Ollie North "charity" a scam

This story has been in the making for a few months now, but we haven't been able to follow it because it had so much number-crunching.

Since 2003, right-wing talking head Sean Hannity and Iran/Contra felon Oliver North have helped put together what they call Freedom Concerts - a series of concerts featuring country music superstars ostensibly to raise money for North's Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund. The Freedom Alliance is supposed to be a charity that includes this fund to provide college scholarships to children with a parent who was injured or killed in the war. In addition to the music, at least one of the concerts also featured speeches by Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, and other luminaries of Bushism.

It turns out however that the Freedom Alliance has received an 'F' rating from a nonpartisan watchdog group for its scaminous ways.

A ticket to one of the Freedom Concerts cost $38 to $78. But only $4 - less than 11% of the cost of even the cheapest tickets - went to the Freedom Alliance. And the Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund is itself only a tiny fraction of the Freedom Alliance. By my calculation, less than 6% of the Freedom Alliance's intake goes to the scholarship fund. Multiply 11% by 6% and you get 0.66% - which is about how much of the cost of a ticket goes towards the scholarships. (Actually less than that, because I rounded up to get the 11% and 6% figures.)

The Freedom Alliance spends almost 5 times as much on "printing and publications" as it does on the scholarship fund. It spends even more than that paying its own officials (I'm assuming that includes Ollie North) and consultants it hires.

Misleading folks into thinking most of the money would go to scholarships for military families when really it just lined North's own coffers led the American Institute of Philanthropy to give North's so-called charity an 'F' rating. A few other charities also fared poorly, but what the Freedom Alliance did was shockingly egregious.

Who would exploit the tragedy of the war by misleading the public like this just to award themselves a huge salary that's many times what most people in my city make? Ollie North is the man who sold rockets to Khomeini and lied to Congress about it, so do you really trust him anyway? Do you really trust Sean Hannity, after he tried blaming the Democrats for the Jack Abramoff scandal and has a persecution complex over stuff that happened to him 20 years ago? (He's as bad as the bullies I went to school with over dwelling on what happened 2 decades ago.)

(Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/14/7317/2982/238/421835;
http://www.newshounds.us/2007/12/13/freedom_alliance_the_favorite_charity_of_sean_hannity_and_oliver_north_receives_an_f_from_leading_watchdog_group.php)