ACORN, an umbrella organization of community groups that serves poor people in major cities across the country through housing, legal advocacy, family services, and higher wages, has lost all federal funding, after decades of working for low-income, disadvantaged Americans.
That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings, not even being provided a copy of the full, unedited video tapes shot by conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles at a couple of ACORN offices.
This is serious stuff here. This is not a game of gotcha, of cheap political points, of practical jokes -- not when this is money that helps in many real ways in impoverished communities around our country.
It is vital to assess how this backlash was accepted so quickly in light of videos that were from someone whose films are funded by conservative backers, videos that misrepresented ACORN through editing and not disclosing other failed attempts at their desired response, which may well have been dubbed over, if O'Keefe would dare to release the unedited tapes in their real context to prove otherwise.
A significant reason that this ACORN backlash has moved through Congress like Montezuma's Revenge is that this particular hidden camera stunt had the ring of "child prostitution" in it, which most politicians of either party would run from rather than dispute its irrelevance. "Anyone defending ACORN is for child prostitution" is an immediate fallacious meme. It's not like we're talking about the Catholic Church here, who still gets federal funding.
Noteworthy is that there have not been any previous allegations between child prostitution and ACORN. In this weekend's LA Times, O'Keefe himself asserts that this ruse had nothing to do with prostitution, importing underage sex workers, or tax help for starting up a business.
"Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization," he said. "No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find."
That's what this is really about: the elections, and the threat that has been hyped tirelessly that ACORN is in some way stealing your vote.
Before I digress into the long campaign to smear ACORN because of its successful voter registration, I don't want to be accused of changing the subject to the elections. O'Keefe clearly stated that is what these stunts were about from the beginning.
There is much to dispute in O'Keefe's quote. There is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are getting elected "single-handedly" by ACORN, and it is a wild exaggeration. Many claims of voter fraud are made, few instances ever occur.
What has been distorted is that these allegations surround voter registrations, not actual votes, and that ACORN has regularly flagged forms that were incomplete, duplicate, or unverifiable. By law, anyone collecting voter registration forms has to turn in all that are used, even if they know the forms will not be processed.
Far-fetched is the idea that no one in the media has been putting pressure on ACORN. That O'Keefe would even think ACORN could elect politicians single-handedly is because of FOX News' rampant coverage and conflation of ACORN conspiracies and allegations, to the extent that John McCain worked it into his stump speech by the end of the 2008 presidential election.
The red herring of voter fraud as an excuse to deny others the right to vote is a well-worn claim. Voter suppression, specifically using the fear of "voter fraud" to advance voter suppression, is a topic I have explored and documented in-depth in my documentary Free For All! which you can see online for free right now. I also produced a video about ACORN with Video the Vote focusing on the fraud of voter fraud.
David Iglesias, a Republican U.S. Prosecutor for New Mexico, investigated allegations of voter fraud throughout the state at the urging of Republican leaders, and when he found no evidence and would not prosecute falsely, he was fired, as asserted by David Iglesias in his testimony before Congress and emails recently declassified from Karl Rove.
But again, I don't want to be accused of dodging the issue -- I am just looking to rebut the persistent falsehood which directly affected this kid's motivation to punk a community organization into losing millions of dollars to help the poor.
O'Keefe is comparable to the FBI informant who brought down the Bronx terrorist plot -- only that there would not have been any actual plot were it not for this FBI informant actively recruiting mentally challenged Muslims from mosques for this plot, which apparently involved entrapping people who were dumb enough to listen to him.
O'Keefe could well have actually attempted to show something about ACORN's voting registration controversies -- by speaking to registrants who admitted falsifying voter registration forms, or following up on who registered and who voted, or even interviewing ACORN directly. But none of those would have involved a minister's daughter dressing slutty, so you can't really blame him.
So it came to pass that in this effort to dispute voter registration that Giles and O'Keefe conceived of the worst sounding scandal they could invoke, and traveled the country to ACORN offices across the country to find someone to take their time to humor them in the improv game of "Yes, and."
And they eventually found some clueless ACORN employees, people far too eager to offer good customer service than employ any common sense. A couple of workers comply with O'Keefe's outlandish inquiry for underage brothels in dispensing tax advice.
The well-publicized clips are shocking enough, and have been exploited as much as any couple of minutes of video can be. Glenn Beck taunted other networks for not covering it. Even Jon Stewart bunted on it, as if his guest interview were Sistah Souljah. As a potent testament to Stewart's "Most Trusted Newsman" gatekeeper status, the House next day voted to cut all federal funding for ACORN.
It is worth noting here that what transpired on O'Keefe's videotape were conversations about hypothetical situations -- not actual prostitution, no actual crime, and not proof of an agency-wide policy or program involving prostitution or illegal immigrants. In fact, O'Keefe's experiment proves this -- that several other ACORN offices would not be ensnared by their absurd scenario, and turned away these provocateurs. One office in Philadelphia filed a police report because they were alarmed by the pair.
Ironically, the only thing illegal in some of these tapes is that O'Keefe is filming illegally. States like California and Maryland have strict consent laws about surreptitious recording, which is why the news and entertainment industries have long figured out workarounds for hidden cameras. (Hint: Vegas.)
As the crankosphere raves over how the Media didn't uncover this, it is worth pointing out that not only are the tactics against the standard of journalism, the lack of disclosure and misrepresentation pushes this expose well out of the range of journalism and in to the realm of entrapment.
As it was, O'Keefe had to misrepresent a conversation where a woman stated up front that their inquiry was illegal, but played along because she figured it was a gag. Another misrepresentation by FOX was the breathless uproar about a woman who joked that she had killed her husband -- well after it was established that her husband was alive, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others kept repeating the ridiculous claim for another day, demanding an investigation, since they obviously didn't have the resources as a major news network to confirm that this guy was alive.
Nor is this O'Keefe's first foray into being the Tucker Max of conservative hacks. He pulled a stunt on Planned Parenthood entrapping receptionists and donation reps into conversations where he said he wanted to kill off black people, while his compatriot Lila Rose called and claimed to be underage to see if the clinics would report statutory rape. (Lila Rose just recently called for abortions to be held in public squares to create the mass gross-out that would therefore make them all illegal.)
In a detailed response from Bertha Lewis and Steven Kest :
O'Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008 he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization's affiliates. During the calls, O'Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O'Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes. O'Keefe's intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are.And in college, O'Keefe showed women their place with his video wit, as reported by Media Matters:
As a Rutgers University undergraduate, O'Keefe videotaped a classmate distributing to a Women in Culture and Society lecture a handout that emphasized that a "good wife always knows her place."
And most tastefully of all, O'Keefe drove around posing as a Publisher's Clearing House van offering big checks to people, only to taunt them that the money is what was going to bank bailouts. Black people sure are suckers for that one!
Do not-so-subtly racist or sexist stunts count as courts of law? Shouldn't there be a requirement that they at least be funny, besides mean for the sake of mean?
Is this same adolescent accountability accepted by defense contractors, when Blackwater and its owner Erik Prince are implicated in murder? He just keeps getting contracts. Rep. Darrel Issa from San Diego sent out a letter bragging of cutting ACORN's money for all of us, then asked us to give him money. San Diego has had political scandals that have led to actual convictions, not simply recordings of speculative conversations. Isn't it time to slash San Diego's federal funding? All of this is not to get off subject, though. Whatever angry conservatives want to insist the subject is.
It is natural for many to shirk away from defending ACORN in light of this footage. But this particular exchange is not just cherry-picked -- it was planted, nurtured, and harvested, the latest to take down an organization that empowers the numbers that vote Republicans out of office.
Follow John Wellington Ennis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnennis
John Atlas: What is Acorn? And Why Progressives Need to Support It
I can't wait until dems the stop feeling guilty for scaring white republicans and accept that they elected a president with a decent majority (in recent comparison), and that they need to stop making concessions to a party that would have never made concessions to the dems.
There's definitely some drama-thru-editing going on here. Even with the edited videos, if you take the time to watch them you get a VERY different impression. I've watched two of them -- San Diego and NYC -- and there's NO illegal activity going on at all:
http://www.osborneink.com/2009/09/acorn-san-diego-mucha-dificultad-sobre.html
Entrapment goes both ways. This could be fun..
Who is in for dressing up as a Faux News reporters - Glenn Beck mask and Coulter lookalike - and "entrap" O'Keefe in to admitting he was acting illegally? No need to ask for links - just post it on Youtube
Excuse me, but our REAL enemies attacked us 8 years ago, or perhaps he has forgotten that WE ARE AT WAR.
Why does he haight America, that very same America so beloved by liberals and dems, why does he haight the United States so much???
It is the neocons who trashed this country's soul, and the progressives that are working to rebuild it. Until that soul is rebuilt, our economy will fail as well. The neocons destroyed this country!
Mr. Ennis, can I get a link for this please? I've had my suspicions about this story from the start, it's just too convenient that the Rightwing's favorite Enemy Organization du jour should also turn out to be open to helping set up whorehouses for underage immigrant girls. I've seen the backstory on the San Bernardino tape, and heard people suggest that the tapes were edited before they appeared on Fox. But the misrepresentation above, I had not heard about before. Where can I get the full story?
I think what made me skeptical about this story was that it went for so long with only Fox covering it. Fox has a reputation for covering a lot of fluff and smear campaigns instead of real news (this drama about Bank of America and the flags on the lawn being a good example).
Excerpt:
"They were not believable", said Ms. Kaelke of the two actors. "Somewhat entertaining, but they weren't even good actors. I didn't know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephen Colbert does – saying the most outrageous things with a straightface." While her sense of humor might not be funny to many people, the fact is that she spun false scenario afterfalse scenario and the videographer ate them up.
For example, in response to the set-up by the filmmakers in which they say they are trying get the young woman away from her abusive pimp, she responds that she was abused by her former husband as well (true) and that she shot and killed him (false). He is very much alive and living near Barstow, CA.
However, this is taken as the gospel truth, not just in the film itself, but also by several "news" personalities,indicating that no journalistic standards were applied to making the video or vetting it for broadcast.
Further, as the actors repeatedly noted how nice she was being, Ms Kaelke responded, also repeatedly, that her"niceness" was just her, not ACORN. "My supervisor would shoot this down like faster than a bat out of hell."
and evil incarnate. I've noticed for years, for example, that Republican governors have obsessively tried to close down nearly all county hopstials in their state, especially in urban centers.
This is the WHY behind most of the conservative backlash during the Clinton administration, and especially the Obama administration. The Rethugs have been desperate to create a hybrid of a "Christian" theocracy and a corporate oligarchy, and they have come damn close to succeeding. The racism behind most of the attacks on Obama are also fueled by their utter hatred and contempt for most of the country and most of the human race. Do not delude yourself into thinking that it is any more complicated than that. Their greed, hypocrisy, arrogance and sense of entitlement is all part of their mind-set. They have played their hand too many times to dismiss it for any other set of reasons.
We all know what targeting the poor to get into a house at the expense of government regulation has done to the economy. It does not work. It hurts the country as a whole.
Acorn is corrupt from top to bottom although there are a lot of people at the lower levels that have their heart in the right place. They are strictly paid pawns doing overt acts to make Acorn look good to the public. What is taking place down in the bowels of the organization wreaks with corruption and has for as many years as the organization has been around.
You should simply come out and say "poor people do not deserve a home." You show your ignorance of the facts and economics when you perpetuate the lie that the CRA has hurt the economy.
That's right, ACORN (the organization).