Faux cancer charity pitches Las Vegas with variation on a theme

Posted on by September 27, 2021
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Faux cancer charity pitches Las VegasThe cheery female voice–I didn’t get her name–recently cold-calling the New To Las Vegas world headquarters was seeking a donation for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Initiative. This is yet another cancer cause I hadn’t heard of–there are thousands of them out there. Unfortunately, in my long experience the ones calling out of the blue often are up to little good.

I asked where the organization was headquartered. “Washington, D.C.” she quickly replied. Okay, I said, how old is the organization?

There was a pause. A long pause. Then, “I can’t answer that type of question.” She hung up even before I got a chance to ask for her name. Gee, it’s not like I was inquiring how to deal with the Taliban.

Maybe she didn’t want to tell me that the Initiative was likely less than seven months old, judging from the registration date of its website (March 3, 2021) that I quickly looked up. Or maybe it was that she really didn’t exist as a person, but was just a computer-generated voice controlled by a real human somewhere using what is known as soundboard technology. Such callers are known to cut and run at the first suggestion of donor difficulty.

Whatever the reason, after a few more minutes of Internet research I realized a few more things: (1) Despite its call-to-action name, the Initiative wasn’t a charity, but simply a political action committee, or PAC, whose stated mission is to make political contributions; (2) United Women’s Health Alliance PAC, the parent organization controlling the Initiative and which also solicits under other names, during its entire life has spent nearly 80% of all the contributions received in fundraising expense, something would-be donors might be very unhappy to learn, (3) no money–not even one dime–ever has ever spent in political contributions. Talk about cheap!

Plus (4), this was the fourth call I’ve gotten in less than a year from UWHA PAC causes. Two came on the very same day in June on behalf of something called U.S. Breast Cancer and Women’s Health Initiative PAC. You can read about those calls by clicking here and the earlier one by clicking here. So I am adding the Ovarian Cancer Awareness Initiative as a candidate for my list of America’s Stupidest Charities. The criteria is simple: exempt organizations that call me asking for money despite a previous critical post by me about the organization. UWHA PAC and the Breast Cancer and Women’s Health Initiatives PAC already are candidates. You can view the entire list elsewhere on this page.

I call these outfits a faux charity because they sound like charities in making their pitches but really aren’t. Rather, it’s all simply a variation on a theme. The founder/treasurer of UWHA PAC, Audrey Stephanie Mastroianni, has a rather iffy past on the charitable front, as I have detailed before and will briefly summarize again below. Continue reading →

From Las Vegas: World history is fatal flaw in Trump’s voting fraud claim

Posted on by September 21, 2021
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fatal flaw in Trump's voting fraud claim

Donald J. Trump (courtesy donaldjtrump.com)

Every single court that has weighed in–more than 50 at last count, including the Nevada Supreme Court covering where I live and the U.S. Supreme Court covering where we all live–has rejected claims on behalf of Donald J. Trump that he lost his 2020 presidential re-election bid due to massive voter fraud. The main reason for the goose eggs across the board–perhaps the most singularly unsuccessful legal effort in the entirety of U.S. history–is, of course, that no one produced probative evidence supporting his fraud charges. (Having Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye problems as a lead lawyer probably didn’t help, either.)

Yet according to a poll last month by Yahoo News/YouGov, two-thirds of all Republicans continue to believe that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” A CNN poll last week put the number even higher: 78%. The incumbent got 74 million votes, presumably mostly from Republicans. So that is a lot of doubters, even if not very many of them showed up at Saturday’s “Justice for J6” rally in Washington, D.C. From Trump’s perspective the Big Lie clearly has worked.

OK. Sitting in the comfort of the New to Las Vegas world headquarters, I am going to come at this from another angle. The hell with the lack of what lawyers like to call admissible evidence. I’m looking at history. World history. Going back into the 1980s.

Examining nearly 35 disputed-after-the-fact national elections on five continents, I can’t find a single credible example of widespread voter fraud affecting the outcome where the fraud was committed by the party out of power. Trump and his Republicans in 2020, of course, controlled the extensive executive machinery of the U.S. Federal Government. More to the point, I can find only one other good example of an incumbent national leader making a big election fraud allegation. That was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after Romano Prodi ousted him in 2006. And Berlusconi, who like Trump carries significant personal baggage, produced no proof of the claimed fraud.

There is a very logical explanation for this pattern. The party in power trying to hang on usually has the money, the courts, the prosecutors, the control of the election machinery, the police, the military, the guns, the teargas, the mace, the jails. The muscle. The party out of power generally has none of this. It’s really just that simple. (I am excluding from my universe any scrutiny of provincial, regional or local elections, where out-of-power parties not facing overwhelming incumbent resources sometimes have swindled their way to victory.)

Now Trump has loooooong experience as a promoter/propagandist–decades of making boastfully false claims about his business career and economic endeavors, which aside from a handful of properties have mainly faltered or even failed. I would submit it is this expertise he has developed peddling flawed products that has enabled him to sell his narrative of a stolen election to so many folks despite a lack of proof and, I would suggest, requiring that logic be suspended.

Trump, who has said he doesn’t read books, is clearly no student of history. He suggested Canada burned the White House in 1814 (it was England), Andrew Jackson was upset about the Civil War (he died 15 years earlier), and Frederick Douglass is still doing good work for blacks despite his death in 1895. On the world front, Trump said North Korea was once part of China (it never was) and that President Clinton negotiated a bad deal with current North Korea leader Kim Jung Un, who didn’t come to power until a decade after Clinton left office.

Much of the public does read books, but folks may not have a full understanding of recent global history. So let’s do some time-traveling around the world. Continue reading →

At the Las Vegas sentencing of the killer whose victim I found

Posted on by September 12, 2021
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killer whose victim I found

Jarrid Johnson in 2018 (courtesy Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept.)

I have been writing in this space about the case of Jarrid Johnson since his arrest for murdering a homeless man whose body I discovered while walking the dog near the New To Las Vegas world headquarters before sunrise on 2018’s shortest day. I’m certainly not condoning murder, and this one was especially senseless and gory. But the more I learn, the more I realize Johnson was in some ways a victim of circumstances not unlike the man he killed, Ralph Franzello. Indeed, the Johnson case has revealed a number of tough truths about Las Vegas.

My latest lessons learned came yesterday, when I attended Johnson’s 13-minute sentencing at the Regional Justice Center in downtown Las Vegas. In an earlier plea-bargain deal, Johnson, now 28, had pleaded guilty but mentally ill–a uniquely Nevada formulation–to second degree murder with a deadly weapon. Appearing on a Zoom-like feed from the county jail projected onto several large screens, some of his hair in what looked like a ponytail, he apologized to the Franzello family. “I wasn’t in my right mind,” Johnson said in a soft Southern accent as his father and a sibling watched stoically sitting in the 14th-floor courtroom near me.

Johnson then learned his fate from District Judge Michelle Leavitt: 10 years to life on the murder charge, and an additional eight-to-20-year “enhancement” for using a deadly weapon–the knife he grabbed from the much-older Franzello, 63, and used to gut his body and drink his blood. I think that basically works out to a minimum 18-year sentence, minus the nearly three years Johnson has been jailed since his arrest. He’ll likely be in his 40s when he gets out. Johnson is supposed to get continued mental health treatment while incarcerated, but good luck on that long term in minimal government Nevada.

In previous posts, I described how Johnson had been arrested a week before the Franzello killing on a separate charge of battery upon a relative–two years ago, I speculated an uncle–with a sword. To me, assaulting a relative with a sword is a clear sign of mental illness warranting further treatment and monitoring and definitely not a quick release. But instead, Johnson was ordered free dby another judge, Karen P. Bennett-Haron, without appearing in court and without bail. Maybe 36 hours later, after meandering around east Las Vegas, he had his fatal encounter in the middle of the night with Franzello. The victim, who became homeless after moving to Las Vegas a quarter-century ago with some disability income, had been living on the streets of Las Vegas for awhile, just trying to get by. Early on the morning of December 21, 2018–the first day of winter–he was simply catching some shut-eye behind a supermarket whose employees knew him as a customer.

The day before the sentencing, Johnson’s lawyer, deputy public defender Anna Clark, publicly filed a sentencing memo with the court laying out her view of the facts and attaching a psychiatrist’s report and letters from friends and family. In open court yesterday, prosecutors said they had no problem with the package, which Clark, who unlike the prosecutors appeared in person, summarized for a few minutes to the judge. So I’m going to take the stated facts and conclusions in the presentation as more or less true.

Boy, did I learn a lot! Continue reading →

COVID-19 pandemic still hits Las Vegas worse that U.S.–just like 1918 Spanish flu

Posted on by September 6, 2021
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pandemic still hits Las Vegas

Las Vegas newspaper headline, 1918

On this Labor Day, I know I’ll sound like a broken record. But Las Vegas as a whole in my view still isn’t taking the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously as it should. For me, the evidence–besides all the unmasked folks I see walking around and crowding one another–is in the data. It’s compelling–and yet nothing new.

The population of the United States is 331.5 million. By the latest count, 648,000 have died from COVID-19. That’s one death for every 512 residents.The population of Clark County, home to Las Vegas, is 2.35 million. According to official statistics, 5,265 have died of the illness. That’s one death for every 446 residents.

A lower ratio means things are worse. So the per-capita death rate in Las Vegas is 13% worse than the national rate. Back in March, when I wrote about this, the Las Vegas rate was 7% worse than the national rate. So the trend here is definitely moving in a bad direction.

Clark County has 0.7% of the national population. But there have been some days where the county (the official definition of the Las Vegas metro area) has accounted for nearly 8% of the total deaths nationally. That’s upwards of 10 times the national per-capita rate. Also not good.

Nationally, 53.6% of all people eligible to get a shot have been fully vaccinated. But the figure here in Clark County is only 45.1%. That’s 16% worse, in a place where, after a bumpy rollout, the free vaccine is widely available, often with no appointment needed and no wait. By my count, there are at least eight places to get vaccinated just within a two-mile radius of the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.

About the best I can say for the local performance during the current pandemic is that it’s the same old story. You see, Las Vegas also did significantly worse–actually much worse–that the country during the famous Spanish Flu epidemic starting more than a century ago in 1918. Continue reading →

Faux charity trolling Las Vegas for relief causes spent $0 on stated mission

Posted on by August 16, 2021
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Faux charityThe chipper voice on the phone recently at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters said she was soliciting money for Breast Cancer Relief Committee. I hadn’t heard about that organization. But that’s not surprising, since there are thousands of cancer causes out there.

The cold caller went through her spiel about helping ailing women. But she mentioned the way to help them would be by supporting political candidates. Hmmmmm.

“Is that a charity?” I asked, batting my baby-blue eyes at my phone.

“Yes,” the caller replied.

Now, that was a blatantly false answer. Charities are barred by law from making contributions to politicians. The full name of the cause calling me was Breast Cancer Relief Committee PAC, as in political action committee. The legitimate function of a PAC is to give received donations to support or oppose candidates for political office in line with the PAC’s stated conceit (conservative, liberal, pro-health care, pro-cop, you name it). Contributions by you to PACs are most definitely not tax-deductible. That might have been why the caller left out the PAC part in her initial pitch to me.

The only reason I don’t call the answer I was given to my question about charitable status a lie is that the caller wasn’t exactly a person, but rather a computer-generated voice controlled by a hidden but live operator who hits keys on a keyboard (using what is known  as “soundboard technology”). It’s possible the hidden but live operator who controls the answers simply hit the wrong key. Of course, the hidden but live operator should have known better.

By expressing some interest in making a pledge, I eventually got switched to a live person who wasn’t hidden. She told me that Breast Cancer Relief Committee is a name used by something called American Coalition for Crisis Relief PAC, in Windermere, Fla. As you will see later, that location is officially false, too.

Let’s cut to the chase. I started perusing records filed with the Federal Election Commission. In its entire reported history, from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2021, American Coalition received $3.46 million in donations, mostly from small donors. Guess how much was given to political candidates?

Zero. Not. One. Penny. You spent more on your last Starbucks.

So maybe, you ask, American Coalition is amassing a war chest for future campaigns (although 2020, a presidential election year with control of Congress at stake, was pretty big)? Nope. American Coalition, which also solicits under the name Veterans Crisis Relief Fund PAC, spent upwards of 98% of the money raised on fundraising expenses and overhead, including fees to a entity apparently controlled by its leaders. Cash in the bank on June 30 was just $54,528.24, which in this era of big-money politics isn’t going to support a lot of candidates going forward.

I call these PACs with outrageous financial efficiencies misleadingly soliciting in the name of seemingly worthy causes “faux charities.” They exist mainly to financially benefit their operators (it’s never disclosed how much they rake off, perhaps in kickbacks from telemarketers), not the public. There’s at least one blog post on the Internet calling American Coalition something a lot worse.

And as it turns out, American Coalition has some interesting ties–and shared m.o.’s, down to key words in the name–to an iffy charity I wrote about in this space exactly four years ago today.

Intrigued? Read on. Continue reading →

A warning to would-be Las Vegas visitors

Posted on by August 6, 2021
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Las Vegas visitorsSee update at end of story

With 0.7% of the national population, the Las Vegas area this morning reported 3.1% of all COVID-19 deaths nationally, or 24 out of 725. That’s more than four times the national per-capita rate.

This is an unfortunate trend that has persisted locally for months, and is undoubtedly linked to the relatively low vaccination rate in Nevada. Previous New To Las Vegas posts have suggested this is the result of a high local tolerance for risk.

The Las Vegas chunk of the national death rate has been as high as 8%. But it’s dropped not because the locals are doing a much better job of vaccinating but mainly because the death count elsewhere have risen.

Would-be visitors, take note. The risk in Las Vegas begins long before you hit the casinos on the Strip.

UPDATE ON AUGUST 6, 2021: This morning, the Las Vegas area, still with 0.7% of the national population, reported 4.5% of all COVID-19 deaths nationally, 26 of 594. That’s more than six times the national per-capita rate. Things are getting worse in Sin City.

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