Minnesota ACORN Lobby Day
Raise your voice on issues that matter most:

Join ACORN Members as we

- Rally with Our Allies

- Speak Directly with State Representatives

- Hold Officials Accountable

Meet at the ACORN Office, 757 Raymond Ave #200, St. Paul
(Corner of University and Raymond) at 8:00am to carpool
to the capitol.

For More information call ACORN 651-642-9639

Acorn makes it happen at City Hall.

The action started outside City Hall Tuesday, March 27th with chants and a call to action.  Members held signs and made the loud cry for the City of Minneapolis to listen to its people.  This alone won us the opportunity to meet in person with Council Member Don Samuels.  

Before meeting with Council Member Samuels, we were granted the opportunity to speak with Recardo Cervantes from the Licence Bureau who agreed to a meeting with Acorn Members as well as Police and City Council Representatives.  This is a major accomplishment because the city has been avoiding this meeting till now.  This meeting will be on the official schedule soon so it will be ESSENTIAL TO OUR SUCCESS for every member to attend.  We worked very hard to get this far and now we must push Harder.

Our Meeting with Don Samuels gained a lot of information as to the success of the Corner Store Campaign.  Thus far, the city has only begun to scratch the surface in North Mpls and is virtually ignoring the complaints in NorthEast. They say that the problems with the most 911 calls get handled first. When Acorn first met with Council Member Paul Ostrow he said he new little about the Corner Store Task Force.  Therefore, we must follow through with this campaign and keep North East safe.  We can't let the city wait till these problems are out of control.  If you see something funny at a corner store call 911 and give them the exact address of the store not just the corner address. Join us at the next meeting to make your voice heard.

Council Member Samuels did say they are working on changes to the Licence requirements of the corner stores so that if the store breaks the agreements being now signed, they will be shut down. So it is happening but may take a while to clean up all of them. Some of the stores on the north side that have signed the agreements are showing greatly reduced numbers of 911 calls.

Congratulations to all our members who have given their time and energy to this campaign.  Today was a big success for each of you." Thanks...

There is going to be a big important meeting that we will need every one to attend in May when the task force makes recommendations to the City Council. More on this later.

 Come Join The Action

We will meet at Logan Park
Tuesday March 27 at 3 PM
carpool to Mpls City Hall
Action is at 4 PM

Click For FLYER

We want a meeting with the Task Force on
neighborhood crime to ask for the enforcement of the existing regulations of the sale of drug paraphernalia. We want the corner stores safe for our children in all neighborhoods of Minneapolis !!

``People selling drug paraphernalia are in essence no different than drug dealers,'' said John Brown, acting DEA chief. ``They are as much a part of drug trafficking as silencers are a part of criminal homicide.''

Full Article

Town Hall Meeting on Predatory Lending

Over 80 people packed the Jenny Lind Elementary Cafeteria tonight,
in a Town Hall Meeting on Predatory Lending with the
newly elected Congressman, Keith Ellison.

Our leaders did a great job of leading the meeting which included testimony from victims, stories from ACORN leaders about previous financial justice campaigns, an overview of our state legislation by the two authors in the House, and a great speech by Ellison to finish the night off.

Hats off to organizer Jeff Skrenes and leg/pol director Elliot Ginsburg for driving the turn out and coordinating the agenda, prepping members, etc.

FOX 9 news was there and did a great feature on their 10:00 news.
CLICK HERE

The major progressive blog in MN did a nice piece which I've posted below.

House of Shame: Legislators and Citizens Address Emotional, Legal Sides of Predatory Lending
Feb 27, 2007 -- 4:38 PM CST
Paul Schmelzer

Glarushia Davis blames "Minnesota Nice" -- and herself -- for falling prey to predatory lenders. A few years ago, she refinanced her mortgage in hopes of using the extra money to get new siding for her St. Paul home. She assumed her lender had the best of intentions and agreed to a loan with an 8.5 percent interest rate that would convert to a fixed-rate loan at the end of two years. But by the end of those two years, she said, the rate had swollen to 14 percent, and that promised fixed rate never materialized. Instead, she struggled with monthly payments that rose from $759 to more than $1,400.

"I'm embarrassed to admit I was that stupid," she said. She was one of several Twin Cities residents who discussed their experiences with predatory lenders at a town hall meeting in north Minneapolis Monday night. Such mortgage brokers offer quick and easy access to loans that benefit the lender while often leaving the borrower with unmanageable debt or hidden costs.

Organized by ACORN and Jewish Community Action, the meeting of about 150 community residents and leaders also included testimony by Guisela monthly mortgage payments ballooned from $1,200 a month to $1,500, she fell four months behind in paying. Speaking through a translator, she said the lender told her she'd need to come up with $10,000 in cash, plus an additional $700 in back payments to save her house. She lost her home four months ago. Likewise, Ignacio Garcia purchased a home through a major Twin Cities-based realty company, but within 15 days of closing, he was told the place was uninhabitable, and utilities were shut off.

Their stories illustrate what ACORN organizers and state legislators say are common tactics among predatory, or "sub-prime," lenders: granting loans without verifying the borrower's income or long-term ability to pay, deceiving borrowers about hidden fees that jack up monthly payments, and using "negative amortization loans," ones with payments so low, borrowers actually owe more at the end of a year of payment than they did at the start of the year.

Paul Schmelzer :: House of Shame: Legislators and Citizens Address Emotional, Legal Sides of Predatory Lending These practices are partly to blame for today's near-record home foreclosure rates here in Minnesota and the country in general, where there were around 1.2 million foreclosures in 2006. According to Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, "2.2 million sub-prime home loans made in recent years have already failed or will end in foreclosure. These foreclosures could cost as much as $164 billion -- an amount that could send more than 4 million children through college." Closer to home, there were fewer than 1,000 home foreclosures in Hennepin County six years ago, according to ACORN statistics, but in 2006, there were more than 3,000. In Ramsey County, that number jumped from 300 to more than 1,400 in the same time span.

State Reps. Jim Davnie and Joe Mullery, both DFL-Minneapolis, attended the meeting to discuss the predatory lending bills they'll each be introducing this session. The bills aim to do away with "no-document loans," explained by Davnie as loans "where they don't know what you can afford but they sell you the mortgage anyway." They also aim to rein in negative amortization loans, abolish penalties for borrowers who repay their loans early and ban what the lending industry calls "yield-spread premiums," bonuses paid to mortgage brokers who get borrowers to sign up for loans at a rate higher than what they qualify for.

"The best analogy I can come up with is, if at the end of the day the grocery store owner looked at the till and split with the cashier anything extra she was able to charge you on the bag of carrots," he said. "They've been kicking back some of that over-charge to the broker who sold you the mortgage."

Mullery's bill aims to give citizens the "private right of action"; that means a loan recipient can hire a lawyer who then gets the same legal rights the state attorney general has in defending individual rights. It also criminalizes predatory lending, in some cases. "If it's clearly a violation of the law, then they can be held for crime," said Mullery. "That's a lot more scary to them than a civil action where they may lose some money."

Like Davis, Dave Snyder, an organizer for Jewish Community Action, referenced "Minnesota Nice," admitting that the stories he heard Monday night made him "pissed off." Fair access to credit on reasonable terms is a basic tenet of his organization and his faith tradition. "A 13th-century biblical scholar and philosopher called Moses ben Maimonides teaches us that that highest ethical thing you can do to rebuild the world is to give somebody a fair loan so they can become self-sufficient," he said. "What a diminishment of that principle, what a defilement of that principle, what a corruption of that principle to have somebody giving a predatory loan that promises somebody to fulfill the American dream and then takes their home away."

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., capped off the evening with information on a federal predatory lending bill that is now being drafted. He expects it will be similar to -- and possibly stronger than -- a versionintroduced last year by Reps. Mel Watt and Brad Miller, both D-N.C., along with Barney Frank, D-Mass., new chair of the House Financial Services Committee. He says he'll work to incorporate features of the Minnesota bills in the federal draft.

Ellison, a longtime north side resident and former state senator, said "abusive mortgages" target people in districts like his -- and they contribute to the overall decline of neighborhoods. "In the sub-prime mortgage market, it's estimated that 20 percent of them -- one out of five -- are going to result in a foreclosure. They don't happen evenly everywhere. Yeah, there's a few out in Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, but they tend to cluster," he said. "You'll see multiple houses on the same block that are boarded up. That says this  neighborhood is vulnerable.

It says to some people who might want to buy there that maybe they might not want to buy. It says that if they turn around and re-rent these units, maybe the landlords will have to lower standards for who lives in those units. And before you know it, it has a negative spiral on the whole neighborhood. We will not allow the creation of slums in our neighborhood."

Vital neighborhoods, he added, rest on citizens supporting each other to expose and resist such lending practices. Bookending Davis' remarks early in the evening, he concluded that action, not shame, are key to defeating "well financed" opposition to lending reforms.

"We were raised to always want to pay our bills, and we get a little embarrassed when we find ourselves in a financial tough spot. We're saying, 'How can we be so dumb?' And we're taking all this shame upon ourselves, and we don't ask for help," he said. "Don't stand alone in this situation. When our friends and our neighbors and relatives tell us they got into a bad loan, we can't engage in shaming behavior. We've got to say the blame is not on the person who wanted to get a good loan, who expected to get a good loan, who had every right to believe they would be treated fairly, but is on the avaricious people who sold them this bad loan in the first place."

 Groups push for clean wage increase bill

More than 500 groups called for a wage increase with no strings attached.

One day after President Bush announced support for a minimum wage increase tied to new business tax breaks, ACORN released a letter co-signed by 500 organizations calling for a wage hike without any strings attached. "President Bush needs to listen more carefully to the message that voters sent loud and clear this November: a fair wage is long overdue--with no if's, and's or but's. The American people and organizations across the country agree that we need a clean wage increase bill," said ACORN President Maude Hurd.

Sen. Edward Kennedy plans to introduce a bill early in the new Congress that will raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour in three steps over two years.

Click here to read the letter from community, labor and religious organizations supporting a clean federal minimum wage increase bill.

Court halts restart of Katrina housing program

ACORN member Vanessa Gueringer spoke to the press in Washington D.C. about the ruling in ACORN vs. FEMA.

Charles Barkley views "social injustice'' in New Orleans

Harris gives Barkely a tour of the Lower 9th Ward.

On Dec. 13, TNT television cameras followed Tanya Harris, New Orleans ACORN head organizer, as she showed Charles Barkley, the former NBA player and TNT sportscaster around the Lower 9th Ward and other areas of New Orleans hit hardest by the storm. “He was honestly quite upset. He called it ‘social injustice’ for poor people that they are playing games in the Superdome and other neighborhoods look better and our neighborhoods look like disaster just hit them,” Harris said of the candid conversation with the basketball legend. New Orleans ACORN has been leading the fight for the rights of residents to return to New Orleans by preventing the city from seizing homes, stopping homes from being razed and fighting for the return of city services to the Lower 9th Ward. To view the interview, click here.

Did you vote for her on CNN ?