Former ACORN head Bertha Lewis, who presided over the organization’s extinction after staffers were caught on videotape advising a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute on opening a brothel, has returned with flourish.
Only now she is going after longtime ally Bill de Blasio instead of fake pimp James O’Keefe and all those other wicked conservatives who tripped her up.
At a rally outside of City Hall yesterday afternoon, Lewis called de Blasio’s administration morally depraved for not giving sufficient city contracts to self-identified women and minority owned businesses.
“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. This administration is incompetent and immoral,” she yelped. “Yes, I said it. As Kanye West would say, to paraphrase him, this administration doesn’t care about minorities and black people.”
Her word choice is worth noting. Apparently, the only transgressions that liberals see fit to discuss publicly are racial sins. Any other kind of moralism is derided as quasi-theocrats imposing their values on others.
According to Lewis, who now heads something called the Black Institute, de Blasio has sinned against the diversity gods because his administration’s record of awarding contracts to minority and women owned business is woefully inadequate.
In September, when de Blasio announced the City awarded $1.6 billion in contracts to them out of a $13.8 billion procurement budget for fiscal year 2015, Lewis called his statistics bullshit.”
Actually, they might be. But not in the way she meant. Any business certified by New York City as minority or women owned has a better chance of getting government gigs. The Big Apple has a “goal” of giving 37 percent of its contracts to them.
But quite often it is really a honky pulling the strings.
Last year, a grand jury impaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., determined systematic criminal conduct in the program by multiple individuals and construction industry companies going back at least 10 years.
And that was the tip of the iceberg.
“Anecdotally, we know that there are clearly hundreds of millions of dollars that are being defrauded as part of these constructions projects through the MWBE program,” said Executive Assistant District Attorney David Szuchman. “In our view, it’s a major issue.”
Building contractors either falsely identified their subcontractors as minority or women owned.
Or they officially subcontracted with firms actually controlled by women or minorities but had other companies do the actual work.
The amount of deception here is roughly equivalent to the yarns James O’Keefe and his “lady of the evening” spun to nail ACORN.
Now, Bertha Lewis’s continued outbursts at de Blasio on behalf of racial preferences shows she is once again being taken for a ride.