Brandishing the Transmorgrifier

Ever catch the cartoon strip of Calvin and Hobbs, playing with imaginary transmogrifier guns? Zap! Hobbes, Calvin’s stuffed tiger, turns Calvin into a miniature pterodactyl. Zap! Calvin retaliates by turning Hobbs into… something. Zap! Zap! Back and forth until the gun overheats and Calvin is stuck in owl-form and must wait until the transmogrification wear off.

Every now and then, I notice that the transmogrifier guns make their way into the public arena – like the time education reformers of the progressive stripe realized parents were becoming increasingly discomforted by “outcome-based education.” No problem! Zap! Give it another name. Write it up as a “new” program. Issue resolved.

Then there’s ACORN, the Alinskyian community organization making the news for all sorts of scandals – embezzlement in high places, voter registration fraud in low places. After years of controversy, the US House has finally voted to cut federal funding to ACORN while California, Georgia, and Minnesota have called for investigations or discontinuation of state funds. Even the US Catholic Church pulled Acorn off the nipple last autumn.

Enter the transmogrifier. Zap! The ACORN affiliate of Chicago disappears and here is Action Now, “a grassroots organization of low-and moderate-income families working together across Illinois to improve their lives and communities. We're building a truly transparent organization, with leaders, a policy direction, and a fiscal decision-making process that will remain open and accountable to our members and the working families whose interests we serve. We are continuing the work we started 25 years ago in Chicago: to organize and win power for regular working families in their communities, their cities, and their state.”

Doesn’t that sound as though Action Now is a 25 years-old, veritable bastion of respectability, stability, and accountability?

However, we learn at the Annenberg website – Annenberg is a philanthropist who has poured millions of dollars in outcome-based education reform, or whatever it’s called today – that Chicago ACORN prepared a six-year “research” study describing its “education organizin g” with Action Now. Only, Action Now was founded in 2008, more or less around the same time Chicago ACORN closed its doors, so whatever “work” it did with ACORN was limited. In fact, Action Now was founded “by the board, staff, and members formerly associated with Chicago ACORN. This group is continuing the education and other organizing campaigns that were begun by ACORN.” [“Rethinking the Teacher Pipeline for an Urban Public School System,” www.annenberginstitute.org/WeDo/Mott_Chicago.php]

Same people; new name. Madeline Talbott, lead organizer for Action Now was the founder of Illinois ACORN 25 years ago and was its former director. She explains that “when you have this big of a mess, it takes time to clean up and your funders drop like flies.” ACORN’s Chicago office=2 0closed in January 2008 and Talbott she and other Chicago ACORN staff “quit over concerns about mismanagement and a lack of financial transparency at the group’s national headquarters.” [P.J. Huffstutter and Kate Linthicum, “ACORN scaling back or shutting down in many cities,” LA Times, September 19, 2009]

John Atlas, who is writing a book about the work of ACORN, sees recent scandals and the bad publicity following in their wake as tainting the brand. “This is going to make it harder for them to recruit new members, to get foundation funding and get funding for voter registration….They may have to shrink back; they may have to rebrand."
In merchandising, it’s all about the name. Zap!

Talbott, however, remains the same Chicago activist she always was.

For one thing, in addition to her “new” work with Action Now, Madeline Talbott is the National Field Director for Healthcare United, which was launched around the same time (winter 2008) as Action Now. [www.healthcareunited.org; and seiu.bluestatedigital.com/about/the_healthcare_united_t - [Cached Version]]

Part of the Health Care For America Now! coalition, Healthcare United bedfellows include a number of major unions, several national pro-abortion groups and the Alinskyian organizing networks of ACORN, Gamaliel, Interfaith Workers for Justice’s Jobs With Justice, Northwest Federation of Community Organizations, the Progressive Action Network and USAction. There’s also a representation of George Soros-funded groups, namely MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress. This is a problematic group from either a politically conservative or socially traditional perspective.

It also suggests that the distance she has attempted to establish between her work and the ACORN scandals is not based on ideological distinctions but is simple a matter of…ahem, expedience.

Zap…Zap… Zap….yikes, the transmogrifier appears to be out of juice. Action Now is frozen as ACORN!

Drat!

Stephanie Block edits the New Mexico-based newspaper Los Pequenos and is a founder of the Catholic Media Coalition.