Videos: ACORN advising on tax evasion for pimps and prostitutes?

Jeff from WI:

I would love to hear the other criminal activities that ACORN supposedly deals in. As for voter registration, well:

Officials at ACORN say they sending a clear message to those in its ranks that they will not tolerate voter fraud. The Miami Herald reports:

Eleven people hired to register potential voters in Miami-Dade County before last year’s presidential election were being sought Wednesday for falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office issued arrest warrants for each of the 11 suspects, all of whom worked for the local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, (ACORN). By early Wednesday morning, six were in custody, authorities said. …

The arrests are “further evidence we’ve been policing our own folks and report people attempting to commit voter registration fraud,” said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring. “This was really some individuals who were trying to defraud their employer.”

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN. “We’ve been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,” she said. “But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.”
Apparently, suspicions were aroused when “Paul Newman and James Taylor” appeared in the cards submitted for registration. Such vigilance is to be commended. Let’s hope it is kept up. To some extent the problem that Pakistani passport control officers and perhaps ACORN officials have is that of counteracting signals, emanating from the unofficial culture that certain things are permissible. Official attitudes are not always the ones commonly held within the millieu and that can complicate things.

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/09/09/the-short-arm-of-the-law/

Let’s be honest, ACORN might be sloppily run but as far as systematically supporting child prostitution, well I’ll trade you that land for some stanley nickels and schrute bucks.

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 12:39 PM

mjk:

Let’s go one by one.

Illegal registering: Now what ACORN’s problem was is that they created financial incentives for turning in paper and sent out poorly trained workers to do their work. Some idiots thought they wouldn’t get caught and they did. Again, go here: http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/09/09/the-short-arm-of-the-law/. When somebody is making 8-9 bucks and hour and they get hired because no one else will, that most likely won’t lead to the best of situations

Voter intimidation: I haven’t heard anything about this one. I would love to hear more but I can’t find it on the internet. I did hear about black panther intimidation, but I’m sure you know the difference.

and my favorite, “varied and sundrie illegal activities”: yep, I love it when criminal activity becomes charges based on emotion. “I just know it, I don’t have any proof or anything but I just know it.”

Oh and if you didn’t get my analogy about the insurance, it isn’t directly literal. I’ll spell it out for you: just because I know there might be a few cases where things don’t work they way they should (insurance, ACORN workers being enablers) doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work in the other 999,999 times.

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 12:59 PM

Buy Danish:

You have a great comment, and trust me, I’m not one on the minimum wage bandwagon. The point I was making with my “underpaid” mention leans more towards “under-motivated”. When a person doesn’t feel a passion for their work, doesn’t feel like they are paid enough (which for walking around and getting people to sign up to vote isn’t the pinnacle of trained expertise) and a financial incentive is created to cheat, well the answers speak for themselves. The higher-ups in the voter registration have no incentive to create fake registration cards, because there is no benefit to invalid registrations since they don’t become real voters come election. There were no fake votes in the last election. Only the workers on the bottom benefit.

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 1:10 PM

mjk:

I will make a deal when you actually spell out those “sorts of illegal activities”. If you are talking about voter registration fraud, see the above. You absolutely have a point with the poor hiring practices of ACORN and their incentives for workers. But I’m sure you read that pajamas media article where they showed that ACORN has been self reporting their own workers to authorities. If you want to play up the everything they do is evil, I need proof. Sorry that I’m like that sometimes.

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 1:17 PM

Crawford:

I swear it’s spinning wheels. So do you think that all those Paul Newman’s and James Taylor’s either absentee voted or showed up to the polls? There has been NO proof that ANYONE voted fraudulently on election day. The system worked like it was supposed to, caught the fake voters, and the people who faked the registration cards are being charged. And for the future I hope that Dems change their mind on the ID checks, because I agree that if IDs weren’t checked (like they are now), then it could open the flood gates to REAL corruption of the election process.

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 1:26 PM

Crawford:

You mean this?

Hamilton County election officials will meet this morning to discuss 19 voter registrations for people who may not exist, which would be a rare case of election fraud.

Board of Elections Director John Williams subpoenaed those named on the voter registration cards after similar handwriting and false addresses raised election workers’ suspicions. The sheriff’s department could not find them, he said.

The cards were turned in, Williams said, by someone affiliated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group that represents low-income people.

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/08/loc_voters08.html

weilbourbaki on September 10, 2009 at 1:33 PM