October 16, 2008
Who’ll stand up for ACORN and John Lewis?
Certainly not Barack Obama. As our tightrope-walking candidate for president, he can’t afford to do much more than he did during the final debate Wednesday night: minimize his association with ACORN and mildly castigate Congressman Lewis. But the rest of us can’t stand with our fists by our sides and watch a terrific progressive organization and the most moral man of our times get sucker-punched by a lowlife political punk like John McCain. The New York Times weighed in with an ACORN-supportive lead editorial, but so far the only public leader to speak out with any forcefulness on either of McCain’s slanderous attacks has been AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
In a press release issued the morning after the debate, Sweeney said: “McCain’s scapegoating of civil rights hero John Lewis showed just how low he’s willing to go to score political points. He offered a similarly overblown, ridiculous attack on ACORN, a group dedicated to giving low-income Americans a voice in the political process. These kinds of cheap attacks show an alarming lack of integrity in a campaign that’s increasingly more concerned about winning at any cost than addressing the real issues facing working families.”
I’ll go further than President Sweeney. John Lewis is a lifelong friend of mine, my personal hero, and he’s the kindest, gentlest, most thoughtful man I’ve ever met. He knows that words can be as violent as actions, so when he speaks critically of someone, it’s only after anguished consideration. In comparing our current political climate to the one created by George Wallace over many years ago, John spoke for all of us who share a secret fear of a repeat of the events of that horrific. When Lewis said that John McCain and Sarah Pallin are “sowing the seeds of hatred and division,” he sent an alarm to everyone whose souls were scarred by the murders of Emmit Till, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and, yes, those four little girls in that Birmingham Church. That John McCain doesn’t understand our concern only demonstrates how distant he is from the human condition; he’s lived a gated life that disqualifies him from judging someone like John Lewis.
Wade Rathke, Steve Kest and Maude Hurd are also longtime friends of mine, and ACORN, the organization they founded and lead is one of the most vital partners in the progressive coalition that has brought us back to the altar of economic and social justice our country deserted 40 years ago. ACORN is unique among advocacy organizations because it’s run from the bottom up, governed by the people it serves, poor and middle income families, most of them African American. Even before the debate, McCain was running bilious television ads charging ACORN with forcing banks to issue risky home loans of the kind that brought on our current financial crisis. Then on Thursday night before tens of millions of viewers, he accused the venerable organization of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voting history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
The truth is that ACORN has helped 1.3 million people register to vote, with a remarkable record for efficiency and accuracy. In many states, they were required to turn in every voter registration card they’d collected, even those that obviously weren’t valid. In most cases, the falsified cards were signed by people who don’t exist and therefore aren’t like to show up at the polls. Most of the invalid cards that are now turning up were collected by field workers who were being paid by ACORN, so the irony here is that it was ACORN that was defrauded. The “greatest fraud in voting history?” Sorry, that honor goes to the Republican party in Florida in 2000.
The banks? ACORN has indeed been on their butts for many years. Helping working class families build more than $6 billion in wealth through home ownership, and save another $6,2 billion in fees and interest by foregoing subprime lending scams. Organizing class action lawsuits against corporate criminals like Household Finance and Wells Financial. Leading the fight against predatory lending by banks like New Century and Ameriquist. Enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act. In contrast, John McCain 10 years ago was a chief driver of the deregulation frenzy that freed the banking industry of transparency and accountability and set the table for the public feast of taxpayer bailout dollars the bankers are now devouring.
I have no doubt justice will prevail. No one can stain the cloak of heroism and sacrifice worn by John Lewis. ACORN and its 400,000 members will continue to grow and successfully champion the rights of the least among us. And John McCain will go into the political dumpster with all the grace of a worn out old goat. But it’s a shame he and his sophomoric slandering partner haven’t been more roundly condemned by the media, by our elected leaders, by all of us.
David Iglesias has been standing up for ACORN.
I do think Bertha Lewis is not a particularly effective spokesperson. In her interview on DemocracyNow, she missed a number of openings to refute charges against ACORN.
I also think the conservatives are correct that voter rolls should be purged and there need to be guarantees that those who are voting are eligible. That helps guarantee that everyone has confidence in elections. Where conservatives fail– and where liberals fail in calling them out– is ensuring that purging and eligibility checks are done in a manner that provides equal protection. For example, let Motor Vehicle employees to go out to the homes of elderly rural people, the disabled, and anyone else who may have trouble getting a driver’s license and let anyone with an income below, say, $30,000 per year be provided an identity card at taxpayer expense.
If you have contacts with ACORN, I hope you will mention to them that chances to talk to the public are few, and one has to be prepared with succinct talking points that not merely refute but demolish conservative allegations. Homilies do not serve.
There’s an old country-western song that sings, if you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for nothing at all. Ray, thanks for standing tall — as always — for ACORN and for what’s right! Tell it like it is!
Sorry – John Lewis has displayed complete misunderstanding of much of rural America and has employed a double standard in the comments he issued. I saw nothing racist in the questioning of Obama’s ties to a former terrorist, as clearly implied by Lewis’s statements, though I would agree it was certainly a tenuous link at best and extraordinarily poor judgement for them to try to use that as a slur on Obama’s judgement. Rural America, though, has not forgotten the revisionist history and racist words of Rev. Wright, which are clearly hateful and divisive (to paraphrase Lewis), which the McCain campaign has concsiously avoided. Perhaps you can ask Lewis why he didn’t see the need to condemn the views of Rev. Wright as forcefully? Some of us weren’t around for the civil rights struggle so don’t see things through the same prism as he does.
As for ACORN, yes, they perform a valuable service, but in their zeal, some of their employees clearly made some enormous mistakes, some of which rise to the level of criminal offenses through violations of electoral laws. Why is it wrong to castigate them for failing to provide proper training and supervision? You wouldn’t make similar excuses for Wall Street firms or their employees.
As for the home ownership issue, though ACORN encouraging home ownership, while ACORN may have been helpful to some poor individuals, the overall Democratic political mandate to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to encourage home ownership among the poor “at all costs” (i.e., regardless of whether the purchasers of those homes could afford them) led them to happily take on more and more toxic subprime mortgages, which only increased mortgage lenders’ willingness to provide them without checking a borrower’s ability to repay them. House Banking Committee Hearings from just 3 years ago (and now circulating over the internet) show Barney Frank and Maxine Waters castigating regulators for being “too tough” on Fannie and Freddie, even after they were caught out for committing accounting fraud. While not the only reason for the current crisis, it was certainly a major contributor.
And the so-called “deregulation frenzy” you talk about was a Clinton Administration era law also backed by many Democrats and is far from being the only or even a principal culprit of the current crisis. Don’t be so selective with your facts. The truth about the current crisis is that it was encouraged by the Fannie/Freddie political mandate, the Fed keeping interest rates too low for too long, the fact that some complex financial instruments were subject to no regulation, the fact that there are overlapping regulators who think someone else was minding the shop, a huge demand by foreigners for our fancy financial instruments, the mistaken belief by financial analysts that real estate prices would always rise and that homeowners would always be able to make payments on their toxic debt, no matter how high interest rates rose. There is plenty of blame to go around on this one and it belongs to members of BOTH parties, Wall Street, Alan Greenspan and many more. Try taking off that patch over your right eye and seing only those things you want to see through your left eye. It’s language like this that continues to encourage the left/right divide in this country and prevents lawmakers from reaching reasonable compromises.