The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 1970s invaded welfare offices across the U.S. - often violently - bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them.

Wiley (who was best known for his effective use of the so-called "Cloward-Piven strategy") and Gary Delgado (a lead organizer for Wiley's NWRO) formed the new entity along with Wade Rathke. It would come to be known as ACORN.

In the late Sixties, ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke was an NWRO organizer and a protégé of Wiley. Rathke also organized a draft-resistance campaign for the militant group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the same period. 

In the early Seventies, Wade Rathke and his ACORN co-founders enlisted civil-rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky's activist tactics.

In addition to operating its 1,200 chapters in the U.S., ACORN owns two radio stations, a housing corporation, and a law office. It also runs schools in New York City and a network of “boot camps” where street activists are trained in operations to extort contributions from banks and other businesses under threat of racial violence and trumped-up civil-rights charges. 

[Ed. Note: Pesky Truth predicts that this extortion technique will someday come to be known as Jackson-Sharpton strategy.]

Since ACORN is a private corporation, it is not required to divulge its finances. Complicating any effort to calculate ACORN's income is the fact that the organization operates an enormous number of front groups, many of which conceal their relationship to ACORN. As of October 2008, there wereat least 294 front groups, nonprofits, and businesses related to ACORN, the vast majority of which listed their headquarters as: 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana -- the site of a now-defunct funeral home.

But we can gain some idea of ACORN's revenues by multiplying the organization's claimed 400,000+ member families by the $120 annual membership fee, which yields a total of approximately $48 million. According to ACORN's website, "Membership dues and a host of grassroots and chapter-based fundraising programs pay for 70 to 75 percent of the entire organization's budget." If that is the case, ACORN's annual revenues are at least $64 million. Some of those revenues come in the form of taxpayer dollars furnished by the federal government: Between 1994 and 2008, ACORN received a total of $53 million in federal funds earmarked for so-called "community organizations."

In addition to membership fees and government grants, ACORN (and its partner group the ACORN Institute) also have received large donations from a number of charitable foundations, including but not limited to (this is a partial list only):

Note: not all listings contain hyperlinks

With the massive funding available to them, it should come as no surprise that ACORN has become the largest grassroots community organization (read: radical group) in America. Here are a few pertinent facts about ACORN’s interests:

·         ACORN has been implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during recent election cycles

·         They pressure banks to lend money to under-qualified minority borrowers

·         They maintain close ties to organized labor

·         They oppose capitalism

·         They call for more government control over citizens and the economy

·         They favor a government monopoly in healthcare

·         They advocate an open-door immigration policy.

Foundation Watch editor Matthew Vadum explains specifically what ACORN has done ever since its inception.

"ACORN organizes crude protests against businesspeople and public officials. Opposed to the profit motive and capitalism in general, it pushes for more government control over citizens and the economy. ACORN supports gun control, a government monopoly in healthcare and an open door immigration policy. It supports a big raise in the federal minimum wage and so-called 'living-wage' laws enacted by states and cities. ACORN wants more funding for urban public schools, and wants federal and state laws enacted guaranteeing paid sick leave for all full-time workers. The group claims to fight for affordable housing and it rails against foreclosures and so-called 'predatory' lending, even though it demands that banks make loans [to under-qualified borrowers] destined to default."

Can you imagine what we can expect from ACORN if they “hit the jackpot?” The jury is still out on how much of the $5 to 8.5 billion included in the “Porkulus” bill for “Neighborhood Stabilization Programs” they’ll get.

ACORN spokesperson Bertha Lewis said, “We watch with bemusement as he (Sen. David Vitter, R-La) tries to gin up opposition to progressive solutions to America's deep economic crisis by accusing ACORN of doing something we have never done. We have not received neighborhood stabilization funds, have no plans to apply for such funds, and didn't weigh in on the pending rule changes."

However, sister organization ACORN Housing Corp. HAS developed housing in several cities, and HAS received federal funds. "We theoretically could apply," said Richard Hayes, director of strategic projects for ACORN Housing. "But we would have to compete like everyone else. There is no guarantee we would be chosen." Right.

While that statement may be true, with between 5 and 8.5 BILLION dollars available to “Neighborhood Stabilization Organizations (NSOs),” is it folly to expect ACORN Housing Corp. or one of ACORN’s other 293 entities to get in line with a hand held out? I think not.

ACORN notes on its own website that, “through the ACORN Housing Corporation, first time homeowner mortgage counseling and foreclosure prevention assistance, and low income housing development has benefited its members and constituency.” That would seem to fit the definition of what Congress wanted to encourage with the NSO funding, no?

Housing activism has been a major priority for ACORN, which has formed housing collectives in a host of targeted areas. These collectives pressure local authorities to place them (the collectives) in charge of renovating and managing abandoned or dilapidated properties for poor tenants. In turn, the local authorities provide money for renovation - much of which ends up in ACORN bank accounts.

 When it comes to paying their own workers “living wages” and union organizing, hypocrisy is spelled A, C, O, R, N.

In 1995, ACORN's California chapter went to court seeking an exemption from having to pay its workers the state minimum, at the time $4.25 an hour. The group lost.

"A 2003 study of ACORN by the Employment Policies Institute found the group paid a wage of $5.67 per hour, which was 'less than half the level demanded by many proposed living-wage ordinances that ACORN supported.'”

Although it demands all workers be allowed to organize unions, ACORN doesn't like it when its own workers try to organize. It has tried to block its own employees from signing up with unions, and in 2003, the National Labor Relations Board determined it had unlawfully blocked its workers from organizing.

In many respects, ACORN is like our U.S. Congress where the byword is “do as I say, not as I do – it’s ok for me, but not for you.”

[Ed. Note: Based on our extensive research, we have been unable to determine which body is more trustworthy, ACORN or Congress. Our recommendation is not to trust either entity.]

ACORN’s voter registration operation.

According to their website, since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low-and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote. During the 2008 election cycle, ACORN registered, by their own count, 1,300,000 people in 26 states.

These impressive numbers are tarnished, however, by the fact that ACORN and its affiliates (most notably Project Vote, which is ACORN's voter-mobilization arm) have engaged in massive campaigns of voter-registration fraud.

Although our research found thirty-one specific instances where ACORN was accused of wrongdoing related to voting registrations, here are just a few egregious examples:

·         In 2008 in Indianapolis (where ACORN was very active), the number of registered voters exceeded the official population of voting-age adults by 33,204.

·         In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN submitted 5,000 voter-registration applications in early October 2008. Of the first 2,100 that were analyzed by election officials, every single one was fraudulent. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Republican election official Ruthann Hoagland. "Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same." Hoagland's Democratic colleague, Sally LaSota, concurred: "We're not handwriting experts, but what's obvious is obvious." The fake registrants included dead people and under-age children.

·         Between March 23 and October 1, 2008, ACORN and other "get-out-the-vote" groups submitted at least 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board; of those, 57,435 (23%) were rejected for faulty information. Most of the fraudulent forms - which featured fake social security numbers, incorrect birthdates, forged or duplicate signatures, and non-existent addresses - were submitted by ACORN.

·         In 2008 in Clark County, Nevada, registrar of voters Larry Lomax told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that ACORN was submitting 2,000 to 3,000 fraudulent applications per week.

·         In Oakland County, Michigan in 2008, election officials discovered more than 33,000 duplicate voter-registration applications, most of which had been submitted by ACORN workers.

In 2008, election officials in several states said that fully half of ACORN voter registrations were fraudulent. As of December of that year, ACORN was under investigation for voter-registration fraud in 15 states.

The American Thinker has observed that "ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy" by employing the following techniques:

ACORN asks, “Can Fannie and Freddy come out to play?”

In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, the act was supposed to reduce supposed discriminatory credit practices (“redlining”) by the banking and saving institutions.

The CRA required banks to extend credit to undercapitalized, high-risk borrowers in low-income, mostly-minority areas.

To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions.

Under CRA guidelines, any bank wishing to expand or to merge with another financial institution would be required to first demonstrate that it had complied with all CRA rules. Final approval for expansions or mergers could be stalled, or derailed entirely, if "community groups" like ACORN were to accuse a bank - however frivolously or unjustly - of having violated the mandates of CRA. 

In the early 1990s, ACORN, thus empowered by the CRA, insisted that banks demonstrate their commitment to minority lending by drastically lowering their standards on down-payments and underwriting, and by making loans even to borrowers - especially nonwhite minorities - with bad credit histories. If banks expressed reluctance to do so, ACORN intimidated them into compliance by threatening to sue them, to smear them in the media with negative-publicity campaigns (accusing them of racist and anti-immigrant lending practices), and to block any mergers which the banks might seek in the future.

In response, terrified bank executives routinely agreed to appoint ACORN as their official "advisor" on CRA compliance, thereby giving the group carte blanche to channel loans to its own hand-picked recipients.

By September 1992, ACORN was issuing fact sheets broadcasting its success in having forced lenders to lower their credit standards on behalf of minorities. Ultimately, ACORN proudly claimed "credit for saving the CRA."

The New York Post explained what happened next:

"As ACORN ran its campaigns against local banks, it quickly hit a roadblock. Banks would tell ACORN they could afford to reduce their credit standards by only a little - since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage giants, refused to buy up those risky loans for sale on the 'secondary market.'"

“By itself, the CRA wasn't enough. Unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks would never make home loans to customers with bad credit histories or with too little money for a down-payment.”

"So ACORN's Democrat friends in Congress moved to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dispense with normal credit standards. Throughout the early '90s, they imposed ever-increasing subprime-lending quotas on Fannie and Freddie…."

"ACORN's intimidation tactics, and its alliance with Democrats in Congress, triumphed. Despite their 1994 takeover of Congress, Republicans' attempts to pare back the CRA were stymied."

"In June 1995, the Clinton administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push homeownership in America to new heights - regardless of the compromise in credit standards that the task would require. Fannie and Freddie were assigned massive subprime lending quotas, which would rise to about half of their total business by the end of the decade."

This strengthening of the CRA's loan mandates, coupled with the authority that ACORN and other "community organizations" were given to intervene at yearly bank reviews, placed ACORN and likeminded activist groups in a position of great influence. 

Banks, eager to receive good reports from these groups (in order to avoid having their merger plans blocked or their lending practices challenged by the Justice Department), funneled immense sums of money to ACORN, et al.  As the New York Post puts it, "intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract (extort) hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions."

One financial-industry consultant explains, with resignation: "The banks know they are being held up, but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business."

Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (a community-action group that calls for individual responsibility rather than reliance on government handouts), puts it this way: "ACORN knows that corporate America has no starch in their shorts and, therefore, what they try to do is buy peace from groups that agitate against them. The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."

President Bush publicly called for GSE (Government Sponsored Entity, which includes Fannie and Freddie) reform 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted.  Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President’s repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems.

In fact, in a late 2004 Congressional hearing into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Congress and the American taxpayers were told that “We do not have a crisis at Fannie or Freddie,” “There was nothing wrong,” and “Everything has worked just fine.” Representatives Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Clay, and Artur Davis (all Congressional Black Caucus members) joined with Barney Frank to maintain that all was well with Fannie and Freddie and also to sing the praises of Franklin Raines, the Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae who was paid more than $50,000,000 from 1999 through 2004 for his “outstanding leadership.” Here’s a link to the hearing if you’re interested. 

The ACORN doesn’t fall far from Obama

Obama had extensive experience as a community organizer. In the 80s, he was the lead organizer of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a campaign funded by Chicago’s south-side Catholic churches and formed on the organizing principles of Saul Alinsky. He spent another four years building an organization in Roseland and the nearby Altgeld Gardens public housing complex.

When he came back to Chicago from law school and Madeline Talbot was beginning her intimidation campaign against banks, she enlisted Barack Obama to train her Chicago ACORN organizing leaders in the Alinsky methods.

Toni Foulkes, Chicago ACORN leader, and member of ACORN's National Association Board said of Obama’s successful Project Vote experience, “Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress... By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. "

In 1995, Mr. Obama was on a team of lawyers that represented Acorn in a lawsuit (known as "motor voter") to compel Illinois to comply with federal laws intended to enhance access to the polls. As part of their legal team, Mr. Obama had “an intimate relationship” with Acorn through their suit “against the State of Illinois and the federal government.”

Obama was on the board of directors for the Woods Fund from 1999 through 2002. It is notable that ACORN was awarded grants totaling $190,000 in the years 2000 through 2002 alone.

During the 2008 primaries, his campaign paid an ACORN affiliate called Citizen’s Services $832,386 for “stage and lighting equipment rental” and get-out-the-vote efforts. Citizen’s Services shares offices with ACORN in New Orleans – but, we’re told that there is no linkage between the groups. Right.

Meeting with ACORN leaders in November, 2008, he reminded them that, “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Most of the preceding information was gathered from Discover The Networks – a website that has the most comprehensive gathering of information imaginable about people and organizations that promote liberal causes. Here’s the link: DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

http://www.acorn.org/ http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-and-the-attempt-to-destroy-the-second-amendment/2/

http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/7-7-09-housing-crisis-report.pdf