The video was put together by a partisan Web site, www.biggovernment.com, which sent a man and a woman, dressed flagrantly as a pimp and a prostitute, to Acorn offices around the country to ask for assistance in setting up a prostitution business. In this video, the Acorn workers in Baltimore were eager to help, going so far as to suggest all sorts of tax dodges, lies and subterfuge to make the whorehouse a profitable enterprise and, at the same time, avoid law enforcement and federal taxes.
But as outrageous as that video is, the real outrage is this: Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is financed by taxpayer dollars! Despite the fact that it has been charged in several jurisdictions with voter fraud, Acorn has received $53 million in federal funds and stands to receive $8.5 Billion in Obama administration stimulus funds. Acorn receives money for federal housing assistance (hence, its employees could advise the pimp and prostitute on where to find housing for their underage workers), for voter registration and for other causes.
Acorn is unabashedly liberal, and the actors who exposed Acorn are unabashedly conservative, so some healthy skepticism is in order. An Acorn spokesman claimed the videos were false and threatened legal action, but Acorn fired the two employees in the video. Then Acorn claimed that BigGovernment.com had tried to trap Acorn employees in offices across the country but found fraud only in Baltimore. Then BigGovernment.com released additional videos from Acorn offices in San Bernardino, Calif., Washington, D.C., and others. Acorn employees at other offices were eager to help the budding entrepreneurs and ignore the illegality of prostitution, child sex slaves, tax fraud, etc.
Hidden-camera videos and reporters posing as someone else are always suspect, but you can't discount these videos merely because the organization that set up the sting was at political odds with Acorn. ABC News set up a sting of Food Lion several years ago, which was no less dubious than the BigGovernment.com expose of Acorn. A closer analogy was a sting set up by the Charlotte Observer a number of years ago attempting to prove that topless bars and massage parlors were fronts for prostitution. The Observer sent two "undercover" reporters, a male and a female, to these businesses and sought to catch the employees offering more than a show or a back rub. The Observer didn't have nearly as good a result as the Acorn sting. The actors who went to Acorn do not appear to be doing anything outside the parameters of investigative journalism.
Acorn has a lot of explaining to do, but so does Congress, which keeps shoveling taxpayer dollars to Acorn in the form of federal grants and pork-barrel appropriations. Want to eliminate waste and fraud in the federal budget? Start by cutting off taxpayer funding for all advocacy organizations. If Acorn, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings Institute wants a grant, let it come from private funding, not from the federal budget.
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