Even suspected pedophiles get defense attorneys, free of charge. ACORN seems to have no defenders this week, in the wake of the scandal brought out by an intrepid pair of citizen journalists who exposed that nationwide nonprofit organization. So, being an idiot, I am going to step up and take the job. Defend ACORN? Well, not exactly "defend". More like explaining a few things.
The first thing is that this was a Borat-style setup job. James O'Keefe, age 25, and his 20 year old female assistant, Hannah, spent last summer going from one ACORN office to another as pimp and, uh, employee. On for occasions, O'Keefe's goofy stories of running a prostitution ring and needing to get illegal support for it appeared to be okay with his audience of community organizing staffers. It is unclear how many of the ACORN offices threw O'Keefe out, or called the cops on him. Several, presumably, since he came up with four to video but spent the summer on the job. The four ACORN offices that were succesfully scammed were in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and San Bernadino, California. Staffers at those locations told O'Keefe and Giles how to evade law enforcement, shield their assets from the government and win loans for their illicit endeavor. I won't sugarcoat it, it was advice on how to break the law.
The thing to point out here is that O'Keefe was not running a law enforcement effort to ascertain guilt or innocence. He's not educated on that topic. He was trying to come up with a great little video to inflame some conservatives. That worked, obviously. O'Keefe started his video career a few years back at Rutgers University, taping an unwitting college official who was informed that lucky charms should be removed from the college cafeteria by virtue of being anti-Irish. Obviously the college official could not shift mental gears quickly enough to understand that he was being mocked for "political correctness".
From the standpoint of the ACORN staffers, and also the college official, sitting on a chair bemusedly while trying to mentally struggle with your training that "the customer is always right" while being told a really crazy story is a risky bit. The ACORN staffers have all lost their jobs. In addition, Congress has terminated funding to ACORN, and an investigation is pending.
On one level, the O'Keefe video served a useful purpose, revealing shortcomings in ACORN interaction with clients. At the least, they were poorly trained, or not trained at all. What it does not reveal is a conspiracy to defraud the US government, or a pattern of intentional abuse. We have no way of knowing if ACORN has ever given such advice before without being asked for it. We have no way of knowing if anyone else even asked for it. It's not the sort of thing most pimps would do, they stay busy. In an unrelated case, ACORN staffers apparently defrauded the government by registering imaginary voters. Apparently, those staffers wanted to get paid for doing no work? The FBI and at least 15 states are investigating those accusations.
On a blog discussing this event, I found the following question:
"Why doesn't Mr. O'Keefe go to the offices of UBS and tape them advising their clients on how to evade taxes on millions of dollars by opening offshore accounts? How about exposing the sale of credit default swaps, which brought down AIG? Why waste your time with this 2 bit nonsense when there are real crooks out there?"
Well, there's a question. From my standpoint the main problem with ACORN appears to have been a complete lack of supervision of front line staff. That's the sort of thing that causes organizations, be they for-profit or non-profit, to evaporate overnight. But do we know that ACORN has defrauded the US taxpayer of billions of dollars? No, we don't know that. Actually, there is no way for that to be true, because US taxpayers have not given ACORN billions of dollars. And at this point, looks like they are not going to give ACORN ANY more dollars.
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Comments: 22
The corruption at ACORN both bubbled up and trickled down. You covered one aspect of how it bubbles up, but uh, you missed San Diego where an ACORN worker advised "the couple" to bring their pubescent prostitutes from El Salvador through Tijuana because he had contacts who could move them across the border.
But that is just the latest scandal.
How about the shakedown artists who staff ACORN's shock troops. A quick poll around the lunch table revealed that everyone had, at one time or another, been physically intimidated to give money to an ACORN hustler. Legally, that is a shade on the other side of robbery...
But from the seeds of little crimes - great crimes grow.
Forget about hundreds of indictments for voter fraud, let's get to the real meat stuff, the trickle-down corruption - embezzlement. Dale Rathke, the brother of the founder Wade Rathke, embezzled a cool million from the organization.
Hey, what a few million between liberal buddies?
Remember Air America? They embezzled a million from the Gloria Wise Boy and Girls Club. So what's the problem? Well, instead of reporting the crime to the police (notice a pattern here?), ACORN's board simply transformed the embezzlement into a "loan" to be repaid over 40 years.
Hey!! I have no money, no assets, no collateral either, so why can't someone write me a $1 million unsecured personal loan?
Chris, don't waste your time trying to defend the indefensible. Simple do what Jon Stewart did and yell "What the F***"
See (Gather's link window is not working) http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977818741
"Those cases drew little attention. Not so the embezzlement scandal.
Kettenring confirmed that Wade Rathke's brother, Dale Rathke, stole around $948,000 from the organization in 1999 and 2000, and that Wade Rathke became aware of it in 2000 but told only a few people. It wasn't reported to law enforcement.
Dale Rathke was removed from a leadership position in 2000. He and Wade Rathke were fired last year, and an anonymous donor compensated ACORN for the missing money, Kettenring said.
Two board members sued in August 2008, accusing Wade Rathke of failing to properly report the embezzlement.
Wade Rathke told AP last October that he took responsibility for his brother's "mistakes" by resigning in June 2008 as ACORN's chief organizer. ACORN removed the board members who sued. Lewis said they were "aggressively trying to distract the organization from its core mission."
Wade Rathke said last fall that he remained chief organizer for ACORN International. Kettenring said the two organizations have no relationship, and that ACORN insisted that Rathke's group change its name. It is now Community Organizations International.
Rathke has said he meant to resolve the embezzlement with "private restitution." Reporting the case to police could have put ACORN at risk of financial ruin, Rathke said.
"One choice would have been to go that way," he said in the 2008 interview, "but then we wouldn't have been able to collect that money."
...
Again as Jon Stewat says, "What the F***"
Embezzling $1 million is not a MISTAKE, it's a freak'n CRIME and you remove the board members who sue because your brother stole money and you didn't report it to the police?
What the F***"
We need a special prosecutor....
ACORN is a conflagration of doomed vicious pigs that are eventually going to alienate so many people that no one will listen to their witless screed ever again. It turns out that that is now including the U.S. Senate – who have voted to cancel any Federal funding whatsoever to the ACORN housing projects. Their funding was pulled because of an undercover video that was shot in an ACORN office, wherein an ACORN official advised a man and his girlfriend, disguised as a pimp/prostitute combo, how to commit tax fraud and use underage illegal immigrants to work for them. That's a bad move – and now
rev="vote for" title="ACORN Senate Vote 83-7 Against Funding Rotten Group" href="http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/09/15/acorn-senate-vote/ ">ACORN won't get any payday cash from the taxpayers, and their deal is going DOWN.
The political issues keep intruding. For you an me, ACORN is an organization that appears to suffer from serious incompetence in some areas but had valid intentions and served an actual purpose. To many conservatives of course, it served as the shock troops of Obama in some cases partially financed by taxpayers who hate Obama. We are therefore not going to get everyone to see eye to eye on ACORN. Some investigation by actual law enforcement, as opposed to conservative activists with digicams, might clarify the extent of the incompetence or corruption.
That is a myth, and to be completely honest, a racist myth.
The notion that inner-city people need surrogate fathers and mothers to take care of them is absolutely insane. ACORN positions itself between inner-city communities and what should be readily available government services.
In places like Chicago, New York, Washington, Baltimore and L.A., Democratic functionaries have managed to corrupt the delivery of basic human services into an old fashioned patronage system, modeled on Tammany Hall.
What is needed is to free inner-city populations from patronage and corruption and deliver tax dollar to the people for who it is intended without intermediaries like ACORN siphoning off funds for their own purposes.
In other words, we need ACORN like we need tape-worms.
Sorry, it is not a myth. I don't appreciate being refered to as needing a father or mother to get what should be readily available to me as a citizen. Think again. It is quite often not. It is said to be but often whole segments of the community are ignored or are dealth with by using unreliable statistics or mindsets which has nothing to do with reality. We all get tired of hearing that those people really don't want to work yet when even a handful of menial low paying jobs are available the lines wrap around the block with applicants. Often there is a lot of misinformation about what goes on in many communities. Only a few elected officials actually attack the real problems. Most adhere to what the major community desires. As far back as I can remember the best way to get most things done is through an intermidiary as if thats how the government was set up. Or to be more specific is how electe officials deal with it.
I grew up in such a community.
I witnessed first hand how a black community that had higher moral standards than the typical white suburb of today, was destroyed by "The War On Poverty".
As for jobs, one has to wonder what created a situation where a person can migrate from a rain-forest in Guatemala, travel several-thousand miles, cross two borders and thrive in a land where they do not know the language - but a native can fail to find an equal job.
The answer is simple.
The immigrant did not grow up in a neighborhood destroyed by well-intentioned but poorly thought out poverty programs..
Because politcal machines controlled by the Democratic Party in the major cities are so incompetent, corrupt and patronage based that few services are actually rendered, - we therefore are required to host an incompetent, corrupt and patronage based system of Democratically controlled "community organizing" groups to the deliver the services that the suburbanites take for granted?
What, can I ask, is the common denominator here?
Is it not the incompetence, corruption and patronage oriented partisanship of the Democrats?
Is the P D a criminal element?
Do they do more good than harm?
Who would benefit from their demise?
It is an opportunity for ACORN though if they root out such malfeasance elsewhere and take an aggressive stance against this kind of advice rather than simply blaming the duo who filmed the problems. Suing them also isn't too bright as it starts opening a lot of requests for records. Best bet at this time is to admit problems and start cleaning house.