Morris Dees and the SPLC: Read all about it – Human Events
SPLC: Read all about it – Human Events
Golly, we wonder from here how long it will be before the SPLC labels Human Events.com a “hate site” for telling the truth here?
Mr. Vadum even uses my favorite quote on Dees! [ except for one labeling him ” a slick parasitic huckster“]
Dees’s former legal associate, Millard Farmer, describes the crusading lawyer as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” adding, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” Former associates say Dees is obsessed with making money.
Southern Poverty Law Center Pushes Twisted Definition of ‘Hate’
by Matthew Vadum
Posted Dec 11, 2006
Human Events Online
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has one key message: The nation is boiling over with hatred and intolerance. Decades after the civil rights movement forever changed America and despite the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the imposition of affirmative action, American race relations are always worse today than in the days of Jim Crow, according to SPLC
SPLC has an enormous endowment of more than $152 million, according to its 2005 annual report. Its IRS Form 990 for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2005, shows that the center took in gross receipts of $49.8 million that year, $29.7 million of which consisted of contributions and grants.
According to its balance sheet, by Oct. 31, 2005, its total assets had ballooned from $173.2 million at the beginning of the fiscal year, to $189.4 million by year’s end. SPLC’s endowment is so large that it reported endowment income of nearly $3.5 million, including interest income of $728,356.
Although SPLC bills itself as a civil rights law firm, it devotes only a fraction of its resources to actual legal work. Of the $28.9 million in expenses it declared for the year ended Oct. 31, 2005, only $4.5 million went to “providing legal services for victims of civil rights injustice and hate crimes,” and $837,907 for “specific assistance to individuals” in the form of “litigation services,” according to its Form 990. Roughly half of its expenditures, $14.7 million, were devoted to “educating the general public, public officials, teachers, students and law enforcement agencies and officers with respect to issues of hate and intolerance and promoting tolerance of differences through the schools.”
In the same period, SPLC paid attorney Morris Dees $297,559 in salary and
pension-plan contributions. On the list of nonprofit “employees who earned more than their organization’s chief executive,” (part of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual survey of top nonprofit executive salaries, published September 28), Dees ranked 48th in the nation. SPLC President Richard Cohen took home $274,838, but center co-founder Joseph L. Levin received only $171,904 for his efforts as general counsel.
Bond’s Smear Tactics
SPLC is based in Montgomery, Ala., site of the famous bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement and made a national icon of Rosa Parks, the woman who courageously refused to move to the back of the bus. The center’s fortress-style headquarters seems intended to shield employees from the hordes of neo-Nazis, skinheads and militia groups the center wants people to believe wish to do it harm.
The co-founders of SPLC were Julian Bond and Morris Dees. Bond is the founding president. Since 1998, he has been chairman of the NAACP but remains active with the center and currently serves on its board of directors. A highly visible public figure, he is well acquainted with its smear tactics, having compared conservatives and the Bush Administration to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime.
Bond has smeared black conservatives with relish, deriding them for joining what he calls “a right-wing conspiracy” aimed at eliminating affirmative action, abridging voting rights and reforming public education. In 2002, he told an NAACP convention that black conservatives were participants in “an interlocking network of funders, groups and activists…. They are the money, the motivation and the movement behind vouchers, the legal assault on affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination, attempts to reapportion us out of office and attacks on equity everywhere.” These conservatives are “black hustlers and hucksters … [who], like ventriloquists’ dummies, speak in their puppet master’s voice,” he said. Bond called anti-racial quota campaigner Ward Connerly a “fraud” and a “con man.”
In February of this year, at Fayetteville State University in Arkansas, Bond warned that Republicans’ “idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,” the Fayetteville Observer reported. When his comments provoked a firestorm of criticism, Bond lied, denying he likened the GOP to the Nazi Party. He accused “right-wing blogs” of mischaracterizing his statement: “I didn’t say these things I’m alleged to have said. There is no one in the audience who can say I said them.” How wrong he was: The Observer posted a 45-minute recording of Bond’s speech online. In the same speech, Bond implied that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were token black appointees in the Bush Administration, which was using them as “human shields against any criticism of their record on civil rights.”
For Bond, America is hopelessly racist. “Everywhere we see clear racial fault lines, which divide American society as much now as at any time in our past,” he said in 1999. One might expect Americans to push someone with Bond’s views to the margins of public life, alongside such racial provocateurs as Al Sharpton, yet Bond is an in-demand public speaker. He holds 23 honorary degrees and is now distinguished professor at American University and professor of history at the University of Virginia.
But Bond is strictly B-list compared to Morris Dees.
Dees’ Obsession
Dees is admired by left-wing and not-so-left-wing lawyers from coast to coast. A prestigious legal award has been named after him, and on November 16, the high-powered law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates and the University of Alabama School of Law awarded the first annual “Morris Dees Justice Award” to U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice of the Eastern District of Texas. The award will be given annually to “a lawyer who has devoted his or her career to serving the public interest and pursuing justice and whose work has brought about positive change in the community, state or nation.” One of the rulings for which Judge Justice is honored would puzzle many strict constructionist legal scholars and limited-government supporters. Justice’s ruling in a 1982 case, Plyler v. Doe, opened the doors for children of illegal aliens to attend public schools through grade 12 at public expense.
Dees is a consummate salesman and a champion fundraiser. “I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church. Spending Sundays sitting on those hard benches, listening to the preacher pitch salvation … why it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling,” he said. Dees was finance director for Democrat George McGovern’s failed 1972 presidential bid and for other Democratic candidates. He raised more than $24 million from 600,000 small donors, marking the first time a presidential campaign was financed with small gifts by mail, according to Dees’s official biography on SPLC’s website.
Years before co-founding the SPLC, Dees launched a successful direct-mail sales company specializing in book publishing. However, he experienced an epiphany in 1967 and decided to take his life in a new direction and “speak out for my black friends who were still ‘disenfranchised’ even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Dees wrote in his autobiographical A Season for Justice. “Little had changed in the South. Whites held the power and had no intention of voluntarily sharing it.”
We hope that you will read the entire article here.
And remember..anyone who loves America and shows the courage to oppose open borders and illegal immigration and employment is subject to be labeled a “hater” by Morris Dees Inc & Co..
Bonus info from Georgia here.