Tag: ACORN

Categories
Accountability insider corruption

Nutty Acorn Shenanigans Never Stop

ACORN, a government-funded community activist group long noted for hard-left stances, has been earning more and more notoriety for sundry shady practices.

During the presidential campaign, the organization got in trouble for voter fraud. ACORN officials blamed a few bad apples. But phony registrations filed by its employees have been discovered in a slew of states. In 2008, 14 states began investigating the group for fraud.

Then there’s the ease with which many ACORN employees are willing to advise sex slave traders on how to avoid taxes.

As you no doubt know, in September of this year, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe posed as a prostitute and a pimp at many ACORN offices. They pretended to seek advice on how to avoid paying taxes for income from the child prostitutes they said they were importing into the country. They recorded these visits with a hidden camera, and employees in all too many offices proved eager to help. ACORN responded by firing implicated employees . . . and suing Giles and O’Keefe.

Now it is coming to light that — to save money — ACORN bosses have been telling paid employees to work for them as volunteers, instead, and earn their pay by collecting unemployment insurance. This, as blogger Michael McCray notes, would be a form of fraud.

A fraud to match other ACORN policies, I guess, and the handout mentality that permeates our nation’s capital.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom responsibility

Good Guys and Bad Guys

There are two types of people, those who divide people into wicked capitalists and saintly victims, and those who don’t.

The folks at ACORN, a lefty activist group, see only evil capitalists and downtrodden everybody-else.

Columnist Michelle Malkin reports how ACORN champions the cause of homeowners crushed by the credit crunch and housing collapse. Except that some of their poster-child victims are hardly innocent.

A few weeks ago, as a mob cheered and cameras recorded, an ACORN gang broke into a padlocked home in Baltimore. It had been owned by Donna Hanks, expelled when the bank foreclosed. “This is our house now,” ACORN activist Louis Beverly declared, with Donna by his side.

Man of the people, right?

Except that Hanks was not merely hammered by circumstances. She bought the house in 2001 for $87,000, but later refinanced for $270,000 — money she presumably spent. In 2008 the house was sold for less than the new loan but more than twice the 2001 price. In 2006, Hanks declared bankruptcy, but did not comply with the terms of the court. Malkin gives further details of her irresponsibility, but you get the idea.

There are innocent victims hurting, now, in the current financial collapse. But being a borrower rather than a lender tells us nothing by itself. As the antics of ACORN show, either can be the victim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

ACORN Falls Far From the Tree

Far left groups like the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center cry “fraud” whenever conservative groups make any mistakes in petition or voter registration drives. In fact, they scream “fraud” even when there aren’t mistakes made.

Funny, then, that I haven’t heard a peep from these creeps concerning the serious fraud allegations leveled at ACORN.

ACORN — that’s the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now — has deluged election officials all across the country with hundreds of thousands of fictitious voter registrations. In one state, the group knowingly hired convicts to register new voters.

The FBI is now looking into the group.

Even before these fraud allegations hit the national news, several outfits were highlighting ACORN’s conduct.

Just recently, Americans for Limited Government began a nationwide campaign, StopAcorn.org, to demand investigation into the group’s wrongdoing.

Ballotpedia.org has launched the Voter Integrity Project, which chronicles voter fraud, including ACORN’s activities.

Of course, ACORN isn’t limited to election-related shenanigans. The group also has a long track record of helping politicians bully banks into handing out high-risk, so-called “affirmative action” mortgage loans. Which, thanks a lot, helped bring us the housing crisis.

You might also be interested to learn that ACORN does it all on your nickel. About 40 percent of ACORN’s funding comes from taxpayers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.