ACORN Loses Rep. Barney Frank's Support...That's It! They're Through

Frank Turns Against ACORN

In a stunning turnaround, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is distancing himself from ACORN, blasting their response to a string of recent scandals -- and contradicting a staffer who said the congressman would have voted against a GOP-sponsored bill banning the group from federal funding.

In a rambling, contrite, at times bombastic statement to reporters, Frank apologized for "a number of factors, one of which in particular is my own fault, have contributed to my position on ACORN being unclear."

His "biggest error," he wrote was signing off on a recent letter -- jointly written with Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) -- requesting that the Congressional Research Service audit the group.

Frank said he "had not thoroughly read" the letter "which does not accurately represent my own position in all aspects."

Yet later in the statement, Frank seems to imply he still supports the idea of a CRS study, saying, "I cosigned the letter because I do think it is important that we get accurate and complete information on ACORN funding."

An email requesting clarification from his office weren't immediately returned. An email sent to ACORN wasn't immediately returned.

Last week, Frank's office reported that he skipped the vote to attend a White House ceremony bestowing the Congressional Medal of Honor on a fallen Massachusetts soldier. When asked for his position on the bill, Frank's spokesman said the Financial Services chairman would have voted against the "Defund ACORN Act,” which passed 345-75.

"[T]hrough a misunderstanding with a member of my staff, it was incorrectly reported that I said I would have voted against the motion to defund ACORN," he said in the statement. "In fact, I would have voted for the motion at that time. I am very disappointed in the actions that were taken by members of ACORN, and I do not believe that ACORN’s response has been adequate for an organization that has received public funding."

That said, Frank seemed to cast his lot with Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who has argued the measure may be unconstitutional by violating Article 1's prohibition on so-called "bills of attainder."

And he blasted away at Republican critics, who have claimed the embattled group would be eligible for billions in funding under various Obama administration programs.

"The wild claims that ACORN is the potential beneficiary of billions of dollars in programs voted by Congress is similarly a sad example of excessive partisanship," he wrote.

But Frank reserves his harshest criticism for ACORN, a group he's long defended.

"I have previously communicated to ACORN my dissatisfaction with their lax supervision of employees and volunteers. The fact that people who were improperly registered to vote did not actually cast ballots in no way excuses the organization’s failure to exercise better control in this way. Further, the motivation of those who went to ACORN offices and initiated the discussions involving prostitution are wholly irrelevant to the fact that ACORN’s employees’ actions were outrageous and further indication of an organization that is at best poorly run in many regards. The defense against sting operations is not to ban them, but to behave properly so that they do not reveal as they did in this case clear evidence of gross impropriety."

Sources: Politico, MSNBC, House.gov

Defund ACORN Act Bill Applies To All Non-Profits & Companies With Incidents Of Fraud

Whoops: Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors, Others Charged With Fraud


(Here is video of ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis appearing on Fox News Sunday recently, where she was questioned by Chris Wallace. GOP Rep. Darrell Issa also appeared on the show.)




(ACORN chooses to fight back against allegations of Fraud and agency misconduct. It may be too late.)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately -- but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

The language was written by the GOP and filed as a "motion to recommit" in the House, where it passed 345-75. It carried the Senate by an 83-7 margin.

POGO is reaching out to its members to identify other companies who have engaged in the type of misconduct that would make them ineligible for federal funds.

Grayson then intends to file that list in the legislative history that goes along with the bill so that judges can reference it when determining whether a company should be denied federal funds.

The Florida freshman is asking for direct assistance. He has set up a Google spreadsheet where people can suggest contractors who have been charged with violations and include a link to a media or government report documenting the alleged transgression.

The weapons manufacturers might have a better line of defense in court, however. Immediately after the bill passed, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), a constitutional whiz, noted that the measure appeared to be a "bill of attainder" -- specifically targeting a company or organization or individual -- and is therefore specifically barred by the Constitution. If it's not targeted at one group, then Northrop Grumman is in trouble.

Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) sent a letter to the Congressional Research Service on Tuesday asking it to clarify, among other things, if the Defund ACORN Act is constitutional.




If Congress Attacks the Mighty Oak of Contractor Misconduct, It Shouldn't Just Settle for an ACORN

Last week, the House and Senate voted to prohibit the federal government from awarding contracts and grants to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national network of community-based organizations that advocate for low-income families. Congress rushed to cut off all federal funding to ACORN days after several ACORN employees were caught on camera giving advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and a pimp on ways to evade the law.

The House’s bill is called the “Defund ACORN Act”. The bill specifically targets ACORN, but it also applies to “any organization” or its employees who are charged with violating federal or state election, campaign finance or lobbying disclosure laws or filing a fraudulent form with any federal or state regulatory agency.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is particularly interested in the fraud provision. Recognizing that there are probably worse offenders than ACORN in this area, Grayson is looking for help in coming up with a list of organizations that have committed fraud against the government or employed someone who did. Rep. Grayson will put his list in the Congressional Record as part of a legislative history that judges and lawyers can use to interpret the law.

POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database is a great place to start. At last count, it includes 87 instances of government contract fraud – federal and state – involving 43 contractors. You might want to focus on Lockheed Martin, which has 11 government contract fraud instances, or Northrop Grumman with 9 contract fraud instances including this $325 million False Claims Act settlement from earlier this year.

Bear in mind that, since 1994, ACORN has reportedly received a total of $53 million in federal funds, or an average of roughly $3.5 million per year. In contrast, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman respectively received over $35 billion and $18 billion in federal contracts last year. (Their totals since 2000 are $266 billion for Lockheed and $125 billion for Northrop.)

Congress should clamp down on contractor fraud and waste, but it needs to keep a sense of proportion. If ACORN broke the law it, should be punished; however, Congress also needs to crack down just as rigorously on the contractors who take an even larger share of taxpayers’ money and have committed far more, or far more egregious, acts of misconduct. POGO hopes the mentality behind bills like the “Defund ACORN Act,” combined with the new contractor / grantee responsibility database and mandatory misconduct reporting rule, reflects a new zero-tolerance attitude toward contractor misconduct.



Activist Financier "Terrorizes" Bankers in Foreclosure Fight But Won't Open Books

Despite receiving Taxpayer money, NACA doesn't provide public reports on either its loan-brokerage business or its campaign to modify mortgages. Jim Campen, an economics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says he tried in the 1990s to analyze the performance of loans arranged by NACA, but Mr. Marks refused to provide data.

Mr. Marks says he feared the data would be used by another nonprofit to discredit his group. NACA does provide information to lenders that work with it, he says, but sees no duty to disclose it to the public.

"He's been very effective in shaking money out of the banks," says Mr. Campen, but "he's not one to open up his records to public scrutiny."




United Way asks CEO Gloria Pace King to resign

The United Way of Central Carolinas is asking CEO Gloria Pace King to resign following fallout from a NewChannel 36 report that King was paid $1.2 million last year.

If King doesn't resign by Sept. 30, she will be fired.

United Way Board Chairman Graham Denton says they will pay King two more years of salary at $290,000 per year, but they will not make $1 million in retirement payments.

Denton said the board is taking responsibility for the controversial retirement package, which sparked backlash from donors.

"We owe the community an apology. We are sorry," Denton said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Denton said the board is committed to rectifying the mistake; however, no board member is resigning. The board is calling for a task force to review its makeup and process.

The board also says it can assure the community that it's not paying any more on the supplemental retirement that NewsChannel 36 first reported on nine weeks ago today.

The action comes on the eve of the United Way's annual campaign, which begins next week.

Meanwhile, King has retained high-profile attorney Bill Diehl, who attended the board meeting on Tuesday.

Diehl says his client does not consider this to be honoring the contract and they'll consider their options. He said they've been negotiating with the board's attorney, but he said, "What I do for a living is litigate."

Mac Everett was named as interim CEO of the United Way and will serve through the 2008 donation campaign. Everett is a retired Wachovia executive and past chairman of the UNC Charlotte board of trustees.



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Sources: Huffington Post, OpenCongress.org, Project on Government Oversight, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, House.gov, Fox News, WCNC, NACA, United Way, Google Maps

ACORN Isn't Only Non-Profit With Political Ties & Receiving Big Taxpayer $$$...Was NACA Connected To Bush Admin?

(Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) speaks on the Congressional Floor in support of The American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act, H.R. 3221. He slammed the Bush Administration's poor handling and deregulation of the Mortgage Industry. Yet NACA CEO Bruce Marks (supposedly Foreclosure Prevention Guru) appears to have actually praised Bush's handling of the Mortgage Industry. I wonder why I haven't heard of Mr. Marks praising Pres. Obama's HAMP program. I also wonder if there were perhaps any type of possible "Non-Profit group rivalry" between NACA and ACORN's Housing programs. Why isn't the Media, Democrats and G.O.P. going after other Non-Profits with Political ties receiving Big Taxpayer $$$ like NACA, United Way, etc. Why only ACORN?, Interesting theory. Very interesting indeed.)



(Here is video of ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis appearing on Fox News Sunday recently, where she was questioned by Chris Wallace. GOP Rep. Darrell Issa also appeared on the show.)



(The President speaks after Housing Refinance Roundtable with real people who have benefited from renegotiating their mortgages and explains how millions of others can take advantage of his Making Home Affordable plan.)



NACA's "Save the Dream" Tour






President Obama: ACORN Videos "Inappropriate", Warrants Investigation


President Obama said in an interview aired Sunday that the community organizing group ACORN should be investigated for offering tax help to a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute in widely watched videotapes.

But in the interview on ABC's "This Week," Obama did not say who should conduct such an investigation and played down the importance of the controversy.

"What I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated," he said, but he declined to say whether he supported action by Congress to cut off federal funding for the group.

"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Obama said, adding he had not been aware that ACORN received much federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.

ACORN has come under fire in the wake of videotapes showing field office employees giving tax advice to two conservative activists who posed as a pimp and prostitute. Congress voted last week to cut off federal funding for the organization. House Republicans are pursuing investigations of the group's financial activities.

ACORN -- which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has long been a target of GOP criticism over its role in mounting voter-registration drives benefiting Obama and other Democrats. Obama's infrequent ties to the group extend to his days as a community organizer in Chicago, including representing the group as a lawyer in 1994 and helping in a local voter-registration effort in 1992.

Internal ACORN documents obtained by House Republicans show that the organization has been in financial turmoil for years, with a board torn over how to handle embezzlement by the founder's brother and growing concern that donor money and pension funds had been plundered in the insider scheme, which occurred in 1999 and 2000.

Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Obama's call for an investigation "further legitimizes what many of us in Congress have been saying for months."

"Whether it be Congress's oversight committee, the Justice Department or the IRS, we need to take seriously the question of whether or not ACORN has been abusing its receipt of taxpayer dollars to further a political agenda and whether its status as a not-for-profit corporation is appropriate or not," Issa said in a statement.

ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis said the group agrees that "issues raised by the videos need to be investigated," and she said the group plans to name "a person of standing" to conduct an independent review of the events.

Lewis said the group has stopped accepting new families into its housing and tax assistance programs until an outside review is complete.

"Over the next several weeks, you will see us working triple time to get this review right so that we can refocus attention on ACORN's critical work for low- and moderate-income families," Lewis said.

Lewis and Issa also appeared on "Fox News Sunday," on which the ACORN director vowed to fire anyone who is "too stupid to understand that they are not reaching professional standards."




Activist Financier "Terrorizes" Bankers in Foreclosure Fight But Won't Open Books

Despite receiving Taxpayer money, NACA doesn't provide public reports on either its loan-brokerage business or its campaign to modify mortgages. Jim Campen, an economics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says he tried in the 1990s to analyze the performance of loans arranged by NACA, but Mr. Marks refused to provide data.

Mr. Marks says he feared the data would be used by another nonprofit to discredit his group. NACA does provide information to lenders that work with it, he says, but sees no duty to disclose it to the public.

"He's been very effective in shaking money out of the banks," says Mr. Campen, but "he's not one to open up his records to public scrutiny."




NC Dispute ends in $3.5 million to financial nonprofit (NACA)


N.C. Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco said Tuesday the state will honor its commitment to provide $3.5 million in incentives to a nonprofit group that helps struggling homeowners, settling a mix-up that emerged last week.

Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) chief executive Bruce Marks also announced plans to double the number of workers he expects to hire in Charlotte to about 2,000 by the end of next year.

Marks met with Crisco in Charlotte to resolve a dispute over how much on-the-job training assistance Boston-based NACA was eligible for as it ramps up its work force. Marks said he didn't leverage the 1,000 extra jobs to get higher incentives, saying he sprang the news at the end of his meeting with Crisco, an account confirmed by state officials.

Crisco called Marks' additional hiring plans “wonderful news” and an affirmation that the incentives were a good investment. “There will be a great return on that investment,” he said.

The hiring gives a boost to Charlotte's beleaguered financial sector and highlights a continued growth spurt for NACA. The nonprofit, founded in 1988, helps low-income homeowners prevent foreclosures and get new loans.

The $3.5 million incentives package is far higher than what the Commerce Department announced June 11, when it issued a news release saying the nonprofit could receive $1 million over five years from the One North Carolina Fund. That's a program controlled by the governor that requires companies to meet certain job creation requirements before receiving any money. That grant was “contingent upon local matches,” the news release said without providing any dollar amount.

The local match turned out to be on-the-job training assistance, which subsidizes the wages of unemployed workers hired by companies during a training period. The program is administered here by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Workforce Development Board, but the money comes from the federal government through the state. In this case, the state could pay NACA $2,560 per eligible worker – half of their average $16-per-hour wage over two months.

The Observer reported last week that the state had promised NACA a total of $2.5 million in on-the-job training assistance in June, but last week officials said $1 million was the appropriate amount. At the time, Crisco said he had mistakenly extrapolated an early estimate of the grant amount.

On Tuesday, Crisco said the mechanics for the grant were still being worked out last week. At the time, the state didn't have the funding figured out, but now it does, he said. “We live up to our word,” he said.

NACA still needs to finalize details with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Work Force Board, but Crisco said he expects the group to qualify for the $2.5 million over three years. “Everything is great,” Marks said of the talks with the state.

NACA is growing as the nation struggles with a rise in Foreclosures following the subprime boom in the 1990s and early this decade that left homeowners with unaffordable mortgages. In the recession, homeowners are also struggling with job losses.

According to a 2007 filing with the IRS, NACA had revenues of about $9.4 million, and expenses of $6.7 million. Now Marks says the group has a budget of around $45 million, which includes government funding for its counseling.

The nonprofit has about 1,100 workers nationwide, with about half of those in Charlotte. Marks said the nonprofit has added about 450 workers here since it announced in June plans to hire 1,014 here over the next five years. He now expects to reach that total by the end of this year. Marks said the newly announced 1,000 could be on board by the end of 2010.

Many of the Charlotte workers are helping with NACA's “Save the Dream” tour, where homeowners can get loans modified at events around the country in one stop. As the tour heads to New York and the West Coast, NACA needs at least another 150 workers in coming weeks, Marks said. Prospective employees should apply at www.naca.com.

His goal is to have employees on the road with the tour for a month at a time before being relieved by another wave. So far, NACA says about 180,000 homeowners have come to events and thousands have had their loans modified.

The hiring binge comes as Charlotte's big banks and other mortgage lenders have been laying off workers. The Charlotte area had about 56,300 finance and insurance workers in July, down 2,800 from December but up 1,200 from April, according to Labor Department statistics.

NACA said in June that its new hires would make about $36,000 annually. The average wage for a finance and insurance worker in Mecklenburg County in 2008 was $100,169.

Marks acknowledged the foreclosure boom won't continue forever, but he said NACA can sustain the added 2,000 positions in Charlotte by transitioning workers to its home-purchase lending business, which offers borrowers low-interest, no down-payment loans. That business declined when subprime lenders offered low teaser rates, but he still has commitments from major banks to fund new loans, he said.

“We've always been conservative in our estimates for the project,” Marks said. “We definitely have exceeded them.”

Davetta Davis is one of the new hires. She joined NACA in July as she faced the loss of a teaching job. She has already counseled borrowers at a Save the Dream event in Atlanta, where she said the work included a lot of crying with struggling homeowners and long hours.

“It's well worth it,” she said, “when you know someone saved their home.”



Court Voids Campaign Spending Limits for Nonprofits

Emily’s List, which backs the candidacies of Democratic women who support abortion rights, gained a victory in federal court on Friday in a fight with the Federal Election Commission.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the commission exceeded its authority several years ago when it created rules restricting how nonprofit groups spend their money to support state and local candidates. Reversing a federal district court ruling, the appeals court agreed with Emily’s List that the F.E.C. rules violated the First Amendment.

Will the Supreme Court look at the case? Perhaps. In any event, the appeals court ruling is surely not the last word in the long-running, multi-faceted debate over the place of money in politics.



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Sources: Washington Post, House.gov, Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Observer, NY Times, Huffington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC, C-Span, Emily's List, AJC.com, Charmeck.org, United Way, ACORN, NACA, Youtube, Google Maps