On April 27, 2010, I got a job with the United States Census Bureau in New Jersey. With a hidden camera, I caught four Census supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify information on their time sheets. Over the course of two days of training, I was paid for four hours of work I never did. I was told to take a 70 minute lunch break, was given an hour of travel time to drive 10 minutes, and was told to leave work at 3:30pm. I resigned prior to doing any data collection but confronted Census supervisors who assured me, “no one is going to be auditing that that level,” and “nobody is going to be questioning it except for you.” Another Census supervisor only said he’d adjust my pay after I gave him a letter recanting my hours.
As to whether this is an “isolated incident” or if there are more Census videos showing more waste, fraud, and corruption, we’ll let you take a wild guess.
America, real journalism has been dead for a long time now. With $1500 Hannah Giles and I were able to break a story that the New York Times couldn’t have broken no matter how many times they mortgaged their building. The government took our camera, so I bought another. The government put us in jail and deleted our tapes, but we got out and we’ll just make more. My travel was restricted to the state of New Jersey, so that’s where I got back to work. The media establishment is busy doing character assassinations on my friends and me but time and truth is on our side. [NYT front-page mugshots ... that's just perfect.]
Congress answered to our ACORN videos, now it will be up to the Department of Justice to explain why it edited out of a press release their admission we had no intent to tamper with Senator Landrieu’s phones. More importantly, it will be up to the Census Bureau to explain why their supervisors are systematically falsifying time sheets.More at the link (via Memeorandum).
Exposing corruption requires standing up to power, because power hates sunlight. We should have known they would try and ruin the reputations of those who try and expose them. But in response, we are going to build an army of citizen investigators. There’s hundreds more where I came from. You have awakened a sleeping giant. And you can’t ruin us all. In fact, in the coming months you will see this army expanding into every state, every statehouse, every city council, every school board, and everywhere people are conspiring to keep themselves in power, practice favoritism, or line their pockets with tax dollars.
After this weekend's reporting in Arizona, I feel in good company with James O'Keefe. I would just add the press itself to the list of corrupt institutions. I'll credit fair reporting when I see it, but it's to the point where the odds are at least 2-1 that people aren't getting the full story. Citizen journalism is going to save the Republic in the long run.
See also ABC News, "Exclusive: Conservative Filmmaker James O'Keefe Goes Undercover to Target Census Bureau; Infamous for ACORN Sting, O'Keefe Goes After Alleged Census Waste."
2 comments:
Just to balance this out, I'm working for the census and our teams have been held to strict accounting of time worked, strict accountability for our procedures, etc. Our boss has already fired people for padding hours.
Don't let this report sour you on all of the census workers. In my team alone, most of the census workers are conservatives, so you can't judge political associations either.
In any large organization, there will be bad apples.
Why doesn't this jackhole go undercover at MMS?
Ohh ya... he has an agenda.
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