One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
Two Missouri labor professors have been vindicated after a right-wing smear campaign almost cost them their jobs. Last month, the website BigGovernment.com—run by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart—posted footage of a labor relations class taught by University of Missouri professors Judy Ancel and Don Giljum. In the video, the professors appeared to make a number of statements backing the use of violence in the struggle for labor rights. But it turned out the video was edited in a way to distort their words—similar to recent video campaigns against ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR and former FDA official, Shirley Sherrod. "I was just appalled, because I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn’t saying what I had said in class," said Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City. [original includes transcript]
News From Underground is a daily e-news service run by Mark Crispin Miller, a Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU. It is based on his belief that academics, like reporters, have a civic obligation to help keep the people well-informed, so that American democracy might finally work.
Blogger's Note: I don't think that many of you are ready to watch the full 1 hour 17 minutes, but I found the first half hour to be totally engaging and immensely informative. (The rest is an open discussion of questions raised by the audience.) The first half hour is indeed a MUST-SEE for any American who has been led to believe that "voter fraud" is widely committed in the U.S. ...by liberals. No conservatives have ever been charged despite copious evidence of large-scale, highly organized, well financed, and decidedly fraudulent election activities (for the tip of the iceberg, go here).
The recent demise of ACORN has undoubtedly been a cause for celebration among those who would deny poor people a political voice. But it should also serve as a wake-up call to all those decent folks who don't actually hate poor people, but did believe ACORN was guilty of something, to begin wondering what else Fox News has been lying about.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) aims to organize a majority consituency of low- to moderate-income people across the United States. The members of ACORN take on issues of relevance to their communities, whether those issues are discrimination, affordable housing, a quality education, or better public services. ACORN believes that low- to moderate-income people are the best advocates for their communities, and so ACORN's low- to moderate-income members act as leaders, spokespeople, and decision-makers within the organization.
This doesn't sound so bad to me ...but then I'm neither a right wingnut nor a vulture capitalist.
Anyway, today's report of ACORN's demise follows the January 21, 2010 Supreme Court Decision that corporations have First Amendment rights and so can spend as much money as they choose to back their favorite "business friendly" candidate for high office. I put "business friendly" in quotes here, because I'm not talking about the typical business that provides quality goods and services at competitive prices. I'm totally in favor of this sort of business.
Rather, I have in mind "businesses" like the health insurance industry, which want to charge high premiums with no anti-monopoly restrictions and then deny the services in the event their customers get seriously ill ...and the "too big to fail" banks who run Ponzi schemes and Credit Default Swap casinos destined to destroy the economy but profit the banksters because those now in high office have guaranteed them tens of trillions of dollars of taxpayer "bailout" money.
So within a span of just three months "big business" has been given all the voice their money can buy, and poor people have been robbed of what little voice they've had up till now.
By MICHAEL TARM
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 23, 2010; 7:41 AM
CHICAGO -- The once mighty community activist group ACORN announced Monday it is folding amid falling revenues - six months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute.
"It's really declining revenue in the face of a series of attacks from partisan operatives and right-wing activists that have taken away our ability to raise the resources we need," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said.
Several of its largest affiliates, including ACORN New York and ACORN California, broke away this year and changed their names in a bid to ditch the tarnished image of their parent organization and restore revenue that ran dry in the wake of the video scandal.
ACORN's financial situation and reputation went into free fall within days of the videos' release in September. Congress reacted by yanking ACORN's federal funding, private donors held back cash and scores of ACORN offices closed.
Earlier this month, a U.S. judge reiterated an earlier ruling that the federal law blacklisting ACORN and groups allied with it was unconstitutional because it singled them out. But that didn't mean any money would be automatically be restored.
Bertha Lewis, the CEO of ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, alluded to financial hardships in a weekend statement as the group's board prepared to deliberate by phone.
"ACORN has faced a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era," she said. "The videos were a manufactured, sensational story that led to rush to judgment and an unconstitutional act by Congress."
ACORN's board decided to close remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1 because of falling revenues, with some national operations will continue operating for at least several weeks before shutting for good, Whelan said Monday.
For years, ACORN could draw on 400,000 members to lobby for liberal causes, such as raising the minimum wage or adopting universal health care. ACORN was arguably most successful at registering hundreds of thousands of low-income voters, though that mission was dogged by fraud allegations, including that some workers submitted forms signed by 'Mickey Mouse' or other cartoon characters.
Now, folks, please focus on the last phrase of the last sentence above. The "mainstream media" in general -- and Fox News in particular -- have been hammering ACORN for years for committing "voter fraud" (despite the fact that no ACORN member has been charged with such a thing). The fact is that, if an organization carries out a voter registration drive, it would be a felony not to turn in all voter registrations, even ones signed by "Mickey Mouse" ...occurrences of which were likely due to political operatives bent on sabotage, like for example that committed recently by James O'Keefe (go here and scroll through the entire series of photos).
What IS a felony, however, is to register voters and then tear up the registrations of those who declare themselves members of the party you want to loose. And the people who were actually charged with doing this very thing in the run-up to the 2004 Election were operatives employed by master dirty trickster Nathan Sproul who was paid over $8 million for his efforts ...by the GOP.
Question of the day (purely rhetorical, of course):
Why didn't the "mainstream media" put this story ahead of the simultaneously unfolding frame-up of ACORN?
Blogger's PS: Please see the reader comment below.
WTF?!: NYTimes Fails to Report Fed Judge Finding on 'Unconstitutional' ACORN Defunding Legislation
From misreporting to no reporting at all, questions keep mounting for the 'paper of record' about their bizarre record of failure on the ACORN story...
On Wednesday, March 10, 2010 The BRAD BLOG posted breaking coverage about U.S. District Court Judge Nina Gershon’s finding that day, that the Congressional funding ban on ACORN was an unconstitutional bill of attainder. Her finding included an order to resume federal funding to the community group which has been targeted by a years-long GOP smear campaign.
It's now Wednesday, March 17 --- a full week since the historic ruling was issued by a federal judge (in New York, of all places) yet, not one word about the ruling has appeared in the New York Times, America's so-called "paper of record."
What's wrong with this picture?
As we now know, the NYTimes has misreported the ACORN "Pimp" Hoax story time and again since last fall, yet both their Senior Editor for Standards, Greg Brock, as seen in emails published by The BRAD BLOG, and their Public Editor (ombudsman) Clark Hoyt, as seen in emails also published by The BRAD BLOG, have both refused to issue or recommend corrections despite being shown the gross, factual inaccuracies in the paper's coverage.
Furthermore, Gershon's decision last week heavily referenced a report [PDF] by the former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, released on December 7 of last year, finding no criminality by ACORN workers as seen in the highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped videos released last year by James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart. The publication of those videos led to the unconstitutional legislation undone last week by Gershon. Yet the New York Times has never so much as mentioned the Harshbarger report in its pages either.
So, again, I ask: what's wrong with this picture?
Blogger's Post Script: Monday, March 22. Perhaps goaded by this and/or other posts circulating on the internet, the New York Times Public Editor finally reviewed the ACORN story and the Times' part in it, causing him to admit that the Times had blundered and apologize (sort of) for the fact that their poor reporting might be to some degree responsible for ACORN -- a community service organization that has helped millions of disadvantaged Americans by organizing to confront powerful institutions like banks and developers -- now being on life support.
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?).
