CBD wrote:
Is this going to be like you acting as though Noco would be nationally shut down because a couple kids in Omaha sold cigarettes to minors? I mean, that was pretty funny but no joke is really that funny the second time around.
Yes. It was hysterical that you still fail to grasp that other organizations are held accountable for the actions of their employees. The degree of accountability does kinda hinge on the degree of violation though, doesn't it? If 5 H&R Block employees at 5 different offices in 5 different cities all failed to pass a similar type of sting, you can bet the entire organization would be on notice.
In a day and age when we condemn and fine a company for paying their employees bonuses that some thinks are too large, it's hard to figure out where your sudden willingness to look the other way when it comes to fraud at an organization comes from.
gbaji wrote:
Yet your stance before this thread has been "This is because ACORN trained them to commit fraud!"
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO!
I said this the last time someone invented that strawman position for me. I have *never* said this. Stop inventing stuff to argue against.
My position has always been that the the environment at ACORN lends itself to its employees committing fraud. That is an entirely different thing. They don't have to train anyone to commit fraud. Just not train them well enough not to, and put pressure on them to hand out as much money to as many clients as possible.
An organization like ACORN has a responsibility to ensure that the trust placed in it is not misplaced. They are supposed to be making sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. They have failed to do this.
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Now you're saying the exact same thing but as "ACORN is now changing their training, so the training must have failed before!" still implying that ACORN condoned fraud at some point. It's still total nonsense, no matter how many different ways you invent to say it.
What I am saying now is completely consistent with what I have said all along. If you'd read what I write instead of other people's strawman interpretations, you might understand this. What's so frustrating is that this is now the second time someone has accused me of changing my story by making the exact same false claim about what I "started out saying".
I have not ever said that ACORN trained their employees to commit fraud.
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gbaji wrote:
but also to provide an extreme situation in which there should be absolutely zero moral ambiguity. No one should be able to claim that they helped someone lie "just a little bit" because they were in such a sad and difficult state.
It shows that the people who did it are extremely @#%^ed up. It doesn't really say anything about the organization as a whole other than several branches should be utterly embarrassed at both their hiring ability and their ability to make sure their employees have their heads on straight.
Sure. But they are responsible for making sure their employees *dont* do those things. There should be a greater degree of responsibility placed on organizations handling public funds than private companies, but it seems like many seem to view this the other way around. If a private company mismanages their money, it's their money. It's their loss. Of course, they're less likely to tolerate such incompetence or illegality from their employees exactly because it is their money at stake. But that's why organizations handling public money need to hold themselves to an even higher standard and really should come under even greater oversight. They are handling other people's money. Not theirs. They don't lose anything if their employees hand out that money incorrectly, or commit fraud along the way. Thus, unless the folks running it are very very committed to doing the right thing, it's quit easy for things to slide and the sort of events we see on those videos happen.
It's not the exception, it's the rule. When no one has a vested interest in avoiding fraud, and no one is looking out for it, it's going to happen. You can dismiss this as just a few bad apples, but the environment itself lends itself to people doing that sort of thing. They don't lose anything. They make other people happy. The people get their free money. And the organization can show much much money they handed out to people "in need" and clap itself on the back, get awards, get invited to political events, etc. Everyone wins if the employees commit fraud... Except the taxpayers who are footing the bill.
I just don't know how many times I have to explain this process before you get it. It does not require deliberate action by the organization as a whole to cause this. It need only not act deliberately to prevent fraud to ensure that it happens. Whether anyone chose not to act to prevent it is subject to debate of course, but it's clear that ACORN as an organization has failed to act in a manner we should expect of one trusted with handling public money.
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When I got trained at my first serving job, I was told to do whatever was within my power to make the customer happy. I had enough common sense to realize that even the "within my power" part had its limits, without having to have every caveat directly related to me. I could easily remove every drink from the bill if I felt the customer didn't have a good time, but I didn't.
Sure. And if the companies profits weren't based on whether or not they got paid for drinks you handed out, might you have made a different choice?
Do you see how what ACORN does changes that dynamic?
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This doesn't even really show that they don't address it enough in the training. All it shows is that several employees with questionable moral values were employed at ACORN. All it shows is that several locations may not have followed the organization's training guidelines to the letter. Trying to extrapolate a few specific cases to the whole is nonsense, and if you'd stop being so blinded by your partisan rage you'd probably see that.
My "partisan rage" is due largely to people like you who refuse to admit that an organization so closely tied to their own partisan agenda should be held accountable for their activities. It's because so many people are willing to look the other way if illegal activities benefit them, or a political cause they agree with. It's because of the incredible double standard being employed, where we see liberal political organizations and entities engaged in questionable actions time and time again being ignored, or defended, or made to be victims, while the slightest hint of something amiss on the other side of the political fence becomes front page news.
When you've got a prominent news anchor saying "what story" a week after the initial videos surfaced, it speaks volumes about the degree of "headinsandism" going on out there. It reminds some of us of the Reverand Wright videos, which floated around the internet for 6 months before a single mainstream media outlet would touch the story. And that was almost an additional 3 months after they appeared on youtube and got millions of hits.
It's just startling the degree to which some people just want to ignore problems when they don't fit their own politics. If Acorn were a fortune500 company, and this was a case of embezzlement, you'd be all over it. And that's the bigger issue btw. It's not about prostitution. It's really about stealing of taxpayer money. ACORN is entrusted to handle that money. It should be responsible for making sure it's doing a good job, and if it can't, it should no longer be allowed to do so. Companies lose their licenses to do all sorts of things for usually far less than this. Yet because it's a non-profit and handles taxpayer money, we should just chastise the individuals involved and do nothing else?
Sorry. That's just not sufficient.