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Fake ACORN Pimp Pleads Guilty; the New Yorker Adds its Voice to the Anti-ACORN Story
What's the difference between James O'Keefe, who made national headlines with his ACORN undercover video, and ACORN? O'Keefe is a criminal and ACORN is not. Yesterday O'Keefe pleaded guilty to charges of entering federal property under false pretenses when he attempted to embarrass Senator Mary Landrieu because of her support for the health care legislation. O'Keefe, along with three co-defendants, said their goal was to show that the Senator's office phones were working, yet people opposed to health care reform could not get through to register their opinions. He was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine.
Despite numerous official investigations and innuendos by the extremists, like Republicans Rep. Darrell Issa (CA), the Ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, ACORN has never been convicted of a crime. Issa released a report in 2009 falsely accusing ACORN of hiding "behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy ... to manipulate the American electorate."
A related story has emerged concerning O'Keefe and New Yorker magazine. I love the New Yorker, read it every week, and once believed its well-earned reputation for fact checking. But then I read Rebecca Mead's story in the May 24 issue about Andrew Breitbart, the right wing media provocateur. Breitbart had advised conservative activists O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, a young journalism student and the daughter of a conservative Christian minister, on how and when to release their provocative gotcha video tapes many of you have seen. They purport to show ACORN staffers across the country giving illegal advice to O'Keefe and Giles who disguised themselves as a pimp and prostitute.
Mead reported the incident this way:
"Breitbart's biggest scoop thus far has been a series of videos made by ... James O'Keefe, which was posted on Big Government last September. O'Keefe, along with Hannah Giles...travelled across the nation and entered several offices of Acorn, the community-organizing association, with a hidden camera; they posed as a pimp and a prostitute who were seeking housing and business help."
Mead then vividly describes what occurred in one ACORN office:
"In a visit to an Acorn office in Baltimore, O'Keefe and Giles politely introduced themselves as having 'kind of a unique life situation.' As Acorn employees solicitously offered them routine small-business advice (file a 1099 tax form, look for deductions), O'Keefe and Giles slowly revealed what their unique life situation entailed, then presented an unorthodox business plan: to smuggle a number of underage Salvadoran girls into the country, with the goal of sexually enslaving them. The Acorn employees were, alarmingly, unalarmed by the proposal. 'My job is not to judge people,' one of them told O'Keefe and Giles."
What is wrong with this picture?
O'Keefe's tapes were misleading, doctored, and edited, yet reported as fact by the right wing press as well as CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and now the New Yorker.
O'Keefe never posed as a pimp when he talked to ACORN staffers. He presented himself as a friend, or boyfriend, or a colleague of Giles, who was posing as the prostitute. O'Keefe wore a dress shirt and Khakis when he entered ACORN offices, and later spliced in shots of himself wearing the pimp outfit in the final videos to make it appear that he had worn them in the meetings with ACORN. To sensationalize the tape, O'Keefe dressed up in cartoonish pimp garb for the bumpers shown on television. The outlandish costume aimed to make ACORN's African-American intake staff look like buffoons. Despite O'Keefe's refusal to release the original, unedited footage, the media would be duped into erroneously reporting or suggesting that O'Keefe pretended to be her pimp.
ACORN's Baltimore office was just one of ten O'Keefe and Giles entered. In most of the offices ACORN's staff turned the pair away, reported the couple to the police, refused to provide them any aid, and in one case tried to convince the phony prostitute to get counseling. In no ACORN office did employees file any paperwork on the duo's behalf.
Independent investigations of the incident by the former Attorney General of Massachusetts, the Brooklyn District Attorney, California's Attorney General, a federal district court, the Congressional Research Office concluded that ACORN had done nothing illegal, the tapes were doctored, and O'Keefe never posed as a pimp inside ACORN's offices. In an interview with the Washington Independent, Giles admitted that the images of O'Keefe in an outlandish pimp outfit were edited in later. While Mead conceded that the tapes did not expose endemic corruption at ACORN or any evidence of any actual wrongdoing by Baltimore employees, her piece left the overall impression there was something very wrong at ACORN.
Further, like so many other media stories about ACORN, you don't learn anything about the group, besides the scandal. Meade supplies just one fact; ACORN is a "community-organizing association." Was it an effective one? Is the group large, small, new, old? What else did ACORN do besides provide advice? Was it similar to other groups? Why did Breitbart go after ACORN? What is a community organizing association? What is the context for the controversy besides involving Breitbart?
Mead does not report that several scholars say ACORN, a predominately African-American group, is one of the most effective anti-poverty groups in the country and that it had office in more than 700 neighborhoods of 70 cities across the country. Its 400,000 dues paying low and moderated income members successfully fought banks that engaged in predatory lending, employers that paid poverty wages, and developers that gentrified low-income neighborhoods. There's no mention that ACORN has strengthened our democracy by registering more than a million low-income, minority and young voters, the hardest to register groups in America. Many in the media got the story wrong, but only Jon Stewart (who had joined in the anti-ACORN chorus after the O'Keefe videos were initially broadcast) made a public correction. He devoted a segment on his January 27, 2010 Daily Show to making fun of O'Keefe's credibility and praising ACORN for doing "God's work."
Inaccurate reporting by the mainstream press about the accusations against ACORN began with the voter fraud controversy. For example, ACORN itself reported voter-registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law, yet 80 percent of the print and broadcast stories about ACORN's alleged voter fraud failed to mention that.
The voter fraud allegations and the O'Keefe videos led to ACORN's lost credibility with foundations and one-time political allies. Congress voted to cut off ACORN's federal funds (a tiny part of its overall budget) and to end ACORN's ability to provide free tax preparation clinics for the poor and to help Census workers recruit people to fill out the forms. Because of the pivotal role the video deception had in bringing down ACORN, the New Yorker should make a correction and perhaps even do some honest journalism about ACORN's success.
I am beginning to believe that most well-paid liberal journalists, who are unfamiliar with urban issues and what it's like to be poor in a wealthy society, are quick to believe any story about an African American group screwing up.
30 Comments so far
Show AllOne of the more outrageous memes in right-wing circles is that ACORN helped Obama steal the 2008 election from the Republicans (who were headed for certain victory, at least in Wingerworld). I've tried explaining that if ACORN were that useful to Obama, they would probably still be around, but it doesn't help.
ACORN was targetted by the Republican Party and the conservative Democrats.
Sorry Shawn only seven of 59 Democratic Senators voted against ending federal funds to acorn:
Burris (D) from Illinois;
Casey (D) from Pennsylvania;
Durbin (D) from Illinois;
Gillibrand (D) from New York;
Leahy (D) from Vermont;
Sanders (I) from Vermont; and
Whitehouse (D) from Rhode Island.
So your statement is factually incorrect and a lame and misleading attempt to defend the traitorous Democrats.
I suppose you defend O'Bomber also?
Amen. Almost as outrageous as the right-wing attack was the liberal blind funk to throw ACORN under the bus. Even supposedly progressive groups like the A. Philip Randolph Institute dismantled its model Delaware Chapter partly due to the influence of ACORN there. When the reactionaries lead the charge, the liberals lead the retreat.
Thank's for this blog. I've always thought of the New Yorker as elietist and entirely too smug. To that I can now add employers of lousy editors and reporters. One more reason to avoid it. It doesn't take too much. It took only Judy Miller to stop me from reading the NYT.
I read Mead's article in The New Yorker, and remember the section on O'Keefe. The article really was about Breitbart, who comes across as the kind of scumbag who would encourage a scumbag like O'Keefe.
This column indicts Mead for a sin of omission, rather than one of commission (such as the articles in the NY Times by Judith Miller on Iraq.
I think some people should calm down and stop looking under their beds for burglars.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have subscribed to The New Yorker since 1971 and have never regretted it.
But it's a sin of omission the pre-1987 New Yorker would not have made. Whatever the magazine's limitations, its editors were thorough.
You are correct about that. David Remnick is pretty good, but he is not William Shawn, who by all accounts, read every word that went into the magazine each week.
Thank you so much for this article. It is really too bad for all of us that this truth has been lost to the masses - and once again has been replaced with the pop myth that serves only to divide us by race and class.
What we believe to be American history is for the most part a collection of well constructed and edited lies akin to what cable regurgatates into our highly programable and poorly read populace.
Atlas deserves high marks for unwinding this story.
Our minds have been poisoned by the corporate media. The media make up the very vocabulary we use to think. Modern brainwashing techniques are subtle and derived from 100 years of mass media advertising experience. Propaganda techniques have come a long way since Joseph Goebbels.
Quick: What's Rodney King's occupation?
A: "Black Motorist".
to me, the most troubling aspect of this whole ACORN thing is that it reinforces the mistaken idea that voting determines our leadership...
If the media ever threw its might at BP, Goldman Sachs, AIG or any of the real criminal organizations in this country, the way it has done to ACORN, more real criminals would be behind bars or headed in that direction, and our country would be much safer.
"O'Keefe, along with three co-defendants, said their goal was to show that the Senator's office phones were working, yet people opposed to health care reform could not get through to register their opinions."
Bullshit. How does the senator's office know in advance which opinion I want to register by phoning her office? They entered her office posing as phone workers to try to prove the phones were working?
O'Keefe seems to be an ambitious congenital liar who thinks other people are idiots; a sociopath.
"He was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine."
That'll chasten him.
-30-
Thanks for the info about the doctored video. I wish I'd known this earlier. I wonder what, if any, other media outfits are running this story.
Luckily we have/had a President who stood up and defended ACORN!!! And Van Jones before them.
Oh, that's right, I forgot......ACORN and Jones don't have the same kind of money Lehman does...........
More change WE CAN BELIEVE IN!!!!
This is why we have libel laws. Use them!
PACHAMAMA
DREAMER AWAKEN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y567ynxn8t4&feature=related
OK New Yorkers,
It's time to PICKET the "New Yorker" offices until they fire the author of this slanderous and false article, and her editor.
My, how the crooks and liars create the news to serve their agenda.
As always, the treatment of ACORN by such as James O'Keefe and the millions who are prepared to consort with him is not a mistake. It is an indication of the character of the place where it happens, in this case the USA.
But why concentrate on the negative? I would say the people who ran ACORN should now be recognised as heroic. The O'Keefe incident indicates what they have been up against. What strength and power there is in the people of the USA! Organisations should be clamouring to employ the brave hearts on the ACORN staff and the fraudulent con men, O'Keefe and supporters, should be paying the price legally economically and socially.
Is this happening?
Or is it that a matter like this being relegated to to commentary alone indicates that corruption is systemic in the USA?
My honest belief is the latter. US citizens have a lot of work to do and small as it may seem there is one supporter here writing this comment, for recognising the problem is the beginning.
O'Keefe didn't just attack ACORN, he attacked poor people. Parents struggling to provide for their children, the elderly trying to protect the home they've lived in for decades. And that slimy little fuck doesn't care in the least.
If I met him in the street I'd be seriously tempted to beat the shit out of the little attention whore.
Do it!
"I am beginning to believe that most well-paid liberal journalists, who are unfamiliar with urban issues and what it's like to be poor in a wealthy society, are quick to believe any story about an African American group screwing up."
The frame of this story is familiar: Two political camps, liberal and conservative, liberal being leftwing, and conservative rightwing.
But the fact is both camps are rightwing elite. The real division is between the people and the elite. The people represent the true left.
But the fact is both camps are rightwing elite. The real division is between the people and the elite. The people represent the true left.
---------------------------------------
Bingo! This is it in a nutshell.
It shouldn't ever surprise any of us when the "liberal" press carries water for the right: "left" or right, their interests are the same; only the rhetoric is sometimes different. They're on the side of wealth and not on ours. Same with the politicians. Even, I'm sorry to say, Kucinich (I've long known that Sanders is only a nominal socialist, so I won't mention him).
I think Cynthia might be the only politician consistently on our side.
Good article. If there was real justice in America, nearly every "representative" in the US government would be in prison, including obama and his crew.
The word “fascist” will probably not be used again to proudly describe a nation-state or program (except by a few die hard fanatics). The reason is not because of the nightmares of the holocaust, but rather because Mussolini and Hitler were defeated. To lose a contest for domination is the ultimate shame for those dedicated to victory and rule at all costs. So don’t look for swastika arm bands or heil Obama cheers in the white-house or elsewhere.
The heart of the fascist mindset is a total, ruthless pursuit of power and domination. “Full Spectrum Dominance” as our beloved military so candidly expresses it. The ultimate goal is to control (enslave) every human being on the planet. The fascist is resolutely masculine and (not so secretly) despises all that is feminine, because to him this equates to weakness, the ultimate sin. Thus cooperation, compassion, love, spirituality, are only seen having value in serving to manipulate the naive. A peace parley would be seen as a good opportunity to assassinate ones enemies. One’s “allies” are understood to be a temporary expedient until such time as they to must succumb to your domination.
All this is to somewhat flesh out my belief that abuse of power has been from the beginning of the human experiment the fundamental cause of our most serious problems. By whatever name, this poison pervades the whole gamut of human relationships, and unless processes are engaged to heal it, we will fritter away our time devising ever more elaborate band-aids to cover over the rotten wound at our hearts.
" A lie ca travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes"
-Mark Twain