Domino’s Pizza and ACORN share something in common.
Amateur film released on the Internet rocked the organizations and threatened their existence.
The way each organization handled its respective crisis exposed a lot about the nature and character of the people who manage the organizations and helps us understand that, yes, ACORN deserves to disappear and have its executives investigated.
President Obama’s ties to ACORN should also be revisited and investigated, as should those of his current Political Affairs Director, who prior to joining the Administration worked for ACORN.
Domino’s problem video showed employees doing disgusting things to food that was to be served to customers.
ACORN’s problem videos were of a far more serious nature – ACORN employees aiding, abetting, and encouraging serious felony criminal behavior, including counseling people who came to them on how to smuggle underage illegal-immigrant girls into the U.S. to be employed as sex workers and then launder the funds (tax free!) that came from the work.
Both organizations faced an existential threat over the release and viral spread of these amateur videos.
To get an idea about the leadership character of both organizations, we can to look to what each did when the videos were released.
Domino’s expressed outrage at the employees’ behavior and immediately issue a public apology to customers.
ACORN expressed defiance and outrage at the filmmakers and said the films were doctored. When additional films came out disproving this and made clear a pattern of corruption in ACORN’s offices nationwide, only then did ACORN leaders express outrage at employee behavior; yet they still refused to issue an apology or open the organizations records to show that the problems were isolated incidents in order to put to rest the suspicion that the corruption is systemic.
How did each organization deal with the employees implicated in the videos?
Domino’s filed a criminal complaint and pursued felony charges against the employees.
ACORN said that they “terminated” their problem employees but really just suspended them without pay, and then sued the filmmakers and threatened to sue news organizations that showed the videos!
Any principled and non-corrupt CEO would be sickened to discover such behavior from her employees, but feel grateful to find out this information and put an end to it.
But ACORN’s CEO, Bertha Lewis, does not appear to be embracing this role. She initially stated blatant untruths about the films and refused to take ownership of the exposed corruption. Once the evidence continued to roll out and was undeniable, she acted like a concerned CEO and even went so far as to thank the filmmakers for exposing the corruption; but then moments later she threatened to sue the filmmakers for having uncovered the corruption! It might be funny if it weren’t true. What an unbelievable contradiction.
Bertha Lewis heads up a serially corrupt organization. She presides over an organization that is rotten to the core. In the real world, she’d have been let go long before now, but she’s still there, and that further scandalizes the organization.
No wonder ACORN public perception is in the toilet.
Bertha Lewis needs to be questions about how much criminal activity she may have been aware of at ACORN – she’s a 16 year veteran of the organization and has worked there in many capacities and levels. It’s not just these videos only that have occurred during her tenure, but many other scandals she has presided over.
She has presided over documented voter registration fraud. In fact, just last month ACORN suffered yet another blow when a former ACORN employee, a director of the Las Vegas office, agreed to testify about ACORN’s voter fraud in that state.
It is now dawning on people that ACORN may have thrown the Minnesota Senate Race, which resulted in the election of Al Franken to the Senate by a mere 312 votes. Mickey Kaus surmised:
“ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process … that’s 480 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken.”
In addition to serially encouraging felony behavior and engaging in rampant voter-registration fraud, ACORN also shakes down businesses and engages in tax-cheating.
ACORN is a criminal organization, engaging in systematic and repeated organized crime. It is, along with its sister organization SEIU, part of a Mafia-like structure that preys upon the poor and extorts money from the productive.
Perhaps the greatest outrage of all is that your president has long ties to ACORN over nearly two decades.
President Obama trained ACORN activists, worked as an attorney for ACORN, and also funded ACORN activities.
Of the recent controversies with ACORN, Obama said:
“Frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.”
Really? The man who over two decades worked with them, distributed money to them and worked as their attorney didn’t know they were getting a lot of federal money?
In 2007, Obama spoke to ACORN leaders and said:
“I’ve been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.“
And not only that, Bertha Lewis’s former political director in New York, Patrick Gaspard, is now the Obama White House Political Affairs Director. By way of Gaspard, there’s a direct line of communication between the ACORN CEO and President Obama.
It gets worse. The Obama campaign actually paid money to ACORN to get out the vote for Obama, and then misrepresented it on their financial statements.
The Wall Street Journal reported that:
“The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an ACORN subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.”
Will our President and his team keep putting money into ACORN’s pocket and then obscure it in their financial statements?
ACORN is losing federal taxpayer funding (can you believe you were funding this racket?) and corporate backing, but more needs to be done to remove this blight and cancer from the American landscape forever.
Call your Representatives and express your feeling that ACORN should never again receive any taxpayer funding and that you want them to be criminally investigated by Congress.
Let them know that as a taxpayer you are outraged at what they’ve done with your taxpayer money and you want to see justice done.
And then let them know you want the Obama Administration’s ties to ACORN investigated.
Consider holding a rally near your local ACORN office and inviting the press to cover your rally, demanding that ACORN be investigated and prosecuted by your local government. Make sure to obtain permits as necessary.
Investigate your elected officials for their ties to ACORN and, if they are found, disseminate that information and mount a pressure campaign to require your representatives to publicly denounce ACORN.
Please share this information with others. If enough Americans understand ACORN’s corruption and the Obama Administration’s ties to it, it could help slow his Big Government agenda, and defeating Big Government is what SBABG is all about.
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September 30th, 2009 at 11:45 am
My name is John Wilson , I am the other owner of flinttalkradio, located in Flint, Michigan, are opposed to big government and I would like to ask if there is ,perhaps, a member of your organization who lives locally who may be willing to come into our studio and either do an interview with me on your group’s ideas or even start a regular show on this idea? I can be reached at 810-624-9881 pretty much anytime, Tnank you for your time, John Wilson
November 7th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
The worst problem with ACORN is their disregard for common sense. Sure, their objectives are to “help those who have historically been locked out become powerful players in our democratic system” (from their website). In reality, however, they end up supporting whoever will give them the most money from those that have the most power. Not only is this generally against the best interest of those “that have been locked out” of the system, it also sets up “power” as the most important factor of success.
Historically, democracy is a system of government that focuses on the “rule of the people.” Although there is no such thing as the “perfect form of government,” no other form of government places a higher net worth on moral values over temporal values than does democracy. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, any other form of government produces even less desirable results than democracy.
Until today, no other form of government has implemented common sense better than democracy. In fact, democracy is the very principle that allows ACORN to do what they claim they are trying to do! However, since ACORN is working so hard to establish “money” and “power” as their primary objectives, common sense tells us that these should be the very problems that ACORN would be trying to destroy!.