Labor Stands With ACORN

ACORN Under Attack, Labor Offers Support

By Paul Burton

Despite recent negative news reports, the activist group ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) continues to advocate for poor and working class people in California and around the U.S. The organization took a hit recently when Congress passed the Defund ACORN Act and cut off its federal funding, which makes up about 10 percent of its budget; ACORN has received about $53 million in federal funding over the past fifteen years. The vote came in response to news reports that featured a video secretly made by two conservative filmmakers disguised as a prostitute and a pimp who were given tax and immigration advice by ACORN employees who advised them to disguise the source of their income to get housing aid.

“There’s been tons of negative attention because of the videos shown on Fox News,” said San Mateo County ACORN Organizer David Sharples. “A few of our staff members said and did stupid, indefensible things, but they are not in line with ACORN’s values and what we are about as an organization.” (Other tapes showing ACORN employees ejecting the videographers from other offices were not shown on Fox.)

And, Sharples pointed out, “None of our staff members committed any crime; they may have said stupid things, but the only crime committed was by the videographer, who secretly taped without the permission of the person being taped. In California you can’t videotape without permission.” In September, Gov. Schwarzenegger wrote a letter to Attorney General Jerry Brown calling on his office to investigate the videotaping incident. The Attorney General said he would investigate both sides. “It’s clear that the party who committed a crime is the videographer,” Sharples said. “What has been lost in the negative news stories is the good work ACORN is doing in the community.”

A History of Advocacy and Organizing

ACORN has been organizing the unorganized and helping low-income communities fight for justice for nearly 40 years. The organization advocates for improved access to health care, fights against predatory lending and for affordable housing and living wages, registers voters, helps fight foreclosures and works for relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

In San Mateo County, ACORN offered free tax filing assistance to over 750 low-income people this year. “That put over $1 million in refunds back into the pockets of families; and another two hundred thousand dollars through the Earned Income Tax Credit,” Sharples noted. San Mateo County Central Labor Council Executive Secretary-Treasurer Shelley Kessler pointed out that, “An analysis of ACORN’s work over the ten year period through 2007 concluded that the organization’s work delivered $15 billion in improvement and investment to communities.”

“ACORN’s goal is to help low-income people to lift themselves out of poverty,” Sharples said. “We do a lot of work helping organize in the community to win neighborhood improvements. In South San Francisco, ACORN worked to get stop signs and stop lights installed; in San Bruno, the City installed speed bumps to slow traffic through residential areas; in East Palo Alto, ACORN fought for and won street paving. It’s about ordinary people coming together to get power in numbers, go to City Councils and get their voices heard to get improvements in the community.”

San Mateo County Central Labor Council Community Services Director Rayna Lehman said, “ACORN has been our partner in organizing support for access to health care in the community. They really stepped up and helped because they are in touch with the people who have no health insurance, who live below the poverty line and may have health issues. ACORN has been the voice—a relentless voice—for these people. They have worked very hard in the community to improve the quality of life. No one else is on the ground doing what they do. ACORN is a visible local advocate for the rights and needs of the poor and the working poor. That’s what we see with ACORN, not the stuff that’s on TV.”

ACORN has over 400,000 members nationwide and more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in over 100 cities across the U.S. The organization was founded in 1970; its goal was to “unite welfare recipients with needy working people around issues such as school lunches, unemployment, Vietnam veterans’ rights, and emergency room care.” Over the past 39 years the organization has registered millions of voters and helped pass local living wage laws in 15 cities—including Chicago, Oakland, Denver, and New York City. In 2004, Florida ACORN helped to raise Florida’s minimum wage by $1.00 an hour by lobbying to get a minimum wage amendment on the ballot. Over 1 million Florida workers were affected by the raise, which is adjusted annually for inflation.

ACORN members also organized fundraising and organizing drives to ensure that victims of Hurricane Katrina received assistance and could return to affected areas. They bused in displaced New Orleans citizens to vote in the city’s elections, rebuilt over 1,850 homes with the help of volunteers, and helped more than 2,000 homeowners affected by the storm. More recently, ACORN has fought to keep families facing foreclosure from losing their homes by trying to work out loan modifications with lenders, and as a last resort, encouraging homeowners to stay in and defend their foreclosed homes. Unfortunately, because of the negative media attention and the internal review ACORN is undergoing, ACORN has temporarily suspended some work like foreclosure prevention services.

Sharples said that at the state level ACORN is working for a law to set up a monitored workout program that would require banks to work with homeowners who are facing foreclosure to modify the terms of their mortgage, so families can stay in their homes. “That has been our main focus and will be next year,” he said. The bill is based on a similar model in Philadelphia that has helped people stay in their homes. “At this time the banks are not doing a good job working with homeowners. We need to put pressure on the banks to work with homeowners and streamline the loan modification process,” he said.

The organization continues to do community organizing, particularly around health care reform. ACORN is active with San Mateo County’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Health Care that seeks to find ways to get health care coverage for the uninsured who meet certain income requirements. The Labor Council’s Rayna Lehman pointed out that ACORN also worked on the groundbreaking Healthy San Francisco program that has given 46,000 people so far access to health care. “The grassroots support that they helped to build helped move that forward,” she said. “I view ACORN as a valuable, important partner as we struggle for health care, safe streets, and improving our communities.”

But clearly, some vested interests do not want to see more poor people and people of color organizing to improve their communities—or voting in their self-interest. ACORN has come under fire from Republican politicians and groups, propaganda outlets like Fox, and right wing talk radio blowhards for “voter fraud.”

“It’s part of a long term campaign by Fox News,” said ACORN’s Sharples. “Leading up to the election last year, ACORN registered 1.3 million new voters, mostly people of color [who tend to not vote for Republicans]. The McCain campaign started to attack ACORN and Fox began reporting on allegations of voter fraud, which are false.” The group was accused of turning in voter registration forms with fake names. “We are required by law to turn in all the registration forms,” Sharples said. “If someone registers as Mickey Mouse or Tony Romo, that form is flagged and turned in to the Election Board.” It is possible that some members of the Election Board are political operatives and used the fake name issue to try to discredit ACORN. The organization has fired workers who engage in falsifying registration forms, but, as ACORN's Midwest Director Jeff Ordower noted, “There is no scenario where those people on problematic cards would show up at the polls,” so in fact there was no “voter fraud.” And it could be argued that former president Bush was elected due to the biggest voter fraud in history because of issues with the Florida ballot in 2000 and electronic voting systems in 2004.

Double Standard

Lehman and Sharples both pointed out that while ACORN has been targeted for funding cuts because of the questionable actions of a handful of employees and volunteers, companies that have committed crimes are still being awarded government contracts.

“Congress jumped all over ACORN and cut off funding for the housing work we do,” Sharples said. “But there is a real double standard when companies like [the private security firm] Blackwater have people on their payroll who have been charged with manslaughter and the company still gets millions in government contracts. And Pfizer recently settled a case for fraud and still gets government contracts.” [see sidebar at end]

Stand With ACORN

As families continue to face foreclosure the need for ACORN’s work remains urgent. The organization depends on membership dues and private donors to support their organizing work as well as pay attorney fees and fight back against the negative news reports with their own public relations campaign. Sharples said they are reaching out to their membership for donations as well as to individuals and organizations who ACORN has worked with. ACORN has about 2,000 members in San Mateo County.

The San Mateo County and San Francisco Labor Councils have passed resolutions in support of ACORN, and Painters and Tapers Local 913 made a donation to the organization. Shelley Kessler urged other unions to do the same. “In recent months ACORN has committed their resources and organizational strength in the struggles for quality, affordable health care for all Americans, ending the foreclosure crisis and achieving employee free choice, financial regulatory reform and the rights of immigrants, and had more than 70 organizers working to enable the voices of those without adequate health care to be heard in pro-health reform events in cities across the country,” she said.

“Once again, they stood with us and we should stand with them.”

>>>

Will ACORN Standard Be Applied to Cut Funding of Corporate Lawbreakers?



In a recent article, “The ACORN Standard,” in The Nation, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, wrote that, “The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight and Reform recently revealed that the top 100 government contractors made nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone. Since 1995 these same contractors have been involved with 676 cases of ‘misconduct’ and paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse. Fines and other penalties, it seems, are simply the stunningly small price of doing government business.”

And in an interview on Democracy Now, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, also decried the double standard that allows corporate criminals to continue to win government funding: Sanders noted that, “… that tape gets up on Fox, and it’s repeated over and over again, and without any kind of hearings, without any kind of process, suddenly this organization, which has done a lot of good work at the grassroots level in voter registration, dealing with affordable banking, housing, and so forth, suddenly, like this, they are defunded. I was one of the members of the Senate who voted against that, because I think you didn’t have any kind of process out there. It was absolutely unfair.

“Meanwhile, we did a little bit of research, and my staff discovered that the three largest defense contractors—and we focused on defense because we’re in the middle of the defense appropriations bill—the three largest defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Boeing—who have received over the years hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, not the $53 million that ACORN had received, but hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, these three companies alone, just these three, have been involved in 109 instances of misconduct. They had paid $2.9 billion to the government for fines or settlements. So, this was not a two-minute videotape recording a stupid, absurd conversation. This is where courts of law or settlements have taken place, where these people have pled guilty or acknowledged misdeeds and paid $2.9 billion since 1995,” Sanders said.

“Now, I asked myself, gee, the Congress defunded ACORN, how much attention has been paid to this systemic fraud that goes on year after year after year? And after awhile, it’s not hard to figure out that for these large corporations, this is a way of doing business. This is not an accident; this is part of the business model,” Sanders said. “But I find it ironic, again, that an organization which has received $53 million, ACORN, over a fifteen-year period, is attacked over and over again, but large defense contractors, which have, in a sense, pled guilty and paid $2.9 billion in fines, having received hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, their misdeeds are somehow ignored. The hypocrisy is extraordinary.”

In response to the Defund ACORN Act (which passed in the Senate by a vote of 83-to-7 and in the House by 345-to-75), some of the lawmakers who voted against the measure have introduced legislation of their own. Sanders proposed an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that calls on the Secretary of Defense to conduct a wide-ranging study of the money the government pays to contractors that have been indicted, settled charges or been fined by a federal agency, as well as those that have been convicted of fraud.

In the House, Minnesota Democrat Betty McCollum introduced an ACORN act of her own—the Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act of 2009, which seeks to prohibit federal funding to corporations guilty of felony convictions. “Why are companies that break the law as a business strategy allowed to receive taxpayer funds?” McCollum asked.

“Several Congressional offices say they are weighing the possibility of introducing legislation that would apply the ACORN standard to companies like Blackwater, whose operatives will stand trial next year on manslaughter charges stemming from killing Iraqi civilians; or KBR, which is being investigated in connection with the electrocution deaths of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq,” Scahill wrote. “Florida Representative Alan Grayson is spearheading calls for fraudulent military contractors to be defunded under the anti-ACORN legislation. He points to Halliburton’s misconduct and its ‘extreme and gross negligence... putting in showers in Iraq that end up electrocuting soldiers, and feeding them poisoned water.’ The federal funding ACORN has received over the past twenty years, Grayson says, ‘is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq.’”

But while a few members of Congress have risen to the defense of ACORN, the Associated Press reported Oct. 12 that, “Conservative Republicans are capitalizing on the troubles of community activist group ACORN… to revive their long-standing fight against a federal law that grades banks on their investments in poor and minority neighborhoods. The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was intended to end redlining, a practice in which banks in effect walled off many inner-city neighborhoods from mortgage loans. But some GOP lawmakers say it has outlived its purpose and is being used inappropriately by ACORN to shake down banks for money. They want to repeal the law, scale it back or at least block a Democratic proposal to expand it.”

ACORN receives some funding from banks to provide advice to first-time home buyers or homeowners who are at risk of losing their homes to foreclosures. ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring said that, “The Republicans are attempting to intimidate banks to halt monies that are used to help working families become home buyers or save their homes from foreclosure.”

For more information see http://www.acorn.org/.