ACORN Funding Investigations Open Across the Nation

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) has cut funding to ACORN amid the widening scandal facing the group.

"I have instructed the State Fiscal Officer to conduct a comprehensive review of the state's relationship with ACORN, and all state agencies are to cut off funding for any current contracts with ACORN to the extent the law permits," Governor Barbour said.

Mississippi joins a growing list of states severing ties to the group after a video was released showing employees in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., advising two undercover activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute to lie about the prostitute's profession, suggested they launder the money and advised how to hide underage prostitutes.

San Diego's Board of Supervisors might go back and audit the group's voter registrations. Nice. Isn't that a little late? Considering that the group has repeatedly been caught engaging in voter registration fraud - a separate and distinct issue from actual voter fraud - it should have opened an investigation long ago. The ACORN office in San Diego says that if their voter registrations should be audited, so should all the other registrations. Good point (even if broken clocks are right twice a day). Local and state elections officials have repeatedly shirked their responsibilities to confirm that those who register to vote are actually eligible to vote (including failing to cull the deceased from voter rolls). But, special scrutiny should be paid to ACORN-related registrations primarily because of the flexible moral and ethical conduct of ACORN employees as witnessed on the multitude of videos.

Maryland Attorney General has finally launched an investigation into ACORN activities, stemming from the video showing the Baltimore office's gross misconduct. That's after Baltimore officials appear more than willing to overlook matters:

Hours after the Justice Department's inspector general announced Monday that he plans a review of funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Maryland's top law enforcement officer also moved to launch an investigation.

Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) asked and received permission from Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute "conduct involving" ACORN.

Gansler's investigation effectively usurps Baltimore City State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. She had called the secret taping of ACORN employees giving tax advice to a man and woman posing as a pimp and prostitute illegal under Maryland's requirement for two-party consent for audio recordings.

"As time went on, it became clear that the local authorities were not going to look into it," said Raquel Guillory, Gansler's spokeswoman. "It's obviously something that needed to be looked into, and that's why we've taken this step."

Baltimore's more interested in prosecuting James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles than going after the gross misconduct at ACORN. Curious how that works. Instead of trying to deal with the huge mess that O'Keefe and Giles kicked over with their expose, Baltimore's prosecutor wants to hit the duo. Nice.

It's also good to see that the US Justice Department is finally opening an investigation. They're going to look for improprieties in any funding obtained through the Department. I would suggest that Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services likewise open investigations given that ACORN may have obtained funds through both of those agencies as well as part of their homeowner assistance programs and other community programs.

Such investigations are long overdue (going back years in fact), but there is no way one can possibly ignore the mess.

Firing Workers Wont Be Enough

ACORN has announced that they fired yet another worker viewed on videos showing ACORN employees providing advice on how to break the law. Juan Vera was canned after he was shown on video of the San Diego office providing advice on how to engage in child prostitution, solicitation of sex, and smuggling of children across the border. Yet, Juan Vera's superiors first attempted to claim that he made the best of a bad situation.

David Lagstein, the group's head organizer in San Diego, initially said Thursday that he believed Juan Carlos Vera did his best to deal with a challenging situation and would not be disciplined. But three hours later, Lagstein reversed that decision.

He said he reevaluated the videos posted online in which Vera was secretly filmed answering questions about smuggling people into the U.S. through Tijuana. Lagstein said after further discussion with supervisors and state ACORN officials he decided Vera's conduct was "unacceptable."

How exactly is that a sign of good judgment on the part of Vera's superiors?

What does that say about Lagstein's moral and ethical flexibility where he first concluded that he would not be disciplined? What would it have taken for him to be disciplined? The only reason that Lagstein reversed his position would have to be pressure from above to fire Vera to make the mess go away.

New York continues investigating matters, and for now, ACORN has closed intake for homeowners seeking assistance. Bertha Lewis, head of ACORN vows to clean up the mess.

An internal audit will likely result in no substantive change, primarily because the so-called independent people involved are actually quite associated with ACORN and have a vested interest in making sure that ACORN gets cleared with a minimum of disruption.

Let's just say that law enforcement will have a much better time cleaning up the mess than Lewis if managers of various offices are engaging in the same moral and ethically questionable conduct as those who were fired.

The Houston GOP is calling for the city to cut ties with ACORN going forward. ACORN had a $155,000 contract ending this past June to provide homeowner assistance programs to local communities. This goes back to one of the core problems - monies for legitimate assistance of homeowners who need help gets commingled with political organizing. The group's various political organizing and homeowner assistance take place under the same roof and it is anything but clear that the group keeps them separate. That goes to whether the group is violating its tax exempt status.

UPDATE:
Michelle Malkin notes that the San Diego ACORN office was on the forefront of extending home loans to illegal aliens and promoted its program.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that “undocumented residents” comprise a vast market representing a potential sum of “$44 billion in mortgages.” Citibank enlarged its portfolio of subprime and other risky loans. ACORN enlarged its membership rolls. The program now operates in Miami; New York City; Jersehttp://acornhousing.org/index.phpy City, N.J.; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Bridgeport, Conn., and at all of ACORN Housing’s 12 California offices. San Diego ACORN officials advised illegal alien recruits that their bank partners would take applicants who had little or no credit, or even “nontraditional records of credit, such as utility payments and documentation of private loan payments.”

The risk the banks bear is the price they pay to keep ACORN protesters and Hispanic lobbyists from the National Council of La Raza screaming about “predatory lending” off their backs. These professional grievance-mongers have turned the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act – which forced lenders to sacrifice underwriting standards for “diversity” – into lucrative “business” opportunities. Or rather, politically correct blackmail. As the Consumer Rights League noted in a 2008 report on the group’s successful shakedowns of financial institutions, “an agreement with Citibank, a significant ACORN donor and partner, showed that some activists become less active when deals are in place."

UPDATE:
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) says that the efforts to defund ACORN are unconstitutional. Interesting. That's the first reasonable argument made in defense of ACORN vis a vis the defunding to date.

He claims that this is a bill of attainder. It's an interesting argument since Nadler is essentially saying that ACORN is insulated from Congressional action and can continue spending federal appropriations even if engaging in criminal or potentially criminal actions.

ACORN's Ethical and Moral Flexibility On Display Again

ACORN announced yesterday that they would shut down their homeowner assistance programs pending an independent review of the situation. That's a good start. The problem is that ACORN's problems run much deeper than that which has been depicted on the videos so far.

The latest video, coming from San Diego, shows one of ACORN's employees soliciting Hannah Giles for sex in exchange for providing assistance on smuggling girls into the US to engage in child prostitution.



ACORN has tried to cast these videos as random and isolated incidents, but the fact that it was so easy to get this kind of response from workers at multiple offices shows that ACORN's problems run much deeper than that.

They hire people with a certain moral and ethical flexibility, who show a depressing absence of understanding right from wrong. If they were so quick to provide assistance on how to break the law on any number of issues (child prostitution, tax evasion, etc.) what other kinds of questionable advice are they providing to the communities they claim to assist.

After all, ACORN claims that they want to help the lower classes advance and yet we see that their definition of advancement includes turning a blind eye to child prostitution and tax evasion.

So, while ACORN has fired several people in connection with the videos, the ACORN leadership has thus far escaped serious civil and criminal repercussions.

I expect that to change with the release of these videos and subsequent investigations opened in places like New York City and New York State. It would be a gross dereliction of duty on the part of state attorney generals around the nation not to take a closer look at whether ACORN's activities there are legal - including whether they are operating without licenses as in the case in Maryland.

Until ACORN can show that it has cleaned up its act, it should get no government assistance and any money earmarked to housing assistance should be reappropriated to other groups that have legitimate programs, such as Nehemiah Housing.

ACORN makes a big deal about providing homeowner assistance to underprivileged communities, and yet one has to question the kind of advice and assistance provided based on these videos. People coming in for assistance need to know the proper and legal methods of handling the real estate transactions they're interested in, and evading the law perpetuates problems within the community. Excusing such behavior as the ACORN leadership has done by claiming that this is a problem limited to a small group of its employees doesn't wash. It throws into question all of their operations nationwide, and ACORN has repeatedly had egg on its face by claiming that this was first an isolated incident, and then by claiming that its other offices weren't taken in by O'Keefe and Giles. They lost credibility - rightfully so.

Roger Stone at Big Government notes that NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo may have to investigate the Workers Families Party (WFP), which I've previously highlighted as having been cofounded by ACORN and which has had problems keeping track of monies.

Cuomo has to investigate these groups, and promising that he will insure that monies for ACORN goes solely to the homeowner assistance programs is insufficient. Member items (also known as earmarks and as pork) in New York are doled out to groups all across the state, and ACORN gets its share of member items. They don't specify that the money goes to homeowner assistance, but rather to the group generally.

For example, the 2009-2010 budget bill includes the following language from page 183 and 185:

45 ACORN/NYACA ... 5,000 ................................... (re. $5,000)
28 NY ACORN ... 10,000 .................................... (re. $10,000)
29 NY Acorn ... 2,500 ...................................... (re. $2,500)

That's a reappropriation of those monies. It doesn't specify what program the money goes to. It is the same for all the other programs listed in the budget bills.

Legislators know, or should know, that the money goes to a variety of operations within the groups it funds. For ACORN, they know it covers overhead, the homeowner assistance programs, and the political organizing, even though such organizing would conflict with its tax exempt status.

The best way for the Attorney General to get to the bottom of matters in New York is to conduct a full audit of ACORN operations to see where all the money has gone. Simply promising to ensure that the money goes to homeowner assistance doesn't address systemic problems within ACORN. Moreover, it doesn't address the questionable advice provided by ACORN to those seeking assistance.

UPDATE:
The House voted by a wide margin to defund ACORN. 345-75, with 2 present and 11 no votes. However, missing among the counts is none other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier claimed she had no idea what the Senate had done. Totally clueless. Fitting.

It was bipartisan, but some of the usual suspects wanted to protect ACORN's funding, including Democrat Charles Rangel (D-Tax Cheat, NY). All 75 voting to protect ACORN's funding were Democrats. Birds of a feather.

UPDATE:
ACORN is finally trying to strike back at O'Keefe and Giles, claiming that their Philadelphia office called the cops on O'Keefe. They have a copy of a police report claiming that O'Keefe caused a disturbance at the office on 7/24/2009. However, the precise nature of what happened in the office on that day isn't clear, and someone ought to ask O'Keefe about it.