Saturday, September 19, 2009

With big banks hitting taxpayers for $Trillions to pay their gambling debts, why is Congress jumping a tiny organization of relatively poor folks?

The answer to the title question is this: The big banks and other big-moneyed interests intend to tar ACORN with some of the very same election-related crimes that they themselves have been practicing ...and the Main Stream Media (owned by big-moneyed interests) have turned a blind eye to.


With regard to the recent (likely big-money sponsored) sting operation, which entangled only a very few of ACORN’s 700 employees, watch this DemocracyNow! segment:



Now let’s return to the “voter fraud” issue. The big-moneyed interests fear that if all of the “low- to moderate-income people across the United States” were to vote, candidates less deferential to the big-moneyed interests might be elected.


So, last fall ACORN was accused of registering voters who gave their names as “Mickey Mouse” or were registered in one state and falsely pretended to be an eligible voter in another.


But to the extent this may have been true, (1) such false registrations were clearly the faults of those who filled out the forms, (2) those folks who falsely filled out forms would be extremely unlikely to risk committing a felony double vote under the name Mickey Mouse and/or by traveling to another state to take this risk, (3) any conceivable culpability on the part of ACORN in such situations would not have been a felony, and...


(4) ACORN has never in fact been charged with “voter fraud.”


The same can’t be said of operatives sponsored by the big-moneyed interests.


Here’s what the MSM hasn’t told you: In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul and Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states. The group was run by Nathan Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party. And thanks to the sleuthing of John R. Brakey, Mark Crispin Miller, and Jared Irmas, it is known that Sproul’s voter registration services, “political consulting,” and certain unspecified post-election activities were paid for by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to the tune of $8,359,161(!) – making Sproul the eighth largest expenditure of the RNC’s 2004 campaign. (You can download a copy of this story here.)


Do you think the RNC lavished all this money on Sproul for honest election-related activities?


Well, in fact, back in the fall of 2004 Sproul’s firm was up to its corporate keister in dirty tricks THAT WERE FELONIES. Below I’ve extracted one paragraph from a much longer article entitled “Republican Dirty Tricks” by Max Blumenthal, posted on AlterNet October 15, 2004:


Sproul's dirty tricks may have finally caught up with him, though far from his stomping grounds in Arizona. In Oregon, Sproul's firm is being investigated by the state attorney general and could face a class-C felony, punishable by five years in jail, for allegedly altering and destroying voter registration forms. And in Nevada, state election officials have just launched an investigation into whether Sproul's Voters Outreach of America destroyed the registration forms of exclusively Democratic voters.


Did the MSM tell you about this? Well, they have been pretty mum on this subject, but CNN did put out this story. Still, there have been no news reports of any of Sproul’s people being convicted of felony destruction voter registration forms. But Sproul and Associates received as much as $2.3 million of their total $8.3 million in payments from the RNC after the 2004 Election. Could it be that much of this late-arriving money was a legal defense fund?


So let’s summarize.


Nathan Sproul and the groups he controlled were paid $8.3 million to commit (and perchance defend themselves against charges of) felony election fraud in 2004 ...and yet he appears to have gotten away scot-free.


ACORN, a group representing “low- to moderate-income people” (and thus unlikely to have a multi-million dollar defense fund) is falsely accused of doing what Sproul did ...and is now denounced by both houses of Congress for the indiscretions of likely no more than a dozen of its 700 low-paid employees caught in a sting operation (run by Sproul?).

Post Script:

The ACORN witch hunt

US voter registration group under attack

By Tom Eley

21 September 2009

3 comments:

Mark E. Smith said...

Finally, some accountability!

Many Members of Congress have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison. So we can stop funding Congress immediately.

Many members of previous administrations have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison. So we can stop funding the executive branch immediately.

Federal judges have been convicted of crimes and sent to prison, so we can certainly stop funding the judiciary branch of government immediately.

Many members of the military have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison, so we need to stop funding the military immediately.

And most importantly, many employees of some of the biggest multinational corporations have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison, so they should no longer be eligible for government contracts and their charters should be revoked immediately.

I like it! If having a few corrupt employees makes an organization a criminal enterprise, our entire government and its corporate owners qualify in every respect.

Defund them now!

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the reason why there were no charges pressed, were because the allegations were in fact fabricated. The investigations that went forward into Sproul & Associates revealed no evidence of fraud (which was all hyped by bloggers such as yourself). The reason why they didn't reveal fraud, was becasue no actual fraud existed. The story from NV was related to a disgruntled employee who went to the news AFTER he slashed his supervisor's tires AND after he threatened to go to the media if he didn't get his paycheck for hours that he didn't work (Eric Russell).

Sorry to burst your bubble on conspiracy theories.

David Griscom said...

Mark Smith is right on the money!

Anonymous is not. Out in Arizona, a place where I have good knowledge of what's been going on, investigations of election fraud by insiders are routinely rigged behind closed doors by "elected" officials who always find "no evidence of fraud" (despite the existence of mountains of irrefutable evidence of fraud out in the public domain thanks to thousands of hours devoted by patriotic volunteer sleuths). And those officials never let the public check their work, while judges rule that the ballots be destroyed before they can be recounted by others.