I called ACORN to get a response from Bertha Lewis, the group’s CEO. “I don’t think the conservative right will ever be satisfied,” she told me. “They’re not going to stop because they’re raising money on us every day — we’re a nice, simple convenient bogeyman.”

Still, Lewis seemed almost shell-shocked: “We can’t understand this obsession, and the vehemence. They just make up something and keep repeating it over and over — yesterday, I’m cleaning my house and I get a call, someone from my office saying ‘This guy from Breitbart is going crazy saying you were in the White House!’ Apparently some woman named Bertha Lewis visited the White House in September, so automatically they assumed — but it wasn’t me.”

Lewis says the trouble started in 2000, when ACORN began to register massive numbers of voters. “If we had been a nice little community group that maybe registered a couple thousand people, there would not be this furor.” Often, ACORN registered those voters around explicitly progressive issues. “In 2000, we registered almost a million people in Florida around raising the minimum wage,” she notes.

ACORN also became aggressive about fighting voter suppression. “They were doing it very unabashedly,” Lewis told me. “You go to the poll and you’re not on record, your name’s not on the rolls, you didn’t re-register, you didn’t vote in this last election cycle, you used to be a felon. Voter lists were purged and folks were turned away or asked for multiple forms of identification. It was all about suppressing black and brown and poor votes.”

Read the whole article here.

Margaret Williams, Maryland ACORN board member and Sonja Merchant-Jones, Baltimore ACORN President both reported that the low level ACORN employees caught on tape in the Baltimore office were immediately terminated for behaving unprofessionally; but yet, senior staff members who assisted and concealed a million dollar Rathke embezzlement remain employed.

The ACORN 8 commends these board members’s decisive action, but find it extremely ironic since the board of directors do not actually control ACORN employees. According to ACORN’s by-laws that authority is exclusively exercised by the “Chief Organizer,” formerly Wade Rathke and now Bertha Lewis. This fundamental disconnect between an actual functioning board of directors and senior management is the true problem and real scandal within ACORN. It causes low-income members and staff to become mere pawns of senior management.

Ultimately, ACORN’s low-income workers are simply trying to meet and fulfill unreasonable membership quotas set by senior staff. This undue management pressure results in fraudulent voter registrations, tax assistance for “pimps and prostitutes” or worse. Poor governance and lack of accountability are the real problems. Voter fraud or rather voter registration fraud are just symptoms of a far greater problem. And that is the lack of meaningful control and accountability by the membership. So don’t fault poor workers – blame the board!

If ACORN hopes to survive then the know-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing board of directors must by replaced by individuals with the strength and capabilities to fulfill their fiduciary obligations and the courage to reign in corruption by ACORN’s senior management. If they fail, it is the low income communities which ACORN serves which will suffer the loss.

The damage to the ACORN brand and its overall effectiveness has been immeasurable due to poor governance, mismanagement and corruption within senior management. Consequently, the board of director’s missed the last best chance to save ACORN through reform. It seems apparent to all, except the most ardent and the culpable, that ACORN has been mortally wounded; and the only question now is who goes down with the ship?

But it may already be too late; ACORN had its chance to do the right thing following the million dollar Rathke embezzlement. There was a glimmer of hope when the board of directors appointed an interim management committee tasked to investigate the embezzlement and reorganize ACORN. But they were terminated for seeking a forensic audit.

From the very beginning, the ACORN 8 have always sought to reform – not destroy – the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now. But now find it impossible to imagine that even this once venerable association can withstand the latest onslaught of negative publicity.

The Census Bureau and IRS recently severed ties with ACORN, and the U.S. Senate voted 83 to 7 to cut off funding for the embattled group. The House followed suit by a vote of 345 to 75. Unfortunately, this is yet another example of poor governance, mismanagement and corruption within the once venerable organization. ACORN cannot survive if it can’t raise any more money.

No More Charitable Donations: No tax exempt 501(c )(3) organization will donate money to ACORN under the present circumstances. Since they cannot prove that the 501(c )(3) funding was not commingled with partisan activities.

No More Federal Contracts: Likewise, the federal government has already begun to sever ties to ACORN and could not fund the association through CCI a registered lobbying organization.

No More Negotiated Settlements: ACORN no longer possesses the necessary moral authority to pressure corporations or any organization through public demonstrations or protests. Thus, even this revenue stream will be unavailable to ACORN.

ACORN has been hijacked by senior staff and executive leadership who are acting in their own personal interest and not the best interest of the association or its membership. Only one question remains. Is ACORN now dead on arrival?!?

ACORN has survived in the past as a surprisingly well funded, politically well connected, dictatorial operation which flew under the public’s radar. Ironically, the election of President Barack Obama was actually the worst thing that could happen to ACORN. The attention that the election of the first African-American and community organizer to the highest office in the land has made it impossible for ACORN to avoid real scrutiny as it has in the past. Ironically, President Obama’s ascent has turned into ACORN’s demise.

 Here is a first-hand account of how it happens. In February 2008, Fathiyyah Muhammad of Jacksonville, Florida, heard that ACORN was paying people three dollars for each voter they could register. ACORN paid her three dollars for each voter she registered, but Fatiyyah Muhammad says that the group threw out her votes and fired her when she brought them registrations of Republican voters.

 Fathiyyah Muhammad voted for Obama. “I’m a Republican,” she says, “and this was the first time that I voted for a Democrat since JFK…. I’m one of those rare birds, a black conservative Republican, and actually this is the black conservative capital of the country, Jacksonville, Florida.” She is an entrepreneur and a great American: she makes custom caps for her businesses Bilal’s Custom Caps and Only in America. She and her James have made custom caps for politicians, sports heroes, musicians, and others. “America,” she says, “is the place you can live your dreams if you work at it.” She’s a can-do woman with a great American spirit, and when she saw what was breaking in the news about ACORN, she came forward; I interviewed her Monday morning.

 “This is my first experience” with ACORN, Muhammad said. “This was before Obama got the nomination, long before then….I heard about this group that was paying $3.00 per person, to go out and to get people to sign up to vote. So I went over, I thought that well this is a good way to make some money because I know everybody, you know. I went over there and this guy signed me up and everything, and gave me my little pad, all this stuff.”

 Muhammad went to the ACORN office in Jacksonville. There she encountered a young man speaking to a room of about twenty people. “He was telling us, you know, about his experience, he was from Brooklyn, he wasn’t from this area. He was just here recruiting people to register people to vote. They had a big office here, and I would say maybe about ten or twelve people at there.”

 She went to work: “Well, I went out and got a lot of people, homeless people, but of course I signed everybody up as a Republican, and I would have put people had they been Democrats.” She was not forcing people to sign up as Republicans: “You could put down anything you wanted.” But when she got back to ACORN, a group leader was not pleased: “So I showed what I had, and he said, “No, no, you a fraud, there can’t be any black Republicans,’ and oh, he just kind of hung me out to dry…. But of course their main aim was to register only Democrats. They’re not interested in registering Republicans.”

She saw ACORN officials in Jacksonville throw out the Republican registrations she made. “They just discarded those, they weren’t valid. All of the registrations… they just threw those out.” Yet she says that she is sure that the people she registered were actually going to vote: “Yes, they all were going to vote, I just didn’t want to get anybody just to get the three dollars, I wasn’t desperate for three dollars.”

 ACORN did not honor its agreement to pay three dollars for each registered voter. “He took my papers,” says Muhammad, “didn’t pay me anything and I just left, I just figured that this is just another scam…. Everyone else got paid, all the other people got paid, but I didn’t. And I didn’t make a big deal about it, I just figured that it was another one of life’s experiences.”

 Fatiyyah Muhammad didn’t know anything about ACORN at that time. She didn’t know that ACORN has been doing this for a long time. As far back as November 2006 the organization was indicted for some 40,000 illegal voter registrations, and that was before any of the recent revelations.

 Now Fatiyyah Muhammad says: “I can’t believe that they got away with it for so long.” And she wants her story to be told: “How are you going to shine a light on the laundry if you don’t want to come out and say what happened?”

Fatiyyah Muhammad is unafraid to shine that light. And her testimony is another nail in the coffin of the community organizers of ACORN and their stealth agenda.