Behind the Lies About ACORN

[marmar]

from OpenLeft:



Behind the Lies About ACORN
Sun Dec 06, 2009 at 08:30

Republished from Random Lengths News, December 4, 2009 Issue. My contribution to pushing back against the rightwing war on ACORN.
Behind the Lies About ACORN

By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor


In the summer of 2009, two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute-and occasionally other characters-approached at least 10 local offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN. Among other things, they asked advice on taxes and a business venture that involved underage illegal immigrant girls from El Salvador. ACORN employees at some offices asked them to leave, at two (at least), the police were called, and one staffer recorded them on a cell phone. Los Angeles was one place they were kicked out. But staffers in four offices-San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Brooklyn-fell for the act, and offered to help them, with advice on taxes and buying a home.

Within a week of the tapes being released, and causing a media firestorm, Congress took the unusual step of specifically defunding ACORN by name, without even pretending to investigate-even though ACORN itself had already fired the staffers involved, and was moving to make its own investigation, headed by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger.

The defunding was so unusual that it's almost certainly unconstitutional, a violation of Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 of which provides that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed." A bill of attainder singles out individuals or groups for punishment without benefit of trial, and violates the bedrock principle of separation of powers. On November 12, ACORN filed suit to nullify the defunding as unconstitutional.

For those who think President Obama is a socialist born in Kenya, there was already probably no organization more sinister than ACORN. And for good reason: A media analysis, released in September, 2009, documented a persistent pattern of deeply biased reporting that fundamentally misreported basic facts, in effect reproducing propaganda that ACORN's enemies had been peddling for years.

"Over the years, ACORN has made powerful enemies," explained Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College and one of the study's co-authors, in an LA Times op-ed. "Many businesses oppose the group's efforts to raise wages for the working poor. Banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders have fought ACORN's campaigns to strengthen regulation of the financial industry. Business groups have funded anti-ACORN Web sites, such as rottenacorn.com, that aim to destroy the group's credibility. Republicans have long opposed ACORN's success at registering low-income, mostly minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=16349

[Luminous Animal]

1. That's a good article.

Thanks.

[Luminous Animal]

2. Kick.

[bleever]

3. All roads lead to Rove:

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, "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: "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."