Exactly. As an organization, they did nothing wrong. .
Wrong ? that depends on who you are pulling for the Neo-comms or the Taxpayers.
Groups like ACORN are astroturf movements funded by leftwingers like G Soros to facilitate and manipulate, nudging policy and inventing crisis (housing crisis) toward the goal of Social justice(wealth redistribution)
Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern writes that ACORN, professing its dedication to the poor and powerless, in fact promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. ACORN, Stern elaborates, organizes people to push for ever more government control of the economy and to pursue the ultra-Lefts familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. This agenda is made plain in ACORNs own Peoples Platform, which says: We are the majority, forged from all the minorities. We will continue our fight
until we have shared the wealth
The cloward/lPiven strategy to create crisis was seen in the open with the Motor voter bill
Cloward and Pivens final victory came on May 20, 1993, when President Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 commonly called the Motor-Voter Act. It ordered every state to provide resources enabling people to register to vote at state agencies, at the same time they applied for drivers licenses, welfare, Medicaid and disability benefits.
Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the `incentivizing of fraud
than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act
Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning `dead wood people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes from their rolls.
Since its implementation, Motor Voter has worked in one sense: it has fueled an explosion of phantom voters.
Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The "Motor Voter Law," the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver's license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge "deadwood" voters (those who have died or moved away). In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia's voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city's population has declined by 13 percent. CBS's 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California
twice.
ACORN and Project Vote were still in the game, however. The task would fall to them to figure out how to make Motor Voter work in the streets. Much as Cloward and Piven had turned George Wiley loose to implement their flood-the-rolls, bankrupt the cities in the Sixties, they now released ACORN and Project Vote to put the crisis strategy to work at the polls.
"[W]e allowed conservatives to steal pages from our playbook and do actions on us in Dade County," Rathke later lamented in his magazine Social Policy. "We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim."
With new resolve, Rathke and ACORN thereafter pushed into high gear their efforts to help Democrat candidates win political elections at any cost. Toward that end, ACORN's mass campaigns of voter-registration fraud would reach unprecedented heights in subsequent election cycles. ACORN's paid workers, tasked with registering as many pro-Democrat voters as possible, submitted many tens of thousands of fraudulent voter-registration cards in key voting districts around the United States. By 2008, federal authorities were investigating voter fraud by ACORN in 12 separate states.
BAck to the Goal
In July 2009, ACORNcracked.com editor Kyle Olson visited a Rathke book signing (for Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families), where he interviewed the ACORN founder. In the interview, Rathke confirmed that he was pursuing the so-called "Maximum Eligible Participation" Solution (MEPS), a strategy calling for all Americans eligible for welfare payments to demand every penny to which the law "entitles" them. He urged people to "make sure that other people in the community" are actually getting their due from the government.
The MEPS is essentially an updated incarnation of the old Cloward-Piven Strategy, aiming to orchestrate a crisis that will overwhelm the financial system and cause it to collapse. Rathke writes in his book, "it is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs." Rathke has also said that technology should be utilized to make it as easy as possible for people to claim welfare benefits.
More reading
Acorn: Agenda & Tactics
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/pvextprofile.html
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1773
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2003
