Tag: nonprofit

REPORT: Gavin Newsom’s Wife Rakes in Hundreds of Thousands Per Year From Major Political Donors, Non-Profit

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom is a documentary filmmaker, but apparently makes a very good living through her association with a non-profit and major political donors.

She reportedly makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in this way.

It must be great to be a high-profile Democrat. There seem to be endless streams of income available for the taking and the media looks the other way to protect you.

The New York Post reports:

Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer, raking in as much as $300K a year from political mega-donors and nonprofit: Sources

The wife of California governor Gavin Newsom runs companies stacked with her husband’s former Democratic aides and confidants — while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from the state and lobbyists, according to public records.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the self-described “First Partner” of California, also received donations to her Representation Project nonprofit from companies that lobbied her husband, according to reports.

The Sacramento-based Representation Project, which describes itself as “the leading gender watchdog organization,” pays Siebel Newsom $150,000 a year for a 40-hour work week, according to tax filings.

Its largest independent contractor is Girls Club Entertainment LLC, a for-profit film company which Siebel Newsom also controls.

In 2024, the nonprofit paid Girls Club $150,000 for “writer/producer/director” services, according to that year’s federal filings…

“It is no surprise Gavin and Jennifer Newsom have leveraged their business and non-profit endeavors for personal and political gain,” said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, a non-partisan watchdog group.

What are the donors getting in return?

Keep reading

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick voids ‘illegal’ $7.4B payment to Biden ally-staffed nonprofit for semiconductor research

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick canceled an Biden administration agreement Monday to distribute billions of dollars for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees, according to a letter obtained by The Post.

The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act provided for $11 billion in semiconductor research and development funding to be given out by the Commerce Department’s National Semiconductor Technology Center.

“Rather than establishing these operations within the Department, however, Biden Administration officials spent significant time, effort, and resources creating an unaccountable, outside entity–Natcast–to administer taxpayer funds,” Lutnick wrote Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford.

Four days before Biden left office on Jan. 20, Lutnick noted, the Commerce Department agreed to set aside $7.4 billion in “advance payments” to Natcast after spending nearly two years setting it up and tapping administration officials, advisers and allies to fill out positions.

That arrangement both effectively removed the incoming Trump administration from being involved in the process and provided “virtually all” of Natcast’s funding — prompting incoming Departments of Justice and Commerce officials to take another look at the Sunnyvale, Calif., nonprofit.

Keep reading

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City

The act of naming is always a form of propaganda. When you name something, you are never perfectly describing what it is, but are instead influencing how it is perceived.

Marketers know this better than anyone. Prior to 1977, there was no such thing as the Chilean sea bass; the fish was called, instead, the Pata­gonian toothfish. The Chilean sea bass isn’t a type of bass at all, and most of them do not come from Chile. It was purely a marketing invention: an entrepreneur named Lee Lantz intuited that the American market might enjoy the taste of the Patagonian toothfish, but would never buy it under its given name. First, he chose to falsely call it a “bass” because Americans were comfortable with that type of fish. He then rejected the names “Pacific sea bass” and “South American sea bass,” on the grounds that they were too generic, and eventually settled on “Chilean sea bass” as a more exotic alternative.

The name of one of the most popular fish in the world therefore has nothing to do with what the fish really is. A type of cod that is primarily farmed near Antarctica became the Chilean sea bass as a Goldilocks branding compromise. The familiarity of the bass was married to the perceived exoticism of Chile so that an American entrepreneur could sell a fish nobody had ever heard of to high-end restaurants in the United States. This ploy worked so well that today nobody has ever heard of the Patagonian toothfish, while the Chilean sea bass has a secure and inalienable position on restaurant menus from sea to shining sea.

So its name is propaganda, but nobody cares. A lie that makes money will always be preferable to a truth that does not. Once you realize that every name is propaganda, it becomes readily apparent how much misconduct, greed, and corruption can be concealed behind an innocuously disingenuous name, especially a name that successfully evokes positive emotions in the general public.

Consider the word “nonprofit.” Whoever came up with the idea of calling these organizations “nonprofits” was a marketing genius on the level of Steve Jobs. When someone hears the word nonprofit, they assume that such an organization is working for the public good; that it serves the homeless, protects the weak, exists for the benefit and the betterment of society at large. Hearing that something is a “nonprofit” immediately gives a sense that the organization is trustworthy and the people running it are driven by a charitable agenda. It’s a word that shuts down the critical faculties and grants an instantaneous moral stature to any organization to which it is applied. Consequently, non­profits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation.

Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. In some cities, upwards of a billion dollars of public funds are paid to nonprofit organizations every year with glaringly insufficient safeguards to ensure that the money is used in a manner likely to serve the public interest.

Keep reading