| Behind the Lies About ACORN (cont.)
ACORN From Eye-Level
Whatever ACORN means to its enemies, it means something quite different to its 500,000 members, and the millions more it has helped over the years by improving their communities, providing financial counseling, and registering them to vote.
"They're saving people's homes, they're helping neighborhoods rebuild, they're helping educational foundations do the right thing, they're working with police agencies, they're doing things are needed to be done," said Bernie Kabe, a 21-year veteran of the LA County Probation Department, and shop steward and executive board member with AFSCME Local 685. Kabe said he has worked with ACORN for more than half a decade.
"About 4 or 5 years ago when we went up [to Sacramento] to request that the probation budget not be cut, they brought about five buses and-I don't know-they brought about 3-400 people up there to help us lobby the legislature In fact, they were so vocal that a bunch of their people got arrested.
"I was just stunned, but surprised, happily that they were that committed to their young people and to their communities, and to the probation department, ie 685, the union, that they would come up there and help us lobby. That was phenomenal."
Lyneva Mottley, chairperson of Watts ACORN, first got involved with ACORN more than a decade ago, "They were fighting to get traffic signals at a street corner," she recalled. After a few years off, "to take care of my mom," she got involved again, taking part in a citizen lobbying action that took her to Washington. Among other things, she recalled, "We spoke with Ted Kennedy, about the health care bill that's going through the process of being passed right now."
More recently, she's been involved in fighting foreclosures. "We were able to save two homes," over the course of the last year, she said. "One of a retired school teacher. We intervened and helped her save her home." Both were homes their owners had lived in for decades, before falling prey to predatory finance schemes that they were told would help them make needed repairs. It was this pattern of financial predation that ACORN discovered in the late 1990s, and helped organize against years before similarly deceptive tactics were expanded to trap new homeowners in the sub-prime market-many of whom we actually qualified for standard prime-rate loans.
Peter Kuhns is a local ACORN staffer who's been with ACORN for over a decade. He vividly recalls ACORN's 2000 convention in Philadelphia, which featured a mass action against predatory lending.
"We had 2000 people simultaneously march into the offices of three major banks and investment companies and demand to talk about predatory lending. It was right at the beginning of the time across the country that predatory lending was being discussed as a problem," Kuhns recalled.
"That experience had a big impact on me, because I'd never been part of something that big before, where there was 2000 people doing a very aggressive [action]-it was obviously non-violent, and nobody even got arrested, it was just marching into a building and having a press conference, but the combination of that being part of something that big, with the fact that in retrospect we were among the very first people around the country to raise the issue of predatory lending, that had a very big impact on low-income communities, and communities of color in particular, that had a big impact on me."
ACORN's Fight Against Predatory Lending
ACORN first became aware of predatory lending-a term they claim to have coined-from friends and family of those affected.
"ACORN's organizing model is to go door to door in low-income communities and talk to people about the things they'd liked to see changed. And then that helps us build a network of folks in the community," explained Nathan Henderson-James, ACORN's Chief of Online Organizing. "One of the things that our members started to talk to us about, after they were done talking about the fact that the garbage doesn't get picked up, and that there's stray dogs in the alleys, and those kinds of issues, was that some of their neighbors, some of their relatives getting scammed out of their homes."
"It was just like their parents who had had a house for 30 year all of a sudden were in foreclosure, through a set of circumstances that they did not understand," Henderson-James said. "They'd receive a bunch of crazy promises from somebody, and a bunch of obscure and obtuse paperwork. And it turned out this wasn't just happening in one place, it was happening in community, after community, after community."
Because of their nationwide scope, ACORN was able to see the pattern more quickly than others. "We began to see the fact that there was a systematic attempt to get people into loans they couldn't afford, and put them into a process that would essentially take out as much equity as they could get from the folks, and then turn it over to the bankruptcy lawyers or the foreclosure attorneys, or the sheriffs," Henderson-James added. "This was in the late 90s."
In 1999, ACORN helped North Carolina draft the first anti-predatory lending law-a process ACORN would soon duplicate elsewhere. "We were able to pass laws in 8 or 10 states, maybe, modeled on the best aspects of the law passed in North Carolina in1999," Henderson-James said.
By 2000 and 2001, ACORN began releasing a series of reports-many with titles beginning "Separate and Unequal" analyzing the impacts of predatory lending in cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, as well as nationwide, documenting both the spread of subprime lending, and the racial bias associated with it. For example, "Separate and Unequal 2002: Predatory Lending in America" reported that "18.05% of the conventional refinance loans received by upper-income African-American homeowners were from subprime lenders," while "Subprime lenders made 11.76% of all conventional refinance loans received by low-income white homeowners."
"We were able to have a real set of victories that made people's lives better, that stopped predatory lending in a lot of different places around the country," Henderson-James recalled, "And made us whole new set of enemies within the financial services industry."
Voter Registration vs. Voter Suppression: ACORN vs. the GOP
But those enemies were nothing compared to its enemies within the Republican Party, which has been suppressing minority voters since at least the 1950s, when former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rhenquist is known to have participated in suppressing Latino voters in Arizona. In the 1980s, the GOP settled a lawsuit agreeing to halt all such activities, but spin-off groups have repeatedly violated the spirit of that settlement.
ACORN began doing statewide voter-registration work in the early 1990s, in partnership with Project Vote, focused mostly on minority and low-income communities where voter registration rates were abnormally low. (The US is the only industrial democracy with a pronounced class bias in voter participation rates.)
"In terms of a nationwide large-scale programs, we didn't really get that together until 2004, when we were able to help about 1.1 million folks register to vote in 26 different states," said Henderson James.
"That was also in conjunction with a statewide ballot initiative in Florida, constitutional amendment in Florida, to raise the minimum wage and index it to the inflation rate." ACORN registered about 200,000 voters, gathered signatures for the initiative, and then ran a get-out-the-vote field operation to mobilize the communities they served.
"Our folks voted in huge numbers, that thing passed in huge numbers, and I think was the shot across the bow to folk who support the status quo and are worried about distribution of wealth issues about the ability and capacity of ACORN to make serious change."
Indeed, it was noticed all the way up to the White House, where presidential advisor Karl Role (aka "Bush's Brain") became involved in trying to counter-attack ACORN. In late 2006, nine US Attorneys were fired for various political reasons, which were hidden behind false claims they had under-performed. Failure to prosecute highly questionable voter fraud cases appeared to be factors in at least three of the firings. Most notably, New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias stated emphatically that he had been pressured for years to bring baseless voter fraud cases, and that his failure to do so was the reason he was fired. He looked at over 100 potential cases, and found none worthy of prosecution
Rove himself denied he was responsible, even as he told Fox News, "I passed on to the White House counsel`s office to pass on to the Justice Department complaints about the performance of the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, that he failed to go after ACORN and clear cases of vote fraud."
As Henderson-James sees it, the "voter fraud" charges became even more prominent in 2008 because, "[I]t was the only thing they had left. They weren't going to win an election on the issues, they weren't going to win an election on a vision, so they were trying to win an election by keeping the other guys voters from the polls"-otherwise known as "voter suppression," which took other well-known forms as well: "[T]he attacks themselves from 2004 to now were also tied to attacks on the state level to restrict access to the ballots... though voter ID laws, through voter list purging laws, through a variety of policy changes and legislative changes as a way of narrowing the voter rolls to a set of folks who were more to the liking of the politicians in power, or who were forces of the status quo."
Lessons From An Ambush
Playing a key role on two different fronts where low-income and minority communities confronted establishment power put ACORN clearly in the crosshairs. In retrospect, Henderson-James said, ACORN had left itself vulnerable to attack, let its guard down, and failed to respond quickly and effectively.
"ACORN itself did not do a good job of responding to these things and we did not do a good job of understanding the position we were in, in the first place after a year of attacks," he said. "We had a lot of things on our plate" and worrying about a sex-based sting on under-trained staff was not one of them.
What's hurt ACORN most has not been the cut-off of federal funds, which were never a large part of ACORN's budget, but rather the intimidation of others who've drawn back from working with ACORN.
On the right, the mercenaries firm formerly known as Blackwater has had a long trail of misdeeds that have left dozens of people dead directly and thousands dead indirectly. But even the Obama Administration seems disinclined to act, as it recently granted Blackwater another $200 million contract. The contrast with how quickly ACORN was cut off could not be more stark.
When asked what he thought accounted for the difference, Henderson-James specifically stepped out of his role as an ACORN employee. "This is a personal observation, not an organizational observation," he said, and then plunged ahead: "It really points out how the progressive movement is not a movement. It is a bunch of people who share a political vision for America, but do it from the feet of several independent organizations that do not have an infrastructure that allows them to communicate quickly with each other, and create ways so that they can function much more as if they were part of a unified movement."
As a result, "What you see when ACORN starts to get attacked, the second round, and cleverly through sex, and prostitution scandal, a non-scandal, really, was the inability for people to think outside their own organizational self-interest," and thus the urge for organizational self-preservation took center-stage. It's not anyone's fault, he stressed. Rather, "structurally, there was no ability for people to get together."
Dreier has an even stronger sense that the attack is not so much on ACORN per se, but on progressives as a whole, as well as the Obama Administration.
"ACORN's just a proxy," Dreier said. "It started with GOP convention in St Paul," when Obama was repeatedly attacked and mocked for his early years as a community organizer, most notably by Sarah Palin.
"They'er trying to weaken the progressive movement, and to destroy the Obama Administration, that's what's important about it," Dreier said, pointing out that Glenn Beck and other key figures are already lining up others for similar attacks.
"This isn't about ACORN," Dreier concluded. "That's the bigger story."
But from Lyneva Mottley's perspective, maybe it is about ACORN, and maybe that is the bigger story. And maybe that's not even a contradiction of what Dreier said, but rather, another way of saying the same thing.
The day she spoke to Random Lengths, ACORN had held a protest at Fox. "We want the public to see the real face of ACORN," Mottley said. "We had buttons that said, 'I am ACORN ask me why.' We had people there that ACORN had helped."
She went on to say, "We are a community ACORN is the form by which they can also be ACORN by uniting." | 
