...The banks have been working to buy off ACORN, as Flaherty explains, because the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) gave politically savvy rabble-rousers the power to put the bankers over a barrel. “The banks needed somebody to market and administer loan programs in these formerly redlined areas,” Flaherty says. “So ACORN says, ‘Here we are,’ and they go from being critics to being business partners. That’s the most lucrative part, but there also have been direct grants to ACORN and its various affiliates.”
Besides JPMorgan Chase’s largesse, those direct grants include at least $3.6 million from Bank of America, which also donated thousands of dollars’ worth of stock to Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate. The Capital Research Center documented these donations to ACORN Housing, another node in the ACORN system:Most of the money moves beneath the radar. Direct gifts from corporations to nonprofits do not have to be disclosed by the donors, and the recipients only have to disclose them to the IRS. And direct donations are not the only means that companies have to fund ACORN: Local community-development grants and other low-key programs frequently are administered with an eye on politics.
JP Morgan Chase Foundation: $5,007,500 and $300,000 to separate state-level ACORN units
Given the size and complexity of ACORN’s operations, tracking them all is a daunting task. Flaherty’s organization will be trying to put proposals before the banks’ shareholders at this year’s annual meetings, either to cut ties with ACORN or to voluntarily disclose donations of the sort that the group has relied upon. “ACORN has the leverage of the CRA,” he says. “So it’s kind of a natural that ACORN targeted the banks long before they targeted the taxpayer.” But in 2009, the banks are the taxpayer, to no trivial extent. The purple pimp hat is on us.
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