The real purpose of the right's attacks on ACORN is to destroy a remarkably successful 50-year-old grassroots model for defending the poor and workers.To understand the current attacks on ACORN, and the organization itself, we need to go back more than 60 years, to the 1930s and the New Deal, when for the first time, the federal government accepted responsibility for directly helping the non-working poor.
These programs were expanded in the 1940s, but in the 1950s, a backlash erupted against the poor, driven by several factors.
The postwar prosperity dramatically reduced the number of poor families, and an increasing number of black women were added to the welfare rolls, injecting race into the debate.
Meanwhile, a Republican White House mostly left welfare matters to the states.
The myth of welfare recipients as lazy, immoral chiselers began to circulate. States adopted punitive laws to reduce welfare rolls. Special units of welfare departments conducted "midnight raids" to see if the recipients were involved in a relationship with a man, something that would result in a cut-off of benefits. The average grant declined.
In desperation, low-income mothers in dozens of big cities organized for survival. They came together to collectively negotiate not only with welfare offices for benefits, but with utilities to eliminate deposits required from low-income households and with the post office to install locks on mailboxes in apartment houses to prevent the theft of welfare checks.
Several veterans of the civil rights movement worked to bring local welfare-rights organizations together into a national organization.
In June 1966, a coordinated national day of action brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in 16 major cities. Two months later, representatives of 75 local welfare-rights organizations convened in Chicago to create the National Welfare Rights Organization.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/142812------------------------------------------------------------
It's all about race and class -- don't let the bullshitters bullshit you...
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