[Vision2020] Mark Potok Visit: The Reality of the SPLC
Tim Lohrmann
timlohr@yahoo.com
Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:04:18 -0800 (PST)
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Visionaries,
I'm sure the visit of Mark Potok to the Palouse is a wonderful thing to many. But the well-intentioned folk of the area do deserve to know more about the organization that he represents---the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It's not a pretty picture.
In short, the following fact sums it up--The American Institute of Philanthropy's CHARITYWATCH.ORG website assigned the SPLC an "F" grade on a scale of A to F a few years ago. That of course means that the SPLC's ratio of money raised to that spent on the work it professes to raise it for is very poor.
Recently on my radio show, a caller mentioned that Mark Potok was coming to visit the Palouse. I mentioned some of the facts contained in the articles below. The caller, clearly a true, if uninformed, believer in the virtues of the SPLC, first responded in a knee-jerk fashion that "I had been listening to Doug Wilson too much."
Well, I've never listened to Doug Wilson at all, apart from attending about 15 minutes of a public debate at the U of I once years ago. And I said as much.
The caller then conceded my points, that the SPLC staff pays itself large salaries, builds luxurious headquarters from "charitable" contributions and uses the vast majority of the rest of the money it raises to raise more money. However the caller justified all this just because many other charities were guilty of the same thing. He then went on to contend that the questionable fundraising and spending practices of the SPLC didn't detract from the expertise of SPLC spokespersons on civil rights matters.
Well, I disagree on both points.
First of all, we learned in childhood that two wrongs don't make a right. The fact that ENRON ripped off shareholders doesn't excuse Tyco execs for doing the same thing. Sure, this analogy is somewhat flawed, a "charity" such as the SPLC isn't technically committing fraud if it spends even a fraction of the money it raises on the work it claims it will be spent on. So it is technically not guilty of fraud in the Enron sense.
But isn't this just the sort of near-fraud that gives all charities a bad name? And more than that isn't it simply disgusting to exploit the noble intentions of charitable givers? As I mentioned above Charitywatch.org has given the SPLC an F rating for its practices.
Second, the fact that the SPLC is engaged in such super-aggressive and deceptive fundraising does indeed bring its actual work into question. It is in the SPLC's direct financial interest to go beyond monitoring what it calls "hate groups." An SPLC type of money making machine must constantly grow. And so it is absolutely in the organization's interest to sensationalize and magnify the threat posed by any of these groups.
Why? So that it the next fundraising appeal can sound that much more dire and desperate of course.
The sky is falling--give until it hurts!!
Below, I've included both a posting I sent to V2020 previously that includes the article by Alexander Cockburn and the famous article on the SPLC entitled "The Church of Morris Dees that appeared in Harper's Magazine in 2000.
Best,
TL
From: Tim Lohrmann
To: vision2020@moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] More on Dees/SPLC
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:22:20 -0800 (PST)
Visionaries,
It was amusing to see one post-er's comment that "despite the drivel on this list," one or the other SPLC spokespersons are recognized as authorities on hate.
Sure the SPLC is widely recognized as an authority.
Cheney and Rumsfield are recognized by some as authorities on international policy too.
Does that mean that those who question their motives and their conclusions are guilty of being drooling authors of "drivel?"
Alexander Cockburn, a mainstay of left/liberal journalism, contributor to THE NATION, and one of the editors of COUNTERPUNCH may be many things. But guilty of writing "drivel?"
I don't think so. Cockburn's take on Dees' empire is included below this message.
I was particularly interested in Dees' allegation of dangerous racists in those who protested the WTO in Seattle. And not only that, he apparently used this "finding" in, what else, his relentless fundraising appeals.
TL
The Dees Money Machine
by Alexander Cockburn
from "Wild Justice," The New York Press
I've long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as
collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a
relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying its mostly low-income
contributors into unbeltiing ill-spared dollars year after year to an
organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million, with very
little to show for it beyond hysterical bulletins designed to raise money on
the proposition that only the SPLC can stop Nazism and the KKK from seizing
power.
Gloria Browne, a lawyer who's worked with Dees' outfit, once told the
Montgomery Advertiser that the Southern Poverty Law Center trades in "black
pain and white guilt." He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil
rights movement.
In fact, Dees began the 1960's as an attorney in Montgomery, represen! ting a
Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, Claude Henley, who had led an attack on Freedom
Riders at the local bus station. Dees has denied he was ever personally
supportive of the Klan or Henley, but his former partner, Millard Farmer,
has said, "We expressed openly our sympathies and support for what happened
at the bus station." For the rest of the 1960s Dees sat on the sidelines
and got rich from marketing "Famous Recipe" cookbooks with Farmer; he built
a tennis court, pool, high-quality stables and got a Rolls-Royce.
He founded the SPLC in 1971. In the end Dees and Farmer fell out, with
Farmer (who later gave away most of his money and started Habitat for
Humanity) saying bitterly, "If an issue isn't bringing in money, he's off to
the woods. He may believe [in civil rights] but he'll quit doing the work
if it doesn't make money." Farmer says of the Southern Poverty Law Center
that it's "little more than a 900 number."
Dees has always been alert to the paranoias of the hour. The center's
entire legal staff resigned in the late 1980s, in part because Dees was
reluctant to take up legal issues of real importance to poor people. His
obsession was the Klanwatch Project, a cash cow for the SPLC. Literature
from the SPLC portrayed the Klan as poised to take over American and embark
on an orgy of burning and lynching. This was at a time when the major
danger to poor people was going to be welfare reform , a collusive project
between the Gingrich Republicans and Clinton liberals, among the latter
being many fervent supporters of Dees. Dees sits on a mountain of cash, but
his courtroom forays are not profuse. In the early 1990s, when the center's
reserves were about half what they are today- $52 million in 1993- the
center (between 1989 and 1994) filed only a dozen suits.
Recently Jim Reddin and Cletus Nels! on sent CounterPunch, the newsletter I
coedit with Jeffrey St. Clair, and interesting account of Dees' latest twist
in moneygrubbing. In its most recent Intelligence Report newsletter, the
SPLC -in a "Special Report"- puts forth the preposterous theory that far
from being a glorious renaissance of the radical spirit in American
political life, the protest against the World Trade Organization, most in
evidence in Seattle and in Washington, DC, at the start of last week, have
been the nexus for a far-flung crypto-facist conspiracy comprised of white
supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other shock troops of the
far right. The SPLC's anonymous writer confidently states that the
anarchists, socialists, environmentalists and other left-wing dissidents who
gathered in Seattle at the start of last December were secretly infiltrated
by European-style "Third Position" fascists who mix racism with
environmentalism. "Right ! alongside the progressive groups that demonstrated
in Seattle- mostly peaceful defenders of labor, the environment, animal
rights and similar causes- were the hard-edged soldiers of neofascism," the
newsletter excitedly warns.
No documentation is offered to substantiate this allegation. The newsletter
doesn't name a single right-winger who has infiltrated Direct Action, Food
Not Bombs, Greenpeace or any of the other groups that organized the Seattle
protests. Dees' pretense is that he stands for civil rights, but of course
the newsletter entirely ignores the civil rights abuses committed by the
Seattle police against the protesters, even though the ACLU has filed a
civil rights suit over the "no protest" zone" declared by city officials.
The attack on the anti-globalization movement marks a significant shift in
the SPLC's policies, suggesting to us that Dees sees material opportunity in
attacking a popular radical cause. ! ; As part of its scourched-earth policy,
the organization has declared war against grassroots environmental
activists. "They pine for nations of peasant-like folk tied closely to the
land and to their neighbors," the newsletter observes disdainfully.
Some who've followed the FBI's recent disastrous predictions about Y2K
terror attacks from right-wing militias suspect that both the SPLC and the
Anti-Defamation League (which helped fuel the FBI"s Y2K predictions) are
hauling water for the bureau, essentially acting as subcontractors
performing tasks of defamation that in the old COINTELPRO days would have
been performed by the bureau itself. The worrying fact for fundraisers like
Dees is that there is a distinct shortage of terrifying specters with which
to coax the money out of the pockets of the suckers. How long can you raise
the alarm about a fascist takeover, when the legions of the ultra-right are
a few beleaguered plat! oons camped around Hayden Lake, ID?
The Nation, Mother Jones, and kindred liberal publications have the same
problem. If the fascist/Gingrichian bogey isn't out there in the darkness,
prowling round the campfire, maybe people will start concluding that real
enemy is all too unidentifiably roosting in Washington in the two-party
system. So the new strategy of the Dees crowd, the SPLC and ADL, is to
point tremulously to such signs of realignment as the Antiwar.com
conference, "Beyond Left and Right," about which I reported a couple of
weeks ago, and raise the alarm, saying -as the Dees Intelligence Report
does- that the left is being duped and captured by the far right and that
realignment is a neo-fascist strategy. And of course they're strains in the
anti-globalist, anti-free trade movement that can buttress such a charge.
It's not hard to go to a gun show and scoop up a pamphlet attacking the New
World Order along wit! h the UN, the big banks, and the WTO.
American, populist culture has crank patches, as do all political cultures.
In American environmentalism there's a Malthusian element that goes back to
the racist speculations of Harvard professors a century ago. One task for
us left greens has always been to identify this element and attack it.
Going "beyond left and right" doesn't mean abandoning basic positions on
racism, Malthusianism and the like, it means trying to forge alliances on
issues such as U.S. Interventions and wars, or on the Bill of Rights - and
keeping one's powder dry. The attack from Dees on the anti-WTO forces won't
be the last.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--==-=-=-=-==-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
THE CHURCH OF MORRIS DEES.
Harper's Magazine, Nov, 2000, by Ken Silverstein
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then. 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." The center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants. But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains--like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler--eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser the SPLC, m!
eanwhile,
made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse. Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history--and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's--was never credibly linked to any militia organization.
No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhilike disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in itself.
Any good salesman knows that a product's "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees--who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern--is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation--why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements--such as angry black people--and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris D!
ees,
we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.
Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995--when the center had more than $60 million in reserves--informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fundraising." Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising--$5.76 million last year--as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights a!
buses.
The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."
The SPLC's "other important work for justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members--a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues--such as homelessness, voter registration, and
affirmative action--that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."
Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10.8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I ... shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his
compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to t!
he most
desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly." Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Harper's Magazine Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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<DIV>Visionaries,</DIV>
<DIV> I'm sure the visit of Mark Potok to the Palouse is a wonderful thing to many. But the well-intentioned folk of the area do deserve to know more about the organization that he represents---the Southern Poverty Law Center. </DIV>
<DIV> It's not a pretty picture.</DIV>
<DIV> <BR><FONT face=Arial> In short, the following fact sums it up--The American Institute of Philanthropy's CHARITYWATCH.ORG website assigned the SPLC an "F" grade on a scale of A to F a few years ago. That of course means that the SPLC's ratio of money raised to that spent on the work it professes to raise it for is very poor.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Recently on my radio show, a caller mentioned that Mark Potok was coming to visit the Palouse. I mentioned some of the facts contained in the articles below. The caller, clearly a true, if uninformed, believer in the virtues of the SPLC, first responded in a knee-jerk fashion that "I had been listening to Doug Wilson too much." </DIV>
<DIV> Well, I've never listened to Doug Wilson at all, apart from attending about 15 minutes of a public debate at the U of I once years ago. And I said as much. </DIV>
<DIV> The caller then conceded my points, that the SPLC staff pays itself large salaries, builds luxurious headquarters from "charitable" contributions and uses the vast majority of the rest of the money it raises to raise more money. However the caller justified all this just because many other charities were guilty of the same thing. He then went on to contend that the questionable fundraising and spending practices of the SPLC didn't detract from the expertise of SPLC spokespersons on civil rights matters.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Well, I disagree on both points.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> First of all, we learned in childhood that two wrongs don't make a right. The fact that ENRON ripped off shareholders doesn't excuse Tyco execs for doing the same thing. Sure, this analogy is somewhat flawed, a "charity" such as the SPLC isn't technically committing fraud if it spends even a fraction of the money it raises on the work it claims it will be spent on. So it is technically not guilty of fraud in the Enron sense. </DIV>
<DIV> But isn't this just the sort of near-fraud that gives all charities a bad name? And more than that isn't it simply disgusting to exploit the noble intentions of charitable givers? As I mentioned above Charitywatch.org has given the SPLC an F rating for its practices.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Second, the fact that the SPLC is engaged in such super-aggressive and deceptive fundraising does indeed bring its actual work into question. It is in the SPLC's direct financial interest to go beyond monitoring what it calls "hate groups." An SPLC type of money making machine must constantly grow. And so it is absolutely in the organization's interest to sensationalize and magnify the threat posed by any of these groups. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Why? So that it the next fundraising appeal can sound that much more dire and desperate of course. </DIV>
<DIV> The sky is falling--give until it hurts!!</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> Below, I've included both a posting I sent to V2020 previously that includes the article by Alexander Cockburn and the famous article on the SPLC entitled "The Church of Morris Dees that appeared in Harper's Magazine in 2000.<BR> <I><BR> Best, </I></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial><I> TL</I></FONT></DIV>
<P> </P>
<P> </P>
<P>From: Tim Lohrmann <TIMLOHR@YAHOO.COM><BR>To: vision2020@moscow.com<BR>Subject: [Vision2020] More on Dees/SPLC<BR>Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:22:20 -0800 (PST)<BR><BR></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">
<DIV>Visionaries,</DIV>
<DIV> It was amusing to see one post-er's comment that "despite the drivel on this list," one or the other SPLC spokespersons are recognized as authorities on hate. </DIV>
<DIV> Sure the SPLC is widely recognized as an authority.</DIV>
<DIV> Cheney and Rumsfield are recognized by some as authorities on international policy too. </DIV>
<DIV> Does that mean that those who question their motives and their conclusions are guilty of being drooling authors of "drivel?" </DIV>
<DIV> Alexander Cockburn, a mainstay of left/liberal journalism, contributor to THE NATION, and one of the editors of COUNTERPUNCH may be many things. But guilty of writing "drivel?" </DIV>
<DIV> I don't think so. Cockburn's take on Dees' empire is included below this message.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I was particularly interested in Dees' allegation of dangerous racists in those who protested the WTO in Seattle. And not only that, he apparently used this "finding" in, what else, his relentless fundraising appeals. </DIV>
<DIV> TL</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The Dees Money Machine<BR>by Alexander Cockburn<BR><BR>from "Wild Justice," The New York Press<BR><BR>I've long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as<BR>collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a<BR>relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying its mostly low-income<BR>contributors into unbeltiing ill-spared dollars year after year to an<BR>organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million, with very<BR>little to show for it beyond hysterical bulletins designed to raise money on<BR>the proposition that only the SPLC can stop Nazism and the KKK from seizing<BR>power.<BR><BR>Gloria Browne, a lawyer who's worked with Dees' outfit, once told the<BR>Montgomery Advertiser that the Southern Poverty Law Center trades in "black<BR>pain and white guilt." He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil<BR>rights movement.<BR><BR>In fact, Dees began the 1960's as an attorney in Montgomery, represen!
! ting
a<BR>Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, Claude Henley, who had led an attack on Freedom<BR>Riders at the local bus station. Dees has denied he was ever personally<BR>supportive of the Klan or Henley, but his former partner, Millard Farmer,<BR>has said, "We expressed openly our sympathies and support for what happened<BR>at the bus station." For the rest of the 1960s Dees sat on the sidelines<BR>and got rich from marketing "Famous Recipe" cookbooks with Farmer; he built<BR>a tennis court, pool, high-quality stables and got a Rolls-Royce.<BR><BR>He founded the SPLC in 1971. In the end Dees and Farmer fell out, with<BR>Farmer (who later gave away most of his money and started Habitat for<BR>Humanity) saying bitterly, "If an issue isn't bringing in money, he's off to<BR>the woods. He may believe [in civil rights] but he'll quit doing the work<BR>if it doesn't make money." Farmer says of the Southern Poverty Law Center<BR>that it's "little more than a 900
number."<BR><BR>Dees has always been alert to the paranoias of the hour. The center's<BR>entire legal staff resigned in the late 1980s, in part because Dees was<BR>reluctant to take up legal issues of real importance to poor people. His<BR>obsession was the Klanwatch Project, a cash cow for the SPLC. Literature<BR>from the SPLC portrayed the Klan as poised to take over American and embark<BR>on an orgy of burning and lynching. This was at a time when the major<BR>danger to poor people was going to be welfare reform , a collusive project<BR>between the Gingrich Republicans and Clinton liberals, among the latter<BR>being many fervent supporters of Dees. Dees sits on a mountain of cash, but<BR>his courtroom forays are not profuse. In the early 1990s, when the center's<BR>reserves were about half what they are today- $52 million in 1993- the<BR>center (between 1989 and 1994) filed only a dozen suits.<BR><BR>Recently Jim Reddin and Cletus Nels!
! on sent
CounterPunch, the newsletter I<BR>coedit with Jeffrey St. Clair, and interesting account of Dees' latest twist<BR>in moneygrubbing. In its most recent Intelligence Report newsletter, the<BR>SPLC -in a "Special Report"- puts forth the preposterous theory that far<BR>from being a glorious renaissance of the radical spirit in American<BR>political life, the protest against the World Trade Organization, most in<BR>evidence in Seattle and in Washington, DC, at the start of last week, have<BR>been the nexus for a far-flung crypto-facist conspiracy comprised of white<BR>supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other shock troops of the<BR>far right. The SPLC's anonymous writer confidently states that the<BR>anarchists, socialists, environmentalists and other left-wing dissidents who<BR>gathered in Seattle at the start of last December were secretly infiltrated<BR>by European-style "Third Position" fascists who mix racism with<BR>environmentalism. "Right !
alongside the progressive groups that demonstrated<BR>in Seattle- mostly peaceful defenders of labor, the environment, animal<BR>rights and similar causes- were the hard-edged soldiers of neofascism," the<BR>newsletter excitedly warns.<BR><BR>No documentation is offered to substantiate this allegation. The newsletter<BR>doesn't name a single right-winger who has infiltrated Direct Action, Food<BR>Not Bombs, Greenpeace or any of the other groups that organized the Seattle<BR>protests. Dees' pretense is that he stands for civil rights, but of course<BR>the newsletter entirely ignores the civil rights abuses committed by the<BR>Seattle police against the protesters, even though the ACLU has filed a<BR>civil rights suit over the "no protest" zone" declared by city officials.<BR><BR>The attack on the anti-globalization movement marks a significant shift in<BR>the SPLC's policies, suggesting to us that Dees sees material opportunity in<BR>attacking a popular radical
cause. ! ; As part of its scourched-earth policy,<BR>the organization has declared war against grassroots environmental<BR>activists. "They pine for nations of peasant-like folk tied closely to the<BR>land and to their neighbors," the newsletter observes disdainfully.<BR><BR>Some who've followed the FBI's recent disastrous predictions about Y2K<BR>terror attacks from right-wing militias suspect that both the SPLC and the<BR>Anti-Defamation League (which helped fuel the FBI"s Y2K predictions) are<BR>hauling water for the bureau, essentially acting as subcontractors<BR>performing tasks of defamation that in the old COINTELPRO days would have<BR>been performed by the bureau itself. The worrying fact for fundraisers like<BR>Dees is that there is a distinct shortage of terrifying specters with which<BR>to coax the money out of the pockets of the suckers. How long can you raise<BR>the alarm about a fascist takeover, when the legions of the ultra-right are<B!
R>a few
beleaguered plat! oons camped around Hayden Lake, ID?<BR><BR>The Nation, Mother Jones, and kindred liberal publications have the same<BR>problem. If the fascist/Gingrichian bogey isn't out there in the darkness,<BR>prowling round the campfire, maybe people will start concluding that real<BR>enemy is all too unidentifiably roosting in Washington in the two-party<BR>system. So the new strategy of the Dees crowd, the SPLC and ADL, is to<BR>point tremulously to such signs of realignment as the Antiwar.com<BR>conference, "Beyond Left and Right," about which I reported a couple of<BR>weeks ago, and raise the alarm, saying -as the Dees Intelligence Report<BR>does- that the left is being duped and captured by the far right and that<BR>realignment is a neo-fascist strategy. And of course they're strains in the<BR>anti-globalist, anti-free trade movement that can buttress such a charge.<BR>It's not hard to go to a gun show and scoop up a pamphlet attacking the New<B!
R>World
Order along wit! h the UN, the big banks, and the WTO.<BR><BR>American, populist culture has crank patches, as do all political cultures.<BR>In American environmentalism there's a Malthusian element that goes back to<BR>the racist speculations of Harvard professors a century ago. One task for<BR>us left greens has always been to identify this element and attack it.<BR>Going "beyond left and right" doesn't mean abandoning basic positions on<BR>racism, Malthusianism and the like, it means trying to forge alliances on<BR>issues such as U.S. Interventions and wars, or on the Bill of Rights - and<BR>keeping one's powder dry. The attack from Dees on the anti-WTO forces won't<BR>be the last.<BR></DIV>
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<DIV class=s11 style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 5px; WIDTH: 562px; PADDING-TOP: 5px; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f0f6f5" align=left><FONT size=3><SPAN class=s14b><B>THE CHURCH OF MORRIS DEES.</B></SPAN><BR></FONT><B><A href="http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/mag.jhtml">Harper's Magazine</A></B>, Nov, 2000, by <A href="http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/PI/search.jhtml?key=%22Ken Silverstein%22">Ken Silverstein</A></DIV></DIV>
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<P>How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance</P>
<P>Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then. 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." The center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.</P>
<P>The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants. But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains--like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler--eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser the SPLC,
meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse. Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history--and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's--was never credibly linked to any militia organization.</P></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhilike disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in itself.</P>
<P>Any good salesman knows that a product's "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees--who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern--is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation--why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."</P>
<P>This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements--such as angry black people--and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morri!
s Dees,
we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.</P>
<P>Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995--when the center had more than $60 million in reserves--informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fundraising." Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising--$5.76 million last year--as it does on legal services for victims of civil right!
s abuses.
The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."</P>
<P>The SPLC's "other important work for justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members--a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues--such as homelessness, voter registration, !
and
affirmative action--that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."</P>
<P>Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10.8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.</P>
<P>In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I ... shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where!
his
compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to t!
he most
desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly." Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.</P>
<P>COPYRIGHT 2000 Harper's Magazine Foundation<BR>COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group</P><p><hr SIZE=1>
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