ACORN Rears its Ugly Head for Headcount

President Barrack Obama, the nation's first Community-Organizer-and-Chief, is gearing up for the constitutionally mandated U.S. census. The national headcount will determine whether congressional districts are added or subtracted from the states. In 2000, the Liberal leaning states of New York and Pennsylvania lost two congressional districts each, while the more conservative states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas each gained two. As 2010 nears, the Obama administration is raising concerns that his Chicago-style of governance will come into play. Enter ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Change Now. The Obama administration announced ACORN’s inclusion among a group of organizations working in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, which is troubling in light of numerous indictments as well as ongoing investigations of ACORN chapters for voter fraud.

In 1966, sociology professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven of Columbia University outlined a game plan employed by ACORN for undermining the American government, known by Leftist organizers as the Cloward-Piven Strategy. Authors Michael Reich and Janice Andrews, in their book The Road Not Taken, outlined the purpose of this strategy:

Cloward and Piven proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.

In other words, the gist of this line of attack is to bring down the American system through the collapse of its behemoth welfare state, thus ushering in a brave new socialist utopia. Of course, the strategy was later, and more effectively, altered to attract the much larger American Middle Class, which provided numbers the poor could never match. The definition of welfare has broadened to include education, Medicare, Social Security and, eventually, national health care.

ACORN adapted the Clowar-Piven strategy in state after state, later broadening it to include voter registration. Though ACORN faces many ongoing investigations stemming from voter fraud as well as charges of embezzlement, the organization continues to plod on. Remember, its purpose is to overwhelm the system, not for its members to avoid jail time. Whether that system involves the welfare or voter rolls or, potentially, U.S. Census data, ACORN's leagal entanglements are worth the sacrifice to achive a desired end.

One of its more successful former organizers now occupies the Oval Office. In the early1990s, Obama helped coordinate ACORN’s get-out-the-vote efforts in Chicago, an association his presidential campaign denied. According to then candidate Obama’s website:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

Barrack Obama community organizing.

Unfortunately, for Obama, the Internet is a hard place to erase evidence. An expunged article and photo from the journal Social Policy was uncovered, revealing Obama’s role in training ACORN members in voter registration methods. According to a 2004 article by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN leader:

Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

And Obama never forgets an old friend. The administration entered into partnerships with organizations across the nation to aid in gathering data for the 2010 census, many of which have an interest in padding voter roles to secure state and national power.

However, ACORN is not alone. Here is a partial list of over 300 organizations (courtesy of CBS News) partnering with the Census Bureau; and they have more than a passing interest in increasing the size of our bloated Nanny State and advancing interests not to the benefit of our nation or its overburdened taxpayers:

AFL-CIO Civil, Human & Women’s Rights Department.
AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts.
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
American Association of School Administrators.
American Educational Research Association.
American Farm Bureau Federation.
American Federation of Government Employees.
American Library Association.
Arab American Institute.
Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage.
Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Coalition of Labor Union Women.
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc.
NAACP National Voter Fund.
National Association of Social Workers.
National Indian Gaming Association.
National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
National Newspaper Publishers Association.
Oakland Citizen’s Committee for Urban Renewal.
Rainbow Push Coalition (Jessie Jackson’s organization).

The full list is a community organizer’s dream team.

Alabama’s Republican Sen. Richard Shelby recently dashed off a letter to the White House expressing his concern regarding one of the community organizer’s community organizers:

Past allegations of fraud should raise great concern about the accuracy of data provided by this organization. Washington State filed felony charges in 2007 against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for falsifying 1,700 fraudulent voter registration cards. An ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced in 2008 for fabricating 29 falsified voter registration forms. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage, as well as dead, voters. ACORN has been implicated in similar voter registration schemes around the country and its activities were frequently questioned throughout the 2008 presidential election.

To keep the census nonpartisan, we cannot allow a biased, politically-active organization taking any type of official role in the process, let alone recruitment. By over counting here, and under counting there, manipulation could take place solely for political gain. Using ACORN to mobilize hundreds of thousands of temporary workers can surely lead to abuses for those who want to gain political advantage, just as we saw with the voter registration issues in past elections. The laws that govern voter fraud were not enough to dissuade those with the intent to throw an election and it is doubtful that the laws governing fraud in the census will be any more effective against such deceitful intents.

It’s unlikely Sen. Shelby’s letter will dissuade President Obama from taking advantage of this historic opportunity to fix future U.S. elections Chicago style.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s website reminds Americans of their mission:

How our data are used:

To apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

To define legislature districts, school district assignment areas and other important functional areas of government.

Where to build new roads and schools.

Where to locate job training centers.

Where to distribute $300 billion in federal funds to local, state and tribal governments each year. Census data affects how funding is allocated to communities for:

Neighborhood improvements.

Public health.

Education.

Transportation

And much more.

With federal budgets larger than any in U.S. history, Obama intends to remake America the ACORN way, by “overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.” For America, the future provides little “hope” but plenty of “change.”