Augusta accepts first women members...

[Mark Chaplin]

Mr Schmidt - name five examples where Mr Mucci has changed the argument when it wasn't going his way 

[Carl Johnson]

Carl Johnson,

I recall, that when the club was first being formed, that the Bon Air-Vanderbilt Company acting for the club,
purchased the option to buy about 365 acres for the club.

Subsequently, a company called the "Fruitland Manor Corporation" was formed to buy the property.

At the same time, a seperate corporation was formed to own the golf club.
Bobby Jones's father was the first stockholder in that corporation.

The idea was that the Fruitland Manor Corporation would initially lease acreage to the golf club and that the club would eventually buy the land from Fruitland.

Most accountants and attorneys will tell you that you can't co-mingle funds from seperate entities.
Ditto cavalier self dealing.

Pat, your answer does not really address the question of whether ANGC is a separate, stand-alone non-profit entity from Augusta National, Inc., which on the record, appears to be the club.  I don't want to get into a who-knows-more argument, but effective January 1 of this year I retired as lawyer after 43 years of practice, most of it dealing exclusively with complex nonprofit organization issues.  So, although I can no longer say I am a lawyer, I can claim to be a layman with a little knowledge of the law.

A sidebar, which may or may not be relevant here:  Interestingly, as an academic question, a for-profit may control a non-profit.  The simple way you do it is to organize a membership non-profit, and then make the for-profit the sole member of the non-profit.  It happens.  The result is in effect a parent-subsidiary relationship.  However, that does not mean that the for-profit can subvert the non-profit and use it in any way, or cause it to do anything, not permitted of the non-profit under the non-profit and tax-exempt organization rules.  (Note: although there are techincal differences between tax-expempt organizations and non-profits, they usually go hand in hand, and when I use the term non-profit here I mean an income-tax-exempt non-profit.)  These sorts of layered arrangements, which may also include government entities (distinctly different from both for-profits and private sector non-profits), give the IRS, U.S. Labor Department, and other regulators lots of difficult problems to deal with.  I will say no more.

Here's my bet - which is all it is . . . I do not know this to be a fact.  There is one entity, "Augusta National, Inc." which is a for-profit corporation that runs both the Masters and Augusta National Golf Club simply as business divisions, not separate legal entities.  I'd be curious to know whether this picture is correct.  (As I mentioned in my first post above, if the club is a separate non-profit, where is it's Form 990?  These things are all available to the public from the IRS and picked up on the web.  For example, here's a link to the most recent 990 available for Myers Park Country Club, a typical golf and country club, in my hometown (and of which I am not a member): http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/560/560333840/560333840_201012_990O.pdf ).

It would be interesting to see if Augusta National, Inc.'s articles of incorporation (charter) shed any light, but as best I can tell the Ga. Sec. of State's office does not put charters on-line.  If you look up "Augusta National" on the Sec. of State's website the only thing you get other than ANI's annual registration statement is reference to a name reservation for "Augusta National's Realty L.L.C." filed in 2006, and since expired.  So, I have placed an order with the Sec. of State for copies of all of ANI's filed documents.  I'm promised to get them within 30 days.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Pat: you are a master at putting words in other people's mouths. Nobody is taking about Co-mingling funds, operating without any lines of demarcation or lines of distinction.

Yes you were, you stated that You could tap profits from the Masters and simply transfer it to the club for the purpose of subsidizing non dues paying members.  Please reread your post # 89  

 If you need to alter what I'm saying to refute it, then you haven't refuted it at all.  And yes, I'm perfectly aware of how a holding company operates (at last count, I believe the holding company I work for has something like 140 or so controlled for-profit subsidiaries (or at least hopefully so...  ).

So now you are talking about the opposite -  a for-profit controlling a not-for-profit?  That's what you're saying?  

Not necessarily.
The for profit could also provide management services for the non-profit

Well, first off, I agree with you - there are rules against that when it comes to the topic at hand - distributing money up to control persons. But secondly and more importantly, that's not what you said initially and what I responded to!  You've just changed your fundamental premise around by 180 degrees - because what you initially said or at least implied was that because ANGC (the not-for-profit) and The Masters (the for-profit) were separate entities, ANGC (the control entity, or at least what what would normally be the control entity) could not take profits from The Masters to subsidize memberships for the less well to do. That's where this whole thing started, remember...but now you're saying exactly the opposite, and doing so by making up factual scenarios that don't apply, both with respect to prohibited acts that nobody is talking about and by flipping the control around.


No, what I said was that you can't have cavalier dealings between a non-profit and a for-profit entities as you suggested in post # 89

[Jud_T]

As I've said before, the act of pressuring someone into bending to your will (as opposed to their own) is about as disgusting a rebuke of the notion of freedom and liberty that I can think of. It is an insult to every person of good and free will  

Not quite right Dave. There would be fewer freedoms and liberties today if pressure wasn't applied where it was needed, but the real insult to 'persons of good and free will' is that they were denied those freedoms and liberties in the first place.

 

Jim:  How are there more liberties if a guy who owns a store and doesn't want to sell his stuff to, say, black or indian people, is forced to sell his stuff to one of them? Or if an employer has to hire a minority instead of the white male he thinks is best for the job? In each case, one guy lost a liberty; another gained one.  If you add 'em all up, since minorities are (at least for the time being) minorities in number, there is no way mathematically that taking a freedom away from a majority can be offset by the creation of a freedom for a minority.  Jim, without question, you have a tenable qualitative argument, but you certainly don't have the quantitative argument....

Actually I believe women are the majority.

[Charlie_Bell]

Dave, I admire the precision of your argument but not your logic.  If a store owner opts not to sell to "one" member of a minority, by your accounting the result is a zero-sum game of liberty:  one person gains liberty while one person loses it.  Typically, though, I would imagine one bigoted store owner might refuse to sell to scores of customers, leading to a clear imbalance -- by your calculus.

In reality I suspect bigoted merchants are few;  I don't picture many shopkeepers turning down potential sales.  Landlords, however, are a different breed...

Numbers aside, I side with Jim on this one philosophically.  Just as your right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, so too should freedom of association end where it systematically and categorically denies others the freedom to join. 

[Tim_Cronin]

Pat, Carl, Dave,
   I agree completely with posts 108 and 109. It's the most logical way of operation, and Clifford Roberts was nothing if not logical.
   And Pat, all I know is I see "Augusta National, Inc.," on printed materials and cannot unearth a 990 for Augusta National, Bon Air, Fruitlands, or Berckman's (to pull that name out of the hat). It's a for-profit club, and doing quite nicely, from all appearances. I'm sure the shirts I bought in April put them in the black!

[George Pazin]

Numbers aside, I side with Jim on this one philosophically.  Just as your right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, so too should freedom of association end where it systematically and categorically denies others the freedom to join. 

? Your freedom of association is completely independent of others' "right" to join. All natural rights of man do not require any infringement of others' rights.

Freedom must protect the right to be wrong, or it's no longer freedom. It's sad we've lost sight of that, though not surprising.

[Garland Bayley]

http://www.secretinthedirt.com/index.php/the-vault/cartoon-vault/cartoon-library/summer-2012/cartooncorner082412condi-darlaaugustamembers-1097#joomimg

[Jim_Kennedy]

As I've said before, the act of pressuring someone into bending to your will (as opposed to their own) is about as disgusting a rebuke of the notion of freedom and liberty that I can think of. It is an insult to every person of good and free will  

Not quite right Dave. There would be fewer freedoms and liberties today if pressure wasn't applied where it was needed, but the real insult to 'persons of good and free will' is that they were denied those freedoms and liberties in the first place.

Jim:  How are there more liberties if a guy who owns a store and doesn't want to sell his stuff to, say, black or indian people, is forced to sell his stuff to one of them? Or if an employer has to hire a minority instead of the white male he thinks is best for the job? In each case, one guy lost a liberty; another gained one.  If you add 'em all up, since minorities are (at least for the time being) minorities in number, there is no way mathematically that taking a freedom away from a majority can be offset by the creation of a freedom for a minority.  Jim, without question, you have a tenable qualitative argument, but you certainly don't have the quantitative argument....

Dave,

If you don't like the Civil Rights act of 1964 which made it against the law to exclude minorities from places of public accommodation then just come out and say so. That act didn't stop a shopkeeper from creating a private race/religion/gender-only 'store' using the same model as the golf clubs of that day, and this.  

If you think that the multi-generational exclusion of minorities from certain jobs, especially in some parts of our country, is better than trying to create a framework for including them in the hiring process for some of those jobs, then you probably think Affirmative Action is wrong, so just come out and say so.

In reality there hasn't been a loss of liberty for the bigoted storekeeper or the white male job seeker, and if we guided our country and our lives by the one great truth of our Declaration Of Independence, that  "All men are created equal", we wouldn't even be talking about this stuff.  

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