I can’t make up stuff this crazy, so here’s the full report from Public Policy Polling:

Toronto This is so weird and bizarre it’s frightening and unsettling, but in the release of a poll yesterday 1 out of every 5 Americans still believe that ACORN is likely to “steal” the midterm elections this coming November!

I can’t make up stuff this crazy, so here’s the full report from Public Policy Polling:

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

ACORN!

ACORN may not exist anymore but 20% of Americans still think (or at least say they think) it will steal the election to keep Democrats in control of Congress this fall.

That does represent a decrease from last fall in ACORN’s perceived ability to steal an election. In November we found 26% of people thought the organization had stolen the 2008 Presidential contest for Barack Obama.

What’s interesting is that there’s been a significant reduction in concern in Republican ranks about ACORN’s influence. While 52% of Republicans said they thought it had been responsible for Obama’s victory, just 23% of them think it will bail the Democrats out this fall.

That 23% of Republicans who think ACORN will be influential this time is actually barely higher than the 20% of Democrats who say they think it will keep their party in charge. Perhaps Democratic voters have come to the conclusion that ACORN is their last best hope. Or more likely they gave a silly answer to a silly question. And we’re not going to apologize for asking the occasional silly question.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about all this is that only 40% of voters definitively say they think ACORN will not steal the election with another 40% saying they’re not sure. I guess a lot of folks are just waiting to see if ACORN’s really gone away or if it’s just hiding in the bushes waiting for people to get complacent before it makes its move.

Your theories would be much appreciated.

If that’s not enough for you I’ll also share a posting from the Minnesota Independent which quotes another set of comments in Slate extrapolating the extreme conclusions.

Poll: One in five Americans thinks defunct ACORN will steal next election

By Andrew Restuccia 9/14/10 4:08 PM

Public Policy Polling has proven, once again, that one in five Americans will signal their belief for just about anything. The group’s poll today notes that 20% of Americans think that ACORN will steal the election for Democrats, and 40% aren’t sure. (The other 40% are pretty sure this won’t be the case). All this, despite that fact that ACORN is now a defunct organization.

But this is not simply a laughing matter, notes Dave Weigel at Slate:

More seriously, we’re about to go into the first election since 2004 where the Democrats won’t do very well. It is also the first election since the 1970s when ACORN won’t really exist. In 2004, 2006 and 2008, when things were either touch-and-go or terrible for Republicans, voters read lots of election-time stories about an organization called ACORN that was filing lots of bogus voter registrations. This year, Republicans will win, and I bet the myth of ACORN only grows — that a stubborn number of Americans will think that Democrats only won the 2006 and 2008 elections because of fraud, and that James O’Keefe saved us from it.

The New York Times writes an editorial on “Labor Day, Now and Then,” and while noting that Labor Day dates earlier than other holidays mindlessly say the following:

Toronto All afternoon I kept overhearing snippets of conversation about the action with a housing committee at City Hall that evening. It was a deputation? No, it was just lobbying to keep them on track. It was important? No, it was just another exercise in keeping the City [...]]]>

Toronto All afternoon I kept overhearing snippets of conversation about the action with a housing committee at City Hall that evening. It was a deputation? No, it was just lobbying to keep them on track. It was important? No, it was just another exercise in keeping the City of Toronto on track to finally put teeth in the landlord licensing law. Are you going, Wade? No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t figure it out, and I had plenty of things still on the list. What did I know!

When Judy Duncan, ACORN Canada Head Organizer, and I talked with the Toronto ACORN Field Director Tatiana Jaunzems and Organizer Shauna Harris after everything was said and done, there was a whole different story as the details emerged. They were super charged! It turned out that there were 30 ACORN members at the committee meeting with 10 other allies and they had dominated the affair and seized the opportunity to advance the agenda. When the crowd was broken into work groups to prioritize what needed to be done next, our teams were well organized and efficient and “bullet voted” their top priority so that a long standing issue could no longer be ignored.

We were all about the box. Like any classic community organizing issue it almost seems too simple a demand to be taken seriously, but that’s precisely the beauty of it. We were demanding a box, and we would not be satisfied with anything else. Every time the discussion started to veer one way or another, according to the organizers, we then herded it back into the corral by arguing the box would solve the problem. We were on our game and playing our card in every game until it became the trump. When the City Councilor heading the committee finally said, the one thing we are all clear on is that we need to make the box happen, but can we discuss some of the other issues, the ACORN members knew they had finally come around the corner and would win the box.

Ok, you are now as confused as I was, so let’s think out of the box. Under the landlord licensing law that Toronto ACORN won in recent years for tenants, there have to be inspections by the city of the housing complexes. In the first year we were livid. Hardly a hundred buildings were inspected. We went crazy and were all over the City for dropping the ball here. The commitment increased tenfold. All good!

But, once the inspection was finished there was a problem. How would existing tenants or prospective tenants know what problems the building had and, perhaps more importantly, check and make sure the needed repairs were being made by the landlords? Solution: the box of course! We were demanding that there be an official City of Toronto box constructed or placed in the lobby of all inspected buildings so that all the tenants would be able to access the report and keep pushing the landlords to make the repairs or in the case of prospective tenants, not move into the complex until they saw that the repairs had been made. It was all elegantly simple. Without an inspection tenants had no collective leverage on the landlord for fines or broken regulations. But an inspection was meaningless if there was no transparency so that the tenants themselves were empowered to be able to constantly push both the landlord and the city to make the repairs and improvements. And, you guessed it, there was only transparency if there was a box that was placed permanently in the lobby so that all the inspection reports could be protected and available for all the tenants to constantly consult and make sure rules were followed and therefore justice was done.

Turns out for Toronto ACORN it was thinking in the box that would guarantee change for tenants.

Don’t you love it?!?

New Orleans Many fronts have only one message: stop the anti-immigrant rage now! Protesters in Chicago showed up at a Cubs versus Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game and said it was time to boycott Arizona. The Major League Players Association has condemned Arizona. The New York Times in a stern [...]]]>

New Orleans Many fronts have only one message: stop the anti-immigrant rage now! Protesters in Chicago showed up at a Cubs versus Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game and said it was time to boycott Arizona. The Major League Players Association has condemned Arizona. The New York Times in a stern and striking editorial yesterday demanded essentially that President Obama step in and do right on Arizona and push every button possible from a legal move by the Attorney General to refusal to share ICE immigration records kept federally for Arizona authorities to abuse. Asking organizers in Phoenix what is on tap for next week when I’m there, and the answer was essentially, “don’t worry, there’ll be plenty!”

Last night the sister and fiancée of a friend of my daughter’s from Canada were visiting. Carl had driven the ACORN International bechak during Mardi Gras and he and a buddy had borrowed my canoe once. Super guy. From a farming family around London who had gone to university in Waterloo. I’d talked to him about helping out with ACORN Canada in Hamilton or Ontario. That was then though. Now, his sister and boyfriend were not really down here for the Jazz Fest, though they had popped in for a day, but more directly were packing his gear and tools and cleaning out his place around the corner so he could get his deposit. He had gone back to Canada to see his folks and driving back through Windsor outside of Detroit with another sister to fly back to New Orleans where he had been helping with the recovery off and on for years, was held by immigration for 8 hours and denied entry and barred from returning for the next 5 years. Immigration looked through all of his cell phone messages and interpreted several as “work” in New Orleans, which is a no-no without a green card. Suddenly, one of the many important pieces in the cities recovery gone. New Orleans should apply for humanitarian visas for anyone who will help our desperate city.

While talking to Inge and Wayne, I got a call from my companero with CASA de Maryland as he was ending his day on another late Silver Spring night. To keep a long story short, Gustavo Andrade told me about an action they had done earlier in the day with 60 folks from CASA and the workers’ center to protest the jailing and threatened deportation of woman with 3 kids in Prince George County who had been arrested for selling a $2 phone card to a neighbor. Because of a 287g type agreement between PG and ICE, they had pulled her number and she came up as having overstayed a visa. This is another perfect example of the criminalization of immigrants that is central to the failed 287g program that mysteriously the Obama administration in a “get tough” guy has proven unable to improve or reform and needs to throw away.

http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/local/md-woman-faces-deportation-after-selling-phone-cards-without-a-license-042610

Time to send the Statue of Liberty back to some country that believes in welcoming immigrants, freedom, liberty, and the rest of those quaint sentiments that seem unable to conform with modern public policy.

Chicago First in a session with Kim Bobo and her talented staff at Interfaith Worker Justice and then with the great immigration rights organizers, Josh Hoyt and Lawrence Benito and some of their staff at Illinois Council of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, it was only a matter of time that we stopped [...]]]>

Chicago First in a session with Kim Bobo and her talented staff at Interfaith Worker Justice and then with the great immigration rights organizers, Josh Hoyt and Lawrence Benito and some of their staff at Illinois Council of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, it was only a matter of time that we stopped talking about Citizen Wealth and what was needed in the world, and each in their own way asked essentially, “How do we prevent ‘stings’ from crippling our work?” These are smart and effective organizers who understand in the wake of the devastating ACORN tragedy that there is no magic cloak protecting them from any unprincipled stingers if their organizers acquired a sudden bullseye.

Organizers are not paranoid for the most part. We know there are people and forces dedicated to our destruction.

What is so chilling for social change organizations in the lessons of ACORN’s demise is two things: (1) that no one can control or prevent how something “might seem” on the screen: the old Richard Pryor problem of the facts versus your lying eyes, and (2) any non-profit director with an ounce of sense is horrified at the “holier than now” shunning that they are still hearing from funders who are still knocking right at the door of saying that essentially “ACORN got what it deserved.”

For IWJ Kim’s nightmare is knowing that with separately constituted independent affiliates all over the country that obviously IWJ does not control, who knows if all their paperwork is in order and timely filed with every “i” dotted and “t” crossed. These are semi-volunteer operations. Kim told me a telling story of how great her board has been, and having met with her board before, I knew that was the case with major church and union leaders with deep leadership and administrative responsibility. She had me laughing at the irony of funders pretending that if ACORN’s board had just had more big names and upper class folks rather than democratically electing its own members to provide its governance, how little it would matter. She went through an array of questions that she had never been asked by her board and furthermore knew for a fact they would have been clueless about that some anti-outsider could plaster all over the news. True that!

Josh in his masterful way was almost lobbying me to write the “how to manual” for crisis management on these kinds of attacks, and maybe that will be in the next book, but given the polarization around immigration now, I have no doubt that my friends wake up at night wondering if there is anyway to batten the hatches down.

Nonetheless, they are asking the right questions now to prevent being “next,” by assuming that that arrogance is not the guide, it could happen to anybody, anywhere, anytime in this work, so you have to be prepared. That’s my first piece of advice: assume it’s coming and prepare. We certainly never had “crisis management” discussions or preparations when I was at the ACORN helm. I can remember having great organizing discussions on how we might prepare to take advantage of crises as opportunities for organizing, but certainly nothing about how we would communicate to the outside world and our members if all hell broke loose. I think the ACORN tragedy suggests that it is not a matter of conceding error and saying you’re sorry, but how to voice these points with credibility and sincerity sufficient to trigger compassion. Only ACORN grassroots leaders would have had that capability, and for whatever reason in too many cases they were not the ones chosen to speak on the firing line.

Any social change based non-profit needs to have the conversations about being “acorned” now with their funders and friends to inoculate them to the near certainty that all are vulnerable and to assure that others will step up front and behind the scenes to protect them and speak to their mission and right to work. The notion that one can be safe behind the scenes is over. No director of such an organization can allow the organization to be as isolated and alone as ACORN became.

Organizations in the business of meeting and working with the public, as ACORN was, are especially vulnerable because representatives are trained and hard wired to do their best to help and comfort people, which also makes their good will easy to victimize and distort. Organizers who are trained in the give and take dialectic of communication rather than the didactic will often look like they were aiding and abetting something, by not condemning but instead questioning and pushing conversations back.

Do such organizations need their intake people to ask folks to sign waivers when they come in? Do they need to start conversations with scripted language that makes sure their advice is understood and couched correctly? Do such conversations need to be taped or filmed to protect the organization? There may be merits to all of these intrusive and difficult strategies, but even if employed would that stop the O’Keefe and Giles types from not editing to suit and simply leaving such protective matters on the cutting room floor?

Is our first mission advancing our members interest or covering our own institutions and how do we resolve these issues? There are many lessons in the ACORN tragedy, but most are only partially understood with answers still debatable and advice still uncertain and hard to come by especially since so many are playing “cover your ass” now and “not me” with funders and the outside world. People like Josh Hoyt and Kim Bobo are smart, skilled, and professional, and they know that “there by the grace of god go we,” and approaching the ACORN tragedy with humility rather than arrogance is probably the first step in finding useful lessons to advance all of the work.

New Orleans Normally, I would keep quiet about something like this since it is still so half-baked and almost pre-organizational, but our little first committee meeting to organize the New Orleans chapter of the so-called Secret Society of Creative Philanthropy got some interesting queries when I posted about the meeting on Facebook that [...]]]>

New Orleans Normally, I would keep quiet about something like this since it is still so half-baked and almost pre-organizational, but our little first committee meeting to organize the New Orleans chapter of the so-called Secret Society of Creative Philanthropy got some interesting queries when I posted about the meeting on Facebook that I feel compelled to offer a little something something here about the our first tentative steps into what I’m calling “micro-philanthropy,” or philanthropy by the poor.

Some weeks ago I posted about an interesting experiment begun by Courtney Martin in New York in 2006 when she came into an author’s advance and thought she should share some of her small ship coming in with both a group of friends and her community. She gather ten of them together, staked them with a $100, and in a process that was both innovative and collaborative, watched and enjoyed the very diverse ways that they all practiced a creative philanthropy with this small amount of money, and have done so annually ever since then. There was an article about the annual celebration and reporting of their “secret society” in the Times. Short story is that I read it, blogged that we should all get on this bandwagon and that I was ready, and tracked down Courtney Martin through the magic of Google and the internet. I told her I was ready to organize the New Orleans chapter of the Society of Creative Philanthropy. A week or so later, she replied essentially, “right on!” and away we went.

I was especially happy once I located their web site (www.creativephilanthropy.org) to see that our New Orleans chapter would be the 4^th after New York, San Francisco, and Munich, Germany, I believe. We are just barely getting on the round ahead of Seattle.

Here’s what I like about all of this. First, with all appropriate apologies to the rich and hip, I am heartened by the recent studies and surveys that exhaustively document the fact that poor and working families are wildly more generous with their relatively minimal incomes compared to the well-to-do and well born. Secondly, I think there are hugely positive values in the exercise of sharing resources and tremendous benefits of doing so collectively. I still don’t understand the “organizing model” for the “society,” but have become comfortable with the recognition that the model is not to have a model and to advance the “creative” side, and that works. Finally, I think the whole practice of micro-philanthropy and maximizing small donations is likely the future of support for a lot of social change work whether we call in membership dues or monthly pledges or annual gifts, and this is particularly true on the international level where an organizer can be totally supported on $300 per month. I want to learn more about how people think about all of this!

As an old school organizer, I wanted an organizing committee meeting first so eight of us had cupcakes, coffee, and water on Burgundy Street in the Bywater to kick it around for 90 minutes. I had sent out the website, the Times article, a slam by Courtney Martin on the Oprah giveaway shtick, and whatever. All good.

Here in this very urban crowd in the New Orleans 9^th Ward it was fascinating to hear the first thoughts that so many of the organizers had about maximizing resources. It was farm-and-garden time in the city! One was thinking about giving away chickens. Another wanted to giveaway goats to keep the grass down in the lower 9 with a “movable pen.” Did you know that in New Orleans it is legal for home dwellers to keep three chickens and one goat per household. Yeehaw! I had no idea. A teacher wanted to build a community garden at her school with the money. She also had an uncle living outside of Little Rock who gave away free goats. Someone had in mind two compost piles. I was almost relieved to hear one person talk about international work and another about using the money to help organize workers – at least I understood that stuff better.

But, it was exciting to listen to the ideas and to hear how even in the discussion people were already leveraging the C-note by fertilizing it with great ideas, community values, and, let’s be honest, adding to it with huge sweat equity that would be worth thousands.

We need to figure out how to add other people past the ones signed up for the first meeting, because we need to find room for the other folks in New Orleans who now want in. We may not have much money, but we’ve got good spirit, creativity to burn, and a well grounded community.

Mumbai We were up and out early into the Monday morning traffic where Vinod had been invited to speak about about the environmental impact of recycling by our waste pickers in Dharavi to a class at the B. M. Ruia Girls’ College, a junior college of sorts with 1500 students served in [...]]]>

Mumbai We were up and out early into the Monday morning traffic where Vinod had been invited to speak about about the environmental impact of recycling by our waste pickers in Dharavi to a class at the B. M. Ruia Girls’ College, a junior college of sorts with 1500 students served in two shifts by 50 teachers in downtown Mumbai. This was the old Bombay of trees and giant houses that were now eight-plexes or more. The college was in the next street over from the stately and historic house that was home and workspace for Mahatma Gandhi.

Fifty young women or more were crowded into the six floor classroom. A year before I had accompanied Vinod Shetty, ACORN India’s director, when we were making one of our first presentations at the American School. Since then Vinod had signed up 23 schools of various shapes and sizes to partner with our recyclers. The design was straightforward. If they would collect the dry and wet waste at the school, then we would arrange to pick it up, sort through it for the cardboard, paper, plastic, and anything else of value, and our recyclers would sell, hopefully at a better price to increase their livelihoods.

The easy part perhaps was the agreement by the schools to be ACORN’s partner. The hard part I could tell the more I listened to Vinod’s presentation and talked to him, was getting the schools to actually take it seriously and make it happen. What had been a feel good win-win, environmental rap a year ago, now was refined with surefire, but pointed, jokes about taking it seriously, the need to have a real committee of the students on solid waste management, and the pleas before and after the meeting for a teacher who would shepherd the program inside the institution on a day-by-day basis. When those pieces were in place, then the program worked. When they were not, too often our recyclers showed up to collect and the waste was gone or had not been collected, frustrating the program and ironically depressing our recyclers earnings. The model was right but Vinod had clearly found that the flesh was often weaker than the spirit.

He was plowing forward though. He set up the documentary on our ragpickers, Waste, in the first 20 minutes with me, then ran the movie to dramatic impact, and then upped the ante, and pressed the “ask.” They were there, but Vinod clearly had learned the hard, organizers law, based on too much experience, that it’s what happens after the meeting that matters. When we met the principal in her office, we went again to the point to get more and more buy in. It all sounded good when we left. Maybe it would work. A college would be important.

More significantly, Vinod was committed to continuing to press forward with some confidence that each time we had the opportunity to speak to another school, another assembly, another college, and got them to actually follow through with us, we would be closer to our goal.

Good ideas take so much sweat. This one still might work.