So it seems the reluctance of some U.S. Garment Companies to sign on to improve conditions at Bangladeshi Sweatshops (where over 1000 have died recently in building collapses and fires) is that they may be exposed to law suits by former slaves employees about the inhumane conditions they previously worked under.

Actually I take that back.  This is exactly like the arguments made by Slaveholders about their “human” assets that represented over 50% of the entire wealth of the United States at the time of the War of Southern Rebellion.

U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: May 22, 2013

American retailers remain sharply opposed to joining an international plan to improve safety conditions at garment factories in Bangladesh as their European counterparts and consumer and labor groups dismiss the companies’ concerns about legal liability.

A few shareholders at Gap’s annual meeting this week questioned the company’s refusal to sign on to a plan that commits retailers to help finance safety upgrades in Bangladesh, where 1,127 workers died when the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed on April 24.

“In the United States, there’s maybe a bigger legal risk than there is in Europe,” Gap’s chief executive, Glenn Murphy, responded. “If we were to sign onto something that had unlimited legal liability and risk, I think our shareholders should care about that.”

…

Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, gave another reason for opposing the Bangladesh plan, saying it “seeks to advance a narrow agenda driven by special interests,” a reference to the labor unions that helped shape the plan and then pressed retailers to sign on.

…

In rejecting the accord, Wal-Mart outlined its own proposals that it said would meet or exceed the accord’s goals. The company, the world’s largest retailer, predicted quicker results, saying it would inspect all of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh over the next six months.

While Wal-Mart, voicing concern about potential liability, said the plan “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government.”

Totally in keeping with our history of subjugating brown people long after the “civilized” world has moved on.

Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Monday, 20 May 2013 10:16

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current attempt to close down 54 public schools largely inhabited by poor minorities is one more example of a savage, racist neoliberal system at work that uses the politics of austerity and consolidation to further disenfranchise the unskilled young of the inner city. The hidden curriculum in this instance is not so invisible. Closing schools will result in massive layoffs, weakening the teachers unions. It will free up land that can be gentrified to attract middle-class voters, and it will once again prove that poor minority students, regardless of the hardships, if not danger, they will face as a result of such closings, are viewed as disposable – human waste to be relegated to the zones of terminal exclusion.  Not only are many teachers and parents concerned about displacing thousands of students to schools that do not offer any hope of educational improvement, but they are also concerned about the safety of the displaced children, many of whom “will have to walk through violent neighborhoods and go to school with other students who are considered enemies.”

This is not simply misguided policy, it is a racist script that makes clear that poor black youth are disposable and that their safety is irrelevant.  How else to explain the mayor’s plan to produce a Safe Passage Plan in which firefighters would be asked to patrol the new routes, even though they have made it clear that they are not trained for this type of special duty. That many of these children are poor black children trapped in under-resourced schools appears irrelevant to a mayor who takes his lead from politicians such as Barack Obama and Arnie Duncan, two educators who have simply reproduced the Bush educational reform playbook, i.e., more testing, demonize teachers, weaken unions, advocate for choice and charter schools, and turn public schools over to corporate hedge-fund managers and billionaires such as Bill Gates. Emanuel’s passionate zeal to downsize schools in impoverished black neighborhoods is matched only by his misdirected enthusiasm to lay out $195 million “on a basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university.”

…

What these three days of demonstrations must address is that without power over the conditions of their labor, teachers become pawns in a neoliberal politics in which they are deskilled, reduced to security guards, and work under conditions that transform education into a form of training.  High-stakes testing and its corresponding tactic of promoting cheating among administrators, putting into play the most degrading forms of competition, and its killing of the civic imagination is both a debased form of instrumental rationality and a reification of method – put another way, a kind of methodological madness.

…

The war being waged against Chicago Public schools, teachers and students is the product of a corporate ideology and pedagogy that numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and disdaining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and die.

Pressure building on OFA over Keystone Pipeline betrayal

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

5/20/2013 10:00am

Last week we wrote about Obama’s back-pocket “grassroots” organizing group, OFA, refusing to help progressive activists challenge the Obama administration on the Keystone XL Pipeline battle.

…

President Obama’s organizing operation is warning its volunteers that they may be the target of progressive protests and urging its membership to stress their “mission of changing the conversation on climate!” in any confrontations with environmentalists. Organizing for Action – Obama’s outside grassroots organizing group designed to put Republicans’ feet to the fire on behalf of the administration – has found itself on the receiving end of late for its refusal to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline.

Why would OFA get into a “confrontation with environmentalists” if their mission is to “change the conversation on climate”? Only if the second statement were untrue, of course. Or, more generously, if all OFA wants to change about climate is … the conversation (as opposed to the actual climate).

…

OFA circulated a set of talking points to its members for use in dealing with unruly activists. The document, obtained by BuzzFeed, includes information on the science behind climate change and the president’s environmental positions, and ends with a section titled “Keystone Talking Points.” … The talking points come with a warning: “Volunteers from Credo Action or other organizations may attend your planning session and want to demand that we work on the Keystone XL pipeline.“

…

OFA is on the bad side of the news in part because CREDO is organizing resistance and directing it where it can do some damage, at Obama’s OFA. Excellent.

Action opportunity

CREDO is just one of many, but right now they’re leading the charge. I’ll bring up other actions opportunities as they evolve. There will be many; McKibben’s just getting started. In the meantime, if you’re interested in what CREDO is doing, click here.

(And if you want a fun read, go back to the article I quoted and read the full leaked OFA talking points doc appended to the bottom. As you do, ask yourself which part of it does Keystone-ignoring OFA actually believe. As I say, a fun read.)

As Congressman Alan Grayson (D Fl. 9) points out today is the 50th anniversary of the unauthorized publication of “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the New York Post Sunday Magazine.

This is part of his introduction-

King was jailed for campaigning against racial segregation in Birmingham, in violation of an injunction against anyone “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.” His letter was written on the margins of a newspaper, scraps of paper that another prisoner gave to him, and then a legal pad that his attorney left behind. It has been an inspiration to millions of people; I am one of them.

He shares some of his favorite quotes and I thought I’d share some of mine also (from this source)-

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

…

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

…

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

…

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

…

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake.

I once again have to try and find something interesting to say about Pimlico.

Preakness Trivia

• Actually 2 years older than the Kentucky Derby.
• Shortest in distance (1/16th shorter than the Derby).
• Only the Derby has a larger attendance.
• No Black Eyed Susan has ever been used, currently it’s painted Chysthanthemums.

There have been 34 winners of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes including the 11 Triple Crown winners.

Preakness Traditions

Winners don’t get the real Woodlawn Cup to keep, but a half size replica (oh, and the Woodlawn Racing Club is defunct).  Black Eyed Susans don’t bloom until 2 months after the Preakness.  The Old Clubhouse was destroyed in a fire in 1966.  They paint the winner’s racing silks on the weathervane.  No one on the internet knows why it’s called the Alibi Breakfast.

Official Website

I need a drink-

Post time 6:20 pm ET, coverage starts at 4:30 pm on NBC.

I once saw a future Miss America almost eaten by a horse.

Ok, so she wasn’t a Miss America, but she was one of the 10 finalists.

We were on this band trip (she played French Horn, was the practice Piano player for Choir, and sang- rather badly as I recall which is why she got stuck playing Piano) and we went to this ski resort in Pennsylvania where I and my room mates mostly amused ourselves by doing a lot of superficial “damage” like draping our underwear over the lamps and taking the mattresses off the beds (they wouldn’t let us on the bus for the trip home until we “fixed” it which took like a whole 5 minutes).

For me it was notable for this big scar I got while skiing (I’m quite good by the way) when this football player plowed into me at full tilt and opened up a remarkably large wound on my shin with his edge through a teeny tiny little hole in my jeans.  Hardly even noticed it until my boot started filling up with blood.

So one of the other things you could do was horse riding which was a big thrill for me since I went to the boy’s camp with the lake and not the girl’s camp with the horses and the only other time I’d been on the back of one was this sad nag at the fair who was chained to a not very Merry-go-round and even though we didn’t get much past a stately amble at least we were going somewhere.

Future Miss America was two horses in front so I saw it all.  It had started to snow a little, the path was getting slippery and her horse’s hoof went out and kicked the horse behind.

Who got a little ticked, climbed up on the back of her horse and started biting her.

Well, she went the emergency room, I got the aid station at the slope where the patrol person took a look and said- “That’s nothing, just a scratch.  Are you sure you want a band aid?”

I dunno, does it have Spongebob on it?

Some Peakness coverage from The New York Times.

Witnesses to Horse Racing’s Two Sides

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN, The New York Times

Published: May 17, 2013

Joe Miller and Jimmy McCue work in different environments at the same racetrack. McCue, 66, has been a staff photographer at Pimlico Race Course since 1970. Miller, 50, has been the track’s equine ambulance driver since 1997, though he has worked there since 1981.

They represent the intriguing, underexposed dichotomy of a troubled industry. McCue records the light with his camera; Miller, more often than he would like, hauls away the darkness in his ambulance.

…

Miller does not see happy faces. He sees injured animals, distraught owners and shattered dreams.

He watches each race from the superintendent’s office, a shack a quarter-mile from the winner’s circle between the one-quarter and the three-sixteenths poles.

The cumulative effect of transporting injured horses has made Miller distance himself emotionally from the thoroughbreds for whom he once cared.

“It might be a horse I’ve hauled off for whatever reason,” he said. “A couple months later, or six months later, he comes back and runs and wins. I don’t pay attention to them. If he’s going to take the last ride, I don’t want to know who he is.”

At Preakness, Orb’s Challengers Include Childhood Friend

By JOE DRAPE, The New York Times

Published: May 17, 2013

BALTIMORE – They shared the same paddock and gamboled in the same Kentucky bluegrass as weanlings and yearlings. Orb hit the ground first at Claiborne Farm, with Departing tumbling out of his mother a month later. Now 3 years old, the two horses will be reunited Saturday in the 138th running of the Preakness Stakes.

Preakness Champion, and Mother, Toughs It Out

By MELISSA HOPPERT, The New York Times

Published: May 18, 2013

LEXINGTON, Ky. – On a sun-drenched May morning on the 460-acre Stonestreet Farm, Rachel Alexandra, a member of racing royalty, emerged from a 16-by-16 oak-paneled stall in a barn named Cabernet.

She showed no signs of distress as she did the day after giving birth to a 140-pound filly by Bernardini in February. Rachel Alexandra, who in 2009 became the first filly to win the Preakness Stakes in 85 years, was nearly back to her old self as her hooves clip-clopped on the asphalt on the way to her paddock.

Picks

Here’s that Sierra Club piece I promised.

It’s Not Easy Being Green: Are Some of the Biggest Enviro Groups Giant Sell-Outs?

Jason Mark, Alternet

May 15, 2013

About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.  

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

…

The Sierra Club, under the leadership of its previous executive director, Carl Pope, wasn’t the only prominent environmentalist organization heralding natural gas as a bridge fuel that could take our energy system from carbon-intense coal to renewables like wind and solar. (When burned, gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal.) Among the most vocal proponents of natural gas today are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based liberal think tank the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus and Shellenberger ticked off greens in the early aughts with the essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which urged green groups to rethink the core assumptions of their political strategy. The pugnacious pair is often bashed for their rhetoric, but the two are genuine in their hawkishness on the climate and their commitment to global equity.

…

(S)ince the fracking boom began in earnest, a larger, anti-fracking grassroots has emerged. Small towns in the East that were unaccustomed to the thrum of the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked to find themselves surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery and with compressors in their back lots whirring all night long. Some homeowners had their wells contaminated with flammable methane. Places like Ohio and Arkansas that weren’t used to seismic activity started to experience earthquakes when underground wastewater injections stimulated geologic faults. Today, the movement against gas fracking has become a cause célèbre (Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo have an “Artists Against Fracking” group) and is one of the most invigorating issues among grassroots environmentalists. At February’s Forward on Climate rally near the White House, easily a fifth of the placards in the crowd of 35,000 had to do with gas drilling.

…

“Of all the forms of fossil-fuel extraction, fracking is the only one that is wrapped up in a green myth,” says Sandra Steingraber, who wrote the letter against the Sierra Club. “The demand for energy is not some inexorable thing like gravity. We control that. And it’s plain to me that we could reduce our energy use by half and entirely run our economy on renewables.”

…

Whether the question is shale-gas development, nuclear power, utility-scale solar and wind, or GMO crops, the core of the debate among environmentalists comes down to what’s realistic. That, of course, is the same dilemma that confronts any political movement, whether on the right or on the left. But environmentalists’ conundrum is especially complicated because it involves a system beyond our control: Earth.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger say their pragmatism is grounded in what is politically possible given a range of shitty options. In the other camp, Steffen, Steingraber, and Stephens also claim the mantle of pragmatism, one based on geophysical necessity. The existential threat of climate change has become a sort of projection screen: Either it confirms that we are locked into business as usual, or it’s proof that we need to make a societal 180-degree turn in how we relate to the planet.

“Those of us who are calling ourselves the latter-day abolitionists, our idea of what’s possible is grounded in physical and natural laws. How much water and land and resources do we need to feed ourselves?” Steingraber says. “My hope that is that we can help people imagine, have a vision of a future when blasting gas out of the ground to make our tea kettles whistle is just barbaric, which it is.” It’s a view Nordhaus and Shellenberger call naïve.

Of course The Sierra Club also sells out for access advocacy.

Who’s being naive now Kay?

First of all I’m not a lawyer, don’t even play one on TV.

What I have been (and still probably am on some obscure piece of paperwork) is an officer or director of a community group (told you I was a community organizer), a 501 (c) 3.

Now a 501 (c) 4 is flat out allowed to lobby and endorse candidates.  Think Sierra Club (more on their Keystone sellout later maybe).  In return contributions are not tax deductible for the contributor.  For a 501 (c) 3 it’s more problematic but as a practice when we were pan handling in front of grocery stores (poor day when I couldn’t make my $35 an hour) we promised nobody nothing.

Can you make money?  I just told you it was a poor day I couldn’t rattle my can for $35 an hour.

In fact some of the organizations I’ve worked with had cash flows of 10s of millions.  It’s not as much as it seems when the money goes right out the door as expenses.  Non-profit?  I funded one club out of my pocket $10,000 to keep them going.

Now, is this money going to a worthy cause?  Hell no.

A lot of them are just subsidized bars where well drinks are a dollar and top shelf $2.50 (no, you can’t drink if you’re not a member or guest, that will be $100 and I’ll swear you in right here).

Do they bring value to a community?

I dunno.  How valuable is your Town Fair or Carnival?  Your Parade or Craft Show?  Your Community Theater?

Umm… these are all projects I’ve worked on.  For weeks or years.  For nothing.

I do it because it’s fun and I love Stars Hollow.  I do it because I get to hang out with my buddies who are similarly “community minded”.

And there’s usually free beer.

But my point is that, for a club, 501 (c) 3 or 4 mostly means that you don’t have to keep a lawyer and accountant on retainer and the problem is not your tax status- it’s that the IRS has targeted particular clubs for political purposes.

And that’s just Nixonesque (2.2).