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Background on ACORN......
ACORN - ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS FOR REFORM NOW
ACORN is the largest radical group in America, with 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 US cities Implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election. They maintain close ties to organized labor unions.
ACORN is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Their members in the late 60s and early 70s invaded welfare offices across the U.S. — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them. In the late 60s, ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke was a NWRO organizer and a protegé of Wiley. Rathke also organized draft resistance for the militant group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the same period.
In 1970 Rathke — along with the aforementioned Wiley (best known for his effective use of the so-called “Cloward-Piven strategy,” which called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants and thereby creating an economic crisis) and Gary Delgado (a lead organizer for Wiley’s NWRO) — formed a new entity called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The group’s name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym ACORN remained. Instead of focusing only on welfare recipients, ACORN’s mandate included all issues touching low-income and working-class people.
Rathke and his ACORN co-founders enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky’s activist tactics.
Today ACORN claims 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 U.S. cities in 38 states. ACORN owns two radio stations, a housing corporation, and a law office, and maintains affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. ACORN also runs schools where children are trained in class consciousness; a network of “boot camps” for training street activists; and operations that extort contributions from banks and other businesses under threat of racial violence and trumped-up civil rights charges.
In 1998, ACORN founded the Working Families Party in New York, which endorses candidates for political office. The Working Families Party endorsed Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race. Canvassers from ACORN and its sister groups launched a statewide voter-mobilization drive that proved influential in Clinton’s victory. In November 2001, a coalition of radical politicians led by ACORN-sponsored candidates running on the Working Families Party ticket won a veto-proof majority on the New York City Council, giving ACORN de facto control of the New York City government.
Acorn and Obama
Hybrid Mode
