Today’s equity news,  

 “Making a Healthy Lunch, and Making It a Cause,” -  The New York Times

Between them, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey have worked on Wall Street, traveled the world and taught school from East Africa to Ecuador. Now they make lunch for a living.

Friends since they met in business school at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey founded Revolution Foods Inc. to ride a political and economic wave: surging support for healthier food in school cafeterias.

“ACORN’s Real Crime: Empowering the Poor,” - alternet.org

The name Felix Walker is not one you would recognize, but this 19th-century congressman inadvertently contributed a word to America’s political lexicon that you will recognize–a word that fairly well sums up a lot of what we’re getting these days from right-wing politicos and pundits.

In the 1820s, Walker was the U.S. representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. In an age of great political orators, Walker was not one. He was a droner, a dull fellow known for expressing his dullness at great length on every topic. No matter what issue was up for debate in the House–no matter whether he had any real knowledge, facts, or insights to add–Walker would rise to speak, insisting that his constituents back home would want his voice heard. He would then launch into a wandering, wearisome, often-nonsensical discourse that he always called “a speech for Buncombe.”

“New push for infrastructure funding in US jobs bill,” -  Reuters

WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - The Obama administration, key lawmakers and big trade groups want to include billions of dollars for transportation and infrastructure in pending legislation aimed at easing stubbornly high U.S. unemployment.

The move reflects cold calculations about what initiatives will take priority amid joblessness that is near a 26-year high at 10 percent and rapidly shifting political sands in Washington ahead of next November’s congressional elections.

A recap of this week’s equity news.

“8,800 Road Home properties to return to private hands, ” - Times Picayune

Actor Wendell Pierce and trumpeter Terence Blanchard have come back to their old neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park, and are poised to take over one of every nine properties there — so they can build and sell affordable homes,
On Monday, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will vote on an agreement to transfer 114 abandoned and vacant properties to Pierce and Blanchard’s Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp. It’s a big moment for the star of HBO’s cop drama “The Wire,” the Grammy-winning musician and some of their childhood buddies and fellow investors, who want to return New Orleans’ first middle-class black subdivision to its pre-Katrina glory.

“Homeless numbers ‘alarming’,” - USA Today

More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation.

Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.

“ACORN fights back,” - San Francisco Chronicle

In the midst of the predictable partisan exaggerations, distortions and occasional lies that close election races generate, ACORN has become the focus of an extraordinary amount of attention over our voter-registration program. We submitted nearly 40,000 voter registration applications in San Diego and throughout California, and 1.3 million nationwide. In communities across the country, anxiety about the direction of our country, and more specifically our economy, is driving much of the interest in this year’s presidential election. Voter turnout is expected to be of historic proportions. What is surprising is that these attacks, issued from partisan sources, have become relentless, and wildly exaggerated. We’ve even been accused by some Republicans of causing the global economic crisis.

The truth, plain and simple, is that no illegal votes will be cast as a consequence of ACORN’s voter-registration program. In fact, illegal votes constitute fewer than 1 out of a million votes cast, and no illegal vote has ever been tied to ACORN, in spite of the almost 2 million registrations we submitted in 2004 and 2006. The small percentage of problematic cards that we have submitted to local election boards in 2008 - and that we are required by law to submit, even cards that we can plainly see are invalid - will not result in any illegal voting, contrary to over-the-top partisan claims. The irony in these attacks is that our registration drive and get-out-the-vote program is nonpartisan.

In today’s editions of La Opinion — the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper — PolicyLink CEO stands up for ACORN against the withering assault of right-wing critics. Though Ms. Blackwell’s op-ed was published in Spanish, here is the English version:

Why ACORN Matters

By Angela Glover Blackwell

On door steps and street corners across the nation, thousands of ACORN volunteers have been working diligently to enfranchise and empower millions of Americans from low-income communities and communities of color. We’ve seen them registering our Latino and African-American neighbors in dense urban centers, far-flung rural towns and everywhere in between - fighting to give a voice to our historically marginalized communities.

In just the past year, Latinos represented about one-quarter of the 1.3 million new voters ACORN registered - more than 300,000 new American voters. That is why the unwarranted and unsubstantiated attacks on ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) the past few weeks have been so damaging to anyone who wants communities of color to have a say in our government.

The work being done by ACORN and Latino voter rights groups is an enormous and important step toward giving Latinos and African Americans the voice we need and deserve.  When our numbers are strong, we have the power to make changes– in our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our nation.

But it is exactly this empowerment that is driving the trumped-up voter registration fraud charges being repeated ad nauseam by right-wing pundits and sympathetic media outlets like FOX News.  It threatens to undue the work of ACORN, Latino, African American, and other organizations across the country working for decades to secure and protect the right to vote for all Americans.

Entrenched powers are uncomfortable with the voters ACORN targets. Those powers are fearful of the nation’s rapidly expanding Latino population and the country’s inevitable march toward a day when the majority of Americans come from racial minority groups.

It is the fear of the powerless becoming powerful, of the voiceless finding their voice. It is the fear of 148,000 new ACORN-recruited voters in Pennsylvania, 152,000 in Florida, 217,000 in Michigan, and 238,000 in Ohio. It is the fear that people of color across America will finally be able to speak out on behalf of their communities.

But the work of ACORN and other civil rights groups does not stop at the ballot box. The struggle continues in every corner of our lives, from health to housing to criminal justice reform.

ACORN was one of the first and most vocal groups calling for reform of the predatory lending and subprime mortgage laws, long before those sectors dragged our economy down into crisis. In New Orleans, ACORN brought together thousands of displaced residents to give them an amplified, powerful voice in the revival of their own city. Throughout the nation, ACORN has organized millions of red-shirted supporters to crowd City Council meetings and legislative hearings to fight for fair, equitable public policies for all people.

At heart, ACORN is working to ensure all our children have good schools, all our neighborhoods are affordable and healthy, and all our families are economically secure. But we can only make our dreams real if we join together as a powerful force for change.

ACORN plays a vital role in making sure our communities have a seat at the table to advocate forcefully for that change. They deserve our utmost respect and support - not the scorn and derision of ill-informed politicians.

Ms. Blackwell is founder and CEO of PolicyLink

Community residents are the best judge of what they need in their immediate surroundings to promote good health. ACORN and other organizing groups recognize this expertise and are leveraging it to make tremendous contributions towards improving the health of communities across the nation. ACORN fights for healthy communities by promoting factors like improved land use, public transportation, housing quality, walkability, safety, access to parks, bikeability, food retail options, and environmental protection. Broad civic participation is essential so citizens can weigh in on policies that will address these factors and impact their health.

For example, ACORN is pushing the City of Los Angeles to ensure that new development projects reduce existing health disparities in low-income communities. To make sure that new residential development improves the health of the community, ACORN and partnering organizations have sought to assess community needs, health conditions of residents, and place based factors that affect health. In a recent project, ACORN asked over 300 residents to complete surveys in either English or Spanish at community meetings, schools, or faith based institutions, and by going door to door.  ACORN used the community survey as a tool for organizational outreach and recruitment, to ensure that new development meets the needs of current residents, to set priorities for further research and policy, to raise awareness about health disparities, and to get a gauge of what is going on the ground.

Without efforts such as these, community voices often are left unheard, which is why organizing groups such as ACORN are vital to the movement for building healthy communities.

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts seeking to illuminate the heated discussion around ACORN. Please check back at EquityBlog for more in the coming days.

Is ACORN really “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history”?

At best, that statement is disingenuous — at worst, it betrays a deplorable ignorance of American’s sordid history of voting rights.

ACORN is accused of submitting faulty or phony registration forms. When these predictable mistakes happen, they are and should be caught and remedied. But there is no remedy for the thousands that have been murdered and brutalized while fighting for the basic American right to vote in “free and fair” elections.

At the founding of the United States, the right to vote was essentially limited to “free white men with property”. Throughout our history, a litany of devious and violent tactics were used to prevent African Americans from voting.

Examples include:

• Viscous attacks by the Klu Klux Klan - not just cross burnings meant to coerce and intimidate Blacks seeking civil rights like voting, but whole neighborhoods torched, and the most horrific acts of murder - lynching (public hanging) and being tarred and feathered (a euphemism for burned alive)

• A whole range of insidious devices intended to make voting difficult if not impossible - such as grandfather clauses (voting only by those whose fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1869 - almost exclusively whites); poll taxes (fees charged in order to vote); literacy requirements (complex reading tests administered only to Blacks); other eligibility requirements, (such as owning property)

• Overt laws such as “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow” laws that specifically prohibited African Americans from voting, or limited voting in primary elections to whites; enforced segregation and gerrymandering that kept African Americans locked into certain geographic areas, and then drew voting districts that would dilute their voting power

African Americans were not the only group subjected to violent forms of voter suppression, or forcibly denied the right to vote. Women waged a consistent campaign for suffrage, culminating in the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 192o

The road to the ballot box was equally hard for Native Americans. They could only become citizens by relinquishing tribal affiliations; even for those who did so, the same barriers were used to block their votes - eligibility requirements, fees and violence.

The same thing happened to Mexican Americans born in what became Arizona, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada.  In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was supposed to extend voting rights (and U.S. citizenship) to those residents. Instead, literacy tests, and other eligibility requirements, as well as violence were used to intimidate and dissuade potential voters.

For Asian American immigrants, there were sporadic opportunities to participate in democracy by voting, but from 1790, they were generally categorized as “aliens ineligible for citizenship” - and citizenship is a prerequisite for voting rights. Voting was an unquestionable right for those born in America - except for the 77,000 Japanese American locked in internment camps during WWII.

It took over one hundred years - from the early 1820s until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — for the United States government to outlaw the tactics that had been used to keep generations of African Americans and other people of color, as well as women, from voting. And it took the efforts of community organizers and groups like ACORN to bring the promise of the Voting Rights Act to life by bringing new voters into the process.

We cannot afford to deny voting rights to segments of our society because of race, gender or income. Doing that would be a real threat to the fabric of American democracy.

Photo by Flickr user MyJon, used under a Creative Commons License.

In recent days, the name “ACORN” has become a sinister watchword in many conservative circles, serving as a stand-in for voter fraud and underhanded election tactics. One leading politician even said ACORN “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Well, let me tell you about the ACORN I know, the ACORN I’ve seen in action during my more than three years working with people struggling to recover in New Orleans.

ACORN is the group that brought together thousands of African American residents to have an amplified, powerful voice in the revival of their own city.

ACORN is the group that fought to make sure Louisianans displaced from their home state would still have the chance to vote in their elections and help guide post-Katrina recovery.

ACORN is the group that holds politicians at all levels accountable to a poor, largely African American constituency that was systematically ignored and even targeted for housing demolition.

ACORN is the group that has been one of the most effective organizations in holding banks accountable for the predatory loans that are now bringing our entire economy down.

ACORN is not a caricature.

ACORN is not a curse word.

ACORN, at heart, is a group of neighbors fighting to spread the American Dream to all people.   That role seems pretty vital to the fabric of democracy.

PolicyLink Senior Director Kalima Rose is a long-time community advocate and policy expert who has been working with legislators and on-the-ground leaders in Louisiana since just after Hurricane Katrina.