Charlotte blogger Sister Toldjah alerts us to the federal indictments of several ACORN workers who may have been involved in up to 15,000 fake voter registrations in Kansas City. What is ACORN and why does this matter to Charlotte?
First City Journal on ACORN:
The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office, and affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable successes in getting municipalities and state legislatures to enact its radical policy goals into law. … City legislators and local reporters are often less sophisticated than their national counterparts and have been slow to grasp how radical ACORN’s positions really are. Local urban business communities tend to be disorganized, their members focused on world or national affairs rather than what they take to be the grubby and trivial details of local politics. As a result, ACORN has managed to get enacted into law in city councils proposals that the U.S. Congress would laugh off the stage. ACORN’s strategy seems to be that if, working from the grass roots up, it can persuade enough localities from coast to coast to adopt its programs, the result will add up, in effect, to a national policy.
And in 2004 ACORN landed in Charlotte in a big way, bumping up Democratic registration and turnout. It is also pushing a lead paint eradication program in Charlotte, which mostly involves shaking down paint companies. That and getting local government officials to trust them.
You see, shaking down companies is principally what ACORN does to get funding. For over a decade the group has used federal bank merger laws to make itself partners with banks like Bank of America. Either loan money to people and places ACORN wants it loaned and employ ACORN screeners along the way, or ACORN will oppose your bank expansion plans. Any wonder ACORN has a growing Charlotte presence?
City Journal continues:
ACORN’s specific policy prescriptions offer a job-killing recipe for urban blight and decline. Take, above all, ACORN’s signature “living-wage” legislation, which fully 80 cities have now adopted. This legislation requires that companies doing business with the city must pay their employees a minimum wage that is higher than the national minimum—often as much as one-third higher. The earlier versions of this law embraced only a handful of workers, while the later have included larger and larger numbers, ending with Santa Fe’s ordinance, passed just weeks ago, that covers all workers within the city and will hike the pay of a quarter of the private workforce. Clearly, unlike the old New Left, ACORN is patient, willing to achieve its goals by a thousand modest increments. … [Ultimately] the group wants to make it much harder for firms and middle-class taxpayers to escape the urban central planner’s grasp. ACORN promotes ideas like “sustainable development,” which would limit the growth of suburbs—so businesses and individuals can’t flee just beyond the city limits so easily—and “regional government,” which would force suburbs to share their tax revenues with cities, so that overburdened middle-class taxpayers can’t vote with their feet against the cities’ ever expanding social-democratic mini-welfare states.
Any of this sound familiar to folks in Mecklenburg County? Understand why building CATS’ multi-billion dollar train and bus empire is so important to the big picture? Why additional real estate taxes — impact fees or transfer taxes — will be on Charlotte’s agenda shortly?
There is a twisted temptation to sit back and let ACORN do its work, just so the Uptown crowd will be utterly shocked and awed when the Queen City morphs into another one of ACORN’s “social-democratic mini-welfare states” in five or so years; to become what I’ve called Detroit-on-the-Catawba.
But the fact that ACORN will stop at nothing to clear-cut the American dream for so many local families means saving the clueless Uptowners even from themselves. Ever onward.
