Under the bus

LITTLE ROCK — By now everybody has already heard that ACORN is corrupt, if that's some sort of news story.

No teary-eyed, squishy-soft, bleeding-heart defense will be offered here. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will not even be missed, except by the people who use it to advance themselves.

To make this just a bit personal, some of us who regularly stick up for the little guy and poor working families are tired of being routinely thrown under the bus by a bunch of indifferent, tone-deaf, self-seeking opportunists. There is, after all, such a thing as accountability.

It is hard to improve on the You-Tube video depicting what can only be described as a somewhat amateurish ambush on a Baltimore ACORN office in which employees were caught on camera appearing to advise a couple posing as a prostitute and a pimp to lie about the woman's profession to get housing aid.

Apparently, the same people staged similar secret video recording operations in New York and California. Bush-league as it was, the Baltimore defenders of the downtrodden came through with flying colors, making complete fools of everybody just a centimeter left of center.

Similar, cushy insider deals may be hatched in corporate boardrooms every day, but that rationalization is nothing but moral relativism. Besides, corporations, according to classic economic theory, only steal from investors and consumers. ACORN is, to some extent, using taxpayer money.

There are certainly conscientious and honest people at ACORN, and probably plenty of them. That makes this situation all the more detestable because good reputations are stained and, worst of all, the economically disadvantaged remain unassisted.

At the end of the day, nobody is going to miss ACORN. The fact is that some better group of do-goods will step up to the plate; in fact, there probably are several well-managed not-for-profits that would love to have that slice of the pie.

Now all the former ACORN big shots can expect to be hauled before congressional committees and indiscriminately treated like convicted felons. Some good people will be hurt.

It's a funny thing about accountability. That precept is usually put forward as an inconvenience and an obtuse requirement to protect "the public," whoever the heck that is. More to the point, accountability protects very real individuals, including the one being made to give an explanation for his actions.

Of course, it was a completely different deal with the car executives. They only had a 30-year history of manufacturing automobiles that were not generally approved of by much of the domestic market.

Looks like they came out of it pretty well. Too bad for ACORN that it is not "too big to fail."

When the ACORN people finally show up to testify, they will certainly look like a bunch of total idiots. People do not become community organizers because they have a keen sense of business. That ineptitude does not make them crooks.

A lot of the allegations against this nationwide community organization are just pure hysteria and nonsense stirred up by Republicans to endear themselves to the tea-party base of conservative activists. I think of that crowd as the right-wing equivalent of ACORN. Both of these factions probably need to work on their social skills.

There seems to be very little stomach for going after the corporate criminals who crash the world economy and then party on the taxpayer's dime. Michael Moore is promoting a film coming out next month that to some extent will examine the issue, but nothing can top a bunch of bozos plotting to make a bordello look like a lawful enterprise.

Real theft, the trillion-dollar variety that crushes families and the businesses they depend on, is not sexy. Don't expect Congress to ever accidentally let some wise guy with a microscopic camera inside the sanctum sanctorum where lawmakers' souls are offered up to the pantheon of corporate gods.

The current proposal by Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, bears some resemblance to the report

edly shady Baltimore business consultation on how to construe call girls as entertainers. In this case, the perpetrators know that the billions in direct payments to health insurance companies would never pass muster as corporate welfare, so they call it health care reform.

Under the Baucus plan, everybody has to buy health insurance and the federal government will cover those who can't pay. So who benefits? Insurers get millions of new customers and billions of dollars flow to the bottom line. That means our elected representatives will continue receiving their cut in political contributions.

It's a shrewd deal, even by ACORN standards.

Free-lance columnist Pat Lynch has been a radio broadcaster in Central Arkansas for more than 20 years.