Big Business has been filmed accepting questionable ideas. They weren't ACORNed.

Congress Went After ACORN. Big Business Must Be Next!

We are the Yes Men, two guys who dress up as powerful businessmen, propose horrible things to audiences of actual powerful businesspeople and film them cheerfully applauding our most outrageous -- and often illegal -- ideas.

In our new film "The Yes Men Fix the World," we posed as Dow Chemical representatives at a big 2005 banking conference where we said that, clearly, any number of human deaths is acceptable as long as a project is extremely profitable. A life-size golden skeleton made sure the message hit home. Instead of recoiling in horror, most of the bankers simply applauded. One chief executive said he was interested in working with us, and a senior manager at a financial technology firm said he found the idea "refreshing."


WP article site: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/25/AR2009092502016.html

Several of the bankers in attendance then signed up for licenses for the "Acceptable Risk Calculator" and even posed with Acceptable Risk mascot "Gilda, the golden skeleton in the closet," for photos.

If "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR) and other market forces were all that set limits on corporate behavior, what would constitute "acceptable risk"?

"Yes Men" site:http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks

They went after Halliburton too. It is truly mindboggling what these corporate reps believed and approved. Nobody peeped about them as far as I remember.

ACORN doesn't hold a candle to this. Yes, ACORN needs to stop any illegal and/or questionable practices. However, there is really selective accountability as Rachel Maddow pointed out.

Rachel's clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxm--DyavI

different than for the piddly little retail operations.

Corporations are mostly white men in suits helping white men to make money. ACORN helps a lot of brown people. Corporations contribute the nation's economy. ACORN helps people many see as a drag on the nation's economy.

Saying there's a racial element to the ACORN fuss is probably really stupid, and I only wrote it because I am tired and not thinking.

Maybe it's just that corporations and their lobbyists help keep our politicians in office and in style. ACORN does community organizing that indirectly benefits many Democrats, but our politicians don't realize it or don't have the balls to stand up for what's right.

AS for "acceptable risk" I think of the movie Fight Club in which Edward Norton's character explains how his company decides whether or not to do a recall upon discovering a potentially fatal flaw with their product: You calculate the rate of failure and multiply that by the average cost of settlement. If the result is less than the cost of a product recall, we don't do the recall. Maybe that's a bit of an oversimplification, but I think a lot of companies probably function this way.

I'm not sure if it makes it better or worse that the ACORN people had nothing to gain from giving bad/illegal advise. It certainly makes it more bizarre.