Tools for Looking at 990s

Everyone thinks Guidstar is the end all be all for looking up non-profits, but there are more options out there and not all of them retrieve the same data. So far I've found:

GuideStar (only 3 990s for free and they are always hounding you to become a member).
Foundation Center's 990 Finder (sometime gives different hits than GuideStar, has an ultra-handy zipcode search)
Economic Research Institute (several more archived 990s, don't seem after your money, also touts nonprofit salary research)


Here's a handy document that tells you how to read a 990.

Crack Addict Bankers Put Their Finger in the Dam

From the Website of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America

NACA announces ONE BILLION dollars in assistance for subprime lending victims. While the predators are blaming the borrowers , NACA is the first to provide a solution to save peoples home. Click on the enclosed Press Release for more information on this "first of its kind" announcement.

The deal is Bank of America and CitiGroup will advance money already promised to NACA who would in turn use it to refinance subprime mortgages (2 million of which are set to click up several points this year). So for those who spent money they didn't have to buy houses they couldn't afford: whew!

...or maybe not.

NACA says a billion dollars can only bailout 7200 families which leaves more than 900,000 shaky loans still out there. Eyes are now looking toward a federal bailout (S&Lwha). But who needs bailed out isn't exactly clear.

Nonprofits say working families were taken advantage of by predatory lending so it's them we need to help. Local governments are cringing over the idea of a run on housing and plummeting property taxes. And everyone with a stock portfolio is anxious to prop the market up.

Oh wait, I almost forgot about the kind folks who lent the money in the first place (from WaPo):

"If we foreclose, we lose 50 cents on the dollar generally, and the cost to restructure the debt is typically a heck of a lot lower than that," Litton said. "That's our motivation."

Perhaps lenders should have checked for more than a pulse before they dolled out the credit. When did the mortgage industry start resembling crack addicts?

Gawkers Abuse Young Silver Spoon

Nothing beats Gawker when it comes to revealing the collective insecurities of our nation's media clinger-ons.

Like a scene from the high school cafeteria, Gawker hires irreverent-irreverents to trash talk and dictate what's hip and cool. Then every bitter editorial assistant in NYC joins together to come up with the most unique way to repeat what was just said. Here's a particularly vivid example of this where the folks who write your TV Guide listings joined together to humiliate a college student the New York Times selected to be one of its bloggers.

So, yes, grown adults took time away from fetching their boss's latte in order to collectively stick their tongues at a college kid just getting started in life.

...not that'll she'll have a hard time of it, what with blogging for NYT at the tender age of 22.

Indians Could Get Better Healthcare in Prison

Buried in a survey released last month by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was the news that--more than any other racial group--American Indians took the biggest loss in the number of workers offered health insurance by employers. 86,000 Indians lost health coveragebetween '97 and '05 . That 5% drop is twice the rate that whites lost coverage, more than blacks (3.3%) and certainly more than Asians (.5%).

The U.S. has signed hundreds of treaties with various Indian nations promising to provide access to healthcare in exchange for their land. However, according to the 2004 report entitle "Broken Promises" by congress's U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

[the] nation’s lengthy history of failing to keep its promises to Native Americans includes the failure of Congress to provide the resources necessary to create and maintain an effective health care system for Native Americans.

Specifics are much worse:

Life expectancy for Indians is 5 years less than the rest of the U.S. population; suicide for Indians and Alaska Natives is 2 1/2 times higher than the national average (and ranked 3rd in the world); annual healthcare expenditures for Indians are less than half what America spends for federal prisoners' healthcare, 50% per capita what we spend on an average American, 33% what we spend on war veterans, and 7 times less than what we spend in Iraq in one day.

...oh yeah, and we took their land.

My Bank the Crack Addict... how to get paid for not paying

Remember the days when the bank would bulldoze your house if you didn't pay your mortgage. Gone, gone, gone. Now you can get paid $100 just for falling behind in your payments:

The Mod Squad is planning a six-city tour; it hopes to attract struggling homeowners to information and counseling sessions with offers of $100 gift cards to Home Depot Inc. The number is (877) 362-6631.

Not only that, but mortgage companies are adjusting adjustable rate mortgages with the hope that they won't default and continue sending in those monthly checks. In essence, lenders are in the position of having to do anything to keep people spending or else they and everyone else starts losing money. Perhaps the system has become so efficient that that makes sense.

But it makes you wonder if the American economy has become so addicted to consumption that banks are willing to forgive missed payments just to keep feeding the addiction.