SECTION ONE
Prior to its recent troubles, ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was the largest and most influential community organization in the United States.1
Among other activities, ACORN was notorious for fraudulent voter registrations, in-your-face protest tactics, alleged abuse of government funds, and helping to precipitate the banking crisis of 2008. ACORN presents itself as a pragmatic “action organization,” democratic in structure and devoted to producing concrete results for poor people.2 In fact, however, as this chapter will show, ACORN is a classic socialist front group. ACORN is a variation on the “new populist” model: a broadly leftist “mass organization” guided quietly from behind by socialists.
Barack Obama understands this. As far back as his introduction to community organizing at the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983, Obama grasped the socialist backstory of his chosen profession. Obama’s ties to ACORN are broad, deep, longstanding, and intimate. Behind the scenes, ACORN worked cooperatively with leaders of the Midwest Academy and other figures from the socialist networks laid out in this book. ACORN was part and parcel of Obama’s socialist world.
For that reason, Obama’s attempts to minimize and deny his ACORN connection during the 2008 campaign were both deceptive and in bad faith. Although enough information has been publicly available since 2008 to show this, new material from the archived files of ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society decisively proves the point. This new documentary evidence sheds considerable additional light on Obama’s relationship to ACORN. The truth about ACORN—and about Obama’s extensive ties to this group—provides yet more evidence that the president of the United States may indeed be a socialist.
The extraordinary repository of internal ACORN documents at the Wisconsin Historical Society allows us to reconstruct the history of this controversial group. Arguably, Barack Obama is president today because of the financial crisis that erupted during the 2008 presidential campaign. How remarkable it would be if ACORN did in fact have a significant role in precipitating that crisis—and if Obama misled the country during the campaign about the nature of his ties to that group. Evidence strongly suggests that both of these things are true. In the eighties and nineties, ACORN helped drag America’s banking system into the business of subprime lending. During these same decades, Obama did everything in his power to support ACORN’s work.
The problem of ACORN’s role in the financial meltdown raises the complex issue of the place of economic crises in American socialist strategy. The question is not merely whether ACORN’s banking campaign precipitated the financial crisis, but whether the group’s socialist sponsors may actually have intended to do so—by a variation on the strategy of “orchestrated crisis” laid out by longtime ACORN advisors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in the sixties.3 It is very unlikely, I think, that ACORN could have anticipated the path by which its banking campaign helped to destabilize America’s financial system. In a more general sense, however, there is a relationship between the phenomenon of financial crisis and the actions—and intentions—of ACORN and its socialist advisors.
It would be a mistake to treat the question of ACORN’s socialism as if it were somehow separate from this group’s troubling tactics, or its assault on America’s banking system. On the contrary, ACORN is important because, more than any other community organization, it succeeded in putting the model of de facto socialization of the economy “from below” into practice. By combining locally based campaigns against banks with a sophisticated national lobbying operation, ACORN managed to gain significant influence over a core sector of the American economy. While I don’t expect to resolve the question of the precise degree of ACORN’s responsibility for the financial crisis that began in September 2008 here, new evidence from the Wisconsin archives suggests that the group’s effect was substantial. More than we’ve known, ACORN served as a catalyst for the spread of risky subprime mortgage lending throughout the financial system. As we trace the history of Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN, the inside story of ACORN’s role in the rise of subprime lending will unfold side by side. Obama’s support for ACORN deepened as ACORN’s involvement in the banking system grew. (The accompanying charts should help to clarify the history and organizational ties in question.)