The American Spectator : ACORN Sells Out the Poor

ACORN Sells Out the Poor

By Matthew Vadum on 7.9.09 @ 6:08AM

The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully cultivated image as a defender of the poor.

That's because the group has become the leading cheerleader for a controversial real estate development that is slated to use eminent domain to remove the poor people it claims to represent.

ACORN, which has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move, has also taken money from the project's developer and signed a binding agreement forcing it to stand behind the project no matter what.

In the world of corporate shakedowns it is commonplace for liberal activist groups to use the money they extract from a supposed "donor" to fund operations, but it is very unusual for a group to take money in exchange for betraying those it is supposed to represent.

But the far-left activist group ACORN, which claims to defend the poor from what ACORN ally Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) last year called America's "capitalist predators," is doing precisely that.

In 2005, ACORN signed an agreement with Forest City Ratner Companies, LLC, a megabucks real estate development firm, pledging its support for the ambitious Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, New York.

The taxpayer-subsidized 22-acre mixed-use project is currently expected to cost $4.9 billion. The sprawling complex would be built in the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and would include the Barclays Center, a proposed sports arena that would become the new home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team.

In exchange for ACORN's support, the developer agreed to set aside 50% of the expected 4,500 rental housing units for what the agreement's income tables define as "affordable housing."

At a staged media event at Brooklyn Borough Hall, ACORN's Bertha Lewis publicly sealed the deal by planting kisses on the mouths of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Bruce Ratner, CEO of the development company and principal owner of the money-losing New Jersey Nets.

ACORN hadn't wasted any time after the U.S. Supreme Court threw the door wide open for expropriation for private profit in the infamous Kelo v. New London eminent domain case. The Kelo decision was handed down June 23, 2005, and after the above-described bout of public osculation, the formal so-called community benefits agreement between ACORN (and other local groups) and the developer was signed on June 27, 2005.

Without ACORN's horse-traded support for the project, "it was unlikely the Atlantic Yards deal would prevail," John Atlas of the National Housing Institute wrote a few months later in Shelterforce magazine. "And if Atlantic Yards gets built, ACORN will need all of its muscle to ensure that promises are fulfilled and the poor are protected."

It's worth noting that the venal ACORN, which apparently supplied instant supporters for various public hearings on the project, and the government subsidy-seeking Forest City Ratner are a perfect fit for so many reasons.

"We like working with ACORN," an unnamed Forest City Ratner executive told the Brooklyn Paper in 2005. "They have that radical feeling, they really fight for what they believe in. We just love their history, how they started, and feel it really represents what we're working to do here."

Incidentally, left-of-center political activism runs in the Ratner family.

Bruce, who used to teach law, ran the Consumer Protection Division in New York City Mayor John Lindsay's administration. He was also Consumer Affairs commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch. "Bruce is an old lefty, he's an old hippie," one friend told New York magazine. He also worked for the Model Cities Program, an artifact of President Lyndon Johnson's ill-fated anti-poverty crusade.

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Letter to the Editor

topics:
ACORN, Public Corruption, Eminent Domain

Galen| 7.9.09 @ 7:33AM

Years ago my father said of limosene liberals " I never met a communist who treated his maid well."

ThreePuttinDude| 9.20.09 @ 7:36PM

Ha Ha Ha, my father said the very same thing.
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TPD

Melvin| 7.9.09 @ 8:19AM

This crap about, defending the poor, the party of the poor, the faith of the poor is nothing but pure dog squeeze and propaganda.
Unfortunately for the prodigies of government run education, they'll sit there like dumb sheeple and swallow every word.
For some reason the dumb masses fail to fathom that it is about the money, it always has been and always will be about the money.
ACORN is no different that any politician that eventually realizes, "Hey, this is a tremendous opportunity to skim off untraceable copious amounts of tax payer money."
It is getting to the point that doing the right thing, working forty or more hours a week is working us into the poor house. The problem is that we don't have the ability to skim money off the top like Community Organization and politicians do.

LogicalSC| 7.9.09 @ 8:41AM

Little different that Obama when given control of the 155 million dollars at the Annanberg Foundation for Chicago education, most of the funds went to his do-gooding liberal friends and their groups to help them grow their power.

It was shut down after only three years because so little of it went to the actual children of Southside Chicago and their education.

Look at other's around Obama, William Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright have all taken millions by using the plight of the poor in southside Chicago slums, they now all live with Obama in Hyde Park.

The people in the slums are even worse off but waiting for the next "messiah" to come thru to save them.

Pingback| 7.9.09 @ 9:10AM

ACORN Sells Out the Poor | Citizen Right links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…money they extract from a supposed "donor" to fund operations, but it is very unusual for a group to take money in exchange for betraying those it is supposed to represent. Read Full Article >> The American Spectator No related posts. Posted in Acorn, Corruption. No comments By Citizen Right – 0 Responses Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on…

Tim| 7.9.09 @ 10:03AM

Obama did get one thing right.....very right!

You should never waste a crisis.

In similar fashion, we should not waste this golden opportunity to destroy Acorn and with it all of the wackos that profit from its illegal work.

If we capitalize on all of Acorn's criminal indictments and all of the truth that is coming out about this corrupt left orginization we should have nuetralized its reach by 2010 and certainly by 2012 and hence we will take this country back from the socialists who's only goal is and has been to infiltrate and take over the USA and the world.

Pingback| 7.9.09 @ 10:12AM

ACORN – Whoring out the poor « Speaking My Mind links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…These groups are run by wealthy mostly white businessmen who have no real interest in ridding the world of the poor. The reality is that as long as the poor stay poor, they stay in business. The American Spectator beautifully lays out the latest stab in the back of the poor people in New York: The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully…

Big J| 7.9.09 @ 10:19AM

Right on, Melvin.

"pure dog squeeze and propaganda" - I love it!

Hope you don't mind, but I'm stealing it.

Robert Rosencrans| 7.9.09 @ 10:49AM

Selling out the poor has been the mainstream thesis of liberalism at least during the last 50 years.

Keeping them barefoot, pregnant and shoeless is an apt description of how liberals view the poor in this country.

When Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid dismissed a group of visitors at the Capital as "smelly tourists" it was a revealing glimpse of the contempt that the political liberal elite hold against most of normal America.

There's a lot of money in poverty and the liberals can't hold onto power if a majority of the population accumulates wealth and freedom.

That's why Obama has to make the population reliant on government with public health care and in fear of government with cap and trade.

Both are designed to keep the public barefoot, pregnant and down on the farm.

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What the hell did you say? In English, please... Reads like that other fella said "dog squeeze".

pher| 7.9.09 @ 11:18AM

The only correction I'd make to this otherwise accurate article on ACORN's involvement with Atlantic Yards is that Forest City Ranter never won the support of the Prospect Heights community. The paid supporters of the AY project are almost entirely drawn from neighborhoods a long way away from the project--for good reason. None of the project's immediate neighbors are interested in what promises to be decades of construction and condemnation blight.

Rafeal| 7.9.09 @ 11:54AM

ACORn got a number of city owned properties for their support of this deal, as well as the contested Atlantic developlment yards, including 672 east 136th street where they threwout dozens of residents after setting a fire, shameful

Michael Tomlinson| 7.9.09 @ 1:06PM

ACORN like all Democrat surrogates is committed to one thing power for themselves and their political masters (Obama, Reid, Pelosi, etc.). If they have to steal elections, which they and Democrats routinely do, they'll do it. If hurting the poor gets them what they want the poor are expendable. This is par for the course for all liberal Democrats and their minions.

Sadly, some Americans like to be abused and that's why they're Democrats. Don't forget the party of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation is now not only home of the rich, but the political victims of such bigotry and intolerance too. I guess it's hard to quit bowing and scraping to the Mas'a.

Angel| 7.9.09 @ 2:41PM

Liberals don't give a damn about anything but power. They'll sell their mother out to get what they want; they've already sold their souls a long time ago.

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Nice Purse Michelle! « Jim Blazsik links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…our Michelle! More Articles Rasmussen “passion index” down to -8 by Ed Morrissey Report from a health care counterprotest By Michelle Malkin Daily Gut: Pop Goes The Nukes by Greg Gutfeld ACORN Sells Out the Poor By Matthew Vadum A far-away wake for a long-lived lady – The Anchoress Possibly related posts: (automatically generated) JFK More like Reagan than Obama and Democrats Nice Shoes Michelle! Michelle!…

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Capital Research Center: links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

… Home ACORN Sells Out the Poor July 9th, 2009 by Matthew Vadum I have an article called “ACORN Sells Out the Poor” in today’s American Spectator . Here’s the top of it: The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully cultivated image as a defender of the poor.…

Marc Jeric| 7.10.09 @ 5:36AM

The following bears repeating. Obama's only "working experience" was: 1) as a community organizer; 2) as a lawyer for community organizers; and 3) as a law instructor for future lawyers for community organizers. The most important invention by VI Lenin that brought him to absolute power was the soviets - i.e. local community organizations controlled by the centralized Communist Party. This concept of local community organizations was perfected and applied to the American conditions by Davis, Ayers, and Alinsky - all 3 highly placed executives of the Communist Party USA and of course Obama's intimate teachers. His Kenyan father was also a revolutionary marxist. This country is not being socialized - it is much worse, it is being lulled into a communist state. With ACORN brown shirts in charge of the 2010 census, with their expertise in stealing the elections by voter fraud, and with $9 billion earmarked for them in the first stimulus bill, with many more billions to follow, we are in the middle of the communist coup d'etat.

David| 7.10.09 @ 10:08AM

It is incorrect to say that low inome aprtments will be destroyed. The low income tenants were moved out long before talk of Atlantic yards. Most of these buildings are way too expensive or regular working people to consider.

Anonymous| 7.12.09 @ 12:51PM

And George Soros (who owns and runs ACORN, the Deomcratic party, etc.) gives a damn about the poor how?

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NYT Misleads in Editorial on Census and ACORN links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…ACORN was indicted by a grand jury for casting a fraudulent vote in an election. Then there's the newspaper's woefully inadequate coverage of its business partner Bruce Ratner's ACORN-assisted land grab related to the taxpayer-subsized proposed Atlantic Yards project…

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MarineReconDad asked: The New York Times was less than truthful in an editorial yesterday on ACORN's involvement in the 2010 census. After pontificating that Republicans' fears were overblown about Robert M. Groves, the statistical voodoo ...

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Ms Placed Democrat » ACORN AND ACLU In Bed Together…Trying to destroy PA Law (Update) links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…ability to hire and pay canvassers impacts on voter registration activities, which are constitutionally protected actions.” The New York Times, of course, is a business partner with one of ACORN’s business partners, and it covered up a potential scandal involving ACORN and the Obama campaign. The ACLU thinks that ACORN’s actions are legal. Really? “It’s the ACLU’s reading of this, that these kind of laws…

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Dirty Democrats » ACLU: Election fraud is a civil right. links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…months, said Witold Walczak, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is representing Acorn. See also the American Spectator, which in another article notes the real estate links between the NYT and ACORN. Just in case anyone was wondering why the sympathetic tone. The basic issue here is that it’s illegal in Pennsylvania to, as the NYT quoted, ‘give, solicit or accept…

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ACORN in Retreat « Right Sided American Kafir links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…of dollars to tax authorities. The tax debts remain even after ACORN took a controversial payment from a developer in exchange for the group’s support for a sports stadium and mixed-use complex in Brooklyn. Experts say the taxes owed are probably employment taxes, the same taxes used to support the Big Government programs that ACORN is so enamored of. Always resourceful, ACORN is using its massive tax…

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…hearings by force. When the police get involved they say that they are the real victims: Why are you arresting us? That’s not fair! They pretend to want to help the poor and then throw them overboard by taking massive “grants” from wealthy real estate developers. Years ago Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke did terrible things that were far worse than all the other things they’d done. Dale, who…

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ACORN’S Useful Idiots | America Watches Obama links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

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…was filed against ACORN itself by the IRS on March 10. [...] Murdock references a $548,000 lien. If in haste he rounded up, it might be the $547,312 lien I discovered. ACORN also sold out its poor constituents in Brooklyn in exchange for a cash bailout from Forest City Ratner, a wealthy developer trying to build the Atlantic Yards project. BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it…

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