79-02-A6
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Anti-Poverty Abuses II[edit]
Transcript[edit]Last time I was talking to you about the report of the House Appropriations Committee Investigations Staff that documented abuses and mismanagement in ACTION, the federal anti-poverty agency headed by Carter appointee Sam Brown. Today, let's get to the National Grants Program, a new policy initiated by Brown. Its supposed purpose was to help the poor help themselves. Instead, this is just some of what the Congressional investigators found: --One recipient of an ACTION grant, a group calling itself ACORN and CORAP, used volunteers from VISTA (that Volunteers in Service to America, an ACTION division) to get "involved in the Arkansas primary election last spring" ... five VISTA volunteers were actively engaged in organizing a labor union, a violation of federal statutes ... accounting procedures for the grant were called "careless and inadequate-- by the report ... monitoring of the grant by ACTION state-level officials is called "non-existent" ... the grant was so abused, and the projects to help the poor so mismanaged, that this grant was the last ACTION grant that will be given to ACORN and its subsidiary CORAP. --Next there is the Midwest Academy in Chicago, another organization receiving ACTION dollars -- meaning tax dollars. This group, dedicated to confrontation politics and the redistribution of income, is headed by a former officer of the notorious Students for a Democratic Society. Midwest Academy, according to the House report "did not meet any of the criteria" that ACTION itself asks for in a grantee. It has not provided uniform training, and of the groups that it trained with federal anti-poverty funds were described by the investigators as "organizations set up to improve the lot of working women." Now improving the lot of working women is a noble goal, but when you use poverty funds to help women who are already working, something has to be wrong. Need I add that again, just as in ACORN grant, federal money was used at one Midwest project in a labor union organizing drive... finally, one Midwest program had federally funded anti-poverty warriors... and this is a quote from the report "working more to save a middle-class neighborhood landmark -- a country club -- rather than serve the poor." Then there is an organization receiving ACTION funds that, according to the report, receives 90 percent of its operating funds from the federal government, and yet lobbies for federal legislation. That's pot the way the federal anti-poverty program is supposed to be run. What can we conclude from all of this? Well, Sam Brown says he is a victim of the "political right" and "Conservatives" and that the report of a Democratically controlled committee is a "political attack". Jimmy Carter appointed Brown. The question is what, if anything, is Mr. Carter going to do about these latest revelations of incompetence, scandal and abuse of our tax dollars? This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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