And while you’re helping show us all the light, Stephe96, how about tackling this one: what would ACORN Housing’s management gain by instructing their employees to tell random joes off the street how to dodge their taxes or fudge mortgage applications?
I’ve asked questions along this line several times, and no one seems to be able to give a plausible reason. Your view?
How would you like me to put it? How 'bout this: ACORN employees at four offices around the country were told about a child prostitution ring and, rather than immediately call authorities, didn’t even bat an eye and decided instead to offer assistance and financial advice to the ‘pimp’ in question. That better?
Not really. I was really looking for you to offer any sort of retraction from your original statement. Your explanation of your own moral outrage regarding this whole situation has nothing to do with it.
Got anything aside from Ad hominem attacks on my spelling?
Pretty weak there buddy.
I’ll take a shot at it: that is the kind of culture that grows up in certain organizations. I was married in the seventies to a woman who worked for a large city department, a department that also came to have a number of CETA employees working within it. CETA was a program cooked up by Jimmy Carter and the Democratic congress of the time to lower unemployment figures by putting people on the federal payroll and paying them whether they worked or not. CETA employees worked in various departments of federal, state and local governments and were virtually unmanageable and untouchable. It didn’t take long before the CETA employees allegedly working in my wife’s department figured this out. They gathered in groups and talked among themselves; read books; talked on the phone; etc. They did this ALL DAY…AND THEY WERE PAID MORE THAN THE CITY EMPLOYEES WHO WERE DOING ALL THE WORK! And whenever a new hire came to work and actually showed a smidgeon of ambition or desire to do a good job, they were quickly called aside by the others and made to know that they were to knock that shit off. Soon, the new hires were as worthless as all the others.
Now, not only is this typical of what happens when government decides that some program of throwing money at a social problem is the answer to that problem, it also illustrates the fact that certain behaviors can spring from and even come to characterize certain departments or agencies in which those behaviors are allowed to flourish, while at the same time being of no particular benefit to the department or agency itself.
I don’t see an actual answer to the question contained in all that hot air.
I was once knocked in the head at an anti-war demonstration in Oakland. From this I derive the certain knowledge that American is an authoritarian state wth a violent oppressive agenda, and that all “peace officers” are agents of that Fascist regime.
Hey, my personal experience is just as good for evidence as yours!
How did the governor of Georgia happen to be involved in “cooking up” a federal program?
It just came clear to me! Of course! You just have to connect the dots!
ACORN agents slithered all across the country, in an tightly organized, super secret program communicated through their strictly secure chain of command. You know, from Obama to Commissar Soros down through the revolutionary cadres… Anyway, they secured thousands and thousands of corrupt loans and mortgages, which were then packaged as securities and sold…well, you know the rest!
Of course! ACORN started the credit crisis! The fiends! No doubt the plot was cooked up by a band of renegade Marxist MBA’s…
I’m assuming by the question that CETA was already in place prior to Carter’s having become president. And you may be right; I forget the exact chronology. However, it was certainly during the latter couple of years of Carter’s term in office that the program and its employees were foist upon the various big-city government agencies of the city my wife and I lived in at the time…and Carter certainly was the one at whom the real employees of these agencies directed their ire. So whether Carter was one of the ones who cooked it up, or whether he mismanaged it once he was in office (a much more likely scenario, now that I think about it), the fact remains that the program and its waste and inefficiencies flourished during Carter’s administration.
Or maybe you’re just talking out of your ass and repeating shit you heard on the EIB network.
That explains A LOT.
You were beaten to it a long time ago. (@ :20)
Come on, now, Dio. I thought you and I had reached a sort of grudging rapproachment over the years in which, though we rarely agreed, we still treated each other with respect. I’d hate to see that end because we started calling each other liars, especially without a smidgeon of proof.
I can give you my word that every word I said is true and just as I described. I hope you won’t try to make me defend myself against baseless accusations of lying in the future.
Sorry, but I haven’t a clue what relevance that story has to the question I asked.
I’ll try one more time: what would be the benefit to ACORN Housing of having its employees give strangers off the street advice on dodging taxes and fudging mortgage applications?
BTW, where and when was it that you got your head knock, Carol? Enquiring minds want to know.
The relevance is that a certain type of behavior can become endemic within a company or agency, and can even come to typify behavior within the company or agency, and yet still not benefit the company or agency itself. Your argument appears to be that ACORN is not responsible for these employees’ behavior by the simply expedient that ACORN does not benefit by it. My suggestion is that ACORN has been lax in supervising its employees and that a culture has grown up in which ACORN’s employees freely act this way, and that fact that ACORN doesn’t benefit from this behavior does not mean it hasn’t allowed that behavior to flourish. In other words, ACORN is still responsible whether it has benefitted from its employees’ illicit behavior or not.
That is fine, but based on the latest revelations of the “murderess” tape from California, I’m leaning towards the idea that the “intrepid reporter” made so many leading requests to ACORN workers that eventually he got the answers that he wanted.
That’s a bit better.
A valid point, but the (part time) employees were fired, were they not? I would substitute the word ACORN in your post with the words AIG, or Blackwater, or what’s the company, Countrywide. Even better would be if I put in the word society for ACORN and swapped the word employees with citizens.
If anyone here were to try a similar stunt, to goad someone into offering advice on cheating the system, but were to target a different group, say auto mechanics, or wall street traders, or mortgage brokers, would the hue and cry be as great?