OpEdNews - Article: Tax Records Show Hannity Freedom Concerts Mostly Fund White Collar Write-Offs

OpEdNews - Article: Tax Records Show Hannity Freedom Concerts Mostly Fund White Collar Write-Offs

For OpEdNews: Gustav Wynn - Writer

Top-rated talk host Sean Hannity is incessant in plugging his Freedom Concert tours on the radio, advertised as fundraisers for a great cause: college tuition money earmarked for the children of slain US troops. His disclaimers always included the usual mumbo-jumbo if you listen closely, 100% of the profits would be going to the families of our heros.

But where creative accounting can make almost anything look like an "expense", many have wondered what kind of money is going to the families and how much is being used for all the paper-pushing, marketing, consulting or direct mail jobs, bureaucratic overhead, patronage contracts or worse.

A nasty donnybrook recently begun by ultra-right wing blogger Debbie Schlussel asked some of these questions, accusing Hannity and the Freedom Alliance of exploiting public trust. Schlussel described lavish travel expenses and favored treatment for Hannity's pals, interspersed with descriptions of paltrey donations given to soldiers with grotesque injuries.

But the official tax returns filed by the Freedom Alliance did indeed show that the foundation's overhead was far greater than it's charitable payouts for the last three years. Just 7-12% of funds were directed towards "grants and allocations" meaning they give far less percentage-wise than other scholarship funds such as the United Negro College Fund's average rate of approximately 50%.

Because the Freedom Alliance writes off expenses of up to ten million dollars per year before funds are allocated for these families, it seems the operation is far more efficient at creating white-collar jobs for right-wing foundation staffers and third party consultants, air travel, "caging services" or mailing list providers than it is at raising money for military families....