Echoing my earlier post, Rachel Maddow has pointed to the hypocrisy of the US Congress in defunding ACORN while continuing to support military contractors involved in fraudulent, unethical and illegal activities.  She also shows that the Defund ACORN Act is most certainly unconstitutional if applied only to the community organizing group.  The Constitution bans legislation that targets a single individual or group.  In short, the Defund ACORN Act must apply to all groups and organizations receiving federal funds.

The important part of the legislation reads as follows:

Covered Organization- In this section, the term ‘covered organization’ means any of the following:CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(1) Any organization that has been indicted for a violation under any Federal or State law governing the financing of a campaign for election for public office or any law governing the administration of an election for public office, including a law relating to voter registration.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(2) Any organization that had its State corporate charter terminated due to its failure to comply with Federal or State lobbying disclosure requirements.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(3) Any organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(4) Any organization that–CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(A) employs any applicable individual, in a permanent or temporary capacity;CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(B) has under contract or retains any applicable individual; orCommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(C) has any applicable individual acting on the organization’s behalf or with the express or apparent authority of the organization.

The Act then goes on to — unconstitutionally — name ACORN as its target; but if the Republicans and Democrats who supported this bill want it to maintain its legality, then its enforcement cannot discriminate.  As an example of the dilemma this poses, Maddow shows how Lockheed Martin has been fined $68,500,000 for eleven government contracting fraud cases and Northrop Grunman $501,400,000 for nine such cases.  So we will have to defund them as well (but don’t hold your breath on that).

She then goes on to highlight military contractors such as Blackwater operating in Iraq and Afghanistan and discloses how some are not only guilty of or being investigated for fraud, but much worse crimes like murder and prostitution.  Her guest on the show was journalist and war contractor critic Jeremy Scahill.  Watch the segment below:

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) brought up this issue almost immediately and began compiling a list of organizations covered by the legislation.  The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) also has a list of contractors guilty of misconduct, showing that out of the top 100 richest groups and corporations receiving federal funds there is a total of 678 instances of misconduct.

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Rep. Grayson and asked him to put ACORN’s federal funding into perspective, to which he replied: “The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq.”

Writing on his blog, Jeremy Scahill also puts the entire episode into context.

What’s more, the Republicans—and, unfortunately their friends on the other side of the aisle—are advocating punishing ACORN for the—as yet legally unresolved—allegations against a small number of ACORN employees or affiliates. What is painfully ironic about this is that this standard should actually be applied to senior Bush administration officials who authorized, tried to legalize, and oversaw torture and war crimes. It should have applied to the commanders at Abu Ghraib. It should apply to Blackwater’s Erik Prince. They had actual knowledge and complicity at the highest levels. But all of their crimes have been covered up by the tired “bad apple” narrative over and over again. It is never the system that is the problem in the eyes of its powerful beneficiaries. In the case of ACORN, if you really care about facts, then you know that—at best—we are talking about the misconduct of a few people (who were fired) and not some top-down criminal enterprise, which is precisely what the Bush administration was and massive war contractors are.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, Jeremy Scahill, Rachel Maddow, war contractors

It’s funny how certain sections of the American public, with the help of mainstream media of course, are now so outraged by the actions of a handful of ACORN employees that Congress is now bravely cutting off all funding for this already underfunded, inconsequential organization.  Yet the recent — nearly invisible — actions in Kabul by morons working for the private  military contractor ArmorGroup, being paid far greater sums of American taxpayer dollars than anything dreamed  of by ACORN, have been dismissed by the same media as little more than the exploits of silly boys letting off a little steam.  Sure a few will be fired, but have a look for yourself:

Let’s put the whole issue into perspective.  ACORN, a non-profit, grass-roots organization that represents poor Americans has received a  mere $53 million in federal funds since 1994, while these douchbag contractors from ArmorGroup are the recipients of a $189 million 5-year contract to defend the US embassy in Kabul.  That comes to $3.5 million a year for ACORN as opposed to nearly $38 million per year for ArmorGroup.  Where’s the outrage?  Barely a peep is heard.

One of the more obvious problems stemming from the government’s need for contractors like ArmorGroup — a relatively minor player in the realm of private military contractors — is that, given the US government’s commitment to the military occupation of Afghanistan and  Iraq, the Pentagon must rely on these sorts of  for-profit corporations to fulfil the work and procedures once handled by the US  military.

It’s so bad  that actions like those pictured above must go un-addressed.  There’s little the Pentagon can do, even though they have had multiple problems with ArmorGroup.  The New York Times recently discussed this issue:

The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.

With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.

“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”

The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, ArmorGroup, media, media reform, military contractors