POST SCRIPTS

So who is ACORN? You can find out quite a bit about the organization HERE and HERE. The following are a few excerpts from these two sites:

ACORN is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s 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.

Today ACORN claims 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 U.S. cities in 38 states. (The organization is also active in Canada and Mexico). It 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

During the 2004 election, Mac Stuart was working as a coordinator for minority voter outreach for its voter registration effort in Miami-Dade County for ACORN. In the course of his job, Stuart saw ACORN workers copying voter registration form (which was illegal under Florida law) and segregating voter registration forms for Republicans that were not subsequently turned into the County.

In the 2004 election cycle, ACORN and its sister group Project Vote ran a nationwide voter mobilization drive that was marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams. ACORN's get-out-the-vote activists were implicated in schemes that included the falsification and destruction of thousands of voter registration forms, and the registering of convicted felons even in states where felons are ineligible to vote.

Since ACORN is a private corporation, it does not divulge its finances. Further complicating any effort to calculate ACORN's income is the fact that it operates an unknown number of front groups, many of which conceal their relationship to ACORN.

The article, “ACORN and the Money Tree‿ by Meghan Clyne in National Review offers a well researched view into the funding sources for this huge umbrella organization:

‿… the group claims as its purpose helping low- and middle-income Americans — through initiatives ranging from improving urban public schools, to providing counseling on how to avoid "predatory lending," to increasing the availability of "affordable housing." Most of these programs are conducted locally, by state-level ACORN organizations — which are often set up as 501(c)3 nonprofit entities distinct from the national ACORN umbrella, a 501(c)4 lobbying organization. Sounds benign enough — except that, according to Bob Huberty, executive vice president of the Capital Research Center , these tax-exempt 501(c)3s "have no reason for existence other than to get grants from the government and foundations." They are, essentially, an ACORN front for asking Uncle Sam to subsidize political activity.‿

For the tax year beginning July 1, 2002, and ending June 30, 2003, ACORN Housing Corp.'s 990 Form shows a total of $1,710,203 received in government grants (the year before, the total was $1,977,306).

…what kind of return is the government getting on its investment? *** The EPI (Employment Policies Institute) study documents ACORN's involvement in an $850,000 labor-union embezzlement scheme in the late 1990s; in 2003, ACORN was found to have violated the National Labor Relations Act and was ordered to "rehire and pay restitution to employees terminated for attempting to form a union." (ACORN's in-house union-busting starkly contradicts its prescriptions for private-sector unionization, and is especially two-faced considering that ACORN's chief organizer and co-founder — Wade Rathke — is also the chief organizer of Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union in New Orleans.)***ACORN's hypocrisy also extends to its stand on the minimum wage. While it has often attempted to force minimum-wage increases on private businesses through ballot initiatives and local ordinances, ACORN tried to exempt itself from California's minimum-wage requirements. According to EPI, "ACORN argued that being forced to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees — the very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying its employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low- and moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights.