Tag Archives: ethics

Arrogance and Policies

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I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy if this [black] community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election.

That’s what President Barack Obama (D) said in front of the Congressional Black Caucus last Saturday.

All of Obama’s policies, which Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton insists she’ll not only continue but extend and expand, are on the ballot this November.  Every single one of them.

Including, especially, those policies of his and his party that leave members of the black (and other minority) community worse off than they were 10 years ago.  Economic policies that have black (and other minority) teenagers at higher unemployment rates than that time ago.  Welfare policies that leave single-parent black (and other minority) families more thoroughly trapped on welfare and in poverty than that time ago.

Add to that list, now, the Democrats’ policy of personal arrogance, of being Better than us lesser mortals.

Because members of the black community cannot be trusted by Democrats to make up their own minds about the issues of this election.  Not at all.  They’re insulting Obama if they don’t follow his judgment instead of their own.

There Are Charities, and There Are Charities

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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

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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

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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

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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.