Obama, ACORN, and Ayers

[Annie]

Rather than being 'just a guy in the neighborhood', Obama and Ayers share many of the same political philosophies, which I'm certain many progressives here also do. ACORN also shares some, especially regarding education, power, control, and indoctrination:

ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2003

It's very long, but well worth reading:

Sol Stern
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities
The nation’s largest left-wing group is trying to make a revolution, one city at a time. And it is getting results.
Spring 2003

If you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office, and affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable successes in getting municipalities and state legislatures to enact its radical policy goals into law.

Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.

It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New Left–inspired gospel, since it grew out of one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization. In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers, whom he sent out to disrupt welfare offices through sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the “oppressive” eligibility restrictions that kept down the welfare rolls. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America’s unjust capitalist economy. The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy. Yet far from sparking a restructuring of American capitalism, this explosion of the welfare rolls only helped to create a culture of family disintegration and dependency in inner-city neighborhoods, with rampant illegitimacy, crime, school failure, drug abuse, non-work, and poverty among a fast-growing underclass. ...

In cities where ACORN has been entrenched for years, its relentless campaigns have forced local policies to the left. In Chicago, for instance, ACORN took on the administration of Mayor Richard Daley over a law to raise the pay of employees in firms doing business with the city. Although the advocacy group initially failed to win approval for its wage bill, which Daley strongly opposed, ACORN pursued the mayor tenaciously, picketing him as he welcomed delegates to the 1996 Democratic national convention and bursting into a closed city council meeting to garner publicity for itself. After three years, it won the bill it sought. ACORN used that victory as a catalyst in Chicago, which has become one of the organization’s most effective chapters. Last year, it successfully expanded the wage law in the city.

But in cities where the political culture already tilts way to the left, ACORN has scored its biggest victories. The group provides public officials in those places with a ready-made agenda and legislation that city councils can use right out of the box, so to speak. In Los Angeles, for instance, ACORN helped write and pass wage legislation just like the measure it imposed upon Chicago, and it succeeded in watering down welfare reform. In New York, when a term-limits law swept into power a new city council, ACORN was ready with a host of bills—from its trademark wage legislation to an anti-predatory-lending measure—that willing council members rushed into law (see “The Council’s Confederacy of Dunces.” )

As these examples make clear, there’s one further crucial respect in which ACORN departs from the old New Left’s playbook. Instead of trying to overturn “the system”—to blow it up, as George Wiley wanted to do—ACORN burrows deep within the system, taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not only has ACORN worked to influence existing city councils and state legislatures; it has also thrown itself into municipal and state elections, claiming to have registered 500,000 new voters in low-income communities around the country. With the labor-union allies it has cultivated, it has even helped create new parties that have scored real successes. Chicago’s ACORN leader, for instance, won a seat on the Board of Aldermen as candidate of the leftist New Party. Similarly, in Little Rock, several ACORN members, including the group’s state chairman, have won election to the Board of Directors (as the city council is called) as members of the New Party, which shares ACORN’s member list, as well as its mantra of “Think locally, act locally,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports....

But a closer look at ACORN’s educational policies reveals a militant opposition to the authentic educational reform the urban poor need so desperately. Consider ACORN’s successful effort in 2001 to derail Mayor Giuliani’s proposal to allow Edison Schools Inc.—a for-profit educational firm—to manage five of the lousiest of New York City’s lousy schools. Reasonable people can disagree about Edison’s overall record in turning around bad inner-city schools; based on what I’ve seen of the evidence, I think it has done pretty well. But what is beyond dispute is that Edison has never performed as poorly in a single one of its schools as has Gotham’s Board of Ed in the five schools the mayor proposed for privatization. In those schools, more than 80 percent of the students couldn’t read or do math at grade level. Nothing that Edison might have done could possibly have made them any worse—and might well have improved them.

Yet ACORN used every tactic in its comprehensive playbook to scuttle the Edison plan. It intimidated schools chancellor Harold Levy into letting it print leaflets at city expense, filled with false information about Edison’s record, including the charge that the firm expelled children for poor grades. ACORN obtained from school officials lists of the addresses and phone numbers of parents, whom it then barraged with calls and letters. When Edison reps tried to make their case at public forums in Harlem, ACORN activists shouted them down. For good measure, ACORN staged a noisy demonstration outside Edison’s headquarters, complete with the 12-foot-high inflated rat that is an ugly staple of all union demonstrations in New York against non-unionized companies.

Sadly, ACORN’s bullying tactics won the day, and the parents at all five schools voted against the plan. ACORN’s “victory” certainly didn’t benefit the kids, who were stuck right where they were. So who did profit? ACORN. Little appreciated was the crucial detail that ACORN itself is part of the failed bureaucratic system that any successful privatization program would unsettle. For more than a decade, ACORN has used foundation grants to start up its own New York public schools, something the Board of Ed sometimes allows community-based organizations to do. With warm-sounding names like the Bread and Roses High School, ACORN’s schools are political-indoctrination centers with mediocre academic records. Their curricula abound with “social justice” themes that wouldn’t be out of place at an ACORN community organizers’ training school. Bread and Roses, for example, holds an annual “Why Unions Matter” art project to “teach students how labor unions work and what they do to support social change, economic growth and democratic principles.” The schools have even bused kids to Washington to demonstrate against “tax cuts for the rich.”

In addition to its visceral antipathy to any for-profit entity and its fear that the schools run by Edison might look better to parents than its own schools, ACORN had another ulterior motive for opposing any privatization experiment. ACORN has political ties with teachers’ unions—and they fiercely oppose privatization and vouchers in education, because these reforms might threaten union members’ jobs. It is fitting that leading the anti-Edison campaign was Bertha Lewis, New York ACORN chief and co-chair of the Working Families Party—fast becoming the key vehicle for advancing the political agenda of several of the city’s trade unions. Though ACORN sent hundreds of cadres to demonstrate outside Edison’s headquarters, it has never uttered an unkind word about the teachers’ unions, the main culprit in New York City’s educational failure.

Every recent opinion poll of inner-city parents reveals that the poor quality of the public school system is their Number One concern and that a large majority favor a voucher program to allow their children to opt for private or parochial schools. ACORN tells organizers like Heather Appell to take the pulse of the community; considering this mandate, it’s amazing how adamant ACORN’s leaders are in excluding the options of privatization or vouchers for school improvement....

The connections are there: ACORN, Education, Obama, Ayers, Annenberg Foundation $$$$, (shocking as it is, conservative philanthropists don't necessarily check out the grant writer's history, rather just their curricula vitae and the plan), and the Woods Foundation.

McCain Memo Attacks Obama on ACORN - Real Clear Politics - Elections 2008 - TIME

...The relationship between Barack Obama and ACORN dates back to the early 1990s, well before the start of his political career. In 1992, Obama directed Project Vote - an arm of ACORN that also encouraged voter registration. Around the same time, Obama began teaching classes for "Future Leaders Identified by ACORN," and according to an op-ed at the time, Obama continued his community organizing work largely through these classes.

Obama soon moved on from his role as a community organizer and became a trial attorney for ACORN. In 1995, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois for its supposed failure to implement a federal law designed to make voter registration easier, and thus increasing the likelihood of voter fraud. Obama also joined two well-known boards with strong ties to ACORN - the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation. Under Obama's watch, the Chicago ACORN branch received thousands of dollars in grants from both organizations.

During this year's Democrat primaries, Obama's campaign paid $832,000 to Citizens Services, an ACORN-affiliated organization, for get-out-the-vote efforts. Sensing the need to distance itself from the controversial organization, however, Obama's Federal Election Commission report mischaracterized this work as "staging and lighting."

Given his longstanding ties to the organization, it is not surprising that Obama accepted the endorsement of ACORN in 2008. In a press release touting the endorsement on his official campaign website, Obama says: "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues that you care about my entire career."

Obama's subsequent failure to disclose the true nature of his relationship with ACORN, however, is very surprising and deeply troubling. His campaign website, which on one page features the aforementioned quote, claims on another page that Obama has no connection to ACORN. This direct contradiction illustrates Obama's willingness to distort the true facts and seriously calls his judgment into question....

 

[driveby]

All Lies !!

 

[Annie]

All Lies !!

I know, just can't seem to stop.

 

[William Joyce]

As we're starting to see, the "ACORN" revolution involves registering people multiple times, getting illegals and felons to vote, and other blatantly illegal activity. Makes 'walk-around' business look tame.