The war on ACORN

By GottaLaff

This op-ed in the L.A. Times by Peter Dreier says it all. I'm rushing off to work, so here are some excerpts:

For 40 years, the community organizing group ACORN has been a strong and effective voice for low-income Americans. It has registered more than a million citizens to vote. It has provided counseling and other assistance to help Americans buy and keep homes. It has fought on behalf of working people for fair treatment by employers, banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders. It played a leading role in organizing the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

But few Americans had heard of ACORN until last fall, when Sen. John McCain and then-Gov. Sarah Palin began attacking the organization for "voter fraud." [...] In the last month, Fox News, and then the rest of the media, have broadcast videos of several ACORN staffers advising people posing as a pimp and prostitute to lie on their tax returns. Now people know ACORN for that too. [...]

But the organization took swift action in both cases, notifying election officials in the first instance and terminating employees in the second.

The attack on ACORN is not really about bogus names on voter forms or about staffers encouraging people to lie on their tax forms. Rather, it is part of a broader conservative effort to attack progressive organizations and discredit President Obama and his liberal agenda. [...]

Republicans have long opposed ACORN's success at registering low-income, mostly minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats. [...]

[D]espite ACORN's effective community organizing work in more than 70 cities across the country, 55% of the stories about the organization during 2007 and 2008 dealt with voter fraud. [...]

The coverage was largely driven by the GOP. [...]

But let's look at those incidents. Did ACORN engage in election fraud? Absolutely not. [...]

Our study documented that many news outlets reported the voter fraud allegations without attempting to verify them. Had they done so, they would have discovered that not a single person who signed a phony name on a registration form ever actually voted. What occurred was voter registration fraud, not voter fraud, and it was ACORN that exposed the wrongdoing in the first place. [...]

A healthy democracy requires that the voices of the poor be heard in the corridors of power. That's what ACORN has been facilitating, more successfully than any other community group, since the 1970s. If ACORN's enemies are able to defeat this feisty group, it won't just be the organization's 500,000 members who will suffer. Our democracy will suffer too.

Please go here for the rest. I left a lot out.