It takes a lot of nerve to launch a come-back at the epicenter of one’s disgrace, but that’s exactly what’s happened in Baltimore. After an employee of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was caught on videotape in Baltimore counseling undercover activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles on how to set up a brothel featuring underage victims from Central America, a national backlash forced Congress to cut off ACORN’s funding. In March 2010, Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of ACORN’s Baltimore chapter, conceded that “the ACORN brand is probably ruined for life,” and said the tax-subsidized non-profit would no longer operate in her state. But Merchant-Jones was being less than honest. A month before she told the Baltimore Sun that ACORN would not try to rebrand itself in Maryland, its housing entity had already done precisely that. According to documents obtained from the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation by Examiner blogger Mark Newgent, ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc. (AHC) in Baltimore changed its name to the Affordable Housing Center of America, Inc. The name-change application listed the same board of directors, the same national headquarters in Chicago and even the same Baltimore office where O’Keefe and Giles caught ACORN red-handed just five months before.
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This was not news to Matthew Vadum, author of the recently released “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.” Vadum was the first to report a leaked 2010 email from Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, explaining how ACORN staffers could launch “re-imaginings … without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.” Vadum told The Examiner that name changes in Maryland and 13 other states are an attempt to disguise the fact that this is the same old legal entity, in many cases occupying the same offices and employing the same people. The only real change is on paper.
Because the congressional cutoff of funding applied only to the national ACORN organization and only for one year, Vadum says “it’s unclear” whether ACORN’s newly renamed housing entities are receiving state and federal funds despite the group’s documented role in the recent housing market meltdown.
Nobody should be fooled by ACORN’s “re-imaginings,” especially Maryland lawmakers who have a fiduciary duty to taxpayers to cut this obnoxious and destructive seed off at the roots.
