In Defense of ACORN

Following the September 14th Senate vote to deny HUD funding to ACORN, David Morris defends the organization and its 50-year history of effective action on behalf of poor Americans:

"ACORN is one of the few grassroots neighborhood organizations capable of wielding power on a national scale....ACORN's bottom-up and coordinated structure has enabled it to confront national corporations in a way few other organizations can. When Reagan and the first President Bush's regulators failed to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, ACORN and other groups conducted their own studies. They identified banks with patterns of discriminatory lending, exposed these practices to the media and then demanded regulators do their jobs. ACORN's provision of services has also enabled it to see national problems before they become national problems. Its mortgage counseling for lower-income households led it to sound the alarm about an industry that was manipulating families into taking out risky loans."