Political Priorities

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."

  The Nation

I’ll vote for that.

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is being attacked. Yet the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company.

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Blackwater has a $217 million security contract through the State Department in Iraq--a contract just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. It also holds a $210 million State Department "security" contract in Afghanistan, running through 2011 and another multimillion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for "training" in Kabul. This is on top of Blackwater's clandestine work for the CIA, including continuing work on the drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This also does not take into account Blackwater's lucrative domestic work training law enforcement and military forces in the United States at the company's compounds in North Carolina, California and Illinois, nor the private "security" work it does for entities like the International Republican Institute, nor the work it does in training "faith-based organizations." Nor does it include the contracts doled out to Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, which works for foreign governments and Fortune 500 corporations.

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Blackwater was paid more than $73 million for federally funded, no-bid security contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, billing taxpayers $950 per man per day, a spending decision the Bush administration called "the best value to the government." In the wake of the hurricane ACORN, meanwhile, only helped poor people who were suffering as a result of the government's total failure to respond.

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Blackwater has been or is being investigated by Congress, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department and the IRS, among other agencies, for a range of issues from arms smuggling to manslaughter to tax evasion. One of its operatives pleaded guilty to killing an innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilian, while five others have been indicted on manslaughter and other charges stemming from the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which seventeen Iraqi civilians were gunned down. The company is also facing a slew of civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings in Iraq.

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Here is a question for the Democratic lawmakers that voted in support of the Defund ACORN Act: how do you justify making this a major league legislative priority while Blackwater continues to be armed and dangerous around the globe on the US government payroll? Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

Lawmakers’ defunding of community activist group ACORN “means there is no spine in Congress when it comes to standing up against the real crooks and criminals in this society,” military-affairs reporter Jeremy Scahill says.

Scahill, a writer for The Nation who this summer broke the story that Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, had been implicated in at least one murder, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that ACORN got “pennies” compared to military contractors who have been convicted of crimes but continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from US taxpayers.

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Earlier in the program, Maddow had listed off a litany of criminal accusations against numerous government contractors, including murder allegations against Blackwater; the 2000 scandal involving DynCorp, in which 13 company employees were sent home from Bosnia for running an underage forced sex slave ring; and recent claims about ArmorGroup and its alleged links to fraud and prostitution.

“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 these things have been exposed,” Maddow told viewers.

“If this isn’t just a witch hunt against ACORN … then we can all look forward to the explanation from the fake-outraged Republicans and the cowering Democrats about why nothing ever inspired them to defund anyone before ACORN,” Maddow said.

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Scahill suggested that it’s relatively easy to go after a grassroots community group like ACORN, while pursuing much worse allegations against defense contractors requires actual courage.

  Raw Story

Sorry, there’s no funding for courage.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.