Category Archives: ethics

There Are Charities, and There Are Charities

Posted on by
Reply

The Daily Caller has some numbers on the Clinton Foundation, which is pleased to refer to itself as a charity.  The Clinton Foundation spent, according to its 2014 Form 990 (the latest available)

  • a hair under $91.3 million in 2014
  • $34.8 million on salaries, compensation, and employee benefits.
  • Another $50.4 million was marked as “other expenses”

And

Despite taking in an additional $30 million in 2014, the Clinton Foundation spent 40% less on charitable grants in 2014 than in 2013. Even as it slashed charitable spending, the foundation increased the amount spent on salaries, employee benefits and compensation by $5 million in 2014.

Here are those 2014 vs 2013 numbers, taken from lines 8-19 of the Foundation’s 990 (rounded, in dollars):

Item 2013 2014 Change
Contributions and grants 142,900,000 172,600,000 +29,700,000
Grants and similar amounts paid 8,900,000 5,200,000 -3,700,000
Salaries, compensation, employee benefits 29,900,000 34,800,000 +4,900,000
Other expenses 45,300,000 50,400,000 +5,100,000

“Other expenses” include things like “legal” and “accounting” (small amounts); “occupancy,” “travel,” and “conferences” ($25 million); “other program expenses” (nearly $3 million), and so on.

Wait, what did the Clinton Foundation spend on actual charity?  Those “grants and similar…”: $5.2 million, down 42% from 2013, despite a 21% increase in revenue (those “contributions and grants”) over 2013.

Of the total Foundation spending of some $91.3 million (I’ve omitted some minor spending in my table above), the Foundation only spent those $5.2 million on “grants and similar….”  That works out to less than 6% of the money spent going to actual charities.  The rest went to the Foundation’s and Foundation personnel’s personal benefit.

There’s also this curious datum from the Clinton Foundation’s 990:

Under Liabilities (Part X, Line 18): “Grants payable” is $0.00 for both 2013 and 2014.  It’s an unusually efficient “charity” that has all of its charitable commitments fully paid by the end of every year.

TDC says that a well run charity spends only about 25% on administrative costs.  Take that with a grain of salt; I’ve seen numbers as low as 10% on admin, and numbers above 30%.  In any event, the Clinton Foundation doesn’t even come close to a decent or proper charity to expense ratio.

As Rick Moran, of PJMedia, put it in his description of these data,

If there’s a better definition of “pay for play,” I have yet to hear it.

The Clinton Foundation tax return can be seen here or here.

Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Posted on by
Reply

What she said.  Now it’s what FBI Director James Comey is claiming.

There’s an opportunity to feed that monster of a bias, that confirmation bias, all the time. So it accelerates that fractionalizing of our society, and it makes it much harder for people like me, like you, like the people in here, to speak reason to folks about our institutions.

Because of course.  Or, the Left is projecting again.

Yet Another Democrat’s Disregard for An Inconvenient Law

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that Governor Terry McAuliffe (D, VA) granted en masse a restoral of the right to vote to some 200,000 convicted felons, and the Virginia Supreme Court said Virginia law didn’t allow that: any such restoral had to come only after individual, case by case evaluation of each felon separately from any other felons.

McAuliffe replied that he “cannot accept” the ruling. He called it a “political decision” that “reminded” him of Bush v Gore and that the justices were “scared” of the legislature. He has since acted on his defiance by restoring rights to some 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote when the state Supreme Court’s decision invalidated his executive order.

McAuliffe also is insisting that he’ll restore the vote to the remaining 200,000 before he’s out of the Governor’s mansion.

In addition to that contempt of—and for—Virginia’s Supreme Court, his charge that the Supremes were scared is nothing but an FDR-esque effort to intimidate those Justices to rule more…suitably…in future.

The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly at the above link:

McAuliffe has nullified the Virginia Constitution’s guidelines on felon voting simply because he dislikes those rules.

And

At stake is whether an executive can first rewrite the law in defiance of the legislature and then do what he wants anyway in defiance of a court.

This is the risk we run from a Clinton extension in 2017 of the Democrats’ rule over our nation.

Union Greed

Posted on by
Reply

It isn’t enough that unions demand the “right” to raid honest citizens’ pocketbooks for union dues—demanding that non-union members pay up as a condition of being allowed to work.  Unions also are demanding the “right” to raid honest citizens’ pocketbooks for tax money with which to plus up union “pensions.”

See, for instance, the United Mine Workers of America and their pet Democratic Party Senator, Joe Manchin (whom we had thought was more honest than this).

The Miners Protection Act of 2015—sponsored by Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and co-sponsored by eight Republicans—would bail out the underfunded pension plan of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

This potential for legalizing theft also has the unfortunate support of eight allegedly Republican Senators and the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, Orrin Hatch (R, UT), who most assuredly should know better.

This bill would raid a mine reclamation fund to the tune of $490 million for the sole purpose of feeding the union maw.  Never mind that the unreclaimed mines would remain uncleaned up (which, by the way, Democrats, having successfully defunded mine reclamation, will rend and wail about those same unreclaimed mines for their personal political gain).

Manchin is disingenuously arguing that the Federal government has an obligation to bail out the union and its funds.  It’s a familiar refrain: Government has to do this, Government has to bail that out, because private enterprise—of which the UMWA is one, make no mistake about that—cannot be trusted to see to its own affairs.

Manchin is disingenuous in another way: as Diana Furchtgott-Roth (lately Labor Department Chief Economist and currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute) pointed out in her piece at the above link,

UMWA knows how to fund a pension plan.

The UNWA needs no government help in this.

And

Required filings with the Labor Department show that the pension plan for the officers of the UMWA—the president, vice presidents and treasurer—is solvent.

UMWA leadership has been careful to take care of themselves.  It’s on them—not honest American citizens—to take care of their membership, too.  Again, no government involvement is needed or appropriate here.

No, this whole sordid affair is just another Progressive effort to take money from honest Americans and redistribute it to their cronies.

Early Stage Alzheimer’s?

Posted on by
1

From the latest FBI document release last Friday, we learned or received a measure of clarification on a few things.

Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the FBI during the interviews that were the subject of the document release that

Clinton could not recall when she received her security clearance or whether it was carried over from her time in the Senate. She also could not recall any briefing or training by the State Department “related to the retention of federal records or the handling of classified information.”

And further,

Clinton recalled being briefed on Specific Access Program information (for classified material). But [she] could not recall any specific briefings on how to handle information associated with the SAPs[.]

And

she requested a secured BlackBerry while at State but could not recall why they were unable to provide one[.]

And

Clinton repeatedly claimed to have little training or understanding about the classification process—despite leading the department that handled such information on a regular basis and having a security clearance[.]

And this:

FBI agents also asked Clinton about three emails marked classified. They contained a “C” or portion marking, indicating the intelligence was at the lowest level, or confidential. Clinton said she thought the “C” was part of series like bullet points or a listing, like A, B, C.”

More than 30 times in the FBI’s Friday release, Clinton told the FBI agents interviewing her that she couldn’t remember this or that major briefing or training or similar event.

Recall that Clinton signed off on documents certifying that she had had security briefing when she became Secretary of State.  Recall that then-Senator Clinton served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which capacity she also was briefed and periodically trained in handling classified data and documents, and in which capacity she routinely handled classified data and documents.

Couple these memory lapses and instances of confusion with her deflections when reporters ask her questions that she doesn’t understand (back when she was interacting with them)—”You mean like with a cloth?”, her efforts to change the subject when told things she doesn’t understand, and her current months-long (more than 270 days) hiding from interactive meetings with the public (the TV interviews her campaign touts aren’t live; they’re “edited to fit the time slot”).

Assume she’s telling the truth about all of this, about her confusion concerning really quite routine classification protocols, about her not remembering.  Assume she’s not being evasive in response to simple questions when she deflects or changes the subject.

All of this may be why she’s hiding from interactive public meetings like press conferences.

All of this begins to look like Clinton is in the throes of early-stage Alzheimer’s.