ACORN is gone

[1bad65]

At least some good news happened today.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmi...s.html?showall

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The national organization folds.. but the local chapters will still be working registering voters and so forth. Since ACORN is mainly a grass-roots organization they may actually be more effective now than before.

The Neo-Cons really showed their colors on this one.

[1bad65]

The Neo-Cons really showed their colors on this one.

Actually it was ACORN that showed their true colors on those undercover tapes.

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Actually it was ACORN that showed their true colors on those undercover tapes.

No.. ACORN was CLEARED of any wrongdoing. The "journalists" who tried to entrap them visited multiple offices trying to get some footage they could use and edit, they heavily edited the footage so the questions the ACORN employees were replying to were not clear AND they used "B-roll" footage of that dude in his pimp outfit when he was wearing a preppy shirt and slacks in the ACORN office.

The real crime of ACORN was attempting to enfranchise the poor and powerless.

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ACORN's Real Crime: Empowering the Poor
January 27, 2010

Jim Hightower

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown

The name Felix Walker is not one you would recognize, but this 19th-century congressman inadvertently contributed a word to America's political lexicon that you will recognize--a word that fairly well sums up a lot of what we're getting these days from right-wing politicos and pundits.

In the 1820s, Walker was the U.S. representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. In an age of great political orators, Walker was not one. He was a droner, a dull fellow known for expressing his dullness at great length on every topic. No matter what issue was up for debate in the House--no matter whether he had any real knowledge, facts, or insights to add--Walker would rise to speak, insisting that his constituents back home would want his voice heard. He would then launch into a wandering, wearisome, often-nonsensical discourse that he always called "a speech for Buncombe."

Exasperated colleagues began to refer to Walker's interminable prattling as "just so much buncombe," a phrase that has been passed down to us as "bunk"--a synonym for meaningless political claptrap.

We've been getting an overload of bunk in recent weeks from a gaggle of Fox-brained Republican Congress critters. They've been flapping their gums to demonize and destroy a grassroots group that has offended them by--get ready to be outraged--organizing and helping to empower thousands of Americans who live in low-income and working-class neighborhoods all across the country.

ACORN is this grassroots group. For four decades, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been going door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood, to extend basic democratic tools to people who've been dissed and dismissed by the political system. What ACORN's effort amounts to is civic education. Few members of the local chapters have ever been active in community decision making. After all, that process is usually held in the tight grip of moneyed interests who reside and work in distant, much tonier zip codes, and regular folks rarely are welcome.

Through ACORN, however, these powerless ones get an immersion in self-help democracy, learning how to operate in the public sphere to become both political and economic players. They form their own neighborhood organizations, elect officers, and choose a set of issues to push--from bank redlining to better garbage pickup, from rip-off utility bills to enforcement of antipollution regulations. They soon discover that working together, they have actual power to get things done through direct actions, group negotiations, and voter participation.

This democratization process is the essence of self-government, and ACORN has been remarkably successful at it. Having organized half a million members into 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities and 39 states, the group has become our nation's most effective voice of, by, and for modest-income families. As a Texas ACORN member put it, "Once you get involved, you will never be satisfied with grumbling again. After getting organized and making change happen, you can never go back to doing nothing."

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Panic attack

An engaged, organized, educated, and motivated group of low-wage Americans with an agenda of progressive change is not a sight that delights the corporate establishment--especially when the group has proved to be an impressive force in congressional and presidential elections. This is why the money powers have unleashed (and funded) their snarling hounds of right-wing politics to go after ACORN with a blood lust.

It was in 2004 that national GOP political operatives first felt the group's growing grassroots punch. In the Bush-Kerry presidential run, ACORN members registered and helped turn out hundreds of thousands of voters in their neighborhoods, especially in such hotly contested states as Florida, Michigan, and Ohio. Most of those folks preferred the policies put forth by Kerry and several Democrats who were contending for congressional seats, thus adding substantially to the usual number of Democratic votes.

The reaction from corporate-funded campaign operatives was instantaneous: "Auuuuuuugh," they cried. In 2006, ACORN's registration and get-out-the-vote drives brought even more new voters into the process in such states as Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio, where Democratic congressional candidates were elected. "Double-Auuuuuuugh," shrieked GOP politicos.

Republican-minded groups--from the NRA to religious rightists--run the exact same kinds of voter-reg and turnout campaigns in GOP neighborhoods. But these rabid partisans (who are the same people who connived in 2000 to "elect" Bush president on a rigged 5-4 Supreme Court vote) were not about to allow a Democratic-minded group get away with such success. So they cynically decided to demonize the group, shout it down, and shut it down.

Their first ploy was to raise the bugaboo of voter fraud, claiming that a tsunami of ineligible people was casting ballots and stealing elections and that ACORN was behind it. The demonizers knew that there are practically no cases of intentional voter fraud in all of America, much less a single case of any election being stolen by illegal votes. However, Karl Rove and John McCain led the Republican squawk squad, demanding that ACORN be investigated, prosecuted, and executed for conducting a secretive mass campaign to pervert the sanctity of the ballot.

Rove even played a central role in the heavy-handed firings of Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys, removing at least two in part because they had not found any actual electoral fraud by ACORN and would not play politics with the issue.

Meanwhile, McCain went totally goofy in 2008, loudly denouncing ACORN for instances in which a few of its canvassers signed up people who registered more than once or used fake names. But the law plainly says that voter registrars cannot reject any application, no matter how silly. That's the job of voting officials--and indeed, in the very cases waved around by McCain, ACORN staffers were the ones who flagged the phony signatures for the officials.

Registering to vote is not the same as ultimately voting. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck might sign up, but they are not allowed to show up and cast a ballot. Indeed, there is not one documented case of an improper vote cast because of a problem with a voter-registration form collected by ACORN. The organization committed no fraud.

But the devil creates his own "truth," and the right-wing screed machine continued to pound its fraudulent voter-fraud line. A corporate-funded front group bought full-page ads in the New York Times under the name of "RottenACORN.com," hyping the lie that the group was involved in a voter registration "scandal."

Mainstream-news outlets dutifully spread the lie. In an academic analysis of the 2008 coverage that 15 major-media organizations gave to the voter-fraud accusations against ACORN, two university professors found that some 80% of the stories did not mention that ACORN itself had reported the false names--and 72% of the stories failed to quote anyone from the grassroots group to get its side of the story. Previously, ACORN was not a household name, but by election day 2008, a national poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 82% of Americans knew of it and that most of their knowledge came from the right wing's voter-fraud campaign.