzlement and conspiracy charges, and criminal civil rights violations in relation to the embezzlement of around $1 million from the accounts and an alleged cover-up of the theft for nearly a decade. This stems from a dispute within ACORN since disclosure in June that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN co-founder and former Chief Organizer Wade Rathke, embezzled $948,000.

ACORN 8 members, however, have claimed the embezzlement is a sign of a deeper problems within the organization. They created a counter website to address the disputes they have with ACORN. Marcel Reid, who is the D.C. Acorn Chair and member of the Acorn 8, has gone on Fox News to explain her story along with others.

Anita MonCrief has been one of the most outspoken former employees of ACORN. MonCrief testified in court that the Obama campaign had given ACORN their donor list and coordinated funding with them. The New York Times had been investigating MonCrief's claims during the 2008 campaign, but when MonCrief offered to supply the Times with a copy of the Obama campaign's donor list, the Times killed the story. MonCrief has set up a blog and Twitter account which she used to release internal ACORN documents to bloggers on May 21, 2009.

Response

FBI Investigation

By October 2008, the FBI has announced it planned 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."

In March 2010, it was reported that the public interest group Judicial Watch had obtained documents from the FBI which provided information on the federal investigations into ACORN. Judicial Watch stated that the FBI documents "show serious allegations of corruption and voter registration fraud by ACORN."

The documents include background information on two specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively, during the 2008 election season.

According to Corelli, on August 1, 2008, her office received 1,200 ACORN voter registration cards from the Secretary of State’s office. Over 300 of these cards were rejected because of “duplicates, underage, illegible and invalid addresses,” which “put a tremendous strain on our office staff and caused endless work hours at taxpayers’ expense.”

The documents include records related to a federal investigation of ACORN corruption in St. Louis, Missouri, involving 1,492 allegedly fraudulent voter registration cards submitted by Project Vote, a liberal non-profit organization affiliated with ACORN on voter registration drives, during the 2006 election season.

Likewise, Borges contended that: “The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive which has produced over 100 rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens…” Among the examples cited by Borges was a seven-year old child who was registered to vote by ACORN through the use of a forged signature and a fake birth certificate claiming she was 27-years old.

The Justice Department closed down the investigation in March 2009, stating that ACORN broke no laws, though it noted that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices.”

Government Accountability Office report

A “preliminary” GAO report proves that the now-defunct left-wing group ACORN's decision to shut down was the result of “a McCarthy-era style war against the poor and minorities,” says the group's former leader, Bertha Lewis. The report found ACORN affiliates received a stunning $40.4 million in taxpayer subsidies in 2005-2009 alone. Even the Justice Department (which is supposed to be investigating the group) funded the creation of the “ACORN Youth Union” to “provide youth leadership training” (indoctrinate public-school students) to win “specific improvements and policy changes”(lobby for the group's pet issues) “such as school funding” (higher taxes), etc. The IG report indicates that of the six major federal agencies GAO queried, only one has provided responses. “We did not independently assess the sufficiency of agencies' oversight activities,” states the report. The GAO added that 12 ACORN workers have pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud; unmentioned was that at least six more former ACORN workers are under indictment on similar charges. Yet to investigated are charges ACORN engaged in violations of RICO through money-laundering of taxpayer funds designated for nonpartisan activities, engaged in partisan activities, or violated ERISA by shifting pension funds to conceal a million-dollar embezzlement perpetrated by ACORN founder Wade Rathke's brother. The report incorporates changes ACORN demanded.

Civil suit

An Ohio civil suit filed by Buckeye Institute against ACORN and its Project Vote operation alleges that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is regularly advised by ACORN on election strategy, and deprives voters “of the right to participate in an honest and effective elections process.”

Defunding

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.” 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

Reeling from revelations of systematic fraud in both election registration and community development programs, ACORN saw both Houses of Congress vote to cut off federal funds in the "Defund ACORN Act," and the Census Bureau reject its help. Many states and cities are considering similar punishment. It shuttered 40% of its centers in cities including Chicago, Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Omaha, and is not taking new clients in the centers that remain open in low-income neighborhoods. In an effort to regain some support, it sued to have the "Defund ACORN Act" enjoined as an unconstitutional bill of attainder. On December 11, the district court ruled in favor of ACORN, citing the precedent of United States v. Lovett to say that Congress cannot "declare that a single, named organization is barred from all federal funding in the absence of a trial."

Convictions

So far in 2010, 15 ACORN members have been convicted of voter fraud across the country.

Name change

Due to all the conservative press ACORN gets for fraud, Wade Rathke has approved changing their name to 'Community Organizations International'.

ACORN successor groups

ACORN's national organizational is now defunct. The group has split into regional organizations under different names shown below.

• Community Organizations International
• Action Now
• Action United
• Texans Together Education Fund
• Health Care for America NOW!
• Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
• Voting Is Power
• Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas
• Communities Voting Together
• Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change
• Affordable Housing Centers of America, Inc.
• New England United 4 Justice
• A Community Voice
• Communities United Inc
• Minnesota Neighborhood's Organizing For Change
• Missourians Organizing For Reform and Empowerment
• New York Communities For Change
• Mutual Housing Association of New York
• Working Families Party
• Pennsylvania Neighborhoods For Social Justice
• Texas Organizing Project
• Organization United For Reform Washington
• American Institute For Social Justice
• Project Vote
• The Black Institute
• The Advance Group
• Arkansas Community Organizations
• Alliance Institute
• Organizers in the Land of Enchantment
• Organize Now, Inc.
• Living United for Change in Arizona
• Action NC
• Olé

See also

• SEIU
• New Party
• Front organization
• Catholic Campaign for Human Development
• Demos (think tank)
• Rules for Radicals

External links

• Inside Obama’s Acorn National Review Online
• ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities City-Journal
• House Votes to Strip ACORN of Federal Funding
• Influencewatch - ACORN
• Ballotpedia - Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
• Bad Seeds – Why the ACORN Scandal Matters to Other Nonprofits
• Common Dreams - ACORN press releases

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