| This is the final Blast From the Past for this election, as election day is tomorrow. As noted in the previous Blast from the Past article, we're going to take a look at the man Republicans and their operatives running ads in LA-06 - Lane Grigsby, Club for Growth, Freedoms Watch, and the NRCC - want to elect: Louis "Woody" Jenkins. The articles are no longer online, but are from The Times-Picayune's coverage of the 1996 Senate race. I have saved the articles in .pdf format, and will include a link to them in each post.
The second article is from October 26, 1996 and is entitled JENKINS' CHARITY VIOLATES LAWS, and was written by John McQuaid of the Times-Pic's Washington Bureau.
Woody Jenkins and his wife, Diane, founded a charity in 1984, called Friends of the Americas, as a "non-political" organization to establish "people-to-people programs between the people of the United States and the people of Latin America" and to provide "humanitarian assistance to the people of Latin America suffering from poverty, natural disasters, or war." The website I got all the quotes from is RightWeb Online, which seems to have a javascript problem because all you see is a the html code for the website. But Woody is quoted as saying that he set up the non-profit to:
"to aid the victims of communist aggression"and FOA's relief efforts in Central America are "a strategic lever to help the forces of democracy in the region."
That's much more likely, as the FOA's most extensive operations are found in Honduras along the Nicaraguan border, where the Sandanistas, a Communist front, fought a war of liberation against the oligarchs ruling Nicaragua throughout the 1980's and 1990's. There are some who speculate that FOA had some role in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980's on the basis of the fact that they were investigated by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in his investigation into the Iran Contra scandals prior to Congress' pardoning of the major players in the scandal - Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Albert Hakim.
But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that Louis "Woody" Jenkins seemed to think that he was above the law back in the day, as at least 42 states have laws stating that charities raising money in their states must register with them. And as Mr. Jenkins acknowledged to the Times Picayune back in 1996: He said that the group hasn't registered with state charity bureaus, as more than 40 states require, because he believes state charity laws have no jurisdiction over out-of-state groups, an argument charity experts and state officials reject.
The laws are designed to protect residents from fraudulent and misleading appeals. The State of Louisiana does not have such a requirement unless the group uses a professional fund-raiser.
And yet, Woody states that: "It's the states, not [my] organization, that is wrong."
But in another piece of investigative journalism you rarely see from the BSM anymore, Mr. McQuaid found another charity that was roughly the same size of Jenkins' FOA, the Cancer Research Foundation of America, and a Susie Wellman, then the Director of Programs for the Cancer Research Foundation of America states:
"We make absolutely certain we are registered in every state where we send direct mail."
Woody then tried to justify the lack of registration with the state where FOA send direct mail solicitations by saying:
"The basic issue for Friends is, just because it has 10 people in the state who support it, it would be burdensome to put it through that process."
Back to Ms. Wellman:
Wellman said that one of [her] group's 10 staff members is in charge of registering each year. "I am familiar with how time consuming it can be to fill out those forms. For a small organization, we do what we have to and we certainly want to obey the laws in these states."
As always, Woody's slogan should be:
Woody Jenkins: It's ALL about me. |
