The Company You Keep
Your taxpayer dollars at work. Michelle Malkin has the story.
If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?
OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics? A real yawner, right? What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue?
Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.
Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.
Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market.
Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe). If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN. A small excerpt:
To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.
Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for.
For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself. Well, until he actually joined it.
So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next? He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin.
If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident. If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past. Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.
[tags]ACORN,Barack Obama,community organizer,Chicago,socialism,Sol Stern[/tags]
Filed under: Democrats • Doug • Liberal • Politics
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