ACORN - Federal government's best investment ever

The real purpose of the right's attacks on ACORN is to destroy a remarkably successful 50-year-old grassroots model for defending the poor and workers. ACORN is one of the few grassroots neighborhood organizations capable of wielding power on a national scale. It is unique in the combination of strategies it uses: organizing, direct action, lawsuits, lobbying and the provision of direct services. That ACORN is a federation of self-governing locals with a national board comprised largely of poor people seems to both amaze and gall the right. Over 10 years, ACORN's direct services and local and state campaigns generated monetary benefits for lower-income households totaling some $15 billion, or $1.5 billion a year. This includes the impact of enacting living-wage or minimum-wage or predatory-lending ordinances or statutes. The recent video of an ACORN employee giving tax advice to a make-believe prostitute and her "pimp" to engage in a make-believe crime is certainly damning. But we should compare the swift punitive reaction by Congress and the media to that video with their reactions to real-world tax advice given by huge accounting firms to the richest of us that resulted in real-world millions of foreclosures and millions more plunging into poverty.