The Truth About ACORN : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

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Ed Brayton also blogs at Positive Liberty and The Panda's Thumb

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The Truth About ACORN

Posted on: October 1, 2008 1:04 PM, by Ed Brayton

I have a long and detailed article at the Michigan Messenger that looks at the accusations of voter fraud leveled by the right against ACORN. The conclusion: it's pretty much all a bunch of nonsense. Yes, ACORN has had a very small percentage of their canvassers commit fraud, but ACORN is the victim of that fraud rather than the perpetrator. They turn their own canvassers in and provide all the evidence needed to convict them to election officials. When you have huge numbers of people out there taking applications it is inevitable that a few of them are going to take shortcuts to make a buck. Please pardon the bad pun in the headline; it wasn't my idea.

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Maybe they're right Ed, I mean from tiny ACORNs giant oak trees grow. :D
Seriously, good job at exposing this for what it is: a non-story blown out of proportion by certain right wing figures. -DJ

Posted by: DingoJack | October 1, 2008 2:17 PM

There goes that left wing media bias attacking those poor Republicans with those pesky facts and that damned liberal evidence again!

Posted by: dogmeatib | October 1, 2008 2:31 PM

Speaking of ACORN, you guys know anything about something called the "Cloward-Piven Strategy?" A friend of mine started talking about how sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven developed a plan to:

seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Part of it was the whole motor-voter plan for registering voters that was supposed to shut down the government under millions of voter registrations. Seriously. Anyways, I had never heard of it, so, being the good little scientist I am, I started to research it. Alas, the only mentions I could find were on rightwing tinfoil hat sites. I figure it's like the whole Mexican-are-plotting-to-annex-the-southwestern-US conspiracy that exists only in the minds of loonies, but I'd be interested to know if there's even a kernel (er, acorn?) of reality this little fever dream sprang out of. Anyone know?

Posted by: Algerine | October 1, 2008 2:47 PM

One could also mention that phony registrations (from money hungry canvassers) is a far cry from then using them to actually cast phony votes with large enough numbers of fake voters. That is more difficult, dangerous and expensive.

Posted by: Foggg | October 1, 2008 8:49 PM

Algerine: Well the books by the two are still available via Amazon,but my immediate guess that it's basically another right-wing boogeyman. Find some socialist professors, project their own side's practices onto them, then blame their quote-mined positions for the collapse of government.

Off-hand, it sounds like such a strategy would fail if it was even tried. Why would capitalism collapse is government bureaucracy was overwhelmed? Given how many nations manage to remain market-based democracies with higher tax rates and greater government intervention in the public sphere that the United States does, I'm inclined to think that both socialist government and the markets are much more resilient, capable and compatible than the US Right are willing to acknowledge.

Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | October 1, 2008 9:05 PM

sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven developed a plan to:
seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

One way to accomplish this is to convince the citizenry that certain things that they used to do for themselves can be handled better by someone else. Someone else who can make it more convenient to engage in activities that before were only mildly inconvenient. Someone else is especially interested in how you manage your money, even in what form you use it. Someone else also has at least a passing interest in why you spend your money so. Someone who is a bureaucrat, a paper pusher, a functionary, bored and ill disposed.

I find it instructive that while the House and Senate lard up the bailout offer to $830 billion to make it palatable, the market seems to be showing resilience without this massive, totally necessary for life as we know it, rescue effort. It is bending but it is not breaking. If the trend continues it will make a lot of people in Congress appear, ah, extraneous, shrill, easily misled, ill informed and not correct. Wonder how that would go over?

Posted by: Crudely Wrott | October 1, 2008 9:24 PM

And thank you, Algerine, for the reference. I forgot to do so above. -blush-

Posted by: Crudely Wrott | October 1, 2008 9:28 PM

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