Politics: Is scandal-hit Acorn folding? Don’t bet on it. With federal cash at stake, the enterprise is morphing into new groups to keep a hand in the pot. It’s like a con man who changes his name and moves to the next town.
If the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) had any decency at all, it would pull the plug on itself and shut down.
Its long, tawdry history is filled with corruption scandals — everything from Acorn’s community organizers helping criminals to participating in voter fraud and internal embezzlement schemes.
The final straw came last fall when two student journalists, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, filmed Acorn employees giving them help to set up a brothel full of underage girls, offering tips on smuggling illegal immigrants and evading taxes.
Published by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com last fall, the expose sent a decisive signal that Acorn is steeped in a culture of corruption from top to bottom. In the wake of it, Congress passed a law to ban their access to more federal cash.
But instead of doing the decent thing and truly dismantling, Acorn is now declaring itself disbanded but in fact regrouping, with new names and the same faces.
Groups like New York Communities for Change, New England United for Justice, and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment are suddenly popping up with leases to Acorn buildings and assets. They claim they’re new and independent, but they’re using the same personnel and tactics.
A visit to the Facebook pages of these groups shows their member rolls loaded with senior Acorn staff. Allied organizations, like the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, and various left-wing lawyers and politicians also are represented. One man on the New York site proudly lists his past job as Acorn organizer and his new job as “census outreach” coordinator.
It’s not just that Acorn’s denizens are hardy as cockroaches. There’s still $4 billion at stake in federal government funding for “neighborhood stabilization activities” out there. By changing its name, the former Acorn can continue its business as usual without the legal sanctions.
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