The saying goes, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” The old saying lets us know that even the big and mightiest things start small. The community organization named ACORN - Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now started small. Founded by Wade Rathke in Arkansas in 1970 while he worked for the National Welfare Rights Organization, the fledgling ACORN then stood for Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. Once it expanded outside of Arkansas they changed their name to what it is now.
On the surface they sound good. They say they stand up for the little guy, and fight for the rights of people. However, what we are seeing from this organization, on an ever increasing basis, is anything but good. Report after report shows a large monster with an agenda, funded by your tax dollars, that is involved with corruption, fraud, shakedowns, and criminal activity. The organization has gotten $53 million of your tax dollars since 1994, and has been earmarked to get an additional $8.5 billion in the Obama stimulus!
The latest outrageous offense happened this week. On Thursday Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal reported on an ACORN office in Baltimore that was caught on tape helping a pimp and a prostitute obtain a home for the purpose of running a brothel. They even offered assistance in helping the girl posing as a prostitute file taxes on her “performing arts” business. After being told straight out that the business was prostitution, the ACORN representatives told them to stop calling it prostitution and use a different term. When it was disclosed to the ACORN reps that the couple is planning to bring 13 illegal minors into the country from El Salvador to participate in the prostitution, the suggestion was that the girl list them as dependants! The ACORN rep did say not to list more than three in order to avoid suspicion.
Of course the pimp and the prostitute were really acting, and the two are responsible for secretly taping the entire exchange. 20 year old Hannah Giles and her friend, 25 year old James O’Keefe, decided they were going to expose ACORN for the fraud they are, and go into the local Baltimore ACORN office to purposely pitch this ridiculous tale to see how far they could take it. They, like all of us, were shocked at how ACORN was happy to help them lie about the nature of the business, conceal criminal activity, aid the couple in their efforts to include minors in sex trafficking, and lie to the Internal Revenue Service by writing off “legitimate” business expenses, like condoms.
When confronted with the damning evidence ACORN replied by saying “this film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed.” An ACORN board member, Margaret Williams, even said in her statement that these “Fox News agents” tried this in other cities and accused Fox News of being ”provocateurs.” First of all, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe acted of their own accord, and are not under the employ of Fox News. Secondly, another tape came out Friday with the same exact scenario replaying itself, this time in ACORN’s Washington D.C. office. The same two went in with the same ridiculous scenario, and to their surprise and ours, the ACORN agents there lavished them with the same helpful advice, and this time one even offered up her real estate card to help them get the home!
Margaret Williams opens up her statement by saying, “Fox’s attempt to smear ACORN Thursday September 10, 2009 is despicable, part of a coordinated, long-term campaign by Fox to damage ACORN.” Oh I see. She expects this nation to believe that Fox made them do it. Right. Apparently reporting on this illegal activity doesn’t make Fox News a responsible organization in her eyes. Even if the two that entered and secretly taped these transactions were Fox employees, that would be called investigative journalism. Remember when we could count on other, formerly responsible news outlets to expose this kind of behavior? Remember when we could depend on our free press to ask the tough questions, and investigate? Where are they now?
ACORN’s attempt to make this seem as if their poor unfortunate organization had only this one isolated incident, blew up in their face with the release of the second tape. Margaret continued to tout the wonders and virtues of ACORN’s efforts by saying, “Every day ACORN members are working for health care reform, living wage jobs, to end the foreclosure crisis, and to strengthen our public schools.” This brings me to another area of ACORN’s hypocrisy, the “foreclosure crisis.” ACORN themselves played a major role in our foreclosure crisis, not by trying to help, but by causing it in the first place!
A trip down memory lane is needed as we travel back to the early 90’s during the Clinton Administration. Then ACORN was busy shaking down banks and pressuring the government to get banks to lend more money to people who couldn’t afford to pay back the loan. ACORN didn’t call that responsible lending, they called it “discrimination.” They wanted tougher rules under the Community Reinvestment Act and strong armed the Clinton Administration to sign into law strict numbers that banks had to adhere to in their lending portfolios. The new rules for the CRA demanded that a specific portion of banks’ lending portfolios went to low income people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford the loan for which they were applying. Is it any wonder banks eventually had a glut of mortgages on their books that were bad? Now ACORN wants to portray themselves as the heroes in cleaning up the mess they created!
I suppose that is the same mentality that allows them to think of prostitutes and child sex traffickers as hard working citizens that don’t get a fair shake in our evil system. It is the same perverted mentality that makes them think that demographic is just underserviced and unfairly discriminated against. Do we see a pattern yet?
It is laughable that they even attempted a press release making it seem as if they are just a squeaky clean organization with a couple of employees that went bad. If it were just this one incident, maybe I could swallow that line, but let’s add the TWO prostitution, child sex trafficking and tax fraud incidents to their extortion and shakedown of banks. Don’t forget, they have also admitted to over 400,000 cases of voter fraud in last year’s elections alone, and are currently under investigation in 14 states! Did I miss anything?
American citizens were right to be nervous and highly skeptical of their involvement with next year’s census. Thankfully the events of the past two days saved this nation from all kinds of probable fraud problems in that endeavor next year. Friday the director of the Census Bureau announced an end to ACORN’s involvement and partnership with them, and thus saved our census from being poisoned.
It should take more than ACORN firing a few workers in two local offices to keep them from the microscope of several full scale investigations. They would have us believe that the few disposable employees were the problem and not the organization. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus tells us the opposite is true. Jesus says, “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.” ~Matthew 12:33
In fact this point is so important to understand Jesus said this multiple times in scripture. Earlier in the Book of Matthew, during His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” ~ Matthew 7:16-18
You can find the same advice from Jesus again in the Book of Luke, in chapter 6, verses 43 and 44. Finally Jesus had this to say on the subject, “A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?‘” ~Luke 13:6-7
Sound advice indeed. It is high time for the massive tree of ACORN to be cut down! The fruit they produce is bad because the tree itself is bad, all the way to it’s root system. Why should they continue to feed on our tax dollars with their history of corruption, shakedowns, bullying, voter fraud, investigations, tax fraud, aiding prostitutes, offering housing services to brothels, and offering to help further the expansion of sex trafficking of illegal, minor immigrants? Put pressure on your politicians to stop funding ACORN and even more pressure to launch a full scale, criminal investigation – an investigation that should involve several agencies of our government.
—————————-UPDATE—————————–
**Since posting this article on September 12, another video has surfaced in the media, this time involving ACORN’s Brooklyn office in New York. The same couple, O’Keefe and Giles, are responsible for this undercover report as well. Yet, ACORN sticks to its story saying that all of their other offices had kicked them out, a claim that O’Keefe says is not accurate. In fact he said at no time, in any ACORN office was he or Giles kicked out. In the latest example of sad, criminal behavior from ACORN, their amployee tells the couple, “You have to find another name for it. Honesty is not going to get you the house. You can’t say what you do for a living.”
Remember ACORN holds themselves out as the organization helping people whose loans that have foreclosed. One of the largest reasons for these loans failing is banks not doing their due dilligence in the underwriting process where lying about incomes and occupations was rampant. So it seems as if ACORN has been part of the problem, and receiving Federal dollars of your taxes in the process. In addition to encouraging blatant fraud on loan applications, their suggestions in these tapes also amount to tax fraud as well. In the latest video the ACORN employee is heard telling Giles to say that she is a “freelancer.” “Don’t say that you’re a prostitute thing or whatever,” the woman says. ”You know, what goes on in the house, we don’t care,” the ACORN worker says. “We just help you with the mortgage.”
What is even more absurd in the face of this mounting evidence that this is a widespread problem with ACORN, is ACORN’s response. Now they want to sue Fox News for airing the tapes! They blame Fox for a “smear campaign.” ACORN continues to release statements saying that they are being unfairly maligned and that it is obvious the tapes were “doctored.” If that laughable excuse were in fact really true, then why did they fire the poor, innocent employees? It would seem to me that if ACORN’s claim is true, then the fired employees would have a case for wrongful termination. You see? They can’t have it both ways. ACORN’s claim goes beyond ridiculous, but then again, they are flailing to protect themselves amid all of the scandals that have been uncovered about them. But no, they want to sue Fox News. Isn’t it the job of the media to report this kind of abuse? What happened to freedom of the press? ACORN wants to make the problem about Republicans, conservatives, Fox News, and the couple who made the tapes. According to them, it is everyone else’s fault, not theirs. I wonder what color the sky is on their planet.
What should frighten most Americans is how silent the rest of the media has been about this issue. Not one peep from most major news outlets. So many of them are failing to do their journalistic duty in reporting this blatent fraud and criminal activity in an organization that is so closely tied to Democrats and Obama in particular. Is it any wonder that individual programs on Fox News get higher ratings than combinations of other news outlets combined? The majority of America’s media is so in the tank for Obama and the liberal agenda, that they are guilty of deriliction of duty when it comes to reporting issues in an objective manner to America. In this writer’s opinion, their silence is only serving to aid ACORN in the problem. They basically do not care that such a criminal organization is getting millions of dollars in our hard earned tax money, and was earmarked to get $8.5 billion more in the Obama stimulus plan.
This is just three tapes so far. How many more exist? If this was ACORN’s response in every office so far that this couple visited, how far does the fraud go? How many other tax forms and loan applications that this organization helped people prepare are equally fraudulent and criminal? Conservatives are calling for investigations, but so far ACORN’s liberal chums in Washington want to only go after a Republican Congressman who accused Obama of lying during his speech. A claim by the way that isn’t entirely false. By making a big deal out of this one guy, their hope is to distract people from the people and organizations, like ACORN, with whom they have had close affiliations over the years. Call your Congress Representative and your Senators, and DEMAND that they hold ACORN accountable and turn off the flow of our tax dollars to such a deeply corrupt organization.
