ACORN files for bankruptcy

[chanel]

In an announcement on its website, Bertha Lewis, the CEO of the troubled activist group, says that ACORN has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the reason stemming from the legal troubles surrounding numerous voter registration investigations across the country. The scandals led Congress to vote to cut off federal funding, and the group also lost some government support.

"The ongoing political onslaught caused irreparable harm," wrote Lewis, who blames "a right-wing media blitz." She says "allegations and reports will continue to try to undermine all that ACORN has done, "but says that "ACORN will live on in the hearts of the people it served, and as those of us who fight for justice know, ‘THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED'."

In the last three years, dozens of ACORN workers were accused of, and numerous pleaded guilty to, voter fraud related charge


Read more: ACORN?s Troubled Past Leads to Stunning Election Day Announcement | Foxnews.com

Gee whiz. I thought that the government funding was minimal.

More people are headed to jail. Stay tuned.

 

[Madeline]

In an announcement on its website, Bertha Lewis, the CEO of the troubled activist group, says that ACORN has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the reason stemming from the legal troubles surrounding numerous voter registration investigations across the country. The scandals led Congress to vote to cut off federal funding, and the group also lost some government support.

"The ongoing political onslaught caused irreparable harm," wrote Lewis, who blames "a right-wing media blitz." She says "allegations and reports will continue to try to undermine all that ACORN has done, "but says that "ACORN will live on in the hearts of the people it served, and as those of us who fight for justice know, ‘THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED'."

In the last three years, dozens of ACORN workers were accused of, and numerous pleaded guilty to, voter fraud related charge


Read more: ACORN?s Troubled Past Leads to Stunning Election Day Announcement | Foxnews.com

Gee whiz. I thought that the government funding was minimal.

More people are headed to jail. Stay tuned.

Holy Toledo. I had thought these ACORN stories about voter fraud were so much rightie-tightie wishful thinking. You mean they were true?

Yanno, chanel, a bankruptcy filing is a public document......

 

[California Girl]

In an announcement on its website, Bertha Lewis, the CEO of the troubled activist group, says that ACORN has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the reason stemming from the legal troubles surrounding numerous voter registration investigations across the country. The scandals led Congress to vote to cut off federal funding, and the group also lost some government support.

"The ongoing political onslaught caused irreparable harm," wrote Lewis, who blames "a right-wing media blitz." She says "allegations and reports will continue to try to undermine all that ACORN has done, "but says that "ACORN will live on in the hearts of the people it served, and as those of us who fight for justice know, ‘THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED'."

In the last three years, dozens of ACORN workers were accused of, and numerous pleaded guilty to, voter fraud related charge


Read more: ACORN?s Troubled Past Leads to Stunning Election Day Announcement | Foxnews.com

Gee whiz. I thought that the government funding was minimal.

More people are headed to jail. Stay tuned.

What was it they used to chant? "We are ACORN! The mighty, mighty ACORN!"

Meh, not so mighty now.

 

[chanel]

Ha ha. Yep. You are not alone. Just because O'Keefe made an ass of himself doesn't mean he didn't have a story. Check out the last line of the article. Biggie whistleblower about to testify.

 

[California Girl]

Ha ha. Yep. You are not alone. Just because O'Keefe made an ass of himself doesn't mean he didn't have a story. Check out the last line of the article. Biggie whistleblower about to testify.

What we have to remember - and watch - is that it is only THIS entity of ACORN that is gone. They reforming under different names all over the country. We really need to keep paying attention.

 

[Granny]

Ha ha. Yep. You are not alone. Just because O'Keefe made an ass of himself doesn't mean he didn't have a story. Check out the last line of the article. Biggie whistleblower about to testify.

What we have to remember - and watch - is that it is only THIS entity of ACORN that is gone. They reforming under different names all over the country. We really need to keep paying attention.

Ain't that the truth!!! The number of organizations that need to lose federal funding altogether is ...... a lot.

 

[Madeline]

Ha ha. Yep. You are not alone. Just because O'Keefe made an ass of himself doesn't mean he didn't have a story. Check out the last line of the article. Biggie whistleblower about to testify.

What we have to remember - and watch - is that it is only THIS entity of ACORN that is gone. They reforming under different names all over the country. We really need to keep paying attention.

Ain't that the truth!!! The number of organizations that need to lose federal funding altogether is ...... a lot.

Yup.

DEA, DOE, EPA, DOA, IRS, INS, FDA, HUD....o hell, it'd be faster to list the ones worth leaving open.

But yanno Granny, this whole business of taxpayers funding a politically-oriented "charity" makes me cringe. I cannot even understand how they'd have gotten tax exempt status.

Mayhaps an investigation ain't such a bad idea.

 

[daveman]

"The ongoing political onslaught caused irreparable harm," wrote Lewis, who blames "a right-wing media blitz."

ACORN is corrupt; it's conservatives' fault.

Yes, people really do think that way, and no, it's not thinking.

 

[Bfgrn]

It is amazing how the an organization that did so many good things for American citizens can be so easily vilified and ultimately destroyed by lies, innuendo and falsehoods perpetrated by the right's echo chamber with help from the so called liberal bias MSM. ACORN was one of the leading voices speaking out against predatory lending. If we had listened to ACORN, maybe millions of Americans wouldn't be facing foreclosure.

For ACORN, Truth Lost Amid the Din

The embattled community organizing group is much in the news these days, thanks to the idiocies of a handful of now-suspended staffers having been filmed and YouTubed by a right-wing sting squad. Most of the stories present ACORN as, at best, a shady organization up to no good in America's inner cities, not to mention the nation's primary source of voting fraud.

What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does. Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.

What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work? Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.

Another major campaign has been to limit the interest and fees that banks charge homeowners. In the 1990s, ACORN spearheaded a number of legal actions, often joined by states' attorneys general, that compelled such lenders as Citigroup to change many of their practices. The group has led successful drives to outlaw the most egregious predatory lending in nine states. It also counsels thousands of inner-city homeowners and home buyers.

Harold Meyerson - For ACORN, Truth Lost Amid the Din - washingtonpost.com

Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong

“Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong” by Christopher Martin of the University of Northern Iowa and Peter Dreier of Occidental College, reveals a classic case of the agenda-setting effect in which both conservative and mainstream media outlets propelled the Republican agenda with a barrage of unfounded allegations of alleged “voter fraud.”

The study found that both conservative and mainstream media reported allegations by Republican Party operatives and politicians without seeking to verify these claims or to provide ACORN with equal opportunities to challenge the accusations of voter fraud.

The analysis of the narrative framing the ACORN stories demonstrates that — despite long-standing charges from conservatives that the news media are determinedly liberal and ignore conservative ideas — the news media agenda is easily permeated by persistent conservative media campaigns, even when there is little or no truth to the story.

The authors conducted a content analysis of all 647 stories about ACORN that appeared in 15 major news media organizations from 2007-2008. The news media analyzed included USA Today, The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio (NPR), and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS). They also examined all stories about ACORN from three local newspapers representing cities in which ACORN has a long-time presence: the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Using the controversy over ACORN as a case study, the report illustrates the way the media help set the agenda for public debate, and frame the way that debate is shaped. It describes how what the authors call opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals) set the story in motion as early as 2006, how the “conservative echo chamber” orchestrated its anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, how the McCain-Palin campaign picked it up, and how the mainstream media reported these allegations without investigating their truth or falsity. As a result, the relatively little-known community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, to the point where 82 percent of the respondents in an October 2008 national survey reported they had heard about ACORN.

In October 2008, at the peak of the campaign season, negative attacks dominated the news about ACORN with these key findings:

* 76 percent of the stories focused on allegations of voter fraud.

* 8.7 percent involved accusations that public funds were being funneled to ACORN.

* 7.9 percent of the stories involved charges that ACORN is a front for registering Democrats.

* 3.1 percent involved blaming ACORN for the mortgage scandal.

The report also found that the media, including the mainstream news media, failed to fact-check persistent allegations of voter fraud involving ACORN despite the existence of easily available countervailing evidence. The media failed to distinguish allegations of voter registration problems from allegations of actual voting irregularities. They also failed to distinguish between allegations of wrongdoing and actual wrongdoing. For example:

* 82.8 percent of the stories alleging voter fraud failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare.

* 80.3 percent of the stories alleging involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law.

* 85.1 percent of the stories alleging involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems.

* 95.8 percent of the stories alleging involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of voter fraud to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans.

* 61.4 percent of the stories alleging involvement in voter fraud failed to acknowledge that Republicans were trying to discredit Obama with an ACORN scandal.

The authors reveal that the attacks on ACORN by Republicans and conservatives — and the same pattern of reportage that repeats allegations without any attempt to independently verify the facts — have persisted throughout 2009. For example, despite recently discovered e-mails revealing Karl Rove’s role in the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias for failing to prosecute ACORN on charges of voter fraud despite the lack of evidence, not a single major daily newspaper mentioned ACORN as the Republicans’ target.

UEPI - Manipulating the Public Agenda

 

[Revere]

There is no redeeming purpose for ACORN. It's the political intimidation wing of the Democrat party.

 

[Bfgrn]

There is no redeeming purpose for ACORN. It's the political intimidation wing of the Democrat party.

Yea, we don't need organizations that help Americans secure better wages, help poor kids get free school lunches, help Vietnam veterans' fight for their rights and fight for more hospital emergency rooms.

They are EVIL...

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke

 

[chanel]

Sure. That's why they plead guilty and are going bankrupt.

 

[Bfgrn]

Sure. That's why they plead guilty and are going bankrupt.

So the end of those helpful things they do is a good thing?

 

[Sallow]

Exactly why did the government "defund" ACORN again?

And was it Constitutional?

 

[California Girl]

There is no redeeming purpose for ACORN. It's the political intimidation wing of the Democrat party.

Yea, we don't need organizations that help Americans secure better wages, help poor kids get free school lunches, help Vietnam veterans' fight for their rights and fight for more hospital emergency rooms.

They are EVIL...

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke

If they stuck to those things, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, they - like NPR - think you can take taxpayers money and support one political party over another. I can understand why the left have no problem with that.... However, frankly, you want your own 'talk radio' - you fucking pay for it. You want people out touting for votes? You fucking pay for it, or volunteer. But y'all don't get MY money to support the Democrats. Mmmmk?

And, for the record, yea, I would say the exact same thing if they were blatantly partisan for the GOP.

Stick to your remit or lose your funding. End of.

 

[Revere]

There is no redeeming purpose for ACORN. It's the political intimidation wing of the Democrat party.

Yea, we don't need organizations that help Americans secure better wages, help poor kids get free school lunches, help Vietnam veterans' fight for their rights and fight for more hospital emergency rooms.

They are EVIL...

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke

Not funded with taxpayer money and no oversight, no we don't.

 

[Bfgrn]

There is no redeeming purpose for ACORN. It's the political intimidation wing of the Democrat party.

Yea, we don't need organizations that help Americans secure better wages, help poor kids get free school lunches, help Vietnam veterans' fight for their rights and fight for more hospital emergency rooms.

They are EVIL...

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke

If they stuck to those things, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, they - like NPR - think you can take taxpayers money and support one political party over another. I can understand why the left have no problem with that.... However, frankly, you want your own 'talk radio' - you fucking pay for it. You want people out touting for votes? You fucking pay for it, or volunteer. But y'all don't get MY money to support the Democrats. Mmmmk?

And, for the record, yea, I would say the exact same thing if they were blatantly partisan for the GOP.

Stick to your remit or lose your funding. End of.

Because ACORN registers voters that come from low income and poor communities, it is automatic that they are supporting one political party over another? I think the problem isn't with ACORN, it with the Republican party. That is why the Republicans have such a sordid history of REAL voter fraud and voter suppression.

 

[Sallow]

What was the legal ground for Defunding Acorn? What..should be easy.

 

[Revere]

Yea, we don't need organizations that help Americans secure better wages, help poor kids get free school lunches, help Vietnam veterans' fight for their rights and fight for more hospital emergency rooms.

They are EVIL...

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke

If they stuck to those things, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, they - like NPR - think you can take taxpayers money and support one political party over another. I can understand why the left have no problem with that.... However, frankly, you want your own 'talk radio' - you fucking pay for it. You want people out touting for votes? You fucking pay for it, or volunteer. But y'all don't get MY money to support the Democrats. Mmmmk?

And, for the record, yea, I would say the exact same thing if they were blatantly partisan for the GOP.

Stick to your remit or lose your funding. End of.

Because ACORN registers voters that come from low income and poor communities, it is automatic that they are supporting one political party over another? I think the problem isn't with ACORN, it with the Republican party. That is why the Republicans have such a sordid history of REAL voter fraud and voter suppression.

So what? Why should the be immune from oversight?

Good riddance.

 

[Bfgrn]

If they stuck to those things, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, they - like NPR - think you can take taxpayers money and support one political party over another. I can understand why the left have no problem with that.... However, frankly, you want your own 'talk radio' - you fucking pay for it. You want people out touting for votes? You fucking pay for it, or volunteer. But y'all don't get MY money to support the Democrats. Mmmmk?

And, for the record, yea, I would say the exact same thing if they were blatantly partisan for the GOP.

Stick to your remit or lose your funding. End of.

Because ACORN registers voters that come from low income and poor communities, it is automatic that they are supporting one political party over another? I think the problem isn't with ACORN, it with the Republican party. That is why the Republicans have such a sordid history of REAL voter fraud and voter suppression.

So what? Why should the be immune from oversight?

Good riddance.

They shouldn't be immune from oversight, but they should be immune from assassination based on lies, fabrications and misinformation.