Wednesday, November 10, 2010

BloggeRhythms 11/10/2010

They say the American public has a very short memory. So when I came across this article today, which was buried among lots of trivial stuff, I thought I'd post some of the highlights, in case folks forgot.

On this past election day, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as Acorn, the major voter registration organization in cities and among the poor, filed for bankruptcy in a Brooklyn, N.Y. court. Nonetheless, many of the group's critics are suspicious of the community organizers' intentions.

Documents filed show a massive loss of public support over the past two years, and that the group and six affiliates now are more than $8.6 million in debt and have only $218,709 in cash. ACORN took in $46.1 million in 2008, which dropped to $16.2 million last year, and contributions amount to just $1.57 million in the first 10 months of this year.

The real reasons of how and why ACORN declined are obviously unknown to me, but I certainly remember its actions and, to my knowledge, its most prominent promoter. Because that was none other than Barack Obama. He's had an intimate and long-term association with ACORN, which has been called the largest radical group in America. Easily as far out as MoveOn.org or Code Pink, maybe more so, it works locally in carefully selected urban areas, thus keeping a much lower national profile.

According to Sol Stern, way back in 2003 in a City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities," he states that "ACORN is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s 'New Left,' with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism to match." He says it grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.”

In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices, aiming to remove eligibility restrictions, thereby effectively flooding welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead however, of a socialist utopia, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities, until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

While retaining NWRO’s radical economic framework and confrontational 1960’s-style tactics, targets and strategies have changed. ACORN now prefers flying under the national radar, organizing locally in liberal urban areas, where, according to Stern, local legislators and reporters are often “slow to grasp how radical ACORN’s positions really are.”

The new goals are municipal “living wage” laws that target “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks to combat “predatory lending.” The problem is, instead of helping workers, ACORN’s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed most. The opposition to welfare reform only threatens to worsen the self-reinforcing cycle of urban poverty and family breakdown. And to top it off, ACORN uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive “donations” that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.

So, what we have here is basic evidence of the president's aims all along. Because on the local level years ago he sought the same goals as he's brought to the White House. A tearing down of the establishment, an open-door bank policy requiring banks to lend to all without proper diligence until they run dry, health care available to all regardless that it will escalate costs while diminishing or eliminating service, an anti-business, anti-growth fiscal policy designed to kill the goose, and a remaining society of "equals" with no hope for decent lives unless they're in the surviving upper governmental class.

When you read it back and realize that these goals might actually have been reached its really scary. But, fortunately, two things prevented that from happening. A very, very bright, well-informed population and a little thing called an election.

That's it for today folks.

Adios

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