Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita is on a mission. He is concerned about ACORN. Testifying on Capitol Hill on Dec.1, he described for Republican congressmen allegations of ACORN's involvement in voter registration fraud in Lake County during the 2008 general election.
It's time to set the record straight, and then, perhaps, Rokita can concentrate on important issues.
The right has demonized ACORN issuing misinformation picked up by those whose only apparent points of reference are right-wing media such as Fox "News" and Rush Limbaugh.
What ACORN actually does on a daily basis is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). It also helps those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. ACORN receives a comparatively small amount of government funding -- $53 million in federal funds over the past 15 years -- while trillions have gone to Wall Street investment banks and billions of dollars have vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan, absorbed by private contractors such as Halliburton and KBR despite questions about the quality of their work and allegations of criminal activity by employees of Blackwater and other security contractors. Where were the concerned Republicans then?
You might have seen videos of two people impersonating a pimp and a prostitute visiting offices of ACORN, where they got hapless workers to advise them on how to use illicit revenue to buy houses for use as brothels.
MediaMatters.org noted that commentators failed to mention that those impersonators had been thrown out of other ACORN offices and police were called. Also, that the videos had been heavily edited.
Perhaps a congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise. A fair investigation may dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets, such as: "ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in voter fraud using federal funds." In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind. A handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed state authorities.
If only the Republicans were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts across the country, whose president finally pleaded guilty of voter registration fraud.
He built a lucrative career teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. This received scant publicity. Glen Greenwald noted at Salon.com (Sept. 17), "Nobody is apologizing for ACORN. The issue is one of proportion. If someone opposes government waste and only focuses on a tiny group that helps the poor and receives a minuscule amount of tax dollars -- while ignoring the industries that eat up trillions in taxpayer waste and dwarf the impact of ACORN by many magnitudes -- then any rational person would question what their real motives are."
"Claiming you're worried about taxpayer waste while fixating on ACORN proves the insincerity of the ostensible concern, let alone doing so while cheering on the same Wall Street banks, defense contractors and insurance industries that control and expand government power for their own benefit," Greenwald wrote.
Joe E. Gutierrez of East Chicago is a retired steelworker and USWA Local 1010 official. The opinion expressed in this column is the writer's and not necessarily that of The Times.
