Scott Walter
Nonprofits for Bribery
At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new post on a gun-control group’s complaint that the federal budget doesn’t have enough loose change in it to grease the “bribes” necessary to buy the votes of Members of Congress.
“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”
Mayor Bloomberg also comes in for criticism. Read the full post here.
Funders silent on the war on women
At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on the disturbing fact that multi-billion-dollar foundations fund “population control” and “reproductive health services” but are silent about China’s war on women, even though that nation’s “One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth.”
The whole story is here.
Investigating some donors
Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new piece on Sen. Carl Levin’s plan to open an investigation that will target giving to conservative political causes, especially by corporations. Unions, the administration’s asleep-at-the-switch Department of Labor, and left-wing activists have little to fear.
Read the full story here.
Another voter registration scandal
Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on two scandals breaking out in North Carolina. The first scandal involves thousands of improper voter registrations in a scam that was duplicated in all 50 states this election cycle. The second concerns left-wing nonprofits in the state, whose secret strategy to attack leading conservative office-holders was leaked. Even the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which is North Carolina’s answer to the Ford Foundation, was gravely embarrassed, and the state GOP has filed formal complaints with the IRS and the State Board of Elections (SBE). Unfortunately, the SBE is at the center of the voter registration scandal:
The SBE general counsel wrote Civitas September 26, 2012, to assure them, “We were not contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party” regarding registration. Yet the firm that SBE allowed to conduct “web-based” registrations brags on its website’s front page that its clients include “Presidential campaigns,” and its clients page lists “Obama for President Draft Committee.”
Get the whole story here.
Elitists Violating Donor Intent
Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a blog post commenting our study of the American Library Association and two classic diseases of the nonprofit world that study brings to mind.
The first disease is the capture by the Left of a national group composed of ordinary Americans. Our study of the ALA shows that its leaders are far to the left of its typical member, and this kind of capture has even happened over the years to groups like the Southern Baptists, which you wouldn’t think susceptible to such a takeover.
Second, the subject of librarians recalls Andrew Carnegie’s great crusade to help local communities across America build public libraries. Alas, as our friend Bill Schambra of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal points out, the staff at Carnegie’s main philanthropy for his library project wrested the money out of the old man’s hands and soon abandoned his donor intent. The board and staff stopped seeding libraries in towns and cities. Instead, they preferred to fund the spread of “library science,” by which they meant spreading “progressive” ideology via experts on high. Or, as I summarize in my piece:
Ordinary Americans, in short, just can’t improve themselves on their own initiative, and local communities can’t advance intellectual progress by maintaining a library for those ordinary folks. You need a well-paid expert’s backside warming a chair in a building in a major East Coast metropolis to do that (and it’s best to pay that backside with the interest off a fortune amassed by an ordinary American who improved himself through his own hard work and entrepreneurship).
Read the whole piece here.
Uncivil Unions
[cross-posted from PhilanthropyDaily.com]
While civil society is great in general, that’s not always true for each group in civil society. Teachers’ unions, for instance, are my favorite example of civil society actors who are in it for us at the expense of others (see TeachersUnionExposed.com or this issue of Labor Watch).
Teachers’ unions regularly fight tooth and nail for their members’ benefit, with scant regard for whether they harm children and parents. Yet even I am amazed at the story of another union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which in New York and New Jersey has resisted the help of non-union utility crews that came up to help restore power.
This story has gone back and forth since Sandy hit, and the precise extent to which unions have kept out non-union crews is unclear. But in the case of at least one IBEW local — number 1049 on Long Island, New York (whose financial info. can be found here) – it’s clear that their greed and lust for control blocked the would-be assistance of crews from Florida. The Daily Caller has posted the “contract” that local 1049 insisted upon before they would allow their fellow Americans to help citizens in desperate need.
Here, in all their bureaucratic glory, are some of the unselfish demands local 1049 had for anyone trying to help New Yorkers:
1. That for the period of time October 29, 2012 through November 29, 2012, UTILITY agrees to normal working hours and overtime provided for in Article VIII of the Utility Agreement….
3. That for the period of time … UTILITY shall contribute $9.75 per work hour to the Union Health and Welfare Fund … as outlined in the Utility Agreement, Article XIX.
4. That for the period of time … UTILITY shall contribute 22 ½ % of each employee’s gross salary into the “I.B.E.W. Local 1049 Craft Annuity Fund” as provided in Section 19.20 of the Utility Agreement.
5. That for the period of time … UTILITY shall contribute 3% of each employee’s gross salary into the “I.B.E.W. Local 1049 Craft Division Skill Improvement Fund” as provided in Section 19.03 of the Utility Agreement.
6. That for the period of time … UTILITY shall contribute 3% of each employee’s gross salary to the local collection agent for the “National Electrical Benefit Fund” as provided in Section 19.05 of the Utility Agreement.
There’s much, much more – extortions are also made for the Electricity Industry Administrative Maintenance Trust of Northeastern Line Constructors Chapter, NECA fund; the National Labor Management Cooperation Committee; the National Electrical Industry Fund; the Northeastern Joint Apprenticeship and Training Trust; and, of course,
“UTILITY shall deduct 1% of gross payroll for employees for the period of time October 29, 2012 through November 29, 2012 and shall remit the same to the IBEW Local 1049 as union dues.”
Talk about the milk of human kindness….
The Daily Caller did the math, and if a nonunion crew foreman would normally earn $40 per hour in Florida, the eleven extortions in the “contract” would jump the hourly wage to $67.74; for work on weekends or after 4 p.m. weekdays, the rate would rise to $70.38.
It’s not hard to see why states like New York have disastrous financial problems with unionized government workers and why local governments are going bankrupt from union demands. Consider, for example, a recent report from the Manhattan Institute which, after reviewing financial data for New York state and its largest local governments, school districts, and public authorities, reveals that the state’s total unfunded liability for public-sector retiree health insurance comes to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars.