“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?

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.

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.

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.

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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

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.