ACORN in the crosshairs

WHEN TWO young conservatives, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, managed to capture incriminating video footage of ACORN workers giving them tax advice, right-wing pundits hit the airwaves to smear the organization--and not for the first time.

ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a community group with a long record of grassroots organizing around issues like affordable housing and the living wage.

It's also a favorite target of the right. So, of course, cable TV wing-nuts like Glenn Beck were drooling to fill the airwaves with evidence of ACORN's misdeeds.

In the video footage, a tax adviser working in a Baltimore ACORN office gives the two fake visitors ideas about how to file their taxes, and how to avoid filing for 13 underage El Salvadorans. Evidently, it took the pair several attempts to get the footage they needed.

The footage is the work of James O'Keefe, a 24-year-old anti-choice fanatic, who Fox News personality Sean Hannity recently introduced as an "independent filmmaker."

O'Keefe specializes in tricking people into saying embarrassing or incriminating things on camera. In the past, he secretly filmed a fellow UCLA student, Lila Rose, posing as a distraught 13-year-old who had gotten pregnant by a 31-year-old, and was trying to obtain an abortion at Planned Parenthood facility. Later, Rose accused the clinic of failing to report an incident of statutory rape.

Setting aside the questionable legality of filming people without their knowledge or consent, it's clear that O'Keefe is making a career out of lies and dirty tricks to reach political objectives--and the ACORN incident is no exception.

Hannah Giles, who played the role of "Kenya" the prostitute, is the 20-year-old daughter of conservative Townhall.com columnist Doug Giles and an "aspiring journalist," according to the site. In an interview with Beck, she called ACORN a "thug organization" that takes her tax dollars.

THE FOOTAGE was made public September 10 as the premiere story of the new conservative Web site BigGovernment.com, founded by Andrew Breitbart--formerly of the Drudge Report--who got his friends at Fox News to prioritize this "breaking story" and his site, even while most media outlets were focusing on health care reform.

As Beck declared on his radio show, "The health care thing is irrelevant now...This is who your president is in bed with--ACORN." He also made sure to put in a plug for the right-wingers' September 12 "teabag" march on Washington.

As the media watchdog organization Media Matters noted, this isn't the first instance of the conservative, or even mainstream, media going after ACORN. In 2008, they "claimed, suggested, or uncritically reported that ACORN contributed to the housing crisis by 'bullying' banks into irresponsible lending to minorities," Media Matters reported.

Then it was charges of voter fraud in the run-up of the 2008 election--a ludicrous claim, especially given the fact that it was disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida that delivered Bush the election in 2000.

But of greater importance than smearing ACORN is smearing everything and everyone the right associates with "community organizing." In the mouths of Republican blowhards, that phrase has become barely coded racism to vilify Barack Obama and other prominent African American politicians and activists.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, BigGovernment.com's Breitbart tied it all together: "What we're seeing here...is more of an outrage against the mainstream media...They didn't vet this president...or the people who are running this government and, quite frankly, taking it over...Now we understand what a community organizer is, period."

The conservatives want to take attention off issues that actually effect working people, like health care, and focus on ACORN.

To hear the right-wing attack, you'd think ACORN received billions from the government, but it has gotten just $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years--an average of $3.5 million per year.

This isn't to suggest that there are no problems with ACORN--or that because the right is hyping the current scandal, nothing wrong took place. As Bill Fletcher Jr. wrote at BlackCommentator.com:

It is important to separate the attacks on ACORN, which it is receiving from the political right, from the actual content of the organization's problems. Let's face it: any progressive organization, particularly one as significant as ACORN, must assume that it will be attacked by the political right...

Unless those ACORN employees were plants within ACORN, there is an obvious question: what could those employees possibly have been thinking about? What level of training and supervision, not to mention ethics, were they guided by such that they would think that this was permissible? On top of all of this, what sort of basic common sense did they lack that they would not GUESS that this might have been a set up?...

I know what the objectives of the right are: they want to eliminate any and all evidence of a progressive movement in the USA. What we do not have to do is make their job any easier.

IT'S NO surprise that Republicans were ready to jump in with condemnations of ACORN--but so did Democrats. Almost as soon as the scandal broke, Republican members of Congress proposed the Defund ACORN Act, which passed the House and Senate with support from both parties.

Congress members' quick action against ACORN--based on a hidden-camera trap planned out by a pair of right-wing activists, no less--is in stark contrast to their lack of action on much more heinous crimes committed by federally funded organizations.

For example, the military contractor Blackwater. As investigative journalist and author of the book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Jeremy Scahill, wrote:

The Republican sponsors of this bill are, of course, among the most vocal congressional lobbyists for massive government contracts to scandalous corporations such as Blackwater, KBR/Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, as part of the bloated war budget. The list of their crimes far overshadows the allegations--and more importantly, the evidence--against ACORN.

"De-fund the crooks," [Florida Democrat Rep. Alan] Grayson said. "The numbers of those who have filed fraudulent forms with the government--it's like a who's who of government contracting." In an interview on Salon Radio, Grayson put out this important statistic: "The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq."

Indeed, the bill to strip ACORN of funds could have consequences that members of Congress couldn't possibly have intended. It prohibits "the Federal Government from awarding contracts, grants or other agreements to, providing any other Federal funds to, or engaging in activities that promote certain indicted organizations."

According to the Project on Government Oversight, if this version of the House bill becomes law, 62 federal contractors--including Boeing, Northrop Grumman and GlaxoSmithKline--could be prohibited from receiving additional federal funding.

But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Washington to treat corporate criminals and hired mercenaries with the same zeal as the anti-ACORN campaign.

This only underlines the double standards of congressional Republicans and Democrats, who--aping the self-righteous indignation of right-wing radio hosts--take immediate action to punish community organizers, but the let the murders and swindlers go free.