Deception, Again


James O'Keefe is still at it.

The criminal offender and film editor, who carried out a phony sting against ACORN, now has targeted National Public Radio.

"Has targeted," rather than "targeted," because the stunt is part of the effort by congressional Republicans to end subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides a relatively small amount of the funding, this fiscal year $430 million, which goes to programs distributed to NPR and PBS.

NPR President Vivian Schiller (no relation to Ron), who had announced her resignation for later this year, already has resigned in response to distribution of the highly edited video produced by the guy serving a three year term of federal probation for trying to sabotage the phone system of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (a Democrat: aren't you shocked?), charges later reduced. O'Keefe might be serving a prison term for the offense were it not for one of those liberal, permissive Judges (or, in this case, a prosecutor) who usually appall conservatives.

According to the Associated Press,

The heavily edited video shows Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, meeting at a pricey restaurant in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood with two men claiming to be part of a Muslim organization. The men offer NPR a $5 million donation. NPR said Tuesday it was "repeatedly pressured" to accept a $5 million check, which the organization "repeatedly refused."

"The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party. It's been hijacked by this group that is ... not just Islamophobic but, really, xenophobic," Schiller said in the video, referring to the tea party movement. "They believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting -- it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

The right is exorcised by the attack of Ron Schiller, the president of NPR's fundraising arm and senior vice president for development, on corporate America tea party supporters. Additionally, though, conservatives are arguing that financing should be eliminated for an organization which, contrary to its official policy, doesn't need it. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor charged "This disturbing video makes it clear that taxpayer dollars should no longer be appropriated to NPR.... as executives "finally admitted that they do not need taxpayer dollars to survive." Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) claimed "There's two issues at stake here in regards to taxpayer funding for public broadcasting: We can't afford it, and they don't need it." And Mark Meckler of Tea Party Patriots, subsidiary of the corporate interest group and Republican front group FreedomWorks, asked rhetorically "At a time when the country is upside down by more than a trillion dollars, can we really afford to provide huge subsidies to entities that openly state that they don't need the money?"

The beauty of the schemes hatched by O'Keefe is that there is no downside. When ACORN received defective registration applications, it informed election registrars. When O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, dressed normally (but as pimp and prostitute in the edited video), entered ACORN offices, police were notified. Planned Parenthood, object of a recent phony sting, promptly informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ACORN was defunded and then disbanded. House anti-abortion Republicans, (with a few Democrats) have voted to defund Planned Parenthood, which through its family planning care probably has prevented more unwanted pregnancies, thus more abortions, than any organization in America.

NPR refuses a donation from the phony militant Muslim organization represented by O'Keefe. But Ron Schiller (erroneously) contends NRP doesn't need federal funding; the right reacts "then why waste taxpayer money on it?" And that response is muted compared to that which would have ensued if the organization had promptly pleaded that it was in desperate need of continued federal funding. Given that former Pennsylvania Senator and concurrent Virginia resident Rick Santorum can compare elderly people and poor children in need of health care to drug addicts, a segment of the right likely would attack NPR as a welfare cheat and an arm of the Democratic socialist machine.

ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR. When there is highly edited video and a compliant mainstream media, facts get lost even when they are mentioned, as they infrequently are. The left needs to have an answer, not only to counteract the noxious tactics of ultra conservatives and their congressional allies but also as a deterrent to the far right's aggressive efforts to mislead the public.

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Voter Suppression, Indirectly

In March, 2007 Washington Post Writers' Group columnist Marie Cocco lamented the electoral tactics of the GOP, highlighted by the dismissal of federal prosecutors for partisan political reasons. Eight U.S. prosecutors, including David Iglesias were sacked because they reportedly "would not time indictments and investigations favorably for the Republican Party at election time."

Cocco noted that the right's portrait of a vast Democratic conspiracy spearheaded by ACORN to rig elections far and wide

The Justice Department’s own statistics show that of 87 ballot-fraud convictions obtained since the department launched its “voter integrity” initiative in 2002, 17 were for noncitizen voting and another six were for multiple voting. Most of the cases involved vote-buying schemes hatched by local politicians in Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere.

The charges against ACORN, of course, were a classic in Republican fear-mongering. Far before that organization was forced to disband, the U.K.'s Brad Friedman commented in October, 2008

Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

Even though the ginned-up scandal against ACORN had not yet materialized, Cocco observed

the vote-fraud folklore serves its purpose. It enables Republicans to push through state requirements for photos and other forms of voter identification, rules that depress turnout and impact elderly and minority voters—that is, Democrats—most seriously. This is the real fraud.

And so it is. Rush Limbaugh yesterday commented about

the new Arizona immigration law: It is all about voting. If papers (ahem) are required to vote, the Democrats are finished. It's their only hope. I mean, look, they're the radicals. They are siding against the American people. This regime is siding against the American people. The only hope they have is for fraud and illegals voting, and you can't really get away with that if everybody has to have a photo ID and legal proof (i.e., papers) that they are citizens.

Ironically, Limbaugh, in his own hyper-partisan and fact-free manner, seems to recognize the underlying issue in the new anti-immigrant (or, euphemistically, anti-illegal immigrant) legislation (promoted largely by the state's GOP): preventing the Wrong Kind of People from voting. Greg Palast explains how then-Secretary of State (now Governor) Jan Brewer in 2005 used

a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box....

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

It is a (probably sad) fact about modern American politics: whites generally vote Republican; non-white ethnic minorities, Democratic. Oh, there are a lot of other variables, but racial (if including Hispanics as a separate race) status has become a better predictor than most of one's vote. And holding down the votes of minorities, including Mexican-Americans, is an effective way of getting Republicans elected. And if fearful Chicanos choose to move to California, New Mexico, or Mexico, all the better. Or as Palast concluded

that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

O'Keefe On The Loose

On January 25, four young men- one of them James O'Keefe, who himself and his right-wing allies claim is an "independent filmaker," were arrested trying to tamper with the phones at the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D.-La.).

In a statement posted on Andrew Breitbart's right-wing website, O'Keefe, who with his alleged co-conspirators had posed as telephone workers, claimed in part

I learned from a number of sources that many of Senator Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the healthcare bill. When asked about this, Senator Landrieu’s explanation was that, “Our lines have been jammed for weeks.” I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for “weeks” because her phones were broken. In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office – the people’s office – to ask the staff if their phones were working.

You can believe this explanation if you wish. But reached by The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Senator Landrieu denied a malfunction with the phones, indicating the voice mailbox was full, and stated "Our lines have been jammed for weeks, and I apologize."

O'Keefe issued a standard non-apology apology: "On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building."

Aside from using a different approach because the one he took probably was illegal (charged with entering a federal property under false pretenses with the intent to commit a felony, he faces a possible ten years in prison), O'Keefe's sincerity is suspect. You remember him from his videotaped visits to various Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now offices with blogger Hannah Giles of townhall.com, posing as a prostitute and a pimp. That scam appeared from doctored tapes to implicate ACORN in unethical and illegal activity. However, an analysis now reveals:

1- Transcripts reveal that O’Keefe and Giles said they needed ACORN’s help to protect Giles from a violent pimp—but they carefully edited this out of their videos.

2- While their press releases claim they were posing as a “prostitute and a pimp,” the transcripts show that O’Keefe consistently introduced himself as Giles’ boyfriend trying to protect her.

3- In each of the cases, the ACORN staff advised the prostitute to pay taxes, not to evade them.

In San Diego and Philadelphia, ACORN workers called police. In all the videos, O'Keefe appears in ACORN offices in normal business attire- not in the "pimp" outfit in which he has appeared as the outdoor scenes are televised ad nauseum.

A former state attorney general, who analyzed the tapes for ACORN, reached a similar conclusion, observing

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

By then, of course, opportunistic Republicans and timorous Democrats in Congress had jumped to conclusions and voted to cut off funding for ACORN. It was a response almost (almost) as predictable as it was irresponsible, given the never-ending shots of the pimp and the prostitute and exploitation by the mainstream media, including by one Jon Stewart.

Now we find that O'Keefe shockingly- shockingly! is not quite so independent. In September, the Village Voice reported it

has learned that O'Keefe, in fact, has had heavyweight conservative backers who funded the young filmmaker as recently as a few months before his ACORN films were made.

The ACORN videos are actually just the latest of several films O'Keefe has produced and uploaded to YouTube. An earlier film posted in February, "Taxpayers Clearing House" featured nonwhite, working class people being duped by O'Keefe, who led them to believe they had won money in a sweepstakes.

That video was produced with the help of a grant -- said to be about $30,000 [Thiel's spokesman says closer to $10,000 -- see update] -- from Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook -- an investment which made him a billionaire. Thiel is one of Silicon Valley's more interesting figures: a gay man (according to Gawker's "Valleywag") who has railed against the evils of "multiculturalism." He lives in San Francisco and today runs a hedge fund.....

O'Keefe is a former member of the Leadership Institute, the conservative think tank that has turned out such graduates as Bush strategist Karl Rove, Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, and "Talon News" fake White House blogger Jeff Gannon (real name: James Dale Guckert). The Institute has been involved in setting up conservative newspapers at colleges across the country, and gave O'Keefe a $500 "Balance in Media" grant to begin the Rutgers Centurion in 2005.

O'Keefe, who recently addressed in New Orleans the Libertarian Pelican Institute for Public Policy, was celebrated following the ACORN sham by Republican legislators in Texas. That state, however, features a GOP gubernatorial primary in which arch-conservative Kay Bailey Hutchison is the more liberal candidate, so it's not quite representative of The Party of No. Still, this ought to be a cautionary tale about videotape, the right wing, and the passivity of the Democratic Party. Ought to, but won't.

Double Standard In Awarding Contracts

If you missed this last week, watch it. In its entirety. On Friday, Rachel Maddow continued her series on the trumped-up war on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. A partial transcript of the segment is here; the video is below; transcript of the program is available here. She began by noting that the amendment to the bill recently passed by Congress defunding ACORN is probably unconstitutional because, as an apparent bill of attainder, it targets one specific organization. She continues

So giant government defense contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, it looks like you‘re out of luck. Lockheed Martin has been forced to pay at least $68 million for getting caught 11 separate times committing government contract fraud. Northrop Grumman has had to pay around $500 million for getting caught nine times for contract fraud. Sorry, guys, but if we‘re going to nail ACORN here, you‘ve got to go.

And if—and if fraud is going to be the new issue in our newfound enthusiasm for defunding people, then Blackwater is going to have a problem, too. In just one of Blackwater‘s many government contracts, they were recently found to have defrauded the government to the tune of $55 million. And that‘s just one Blackwater contractor, and they‘ve got lots of contracts.

But if fraud is not bad enough for you, how about murder? Because five Blackwater employees have been charged with murder during the course of their government contracted duties in Iraq. Is murder enough to defund Blackwater?

How about if people they‘re killing, the contractors killing aren‘t just Iraqi civilians or somebody else we don‘t know, how about if they‘re U.S. troops? Because KBR, with its government contracts, is under investigation for killing 16 American troops who were electrocuted through KBR shoddy works supposedly building and maintaining living quarters for our troops in Iraq.

I mean, to be fair, I will admit that if we are talking about behavior by contractors that warrants them being defunded by an outrage Congress, none of those things I just described from those other contractors are prostitution specific, like the Republican and conservative media ACORN case has been. Ever since two activists dressed up in pimp and hooker costumes and then went from ACORN office to ACORN office with a hidden camera until they got a reaction out of ACORN employees that would play well on FOX News.

If the hidden camera stunt induced prostitution angle is what it takes to get a government contract defunded, then I guess we‘re going to have to talk about prostitution broadly and the government contractor known as ArmorGroup, part of Wackenhut, in Afghanistan. Their employees, you‘ll recall, were made famous earlier this month after the release of these pictures that show the contractors barely clothed and shooting vodka out of places you wouldn‘t expect.

The same ArmorGroup personnel who, again, were being paid by you and me were also allegedly engaged in a prostitution ring in Kabul. That‘s according to an ArmorGroup whistleblower. The State Department is investigating ArmorGroup now.

But if we‘re going to talk contractors and prostitution, we‘re also going to have to talk about DynCorp, which is always been one of those horror movie U.S. contractor cases. In the year 2000, at least 13 DynCorp employees were sent home from a U.S. government contract in Bosnia after they were found to be taking part in a Bosnian sex slave ring involving underage girls, not a fake prostitution ring that never actually existed like the one in the activist hidden camera costumes stunt, but an actual forced child prostitution ring, an actual U.S. government contractors from DynCorp.

In the absence of any defund DynCorp uprising, DynCorp still gets a lot of government money. In fact, today, DynCorp landed a brand new $230 million contract with the U.S. Air Force. That‘s on top of the $915 million contract they got from the State Department in June.

ArmorGroup, the prostitution/vodka-shooting contract in Afghanistan at the Kabul embassy, they still got that nearly $200 million contract in Afghanistan with the State Department. But that is currently under review.

Blackwater still has multimillion dollar contracts with the State Department, the Defense Department, as well as the CIA, even as five of their employees face murder charges.

KBR was just awarded a new $19 million army contract in February, despite being investigated in the deaths of those 16 U.S. troops.

Not only have these contractors not been defunded by outraged members of Congress, they all continue to get spectacularly lucrative government contracts even after all of these things have been exposed. I‘m not reporting any of these things for the first time. They‘re all known.

So, sure, if you want to defund ACORN, go for it. ACORN has definitely done some indefensible stuff over the years. They are an imperfect organization, to be sure. But if this isn‘t just a witch-hunt against ACORN, if Congress is actually just going after government contractors who commit fraud and worse, then we can all look forward to the explanation from the fake outrage Republicans and the cowering Democrats about why nothing ever inspired them to defund anyone before ACORN. After that, by all mean, cut them all loose.

In politics, it is often said, once you start to defend yourself, you have lost. So it probably will have no effect on media coverage or public opinion to explain that singling out ACORN is illegal; that the video "evidence" against ACORN consists of one tape which has not been released in its entirety and which resulted from the visit to one of the many ACORN offices (perhaps after no one took the bait at any of the others visited); or even that the Repub campaign against ACORN is aimed at stopping its efforts at registering poor voters, disproportionately minority, who inconveniently vote Democratic. Unfortunately, the only viable option, as this installment, at least, suggests, is to remind voters that there are far, far greater crimes being committed in government contracting.

Finally, on one program on one cable network, some context is brought to the hand-wringing over (sarcasm alert)the evil behemoth ACORN. Elsewhere? The "liberal media" once again is playing its role as front man for corporate and GOP interests.

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Article Of The Week

An article, "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," written before the election and appearing in the November 10, 2008 edition of The Nation, is nearly as topical now as it was five months ago. Peter Dreier and John Atlas demonstrate that, contrary to the claims of right wingers (especially, but not exclusively, on talk radio) even today, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now played little or no role, directly or indirectly, in the housing crisis intrinsic to the financial meltdown.

Dreier and Atlas neatly dispatch the argument that ACORN somehow defrauded the federal government or the American people. The community organization paid individuals- per unit- to register voters. Many of the workers completed the registration forms themselves and passed them on to ACORN, which then alerted the authorities. Ironically, ACORN was the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of fraud, a fact seemingly lost on the political opportunists on the right.

On their way to exonerating ACORN (which shouldn't, but does, need defense) for the subprime crisis, Dreier and Atlas summarize succintly the housing disaster, explaining

Wall Street investment firms--including Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Citigroup--set up special units, provided mortgage companies with lines of credit, then purchased the subprime mortgages from the lenders, bundled them into "mortgage-backed securities" and sold them for a fat fee to wealthy investors worldwide, typically without scrutiny. By 2007 the subprime business had become a $1.5 trillion global market for investors seeking high returns. Because lenders didn't have to keep the loans on their books, they didn't worry about the risk of losses.

The hostility toward ACORN's alleged role in the subprime crisis, insofar as it ever is explained by ideologues short on facts, seems to turn on their supposed role under the 1977 Community Redevelopment Act. But the CRA is no culprit. It applies only to depository institutions, such as commercial and savings banks, rather than other lenders, especially private mortgage companies, including the likes of CitiMortgage, Household Finance and Countrywide Financial (recently bought by Bank of America). Those institutions which do make CRA loans are required by federal regulation to verify the incomes of borrowers to make sure they can afford the mortgages. Not surprisingly, only approximately 20% of subprime mortgages were issued by banks regulated by the act, the others issued by financial institutions not covered by the CRA and not subject to routine examination or supervision.

Only 10% of subprime loans went to first-time buyers with over half being refinances of existing mortgages. Many of these homeowners were persuaded to replace lengthy fixed-rate mortgages with deceptive and risky loans. The number of subprime mortgages increased greatly early in this decade, Dreier and Atlas note, "as the number of lenders regulated by the government and covered by the CRA dramatically dwindled."

But ACORN did play a role: a homeownership counseling program for pospective borrowers, whose foreclosure rate on loans was .032% in 2006; warning, unsuccessfully, of the danger of adjustable rate loans; exposing the "yield spread premium," "a kickback from lenders to brokers for selling loans that are more expensive than what borrowers qualify for;" promoting "assignee liability," which would have made "companies that buy, and profit from, loans bear responsibility for illegal acts committed when those loans were orginally made;" and persuading some major lenders to reduce the exorbitant interest rates and fees they charged borrowers.

With the record so clear and unambiguous, one can only wonder why the right has made the Community Reinvestment Act and ACORN the primary culprits in the financial crisis. Perhaps it is because ACORN is a community organizer as is our President, and the Community Reinvestment Act because it is an example of successful government. Or maybe it's simply because something is needed to divert attention from the disaster wreaked upon the economy by financial deregulation.