Bertha Lewis – To: Friends and allies
To: Friends and allies
Fr: Bertha Lewis and Steven Kest
Re: Fox attacks
Many of you have seen the “news stories” that originated on Fox about ACORN employees captured on videotape advising people posing as a prostitute and a pimp on how to complete federal tax forms and secure a mortgage. I want to make four points about this episode:
First, we absolutely condemn the behavior of these ACORN and ACORN Housing staffers. What they said (assuming the Fox tape was not doctored – and more on that below) was wrong, period. We fired them as soon as we viewed the tapes, and we are reinforcing existing procedures to make sure that whenever applicants for services are suspected of engaging in illegal activities, our employees terminate the consultation and notify their supervisors. Furthermore, we have orderedan immediate cessation of all intakes for our service delivery programs, while we review our policies and procedures.
Second, the ACORN Advisory Council, a group made up of prominent national leaders in the non-profit and business community, is recruiting a respected individual to conduct a thorough top to bottom review of our intake and service delivery programs. We are pledging to adopt whatever reforms are recommended by this process.
Third, these problematic but isolated incidents should in no way detract from the incredibly important work that ACORN and ACORN Housing are doing. The ACORN Tax and Benefit Centers have helped over 150,000 low income families receive over $190 million in Earned Income Tax Credits and other refunds since 2004, and ACORN Housing Corporation has assisted over 110,000 families become homeowners, and provided help to over 50,000 families facing foreclosure.
Fourth, we should be clear that this attack on ACORN is part of an aggressive and sustained right-wing campaign, spearheaded by Fox and their ideological compatriots on talk radio, on blogs, and within the Republican Party, which has as its goal the destruction of the nation’s largest and most effective organization of low- and moderate- income families. But these attacks are about more than ACORN: they represent an attack on the poor and communities of color; on the broad progressive agenda that we are fighting for; and on President Obama himself and the movement for change that his administration symbolizes. And because the stakes are so high, we are asking you to stand with us as we fight back.
For those of you lucky enough not to watch Fox “News”, here is a recap of what took place. Over the past week, Fox has run videotapes produced by James O’Keefe, a right-wing activist, in which O’Keefe and a female colleague, pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute, asked ACORN Tax and Benefit Center and ACORN Housing Corporation employees in several cities for assistance in getting tax preparation assistance or a mortgage loan. O’Keefe and his colleague indicated that they needed this assistance to support their prostitution business, which included bringing underage girls into the U.S. Using a hidden camera, O’Keefe captured the ACORN and ACORN Housing employees offering suggestions and advice.
We were appalled when we viewed these tapes: these ACORN and ACORN Housing employees clearly violated the standards and values which we insist that our employees follow, and they were immediately fired. However, here is what you should also know about this episode:
1. ACORN employs over 300 full-time year-round community organizers, plus another 200 part-time tax and benefit site workers, along with tens of thousands of volunteers. ACORN Housing employs over 250 full-time foreclosure prevention counselors and other workers. We are committed to operating at scale, as we attempt to build a massive and powerful organization that has the capacity to take on the challenges that low income communities face. One consequence of our size, however (and in this we are no different than other large organizations or businesses), is that a small percentage of our employees occasionally engage in illegal or unethical behavior. We hope you will agree that our response to these situations is the appropriate one: when we uncover such behavior, we take disciplinary action; and we continuously strive to improve our training and management systems to root out and prevent such behavior in the first place.
2. Crucially, no tax or loan documents were prepared or filed. What was captured on tape was an initial intake interview – in no case did ACORN or ACORN Housing staff prepare or file any official forms or documents seeking tax refunds, loans, or any other benefit. Systems and procedures to ensure quality control worked, and no actions were taken beyond these interviews.
3. As far as we have been able to determine, O’Keefe’s team tried the same stunt in at least seven other ACORN and ACORN Housing offices, and in all except the episodes captured on film they were sent packing. In Philadelphia, our staff were sufficiently suspicious of the intrusion to file a police report.
4. Many who have seen the videotapes have told us that they believe the tapes are doctored: questions appear to be added in voiceover, there are breaks in some of the action, etc. We have sent a letter to Roger Ailes, the President of Fox News, asking for the original copies of the tapes so we can examine them ourselves. And regardless of the veracity of the tapes, it is clear that O’Keefe was egging on and entrapping our employees, rather than engaging in reputable journalism.
5. The actual videotaping may have been illegal. Maryland law requires both parties to consent to any taping, and on Friday the Baltimore Sun reported that the MD States Attorney is considering filing charges against O’Keefe for violating the law.
6. Finally, O’Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008 he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization’s affiliates. During the calls, O’Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O’Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes. O’Keefe’s intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Why did O’Keefe, aided and abetted by Fox, undertake such an ambitious effort to entrap ACORN and ACORN Housing employees? This episode has to be put in the context of a years-long campaign by the right to discredit the work of ACORN, starting in the Bush White House with Karl Rove’s now well-documented removal of U.S. Attorneys because they were unable, despite their best efforts, to discover any real incidences of voter fraud conducted by ACORN, and because they refused to prosecute ACORN on trumped up charges. All of you are familiar with the Republican Party and Senator McCain’s attacks on ACORN’s voter registration program in the 2008 election season, which, despite the GOP’s best efforts, helped almost one million citizens register or update their registrations to vote. And ever since the election the attacks have continued: ACORN Housing Corporation’s homeownership counseling program, which helps lower income families get fixed rate, affordable, prime loans, was blamed for causing the financial meltdown. The rightwing has loudly charged that ACORN is getting anywhere from $4 billion to $8.5 billion from the stimulus legislation. For the past six months the Republican leadership has claimed that ACORN was somehow going to run the Census – a charge that finally, late last week, led the Director of the Census to rescind a partnership agreement with ACORN (one which we signed at the request of the Census, along with 80,000 other organizations, and which merely indicated our willingness, on a volunteer basis, to encourage residents of underserved communities to fill out census questionnaires). We were told that the Census was having trouble winning Republican support for its necessary appropriations as long as ACORN was listed as a partner!
Much of this has to do with the right’s assessment of ACORN’s effectiveness: we play a critical role, on a massive national scale, in organizing low income people of color to participate in elections and to campaign in support of a progressive agenda. But let’s also be clear: much of this has to do with race. The attacks on ACORN are part of the same rightwing machinery that has been attacking President Obama by calling the President a racist, that has been mobilizing all-white tea parties to rail against immigrants, and that has attacked Eric Holder, Sonia Sotomayor, and, with more success, Van Jones. We have seen a conscious strategy from the right to divide and conquer the nation using race, and the attacks on ACORN must be understood in this context.
By now it should be clear that the right’s strategy is to weaken ACORN’s funding and reputation, split us from our allies, and drive us out of business — at which point they will turn their focus to the next target and the next. Fortunately, many of you, our allies and funders, have seen through that strategy and have sent back a message that progressives won’t be divided and conquered. We thank you for that support, and for helping us weather these storms.
Where do we go from here? First, we are committed to the process initiated by our Advisory Council: we will provide complete access to our offices, staff, and policies to the outside auditor who we are bringing in, and we will implement whatever recommendations come out of this process. In the meantime, we are reviewin our staff training policies and procedures, and make sure that our front-line employees, who for the most part are recruited from the communities we serve, have the support and supervision necessary for them to carry out their jobs effectively and in accordance with our high standards. The fact that O’Keefe’s team was turned away from at least seven offices, and that even in the offices where he drew our employees into his trap we never actually prepared or filed any tax or loan documents, indicates that we are doing a pretty good job. But there is always room for improvement, and we are committed to making whatever changes are necessary.
Second, we plan to directly challenge Fox on their role as part of the rightwing attack machine. Our lawyers are exploring litigation. We are talking to our friends at Color of Change about assisting their campaign to warn sponsors away from Fox. We are exploring further actions aimed at exposing Fox’s pernicious agenda. Stay tuned for more.
Finally, and most importantly, we refuse to allow these attacks to distract us from our critical mission. ACORN is a major field partner in Health Care for America Now, the community-labor campaign to win healthcare reform, and we have scores of organizers and tens of thousands of members hard at work in key states throughout the country. These next couple months are the most critical of the campaign, and we are keeping our eyes on this prize. ACORN is also leading the fight against foreclosures. In the last several months we have forced every recalcitrant mortgage servicer in the country to sign up with the Obama administration’s foreclosure prevention program, and we are now turning our attention to making sure this program effectively halts foreclosures. At the same time we are play a leading field role for Americans for Financial Reform, a broad coalition that aims, a year after Wall Street collapsed, almost bringing down the economy with it, to win effective regulations that would once and for all rein in the power and excesses of the financial industry. As well, many of our members just returned from DC where they helped lead a national community and clergy lobby day in support of labor law reform. We have joined with our partners in the Reform Immigration for America Now campaign. And we are getting ready for a major year-long push to make sure the new voters we brought to the polls in 2008 turn out in next year’s all-important mid-term elections.
On behalf of our 500,000 member families throughout the country, I want to make one thing crystal clear: Karl Rove’s attacks didn’t stop us. John McCain’s attacks didn’t stop us. And we sure won’t allow Fox’s attacks to stop us.
Thanks very much for your continued support of our work, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Bertha Lewis
CEO, ACORN
Steven Kest
Executive Director, ACORN
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