By Anna Corley
While many people thought that the community organizing group, ACORN, had folded up after it was de-funded by Congress, it turns out that it still very much alive and still up to its corrupt and nefarious dealings. On May 18th at the Heritage Foundation’s weekly blogger’s briefing, Matthew Vadum discussed his recent book, Subversion, Inc., which is his latest investigative work about the infamous, taxpayer funded group. Vadum unhesitatingly describes the group as “ballot box stuffers, urban terrorists, and gangsters.”
He says their tactics target political leaders, corporations, and anyone who disagrees with them. He describes ACORN as President Obama’s favorite community organizing group. ACORN garnered national attention when activist James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute trying to get funds for a brothel. They captured this moment on camera as ACORN workers bent over backwards to help their “business” that involved under-age girls in the sex trade.
Importantly, Vadum noted that despite the national ACORN group’s financial bankruptcy, many of the state chapters are alive and well under new names:
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change (PCOC)
Texas: Texas Organizing Project (TOP)
California: Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)
Missouri: Missourians Organizing for Reform Empowerment (MORE)
There are still others.
Of Vadum’s book Michelle Bachmann says, “Through his careful research, Matthew Vadum shined a light that exposed ACORN’s corruption. For months I fought to cut off the flow of tax dollars to ACORN. In Subversion Inc., Vadum warns that despite the defunding of ACORN, the group has only feigned death.” Matthew Vadum is an investigative journalist who works for the Capital Research Center as a senior research editor.
