Accidental Blogger

Right wingers have always been very good at vilifying any organization whose politics don't match theirs, especially if those groups are advocates of the poor, minorities, women, immigrants or homosexuals. At one time or the other, groups like the NEA, ACLU, Planned Parenthood and even government welfare programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps have been objects of anger and derision. A favorite (and effective) tactic is to pick a grain of truth, an isolated incident, a statistically insignificant trend and occasionally, fabricated myths about these services and publicize them as true and widespread practices. Soon enough, with enough people repeating the highly exaggerated accounts of missteps and mismanagement, the organizations become tarred and feathered as un-American, wasteful, wanton and even immoral. The newest target of right wing ire is the community organization, ACORN, some of whose inept officials have been caught saying outrageous things on tape while being led on by conservative actors posing as pimps, prostitutes and other miscreants. (see this WSJ report dripping with gotcha sarcasm but not a word about entrapment) So, is ACORN really a group devoted to shady housing transactions, tax evasion, prostitution, voter fraud and even murder?  Are its employees quasi criminals masquerading as social workers out to defraud the system? Not quite so. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post explains the background of Acorn.

The embattled community organizing group is much in the news these days, thanks to the idiocies of a handful of now-suspended staffers having been filmed and YouTubed by a right-wing sting squad. Most of the stories present ACORN as, at best, a shady organization up to no good in America's inner cities, not to mention the nation's primary source of voting fraud.

What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does. Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.

What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work? Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.

Another major campaign has been to limit the interest and fees that banks charge homeowners. In the 1990s, ACORN spearheaded a number of legal actions, often joined by states' attorneys general, that compelled such lenders as Citigroup to change many of their practices. The group has led successful drives to outlaw the most egregious predatory lending in nine states. It also counsels thousands of inner-city homeowners and home buyers. (More here)

Now, I have no problem with incompetent and corrupt officials belonging to organizations that are beneficiaries of public money, being fired. If a crime is committed they should also be prosecuted whether they serve liberal or conservative causes. ACORN is currently being investigated and the federal grants it receives are under review. Well and good. However, another organization that has been implicated in murder, prostitution, financial irregularities and even torture, is operating with impunity. But it happens to be a Christian, conservative operation. The private security firm of Blackwater (aka XE) which the Bush administration engaged for supplying mercenaries for the Iraq war has never faced any criticism of its unsavory business practices from right wing commentators or elected officials. What is even more ironic is that the Obama administration continues to utilize Blackwater's services while squirming to distance itself from ACORN!

In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the country. A month later, Erik Prince, the company's owner and a former Navy SEAL, flew to Afghanistan as part of the original twenty-man Blackwater contingent. Blackwater worked for the CIA at its station in Kabul as well as in Shkin, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they operated out of a mud fortress known as the Alamo. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Blackwater, Prince and the CIA.

Now the New York Times is reportingthat in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater "as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda." According to the Times, "it is unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance."

The Timesreports that "the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune." A retired intelligence officer "intimately familiar with the assassination program" told the Washington Post, "Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong." The Postreported that Blackwater "was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted."

Jeremy Scahill's report in the Nation here and a video of Scahill in conversation with Bill Maher here.