ACORN

The right has adopted the tactics used by the left over the past 8 years and is bringing ACORN to its knees. I don't believe for a minute that this is being done by a guy fresh out of college and a 20-year-old woman. There is a lot of money and organization behind it. The right has found their Soros. I am glad ACORN is cracking.

With that said, the poor need advocates. There are millions of them and their issues tend to get buried. It's unfortunate for them that their most visible advocate is corrupt through-and-through.

Update:

Based upon some of the comments, let me explain further. What ACORN does is teach people how to game the system. What people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do is shake down businesses in order to fatten their own wallets. What government does is hand out the freebies and perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Then to keep order amongst the young males they continue to pass byzantine laws that keep far too many Americans locked behind iron bars. The "advocates" of the poor are anything but. It's all been an epic failure. We have almost 50 years of experience to prove this.

In the aftermath of Katrina I said that President Bush had a golden opportunity to break this cycle in New Orleans. I said right here that the Feds should enact a WPA-style program to rebuild the city, instead of paying handouts for years so that people could continue living off the public dole elsewhere. But Bush didn't. What happened was the Feds paid billions to contractors who then went out and hired an army of 20,000 hard-working Mexican dudes, who, by the way, received pretty good pay.

Poor people need job skills. They need to learn how to fish. Poor Mexicans know how to fish, poor Americans don't need to learn how to fish because someone is there for them to provide a mediocre (but just enough) existence.

There's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in this country. I think overhauling AmericCorps (nuking the fraud and politics and instead teach job skills) and expanding recruitment in poor areas is a good idea and would go a long way to show these people how to fish.