The little ACORN in state government
Up in Washington, ACORN suffered yet another body blow today, as the House voted 345 to 75 to prohibit any federal funding for the liberal community organizing group.
The Senate had passed a similar measure on Monday, by a vote of 83 to 7. Even the White House now disowns the organization. Sanctioning prostitution, tax evasion and the corruption of underage women _ on video, no less _ will do that.
But it was here in Georgia that the ACORN story took a less predictable turn.
A group of Republican lawmakers held a news conference this morning to announce they would scour the state budget for signs of taxpayer money going to the Asociation of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
The participants were state Reps. Ed Setzler of Kennesaw, Tom Graves of Ranger, Mike Keown of Coolidge, and Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers of Woodstock. Graves and Keown are announced candidates for Congress.
The intention was to show that Georgia lawmakers were “on their game,” Setzler said. “The question that has raised its head for us in the last couple weeks here as state legislators, are there state dollars flowing to ACORN and its affliates?”
The lawmakers declared that, in an investigation that had only begun the day before, their minions in the House and Senate budget offices had combed through 1.4 million documents, and had turned up a single contract between ACORN and the state Department of Human Resources for $104,000.
No state money is involved. Only federal money and cash from private foundations. ACORN was hired to help make poor people aware of the federal food stamp program. The contract expires on Sept. 30.
“It’s a glimpse of where a lack of accountability is present,” said Graves, who is running for U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal’s seat. (Keown is running against U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop.) A reporter quickly asked Graves whether he was speaking of Gov. Sonny Perdue. Of course not, Graves said. His words were directed at Washington.
This afternoon, Perdue issued a press release thanking the lawmakers for bringing the contract to his attention. Said the governor:
In July, I directed my office to review all consulting contracts the state has with outside vendors to look for budget savings; that review did not identify the ACORN contract, because it does not involve state funds.
The state of Georgia will not renew the contract, which expires in 13 days. Further, I have issued an executive order that prevents executive branch agencies from doing business with ACORN in the future and calls for a review of any existing contracts with ACORN.
Perdue spokesman Chris Schrimpf said other contracts will be reviewed over the next week, but “we’re reasonably certain that there are no more.”
Here’s the thing: That single contract was let on Oct. 1, 2008, even as Republicans _ in the heat of the presidential campaign _ were roundly accusing ACORN of wholesale voter fraud. Schrimpf said the ACORN contract was negotiated at the “sub-agency level,” without the governor’s knowledge.
The lawmakers said there is no evidence that ACORN had not lived up to the terms of that food stamp contract. Nor is there any indication that the organization had engaged in criminal activity here. But they weren’t willing to rule it out, either.
“Right now we can’t bring you that evidence, but it’s not something we can take off the board,” said Rogers, the senator. “It sort of defies logic that they would be white-lily clean in Georgia.”
One reporter asked, if the state had entered into an association with an organization so rife with corruption, as the lawmakers attested, whether it might not be wise to have the head of DHR or other state bureaucrats questioned by a grand jury. But the legislators thought this unnecessary.
That said, the lawmakers also indicated that they are considering a search through publicly available records to seek out funding sources of all ACORN affiliates in Georgia. Some sort of legislation in the 2010 session of the General Assembly is a foregone conclusion.
My AJC colleague Ernie Suggs reports today that ACORN has shut its doors on Mitchell Street in downtown Atlanta:
Brian Kettenring, an ACORN spokesman, said that about four months ago, managers in the group’s national office decided to close the Atlanta office. He said that one person has been working for ACORN out of her home wrapping up several projects.
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13 comments Add your comment
retiredds
September 17th, 2009
5:50 pm
I am so glad that our Republican legislature is on top of such an important issue of national security here. Now when these boys return can we get something substantive done on transportation in this great state!!!
Democrats=Retards
September 17th, 2009
6:40 pm
Do you get paid to do this crap? Becuase you suck at it.
Lucas
September 17th, 2009
6:54 pm
ACORN seems to be a generally lousy organization, and I’m glad that their funding got cut. But “an issue of national security”? Dunno about that one.
Hilary
September 17th, 2009
11:59 pm
Rich white people get corrupt and we fork over billions. Poor black people get corrupt, well now, they must be held accountable.
Teela
September 18th, 2009
5:16 am
Enter your comments here
You can parse your sympathies all you want, Hilary….corruption is corruption, regardless of color. And since we have a Black Pres now? Perhaps he will do something about the corruption of ‘rich white people’. And are you for letting go black people for promoting prostitution, tax evasion, etc?
Interesting. No wonder the divide widens with this mentality. Two damn standards on corruption based on color.
Concerned USG Faculty, Staff, K-12 Teachers & Georgia Taxpayers
September 18th, 2009
6:48 am
Enter your comments
The fact that another version of Georgia’s own ACORN has been ignored by Governor Perdue and Georgia legislators should be pointed out. AJC may occassionally print a Letter to the Editor about mandated teacher and staff furloughs, but will not publish Governor Perdue’s recent statement in which he said that the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia has “exclusive authority” to do what they want with millions of dollars in “deferred USG presidential compensation” packages – not disclosed appropriately to Georgia taxpayers or donors (millions of Foundation funds scheduled to be given to USG presidents quietly). If legislation was corrected, then the Board of Regents would not have the ability to give out donated Foundation funds under the table to USG Presidents whose full salaries, supplements, deferred compensations, etc. are circumvented so well that noone sees the real “ACORN” in the Board of Regent of the University System of Georgia.
Is anyone in the General Assembly listening? Governor Perdue certainly is not and certainly not Chairman Seth Harp and his Senate Higher Education Committee. There is a strong – but quiet -backing for new legislation to mandate Board of Regents accountability. Quiet because USG faculty and staff know they cannot speak up. It is clear that legislation change bringing back BOR accountability will not happen with our current Governor and Legislators.
Regina
September 18th, 2009
7:53 am
I SUPPORT ACORN
REGINA UPCHURCH
MEMBER SINCE 1999
Georgia ACORN has worked tirelessly to help the low-income families in destitute situations. They have helped families in emergency housing situations to find homes. GA ACORN has helped refer people find employment opportunities. Over the last three years GA ACORN has helped working poor families with their tax returns and have returned thousands of dollars to the our clients. Further, the same organization has worked to make sure that families who need benefits and who are eligible are able to apply for them.
Georgia ACORN has never received state of Georgia funds, not a cent.
ACORN: Facts about Fox News Attacks
September 17, 2009
· ACORN is a community organization with hundreds of thousands of member families. They are working every day stop foreclosures, increase safety in urban neighborhoods, campaign for quality, affordable health care, and encourage citizenship and voting. ACORN provides free tax preparation and earned income tax credit assistance across the country as a community service; the organization has helped families prepare 150,000 free tax returns and obtain $190 million in tax refunds in the last five years;
· ACORN Housing Corporation runs one of the most successful first time homebuyer and foreclosure prevention programs in the nation.
· In July 2009, ostensibly independent filmmaker James O’Keefe engineered undercover teams to visit upwards of ten ACORN offices around the country, posing as a prostitute and her companion.
1 In many of these offices, ACORN staff threw the scam artists out; some also called the police.
2 The videographers finally duped some ACORN staff in a few offices into talking to them;
3 Some of the videos of these conversations that have been shown on Fox appear to have been doctored; [1]
4 There is some evidence that these scam artists convinced some staff members that they were trying to help the supposed prostitute escape from a violent pimp and to protect a group of girls from him.[2]
· The media and public officials should demand to see the full, unedited video tapes before passing judgment on the integrity of an important, national community organization.
· ACORN and ACORN Housing managers have already said that the actions of these employees are inexcusable, and taken immediate action in response. They have both terminated the employees in question, and begun to take a set of steps to prevent any further inappropriate conduct. This means that it is inexcusable that they weren’t filling out paperwork for real intake sessions and were entertaining casual non-professional conversations, unrelated to their jobs.
· ACORN’s response has included:
1 Halting all new intakes into ACORN’s service programs until the completion of an independent review, and immediate in-service training for all frontline staff.
2 Engaging ACORN’s outside Advisory Council, comprising leaders from the government, labor, business, and non-profit sectors to immediately name an independent auditor and investigator to conduct a thorough review of the training protocols for frontline staff working in the service delivery programs as well as the larger management of these systems.
Legally, it is important to note that while a few employees said stupid things, no loan applications, taxes, or other documents were filed. ACORN’s tax program includes multiple steps to get through the process, including quality reviews. The scam artists didn’t even get past first base;
· It is Fox News that seems to have broken the law by illegally obtaining and broadcasting secret videos under false pretenses, a felony under Maryland law. ACORN has filed suit against the videographers there.
· Fox’s campaign to attack ACORN is part of a larger, coordinated effort that reached into the Bush White House[3], into the McCain presidential campaign, and across the Republican Party and right-wing organizations and media. This is also part of the same rightwing machinery that has been attacking President Obama, calling the President a racist[4], mobilizing racists and gun-toters to oppose the President’s healthcare plan, and the same machinery that has variously attacked Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, all three prominent individuals of color. There is a conscious strategy from the right to divide and conquer the nation using race, and the attacks on ACORN must be understood in this context.
· While Fox and the rightwing machinery focus huge amounts of time, energy and resources on the behavior of a few employees at ACORN, they have yet to demand investigation into the actions of those who are responsible for the current economic collapse, such as AIG, who have actually received billions and billions in taxpayer funding.
· While it is critical for ACORN to move forward with the steps they have announced, the unfortunate truth is that those who will suffer the most from this situation are the thousands of people that ACORN would have been providing assistance to in avoiding foreclosure, filing their taxes and working to improve their communities.
——————————————————————————–
1. In San Bernadino an employee filmed by the scam artists was clearly (though foolishly) being sarcastic with what she thought were practical jokers. Fox reported her clearly non-serious statements (that she had killed her ex-husband, who is in fact alive) as fact.
2. From p. 28 of New York Transcript on http://www.biggovernment.com:
Hannah (Eden): But they should throw Sonny in jail, not me, he’s the one who got me started
Milagros (counselor): yea but its[garbled]
Hannah (Eden): I mean he got a whole slew of which is why I also want a house
Volda (loan counselor): yes because he prey on little girls yea
Hannah (Eden): He’s got all these 13, 14,15 year old girls from El Salvador and that’s what—I need to protect them like I know what its like and I have to protect them and like give them somewhere to live.
3. Just a few weeks ago, Karl Rove’s emails pressing for the termination of New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias came to light. Iglesias was under attack from NM Republican leaders in part for his decision to not investigate ACORN for supposed voter registration fraud. In fact, Iglesias had looked at the issue and found them to be without merit. He was fired.
4. Glenn Beck, Fox News
Tina
September 18th, 2009
9:02 am
So, did the reporter just entirely miss the part about them closing up their office but still claiming to be doing 100K worth of “outreach to tell poor people about getting more tax dollars”? They get the “contract” in October. The taxpayer money comes in a few months later. Then a few months after that, they close their “office.” But they’re still fulfilling the “terms” of the grant, of course.
I went to the DHR in 1992 and reported my VISTA supervisor for pocketing community outreach grant funds he’d received but then did no work for — ironically for the same amount — 105K. The VISTA director told me not to do so, but I went anyway because it was the right thing to do — way to be principled, VISTA. That’s where I learned about these scams — serving in the domestic peace corps. The DHR didn’t investigate my report. They were disinterested. It’s all political graft.
Think about it for a second, for God’s sake. What sense is there in paying some private agency — which actually spends all of its resources on sleazy electoral activism, and I worked with them, so I know — to “educate people about their right to food stamps”? You have no curiosity whatsoever about the propriety of this type of scam? I’m happy to explain it, step by step, but I don’t see why it would be necessary to do so. And Regina, you know what I’m talking about. You people take our money and feather your little political fifedoms with it while pretending to help the poor. Just like that voter registration drive we non-profit workers were forced to “coalition” in, the one where certain people got paid and nobody cared much about the citizenship status of the registrants. Too bad there is no curiosity about that, either, just endless partisan sniping dished out as news. I voted Democrat, and I was appalled by the criminality of the ACORN types, et al.
And in a city like Atlanta, with its tragic child prostitution history, Regina, I’d think you’d drop your sneer a tiny bit and apologize abjectly for being part of an organization that has endorsed the sexual exploitation of young girls and sex trafficking.
Blue
September 18th, 2009
1:11 pm
Stuff & nonsense. Wall Street bankers make off with hundreds of billions. Smaller banks fail because of their greed and over-reaching–and the taxpayers bail out the banks through FDIC, taking all the loses.
And our GA & U.S. pols continue to grandstand the ACORN thing. They of course realize that we are a nation of sheep,
Roekest
September 18th, 2009
1:26 pm
Blue–
ACORN was telling people how to smuggle in underage girls and how to pimp them, with the knowledge that money be used to help fund a Senate campaign. Wall Street appears like a babe in the woods compared to that.
Clarkkent
September 18th, 2009
1:31 pm
I love Glenn Beck. Where is the network media on this story. They have serious cases of crainial rectumitis.
Grumpy
September 18th, 2009
2:14 pm
Roekest–Are you kidding us? The biggest pimps in this country are the ones who go to an office every day on Wall Street and steal billions and billions from the American taxpaying suckers. This ACORN thing is a great distraction from our brilliant Republican political leadership who couldn’t find their a$$es with a flashlight and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy. They’re successful at pulling this off because they’re just a little brighter than their constituents. Sonny Perdue gets a free tax break written into law just for him and saves himself thousands and thousands of dollars he would otherwise owe the Georgia Dept. of Revenue for a Florida land deal, and you guys freak out over this two-bit ACORN operation. That’s why our political leadership is successful at letting their buddies steal for themselves–”let’s give the suckers something of a distraction while we empty the till.” You people aren’t just sheep; you’re dumber than sheep.
BobR
September 19th, 2009
3:44 pm
This wasn’t even state funds, so I would consider it a non-issue, or at least it should be down at the bottom of the priority list. What galls me is this:
“Right now we can’t bring you that evidence, but it’s not something we can take off the board,” said Rogers, the senator. “It sort of defies logic that they would be white-lily clean in Georgia.”
It seems the height of hypocrisy for any state Rep or Senator to decry the state ACORN group as probably not “lily white” when the state congress is so rife with corruption. They go to BBQs hosted by the lobbyists so the new congressman can meet and greet the lobbyists, fer crissakes.
Hey Senator Rogers – how about cleaning up your own glass house before you start throwing stones?