Lessons in Double Standards of the American Right 101.
AP, today:
The Senate voted Monday to block the Housing and Urban Development Department from giving grants to ACORN, a community organization under fire in several voter-registration fraud cases.
The 83-7 vote would deny housing and community grant funding to ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
The action came as the group is suffering from bad publicity after a duo of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her pimp released hidden-camera videos in which ACORN employees in Baltimore gave advice on house-buying and how to account on tax forms for the woman's income. Two other videos, aired frequently on media outlets such as the Fox News Channel, depict similar situations in ACORN offices in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C.
Salon, 6 Aug. 2002:
Two former employees of DynCorp, the government contracting powerhouse, have won legal victories after charging that the $2 billion-a-year firm fired them when they complained that co-workers were involved in a Bosnia sex-slave trade.
The court actions -- one in the United Kingdom, the other in Fort Worth, Texas -- suggest that the company did not move aggressively enough when reports of sexual misconduct among its employees began to emerge in 1999. The tribunal in the U.K. found that DynCorp employee Kathryn Bolkovac "acted reasonably," but that the company did not.
[...]
In late June, Salon published a two-part investigation into the participation of DynCorp employees in the Bosnian sex-slave trade, based in part on evidence uncovered in the Johnston case. At least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia -- and at least seven of them fired -- for purchasing women or participating in other prostitution-related activities. But despite large amounts of evidence in some cases, none of the DynCorp employees sent home have faced criminal prosecution.
Because of a combination of international treaties, jurisdictional loopholes and bureaucratic confusion, employees of private military companies such as DynCorp can escape prosecution for crimes they commit overseas. Most common crimes committed outside the United States are beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, and the burgeoning local law enforcement systems in war-torn regions such as Bosnia are often insufficient or unwilling to police U.S. contractors.
Amount of federal money received by DynCorp in FY 2007: $1.3 billion
In summary:
Non-profit grantee that fires employees complicit in criminal activity = bad.
For-profit contractor that fires whistleblowers who report on criminal activities = good.
For more on the impunity for U.S. contractors that engage in human trafficking and sex slavery, please see this article to see how lobbyists for DynCorp and Halliburton blocked a provision in a bill that would have established an internal watchdog in the Pentagon to monitor occurrences of human trafficking by defense contractors.