By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — As the embattled community activist group ACORN announced today in Washington an internal investigation into allegations of improprieties by some volunteers, members in the organization’s birthplace led a rally in support of health care reform.
The mission of Arkansas’ chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has not changed amid the scandal involving the national organization,
Arkansas ACORN Chairman Maxine Nelson of Pine Bluff said. She said she plans to make sure the poor and under-served are represented.
“It’s not going to affect what we do locally,” she said after the rally on the state Capitol steps. “We work in the neighborhood, we work on issues that affect the every day citizen. We will continue to work on our issues like health care reform, which is not only a national issue but it’s a local issue.”
The organization, founded in Arkansas nearly 40 years ago, is active in 42 states and represents more than 400,000 low-and-moderate-income families organized into more than 1,200 chapters, according to ACORN’s Web site.
“I’m sorry to hear about the events that supposedly occurred, but that was in another state, it was not in Arkansas,” Nelson said. “Arkansas and other states shouldn’t be penalized.”
Today, ACORN officials in Washington announced they had selected former Massachusetts Attorney General Scot Harshbarger to investigate its housing program and other public service projects amid allegations of voter registration fraud and the airing of a video on which ACORN employees were caught giving tax advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp.
Congress is moving to cut off the organization’s federal funding.
Nelson said a loss of federal funding would hurt ACORN’s efforts to help those in need purchase homes, live in safe neighborhoods and improve job conditions.
“I hate to see that because it would be the low income people who would be affected. They would be hurt the most,” she said.
Today’s “Big Insurance: Sick of It” rally in Little Rock, organized by a coalition of groups including ACORN Arkansas and Health Care for America Now Coalition, was held in conjunction with rallies held in dozens of cities across the nation.
“If insurance companies win, we lose,” said Candis Collins, state chairman of the Health Care for America Now Coalition.
About 50 people participated in the rally and then marched a short distance down Capitol Avenue to the Victory Building, where the Little Rock offices of United Health Care, one of the nation’s largest insurance companies in the nation, are located.
Led by Collins, a small group entered the building and tried to give the CEO of the company a pledge card urging the company to support health care reform. Group members were asked to leave, but not before slipping the pledge card under the office door.
