11 thoughts on “Non-Profits”

  1. Too many ‘non-profits’ are salary machines for the c-level execs…

    Want to do good for the public? Take vows of poverty

  2. This likely dates back a long time, but the March of Dimes probably exemplifies it for modern non-profits.
    Intended as a charity to help eradicate polio, which it pretty much did in the States. It needed to either disband or find a new mission. One guess what they did.
    The SPLC then weaponized it, since they were never really needed for their ostensible mission. They most likely named themselves to get people to mistake them for the SCLC after all.

  3. For profit organizations I prefer to think of as Tax-Chevys.
    As opposed to non-profits, which I prefer to think of a Tax-Dodges.
    YMMV…

  4. They have been abused, especially after Citizens United, along with other dark money networks. Many stereotypical “right” leaning nonprofits have been taken over by the commies, even the religious ones.

    I’m in favor of what I call Outcome Based Altruism, where intentions meet measurement and accountability. I’m not sure where taxes fall in all of that and I don’t know if it even matters

  5. Our local electric company is a non-profit (501 (c) 12). They serve an area in south Mississippi that includes most or parts of seven counties. They operate very admirably.

    1. They produce something useful which would be painfully obvious if it stops. A lot of these “non-profits” don’t produce anything but cash for their officers.

  7. I ran across an interesting example of how seedy these non profits can get.

    Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub are suing for an injunction to stop New York City’s new $18 minimum wage law for food delivery app workers, The Washington Post has reported. The app delivery platforms are asking for a temporary restraining order against the new rules, set to be implemented on July 12th. “We will not stand by and let the harmful impacts of this earnings standard on New York City customers, merchants, and the delivery workers it was intended to support go unchecked,” a DoorDash spokesperson told CNN.

    The Worker’s Justice Project that backed the survey decried the new lawsuit. “This latest legal maneuver to prop up their business model comes at the expense of workers who can barely survive in a city facing a massive affordability crisis,” director Ligia Guallpa told the Post.

    New York became the first US city to mandate a minimum wage for food delivery workers, ordering platforms to pay workers $17.96 per hour, plus tips, by July 12th. The minimum wage in the city is $15 per hour, but the extra amount accounts for the fact that delivery workers are usually paid as contractors, so have higher taxes and must pay work-related expenses out of pocket. According to an estimate from the DCWP (NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection), NYC has more than 60,000 food delivery workers who earn an average of $7.09 per hour.

    I’ll note that first, there’s this weird mention of a “survey” that appears nowhere else in the story. Perhaps it’s described in the links in the story somewhere? But it does seem to indicate to me that the journalist has an undisclosed familiarity with the Worker’s Justice Project.
    Anyway, the story does establish that there’s this non profit called the Worker’s Justice Project which advocates for a high minimum wage for gig economy businesses. So what is the Worker’s Justice Project?

    The Worker Justice Project, an initiative of The Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice, combats discrimination faced by workers with arrest or conviction records living in New York City. Every day employers and licensing agencies unfairly deny qualified individuals the opportunity to work because of pending charges, past convictions, and even sealed or dismissed cases. This discrimination prevents countless New Yorkers from maintaining financial stability and supporting their families—and further disenfranchises people of color already subjected to discriminatory employment practices and the racist administration of criminal justice.

    We see that it’s run by another non profit, The Legal Aid Society and has a mission completely unrelated to gig economy minimum wage. So let’s follow this rabbit hole a little further.

    As New York City’s primary public defender, we believe advocacy must not only take place in the courtroom, but in the communities where our clients live and work. Every day our defenders are engaging clients, community members, and advocacy groups helping to amplify the voices of people affected by a broken criminal justice system.

    The expansive reach of the Criminal Defense Practice runs from its dynamic advocacy of clients in court to its presence and partnership in communities. As the primary public defender in New York City, staff zealously and tirelessly work to protect the rights of the most marginalized and disenfranchised in society. Yet our scope, as the country’s oldest and largest public defender, goes beyond any single case or client. Our community engagement, impact litigation, and broader advocacy consistently strive for increased fairness and humanity in the criminal justice system and seeks to reduce the devastating and permanent consequences of system involvement for our clients.

    So they get some money to act as public defenders? Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Turns out it’s on the order of $108 million a year.

    So an organization that receives over $100 million a year just for representing the indigent happens to also be attacking gig economy companies, particularly Uber and Lynx who are responsible for massive declines in the NYC taxi medallion market. When I looked at the minimum wage law in question, if it were possible to restore medallions to their peak pricing (I think it’d take more than that, but consider this calculation a demonstration of the stakes at play), that would mean $10 billion increase in capitalization.

    As I noted in that link, it’s awful convenient that non profits with the appearance of independence are doing wonderful things for clients of the NYC machine.

  8. Where I live, the Democrats imported all of these homeless people and bought them all the exact same tent and plopped them down in front of city hall. They wouldn’t leave until the city gave a Democrat NGO millions of dollars to deal with the homeless people.

    They never got dealt with and the NGO is still hoovering money from the city council.

    Least shocking of all, they were doing voter drives at the homeless camp the NGO set up.

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