The Money Laundry

We know that Tom “Giant Flying Cockroach” DeLay is a seriously crooked human being in all aspects of his life, so the following bit from the New York Times is no surprse:

Like other charities, the DeLay Foundation, which operates from a post office box near Mr. DeLay's house in Sugar Land, Tex., is not required under federal laws to release a donors' list. Nor does it have to account in detail for how it spends millions of dollars in donations on behalf of abused and neglected children.

But forget that this is DeLay’s charity. Does anything strike you as, well, fundamentally corrupt about this business?

This is the definition of a money-laundering scheme. If a “charity” need not disclose its revenue sources, nor how it specifically disperses those funds, wouldn’t you think that it would be mighty simple to concoct all sorts of ways to shovel dough into your own pockets and those of cronies and bootlickers alike through phony events meant to raise money or awareness of the charity or its “cause.”

This stinks to high heaven, and yet it is another of these perfectly legal systems put in place by people in power who still aren’t satisfied with all the other means through which they fleece working people.

Does that mean that all of these charities are bogus fronts from graft? Not at all. But if that’s the case, why such loose rules? I would hope that any legitimate charity would have no problem opening its books so that donors as well as the IRS could rest assured that the money was being used in the best possible manner for the targeted group.

Of course, a key to why this is permitted under our federal laws may be the fact that the Cockroach is hardly the only legislator who has taken advantage of this mechanism. Read the article for yourself, and by the way, note how the “paper of record” manages to go as light on any investigative details as it can. When the Cockroach finally gets the bootheel crunch, and all the pus of his existence oozes out onto the linoleum, it’s going to be quite interesting to see how many other insect-like lawmakers start scrambling for cover and shedding their charitable skins.