Obama Finds An ACORN

Obama Finds An ACORN
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: The man who includes being a community organizer on his short resume has a long association with a far-left group that would organize our communities into socialist gulags.

In 1995, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar balked at implementing the federal motor voter law out of concern that letting people register via postcard and blocking the state from pruning voter rolls might invite vote fraud.

A young lawyer, a community organizer himself, sued on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) and won. The young lawyer was Barack Obama. Acorn later invited Obama to train its staff.

When Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave Acorn grants to fund its agenda and voter registration activities.

Acorn has been in the lead in opposing voter ID laws and other efforts to ensure ballot integrity. Acorn has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Ohio and at least 13 other states. Acorn staffers will presumably be out registering voters again this year.

Obama also opposes voter ID laws. He believes they disenfranchise voters. Last year, Obama put a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky for a seat on the Federal Election Commission. It seems von Spakovsky, as an official in the Justice Department, had supported a Georgia photo ID law. Acorn espouses the leftist view that voter ID laws are racist.

In addition to subverting American democracy to promote a leftist agenda, Acorn's radical agenda amounts to "undisguised authoritarian socialism." wrote Sol Stern in the 2003 City Journal article, "Acorn's Nutty Regime for Cities."

Acorn opposed welfare reform and opposes securing American borders to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acorn was heavily involved a few years back in opposing Rudy Giuliani's efforts to privatize failing New York schools.

Acorn also has been in the lead supporting the "living wage" and opposing efforts by big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart to bring the bounty and benefits of free-market capitalism to inner cities.

Wal-Mart has faced resistance to its plans to expand into urban centers — most notably Chicago and Los Angeles — where unions and liberal orthodoxy remain strong. Opponents there charge that such big-box stores exploit workers, depress wages and drive out community businesses.

Acorn, Obama's former client, supported a big-box living-wage ordinance vetoed by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley to require stores of at least 90,000 square feet operated by firms with $1 billion or more in annual sales nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $10 an hour plus $3 in benefits.

Critics such as Acorn, who complain that Wal-Mart employees live paycheck to paycheck, forget that many of Wal-Mart's customers also live paycheck to paycheck and seek quality merchandise at decent prices, which is why 100 million people shop there every week.

How can they oppose "low" wages for Wal-Mart employees while in effect supporting higher prices for Wal-Mart customers? They can because they believe the socialist orthodoxy that capitalism is bad, government is good and that the solution to poverty is to make everyone equally poor.

Wal-Mart gives people what they want at a price they can afford. It believes a fair wage is one agreed upon between employee and employer. It is the poster child for roll-up-your-sleeves capitalism. It is efficient, innovative, successful and nonunion — everything government is not — and is opposed for all these reasons.

Advocates of the so-called living wage see their efforts as putting money directly into workers' pockets. But it merely transfers money from one person's pocket to another person's pocket. This is classic socialist income redistribution — not economic justice, but economic extortion.

In the real world, companies that pay workers more than the value of the goods and services they produce go out of business. Workers should be paid what their labor is worth, not what their lifestyle requires.

On his Web site, Obama embraces Acorn's socialist goal, pledging to "raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation and housing."

That money would come from taxpayers and business owners or, as Marx would say, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.



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