ACORN appears to have honed these tricks and has now decided to re-brand on a national scale. However, given its history, many are skeptical:

“If you want to see whether ACORN is really changing its ways, check to see whether the signatories to those local ACORN bank accounts are changing. When it comes to ACORN, the money is the organization, and the name is just the name.”

In order to operate effectively, ACORN requires little public scrutiny and a lot of lore and misdirection (think registering Mickey Mouse to vote). For 40 years ACORN’s organizing model has survived social revolutions and political upheavals and to understand ACORN a review of the 1970’s “manifesto” of ACORN founder Wade Rathke is essential.

Acorn Organizing Model

Keeping up with the little nuts that have fallen off Rathke’s tree has begun and one has to wonder how long before another mighty “oak” is formed.

yeyb agenda –

Conference sessions include how to lobby state legislatures, organize labor unions, build the Working Families political party, conduct get out the vote efforts, as well as providing housing and credit counseling.

Remember, ACORN’s housing and credit counseling work is done primarily through the ACORN Housing Corporation, which receives a substantial portion of its funds from taxpayers. Most of its staff are paid through taxpayer dollars. Their attendance at a conference with such overt political activism raises troubling concerns.

Of course, ACORN could have erected strict fire-walls at the conference. It is possible that ACORN Housing employees weren’t allowed in the political sessions. Or, that they were using vacation time to attend the conference, so taxpayer funds weren’t underwriting their attendance at political workshops. It is also possible that ACORN kept a very strict accounting of the costs of the conference. Any cost sharing by ACORN Housing would have been strictly limited to the sessions dealing with housing and credit counseling. The more politcal ACORN “holding company” would have picked up the costs of the political sessions.

These are all possible. But, for some reason, we doubt ACORN was that thorough in protecting taxpayer funds.

The manual provides a bit of background on the issue, some suggested actions and, helpfully, identifies “targets” for these actions.

Basic Issue Development for Organizers –

We draw your attention to two interesting sections. The first is on speed bumps:

If you’re tired of beating up on the City for speedbumps, and the City allows people to pay directly for speedbumps, you can do an ACORN safe streets pledge campaign targeting local businesses, and get each of them to sponsor a speedbump.  Targetting autodealers would make a lot of sense here.  This gives you a private-sector target.  You could also do a campaign to set up a special taxing district to tax local businesses (or downtown businesses, maybe, this may be legally harder) to pay for traffic calming. (emphasis added)

The second deals with the issue of vacant lots:

This would be a massive neighborhood level campaign, but feasible where we’d built something.  The strategy would be to force the City to make a plan to turn the vacant land it owns, or where taxes are delinquent, into an opportunity for decent housing affordable to our members.  We demand the City pool the land, and go after a developer to agree to develop it at an affordable level.  To add a smart growth twist to this, we could go after a big sprawl developer with deep pockets and demand some development in our neighborhoods as payback.  The developers will argue they need subsidies to make it all work out affordably, which may be true.  Call AHC…(emphasis added)

Again, this is an ACORN manual suggesting what is very close to a “shakedown” of private businesses. We’re stunned that the word “payback” is actually used in this document.

We assume “AHC” is “ACORN Housing Corporation,” the ACORN affiliate that receives considerable taxpayer support.