More accurately, the SPLC is, first and foremost, a fund-raising group -- that traffics in hate.
Morris Dees sells hate by the carload.
Morris Dees: King of the Hate Business
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/05/15/king-of-the-hate-business/
What is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center doing now? He’s saying that the election of a black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! Send money!
Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make money selling the notion there’s been a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used the election of a black president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace, ripely endowed with millions to battle the legions of the cross.
Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees’ solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,” with $120 million in assets.
As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.
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http://www.wnd.com/2004/01/22643/
A recently declassified FBI memo obtained by an Oklahoma newspaper contains several revelations concerning the Oklahoma City bombing investigation that could give attorneys for co-conspirator Terry Nichols ammunition to argue in his next trial in March that there were more than just two people involved in the crime.
The memo, transmitted electronically, was sent to the OKBOMB investigation task force and a select group of FBI offices around the nation eight months after the devastating 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, reports the McCurtain Daily Gazette.
One of the revelations was the involvement of civil-rights attorney Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in an informant operation. According to the memo, the SPLC was involved in monitoring subjects for the FBI believed to be linked to now-executed bomber Timothy McVeigh, the neo-Nazi compound at Elohim City and the mysterious German national Andreas Carl Strassmeir.
The Daily Gazette says the memo, dated Jan. 4, 1996, was heavily redacted. It mentions individuals the FBI believed were involved in two cases – OKBOMB, the probe of the OKC bombing, and BOMBROB, which involved a wide-ranging search for a group of neo-Nazi bank robbers in the mid-1990s.
Six people eventually were arrested in connecting with the BOMBROB investigation, the paper reported, all of whom had ties to Elohim City
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Dees is SCUM, ditto the SPLC racket he cooked up.