Obama and his ACORN Problem
By 186 on Oct 9, 2008
I’m sure the Obama campaign will say any mention of Barck Obama’s ties with ACORN and Project Vote are just more attempts at smear tactics and ACORN and Project Vote were just registering people in “my neighborhood”. As is usual with Obama, the evidence tells a much different story.
ACORN is another community-organizing network with Alinskyian roots. Before going off to law school in the early 90s, Obama directed ACORN’s partner organization, Project Vote. Meeting with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of this, saying, “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
Yesterday, ACORN’s political action committee endorsed Barack Obama for President. This is an important nod from a group that understands the urgent needs of Americans most hurt by this economy and how to organize for social and economic justice.
RealClearPolitics - Why Obama’s “Community Organizer” Days Are a Joke
Last week, Milwaukee’s top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards.
The Long Run - Obama’s Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side of Chicago - NYTimes.com
Mr. Obama further expanded his list of allies by joining the boards of two well-known charities: the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation.These memberships have allowed him to help direct tens of millions of dollars in grants over the years to groups that championed the environment, campaign finance reform, gun control and other causes supported by the liberal network he was cultivating. Mr. Brazier’s group, the Woodlawn Organization, received money, for instance, as did antipoverty groups with ties to organized labor like Chicago Acorn, whose endorsement Mr. Obama sought and won in his State Senate race.
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2003
ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak.
ACORN Statement Regarding Las Vegas Voter Registration
ACORN Statement Regarding Las Vegas Voter Registration
Inside Obama’s Acorn by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online
If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.
Acorn became among the most successful at exploiting the law, especially after the Clinton administration set up tough new CRA standards. In 1993 Acorn crafted a $55 million, 11-city lending program administered by it and financed by 14 major banks eager to avoid CRA woes. In 1998 Acorn activists disrupted Federal Reserve hearings on the proposed Citicorp merger with Travelers, waving red umbrellas, a corporate symbol of Travelers, and then later protested Citigroup’s acquisition of Associates First Capital Corp. Eventually Citigroup signed an agreement to provide mortgages through Acorn counseling centers, including home loans to undocumented aliens in California. In 2000 a U.S. Senate subcommittee estimated that such CRA deals had directed at least $9.5 billion through nonprofits, making the CRA the second-most important funder of social advocacy groups next to the government itself.
Growing the pie - How Obama’s voter-registration efforts could reshape the electoral map in November
The beauty of Obama’s registration drive is its universal value. Some progressive activists have raised concerns about the senator’s growing consolidation of the party apparatus, embodied in his rejection of liberal independent 527 organizations that can’t openly support a candidate but can run negative advertisements. However, voter-registration outreach doesn’t stand up to the same scrutiny.
IBDeditorials.com Is ACORN Stealing The Election?
ACORN has also been registering convicted felons — including inmates — in Florida and other battleground states. ACORN boasts registering a record 1.5 million new voters so far this election.What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he’d be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?
For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for “advance work.”)
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
The group is under investigation due to numerous voter registration fraud scandals, and allegations that its canvassers falsified forms with bogus names, fake addresses or famous personalities.
Missouri officials suspect fake voter registration - Yahoo! News
In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.
Vote of Confidence - Chicago Magazine - January 1993 - Chicago
The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. “It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics,” says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side’s 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old African-American lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama.
Vote of Confidence - Chicago Magazine - January 1993 - Chicago
The name Barack Obama surfaced. “I was asking around among community activists in Chicago and around the country, and they kept mentioning him,” Newman says. Obama by then was working with church and community leaders on the West Side, and he was writing a book that the publisher Simon & Schuster had contracted for while he was editor of the law review. He was 30 years old.When Newman called, Obama agreed to put his other work aside. “I’m still not quite sure why,” Newman says. ”This was not glamorous, high-paying work. But I am certainly grateful. He did one hell of a job.”
THE PRO-BARACK VOTE-FRAUD DRIVE - New York Post
SYSTEMIC corruption of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way.
The Obama campaign and Huffington flak now categorizes referencing Barack Obama’s work with Acorn and Project Vote as “semars”?
Fight the Smears: Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.
Smears Contradicted: Obama Organizing Work Was Not With ACORN
Project Vote was not directly associated with ACORN until 1994
Huffington Post and ACORN Tag-Team Cover Up of Obama’s ACORN Days
Not surprisingly, the spin doctors at the Huffington Post microscopically lawyered my post Media Matters-style to attempt to get away from the fact that Project Vote is a vital part of left-wing ACORN’s empire of vote fraud and political agitation. (And incidentally, for 30 years ACORN has been laying the groundwork for the subprime mortgage meltdown.)
Capital Research Center: Barack Obama A Radical Leftist Journey PDF
The remarkable ascent of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama begins with his career as a “community organizer” for far-left causes in Chicago, an experience that served as a launching pad for his political career. Along with way, Obama acquired some unsavory friends including sleazy political fundraiser Tony Rezko and unrepentant Pentagon bomber William Ayers. Obama promises to carry his activist spirit into national politics, but does he also carry the smell of Chicago politics into the national arena?
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