Bank of America Corp. has cut off all its business with the housing arm of the ACORN advocacy group, adding that it “will not enter into any further agreements with ACORN or any of its affiliates” pending a review of the group’s activities. The move is a major blow to the left-leaning housing advocacy group — officially known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — as it reels from right-wing rancor and self-inflicted scandal. The organization has worked together with BoA and other big lenders for years to help prevent foreclosures and counsel hard-to-contact borrowers on their responsibilities. But all that was endangered several weeks ago, when tapes surfaced that showed “ACORN employees giving tax and housing advice to a couple who said they wanted to set up a brothel,” the Wall Street Journal said. The ACORN employees have since been fired. The tapes were recorded by undercover conservative partisans who posed as a prostitute and her manager. Such right-wing pundits have waged a concerted campaign against ACORN as a socialist and un-American group,

particularly after the 2008 presidential election campaign, when it became known that President Barack Obama had worked with ACORN as a community organizer in the 1980s. That campaign appears to have paid off in spades. Earlier this month, both the U.S. House and Senate passed bills to cut off federal money to ACORN in the wake of the “prostitute” tape’s publication. Then came BoA’s announcement. “Bank of America takes recent allegations made against ACORN and ACORN Housing Corporation employees very seriously,” a bank spokesman told the Journal. Michael Shea, executive director of ACORN Housing — the group’s loosely affiliated housing arm — told the paper: “We’re not surprised that our lending partners like Bank of America want assurances that this won’t happen again.” Shea said ACORN Housing has worked with Bank of America for nearly two decades. The group — one of 2,700 organizations endorsed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as housing counseling agencies — has counseled first-time borrowers on how to handle the mortgages, as well as contacted problematic homeowners and advised them on how to avoid foreclosure. The organization has performed similar functions for numerous other big banks over the years; with its urban focus and grassroots staff members, ACORN has often been more successful in directly contacting and working with distressed borrowers in inner cities than lenders could be by themselves. A spokesman from Citigroup Inc. told the paper they had a program in place to work with ACORN “to help us reach distressed borrowers we have been unable to contact.” A spokeswoman for ACORN Housing said the group “has made 18,626 proposals to lenders on behalf of distressed homeowners to help them avoid foreclosure in the past 12 months,” according to the Journal.