May
28
2024

No Corruption, Please, We're Americans

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Apparently, starting up your very own nonprofit corporation is a thing. Amazon has (approximately) a zillion books that will walk you through various aspects, including our Product du Jour. (Amazon claims: "250+ bought or read in past month".) I neither recommend it nor disrecommend it. But the subtitle is fascinating, isn't it? If the IRS isn't after you, you might get slapped with lawsuits! Or scandals! Or more!

But I was looking for eye candy to go with an interesting article by Jonathan Ireland in American Affairs: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City. After an aside about "Chilean Sea Bass", which is not a bass, and usually not from Chile. (Used to be called: the "Patagonian Toothfish". Yum!)

Anyway:

Consider the word “nonprofit.” Whoever came up with the idea of calling these organizations “nonprofits” was a marketing genius on the level of Steve Jobs. When someone hears the word nonprofit, they assume that such an organization is working for the public good; that it serves the homeless, protects the weak, exists for the benefit and the betterment of society at large. Hearing that something is a “nonprofit” immediately gives a sense that the organization is trustworthy and the people running it are driven by a charitable agenda. It’s a word that shuts down the critical faculties and grants an instantaneous moral stature to any organization to which it is applied. Consequently, non­profits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation.

Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. In some cities, upwards of a billion dollars of public funds are paid to nonprofit organizations every year with glaringly insufficient safeguards to ensure that the money is used in a manner likely to serve the public interest.

This money is then spent in ways that would shock the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars are being effectively stolen from them. Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding; nonprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts; and the executives of nonprofits, the very people in charge of institutions whose stated purpose is not to make money, earn millions of dollars while catastrophically failing to deliver the public services we are paying them to provide.

Examples abound. I wonder if our Amazon Product du Jour goes into how to hire murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists for your nonprofit?

Also of note:

  • Probably not a tryst with Stormy Daniels. Allysia Finley wonders: What Was Anthony Fauci’s Top Aide Hiding?

    The Covid pandemic wasn’t government’s finest hour, not least because of a persistent lack of transparency. Emails released last week by the U.S. House reveal how Anthony Fauci’s former top adviser worked to keep the public in the dark and thwart investigations into Covid’s origins.

    The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has been investigating the National Institutes of Health’s funding of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, some of which flowed to scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing risky experiments with coronaviruses. The committee earlier found that the NIH and EcoHealth failed to monitor properly the Wuhan experiments.

    Subpoenaed private emails from Dr. Fauci’s senior adviser, David Morens, now show how NIH officials and EcoHealth President Peter Daszak sought to conceal their lapses. After the Trump administration in April 2020 suspended funding for EcoHealth, Dr. Morens rallied to Mr. Daszak’s defense.

    “There are things I can’t say except Tony [Fauci] is aware and I have learned there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer through this with minimal damage to you, Peter, and colleagues, and to nih and niaid,” Dr. Morens wrote to Mr. Daszak on April 26, 2020. “I have reason to believe that there are already efforts going on to protect you.” (NIAID is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci directed from 1984 through 2022.)

    Ms Finley notes that Morens seems to have sought, and received, assistance from his "foia lady" ("foia" == "Freedom of Information Act") about "how to make emails disappear".

    In short, Morens seemed (a) smart enough to hide relevant information about Covid, EcoHealth, and Wuhan from investigators; but (b) not smart enough to hide his bragging about it.

  • [Amazon Link]
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    I have a longer list, but MTG's a start. Kevin D. Williamson's firmly on the ill-tempered warpath this week, and his primary target is the Jewish Space Laser lady: Expel Marjorie Taylor Greene.

    Greene is not the most significant of the parties who have worked to spread the wild lie that the Biden administration attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during the search of Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump is the most important of the liars. Julie Kelly of RealClear (ha!) Investigations is another. But Greene is a member of Congress, not a social media troll. And while she is not the only member of Congress to traffic in this nonsense, she is the worst offender.

    If you would like an excellent chronicle of how the Trump-assassination lie made its way from the sewers of the Internet to the halls of Congress, my colleague Mike Warren’s account is unimprovable. The short version: It begins with Kelly et al. claiming that bog-standard boilerplate language regarding the use of force in serving a warrant was some kind of extraordinary plan to have FBI agents “engage” the Secret Service—during a search that intentionally was conducted when the former president was not at Mar-a-Lago. The imbecility worked its way up through figures such as Dan Bongino (whose enduring soreness over having failed to make the cut at the FBI is palpable every time he talks about the agency) and then to Greene, who offered this doozy: 

    The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!! What are Republicans going to do about it? I tried to oust our Speaker who funded Biden’s DOJ AND FBI, but Democrats stopped it.

    Oh, we get it. We do. It is as plain as day: Moscow Madge is still looking for some flimsy post-hoc vindication for her risible, failed attempt to get rid of the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a coup-backing knee-walking MAGA grotesque and Trump enabler who is somehow not depraved and sycophantic enough for Greene. The speaker’s great sin against the One True Faith was deciding, for whatever reason, that House Republicans’ No. 1 priority was not not having a Department of Justice. Moscow Madge demanded that Johnson defund the police at the federal level, and Johnson, who occasionally does an almost persuasive impersonation of a functional adult human being, demurred.

    Speaking of Real Clear: What I gleaned from the Real Clear Politics home page today: polling people on "Direction of Country" shows 65.8% say "Wrong Track" while 24.1% say "Right Direction".

    And yet, voters keep returning the bozos to D. C,, year after year. It's a funny old country.