While local “charities” with insider pull openly steal millions from New York’s taxpayers, Attorney General Letitia James crusades with maximum malice against a tiny, defunct non-profit in . . . West Virginia, of all places.
VDare, an obscure anti-immigration website, moved out of state long ago, but was founded decades ago in New York; that was enough to let James focus her office’s efforts on looking into its apparent use of donor money to buy a headquarters in the Mountain State town of Berkeley Springs that doubles as a home for its founder.
For reasons known only to Tish James and God, she has pursued a vendetta against this obscure rightwing blog for years: The press release announcing her latest lawsuit against VDare lists five section chiefs, assistant attorneys general and staff as working on this case.
Meanwhile, politically juiced “service providers” truly active in New York maintain fat government contracts worth hundreds of millions a year, even though their corruption and other insider profiteering have been public, documented knowledge for years.
The profiteers are solid members of the local Democratic elite, so when it comes to investigating, let alone prosecuting, any of them, it’s radio silence from the AG: no press releases, no lawsuits — nothing.
The city’s Department of Investigation details a long-standing pattern of self-dealing, excessive payments, nepotism and other blatant irregularities and flat-out illegality in the city’s multibillion-dollar homeless-industrial complex.
SEBCO, a “nonprofit” shelter provider, hired a for-profit company to provide security services. Surprise: SEBCO owned the security company, chose it via a non-competitive process and paid its own executives hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary.
The husband of a SEBCO executive is affiliated with four of its for-profit subcontractors, providing a range of services from extermination to maintenance and cleaning.
Acacia Network, another homeless-shelter operator with a dodgy safety record, pays its top executive close to a million dollars in yearly total compensation, a figure the charity says is “reasonable” . . . according to a consultant it hired.
Before finally losing its city contracts, CORE Services raked in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to shelter the homeless; it, too, hired its own for-profit subsidiaries to provide security, food, etc., paying the execs in fat-six-figure amounts.
The DOI found similar scams going on across dozens of homeless services providers; the feds have prosecuted a few of the insiders and sent them to prison, while AG James devotes her resources to ideological lawfare.
VDare may have misallocated some of its meager contributions, but it never got a dime from the taxpayers: All its donors are private individuals.
New York social-service nonprofits, meanwhile, are built entirely around leeching taxpayer money and enriching and/or empowering their own leadership.
James is a genius at chasing headlines as she prosecutes her ideological enemies, but an utter failure at policing the “charities” that rob New Yorkers blind.
