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BY SOFIA SAIYED

In print | Published October 22, 2009

You might have heard about the recent scandal involving employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, advising a pair of undercover amateur investigators posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to falsify a loan application in order to start a brothel and how to claim smuggled underage prostitutes as dependents on tax forms. The videos released by the duo fueled the long-brewing anti-ACORN sentiment on Capitol Hill and led to a vote of 345-75 to prohibit federal money from going to ACORN.

The Census Bureau also cut ties with ACORN, which was originally to assist in conducting the 2010 census. The New York Times reported recently that even Democrats who worked closely with ACORN back when it was considered legitimate are now distancing themselves from the organization, as it is increasingly perceived as a political liability.

It’s safe to say that ACORN is thoroughly vilified.

Is all of this really over the organization’s apparent support of prostitution? Take a guess. The videos were just the tip of the iceberg on a barrage of complaints that have accumulated since the first Bush term against the nation’s largest anti-poverty advocacy organization. The central question here is not why ACORN’s low-level employees advised a pimp on how to start a brothel, but why conservatives have made it their goal to defame the organization in the first place.

According to its website, ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization, with over 400,000 member families in 1,200 neighborhood chapters across the country. It has been advocating for social and economic justice in low-income communities since 1970, through activities like advocating increases in the minimum wage, fighting predatory lending, assisting families with tax preparation and registering voters. In the past, ACORN has been contracted by both federal and local governments, primarily for activities related to fair housing development. The conservative Washington Examiner reports that between 1994 and 2009 the organization’s various branches received a total of $53 million in federal money.

Rather than indicating government fiscal carelessness, as the Examiner seeks to imply, this should indicate that ACORN was deemed legitimate — and at times the expert — in its activities to promote fair housing development by the government agencies that awarded them the money.
The real reason that Republicans have been on a (now successful) crusade to defame ACORN is that ACORN engages in activities that undermine, even if on an indirect micro-scale, the power-bases of the Republican party and the corporate interests behind it. Its voter registration efforts in low-income communities result in increases in Democrat voters, so Republicans made loud accusations of voter fraud. ACORN’s opposition to predatory bank practices threaten the interests of the financial sector, so Republicans turned ACORN into the bad guy by stating, as the McCain-Palin campaign did in a web ad, that ACORN bullies community banks and caused the financial crisis. Its campaigns to increase the minimum wage threaten to reduce the profit margin of the corporate interests that back the Republican Party, and so those corporate interests hire “non-profit, non-partisan research institutes” to create a public relations campaign that spews anti-ACORN propaganda by harping on conservatives’ fears through websites like rottenacorn.com.

Before the prostitution scandal, the loudest argument against ACORN was that it was guilty of significant voter fraud. What conservative talking heads meant by voter fraud was really voter registration fraud, and ACORN was guilty of this to the extent that the temp workers they hired to conduct voter registration falsely filled out forms in order to get paid for work they did not do. ACORN reported these false voter registration forms to the authorities, as they were required to do by law, and one would expect that this action absolved the organization of any responsibility for the crime of voter registration fraud.

These incidents however, provided conservatives with ammunition against their entire voter registration initiative. During the Bush administration, Karl Rove was on a campaign to bring charges against ACORN for voter fraud. The U.S. Attorney of New Mexico, David Iglesias, was fired in 2007 for failing to come up with charges against ACORN; notably, the reason he did not charge voter fraud was because there was no voter fraud to begin with anyway.

As Iglesias points out in an interview on PBS’s NOW, even one lawsuit against voter fraud can effectively scare other members of the community from voting; political encouragement of such lawsuits is simply a new type of minority and low-income voter suppression.

The extreme right-wing spokesmen have been ranting about ACORN for years, but it was propelled into the mainstream only during the 2008 election cycle. Even the “liberal” media was guilty of fear-mongering: an independent study titled “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong” examined 647 news stories regarding ACORN in mainstream national news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and found that they were overwhelmingly negative and failed to verify the false accusations being made by conservatives about ACORN’s alleged voter fraud.

McCain came out with the mother of all allegations at the Oct. 15, 2008, presidential debate. Apart from a cheap attempt to link Obama with the implicitly criminal ACORN in the minds of viewers, McCain asserted that the activities of this grassroots community organizing movement were “destroying the very fabric of our democracy.” What does it mean if grassroots community organizing can be linked to the idea of a destruction of democracy in front of a mainstream audience by a serious candidate for presidency? What could be more democratic than individual citizens gathering to confront the government about its failure to meet their needs?

Granted, McCain along with the conservative media pundits are most likely referring to bureaucratic mismanagement and not grassroots organizing when they refer to a destruction of democracy, but I’m fairly certain that bureaucratic mismanagement is no stranger to democratic governments. Vilifying community organizing, something we also saw in criticisms of Obama’s résumé, is essentially arguing that the people in our society who have the least should stay that way and stay quiet. In an impressive turning of the table, this argument turns marginalized communities into the big bad bully while painting the privileged and powerful as innocent victims.

The scary thing is that as ridiculous as this argument seems on paper, it has succeeded.
I do not seek to imply that ACORN should be absolved of its duty to responsibly carry out the functions it was created to do. Its management and leaders should be held to the same standards we hold for leaders of government and corporations. However, the disproportionate ruckus that has been raised about problems within the organization has more to do with the dominant structural forces of the U.S. suppressing the voices of the people it marginalizes than it does with actual outrage-worthy scandals.

The success that the anti-ACORN movement has seen in shutting the largest American grassroots community organization out of mainstream power structures just means that not only are we as a society permitting people to be marginalized, we are now preventing them from participating in one of the only avenues for resistance to marginalization.

Sofia is a senior. You can reach her at ssaiyed1@swarthmore.edu.

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