Some defenders of ACORN are blind. Some are useful idiots.
They say ACORN means well despite the ongoing scandal
related to an undercover video sting
operation. In it, now-fired ACORN employees across America
advised two young people pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute
on how to set up an underage illegal alien sex slave ring.
ACORN backers say — as they have always without fail said
whenever ACORN faces an employee-related scandal — that the
workers were just a few bad apples and that ACORN is focused, as
Democratic strategist Paul Begala
says, on improving “the real lives of real people.”
There are useful idiots and then there’s Joe Conason who
ought to know better. He’s just whining now because the right has
finally learned the power of political theater.
Even as evidence mounts that ACORN is a criminal
organization, the longtime Bill Clinton apologist brushes aside
legitimate concerns about the group in a column on Salon.com.
Trekking into new frontiers of denial and dishonesty,
Conason blames ACORN’s recent troubles on the political right:
“Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has
been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic
image that bears little resemblance to the real
organization.”
As the first in a series of videos emerged, Conason
appeared on CNN reflexively dismissing them, questioning the
propriety of such undercover journalism, and calling the videos
“propaganda.”
In his Salon column, Conason continues digging a hole for
himself, arguing that “ACORN’s troubles should be considered in
the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed
and impoverished.” Although the undercover operatives may have
had fun duping “a few morons into providing tax advice to a ‘pimp
and ho,’” what ACORN actually does is help poor families file for
the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and fight foreclosure so they
can stay in their homes, he writes.
In fact, ACORN does not have “a history of honorable
service to the dispossessed and impoverished.”
This is a
common misconception on the left where the group is viewed as
having roughly the same moral rectitude as the late Mother
Teresa. It is thought of as unassailable because it is believed
to be doing good. The fact that it is so regularly attacked by
conservatives and Republicans causes the left to cheer even
louder for ACORN.
But the evidence shows that ACORN does
not mean well, and that any good the group may happen to do
for people is purely incidental.
ACORN grew out of the tumultuous 1960s. Founder Wade
Rathke, who was charged with
inciting violence in 1970 after a welfare rally he organized
turned into a riot, had worked as a draft resistance organizer
for the radical group Students for a Democratic Society. SDS
splintered over tactics and one faction, the Weather Underground,
was led by President Obama’s friend Bill Ayers.
Rathke was also an organizer for the National Welfare
Rights Organization (NWRO), a group whose members physically
occupied welfare offices, intimidating social workers and
insisting that they be given every government welfare dollar that
the law “entitled” them to. That group followed what has since
been called the Cloward-Piven Strategy after sociologists Frances
Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward.
They defined a model of political and economic subversion
that called upon activists to pack the welfare rolls to spread
dependency, bankrupt the government, and cause uprisings against
the capitalist system. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani
blames the Cloward-Piven Strategy for pushing his city close to
bankruptcy in 1975.
The same year as his arrest, Rathke founded ACORN to carry
out the strategy of upheaval and the agenda of welfare
entitlement. That agenda manifests itself today in
the ACORN Tax & Benefit Access Center and the ACORN
Financial Justice Center.
In other words, ACORN was created not to help people, but
to get people on welfare in order to bring
change to society.
ACORN created a new kind of tax preparation service based
on the assumption that Americans have a “right” to welfare. Think
of it as H&R Block for subversives. ACORN helps people claim
the EITC, a make-believe tax credit that functions more as a
welfare benefit. The goal is not primarily to help Americans in
need but to pack the welfare rolls in order to expand the size
and scope of government. It even strong-armed banks into counting
food stamps as income on mortgage applications.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy remains relevant today
especially because — in a move that just about nobody noticed —
the spectacularly successful Clinton
era welfare reforms were erased in language buried deep
within the February stimulus package signed into law by President
Obama. As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has
documented, federal law has been changed to offer new financial
incentives to states to increase their
welfare caseloads.
ACORN, with its hundreds of tax-exempt nonprofit
affiliates, has always operated on the fringes of the law. It
contributed in its own way to the
subprime mortgage crisis. Its history of lawbreaking,
including poor treatment of its own
workers and
criminal trespass and squatting aimed at forcibly preventing
lawful foreclosures, has been extensively documented.
The undercover videos by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles
merely showed Americans what ACORN really is: a crime
syndicate.
Meanwhile, Conason presses on, defending
a criminal group that has long been essential to Democratic
Party electoral victories.
He tries to “dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by
right-wing media outlets,” including tales of election fraud and
corruption, but he selectively cites only evidence that furthers
his deceptive argument.
One of “the most popular canards on the right, repeated
constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN
has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud,
using federal funds,” Conason writes. “In reality, ACORN has
registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the
country over the past five years — a laudable record with a very
low incidence of fraud of any kind.”
In fact, last year more than 400,000 of the 1.3 million
voter registrations the group claimed to have collected were
thrown
out as invalid. ACORN is under indictment in Nevada
for conspiracy to commit election fraud and under investigation
in Cleveland, Ohio. In Ohio, a person named Darnell Nash was
indicted by a grand jury for casting a fraudulent ballot. Nash
was registered multiple times by ACORN. ACORN
remains under investigation in Cleveland by the local
prosecutor, a Democrat.
That’s one heck of a canard.
It is unclear if federal funds were involved in ACORN’s
electoral crime spree because ACORN’s finances are so incredibly
convoluted. ACORN’s affiliates routinely write each other huge
checks,
moving money around like a South American drug lord.
In Conason’s view, ACORN is such a wonderful, honest,
organization that when its officials discovered cases of voter
registration fraud, “they informed the state authorities and
turned in the miscreants.” He left out the fact that ACORN
officials
routinely encourage and turn a blind eye to such fraud and
throw their own workers under the bus whenever there’s
trouble.
And then there’s the nearly $1 million embezzlement of
ACORN funds by Dale Rathke, the founder Wade Rathke’s brother.
ACORN never called the police.
The Rathkes and ACORN management covered up
the circa 2000 swindle for eight years. It was only revealed
by whistleblowers and the news media. Rathke friend Drummond Pike
of the Tides Foundation rushed in to pay the remaining debt that
had not yet been repaid by the Rathke family. It appears Pike,
who is treasurer of George Soros’s Democracy
Alliance funders’ group, did so out of his own pocket, in
order to keep the identity of donors secret.
The bad publicity generated by the embezzlement scandal
forced the far-left Catholic
Campaign for Human Development to stop funding ACORN
altogether.
The ACORN network also owes millions of
dollars in back taxes to all levels of government. ACORN
sold out its own constituents for an emergency grant and loan
from a big real estate developer.
Expect Conason’s free form spin-doctoring to continue
because ACORN is extremely valuable to the left. The Wall
Street Journal’s John Fund correctly calls
ACORN the “shock troops” of the Democratic Party.
Others on the left are rushing to ACORN’s defense and the
more prominent defenders are just lip synching Conason’s
lyrics.
The most famous member of the useful idiot brigade is
actress
Whoopi Goldberg. She said on “The View”:
Everything, I mean, you know, there are boneheads in all
organizations. We’ve worked for them. We know that they’re
there. But do you kill the whole thing? And I don’t think so. A
lot of people think that you should kill it. But you can’t
answer, you can’t tell me where those people who become even
more disenfranchised go.
Ezra Klein of the
Washington Post concurs and links to
Michael Tomasky, who in turn follows Conason’s talking
points. Tomasky is editor of Democracy: A Journal of
Ideas. George Soros’s Open Society Institute
funds it.
The
American Prospect’s Adam Serwer taps into
his inner useful idiot once
again, arguing that the right takes “the ACORN scandal as a
kind of vindication of all their paranoid fantasies of what ACORN
was responsible for.” Would that it were true.
Fellow Salonista
Glenn Greenwald joined the chorus too, while Amanda Terkel of
Think
Progress preferred deliciously naughty misdirection as she
harped on Republicans’ own hooker hypocrisy.
The consistently execrable
David Neiwert of the appropriately named Crooks and Liars
blog was particularly creative in coming up with the argument
that Fox News was “punk’d” by O’Keefe and Giles. Neiwert wrote a
book called The Eliminationists in which he
argued that within every conservative there is a Nazi waiting to
break out and murder leftists.
ACORN will not go away quietly. It’s too big and too
powerful. Power never concedes anything without a fight, so it’s
not at all surprising that the group is already trying to
whitewash its deep-seated, systemic problems.
The independent audit announced by ACORN last week is
a fairy tale.
It is packed with left-wing political hacks including
Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and SEIU
President Andy Stern. Both men have the ear of President Obama
and Podesta even helped organize the Bush-to-Obama transition. Of
course, SEIU Local 100 and 880 are part of the ACORN network, a
fact that ACORN tried to cover up earlier this year by
scrubbing references to the locals on its “affiliated
organizations” page.
Longtime ACORN ally Jerrold Nadler, who was endorsed by
ACORN’s political party in New York state, the Working Families
Party, came up with a truly original defense of ACORN. The
legislation to cut off funds for ACORN is a constitutionally
proscribed
bill of attainder, he says.
Maybe the congressman’s right. We should heed his advice
and just skip the constitutional concerns altogether and head
straight to a criminal prosecution under federal racketeering
laws and deal with these people the way we do with other
gangsters.
Appointing a
special prosecutor might be a good start.
