Where the money goes

As was posted on the EoHarm Yahoo! Group by someone, possibly from Oregon, calling himself "autisminsider," Autism Speaks filed a form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service to show what money they brought in and where the millions they spent went, that way they can claim a non-profit status and not pay taxes in the same way an individual with this kind of wherewithall would.

Page 18 shows that they lost $84,749 on the May 8th fund-loser "New Decade for Autism" which was the big expensive party they threw where they showed off the short version of the dreadful, "Autism Every Day" video. This photo is from that big ol' fancy party that turned out not to raise a penny at all, at least not that night. That's Tony Bennett, the guy with the hair next to Suzanne Wright.

Page 48 has a statement that sounds like Bob Wright is paying $206,000 in rent per year to another entity he is the chairman of. That's interesting.

Page 10 shows that they paid $57,317 to Platinum Jet for the transportation for entertainers! If they'd thought about it they probably could have got John Travolta to use one of his private jets to go fetch the "entertainers," since Travolta has an autistic son, folks say. Someone would still have to have paid for all that air polluting jet fuel that was burned in transporting those entertainers, but that would still probably have been less than $57,317.
For some reason gramma Wright's head always looks bigger than everyone else's. That's not the kind of thing one would point to normally except for the putative link between head size and autism, and that autism-running-in-families thing.


Over at Autism Society of America, it is said that they are panicking because of all the funds that are going to Autism Speaks and are not going to ASA.

So sad, really.

So ASA is working hard, perhaps scrambling is a better word, to reposition itself in the market. Look out ASA, Autism Speaks is pretty efficient at putting smaller orgs out of business or swallowing them whole. It looks like one of ASA's new strategies is to brand themselves as the pro-quackery organization. They just added the head of DAN!/ARI, Stephen Edelson (that's the one in Oregon, not the one who coulda killed some autistic kids by trying to cook the toxins out of them in a sauna, among other horrible things) and a they added a PhD ABA therapist who works with Andrew Wakefield to their board, it's not like it wasn't bad before with a mercury-vaccine-injury lawyer on their board in the person of Jeff Sell, esq. Anyway, now ASA will be more attractive to the mercury/biomed parents. As it is, Autism Speaks has a member of the CDC on it's scientific advisory board, even though AS also has Sallie Bernard on a board, and she's about as pro-quackery as they come, she's not as obviously pro-quack as Edelson is.

You can be sure that Autism Diva doesn't have the dough to hire a private jet or even to hire a stretch volkswagon and she doesn't know any celebrities. Though she has met the president of ASA, Lee Grossman. Autism Diva has positioned her tiny little blog against the insanity of the faux "autism epidemic" and against quackery because it wastes parents' money and energy, and puts some children at risk for dangerous experimentation. It's too bad that the big autism organizaitons refuse to do the same.



Autism Diva
pecuniae obediunt omnia