When ACORN came under unprecedented attack last election cycle for our work bringing new low- and moderate-income voters of color into the electorate, Adam Bink, one of the editors there, reached out to our small online team and offered the resources of this vibrant progressive community to help us combat the firestorm of accusations and lies pushed by partisan activists.
He and people like Mike Lux, David Sirota, Chris Bowers, Natasha Chart, Matt Stoller, and Paul Rosenberg rearranged their priorities and gave their time to debunk the accusations and put the attacks and our work into context. Their advice was instrumental in helping ACORN build relationships with progressive bloggers and online activists, relationships that helped folks across the blogosphere contribute to our defense. Near the end of the entire saga, in response to a thank you video to the progressive online community that the Working Families Party produced with me, Digby said something that captures what I think is the essence of what happened in 2008. She said, “It’s beginning to feel like a movement.”
Well, it certainly felt like that to me too. And my involvement with the progressive online aspect of that movement all started with the OpenLeft community.
So when I found out that OpenLeft was facing a funding crisis (and I know a few things about facing fundraising crises as the CEO of a poor people’s organization) I knew I had to help. So I did. When ACORN was being attacked, OpenLeft stood up. Now its our turn. When OpenLeft is in trouble, ACORN will always have its back.
But you need to help too. OpenLeft is too important to the progressive movement to be allowed to fail.
If you believe that there is a need for a space that offers deep progressive analysis of both policy and politics, then you need to give.
If you believe that there is a need for a space that offers cogent analysis of the changing electorate and its potential impact on progressive public policy, then you need to give.
If you believe that there needs to be a place dedicated to holding elected officials accountable for their promises around progressive public policy, then you need to give.
If you believe there needs to be a space where progressives can discuss long-term goals, strategies and tactics outside of the short-term urgency of specific campaigns or elections, then you need to give.
Because the truth is that, while there are many sites that do some of these things very well, there are practically none that do them all and do them all so well. And that’s probably the biggest reason that you need to give.
Since 1948, when Congress defeated one of the best chances had at a universal health care bill, the issue has not diminished in its importance to the country or its influence in all aspects of our economy. Right now we are facing what I think is best opportunity of my lifetime to reshape the health care system to insure the uninsured, control costs, and remove health care coverage from its linkage to employment.
ACORN, through its partnership with Health Care for America Now (HCAN), is heavily involved in pushing out elected representatives to take advantage of this moment and enacting lasting, comprehensive health care reform. While we may not end up with the perfect system, from a progressive point of view, whatever we do get will be a vast improvement over what we have now. Today, in a direct shot at the insurance industry fighting the changes, HCAN and its partners, including ACORN, released a study on the consolidation of the industry and its near monopolistic practices in many states. Below I've written more about this, through the prism of Tamecka Pierce, one of Florida ACORN's strongest leaders. We can win real health care reform this year. But we need to fight for it. --Bertha
When Florida ACORN member Tamecka Pierce first got her employer-provided health insurance, she was ecstatic. No more dealing with the limitations and bureaucracy of the Medicaid system, which had been her sole option as an unemployed single mother with three children.
That joy was short lived. Just after she was accepted into the Blue Cross/Blue Shield program, she was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disease in which the body slowly eats away at itself. The treatment is complex, ever-shifting, and life-long as there is no cure.
Predictably, Blue Cross/Blue Shield spent months fighting not to cover Tamecka. When she finally won, her problems didn't end. As the sole breadwinner, money is always an issue. On a monthly basis, Tamecka found herself choosing between medications and visits to specialist, or between health care and other bills.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Follow me on the flip to find out how.
If you didn’t see ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson take on Glenn Beck on Wednesday, you missed a bit of a dust-up. Enough of a dust-up for Keith Olbermann to name Beck his “Worst Person in the World” for Thursday May 7.
For most of the nine minutes, Beck did his best to continue the rich Fox News tradition of smearing ACORN’s work, especially around the voter registration drive we did last year. Scott did his best to give as good as he got.
For the most part, he did pretty well, I’d say, forcing Beck to shut off his mike one point. (Here’s an aside: Why is it that right-wing radio and TV hosts always prattle on about the first amendment when they get called out for their hate speech, but when they can’t bully guests into submission, then need to cut the other guy’s mike? Are they scared to actually deal in facts?)
But the real confrontation happened off-screen, when, during a commercial break, Beck said that ACORN was “bad for America” and Scott responded, “You’re just afraid of black people.” You can almost see Beck’s head explode in this clip.
Follow me over the flip for more on how Beck exemplifies the problems conservatives have with race.
The last time I was here I was discussing the foreclosure crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and the launching of ACORN's Home Defenders campaign. This is the hard work ACORN members and like-minded community activists are doing to help foreclosure victims stay in their homes until the various programs and proposals from the Obama Administration can take effect. As part of that effort, we're calling for a 3-month moratorium on foreclosures and supporting the so-called bankruptcy "cram-down" legislation that is now before the Senate.
But I want to talk about something that’s even bigger than that campaign. And even more complicated and difficult to make sexy. No, it is not my auntie’s hair. (I keep saying, "Braids!" And she keeps reaching for the straightener. It ain't pretty.) I'm talking about President Obama's first budget proposal.
Before you click away with your eyes all glazed over, hear me out. Because this budget is a major down payment on a progressive future for the United States.
On Wednesday I wrote a piece on Huffington Post and another here at Open Left talking about the centrality of fixing the foreclosure crisis to any recovery from the economic meltdown. Since the toxic assets at the center of the meltdown are based on mortgages that are entering foreclosure at a rate of one every 13 seconds, we have to address foreclosure as a part of getting America back on its feet.
The Homeowner Affordability and Stabilization Plan (HASP), announced in Phoenix on Wednesday by President Obama, which will help up to an estimated 9 million families, is a good first step – and the first serious effort by the Federal government to confront the challenge. But just because there was an announcement does not lessen the urgency of the problem. We are still in a situation where four families every minute enter the foreclosure process. We believe there must be a moratorium on foreclosures until HASP is fully implemented.
In the extended entry I give a report back on ACORN's actions on Thursday to create a sense of urgency around this crisis and help some families stay in their homes.
It is good to be back here at OpenLeft. Thanks to the site's editors, I will be posting from time to time on ACORN's major campaigns and the work being done by progressives to push for the kind of policies we need to get America back on its feet and back to work. I'm starting with the work we are doing to address the foreclosure crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown. -- Bertha
Yesterday President Obama signed into law the economic recovery package that is a firm first step forward in getting America back on its feet in the midst of the economic devastation we are experiencing.
Today, President Obama announced his Administration's $75 billion plan for addressing the foreclosure crisis engulfing the country. This is a welcome initiative, especially in the wake of the 2 years of inactivity and neglect from the Bush Administration.
I would argue that in terms of addressing the specific genesis of our present crisis - the toxic assets crippling the financial sector - the announcement today is of greater magnitude. For without a plan to address the predicted 8-9 million foreclosures over the next 4 years, that's in addition to the 2.3 million that occurred in 2008 with a total estimated cost to the economy of over $850 billion, attempts to spur an economic recovery will fail. There can be no long-term solution without addressing the immediate foreclosure crisis.
I talk about the problem and what we can do about it in the extended entry.
A country created by slaveholders, that denied women the right to vote until 1920, and that needed a “second Reconstruction” in the 1960’s to guarantee the right to vote for Black Americans, elected the former community organizer and quintessentially American mixed-heritage Barack Hussein Obama to its Presidency.
Wow.
We made history despite the ugly campaign of fear and lies run by John McCain, a central tactic of which was to demonize ACORN and, in classic guilt-by-association innuendo, raise questions about President-Elect Obama’s fitness for office. We know that not only did that tactic fail, but that voters responded to a campaign that challenged us to be our better selves, to believe in the promise of America, and our resilience as Americans of countless backgrounds and strengths.
The thank you's and ACORN's policy priorities in the new political climate on the flip
With an historic Election Day coming tomorrow, it is increasingly clear that the McCain-Palin campaign’s ACORN-voter fraud endgame may be to use their relentless attacks as a justification for a wave of legal challenges to close election results in key states. Over the weekend, McCain-Palin campaign manager Rick Davis made the rounds of the Sunday news shows claiming that polls showed McCain “structurally tied” in New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. Never mind that, as SilentPatriot at Crooks and Liars points out,
“In Nevada, Barack Obama leads in the last eight polls, with a margin between 4 and 12 points.
In Colorado, excluding John Zogby's garbage internet polls, Barack Obama has lead in every single poll taken since the end of September. What's more, the most recent PPP poll has him up a staggering 10 points.
And in New Mexico, Obama leads in every poll since the second week in September. The last four polls average out to a 10.5 [point] Obama lead.”
Campaigns historically make claims of pushing towards victory on the closing weekend before an election, but the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee have been engaged in six weeks of smears and attacks on ACORN’s record-breaking voter registration work, all part of a coordinated effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Where this is headed on the flip.
While ACORN's record-breaking voter registration campaign - and the partisan attacks which followed - have been much in the news lately, ACORN members and organizers are hard at work conducting extensive Get Out the Vote programs to make sure that ACORN members, new registrants, immigrant citizens, young people, and infrequent voters in low-income and minority communities participate in this historic election. Below the flip are some highlights of our work.
Earlier this week John Oliver, a correspondent for the Daily Show, interviewed me for a story on community organizing and community organizers. The piece aired last night.
I think it did a good job showing the absurdity of the claims from the Right about organizing and organizers, especially as pushed by hackmeisters like Matthew Vadum, who was also in the segment.
For the record, I would never sell used cars. Take public transit, people!
Four weeks ago most people in the United States had never heard of ACORN.
But then the entire apparatus of the GOP started a concerted and coordinated campaign of attacks and smears on us, reaching a zenith of sorts when John McCain attacked us during the last Presidential debate in front of 50 million viewers, saying that we “may be destroying the fabric of democracy”.
So now the whole country knows about ACORN – a Time/CNN poll this week shows that we are known by 86% likely voters in Virginia, a state in which we have never had a serious presence. Some of us, in trying to make light of what has been a trying time, to say the least, have joked that “we don’t care what they say about us, as long as the get our name right.” But that make-shift levity doesn’t change the cold hard facts behind the unrelenting assault on ACORN.
This week, we’ve fought back, and today, we’re asking John McCain to stop the lies. More below the fold.
