Obama's Ties To ACORN

More ties to the radical left have surfaced in Barack Obama's past. The latest stem from his involvement with the activist group, ACORN.

According to its web site, ACORN (an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), is the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities.

Obama was a member of ACORN and taught leadership conferences for the group while working for Miner, Barnhill & Galland, according to No Quarter. Obama actively sought and received the endorsement by ACORN for his local campaigns. He has now done the same in his bid for the USA presidency, says No Quarter.

So what is ACORN all about?

In a Spring 2003 article for City Journal, titled, ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities, Sol Stern reported on the organization:

If you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” 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...

[ACORN]promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor....

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,”...“We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom . . . . "

ACORN has perfected an in-your-face strategy that works effectively at capturing public attention and winning adherents in cities...

...there’s one....crucial respect in which ACORN departs from the old New Left’s playbook. Instead of trying to overturn “the system”—to blow it up...—ACORN burrows deep within the system, taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes...

Accordingly, 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.

At times, ACORN opts for undisguised authoritarian socialism, as when it proposes that “large companies which desire to leave the community” be forced to obtain “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation...

And ACORN has nothing on Al Sharpton, when it comes to the shakedown. Stern again:

ACORN has developed a lucrative niche as an “advisor” to banks seeking regulatory approvals. Thus we have J. P. Morgan & Company, the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN. This act of generosity and civic-mindedness came, interestingly, just as Morgan was asking bank regulators for approval of a merger with Chase Manhattan. Not to be outdone, Chase also decided to grant more than $200,000 to ACORN...

...one prominent consultant to the financial industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, admits: “The banks know they are being held up, but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.”

Much has been made, of late, of Obama's move to the center on certain high profile issues, but an understanding of Obama's associations with the radical left results in only one interpretation that can made of recent Obama speeches, such as his recent speech on July 2. The conclusion being that he continues to hold extreme left wing beliefs.

In the July 2 speech, he said:

The non-profit sector employs 1 in 12 Americans and 115 nonprofits are launched every day. Yet while the federal government invests $7 billion in research and development for the private sector, there is no similar effort to support non-profit innovation. Meanwhile, there are ideas across America – in our inner cities and small towns; from college graduates, to seniors getting ready to retire – that could benefit millions of Americans if they’re given the chance to grow As President, I will launch a new Social Investment Fund Network. It’s time to get the grass roots, the foundations, the faith-based organizations, the private sector and the government at the table so that we can learn from our own success stories. We’ll invest in ideas that work; leverage private sector dollars to encourage innovation; and expand successful programs to scale.

Keep in mind that for Obama, ACORN is the type of nonprofit he knows and believes in. Scary.