[Peace] [Peace-discuss] FW: The Southern Poverty Law Center on the Holocaust "Revisionist" movement

Thu Jul 24 17:56:00 EDT 2014

Karen,
I was duped for a long time into thinking the SPLC was a wonderful, concerned organization that looked out for the oppressed:
Read this below....all unimpeachable .... 

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20111227

The SPLC is a 501c3 tax-exempt non-profit corporation headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama in a building dubbed by the locals the "Poverty Palace." SPLC's co-founder, Morris Dees, lives a life of luxury in a palatial home worthy of any of the myriad of Christian evangelical mega-church hucksters who also use their tax-exempt status to shake donations out of willing, as well as unsuspecting, dupes. And, with only a few days before the end of the tax year, the SPLC is looking to rake in donations from those who can write off their gifts on their own taxes.

The "anti-hate" industry appears to be lucrative. The SPLC's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 tax return for 2009 shows that Dees, the SPLC's chief trial attorney (a professional name for an ambulance chasing lawyer), pocketed a handsome $350,000 annual salary and the group's President, Richard Cohen, raked in just a tad bit less, $345,000. The SPLC's board chairman, Howard Mandell, is a former Montgomery personal injuries attorney (another title for an ambulance chaser), who decided to become a rabbi for a Virginia Beach synagogue.

The SPLC cut its teeth by suing the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation and winning big dollar judgements. Never mind the fact that the Klan and the Aryan Nation and Brotherhood have historically been so infiltrated by FBI informants they began to turn one another in. Nevertheless, the Klan and the Aryan boys helped make the SPLC a wealthy non-profit, wealthy enough to
 have an offshore investment account in the Cayman Islands.

The SPLC appears to have little to do with "Southern Poverty," as the opulent salaries and life styles of its principals suggest. In addition to his six figure salary and his travel by private charter plane, Dees and his associates have access to a nice little "Endowment Fund," valued at $216.2 million in 2010.

Although the SPLC uses its tax free non-profit status to bash right-wing and libertarian groups and shill for Barack Obama and his administration, itself an apparent violation of IRS laws against non-profits engaging in political activities, it has earned the
 enmity of journalists on the left. CounterPunch's Alexander Cockburn wrote the following about Dees  in a May 15, 2009, article titled "King of the hate Business."

"As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio."

Cockburn pointed out that Dees and his cronies are doing quite well as compared to other civil rights fighters like Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights who earned a mere $11,000 as president and senior counsel of his group, which  defends minorities against racially-based criminal prosecutions and opposes the death penalty.

My old chum Ken Silverstein also took on Dees's money-grubbing tactics in 2000 in a ground-breaking Harper's article:

"Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. 'He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,' renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, 'though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.'"

Silverstein followed up in a March 22, 2010 Harper's piece, titled "'Hate,' Immigration, and the Southern Poverty Law Center" by writing:

"[The SPLC's] treasury is now up to $175 million or so, bigger than the GNP of some of the world’s smaller nations."

Before he was found dead of an apparent heart attack at the bottom of his Palm Beach, Florida swimming pool on October 25, 2009, investment banker Jeffry Picower had donated a cool $2.9 million to the SPLC. However, there was a slight problem with picower's generosity. Picower had netted some $7 billion from Bernard Madoff's estimated $65 billion Ponzi scheme, which mainly bilked Jewish investors.

The SPLC has also taken heat from its favorite target, the right-wing.The New American's William Jasper wrote on October 4, 2011 in an article titled "SPLC: Scamming for Power, Lucre, and Control":

"Dees and company have squirreled away an undisclosed portion of the organization’s assets in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. The SPLC’s IRS filings mention the Cayman account but do not provide any details. The organization’s fundraising and spending practices have received poor or failing ratings from the Better Business Bureau, the American Institute of Philanthropy, and Charity Navigator. The Social Contract reports that, unknown to most donors, 'the tax-exempt SPLC flunked an audit by the Arlington-based Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, which requires that ‘a reasonable percentage, at least 50 percent of total income from all sources, should be applied to programs and activities directly related to the purposes for which the organization exists.'

The SPLC, far from meeting those standards, 'spent 89 percent of its total income on fundraising and administrative costs.'"

The New American's account does not differ a bit from the criticism the SPLC has received from the left.

The SPLC's scam is very similar to that of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). My late friend George Fowler, who wrote for Reader's Digest, uncovered in the 1960s a story that the American Nazi Party's George Lincoln Rockwell received regular donations from ADL cut-outs in order to keep the coffers of the ADL brimming with donations from those who feared the American Nazis would bring about another Holocaust. Rockwell had been the publisher for U.S. Lady magazine in New York prior to taking over the Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia. Rockwell's biggest advertisers were Jewish-owned stores like Bergdorf-Goodman, Gimbel's, Macy's, B. Altman, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Rockwell's parents were vaudeville performers whose friends included Jack Benny, Benny Goodman, Groucho Marx, and Walter Winchell, all major Jewish celebrities. Rockwell and the ADL were running a huge money making scam that played on popular fears, much as the SPLC and its principals are doing
 today.

The problem with the SPLC is not its right to attack those with whom it disagrees, including us. The problem is that it has been using its non-profit, tax exempt status to attack journalists who don't enjoy similar tax breaks and who have been working to expose Obama's past and his agenda. Either the Internal Revenue Service tax codes should be amended to grant similar status to news websites and other publications or the SPLC's 501c3 status should be
 suspended forthwith, if not retroactively.

On Thursday, July 24, 2014 2:29 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

Stephen 

FYI

In respect to "Holocaust revisionism" it must be noted that according to the SPLC it is deeply connected to the Nazi movement in the US, not academic historians. Please see the link below: 

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/holocaust-denial/essay-the-holocaust-denial-movement#.U8gb_shBqTg.gmail

Karen Aram

_______________________________________________
Peace-discuss mailing list
Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace/attachments/20140724/b0f3b99f/attachment.html>