Headline of the Day

Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It's Funded by Kalshi

—Futurism, on how the National Council on Problem Gambling f%$#ed itself.

This is unbelievably stupid.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.

The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.

And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, quietly struck a deal to accept donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.

An April board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.

Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.

Taking a donation from a prediction market is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.

(emphasis mine)

To quote not Tallyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

Unfortunately, They Both Could Not Lose

Rather unsurprisingly, Sam Altman prevailed over Elon "I don't read the fine print" Musk in the latter's lawsuit against OpenAI.

The ruling was pretty narrow, the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ waited to file until after the statute of limitations had expired, but my guess is that if that had not been the case, he still would have lost, because incompetent, narcissistic, and erratic justified showing his ass to the door anyway.

A jury ruled in favor of Sam Altman in the culmination of a long and bitter legal battle that pitted the richest person in the world against a leader of the AI boom.

The federal jury in Oakland, California, found Altman, OpenAI and its president, Greg Brockman, not liable for Elon Musk’s claims that they unjustly enriched themselves and broke a founding contract made with Musk when founding the startup.

The verdict, delivered after less than two hours of deliberation, is a stark rebuke of Musk and his lawyer’s claims that Altman “stole a charity” through his leadership of OpenAI. It also provides the AI firm with a clear path ahead to pursue going public later this year at about a $1tn valuation.

The jury’s finding is a non-binding, advisory verdict that left Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers with ultimate power to issue her own ruling in the case. Gonzalez Rogers immediately said that she would agree with the jury’s decision and dismissed Musk’s claims.

Sam Altman is lucky that he was facing off against one of the few human beings on earth more loathsome than himself.

More of This

Providing subsidies in the form of tax breaks to groups that support the Confederacy is bad policy and bad politics. 

New Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger has signed into law a bill that removes tax exemptions from the Daughters of the Confederacy and other Neo-confederate groups.

About f%$#ing time:

On Monday, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and the state’s first female governor, signed into law a bill that eliminates tax exemptions for organizations connected to the Confederacy.

HB167, passed by Democrats in the Virginia house and senate, specifically removes the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, along with other groups, from the state’s list of organizations that are exempt from state property taxes.

Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is a non-profit with chapters in states including California, Kentucky, South Carolina and others. The organization is largely responsible for the proliferation of Confederate statues and monuments across the country after the US civil war. According to tax filings published by ProPublica, the group raised more than $2.1m in revenue, had more than $1.1m in expenses and possessed $15.8m in assets in 2025.

………

Still, Virginia lawmakers are pushing ahead with their efforts. Last week, Spanberger signed into law a different bill that discontinues speciality license plates that feature Robert E Lee and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. She also sent a bill that would establish a taskforce at the Virginia Military Institute to, among other things, recommend ways for the college to distance itself from sanitized narratives about the Confederacy back to the assembly with recommendations.

In many ways, this is more important than removing the statues, because this ends a direct state subsidy to an ideology that supports slavery and insurrection.

Econ 101, if you pay for it, people will make it.

Stop paying for Confederate apologists. 

While on the Topic of Charities Betraying Their Missions

We have to talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which aggressively retaliated against union employees and gutted its investigations of white supremacists following Donald Trump's election.

For five years, I wrote about far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and served as one of its spokespeople. Then, one day, I wasn’t there anymore. I never publicly explained why I was no longer with the SPLC, and I took a year off from social media after I left. On Posting Through It, the podcast I co-host with Jared Holt, I’ve occasionally hinted that something went wrong at the SPLC without getting into specifics. With my book Strange People on the Hill publishing on Tuesday, I’m going to explain what happened here—clearly and in full. 

Some of what follows reflects poorly on the SPLC as an institution. It should be said, though, that many union members there are people I respect and care about. They’re still fighting for a better organization and doing important work in a difficult, often repressive environment. After the right-wing authoritarian shift the SPLC had warned about for years arrived, the organization chose to reduce its public profile. That isn’t on these workers. They deserve better, and so does the broader civil rights community.

………

Donors to the SPLC may not realize that the organization purposefully discarded not only me but also the entire editorial team operating within the Intelligence Project—the division focused on far-right extremism—before Trump took power again in January 2025. That’s why you’ve seen fewer investigative pieces from them, even as open displays of hate have become increasingly common in American life. 

………

That’s why I agreed to become a union steward at the end of 2022. I had seen enough of that type of dysfunction. There were other, related issues. Extremists threatened my friend Hannah Gais’s physical safety during a reporting trip, and the Huang-picked Intelligence Project director didn’t even seem to know what was happening. But my primary goal in becoming a steward was to help us do our jobs without interference from leadership. We wanted to publish the investigative work on the radical right that we believed our donors expected of us.

The SPLC’s unionization effort began before I arrived—a response to underpaid staff working in palpably toxic conditions. (When you’re done reading here, check out the comments on the SPLC’s Glassdoor page for some dark comedy.) Before I became a steward, I had a spotless employment record, and leadership treated me as one of their own. I was once pulled into a Zoom call Huang held with CBS News to feed her talking points in real time. I also participated in ongoing chats with leadership and communications teams, advising them on how best to respond to breaking news. All that changed overnight when I became a steward. 

For those who have never experienced actual union-busting tactics firsthand, consider yourselves lucky. It really, really sucks. Throughout 2023, the SPLC’s leadership team called me into Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred. In one case, leadership put in writing quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale. 

……… 

You hear a lot of liberal and Democratic rhetoric about how dire this moment is. I agree. The only thing I have ever wanted, for the SPLC and for everyone living through this extraordinarily challenging moment, is for us to act like it.

Cowardice and union busting.  Now there is a toxic mix.

Snark of the Day

The pogroms are starting. https://t.co/XZx17qwu8V

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 25, 2026

Stoller is, of course, making a joke here.

Helping someone dig their car out of the snow does not qualify as a pogrom, regardless of the religion of the car driver or the shovel wielder. 

If you value your sanity, you may not want to look at the comments, where a number of truly dense people or organizations missed the humor entirely. 

Another Win for the US Military

It looks like the Department of Defense is planning to kick boy scouts to the curb, because they are too, "Woke."

To quote not-Talleyrand, "This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

The century-old partnership between the U.S. military and Scouting could be coming to an end.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning for the military to sever all ties with Scouting America, saying the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces," according to documents reviewed by NPR.

In a draft memo to Congress, which sources shared with NPR but which has not yet been sent, Hegseth criticizes Scouting for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

The military has provided support to the Scouts for more than 100 years, assistance that was formalized in 1937. But in one memo, Hegseth says, "The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys."

The proposal calls for the Pentagon to no longer provide medical and logistical aid to the National Jamboree, which brings in as many as 20,000 scouts to a remote site in West Virginia. It also states that the military will no longer allow Scout troops to meet at military installations in the U.S. and abroad, where many bases have active Scout programs.

I assume that Scouting America will try to teach their kids a lesson from this, because learning from misfortune is one of the things that they do.

My guess as to the lesson, "Don't let alcohol abuse rot your mind." 

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

In a world where Tech Bros fall over each other to out bigot each other, it is refreshing to see the Python Foundation telling the National Science Foundation telling the NSF to put their $1,500,000.00 where the moon don't shine, because the grant demands that the organization cease all anti-discrimination activities.

I looked at recent data on executive compensation at the Foundation, and no one there got more than $200,000/year in 2023, yet more evidence that Dan Ariely,'s research on compensation, which shows that excessive pay reduces performance, is true.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

"These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

By way of perspective, that $1.5 million is about ⅓ of their annual operating budget.

The Python Foundation is a  501(c)(3) not-for profit, and donations are tax deductible, and they manage thousands of volunteers working on development of the eponymous cross-platform FOSS programming language.

I have no opinion as to its merits as a programming language, but it is very widely used. (I'm not a programmer)

This Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Why the fuss over a tiny bungalo?



In news that should surprise none of my reader(s) New York Attorney General Leticia James has sued the right wing racist anti-immigrant group VDARE for misappropriating funds.

Gee, what was the clue, that the founders used money from an alleged non profit to buy a literal castle?

Right wing charities are grifts:

Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, sued the anti-immigration nonprofit VDARE on Wednesday, saying that the husband and wife who run the group had drained more than $1 million from its coffers to pay themselves and to buy a medieval-style castle in West Virginia.

Peter and Lydia Brimelow, VDARE’s leaders, are longtime opponents of immigration whose blog has become a bridge between mainstream Republicans and the more overtly racist elements of the far right. Mr. Brimelow, 77, has referred to himself as the “god-uncle” of the alt-right, the dissident white nationalist movement that emerged during President Trump’s first term.

At the same time, Ms. James said, the pair had treated their tax-exempt charity as a “personal piggy bank,” using its money to pay for club memberships, international travel, home renovations and payments that benefited them and their relatives. She asked a New York state judge to force the Brimelows to pay back what they had taken, plus penalties, then dissolve VDARE and disperse its assets to other charities.

“Charities are intended to serve the public, not to bankroll castles or pad personal fortunes,” Ms. James said in a statement.

Ms. James, a Democrat, regulates charities registered in New York.

………

But Ms. James said that much of the group’s spending was actually funneled back to the Brimelows. She said the nonprofit paid Mr. Brimelow a salary of up to $345,000, rent for office space in the Brimelows’ Connecticut home, and for some home repairs there.

Then, in 2020, the nonprofit bought a castle.

The 9,300-square-foot home in the resort town of Berkeley Springs, W.Va., had been built in the 1880s with a medieval-style turret and battlements. Ms. James said that the Brimelows moved into the castle, using a charitable asset for their personal benefit. She said they did not seek permission from the group’s board, which at the time consisted of relatives and close friends of Peter Brimelow, or disclose that fact in public filings.

 If this story sounds familiar, it is because it's almost identical to the lawsuit against the National Rifle Association and its corrupt former Executive Director Wayne LaPierre.

I'm beginning to see a pattern. 

Ummm………There Is a Question That Everyone Misses Here

In the latest DOGE insanity,  the Trump administration is planning to release a spreadsheet listing recipients of foreign aid has been accidentally released, and some of the recipients are likely to be targeted for this, putting them in very real danger.

First, yes, this is a major breach, and the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and his merry band of young boys are completely incompetent.

That being said, we are not talking about funding from the CIA, or the DoD, etc.

These are basic foreign aid programs, and unless this is just a front for regime change activities by the United States state security apparatus, these folks should not be at risk.

This is, of course a rhetorical question.  Many of these activities are ust a front for regime change activities by the United States state security apparatus.

It's something that we blithely accept, and have blithely accepted since some point in the 1950s. 

Reports that Donald Trump’s top national security officials accidentally shared their Yemen attack plans with The Atlantic in real-time drove the news in official Washington in recent days. But it wasn’t the only damaging leak of information held by the administration this week.

Two Trump administration spreadsheets — which each include what numerous advocates and government officials say is highly sensitive information on programs funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — were sent to Congress and also leaked online.

The leak, which sent a variety of international groups and nonprofits scrambling to assess the damage and protect workers operating under repressive regimes, came after the organizations had pressed the Trump administration to keep the sensitive information private and received some assurances it would remain secret.

………

The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, informed a variety of international nonprofits and longtime implementing partner organizations last week that upcoming payments of their congressionally approved grant funds came with some conditions that the Trump administration wanted to clarify.

As part of their campaign to eliminate what they’re calling “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Team Trump and DOGE had demanded comprehensive grant recipient information — and State Department officials let the organizations know that Musk’s lieutenants were likely planning on turning this information into a public spreadsheet or database.

Needless to say, this is profoundly f%$#ed up, both from an operational perspective, but also from the window that it gives into the ordinary operation of the surveillance state/non-governmental organizational complex.

Both sides know what they are being paid for, and for the rest of us, it's just more of the merry band of regime change mousketeers creating worse problems in the future.  (See Iran, Afghanistan, much of Latin America, Vietnam, Congo, etc.)

Yeah, That Will Show Them

Remember how I said that the ADL was letting Elon Musk's Nazi salute slide?

Well, they have finally made a statement, well, just a strongly worded Ecch (Tweet) condemning the Nazi jokes he wrote as a followup to his Nazi salute.

Weak tea, Kapos, very week tea.

This is My Shocked Face

I am not trying to suggest that those patriotic Canadians advocating for a "Victims of Communism" memorial are trying to use it to absolve Nazi collaborators of their culpability, but a f%$# ton of the names on this memorial are war criminals who collaborated with the Nazis.

The Department of Canadian Heritage is being told that more than half of the 550 names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism should be removed because of potential links to the Nazis or questions about affiliations with fascist groups, according to government records.

As originally planned, there were to be 553 entries on the Ottawa memorial’s Wall of Remembrance.

Article content

The department had determined that 50 to 60 of the names or organizations were likely directly linked to the Nazis, according to the documents obtained by the Ottawa Citizen through an access to information request.

A 2023 report for Canadian Heritage recommended more than 330 names be excluded to be on the safe side, the records noted. The exclusions were recommended because of the lack of information about the individuals or organizations and whether they might have links to fascist organizations or the Nazis. Some of the entries could also be removed because they have no direct link to Canada.

Rather unsurprisingly, Chrystia Freeland, whose grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and a war criminal (Julius Streicher was executed for doing what dear old grandad did) has been instrumental in securing federal money for the project.

Imagine that.

It now appears that something more than half the names were Nazi collaborators and a significant portion of the remaining names are not victims of Communism in any way shape or form.

Some of the names:

………

An organization calling itself the General Committee of United Croats of Canada purchased virtual bricks dedicated to Ante Pavelić, describing him only as a "doctor of laws."

Pavelić was the wartime leader of the Ustaša, the fascist organization that ran the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet regime. In this role, Pavelić was the chief perpetrator of the Holocaust in the Balkans. Approximately 32,000 Jews, 25,000 Roma and 330,000 Serbs were murdered by the regime.

The same organization purchased a brick dedicated to Mile Budak, whom they identified simply as a "poet". Budak was also a high-ranking Ustaša official.

………

It's not clear whether the donations were returned; when asked, Ludwik Klimkowski, Tribute to Liberty's chair, said it would be "premature" to comment. Another Ustaša official, Ivan Oršanić, remains listed on the site.

An organization calling itself the Knightly Order of Vitéz purchased five bricks. "Several members of the order actively participated in the persecution, despoliation and, in 1944, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews," said László Karsai, a professor of history at the University of Szeged. 

Vitéz members included high-ranking members of the Nazi-puppet government established late in the war, which organized the deportation of some 437,000 Hungarian Jews. "It was the biggest, fastest deportation action of the Holocaust," said Karsai. "Several tens of thousands of Vitéz members got large lands (from) Jewish properties."

The League of Ukrainian Canadians' Edmonton Branch, meanwhile, purchased five virtual bricks in honour of Roman Shukhevych — who led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the Second World War and was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Belarusians, Jews, Poles and Ukrainians.

………

"If Canada commemorates Ante Pavelić or Roman Shukhevych," said Efraim Zuroff, a noted Nazi-hunter and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, "it can throw its human rights record right in the trash."

………

"A monument to the victims of communism is fair and legitimate. Millions of people were murdered by Stalin and Mao, and there is a case to be made for their commemoration. It is peculiar, however, that people who committed genocide are being glorified along with those legitimate victims."

It's not peculiar at all.  Canada was to Nazi Collaborators from the Ukraine what Argentina was to former SS officers.

………

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada initiated a court challenge of the project, arguing that the National Capital Commission (NCC) violated its own procedures on public consultation and the rules set out in the National Capital Act. A poll from the spring of 2015 found that a majority of Canadians — including nearly two-thirds of self-identified conservatives — opposed the initial project.

A NCC spokesperson said the estimated total cost of the monument is now $7.5 million, with $6 million coming from the federal government after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland included an additional $4 million in this spring's budget to complete the monument. 

………

Canadian Heritage hired Carleton University historian Michael Petrou to review those 600 names, but not the names listed on Tribute to Liberty's website or in its newsletters. Petrou told CBC News there is overlap between the list of names for the monument and the list on the website.

Petrou filed his report to the department back in the spring. He said he red-flagged the names of individuals in that list of 600 who collaborated with the Nazis or were associated with fascist organizations that were active in Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the Second World War.

Petrou said he also flagged names of individuals who could not reasonably be described as "victims of communism."

The Pathways to Liberty list seems to embrace a very broad definition of "victims of communism" that extends to other apparent victims of political violence and veterans of Cold War era conflicts.

The list on the website also includes people who don't seem to be victims of persecution by communist regimes — such as Tara Singh Hayer, a Sikh journalist and activist assassinated in Vancouver in 1998, and Jagat S. Uppal, a successful B.C. businessman who was one of the first Sikhs to attend public school in Vancouver.

The final word on this is this:

………

[Wiesenthal Center Director Ephriam] Zuroff said he's alarmed by efforts to present wartime Nazi collaborators as anti-Communist patriots.

"From the beginning of their renewed independence, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, almost all the governments of Eastern Europe — and nationalist elements in diaspora communities — have promoted the canard of equivalency between the crimes of the Third Reich and those of Communism as part of a broader effort to distort the history of the Holocaust and the Second World War," he said.

Doubtless, this is embarrassing to the Canadian government, but Canada's history of harboring and protecting war criminals who were willing participants in the Holocaust is a lot more embarrassing.

Hold on to Your Wallet

Two organizations, GLAAD and the Democratic Victory PAC have been spending excessively on perks for their senior management.

If this sounds familiar, it is, remember the corruption scandal involving former NRA chief Wayne LaPierre.

First GLAAD:

A light rain fell at the Zurich airport one Sunday morning in January 2023 as Sarah Kate Ellis made her way from a seat in Delta’s most exclusive cabin to a waiting Mercedes. It was there to chauffeur her to the Swiss Alps, where she and her colleagues would stay at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week.

Ms. Ellis, who was en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, doesn’t run a Wall Street bank or a high-flying tech start-up. She is the chief executive of the nonprofit organization GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.

The group, which has an annual budget of roughly $30 million, paid for Ms. Ellis’s trip, as well as a day of skiing, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former employees and others with knowledge of GLAAD’s operations.

The trip was part of a pattern of lavish spending at GLAAD, much of it by Ms. Ellis, that may have violated the organization’s own policies as well as Internal Revenue Service rules.

………

When Ms. Ellis traveled for work, there were first-class flights, stays at the Waldorf Astoria and other luxury hotels and expensive car services. Not to mention a Cape Cod summer rental and nearly $20,000 to remodel her home office, which was outfitted with a chandelier, among other accouterments.

All of that is on top of Ms. Ellis’s annual pay package, which has the potential to stretch into the high six or low seven figures — a sum that would far exceed what her peers at many similarly sized organizations have earned.

Such perks, luxurious business travel and large pay packages might be commonplace at a for-profit company. But legal experts said they were inappropriate for a nonprofit organization with about 60 employees that, in exchange for being exempt from federal and state taxes, must ensure that executive pay is reasonable and aligned with the charity’s mission and the intent of donors.

And then the Democratic Victory PAC, which is somewhat less surprising, given that since Trump was elected in 2016, there have been a fair number of people who have made a career as the face of "The Resistance."

Just a note, that the non-profit space in the United States, and non-profit adjacent spaces like Democratic Victory PAC, are largely unpoliced.

As is noted in Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, if fraud can occur, it is already happening.

Unless and until tax authorities start aggressively investigating non-profits, you need to be very careful donating money to charities.

Finally

I do not expect it to pass this Congress, but someone has finally introduced a bill cracking down on looting in the charter school system.

Basically, for profit entities will find or create a non-profit entity which will receive funding to operate a charter, and then the for-profit entity will own the building and collect rent, or license the curriculum, or be the employer of record for the teachers, or "manage" the school, and skim their vigorish off the top.

It needs to be ended:

In almost every corner of the U.S., charter schools are non-profit. And yet, there are numerous ways to run a non-profit for profit.

In two reports (Chartered for Profit and Chartered for Profit II), the Network for Public Education showed numerous examples of the most common techniques. Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over ten times the amount it was paying.

………

To address the issue of charter schools operated for a profit, United States Representative Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) and Representative Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01) this month introduced the Championing Honest and Responsible Transparency in Education Reform (CHARTER) Act. Said DeLauro,

………

The CHARTER Act would ensure that for-profit education management organizations can no longer jump through loopholes that have given them access to funding that has always been intended for nonprofit entities. Educating our children should be for their enrichment and future prosperity – not to maximize the profits of their owners and investors.

The bill adds to the definition of a charter school given in Section 4310 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In addition to the other qualifiers already in the federal definition of a charter school, the bill would add that a charter school:

does not enter into a contract with a for-profit entity, or have a charter management organization or other nonprofit entity enter into such a contract on behalf of such school, under which the for-profit entity operates, oversees, manages, or otherwise carries out the administration of such school, which may include curriculum development, budget management, and faculty management (such as hiring, terminating, or supervising school-level staff);

 The bill also specifies that a charter school may contract for food, payroll, facilities maintenance, transportation services, classroom supplies or other ancillary services.

The bill then goes on to require the amended definition be used for ESEA and IDEA, thereby blocking charters that don’t meet the amended definition from receiving any federal funds.

Even if charter schools did a better job of educating our children, and the evidence indicates that they do not, allow for profit entities to skim the money with a complete absence of public oversight is an abomination.

Good on DeLauro and Bonamici for trying to shut the door on corrupt charter operators.

Even if one supports charter schools, it should be a no brainer not to support charter school corruption.

Meanwhile in Georgia

The Parliament there has passed a law requiring disclosure of funding sources of foreign NGOs operating in the former Soviet republic on the Black Sea.

The supporters of the bill say that NGOs funded by foreign governments meddle in the politics and the elections of Georgia.

Opponents of the bill say that this is in direct contravention of one the core principals of the EU, and that it would make any bid for EU accession harder.

They are both telling the truth.

NGOs funded by Brussels and Washington are used to manipulate the internal politics and elections in many nations, both within and outside of the EU, and the use of these NGOs to meddle in the internal affairs of nations nations, (including EU members) is a core EU principal.

What the law says is that organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from foreign nations must register and report these contributions.

It's a lot like §§611-621, Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is the law of the land in the United States:

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA requires certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.  Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of FARA.

I get that the Europeans, and the US government want to fund more color revolutions, but seriously, at least be honest about it.

The Not-So-Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

As Keith Olbermann had an anecdote on his Countdown podcast , where he described briefly dating Laura Ingram.

The interesting bit was not the dating, but the fact that she revealed to him that what Hillary Clinton called the, "Vast right-wing conspiracy," attempting to get Bill Clinton impeached for a blow job was not vast.

It was not much more than a dozen people.

Now the good folks at Mother Jones have discovered that only a few billionaires are funding almost the entirety of the right wing political edifice.  (I guess that they have an edifice complex)

It ain't a dozen.  It's four people, so they could play a game of bridge and no one would be left out:

In early 2021, Stephen Miller—former White House senior adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the 45th president’s hopeful second-term mass deportation agenda—announced his next venture: America First Legal (AFL).

Paraded as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL fights for Trumpist values in the legal system. And the group is prolific: In its three years of existence, AFL has taken on more than 100 legal actions—between lawsuits filed, complaints lodged with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and court briefs written, according to the Washington Post.

………

The strategy has worked. In 2022, AFL brought in $44 million. Its revenue shot up by nearly 600 percent compared with the previous year. But less scrutinized has been how AFL has secured its haul. More than 60 percent of its funding came from a little-discussed entity: the Bradley Impact Fund. In 2022, Bradley doled out more than $27 million to AFL, according to the organization’s most recent available tax filing.

And AFL is far from the only culture-war donation the Bradley Impact Fund has dispensed.

That same year, according to tax filings, Bradley gave $7.8 million to Turning Point USA and $1.8 million to Project Veritas, the conservative outfit founded by provocateur James O’Keefe that mounts sting operations. The year prior, both organizations ranked at the top of the fund’s list of recipients, receiving $7.4 million and $2.1 million, respectively. (Before 2019, such contributions were limited to a few thousand dollars.) Another group to benefit from the fund has been America’s Future—led by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn—which received a $500,000 gift in 2022.

Over the last few years, the Bradley Impact Fund has experienced massive growth, emerging as one of the key bankrollers of the coterie of organizations and apparatchiks hoping to create institutions that carry out Trump’s ideological agenda. In the process, Bradley fuels the culture wars and undermines faith in democracy by stirring election denialism—all while keeping its donors secret.

Created in 2012, the Bradley Impact Fund is a donor-advised fund (DAF) “aligned” with the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has a long history of conservative influence and, of late, has become a source of money for organizations pushing Republicans to change election laws. Donor-advised funds, such as the Bradley Impact Fund, collect donations from various contributors and then make often untraceable gifts to other organizations. An increasingly popular charity tool—receiving a quarter of all individual giving in the United States—DAFs offer donors “multiple layers of anonymity,” explains Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative watchdog Documented.

DAFs operate like private foundations but are classified as public charities. This allows the funds to give money without the same transparency requirements. And the donors, who can recommend where their contributions should go, are still awarded the publicly subsidized tax breaks associated with charitable giving.

 ………

This work is being enabled by an extraordinarily small universe of donors. Bradley boasts about cultivating a network of contributors across 44 states. But more than 75 percent of contributions to the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 came from just four sources, according to an audited financial statement filed with the California Department of Justice that the nonprofit research organization Accountable US shared with Mother Jones.

(Emphasis mine)

The Bradley Impact Fund received roughly $108 million in contributions and grants that year, including three donations of $36 million, $20 million, and $18 million, respectively. At least another $12 million came from a different donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. By its own admission, DonorsTrust is a convenient conduit for benefactors wishing to provide “gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” (In an email, Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, declined to comment on the reasons behind the grant to the Bradley Impact Fund, saying the implementation of the gift is left to the recipient. “Grants from one DAF provider to another are infrequent and certainly not nefarious,” he added.)

We need to find out who these entities are, and name and shame them.

Also, we recognize that every billionaire is a policy failure, and that increasing inequality is an existential threat to our society.

More generally, charity law needs to be changed to prevent this sort of opacity in funding.

About F%$#ing Time

Many of the modern top ranked universities have been described as a hedge fund with a school attached. 

Many schools, most notably Harvard, have enormous endowments beyond any foreseeable needs, and legislation has been proposed in Massachusetts removing the tax exempt status of these bloated funds:

Within a one-mile radius in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sit Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — academic institutions that together boast $74 billion in endowment funds. Based on the size of these “rainy-day funds” alone, the two universities, with a combined student body of 37,000, have enough wealth to rival Ghana, with a population of 35 million. 

The kicker? These private universities are educational institutions, meaning that for most of their history, they have been exempt from federal and state income taxes.

Massachusetts lawmakers want to change that. State legislators are considering a groundbreaking bill that would impose a 2.5 percent annual excise tax on private college and university endowments that are larger than $1 billion. The resulting $2.5 billion raised each year would be more than enough to cover the tuition of every undergraduate student currently attending public colleges and universities in the state.

The effort builds on a 2017 federal tax on universities’ investment incomes, and offers a bold new way to tackle elite universities’ hoarding of wealth, an increasing amount of which is being invested in private equity. And since Massachusetts boasts one of the highest concentrations of higher education institutions nationwide, the bill could set precedent for the rest of the country.

Your mouth to God's ear.

Good News Everyone!

Wayne LaPierre and the NRA have been found liable fraud and corruption.

It could not happen to a more deserving bunch of ammosexual psychopaths:

In a sweeping rebuke of the National Rifle Association, the nation’s most prominent gun rights group, a Manhattan jury ruled on Friday that its leaders had engaged in a yearslong pattern of financial misconduct and corruption.

The jury, after a week of deliberations, found that the group’s former leader, Wayne LaPierre, had used N.R.A. funds to pay for personal expenses, including vacations, luxury flights for his relatives and yacht rides, and that two other top executives had failed in their duties to the nonprofit organization.

………

Ms. James said late Friday that the N.R.A. verdict was a “major victory for the people of New York.”

“For years, Wayne LaPierre used charitable dollars to fund his lavish lifestyle, spending millions on luxury travel, expensive clothes, insider contracts, and other perks for himself and his family,” Ms. James said in a statement. “Today, after years of rampant corruption and self-dealing, Wayne LaPierre and the N.R.A. are finally being held accountable.”

Jurors found that Mr. LaPierre had misspent $5.4 million. He has repaid some of that sum, but must still repay $4.35 million. Mr. Phillips must repay $2 million.


The judge overseeing the case will decide in a second phase of the trial whether a monitor should be installed to oversee the N.R.A.’s administration of charitable assets, and whether Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Phillips should be barred from serving as officers or directors of any other New York nonprofits, Ms. James said in her statement.

I know of a well-respected New York lawyer and academic who would be particularly well suited to monitoring the activities of the National Rifle Association, Zephyr Teachout.

She knows the law, and is unlikely to "Go Native" while serving as monitor.

UNRWA is Problematic

In fact, I literally quoted Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi 15 years ago to show that the Arab world, with the exception of Jordan, have made no effort at all to integrate Palestinians displaced in 1948, and noted that UNRWA is part and parcel to all of this.

As I have mentioned before the official policies of the host governments is to not keep Palestinians in camps and to keep them as stateless refugees in order to make sure that they, "Stay in the fight," which is why many of the Gulf states deny basic human rights to Palestinians, and (for example) Lebanon stripped Palestinians of the right to own land in 2001.

Unlike the other UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, which is chartered to work toward seeing the refugees settled in where they have fled, repatriated, or settled in a 3rd country, UNRWA is charged with maintaining the camps for the Palestinian refugees, and their descendants, until the sun has burned down to a cinder.

UNRWA is paid to support people in refugee camps as refugees, and the UNHCR is paid to get people  out of refugee status and to become normal citizens.

This, along with its focus on only one group of displaced people does not produce best outcomes for the people that they ostensibly support.

Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that supports for conflict and militants would become part of the de facto mission of the UNRWA.  Direct support of militants has been documented on multiple occasions, and this is a feature, not a bug.

Therefore the revelation that some employees of UNRWA were participants in the October 7 massacres is not a surprise.

What is a surprise is that when Israel provided evidence of this, some of the largest donor nations to UNRWA suspended payments.

It is well past the time for UNRWA to be folded into the UNHCR.  It would be better for peace in the region, and far better for the Palestinians left in limbo for nearly 80 years:

The decision by the US, UK and other western nations to freeze ­funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees will significantly worsen the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians have warned.

Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland joined the United States, Australia and Canada in pausing funding after UNRWA, the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, revealed an investigation had been launched into 12 members of staff who allegedly took part in the 7 October attack led by Hamas that killed 1,140 people.

Switzerland?  Given historical Swiss neutrality, whatever evidence that has been presented must be VERY convincing.

Also, Japan has also suspended funding to UNRWA.

………

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, pleaded on Saturday for donor states to “guarantee the continuity” of the body.

“While I understand their concerns – I was myself horrified by these accusations – I strongly appeal to the governments that have suspended their contributions to, at least, guarantee the continuity of UNRWA’s operations,” Guterres said in a statement.

I actually think that the continuity of UNRWA operations are the problem, at least in the longer term.

Placing the provision of aid to refugees under the auspices of the UNHCR, WITHOUT transferring senior staff to the other agency, is probably the best alternative for all of the stakeholders in this process.

The refugees should have some sort of normalcy in their lives, and UNRWA is an impediment to this process.

Support the Troops, Huh?

In 2007, the Worcester Wreath Company had a problem.  They had just lost their contract with L.L. Bean, who had previously been responsible for 90% of their sales.

Their solution was to create a 501(C)3 charity, Wreaths Across America, and then use this charity to aggressively solicit people to put wreaths on dead soldiers graves.

The thing is, Wreaths Across America only buys from the Worcester Wreath Company, and as such, their prices are not what one would call competitive.

The technical term for this is self-dealing, and if the appropriate regulators executed their duties as they are supposed to, this would result in a loss of charity status or perhaps jail time.

Wreaths Across America is a non-profit organization that places wreaths on the graves of military veterans. It's a simple gesture that has proven popular. Wreaths Across America placed 33,000 wreaths in 2007, its first year. This year, the organization expects to place 2.9 million wreaths at 4,225 cemeteries across all 50 states, a spokesperson for the organization tells Popular Information.

According to Wreaths Across America, wreath-laying is a "simple act of gratitude" that "brings together communities and supports local veterans and military families." But while the wreaths provide symbolic support for veterans and military families, the overwhelming majority of the over $30 million raised in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022 goes to Worcester Wreath Company, which produces the wreaths.

Wreaths Across America was founded in 2007 by members of the Worcester family, owners of the Worcester Wreath Company. The creation of the Wreaths Across America occurred around the same time that Worcester Wreath Company lost its contract with L.L. Bean, which accounted for 90% of Worcester Resources' wreath sales. Rob Worcester, a co-owner of Worcester Wreath Company, said that the loss of L.L. Bean's business following a legal dispute left the firm "in dire straights." The wreath-laying charity, he said, "allowed us to get our feet back under us." Rob Worcester's wife is a member of the Wreaths Across America board.

Nothing fishy here:

In fiscal year 2022, $20,605,527 of the money raised by Wreaths Across America went directly to Worcester Wreath Company. Most of the rest of the funds went to marketing, overhead, and staff salaries.

………

Beginning in 2017, Wreaths Across America began soliciting a "request for proposals" (RFP) every three years to supply wreaths. Several members of the non-profit board who are also employees of Worcester Wreath Company, along with Karen Worchester, are formally recused from this process. This, Wreaths Across America says, ensures that "Wreaths Across America receives the most advantageous terms in it's [sic] purchase of wreaths to further it's [sic] charitable purpose."

But for the first RFP, Worcester Wreath Company was the only company that submitted a proposal. "We have certain standards that we look for and for other [companies] to follow that would be difficult,” board chair Wayne Hanson said. Worcester Wreath Company has also won all subsequent RFPs.

But wait, there's more, it appears that Worcester Wreath Company has a dangerous workplace:

………

The Worcester Wreath Company also has a record of workplace safety and labor violations. In May 2022, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined the company $11,500 in connection with a COVID outbreak that left one employee dead and more than 80 workers sick.

According to records obtained by the Maine Monitor, the company failed to report the wreath worker’s death to OSHA within the required eight hours. It also did not “conduct contact tracing to determine who she had been in contact with.” In addition, an OSHA investigator found that–even after the outbreak–the company refused to enforce its mask policy “despite the CDC’s warnings and guidance regarding the usage of masks in close quarters.” The official concluded that the company’s response was “an act of simple indifference” and pointed out that Worcester Wreath Company had received prior citations in 2017 and 2019 for “failing to maintain illness and injury records.”

“This standard has always been a very-back burner issue for the employer as seen in its prior violations and in the manner it has dealt with the citations with OSHA,” the official wrote.

Worcester Wreath Company received reporting violations again in 2023. In March and April, OSHA imposed $24,000 in penalties against Worcester Wreath for “two reporting violations.” The bulk of this amount, about $22,000, was for “failing to publicly post a report on work-related injuries and illnesses earlier this year” the Maine Monitor reports. Similar to the COVID penalty, this incident was deemed a “willful violation,” meaning that investigators found that the company was acting with “purposeful disregard” or “plain indifference.”

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor ordered the company to pay “$55,654.16 in back wages to 95 employees” to resolve overtime violations. The same year, seasonal migrant workers at the company have also claimed that they were subject to “repeated sexual harassment by a crew boss contracted by Worcester Wreath Company.” The workers allege they were fired and kicked out of employer-owned housing for raising these concerns.

It appears that the Fox News darlings, both Karen and Morrill Worcester are regularly on the cable network, have been using public money, 501(C)3 donations (including the wreath purchases) are tax deductible as a marketing tactic for their own for profit purposes.

In the non-profit world, this is supposed to be a, "No-No."

It isn't, one only need to look at the the supposedly non-profit charter schools set up around the country, or the various foundations set up by silly-con valley tech bros.

The unwillingness of the IRS and the DoJ to pursue this sort of fraud is a real and serious prob lem.

Not a Surprise

A study has shown that nominally nonprofit hospitals spend very little on charity while grossly overpaying senior executives.

Our for-proof system of healthcare is so bad that it corrupts our charities: 

Nonprofit hospitals are under increasing scrutiny for skimping on charity care, relentlessly pursuing payments from low-income patients, and paying executives massive multi-million-dollar salaries—all while earning tax breaks totaling billions.

One such hospital system is RWJBarnabas Health, a large nonprofit chain in New Jersey, whose CEO made a whopping $17 million in 2021, while the hospital system only spent 1.65 percent of its nearly $6 billion in revenue on charity care.

To compare apples to apples, so one chief executive gets about ⅙ of its total spending on charity.

This is unjustifiable.

………

RWJBarnabas Health is far from alone in having plump executive pay and slim charity care spending. A HELP committee staff report released earlier this month examined the financial data on 16 of the country's largest nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital systems. The systems collectively make more than $3 billion in revenue each year, but in 2021, 12 of the 16 systems spent less than 2 percent of their revenue on charity care—even though, as nonprofits, they earn federal, state, and local tax exemptions for providing charity care to low-income people and other charitable community benefits. Of those 12 spending less than 2 percent, six of them spent less than 1 percent.

>

Meanwhile, CEO compensation for the 16 systems averaged over $8 million, with a collective total of over $140 million. By far, the biggest earner was the CEO of CommonSpirit Health, a massive Catholic nonprofit system that runs 139 hospitals in 21 states. In 2021, CommonSpirit's CEO made $32 million. In the same year, the system spent $507 million on charity care, or 1.5 percent of its $33 billion revenue.

There is a simple solution to all of this, place a cap on maximum salaries at charities.  I would suggest a base salary limit $400,000.00, that of the President of the United States, with total remuneration, which would include bonuses, housing, travel, etc., being pegged to twice that.

That college football coaches in some programs would lose over 80% of their wages is just an unintended benefit.