Accorn Supports Child ProstitutionFollow

Ah ha! My next CoH character!

Sixth Column would be a good CoH name.

Obvious truncation joke is obvious.

They are impossible numbers to consider though Gbaji. And ideally the people they are helping figure out if and how to qualify for government assistance, do qualify and so should receive the assistance with or without acorn. Acorn just makes it smoother. Now of course there appears to be some corruption, but there would also be legitimate help, and that makes your assertion of massive amounts of money being funneled through just as flimsy as ignoring it. If Acorn can make someone who would get money do so more efficiently then perhaps they'll get back on their feet sooner and cost less overall.

You'd have to somehow figure out a number that represents the people that are going to get money that shouldn't which is a guessing game and largely meaningless.

I'm not really very familiar with acorns mission statement, or reason for being though, so I'll leave it at that, and not debate the ideal merits of the organization. It appears there needs to be an investigation at any rate.

It doesn't matter. The organization clearly has some serious problems in terms of their employees willingness to help their clients lie and cheat to obtain government assistance funds. That's our taxpayer dollars. They have been entrusted with helping determine who should get it. They're clearly failing miserably at that job.


What's amusing about this is that it ties into the conversation about illegal immigration and health care coverage in another thread. We're supposed to accept that the checks to ensure that government benefits wont be handed out to those who aren't supposed to get them are in place and working, yet these videos clearly show that we've got the fox guarding the henhouse here...




Um... That's a pretty poor excuse. She went along with this to the point of making up her own stories of how horrible she is? For what purpose? If that's actually true (and I suspect it's more of a half truth), it shows a pretty cavalier attitude towards attempts to commit fraud. If she thought it was a joke, she should have laughed and asked them to leave. If she thought it was serious, she should have just asked them to leave (or called the police). She did neither.




Which proves only that she lied about what she did when talking to the sting journalists. Like she's the first person to build up her cred with criminals by making up stuff about her past. The larger question is why she'd feel like she should do this or why she'd think this was appropriate behavior in this situation.



I'm also curious to hear from those insisting that this was or is a rare event now that the video count is up to five...

Edited, Sep 17th 2009 11:40am by gbaji

Do you know this for a fact? If this many workers at Acorn are willing to help a pimp and prostitute lie about their financial situation to help them build a child prostitution ring, it's a bit hard to believe that they aren't doing the same for folks who aren't doing something that ridiculous.

How do we know how many people who've received financial aid with Acorns help actually qualified for it? Aren't you just guessing?




Then lets not give any money to anyone until we can be sure that the system to disperse the funds is working properly. Your willingness to just look the other way is alarming. Maybe for you this is ok, but for me, and I suspect a pretty large percentage of taxpayers, this is completely unacceptable. We are not willing to accept some unknown amount of corruption and fraud in order to obtain the already questionable goal of providing financial aid to those in need.


This is exactly why government should not be a charity. Period. I've made this argument in the past when we've talked about how best to help the poor. I've argued that private charities handing out their own funds are much much better at making sure they don't hand it out to people who don't truly need it than the government ever will. They are accountable to those who donate to them. I can't choose not to pay the portion of my taxes which provides those funds which Acorn is handing out if I don't like the way it's being done, can I? But if a private charity did the same things Acorn did, their donations would dry up. There's a check to the system. With the government, there isn't one.



Yes, there does. And in the meantime they should be barred from providing any sort of financial aid qualification service. They clearly are not good stewards of the public funds and should not be given such power. Some of us would argue that they never should have in the first place, but that's a whole different topic.

Among other things. Whether or not they need to go through Acorn doesn't matter to me. If they are going through Acorn and getting legitimate help, which I suspect a vast majority of people going to Acorn do, then I'm not going to be upset about it.


No, I'm not. I said multiple times I was fine with the being investigated. No issues at all.

What I'm not doing is buying into your hysterical notion that a significant portion of their 400,000 members are criminals or that their actions have produced an amount of fraud sufficient to start screaming "$53 million and gajillions more we don't know about!" as the amount of money improperly spent.

Also, you're smarter than to keep trying to pull the voter registration lines. Have a little dignity.

Isn't gbaji an engineer of some sort? For such a strong math background, he's terrible at proof.

But it does call into question why we'd continue to let an organization like Acorn wield the power they currently have. I'm sorry. I was getting ahead of the argument. I was going to say "Shut Acorn down!", you were going to respond "But what about all the legitimate needy people who wouldn't be able to get the assistance they need?", and then I'd make the point I just made.

Just trying to speed up the conversation here...




You suspect? Shouldn't any amount of doubt be sufficient to shut the organization down? Just to put the private to public funding issue back into focus, if videos appeared showing members of a private charity you donated to doing the kinds of things these videos show, would you continue to donate? Or would you cut them off until they'd provided sufficient proof that they'd cleaned up their act?

Maybe just suspecting that most people getting funding through acorn legitimately qualify for it is sufficient for you. It's not for me. And it's not for most people.


Also, I'm curious what you're not upset about? I'm not asking you to be upset about the folks who legitimately need help and whom Acorn has assisted, but about the people who don't legitimately need help and whom Acorn helped commit fraud to obtain it anyway. The issue is about Acorn employees helping people to lie in order to defraud the government and take our tax dollars. Your statement is like saying that you weren't upset at all about all the things the Manson family did which didn't involve mass killings...

Wacky logic there Joph. Even for you.



I suppose that all depends on what you and I consider "significant". To me, being able to catch 5 people (so far) in a sting like this represents a pretty significant likelihood that these sorts of things are common within the organization. Presumably they don't help pimps set up child prostitution rings every single day, but it's hard to assume that only these 5 people do this sort of thing, and that they only do it when someone wants to set up a prostitution ring and not for everyone seeking government aid.


To me, it was significant after the first video. It was damning after the second. At this point, it's gone to "cut off their license to fill out any government forms on behalf of anyone right now!".



You're the one who brought it up Joph. I simply said that if they weren't actually engaged in said illegal behavior, people might trust them a bit more. The relevance and degree of each act is dependent on the act itself of course. I made no judgment about that. But it's absurd to dismiss people who have a poor view of acorn because of their actions, when the actions they're basing them on did happen.

Indeed. I thought of italicising "things", but the stuff he does... Italicisation isn't enough to convey that. I don't know what is.

I don't know how you can possibly force yourself to sleep at night, or how you get through the day without committing suicide, aside from perhaps only selectively choosing when to condemn corruption.

Of course "any" amount of doubt is not enough to shut down an entire organization. I have more reason to doubt your existence as a personal identity than I do to doubt acorn's functions. You can doubt the existence of anything in the entire damn world, but if you actually try to live either your life or act as if the government should be beholden to every doubt that you can imagine, especially when the statistical force is so insignificant, then you might as well cleave your spinal cord in twain, and give yourself a legitimate reason for the paralysis.

Why in the nine hells am I having to tell you to come out of the ivory tower?

Muse made a new album. I thought you should know that.

It's not bad.