ACORN and Voter Fraud

May 4, 6:26 PMPortland Civil Rights ExaminerDianna Cotter

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Pres. Obama at an ACORN meeting

It has been said before, and will be said again, the question is, when are liberal supporters going to see the truth?

ACORN The Association of Community Organization for Reform Now is the subject of a Complaint filed today by the Nevada Attorney General. Also named in the suit is Christopher Howell Edwards the Las Vegas Field Director for ACORN. The complaint states that ACORN canvassers were required to fill a daily quota of new voter registrations, with a bonus possible in the “Blackjack” or “21” which would give the canvasser an extra 5$ if they registered 21 in a day. Secretary of State Ross Miller and Larry Lomax, Clark County's registrar of voters both say that the quota system encouraged canvassers to turn in false registrations, in direct contradiction of Nevada State law.

ACORN which claims to be Non-Partisan, is anything but non-partisan. In the 2008 Election it openly endorsed Barak Obama for President and openly campaigned for him.

Few people are familiar with ACORN in terms of where it came from, or what it is about.

In the 1960’s a group calling itself the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), led by George Wiley and founded on the principles developed by Robert Cloward and Francis Piven, was fighting for the rights of the poor, this according to ACORN itself in a document titled "Roots of a Social Justice Movement (1970-75)" . According to ACORN’s own history, Wiley had a protégée, Wade Rathke, whom he would send to Little Rock Arkansas in 1970, tasked with uniting people across the social spectrum in the fight for the rights of the poor. By using a clause in the Arkansas Welfare laws, he was successful, and ACORN was created out of that success. Originally founded in 1970 under the name Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, it later became the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the acronym remained the same.

Who are Robert Cloward and Francis Piven? They were a couple of Sociologists from Columbia University; the same school Barak Obama attended incidentally. They published a paper that would have tremendous effect on what was then the future, what we are living today. It was titled: "A Strategy to End Poverty." In the Nation 202.18 (02 May 1966). This single paper has had a profound effect on our society. Historians will be studying this one for decades to come.

As part of a wider social goal, Wiley and Rathke used Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis in their success. The Sophia Smith Collection Biography of Francis Fox Piven includes this information on the Strategy:

In Regulating the Poor, Piven and Cloward argued that any advances the poor have made throughout history were directly proportional to their ability to disrupt institutions that depend upon their cooperation. This academic commentary proved useful to George Wiley and the NWRO as well as a great many other community organizers and urban theorists (Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA).

This very strategy was used in New York City against then Mayor Rudy Giuliani who found himself facing a deliberate flood, overwhelming numbers of people signing up onto the welfare rolls organized by ACORN. It nearly bankrupted New York City in 1975. The Strategy has been used several times, most recently in voter registration fraud and the Mortgage Crisis.

NWRO and ACORN were both founded on the principles of making social changes by overwhelming Government agencies with huge numbers of welfare recipients to the point where those systems would collapse; forcing the Government to makes the changes desired by those orchestrating the movements. The success of ACORN in this area was not enough to bring about the sweeping social changes that Cloward, Piven, Wiley and Rathke wanted. From welfare, they branched out to include the financial industry. In 1999 Madeleine Adamson wrote a brochure for ACORN titled “To each their home”. In it, ACORN brags about its success in undermining the Banking industry:

… they [banks] agreed on more flexible underwriting criteria that take into account the realities of lower income communities. For example, income measurements include less traditional income sources such as food stamps, un-employment, part-time jobs, non-court-ordered child support and foster care payments. (Adamson)

Clearly these sources of income were not only non-traditional, some are in and of themselves signs of credit un-worthiness, yet ACORN successfully used the CRA to flood the mortgage market with large numbers of very risky loans using these very criteria. Adamson’s brochure for ACORN tells us they were successful in getting the banks to lower down payments and closing costs, again lowering the bar in terms of basic loan requirements for both qualifying and completing the loan process. The evidence of their success lay in the very scope of the collapse of the housing market. This ACORN brochure was brought to light by Matthew Vadum on October 28th, 2008 in an article titled “ACORN’s Food Stamp Mortgages”. In his article he states:

After the CRA went into effect, Saul Alinsky-inspired groups such as ACORN and the Greenlining Institute used the law to get into the shakedown business. Rev. Jesse Jackson egged them on at an ACORN "banking summit" in 1992, asking rhetorically, "Why did Jesse James rob banks? Because that's where the money was."

The shaking down of lenders intensified when then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin presided over the Clinton administration's effort to put the CRA on steroids. Banks began to make risky subprime loans and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aggregated them for sale in the secondary market as mortgage-backed securities. These practices made it easier for banks to give in to ACORN's demands to originate more and more doomed mortgages because they knew they could offload their high-risk debt on quasi-governmental suckers Fannie and Freddie, which were under intense political pressure to service the subprime market.

Vadum goes further, connecting ACORN’s overall strategy: 

ACORN's overall strategy has a name. It's called the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" of manufactured crisis (named after two anti-capitalist sociologists) and it calls for packing the welfare rolls to encourage dependency on the government and to overload it with financial demands in order to hasten the collapse of American capitalism.

Clearly ACORN is an agency that uses the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and their work in overloading the banking system with toxic mortgages reached critical mass in 2007-8. All that was missing was a sudden increase in the cost of living to tip the system over, and that would come from a sudden spike in Oil prices in 2007 and 2008. As reported by Shane Sherlund for the Federal Reserve Board, when Oil went over 140$ a barrel, many of those very low income people could no longer pay for their mortgages, this and the predatory lending practices allowed by the CRA, and exploited by ACORN, would cause the huge spike in Defaulting Mortgages that shut down bank lending. The graphs in Sherlund's report match with a disturbing similarity.

ACORN is an Organization founded on socialist principles, following a strategy to support socialist candidates, with socialist platforms. This column is not sure which blatant lie is worse; that ACORN is non-partisan, or that ACORN is looking out for the poor. Given just how many more poor they have created in just the last year with their strategies, this column has to side with heinous actions ACORN has participated in that have cost so many low and middle income families so much. Certainly they are not looking out for poor people, they are deliberately trying to create more. Those dependent on Government checks are going to vote for the guy that promises to keep those checks coming. In 2008, that man was Barak Obama.

Now you know a little more about ACORN.

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