It really wasn’t a long telephone call. “Jack Miller” was on the line recently to the New To Las Vegas world headquarters seeking a donation for National Coalition for Disabled Veterans PAC. The stated mission of this organization with a Chicago business address, I was told, was to improve the quality of life for disabled and hospitalized veterans by electing sympathetic politicians to fight for funding.
Okay, I said. How much money was spent last year by NCDV-PAC for this mission?
“I can’t hear you,” “Miller” said. I politely repeated the question.
“I’ll add you to the do-not-call list,” “Miller said. “Goodbye.” Click.
If “Miller” and his organization were on the up-and-up, that shouldn’t have been a hard question to answer. But “Miller” wasn’t a real person (hence my use of quote marks), but rather a computer-generated voice using soundboard technology. A human operator monitoring multiple conversations at a time hits a keyboard to unleash pre-recorded answers to expected questions, easily handling multiple pitches simultaneously and hundreds of asks a shift.
Nor, as I discovered after looking at official public-but-hard-to-find filings, was NCDV-PAC anything close to a worthwhile entity. In its three-and-a-half-year of existence, NCDV-PAC has raised millions of dollars in contributions across the country. Here, according to its own filed-under-penalty-of-perjury reports, is exactly how much of that was spent for the claimed cause during important election cycles:
Zero.
NCDV-PAC is what I call a faux charity. That’s a political action committee that presents as a charity doing noble things, but in reality spends all the money raised in fundraising expense, overhead and undisclosed profits paid to its hidden organizers. There are scores and scores of faux charities out there, more than a few of which I have outed in this space. (Simply type “faux” in the nearby search box to see my body of work here.) Why the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission, the two federal agencies with the most jurisdiction over PACs, allow this to happen is beyond me.
Continue reading →
