Are you familiar with the "Yes Men"? Those funny guys who pretend to be businessmen and who manage to get members of America's corporate culture to display the worst of their self-serving attitudes?
Two examples from "Servin's" and "Vamos'" antics in their op-ed piece in the Washington Post:
In our new film "The Yes Men Fix the World," we posed as Dow Chemical representatives at a big 2005 banking conference where we said that, clearly, any number of human deaths is acceptable as long as a project is extremely profitable. A life-size golden skeleton made sure the message hit home. Instead of recoiling in horror, most of the bankers simply applauded. One chief executive said he was interested in working with us, and a senior manager at a financial technology firm said he found the idea "refreshing."In 2006, we posed as Halliburton reps at an insurance conference on Amelia Island, Fla. There we unveiled the "SurvivaBall," a grotesque suit six feet in diameter, made of nylon and inflated by two small computer fans, which we said would keep corporate managers safe from the climate calamities that they had helped cause. Lawyers at the conference, who represented some of the most powerful American companies, had a few questions: How much would it cost? Could it be made more comfortable? Might it work in a terrorist attack?
Now we know that the "Yes Men" were copied by two conservative video makers who nailed (I guess) ACORN employers for going along with a similar scheme. Clever -- though of course these college Republicans were nailing low-paid suckers working for an organization which helps people on America's widening bottom-rung get a life.
"Servin" and "Vamos" point out that "the House legislation intended to defund ACORN is written so broadly that it would similarly cut off money to 'any organization' indicted for various forms of lawbreaking, and any organization with employees or contractors who have been indicted on certain charges."
So Congress has given itself the authority to go after even worse perps than ACORN, from Halliburton to Blackwater and then on down the line.
If the idiocy of a few ACORN workers can lead Congress to defund that organization, surely lawmakers will move to rescind the bailout cash given to the banks whose employees seemed ready to go along with our depraved schemes, and whose reckless gambling with other people's money helped create the foreclosure crisis -- precisely the crisis that ACORN and other agencies are trying to help poor and working-class Americans cope with.
Surely such action will set a shining example for years to come and will save society from the most criminal tendencies in our midst.
Won't it?
The ACORN incident tells us more about our elected representatives than about corrupt social service workers, that's for sure.
Are we listening?
Update: Bertha Lewis, ACORN's CEO, got this right:
“One unintended - and positive - consequence of the witch hunt against ACORN is that it could help rein in the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater and even Wall St," she said in the statement. "If the standard is that organizations that have broken the law shouldn’t get federal money, then let’s set that standard consistently. There are numerous corporations that have been proven records of malfeasance. For its part – and although we don’t claim perfection in our work for poor and working families - ACORN has never been convicted of any crime in a court of law - the conservative imagination and the media are another matter."
And Laura Flanders "makes a little list" of corporations and other entities who furture could be poisoned by the Congressional witch hunt. Try, say, Catholic Charities and Lockheed Martin... When you think about the limitless ties between government (taxpayers') money and corporate America -- from churches to defense industry -- the ACORN video may be end up bring down a nice chunk of Republican life support.
