Ok, I'm not going to rehash or link to all the craziness about ACORN we've been seeing since the campaign, culminating in the video "investigations" Glen Beck and Fox have made such a uproar about - everybody here know what's going on. Many of you younguns, however, may not have been running into ACORN, already active and organizing on issue after issue, for the last couple of decades. And if Glen Beck is "right" about anything it is that ACORN really has been at the center of organizing to help the poor on issue after issue after issue as long as I can remember. So, hell yes, let's have not an investigation (there really is no need for one) but rather let's have Congressional hearings on the "sins" of ACORN - and let people talk, on a national stage, about just what the damn commie organization has actually accomplished for the neediest among us for thirty plus years.
Look, any organization with several hundred employees is going to have some bad apples. Based on the issues involved in the current attacks on ACORN an obvious parallel is the Hilton Corporation. How many employees of at all the Hilton and other associated name brand hotels are actively involved in drug dealing or prostitution. If its less than one per hotel I'd be surprised. Do you seriously think that if one was caught by an actual police investigation that proved actual guilt that the right wing would go on a mad witch hunt and that the US Congress would immediately pass resolutions prohibiting any employee of the federal government using a Hilton brand hotel? Of course not. Even though it is a fact that ACORN immediately terminated all employees implicated in any wrong doing, while Hilton, I'm sure but cannot prove, most likely at least turns a blind eye to any drug dealing or pimping by their employees since it is really quite good for business.
So, please, please, please do have Congressional hearings on ACORN. First of all, how great would it be for Kuccinich or Conyers or any politician the right loves to hate to call for exactly what that same right wing says it wants. And how great would it be when we get to see ALL the film these right wing activists produced showing Acorn office after office laughing at their pathetic attempt to create scandal and even calling the police to remove them from their offices. Followed by, inevitably, citizen after citizen coming before the US Congress to speak about how ACORN was the only entity to help them in their pursuit of their most basic rights as citizens. It's not as if CNN or ABC, CBS, NBS or even MSNBC s going to devote days to unearthing the wonderful work that ACORN activists have done for decades, and probably been paid just over minimum wage to do. The world has been changed, mostly for the better, by Congressional hearings and it's time Kerry - who made his name with hearings, or any other Congressperson demanded them in this "deeply troubling" case.
That's my only point here, but I want to ad a few words about why the right is so focused in its attack on ACORN right now. Without going into my political history and why I was, am not now, but often think I should be, a "communist" I do want to briefly discuss the fact that it's all about institution building.
The sixties were unique for a number of reasons, which again, there really isn't space to go into here. The bottom line, though, is that the civil rights movement became incorporated into the Democratic party, where it was largely betrayed; and the anti-war movement essentially died as a radical force when the draft stopped. Intellectually devoted leftists, then, were left to re-imagine what we could do in an age of modern media, when TV, above all, created a consensus we were entirely shut out of. The answer was institution building. Something the right understood as well.
Grover Norquist and other right wing extremists have acknowledged the debt they owe Lenin on precisely this point. The right has for three decades been much better at creating non state institutions to empower their ideas, Fox news being a perfect case in point. I have another diary pending on the left and money about exactly this point. For obvious reasons they have money and access we don't, and they've used them to great effect. To some extent the internet has helped to level that a little, but the truth behind right wing dominance of the national "debate" has an awful lot to do with the fact that their activists are full time and well paid while ours are broke and just trying to scrape by. That is what they are counting on now that the unforgivable failures or the Bush administrations have given us an opening, symbolized, above all, in the election of President Obama.
The right knows that with Fox, with corporate influence on the other networks, with their immense "think tanks" (propaganda machines I should say) and arsenal of lobbyists, that they can expect to at least neutralize any advances towards equality Obama can force through their thicket of influence. But they also understand that, just as it has done for them, the power of the governments purse can give new life to more ideologically informed institutions such as ACORN. They understand in a way the left does not yet seem to that the route to real change is only partially through the state. Majorities come and go, but Fox "news" is here to stay - just like ACORN. So, while Glen Beck, by any objective criteria, may be truly insane, the institution he is embedded in will be here to pursue it's aims long after his 15 minutes burn out. And so will ACORN, unless they can kill it. That is why that hate and demonize ACORN - because it has been one of the few left institutions that has survived. They understand it's importance, and it's time we did as well. I'd love to see Wilson defeated, but keeping ACORN in business is ultimately much more important. If you gave to defeat Wilson, give now to keep ACORN working. Hell, their work registering voters might in itself be enough to bring Wilson down, and will be an essential part of any campaign to do so.
The right understands why ACORN must fail, does the left understand why that must not happen? And is the left intelligent enough to understand that only the spotlight of Congressional hearings can change the nature of the discussion of just what ACONR really is in an era when the media are in the hands of the enemy?