Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

After a couple of days to recover from Momentum 2009, Tides’ terrific conference on ideas for progressives…

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, on Green For AllJohn A Powell, on Opportunity and Race

Manuel Pastor, on Majority-Minority Economics

Jacquette M. Timmons, on the Economic Collapse…I returned from the mountains Sunday to the normal backlog of hundreds of emails, calls, and correspondence – all demanding attention. Somehow, I missed the Fox sting operation (Correction, 9/18/2009: The incident I’ve referred to was not a “Fox sting operation” as I wrote. Fox did not create the video, they broadcasted it. Several individuals unconnected with Fox shot the video) on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) that has been raging through the airwaves. What a story. A couple of “gotcha journalists” posing as a pimp and a prostitute sought financial and housing help from one of ACORN’s many offices around the country that serve the poorest of the poor. And they found one or two where part-time counselors with poor judgment were taken in and supposedly tried to help them game the system. It would be interesting, of course, to see what would happen if they had similarly set up “stings” with payday lenders, tax refund lenders, and other parasites out there who prey on the poor, but Fox, with an ideological agenda to reduce its antagonists to their knees went after ACORN.That the secret taping violated laws and ethics seems overlooked and, to most, irrelevant. The immediate firing of the employees by ACORN also seems unimportant to most. What matters is the smear – very successful, very American. To be associated with a scandal, even one invented for the sole purpose of harming an organization of poor people, not to mention one that is not real, is the door to obscurity in American social and political life, and ACORN, according to some, is headed through that door.I wonder how many nonprofit organizations – even big, well-heeled ones like the Nature Conservancy or the Red Cross – could withstand the kind of media assault and unscrupulous tactics deployed by Fox? I doubt many could. Night after night, the Fox mouthpieces babble on about ACORN. According to them, it’s some incredible scramble of a fascistic criminal enterprise foisting communism and socialism on an unsuspecting public. And people buy this drivel. The Senate yesterday passes a bill to ban ACORN from funding they use to counsel low-income people on housing as a result. One fake prostitute and pimp has managed to do what Bill Riley and Glenn Beck couldn’t do for a decade.

Of course, in the ways of modern media wars, it matters not that ACORN was decrying predatory lending (read subprime insanity) for years before the meltdown. Yes, they believed banks should lend to low income people, but no, they argued strenuously that subprime perpetrators should be prevented from issuing loans that were unaffordable to the low income borrowers. If regulators and Senators had listened to them, we might have avoided the entire mess. But Fox has a better idea: kill the messenger.

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