ACORN Is Not the Nut Here

From 2000 to 2003 I was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I don't know whether to be sorry or relieved that I don't have my old job now.

ACORN has been through some scandals of its own making, but it is currently all over the news because of a pair of absolutely fraudulent and nationally coordinated attacks.

One of these attacks involves accusations of voter fraud. But, of course, "voter fraud" almost doesn't exist, and federal prosecutors have lost their jobs because they couldn't find evidence of its existence to satisfy the Bush White House. In fact, the accusations against ACORN are not about voting, but about voter registration.

Now, if some kid fills out bogus forms in order to make more money from ACORN for supposedly registering voters, ACORN is supposed to try to catch that stuff and not turn in those forms. On the whole, ACORN has registered huge numbers of people with only a tiny percentage of problems. But the more important point is that the kid trying to scam extra bucks has no intention of trying to vote multiple times, risking imprisonment, and no intention of bringing in corpses to have them vote, as CNN seems to imagine. There's no money in fraudulent voting, only enormous risk. But there is money and power in vote suppression and vote miscounting, the major stories that this one is meant to distract from.

The other attack on ACORN focuses on blaming the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for the collapse of Wall Street. Most subprime loans, and therefore most predatory loans, are not made in order to comply with CRA. In fact, low-income and minority communities have seen a great deal of activism in recent years demanding that the predatory lenders stay out, not in. ACORN coined the phrase "predatory lending" and made news years ago by beginning a major campaign to keep loans that are worse than nothing out of neighborhoods.

Predatory loans are not loans made to the wrong kind of people. They are loans made in very deceptive ways with the aim of making the borrower believe they'll be able to pay it back, but with the aim of making them fail. Predatory mortgage lenders make money by refinancing repeatedly, extracting more fees each time, and eventually seizing the property. This is accomplished with misleading fine print that strips people of their equity through all sorts of hidden fees and charges and rate increases, and by consolidating credit card and other debt with house debt. Every year, ACORN produces a lengthy report documenting the targeting of racial minorities with these loans.

For years, ACORN has led efforts to ban predatory loans through local and state legislation, while the same gang that is now so upset about these loans being made has fought endlessly against bans and restrictions.

The good news is that the family of organizations known as ACORN is growing, raising wages, improving schools, reforming corporations, building housing, organizing active citizens, and clearly threatening the powers that be. ACORN has decidedly moved past the stage of being ignored and even the stage of being laughed at. ACORN is now being attacked. Next comes victory.

Anybody who tries to register voters, especially poor voters is their sworn enemy.

And if you can communicate with acorns, could you please come over here and talk these motherfuckers out of my yard, driveway, and off the car? They're driving me nuts! I get pinged in the head every time I go outside.

them.

This is the worst year ever.

Are the very same scum that used to stay up all night dreaming ways to screw over the unions.
this ACORN seems to me to be a relatively ordinary group with a simple job. When the unions were a powerful force we were attached from all sides. We were the worst, communist sympathizers. Funny thing i never net a communist, however I met a real live Marxist, and after that and consistent with my studier at Pitt, I BEcame one too. After thinking it over it was clear. Progressive Marxist. I like the sound of that, I will keep it and fuck the jack,booted thugs that will come after meI know they can take me ,but one lucky punch at a surprising time would do it , then they could do as they please.

Not trying to be offensive, but, you don't make very much sense.

Acorn has been around a long while (since 1970 according to their website) and has done a lot of good work. Naturally the pukes would hate them.

But what they are supposed to do is *flag* the registration form as suspect. Then they are to turn over the forms and directly inform the Registrar of Voters (or equivalent) of the suspect forms.

Every Voter registration form has a serial number and is to be account for.

thanks

in my state. They hired excons thinking they were helping them naively not knowing they were adept at identity theft and fraud. Am just sick about it.

your home for a living instead. I really don't understand what you are accusing the Ex-cons of doing.

I've heard it all now.

also angry with secretary of state who knew of the problem many many months ago and chose to not confiscate records until just before election

and I don't mean amazing in the positive sense.

during the missing neo-cons slot as well. Dobb's is scared shitless because he realizes Obama is going to win. It's getting increasing difficult for him to conceal his true colors.

It's funny b/c I NEVER knew which side he was on (other than the fact that he hates illegals). Recently, though, it did become clear - his is a Republican and I was surprised. I don't watch him too much, since he blathers the same junk every night (boring).

and been the scorn of repukes. It is not the job of those taking registrations to validate them, never has been. That job is reserved for the registrar's office. There is no case against ACORN, no matter how many duplicate or bad registrations there are.

rec'd

(SAVE is Students Are Voting Everywhere) They helped us in our voter registration efforts and we helped them. My boss, the student body president, was a Republican. We were all happy with the arrangement. These groups are good people who do good work, they believe in something and work hard to make a difference. Thanks for the perspective, David.

on the Community Reinvestment Act.


http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html

<snip>

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977, requires banks to lend in the low-income neighborhoods where they take deposits. Just the idea that a lending crisis created from 2004 to 2007 was caused by a 1977 law is silly. But it’s even more ridiculous when you consider that most subprime loans were made by firms that aren’t subject to the CRA. University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr testified back in February before the House Committee on Financial Services that 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision and another 30% were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. As former Fed Governor Ned Gramlich said in an August, 2007, speech shortly before he passed away: “In the subprime market where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision. It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat.”

Not surprisingly given the higher degree of supervision, loans made under the CRA program were made in a more responsible way than other subprime loans. CRA loans carried lower rates than other subprime loans and were less likely to end up securitized into the mortgage-backed securities that have caused so many losses, according to a recent study by the law firm Traiger & Hinckley (PDF file here).

Finally, keep in mind that the Bush administration has been weakening CRA enforcement and the law’s reach since the day it took office. The CRA was at its strongest in the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, a period when subprime loans performed quite well. It was only after the Bush administration cut back on CRA enforcement that problems arose, a timing issue which should stop those blaming the law dead in their tracks. The Federal Reserve, too, did nothing but encourage the wild west of lending in recent years. It wasn’t until the middle of 2007 that the Fed decided it was time to crack down on abusive pratices in the subprime lending market. Oops.

Better targets for blame in government circles might be the 2000 law which ensured that credit default swaps would remain unregulated, the SEC’s puzzling 2004 decision to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital and that same agency’s failure to oversee those brokerage firms in subsequent years as many gorged on subprime debt. (Barry Ritholtz had an excellent and more comprehensive survey of how Washington contributed to the crisis in this week’s Barron’s.)

The ACORN "controversy" is nothing new. It's been a long-running mantra in the GOOP that Democrats are trying to stack voter roles (a big reason for so many being against "illegal immigration"). This year, with the election not going so well for the GOOP, they need a fall guy...and ACORN fits the bill. They also are a big pain in the GOOP's ass in their efforts to cage the elections and make it close enough for them to steal. As long as there's an ACORN around, it makes their caging plans a lot harder to pull off.

As someone in another thread stated, there's no law against the GOOP forming its own ACORN...but they'll try to find some fraudulent voter registrations (a handful in millions filed) that will attempt to justify that the "election is being stolen". I find it interesting that many of the wingnuts never mentioned the groups name until recently...now ACORN is all evil. Says to me the GOOP is preparing for a defeat and looking for a scapegoat.

ACORN, God love 'em, tries to do good work. It isn't always so careful about how it goes about that mission or whom it gets to do the work. But that's true in every loosely-confederated community action group. In the final analysis, ACORN is more about good will and a desire to do SOMEthing than it is about hard-hitting initiatives.

CRA is a vital, essential part of modern banking. It guarantees that depository institutions must give back to the communities whose money was good enough to take on deposit before a bank decided it wanted to expand into more lucrative or prestigious territories. The Act is essentially a Civil Rights issue made into financial practice. It is, in a word, progressive.

These two acronyms are similar. Let's keep them separate. It's better for both.

Just to play devil's advocate here :evilgrin:

If I vote as myself, and then, having filed a registration of a dead male, call him John Doe, and I show up to vote a second time as John Doe, then how does the system stop me? I'm not in favor of picture ID cards, but that would be one way to reduce the risk that I'd vote twice. Granted, the number of people who actually try to vote twice, all tolled, comes to a minuscule fraction of even the closest election, but it does seem that the Repugnants have at least a colorable argument for voter fraud (not voter registration fraud). Please let me know if you disagree!

The problem with your theory is that there's no evidence that it happens, not that RW trolls haven't been busting their fat asses looking for it.

I read about Iglesias, the in the article I read, the writer claimed that 24 legitimate cases of voter fraud (voting more than once) were prosecuted after the last Presidential election, hence my concession that we are talking about a minuscule fraction of total votes.

So the response to a Repug all hot and bothered about Acorn is
(1) if I fill out 2 (or 72) voter registration cards ("vrc's") that are all accurate, all but one are pitched (may gum up the system, slowing down registration of legitimate voters, but that only helps the Repugnants if you assume that most of the new registrants will vote for Dems);
(2) if I fill out a vrc with "Donald Duck," no one will let me vote anyway;
(3) if I fill out a vrc for someone dead, or some 11-year-old kid, using that person's real address, then I have to actually pull it off. For example, here in Texas you are mailed a voter card. So I'd have to wait at the dead person's mail box (unless I used my own address, which would be quite risky), or the 11-year-old's family's mailbox, get the card, vote twice, and hope all went well.

Could happen, but where is the proof that it has.

Fair?

as a result of the election fraud task force he personally set up at the request of GOP operatives hot to get "voter fraud" cases into the news, bogus or otherwise.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3854.shtml

Iglesias found no prosecutable evidence of voter fraud in NM, refused to trump up false charges, and was fired for doing his job.

and making an issue out of a non-issue in order to camouflage their criminal enablers to power.

Thanks for the thread, davidswanson.

Kicked and recommended.

It's the voter suppression programs that the Reich wing tries to put in place by hyping voter fraud that's the real crime.

ACORN registers people in low income communities and the republicans hate that - they know low income voters are going to vote against them. So of course ACORN is going to have a target on their back. They are the favorite whipping "straw man" for the Reich wing.

Sonia

Ah yes, that's what an average joe schmo would know them as if they watched "the must trusted name in news" aka Lou Dobbs. Sometimes I wonder how many points and many years and how many lives and what a different country it would be if we didn't have not one but three channels of blatant hateful propaganda "the must trusted name in news" to tell joe schmo who to hate. Have you watched Lou Dobbs lately? THE DUDE is frightening these days. Between him and Glenn Beck-on CNN as well-who needs FOX news.

Voter fraud they scream. Irony so much irony to stomach.