ACORN Disbands After Congressional Defunding, Prostitution Scandals (Videos)

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ACORN Disbands Amid Scandals, After Defunding



The once mighty community activist group ACORN announced Monday it is folding amid falling revenues — six months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute.

"It's really declining revenue in the face of a series of attacks from partisan operatives and right-wing activists that have taken away our ability to raise the resources we need," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said.

Several of its largest affiliates, including ACORN New York and ACORN California, broke away this year and changed their names in a bid to ditch the tarnished image of their parent organization and restore revenue that ran dry in the wake of the video scandal.

ACORN's financial situation and reputation went into free fall within days of the videos' release in September. Congress reacted by yanking ACORN's federal funding, private donors held back cash and scores of ACORN offices closed.

Earlier this month, a U.S. judge reiterated an earlier ruling that the federal law blacklisting ACORN and groups allied with it was unconstitutional because it singled them out. But that didn't mean any money would be automatically be restored.

Bertha Lewis, the CEO of ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, alluded to financial hardships in a weekend statement as the group's board prepared to deliberate by phone.

"ACORN has faced a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era," she said. "The videos were a manufactured, sensational story that led to rush to judgment and an unconstitutional act by Congress."

ACORN's board decided to close remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1 because of falling revenues, with some national operations will continue operating for at least several weeks before shutting for good, Whelan said Monday.

For years, ACORN could draw on 400,000 members to lobby for liberal causes, such as raising the minimum wage or adopting universal health care. ACORN was arguably most successful at registering hundreds of thousands of low-income voters, though that mission was dogged by fraud allegations, including that some workers submitted forms signed by 'Mickey Mouse' or other cartoon characters.


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Sources: NY Daily News, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps

Runaway Prius Story A Hoax? Possible Gov't Cover Up

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Federal Government Cannot Explain Runaway Prius Incident



The federal government said Monday it cannot explain a reported incident of sudden, high-speed acceleration in a Toyota Prius on a California freeway last week, a malfunction the driver's lawyer is describing as "the ghost in the machine."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement that it continues to investigate but "we may never know exactly what happened with this car."

Prius owner James Sikes called 911 last week to report losing control of his Prius as the hybrid reached speeds of 94 mph. A highway patrol officer helped bring the vehicle to a safe stop.

On Monday, Sikes' attorney, John Gomez, said it's "not surprising" that investigators have not been able to replicate the incident.

"This problem is sort of a ghost in the machine that is the Toyota system," Gomez said Sunday. "It doesn't leave a fault code, it doesn't leave a footprint and you can't make it happen upon demand."

"They have never been able to replicate an incident of sudden acceleration. Mr. Sikes never had a problem in the three years he owned this vehicle," he added.

The NHTSA said its engineers are reviewing data from Sikes' Prius but have so far not been able to find anything to explain the reported incident. Inspectors in California tried during a two-hour test drive to duplicate the acceleration, but were unable to do so.

Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the failure to duplicate the stuck accelerator, along with a vehicle design to prevent such occurrences, raises questions about the driver's story.

"We're not saying Mr. Sikes is wrong or that he lied, we're saying that questions have arisen in the investigation," Bardella said.

Toyota Motor Corp. planned to announce preliminary findings of its investigation at a news conference Monday in San Diego.

NHTSA is looking into claims from more than 60 Toyota owners that their vehicles continue to accelerate unexpectedly despite having their vehicles repaired.

Technicians with the NHTSA and Toyota could not duplicate what Sikes said he experienced March 8 on a mountainous but lightly traveled stretch of Interstate 8 east of San Diego, according to a congressional staffer's memo prepared for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"Every time the technician placed the gas pedal to the floor and the brake pedal to the floor the engine shut off and the car immediately started to slow down," the memo read.

According to the memo, a Toyota official who was at the two-day inspection last week in suburban San Diego explained that an electric motor would "completely seize" if a system to shut off the gas when the brake is pressed fails, and there was no evidence to support that happened.

"In this case, knowing that we are able to push the car around the shop, it does not appear to be feasibly possible, both electronically and mechanically that his gas pedal was stuck to the floor and he was slamming on the brake at the same time," according to the memo.

Toyota has recalled millions of cars because of floor mats that can snag gas pedals or accelerators that can sometimes stick. Sikes' car was covered by the floor mat recall but not the one for sticky accelerators. He later told reporters that he tried to pull on the gas pedal during his harrowing ride, but it didn't "move at all."

The Prius is powered by two electric motor-generators and a small gasoline engine, all connected by transmission gears. A computer, which Toyota calls the "hybrid control computer" determines what combination of motors is needed and which would be most efficient.

Craig Hoff, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich., said that for the Prius to accelerate out of control, at least two systems would have to fail simultaneously. They are the sensor signal that tracks the brake and gas pedal positions when the driver presses on them and the hybrid control computers.

"The chance of them both going wrong, plus the fact that the signal is bad, it just seems very, very, very remote," Hoff said. "Could it happen? Statistically, yes. But it just doesn't seem very likely."

Several events usually combine to cause problems with cars, and it's difficult to reproduce them, Hoff said.

"It's going to make it really hard to find, because you've got to line up the multiple effects," he said.

The congressional memo said both the front and rear brakes were worn and damaged by heat, consistent with Sikes saying that he stood on the brake pedal with both feet and was unable to stop the car. But if the fail-safe system worked properly, the brakes wouldn't have been damaged because power would have been cut to the wheels.

Gomez said the best evidence that his client was frantically slamming the brakes is that a California Highway Patrol officer who was giving Sikes instructions over a loudspeaker smelled burning brakes and saw the lights on.

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Runaway Prius Driver: Brakes Were "Almost Burned"


Before he called 911, James Sikes says he reached down with his hand to loosen the "stuck" accelerator on his 2008 Toyota Prius, his other hand on the steering wheel. The pedal didn't move.

"My car can't slow down," he began when a California Highway Patrol dispatcher answered his call.

Sikes, 61, rolled to a stop 23 harrowing minutes later, he and his blue Prius emerging unscathed but Toyota Motor Corp. suffering another big dent. Toyota has watched its reputation for quality crumble with recalls tied to risks that cars can accelerate uncontrollably or can't brake properly.

Todd Neibert, the CHP officer who gave instructions to Sikes over a loudspeaker as they went east on mountainous Interstate 8 in San Diego County Monday afternoon, said he smelled burning brakes when he caught up with the Prius.

The officer said he told Sikes to push the brake pedal to the floor and apply the emergency brakes as the Prius neared 85 mph. The car slowed to about 55 mph, at which time Sikes says he turned off the ignition and the car came to a stop.

"The brakes were definitely down to hardly any material," Neibert told reporters Tuesday. "There was a bunch of brake material on the ground and inside the wheels."

The officer found the floor mat properly placed and the accelerator and brake pedals in correct resting position.

The freeway incident happened at the worst possible time for Toyota - just hours after it invited reporters to hear experts insist that electronic flaws could not cause cars to speed out of control under real driving conditions.

Another driver in suburban New York told police Tuesday that her 2005 Toyota Prius accelerated on its own, then lurched down a driveway, across a road and into a stone wall. The driver, a 56-year-old woman, escaped serious injury. Police said the floor mat did not appear to be a factor; Toyota said it's not yet known whether the company will investigate.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has sent two investigators to examine Sikes' car. Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said the automaker is sending three of its own technicians to investigate.

Another Toyota spokesman, John Hanson, said the company wanted to talk to the driver.

Sikes' car was covered by Toyota's floor mat recall, but the driver said the pedal jammed and was not trapped under the mat.

Sikes, a real estate agent, said he was passing another car when the accelerator stuck and eventually reached 94 mph.

During the two 911 calls, Sikes ignored many of the dispatcher's questions, saying later that he had to put his phone on the seat to keep his hands on the wheel.

Leighann Parks, a 24-year-old dispatcher, repeatedly told him to throw the car into neutral but got no answers.

"He was very emotional, you could tell on the line he was panicked," Parks told reporters outside the CHP's El Cajon office. "I could only imagine being in his shoes and being that stressed."

Neibert told Sikes after the CHP caught up with him to shift to neutral but the driver shook his head no. Sikes told reporters he didn't go into neutral because he worried the car would flip.

The driver rolled down the window and Neibert told him to apply both brakes. Sikes said he lifted his buttocks from the seat to press the floor brake, an account backed by the officer.

The cars maneuvered around two trucks going uphill to a "clear, wide-open road," Neibert said. The officer had only about 15 miles to stop the vehicle before a steep downgrade and was considering spike strips to puncture the tires as a last resort.

In the final minutes of the 911 call, Sikes tells the dispatcher, "My brakes are almost burned out."

After the car stops, Sikes sighs with relief.

Neibert, a 14-year CHP veteran, worked with Officer Mark Saylor, who was killed in August along with his wife, her brother and the couple's daughter after their Lexus' accelerator became trapped by a wrong-size floor mat on a freeway in nearby La Mesa. The loaner car hit a sport utility vehicle and burst into flames.

Toyota has since recalled some 8.5 million vehicles worldwide - more than 6 million in the United States - because of acceleration problems in multiple models and braking issues in the Prius. Regulators have linked 52 deaths to crashes allegedly caused by accelerator problems. Still, there have been more than 60 reports of sudden acceleration in cars that have been fixed under the recall.


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Sources: MSNBC, CBS News, Fox News, Google Maps

Geithner Gets Fiesty On "The Hill", Encouraged To Resign

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Geithner Defends Fed Actions On AIG Bailout


Democrats and Republicans alike pummeled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Wednesday over his role in the $180 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG Inc., venting public anger over Wall Street's return to prosperity while 10 percent of Americans are still jobless.

Geithner, one of the original architects of the government's 2008 response to the financial crisis as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, defended the use of taxpayer money as necessary to head off "potentially catastrophic damage to the economy."

But members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hammered away at why regulators allowed American International Group to pass on billions of the bailout money to big Wall Street banks that were business partners.

"In effect, the taxpayers were propping up the hollow shells of AIG by stuffing it with money. And the rest of Wall Street came by and looted the corpse," committee chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., told Geithner.

Geithner clearly was getting no cover from committee Democrats on the day that President Barack Obama was to give a State of the Union address intended to assure Americans he shares their economic priorities.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, suggested Geithner was more beholden to banking interests than to taxpayers at the New York Fed and cut him off abruptly when he tried to deny it.

Kaptur later called Geithner's performance weak and said it showed that "he shouldn't have been appointed in the first place." She said in an interview that he should leave the administration "but removing him would be an empty change without eliminating the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street."

Both Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have recently found themselves on the defensive, both targets of political discontent and rising voter anger sweeping the nation.

Bernanke had to scramble for support for confirmation for a second term. And Geithner faced speculation over whether his influence was fading after Obama reset his economic priorities to go with a far more aggressive attack on Wall Street and large banks and began paying more attention to advice from former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

But if Geithner risked being hung out to dry by the administration, it was not obvious in his testimony, in which he tied to deflect repeated congressional criticism and vigorously defended his record.

"Deciding to support AIG was one of the most difficult choices I have ever been involved in, in over 20 years of public service. The steps that were taken were motivated solely by what we believed to be in the public interest," Geithner said.

He also repeated an insistence that he played no direct role in AIG deals with business partners or in withholding information about them from the public.

When Obama picked him for the Treasury post on November 24, 2008, "I withdrew from monetary policy decisions ... and day to day management of the New York Fed," Geithner testified. "I don't think there was a better alternative available."

AIG eventually received an aid package from the government of more than $180 billion. At issue is the part of this money to repay banks that were its business partners, known as counterparties, and alleged efforts to cover up details of the payments.

The committee subpoenaed 250,000 pages of documents from the Fed.

Lawmakers are concerned with revelations about efforts to keep details of the AIG deals secret. Officials from the Treasury Department and the New York Fed worked to keep the public from learning details about those deals and other AIG decisions.

"I played no role in those decisions," Geithner said. "I will take complete responsibility for decisions I played a role in shaping," he said.

But lawmakers expressed skepticism.

"Many people, including people of this committee, have a hard time believing Secretary Geithner entered into an absolute cone of silence," California Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee's top Republican, said. Issa said he had "lost confidence" in Geithner.

Democrats and Republicans took turns lambasting the Treasury secretary.

"Either you made a bad decision there, or there was the attempt to cover up one of the biggest bailouts, backdoor bailouts, in history," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., told him.

Recalling the early controversy over Geithner's failure to pay some personal income taxes, Mica said: "You gave lame excuses then, you are giving lame excuses now. Why shouldn't we ask for your resignation as secretary of the Treasury?"

"You have a right to your opinion," Geithner said.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told Geithner: "It just stinks to the high heaven what happened here."

Lynch said later that Geithner's reputation "has been hurt greatly."

Bernanke also said Wednesday he was "not directly involved in negotiations" involving payments from AIG to its business partners including Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. Those negotiations were handled primarily by the staff of the New York Fed, he said.

Bernanke made the comments in written responses to questions posed by Issa.

Although Bernanke and Geithner have taken the most heat, the government's bank rescue effort began under former President George W. Bush and Henry Paulson, his Treasury secretary.

Paulson, who followed Geithner at Wednesday's hearing, defended his own role. "An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and the economy," he said. "AIG could not be effectively wound down."

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., asked Paulson if he didn't realize how angry people were at wealthy bankers and Wall Street barons who he said play golf together and are always "looking out for themselves" while the rest of the country suffers.

"I'm not a golfer but I sure know that's how people feel. Congressman, you've got it. People are very, very angry. And rightfully so ... They don't recognize that what was done wasn't done for the banks" but to save the nation's financial system and economy.


Sources: MSNBC, CNBC