What do you know about ACORN?

[Are_grits_groceries]

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What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does. Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.

What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work? Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.

Another major campaign has been to limit the interest and fees that banks charge homeowners. In the 1990s, ACORN spearheaded a number of legal actions, often joined by states' attorneys general, that compelled such lenders as Citigroup to change many of their practices. The group has led successful drives to outlaw the most egregious predatory lending in nine states. It also counsels thousands of inner-city homeowners and home buyers.

ACORN's third focus has been to expand the electorate. In the 2007-08 election cycle, it registered 1.3 million new voters in the nation's inner cities. This activity particularly vexed many Republican politicians, who have repeatedly accused the organization of massive voter fraud. The Bush administration's politicization of the Justice Department -- its widely reported firing of U.S. attorneys for their failure to bring voter fraud indictments (all of them looked and could find scarcely any instances of same) -- stemmed from the administration's apparent desire to depress minority turnout, a goal it sought to accomplish by demonizing ACORN.

Now, how much of this would you know from following the stories about ACORN that have been running in even the best of the media? Little to nothing, as Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, and Christopher R. Martin, a professor of journalism at University of Northern Iowa, just concluded in an exhaustive study of news coverage of ACORN. Looking at the 647 stories on the group that ran in leading newspapers and broadcast networks in 2007 and 2008, they found that not only did a majority of such stories focus on allegations of voter fraud but also that 83 percent of the stories that linked ACORN to those allegations failed to mention that actual instances of voter fraud were all but nonexistent.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/23/AR2009092303679.html

ACORN needs to double check on the people it hires, and police itself. If people truly broke the law, they should be held accountable.

However, what % of ACORN's workers actually commit crimes, and are not reported by the organization? How many major companies have employees who also commit crimes? I'm not suggesting that ACORN should be given a pass on the "they did it too" excuse. However, are they being held to an unfair standard?

I would like some "muckrakers" to take their hidden cameras to Wall Street and see what practices they find there. Their cameras would probably melt if they also looked at some of the astroturf groups that have been founded.

[Blue_Tires]

1. ttt

[elocs]

2. It is not fair, but groups such as ACORN that are "perceived" as supporting Democratic causes

need to be above reproach, just as Caesar's wife. They need to go the extra mile to make sure things are done properly, that their employees are squeaky clean.

Yes, it's unfair, yes, it's a double standard, but in the long run it is the very best thing. We cannot excuse misdeeds or stupidity in actions by simply referring to others who have done things just as bad or worse. We wouldn't stand for Republicans doing it, so we should not be hypocritical either.

[JuniperLea]

3. Thank you!

Great story. Damn those do-gooders and their empathy for human dignity!