Anna Johnson
– Staff Writer-
The Association of Community Organizations` for Reform Now, ACORN, is an organization that has existed since 1970. ACORN’s mission is “to organize a majority constituency of low-to moderate-income people across the United States.”
From this description, it seems ACORN is a top-notch charity that simply helps those who are less fortunate. ACORN is a legitimate charity that has even received $31 million in government aid, from Americans’ tax dollars, since 1998.
So, would this legitimate charity advise a young woman to open a brothel, cheat on taxes, and traffic in underage girls from overseas? The answer is yes.
Two individuals, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, took it upon themselves to expose this charity as what they thought to be a corrupt organization. Giles, an aspiring journalist, posed as a prostitute and O’Keefe, an independent filmmaker and investigative journalist, posed as a man that is hoping to run for congress and wants to use the prostitution money for his campaign. They walked into a Baltimore, Md. ACORN office where they discussed opening a brothel with an ACORN tax expert Tanja Thompson and a housing employee, Shira.
Giles stated that she is a prostitute who wants to start her own brothel. In order to do this, she said she needed a house to run her “business.”
Though prostitution is illegal in the state of Maryland, the ladies advise her on how to obtain a house and even how she can manipulate the government and cheat on her taxes.
When the “politician” asked one of the women if prostitution was illegal in the state of Maryland, she replied, “Anything that our government doesn’t approve of is illegal; that’s rule number one.” This quote may be correct, but does that mean that everything that the government doesn’t approve of is okay?
The tax expert attempted to find a different “occupation” under which she could classify the woman because, obviously, she can’t be classified as a “prostitute” on her tax form.
Thompson then advised the “prostitute” to classify herself as a “performing artist” and proceeded to help them find loopholes so they could cheat on the taxes. Thompson suggested that the woman claim condoms, beauty products and clothing on her taxes which would save her a good amount.
Then the posing prostitute and politician took things up another notch and made it known that they were planning on trafficking 13 underage girls from El Salvador for prostitution.
This information didn’t even seem to phase the women. Thompson just advised that they should add a few of the girls as dependents on their tax forms, but not all 13 of them because that would look suspicious to the government.
Thompson said to claim a few of them and pretend that the others just “don’t even exist.” The women also advised the couple to “train” the girls “to keep their mouths shut” about the whole operation because if the police got involved, ACORN couldn’t do anything for them.
Giles and O’Keefe did exactly what they set out to do: expose ACORN as the corrupt organization that they are. There are a few alarming facts about ACORN that really stand out. The first is that this experiment conducted in this ACORN office in Baltimore was also conducted at several other ACORN locations throughout the country, with the same results.
ACORN was accused of being involved in voting fraud in several elections dating from 1986 to 2004. And lastly, President Barack Obama, back in 1992, worked as a lawyer for ACORN and in recent years endorsed ACORN.
Yet, since the exposing of the ACORN’s operations, government funding has ceased. hat needs to be done is further investigation into the client history of the organization and investigation into how deep the presidents invovlement was in ACORN.
