
If it were me writing the story, the headline would be: “ACORN Gives Legitimate Charities Black Eye.” As a journalist it would be my goal to give these guys a black eye. I applaud the efforts of those who have brought the truth to light, it needed doing for more than one reason. First, and foremost they manipulated the people who actually paid them membership dues; by embezzling from there own organization. Then, there is the consideration that ACORN intimidated politicians and manipulated the banking & housing industry, by barging into and disrupting private board meetings and blocking egress to banks in order to promulgate home loans for those who didn’t meet the financial requirements. And last, but not least, they duped all of America by misusing it’s tax dollars and promoting fraud. ACORN, in its entirety, needs to be dismantled; they should not be allowed to continue in any capacity. The good part of their demise is that the crooked political machine lost an ally due to these shenanigans, and that might be the organization’s biggest contribution to society yet!
CHICAGO — Stung by the recession and a string of scandals, the ACORN community activist organization has found itself shutting down in many of the communities it once worked to empower.
Brian Kettenring, a spokesman for the national organization, said that no new clients were being signed up while the group did an internal investigation into how business is conducted.
The freeze comes as ACORN has been closing offices across the nation. The organization has shuttered 40 percent of its centers over the last two years, dropping from its high of 105 offices two years ago, he said.
Dozens of branches, which helped low- and middle-income clients with housing, jobs and navigating government aid programs, have been closed, including those in Chicago, Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Omaha, Neb.
Kettenring said the closures were mostly due to the poor economy and had become more frequent in the last year. “We’re seeing the same challenges the entire nonprofit sector is seeing,” he said.
But former ACORN members say the scandals that have recently dogged the organization — including allegations of mismanagement and voter registration fraud — have been a bigger problem.
In the latest controversy, ACORN workers in several cities, including New York, Baltimore and Washington, were secretly videotaped giving advice to two conservative activists who posed as a prostitute and her pimp and said that they wanted to buy a house and run it as a brothel with teenage girls. Workers were recorded giving advice on how to evade taxes and conceal the nature of their business.
The appearance of the videos last week on a Fox News program set off a furor. The U.S. House voted this week to deny all federal funds for ACORN, while state lawmakers in California, Georgia and Minnesota called for investigations or a cutoff of state funds.
“When you have this big of a mess, it takes time to clean up and your funders drop like flies,” said Madeline Talbott, a former head organizer for ACORN’s operations in Illinois.
ACORN’s Chicago office closed in January 2008, when Talbott — along with 365 community members, the local ACORN board and at least a dozen paid staff members — quit the organization over concerns of mismanagement and a lack of financial transparency at the group’s national headquarters.
“I feel so torn about what’s happening now,” said Talbott, who today is an organizer with Action Now, an advocacy group for the poor in Chicago. “I’m so relieved not to be part of the organization any more, and so sad because they are trying to clean things up.”
Founded in Arkansas in 1970, ACORN advocates for higher minimum wages, easier access to affordable housing and bolstering voter registration in low-income communities.
It has been a top target for conservatives because of its liberal, grass-roots agenda. President Barack Obama worked as an attorney for the group in the early 1990s.
The organization mobilized a get-out-the-vote effort to support Obama’s presidential bid last year, but it was tainted when nearly one-third of the 1.3 million new voters the group registered were rejected.
Last week, authorities in Miami announced the arrests of 11 former registration canvassers on allegations that they had submitted nearly 200 falsified forms.
Later this month, a preliminary hearing is scheduled in Nevada, where state prosecutors have accused ACORN and two former top officials of using an illegal incentive system to motivate people registering voters just before the heated 2008 presidential election.
ACORN officials blame such woes on a conservative push to force the organization out of business.
Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer for California, acknowledged that the organization has had a tough year but said that the state’s 12 offices would survive. Membership is up and funding has been stable, she said.
“Our organization is under attack,” she said. “But we’re going to come out of this just fine.”
Schur said the decentralized nature of ACORN ensures that if an office in one part of the country founders, it won’t necessarily affect those in the rest of the country.
Still, Schur said, she has taken steps to quell any public uneasiness. Schur said the organization has hired an independent auditor to review the finances of the state’s programs and will require more staff training.
John Atlas, a writer who just completed a book about the history of ACORN, said the recent scandals had brought “overwhelming bad publicity” to the organization.
“The brand is tainted,” Atlas said. “This is going to make it harder for them to recruit new members, to get foundation funding and get funding for voter registration.”
But Atlas said ACORN had weathered a lot in its history, and he predicted that the organization would emerge from the scandals smaller but intact.
“They may have to shrink back; they may have to rebrand,” he said. “They’ll be smaller, but they’ll survive.”
Latrell Smith, a former ACORN worker in Chicago and now an organizer for Action Now, said the scandals had been sobering and infuriating
In his current job, he is more cautious when talking with families that approach him for help.
“I joined ACORN because I wanted to make a difference in my community,” Smith said. “Before the videos came out, I could never have imagined something like that happening in ACORN.”
Now, he said, “I wonder if we could be next.”
Los Angeles Times staff writers Huffstutter reported from Chicago and Linthicum from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Ashley Powers in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
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