The word “ACORN” drips off the tongue of a winger with scorn: ACORN, that (gasp!) registers people to vote; ACORN, that (horrors!) promotes health care reform; ACORN, that (disgusting!) pressures mortgage lenders not to screw over loan applicants. You’d think those ACORN troublemakers would be ashamed of such behavior, wouldn’t you?

Really, though, to look on ACORN members as anything less than heroes is a sign of ignorance or delusion. Here’s the latest proof. They applied pressure to the four major lenders who were still refusing to do their part to prevent foreclosures: the “home wreckers” weren’t allowing people with adjustable rate mortgages to refinance so that their payments would be no more than 31 percent of their income.

Now, all four of the “Home Wreckers” have caved. All four have agreed to do what they should have done without having to be shamed into it, what they were refusing to do–until ACORN shone the light on their ugly actions. And ACORN is not done with these reprobates yet:

“ACORN is very pleased with the success of its “Home Wrecker Four” campaign launched on June 30, 2009.   With HomEq’s announcement that it has joined HAMP, more foreclosures will be averted and fewer families displaced.  Despite this victory, ACORN efforts will continue to insure that servicers are compliant with all HAMP guidelines and to work with servicers in the development of “best practices” to achieve maximum results.   Initial key concerns that ACORN must address include servicers continued foreclosure efforts against HAMP eligible borrowers and the poor implementation of modifications which was recently reported by Treasury as only 9% of the 2.7 million eligible loans,” Said Bertha Lewis, ACORN CEO/Chief Organizer.

All I have to say to ACORN is “Keep on keepin’ on.”

ACORN’s Wednesday protest about AmerenUE’s proposed 18 percent rate hike was unusual in the attention it attracted. When the ACORN folks get out on the sidewalk to rant about mortgage scams or banks that use bailout money to lobby against their own regulation, cars cruise silently by. Not so when it comes to the rate hike. As thirty protesters hiked up and down Chouteau Avenue in front of AmerenUE headquarters, yelling themselves hoarse:

AmerenUE

Is tryin’ to

Screw me.

and

Hell no, 18 percent!

motorists honked often, and lots of semis and trucks emitted deep, mellow blasts. You see, mortgage scams are complicated, but a rate hike–and for 18 ever lovin’ percentage points–that’s right in everybody’s face. In the middle of this recession.

And it’s on top of the $162.6 million increase Ameren got last January.

But … but … we need (or anyway want) more money, says Ameren. After two major storms knocked out power for extended periods in 2007, we had to actually start trimming trees to prevent corporate officers from being tarred and feathered if it happened again. That costs money, and we’re only making about eight percent profit a year. Maybe some folks think that since we get to be a monopoly, we should be satisfied with a little less than that, but how are we going to trim the CEO’s oriental rugs in ermine if we take less?

(Just kidding. I’m sure Thomas Voss knows that ermine would be tacky on his oriental rugs.)

But what chutzpah to ask at all in this shambles of an economy. Any kind of rate hike will drive more people to be unable to pay their Ameren bills. Many of them will end up having to get government assistance from the Low Income Heating and Energy Assistance program. So? says Ameren. If poor people can’t pay, let the taxpayers take up the slack. But we need our eight percent profit.

Glenn Burleigh, the St. Louis district director of ACORN, hoots at their hardship. In what other business, he wants to know, does a company get to go back to customers after it has sold them a product and say, we’d really like to charge you more for what you already bought. We had some extra expenses that came up later. Burleigh says, and most consumers agree, that they should have been trimming those trees all along instead of trimming their costs and padding their bottom line.

AmerenUE knows, of course, that it ain’t getting an 18 percent rate hike. The company asked for an outrageous raise so that it can look reasonable when it lets itself get bargained down to something merely excessive.  Or failing that–should the public pressure be strong enough to get the PSC to rule against the utility company along about next March–the fallback plan is probably to appeal to the legislature to pass that moronic CWIP bill so it can fold this rate increase into the bill for future utility construction projects.

If it comes to that point, we’ll see if legislators are willing to put themselves on the line for AmerenUE and against the residential and corporate customers who’ll raise a stink.

One way or another, I’m sure Ameren will push hard, but the pressure from the rest of us will create a New Madrid fault. Too many of Ameren’s customers will see it like Luedale Beck:

At an ACORN rally in front of Wells Fargo (what used to be the Wachovia complex at Jefferson and Market), one of the members, Darryl Moore, talked to me about some of the shenanigans that the financial giants are up to. He pointed out, for instance, that major financial institutions are overseen by watchdogs. The problem with the watchdogs is that they are companies hired by the financial institutions themselves.

I wonder if Goldman Sachs or AIG actually writes into the contract which risky or unethical practices  these watchdogs lapdogs are bound to overlook. Or is a wink and nod good enough?

Apparently the lapdogs do not forbid these institutions from taking billions in bailout money and then using tens of millions of it to fight the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that President Obama is aiming to create. That’s what ACORN members were doing in front of Wells Fargo on Tuesday, publicizing the fact that the big banks and mortgage lenders are going all out to kill reform. True, smothering the infant agency in its crib isn’t likely to happen. But they would be satisfied if they could just weaken the legislation so that it never does more than totter around, presenting no real threat to them.

Roszina Jones had some harsh words about the banks achieving either one of those goals. Most of the protesters were into chants, like “We want a watchdog, not a lapdog.” But Roszina, now, she rants. She started this riff by yelling about how Wells Fargo has taken her taxes and used it:

so you can fight and increase your pay and your money while we stand here in debt and don’t have no money. I don’t get to drive a Beemer. I don’t live in no mansion. I work hard every day, work at minimum wage and you take my money to take it to the (inaudible) TV show to talk against Obama’s financial reform. It’s gonna help me get out of debt and you wanna keep me in debt. That’s not justice. That’s injustice.

This morning’s Post-Dispatch headline “Goldman Sachs execs ready to rake it in” probably made Roszina see red. It ought to. It doesn’t matter that Goldman Sachs has paid back the TARP money it took or that it is only rewarding its people for raking in the richest quarterly profit in its 140-year history. That corporation needs to be reined in. John Cole at Balloon Juice says as much. First, he provides some background in the form of Robert Reich quoting Goldman Sachs’ CFO:

“Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” Goldman’s chief financial officer tells Bloomberg News. Value-at-risk-a statistical measure of how much the firm’s trading operations could lose in a day-rose to an average of $245 million in the second quarter from $240 million in the first quarter. In the second quarter of 2008, VaR averaged $184 million.

Goldman and others brought the world financial sector to their knees, are largely responsible for the worldwide recession, required ten billion in TARP funds, protection as they moved from investment bank status, billions in loans, thirteen billion in direct payments from the taxpayer (routed through AIG), god only knows what else from the Fed’s hidden behavior, as well as a Paulson assist in the elimination of their competition, and here is the CFO of Goldman telling you that they learned nothing and that nothing changed.

Hey, Roszina, ya think Cole has the right idea when he says the banks should stop giving interviews and just take out full page ads mooning us?

This new agency that the bankers are so intent on murdering in its crib is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law Professor that Harry Reid tapped last fall to head the Congressional Oversight Panel, which monitored the financial industry bailouts. Warren might be called on to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Bob Herbert tells us what she said to a Congressional committee last month:

“Giant lenders compete for business by talking about nominal interest rates, free gifts and warm feelings,” she said, “but the fine print hides the things that really rake in the cash. Today’s business model is about making money through tricks and traps.”

It should be clear by now that it is often the goal of financial institutions to see that the consumer is not well informed. “In the early-1980s,” said Professor Warren, the average credit card contract was about a page long. “Today, it is more than 30 pages. … I am a contract law professor, and I cannot make out some of the fine print.”

As I walked along Jefferson Ave. yesterday approaching the protesters, a middle aged man in a business suit walked through the group and toward me. He looked pained and seemed to hope for an answering look of annoyance and pain from me. He all but said, ‘Can you believe these nutcases out here yelling on the sidewalk?’

Oh, sir, I can believe them. I believe them a whole helluva lot more than I believe anything a Wells Fargo exec has to say.

A couple of weeks ago, ACORN put pressure on four large corporations it labeled “home wreckers” because these mortgage lenders continue to refuse to modify mortgages so that they take only 31 percent or less of a homeowner’s monthly earnings. A scattering of ACORN volunteers showed up in front of the Federal Reserve Building in downtown St. Louis in support of a nationwide push by ACORN to get the four big corporate holdouts to sign on to the Making Homes Affordable Act that Congress passed last March. And one of the four targeted companies, OneWest in Pasadena, CA, caved.  It was quite a victory for ACORN.

But now one of the other four “home wreckers”, Wilbur Ross, with the help of Tim Geithner at Treasury, is thumbing his nose at ACORN and the American public in general. … Did I say “thumbing?” I could be mistaken about which digit he’s using.

Geithner has named Wilbur Ross as one of nine fund managers for the Public-Private Investment Program, or PPIP. Using a mixture of federal and privately raised funds, PPIP will buy $40 billion in toxic assets from financial institutions.

It’s a sweetheart deal for this home wrecker.

ACORN is upset, for starters, with the hypocrisy of handing over a deal that screams conflict of interest to someone who won’t even do the minimum, sign on to a program meant to keep people from losing their homes. The Obama administration claims to be trying to keep people in their homes and then tosses Wilbur Ross a multibillion dollar boondoggle.

To muddy the waters, Ross claims that his company has been modifying mortgages:

Ross noted that his company has completed more than 64,000 loan modifications in the past year, with 86 percent of borrowers reaping a payment reduction.

Sorry, Wilbur, but modifying someone’s mortgage from, say, 58 percent of their monthly earnings to maybe 45 percent is not the same as signing on to the act and reducing those payments to 31 percent or less.

More important, though, is the conflict of interest. A couple of years ago, Ross foresaw that the mortgage crisis might eventually deepen enough to force the federal government to step in and buy toxic mortgages at face value or, anyway, at more than their actual worth. So he started a company that bought huge swaths of toxic securitized investment vehicles. Now he’ll be one of nine people deciding whose securitized investment vehicles the government will buy.

Obama is allowing Geithner to hand Wilbur Ross the keys to the candy store. Question: Does Ross deserve even a single M&M?

Update: Speaking of ACORN rallies, the group is holding one in front of Wells Fargo at Jefferson and Market on Tuesday, the 14th, at noon, to protest the massive public relations and lobbying campaign by big banks to stop real banking reform. ACORN’s St. Louis Metro director, Glenn Burleigh says:

“When you buy a microwave oven or a toy for your child, you have the security of knowing that someone has checked to make sure those products are not going to explode in your face. We need the same security when we sign on the bottom line for a loan or a credit card,” said Glenn Burleigh, St. Louis ACORN’s Head Organizer. “For too long, the rules have been written and enforced for Wall Street, by Wall Street. Now groups funded by AIG and others are spending billions of dollars on a massive public relations and media campaign to keep things exactly the way they are. It’s time for the Big Banks and brokers to call off the dogs and stop blocking real protection for ordinary Americans.”

ACORN held a demonstration during the lunch hour on Tuesday in front of the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown St. Louis. There were only eight people–strolling in a circle, holding handmade signs and shouting–in front of that imposing building. It would be easy to judge the whole event as kinda pitiful, but that’s only if you don’t understand the big picture. In the big scheme, Tuesday’s event was a resounding success. More about that later.

First, let me explain that the rally was aimed at putting pressure on four of the biggest mortgage servicers in the country–Litton (owned by Goldman Sachs), HomEq (owned by Barclays), American Home Mortgage (owned by Wilbur Ross), and OneWest, the new IndyMac. ACORN wants those four to allow their mortgage holders to refinance if they need to in order to avoid foreclosure. Eighty percent of the mortgage industry is voluntarily allowing people with adjustable rate mortgages that have exploded on them to refinance so that their payments will be no more than 31 percent of their earnings. In return for agreeing to help stop the wave of foreclosures in this way, companies were offered $75 billion in relief funds through the “Making Homes Affordable” act last March.

All the big mortgage servicers, when surveyed before the act passed, promised to help people in danger of losing their homes to refinance. So Congress did not deem it necessary to make such cooperation mandatory by law in return for the funds the banks would receive. Our lawmakers should have known better. Four of the biggest lenders–scum in $4,000 suits–took the money and thumbed their noses at the federal government and their own customers.

Helping out desperate homeowners is, one would think, the least these financial barons could do, considering how they’ve ravaged our economy. Here’s what they did. Mortgage servicers used to offer fixed rate loans to people who were good financial bets, reserving adjustable rate loans only for riskier borrowers. But there’s no law requiring they do it that way. So, since they could make more money from the adjustable rate loans, they began offering low teaser rates to borrowers, assuring them that the rates would only go up if interest rates went up (which was a lie). Often, they didn’t even mention that a fixed rate was available to people who qualified for it. It was just a little a sin of omission.

Then, once the initial teaser period ended, usually in two years, the mortgage servicers could raise the rates for any reason whatsoever–or none. Oh, and did they ever, because higher payments for homeowners meant more commission for those servicing the loans.

Glenn Burleigh, the St. Louis Metro Political Director for ACORN–that’s him in the red cap–experienced the misleading tactics himself when he bought a home. He had gone to the library and done research on his credit rating, so he knew he qualified for a fixed rate loan. But the loan officer where he applied insisted that he didn’t. Glenn told the man that he would pass up the loan rather than accept an adjustable rate loan and left. Later, the loan officer called him and–surprise–had “discovered” that Glenn was correct about qualifying for a fixed rate loan.

The first wave of foreclosures from this practice hit in 2006, but two more waves resulting from slightly different lending practices are due in the next couple of years. Amazingly, the four holdout companies are willing to see the entire economy go under rather than sacrifice their quarterly profits, because short term profits and balance sheets that look good for a nanosecond but don’t take the future into account are what determine CEO pay.

The young woman doing most of the yelling in the video is saying that her house payments went from $600 a month to $1,000 and she lost her home. The banks got their bailout, she says. “What about me?”

She’s already lost her home, but her actions today contributed to a victory for other homeowners. It didn’t happen in St. Louis, because none of the four offenders is headquartered here. This rally was just a show of support for the demonstrators in the four headquarter cities. The number here was small because a rally gets no mainstream press coverage unless it happens before 5:00 (or unless it’s huge), and most ACORN members work and can’t be there at noon.

But in Indianapolis, where OneWest is headquartered, the turnout was large; and eventually the president of the company, Terry Laughlin, walked out of his fortress and said his company would start helping customers refinance their loans. Americans are so angry at bankers and mortgage lenders that he apparently decided to cut off the bad publicity, knowing that Tuesday’s rally was only the first salvo from ACORN.

At the Goldman-Sachs headquarters in Boston, where fifty demonstrators showed up, the bank told its employees to leave for lunch by the back door. The honchos were well aware of what was going on outside. They wanted to avoid confrontation, and they did. For one day. But ACORN is far from through with this fight.

These Davids are going to hurt Goliath-Sachs.

A motley crew of ACORN activists showed up at Wachovia Securities at Jefferson and Market in St. Louis on Tuesday to present Wachovia with the Turkey of the Year award. Near as I could tell, the Wachovia Securities division in St. Louis takes up six city blocks. But the activists, all … what? nine or ten? … of them were undaunted. Like ACORN people in various cities, they wanted to get the word out to the local press that Wachovia, as well as American General, Yale Mortgage and Morgan Stanley, have yet to take any action to halt the mortgage crisis.

When the activists, trailed by two security guards, approached a building to deliver a letter outlining their complaints and requests, they were met by an amiable woman representing the company. She took the letter and the award. But while it’s easy to present a civil PR face to what the corporation sees as a dozen or so powerless busybodies, what Wachovia plainly doesn’t get is that we’re all in this economy together. Barack Obama has called on mortgage companies to declare a ninety day moratorium on loan foreclosures. Wachovia has ignored that request, even as its “new corporate family [Wells Fargo] has received at least $50 billion in bailout cash and tax breaks.”  

At least four million homeowners are a month or more behind in mortgage payments, so ACORN is asking Wachovia to follow the lead of other mortgage lenders–Citi, for one–who have declared a moratorium in order to use the time to modify mortgage payments down to terms affordable to the homeowners. Such action could be followed by government guarantees:

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has proposed using as little as $25 billion of the $700 billion bailout to guarantee up to half of the loss that may result from re-defaults after a modification. This insurance would help facilitate an estimated 2.2 million home loan modifications, which would have to reduce all housing costs down to 31% of a borrower’s monthly income to qualify.

ACORN also wants bankruptcy protections for principal residences to allow judicial modifications.

Congress must close the loophole that allows the wealthy to protect their vacation homes and yachts while leaving those who only own one home out in the cold. This simple change would help an estimated 600,000 homeowners keep their homes and avoid foreclosure through loan modifications to truly affordable terms.

When the reporter from KMOX asked the ACORN spokesman, Darryl Moore, if he knew anyone whose home had been foreclosed, Moore did describe the situations of two people he knew–but not in detail. The ACORN group that visited Yale Mortgage in Miami, though, came more than prepared to make their point:

In Miami, ACORN member Avery Salkey from Palm Beach, along with 25 other ACORN members from South Florida, presented the “Turkey of the Year” award to Yale Mortgage. They asked CEO Woody Kahn to meet with Salkey. Salkey, a customer of Yale Mortgage, was lied to by the company when signing her mortgage papers and now faces the sale of her home on Dec. 1.

“I wanted to ask him to call his attorneys to stop the sale, but he wouldn’t talk to me,” said Salkey.

When Salkey had first signed for her home loan with Yale Mortgage, she found that the payments listed were far more than they had previously discussed – in fact, they exceeded her monthly income.

“I told them I could not afford those payments. But then they said if I could make the higher payments for six months, they would be lowered after that. I knew I could swing it for six months, so I said OK. But when I brought this up to them after six months of making the payments, they laughed in my face and asked me where I had heard that.”

Salkey has been working with ACORN and ACORN Housing for a year, attempting to negotiate with her lender. But they told her they “don’t do loan modifications.” She has filed for bankruptcy. She has also tried to switch to a different loan servicing company, but Yale Mortgage would not release her payment history showing all of the on-time payments she had made.

On Nov. 14, Salkey got a notice that her house was scheduled to be sold at court Dec. 1. Later, she got a notice that her mortgage has been sold to another servicer – but the change is effective Dec. 1, later in the day than the scheduled court sale.

“I wanted to ask them to just put a stop to the sale so that I can start over with the new servicer, with a clean slate. But they do not respond to me or to others. It seems like this is something they have been getting away with for a long time.”

CEO Kahn, not surprisingly, refused to speak to her. She’s just one of those little people. The ones who don’t matter. The ones whose financial troubles could bring down this economy and the hotshots at Yale Mortgage with them. He doesn’t get that.

But that motley band of ACORN activists in St. Louis understands that sometimes compassion makes the best economic sense. Wachovia ignores them at its peril.

What’s the point of smearing ACORN if the valid registrations that ACORN turned in still count? That’s what I’ve been asking myself as the orchestrated GOP smear spreads from one swing state to another.

Last Tuesday, Las Vegas police raided ACORN headquarters. It was a carnival sideshow, a photo op with no substance, meant to compete on the nightly news with the presidential debate. (How can you believe anything Obama says? He used to work with these crooks.)

The big lies about ACORN have started in Ohio now, and the Saturday Post-Dispatch chronicled the spread of the smear to our state. Republican ‘voter fraud’ allegations are absolutely bogus.

Here’s the lowdown on ACORN. They screwed up in 2004 by not checking the registration cards their paid workers turned in. A few of those paid workers wanted to be paid more than they deserved, so they made up bogus cards. Now by the way, the only people who got screwed as far I can tell that year was ACORN itself–it paid those jackasses for work that was disallowed–because it’s not as if anybody turned up to vote as a consequence of the faked cards. And even if they had, they’d have been disallowed since local boards of election check the info on the cards.

Some voter fraud. ACORN was out of pocket for registrations that did the Democrats no good. You’d think the Republicans would be cheering.

Acorn photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user MartinLaBar.

But ACORN learned its lesson. Now it double checks every registration card its workers turn in–and they’ve turned in 1.3 million this year. ACORN checks for duplicates, checks to see if the card is complete, checks to see if the address matches who actually resides there–in essence does the work for the local board of elections–and separates the cards it delivers into four piles: good cards, incomplete cards, duplicate cards, and cards where no such voter lives at the address listed.

They don’t throw away the bad cards because they’re required by law to hand over all cards that anyone has filled out.

And here’s the kicker: for turning in the faulty cards, which they’re required to do and for sorting the cards properly to help election officials, they get accused of vote fraud. In Las Vegas, they get raided. Here’s part of the press release that tells ACORN’s side of the Vegas story:

For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application in to election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously.

As for the GOP push to discredit ACORN in Missouri, the P-D article plays stenographer, sure:

In the 2006 election, ACORN  submitted more than 5,000 fraudulent registration cards in St. Louis that led to indictments.

Although the paper fails to note that ACORN has improved its procedures and that it is required to turn in faulty registration cards, the article does conclude with this juicy bit:

But this year, the group has caused no such problems, according to Republican city elections director Scott Leiendecker. ACORN finished its efforts in St. Louis about three months ago, he said. So far, he said, “Everything’s been on the up and up.”

So there, Jack Danforth.

Back to my original question, then. Why raise all this unprovable fuss? I don’t know how much, if any of it, is a Republican penchant for satisfying self-deception, but the biggest part of must be to distract the media from the voter disenfranchisement that the GOP is busy quietly instigating. The New York Times reports:

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.

The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters.

…….

In three states – Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan – the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.

If and when that voter disenfranchisement ever gets traction in the MSM, we can expect lots of he said/she said. “You sliced our voters off the rolls!”/”You turned in fake registration cards!” Republicans hope that press stenographers will shrug and imply that both sides have been guilty.

In any case, Missouri isn’t on that NYT list. Why that is, I don’t know. It’s up to separate counties to purge the voter lists, so, much as I’d like to give Robin Carnahan the credit, I don’t see how her office could be responsible.

Here’s another question I can’t answer: Why isn’t the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign screaming bloody murder about these practices? Shining a spotlight on them might slow them down.

Photo courtesy of Bradblog  

Political Fix reported Tuesday that ACORN was planning to stop by Claire McCaskill’s headquarters on Delmar with cardboard boxes: “‘an award for helping Wall Street and forgetting about Main Street.'” ACORN proposes that she give the boxes to “‘any of the 153 Missourians that lose their homes to foreclosure daily.'”

“ACORN members are incensed by Senator McCaskill’s vote last week to kill a provision that could help 600,000 families facing foreclosure save their homes.  The Durbin amendment, which was offered to the Foreclosure Prevention Act, would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of the mortgages of primary residences to achieve an affordable monthly payment when mortgage servicers refuse to or are unable to make such modifications.  Bankruptcy judges already have this power for second homes, vacation homes, yachts, and other major purchases, and the Durbin amendment would close the loophole preventing modifications on primary residences.  Senator McCaskill voted to table, or kill, the amendment.”

” ‘We have always known Senator McCaskill to be on the side of working people.  Frankly, we are shocked that she would side with Wall Street over the interests of her constituents, and we hope this is just an aberration,” said Missouri ACORN board member Lynn Oldham.

ACORN is being haunted by the ghost of Bradley Schlozman.

Last week, ACORN and other groups sent a “letter of intent to sue” to the Missouri Department of Social Services for failing to enforce the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).  That law requires states to provide opportunity for voters to register at public assistance offices.  But a report just released by Project Vote demonstrates that the voter registrations at public assistance agencies:

“have dropped from 143,000 in 1995-1996 to just 16,000 in 2005-2006.” …

“Although hundreds of thousands of citizens in Missouri remain unregistered, many of them low-income citizens, the number of people the state is registering in agencies is one-tenth what it once was.”

As soon as their letter of intent was public came the refrain they expected:  You’re the scum that got sued last fall for faking registrations.  The second half of Jo Mannies’s article had to recapitulate that old news.

That refrain is part of the legacy that Schlozman left to the Missouri Republican Party, a gift that keeps on giving in the ongoing GOP effort to keep po’ folks from voting. 

Republican Vote Suppression:  Think Ohio 2004.  Think Florida every even-numbered year.  Think Voter I.D. laws. Think Bradley Schlozman.

Our state is a high priority battleground for Republicans.  That’s why they sent Schlozman here in 2005 to replace U.S. Attorney Todd Graves in western Missouri.  Graves, a Republican–but with ethics–had already peeved the DoJ by insisting on pursuing civil penalties against a convicted cross-burner.  But then he really stepped in it at the Department:  he refused to sign a letter to Robin Carnahan threatening her with a lawsuit unless she did more to remove unqualified voters from the registration lists.  (For “unqualified”, read “poor blacks”.) So D.C. sent in its hit man to replace Graves. 

Schlozman, of course, pursued the suit against Carnahan. A federal district judge recently threw out the suit, ruling that Carnahan was taking all reasonable measures.  But, with Schlozman long since gone from Missouri and now even from the DoJ, the spirit of their hit man lives on (in Blue Girl’s phrase) at “Just Us”.  They’re appealing the district judge’s ruling.

They’re doing what any politicized Justice Department would do:  pretending to ferret out voter fraud while they’re busy suppressing those no-count po’ folks.

The Carnahan suit hasn’t panned out so well, but Schlozman scored a coup by tarring ACORN right before the ’06 election.  ACORN played into his hands by not checking every new registration its workers collected, and Schlozman salivated when he caught some of the paid workers submitting bogus signatures.  Instead of doing what U.S. Attorneys have always been instructed to do, waiting until after the election to file suit in order to avoid politicizing an election, he splashed it all over the headlines five days before the vote.

That was the hit man’s gift that keeps on giving to the Republican party.  Naturally, ACORN fired the workers who cheated and it began checking every registration before submitting them, but it was too late.  Now, every time ACORN moves its little finger, Republicans scream, “You’re those vote fraud criminals.”

Schlozman and his mentors in the Gonzales group are smirking as ACORN squirms.