>This is a reason to run a campaign against Dees? Silverstein and
>Cockburn are full of shit. Dees does good work shutting down the
>Klan.
Justin, did you actually read Ken's words? Let me recount some highlights in case you missed them the first time through.
>"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 he FBI informants.
>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."
>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 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."
>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."
>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.
>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 the 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 tittle, and promote yourself so shamelessly."
Evidently the shameless self-promotion works, even on people who've read the truth.