Congressional lawmakers wasted no time taking swift action to defund the community activist group ACORN but, Congress is incapable of acting as decisively when it comes to defunding Blackwater.
According to military-affairs reporter Jeremy Scahill, a writer for The Nation and who broke the story that Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, had been implicated in least one murder, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow how ACORN received “pennies” compared to military contractors who have been convicted of crimes but continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from US taxpayers.
Scahill suggested that it’s relatively easy to go after a grassroots community group like ACORN, while pursuing much worse allegations against defense contractors requires actual courage.
“This is political, this isn’t really about upholding the law,” Scahill said on the Rachel Maddow Show. “On the one hand, you have an organization that registered 1.3 million people to vote, 400,000 members, works with the poor and working class people of this nation, and they don’t have lobbying power in the form of massive campaign contributions.
“On the other side, you have 600 war corporations on the government payroll,” Scahill continued. “You want to know an actual election scandal? Twenty-five to 40 cents of every dollar spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — $2.5 billion a week — that money goes directly to war corporations who in turn contribute campaign dollars to the Republicans and Democrats.”
Earlier in the program, Maddow had listed a litany of criminal accusations against Blackwater which included murder allegations.
“Not only have these contractors [Blackwater] not been defunded by outraged members of Congress, they all continue to get spectacularly lucrative government contracts even after all these things have been exposed,” Maddow told viewers.
It is curious how each night, FOX News personalities Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity use their television programs to exhibit faux outrage at ACORN but their outrage doesn’t include a tax payer-funded, government contractor, accused of murder and hired by the former Bush administration to provide security in Iraq?
If Congress can take action to defund ACORN then surely, it is within the scope of their abilities to stop funding Blackwater. Perhaps all Congress is waiting for is permission from Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity?
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