Oh, boy. What the fuck kind of redneck reality TV show is going on with all of this? What has happened to the NRA?

I don't think this is the time to be withdrawing support for the NRA, and I say that as not a particular fan of the organization.

I think its time to double down support for the NRA but to make it perfectly clear that LaPierre has to go

everyone needs to write the NRA and let them know that we're fed up with LaPierre and things need to change

I got an NRA solicitation in the mail today and when I get home I will be sending them a tersely worded letter that they won't see another dime from me until he's gone and that I am taking every opportunity to make sure I tell all of my acquaintances that are NRA members the same thing.

There is strength in numbers and Wayne is just one person.

quote:

Originally posted by clipper1:
So, just so we are clear, the NRA’s top outside lawyer is the son-in-law and brother-in-law of the top executives of the company the NRA is fighting and the guy is also a huge donor to anti-gun Democrats. What the hell is going on? This just sounds so incestuously corrupt.

Aside from the dry cleaning and expensive suits, are we sure that Wayne is the real bad guy in all of this?

If the top outside lawyer is in bed with the Dems, and with family ties to Ackerman, who's screwing the NRA to the tune of $40M a year, that's a huge hole in the NRA's annual $330M budget.

And it's not effective. Seems like some NRA top brass are questioning this. I'd rather spend this fund for national elections.

So did Col North and Chris Cox team up with Ackerman to take over the NRA or at least keep this $40M gravy train going?

Twelve per cent of the annual budget for the Ackerman outfit? Really? There's something wrong here.

Apparently several months ago, Tom Selleck resigned from the NRA Board of Directors. Does anyone have any information on why this happened? I am a Life Benefactor Member and will continue to be one but this mess needs to be cleaned up now!

quote:

Originally posted by Gene Hillman:
Apparently several months ago, Tom Selleck resigned from the NRA Board of Directors. Does anyone have any information on why this Happened? I am a Life Benefactor Member and will continue to be one but this mess needs to be cleaned up now!

Perhaps he needed to devote more time to his reverse mortgage ads.

NPR has been having a field day with this.

quote:

So did Col North and Chris Cox team up with Ackerman to take over the NRA or at least keep this $40M gravy train going?

We need to make judgments about whom we trust in things like this. I don't particularly trust North, and I don't know much about Cox. But I trust Allen West. He is an NRA board member and he called for LaPierre to step down:

“I do not support Wayne LaPierre continuing as the EVP/CEO of the NRA,” he added.

“There is a cabal of cronyism operating within the NRA and that exists within the Board of Directors. It must cease, and I do not care if I draw their angst.”


https://dailycaller.com/2019/0...-nra-wayne-lapierre/

"Cabal of cronyism," with LaPierre at the top, explains the corruption at NRA for me.

I've been skeptical bout the NRA TV and other marketing efforts. They really seem like preaching to the choir. Nothing more than an effort to fire up the membership and get them to donate more money.

quote:

"Cabal of cronyism," with LaPierre at the top, explains the corruption at NRA for me.

Yep. But I'm not so sure about North and Cox either. They seem to have been a part of the "Cabal of cronyism", at least up until it started to be exposed.

Good analysis of what should happen to correct.
Situation is very saddening but I hope and pray for the best.

quote:

Originally posted by Mars_Attacks:
NPR has been having a field day with this.

It’s the best story they’ve run across this year. They love it.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
Twelve per cent of the annual budget for the Ackerman outfit? Really? There's something wrong here.

Still More On NRA Troubles

This anonymous piece from a longtime lawyer and NRA watcher:

It’s been an open secret for more than 20 years (since at least the 1990s) that an outside public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen Inc. (around NRA headquarters, commonly called “Ack-Mac”) enjoyed a favored and protected, if not inviolate, relationship with NRA. The owners of Ack-Mac were close friends and associates of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. He handed them major roles formulating, directing and performing many NRA operations for which Ack-Mac and its associated companies bill NRA millions of dollars annually — in 2017 alone, over $40 million. To ensure their position by enhancing his, Ack-Mac created a persona for LaPierre as NRA’s public face; his strident, increasingly right-wing rhetoric espoused in NRA’s name was shaped and scripted by Ack-Mac. In turn he fended off sporadic calls to reduce Ack-Mac’s penetration of NRA. LaPierre and Ack-Mac became practically indistinguishable.

This special relationship and its financial intertwining were largely opaque, fully appreciated only within inner circles of the 76-member Board of Directors. Though payments to Ack-Mac accounted for a large chunk of NRA’s budget until recently Ack-Mac was unmentioned in annual reports or minutes of the Board’s meetings, it was as if Ack-Mac didn’t exist. The full extent of Ack-Mac’s influence, participation, and responsibility for NRA’s high-level management decisions remains, to this day, obscure.

I knew Ack-Mac had been working for the NRA for quite a while, but I didn’t realize for how long, and how mention of Ack-Mac had been kept out of annual reports.

As Executive VP, LaPierre’s annual salary is $1.4 million. It’s hard to identify the value a non-profit association receives for that kind of money. The President of the United States is paid less than one-third of that; the Secretary of Defense gets only $210,700, and the base salary of a U.S. Senator is $172,000.

Also still on the NRA’s payroll is Joshua Powell, recently removed as director of General Operations (drawing nearly $800K) after being exposed in national media as a serial deadbeat. The most cursory vetting before he was hired would have disclosed his trail of failed businesses and bad debts. The architect of the crashed Carry Guard program and the spark that lit the legal fuse with New York sate, Powell is now a “senior strategist” and still LaPierre’s “chief of staff.”

More information gleaned from the NRA’s IRS Form 990:

This 100-page document, released by NRA only last November, was unusual; it contains unprecedented disclosures of where the money categorized as expenditures for “fund-raising” and “public relations” actually went. For example, it was revealed for the first time the Mercury Group, an Ack-Mac subsidiary run by LaPierre’s closest confidant, Tony Makris, received $5.8 million from NRA in that year; another Makris-run company, Under Wild Skies, got $2.6 million. Meanwhile, NRA has nearly exhausted its $25 million credit line (secured by a mortgage on its headquarters building), liquidated $2 million from an investment fund, borrowed close to $4 million from its officers’ life insurance policy and extracted about $5 million in office rent and overhead from the NRA Foundation.

This, in the same year that NRA’s 10 highest-paid executives received compensation aggregating over $8 million.

Snip.

If indeed, as [current NRA President a LaPierre backer Carolyn Meadows] claims, “the entire board is fully aware of these issues,” the issue of managerial dereliction takes on a new dimension. To claim that these controversial contracts, transactions, and expenses were “reviewed, vetted and approved” by the board is to ratify and accept liability for them.

It begs the next question: Is the Board doing anything to stop the financial hemorrhage? Does it even have a coherent plan? So far the membership has heard nothing but bland reassurances suggesting that “everything is on track”, coupled with whining about leaks to the press.

Can directors with a fiduciary duty to a non-profit membership association justify sports-star salaries, uncontrolled and unaccountable vendors and $100,000-a-day lawyers? The membership deserves credible explanations and plain answers. If these are not forthcoming, who could blame it for throwing out the entire board and starting over?

The author is particularly critical of William Brewer III’s legal briefs. “In over 50 years as a practicing attorney, I have never encountered a lawyer, or even an entire firm, whose services were worth $1.8 million in a single month — much less for ten consecutive months.”

Finally, there’s the revelation that Woody Phillips, the NRA’s just-retired Treasurer for 26 years, broadened the now-all-too-familiar profile of NRA’s salaried executives. The prior norm seemed to be enrichment through extraordinary salaries, conflicts of interest, double-dipping, sweetheart deals, and extravagant retirement schemes. Woody has added the word “embezzlement.” According to a June 19 article on The New Yorker website, his former employer asserts that before Woody came to NRA, he was caught stealing more than a million dollars by generating and paying fake invoices. Unless this story is a complete fabrication, the evidence seems incontrovertible: when he was confronted, the story discloses, Woody immediately returned $500,000 of it and started paying interest on the balance. This comes on the heels of separate reports of questionable payments made by NRA to Woody’s “significant other.” Was his earlier modus operandi revived with a slight twist?

The author ends, as I did, with a call for a forensic audit.

The more we find out about how the NRA has been run, the worse it seems. The crisis started out looking like a case of lax management, but the deeper you dig the more it looks like a case of systematic looting. The more I read about the NRA, the more convinced I am that the current leadership has to go.

https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=41005

F*ck us. So where did Col North and Chris Cox fit into all of this?

Not to gloss over injustices (perceived or real) to specific individuals, but at this point it may be better if we simply focus on solving the core problem by pushing for an audit and accountability by those still with the organization. If all that happens, it'll be a lot easier to know where North and Cox fit into anything. If we don't, if we start by focusing on who's the bad guy, the whole mess will quickly devolve into a "he said, she said" kinda mess and the problem will become impenetrable.

sounds like we probably wanted to retain North and Chris Cox, and get rid of LaPierre and his cabal

the NRA unloaded the wrong group of people

I wonder if criminal charges could be laid for any number of charges...

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:
Not to gloss over injustices (perceived or real) to specific individuals, but at this point it may be better if we simply focus on solving the core problem by pushing for an audit and accountability by those still with the organization. If all that happens, it'll be a lot easier to know where North and Cox fit into anything. If we don't, if we start by focusing on who's the bad guy, the whole mess will quickly devolve into a "he said, she said" kinda mess and the problem will become impenetrable.

If it doesn't happen, the NRA will lose a lot of members who are disgusted at all the shenanigans that are now brought to light. And, it will be very hard to recruit new members. I'm very disgusted at all this. Makes one wonder if the NRA's mission is nothing but an excuse for these assholes to stay in control just to enrich themselves. If the NRA were to completely collapse tomorrow, these crooks will still be laughing all the way to the bank. They will likely morph into the prosperity preachers scamming people again.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131: Makes one wonder if the NRA's mission is nothing but an excuse for these assholes to stay in control just to enrich themselves.

They've done a pretty good job of convincing us (me included) that they were the ONLY thing standing between us and the "jack booted thugs" when in reality they were jacking themselves off with our money. Where would we be without them? Maybe exactly where we are now.

Thinking back on the televangelist scandals of the 80s, as with NRA there was lots of money on luxury travel, villas, expensive clothing-- and babes, plenty of babes. My guess is that is the next shoe to drop with Wayne and others. Maybe affairs, maybe hookers, maybe a combination, but at some point this will also be about pussy.

quote:

maybe hookers,

At that level they are called "Lobbyists"....as far as the accounting goes.