Burners should be aware that all police on Playa are now mandated by law to wear body cameras. You might think you’re in the middle of nowhere having a transformational experience and being whoever you want to be – but you are being recorded.
Police are required at the festival for longer than just the 8 days the gates are open. This year there was a sexual assault during the city build, as well as someone reporting a sexual assault from the previous year.
The Burning Man juggernaut smashes on. Since they declared the business a “non-profit”, it sure has become profitable.
Commodification Camps are running rampant, and Black Rock City has become one of the world’s most sought-after selfie destinations. BMorg even has its own private airline now to bring in the “high” rollers.
Sales were $46.6 million, up $2.1m from 2017. A cash surplus after expenses of $2.6m was generated.
A record of $2.2m in grants was given out; offset by $1.75m in donations and government grants received. About a third of the grants went outside the United States.
The Org ended the year with net assets of $26.26 million. Cash at bank was $8,981,108 with additional savings and temporary cash investments of $5,468,564 – call it $14.5 million.
It’s not enough, of course: ticket prices must still be increased every year.
We predicted that top-tier tickets would be above $2000 by 2020. We’re pretty close – adding in vehicle pass, handling fees and taxes, VIP tickets that were $390 when we started this blog in 2012 are now going for $1760.86.
Financial Comparison – 2018 to 2014
The organization employed 946 people and approximately 10,000 volunteers.
They have 16 directors; 11 of those are “independent”.
In 2018 Dennis Bartels was appointed Chairman of the Board. He was formerly the director of the SF Exploratorium.
One thing that I was highly skeptical of has now come to pass, and I’m pleased to report that BMorg did the right thing:
Finally, in 2018 we completed the transfer of Burning Man’s trademarks from Decommodification LLC to Burning Man Project. These marks include “the Man” logo and the names “Burning Man” and ‘“Black Rock City,” among others. The LLC was established to temporarily protect these words and symbols of Burning Man culture, in order to limit their commercial use and comport with our Decommodification Principle, while our new nonprofit got off the ground (more info here). With the Project well-established by 2018, the trademarks transferred on schedule in April.
Perhaps the intense scrutiny from this site helped to keep everyone honest.
BMorg are grumbling about a 2-cent per gallon water increase which would see the local town of Gerlach making $25,000 from water sales instead of $18,000.
“Unnecessarily increasing the price to consumers will drive business away,” said Burning Man Associate Director Chris Neary in a statement at a Dec. 5 meeting with the Gerlach General Improvement District, an 8-person board.
The money earned from Burning Man for water would help to pay off the loan that the town had to take out for the federally mandated water treatment facility, which cost about $1 million to construct, Jackson said. It costs another $40,000 or so each year to maintain the treatment facility, not including labor, Jackson said.
“I thought maybe Burning Man could add $1 per ticket for Gerlach. That would be great,” said Jackson, who suggested the dollar could go toward infrastructural improvements. “But they said no.” Burning Man representatives at the December meeting said that they were grateful for Gerlach’s resources, but it seemed unfair for the expense of a municipal water system to fall on Burning Man’s nonprofit.
The hypocrisy of these people knows no bounds. “An increase in ticket price of $1 will drive consumers away”, when it comes to the local town of Gerlach that they invade every year. Yet an increase in price of hundreds of dollars over the last few years has only led to record population counts in Black Rock City, and record revenues for BMorg. $1 per ticket would be 0.17% of revenues – less than a tenth of what they spend sending their staff around the world.
They still haven’t figured out what to do with Fly Ranch, which they acquired in 2016 for $7 million of Other Peoples’ Money. There’s a new contest for Burners to come up with ideas.
Other Statistics
Thanks very much to our Pershing County source who provided these graphs. Some of the information is available thanks to their FOIA requests.
Note: there is 2019 and even 2020 data included here. The financials above are from 2018.
Maybe a tiny slice of those bumper profits could be shared with the local communities that have to deal with the year-round consequences of this rave in the desert. You know…to make the world a better place.
Vets4ChildRescue have released their 2018 tax returns. I will be providing a financial analysis, as I have done with the Burning Man Project for many years.
He claims to be conducting covert Tier One operations in the U.S. He also claims to be battling against evil and therefore anyone who questions him in any way is evil, a troll, must be blocked and denounced. Yes, one of those.
When I first heard of Sawyer’s new mission to team up with his Navy SEAL and CIA buddies to stop child trafficking, I was initially supportive.
It seemed like this was happening in the wake of all the awareness brought by the leaks of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Since then we’ve had 201263 men brought down by the #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein, Backpage, George Pell, NXIVM, dozens of Disney pedo employees, and all the bombshell new Jeffrey Epstein revelations. Pedo networks have been taken down all over the world. Perhaps people may have wondered if #PizzaGate was real at the time of the 2016 election; there can be no doubt any more.
Awareness is one thing; but how do we stop this industry of human trafficking? Is it Ivanka Trump? Sawman? Titus Frost (who I’m watching as I write this)?
What can we do, if we are concerned? Donate money to those who are fighting it. So far, so good…
Given how utterly corrupt this underworld is, and the involvement of private security contractors and government officials and intelligence agencies…well, these things make me get kind of suspicious. It’s not exactly the first thing that would be on my list of what charity to donate to: one doing Tier One covert operations with TOP SECRET clearances whose founder had previously provided close protection security for Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and John Negroponte. That’s who’s gonna stop child trafficking in Arizona?
As time passed, I saw less and less activity from Sawyer’s organization – while he seemed to be spending an enormous amount of time on self-promotion. I grew disillusioned, and asked him about it on Twitter:
I take back what I said then about the Honeybee, because she seems to have done the same thing as Sawyer – raised money from concerned citizens to make “Kids, Inc” a documentary exposing the horrors of the child sex trafficking industry, then years later there is still no sign of any documentary.
I note Sawyer’s immediate response to being questioned about where the money was going was that the FBI should “take a closer look” at me, and accusing me of being a pedophile and a rapist. I support good veterans protecting children from pedophiles, but also I believe that our government and legal system needs to be doing that.
If you say “that’s not good enough, we need vigilantes to get involved”…well, if that is indeed the case then they should be delivering justice: not lining their pockets in the name of charity. Child abuse is a sensitive issue, and one you can press peoples’ buttons on. Is this charity really one that is addressing this terrible social issue?
Is it evil to question how public donations to a famous person are being spent? Or why a movie to “make people aware of what’s happening” is taking so long to produce? If everything is above board then why should it matter if potential donors want to assess the operational performance of the organization?
V4CR is forced by law to file the returns of their tax exempt corporation publicly. This gives us a great insight into what is really going on. Was I correct – that nothing was done to stop child sex trafficking and Sawyer had been spending most of his time swelling the coffers of his corporation?
Let’s take a look.
It has now been two and a half years since Sawyer founded the organization. In the official narrative this was as a result of his daughter being sexually assaulted in 2017. There is no indication that her assailant was involved in child sex trafficking, but he was recently convicted on 7 charges: 1 count of aggravated kidnapping, one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and 5 counts of sexual assault.
Sawyer is furious that the judge went “soft” on him by only sentencing him 52 years instead of 238:
Sawyer has now taken down the page on his web site that said they actually began filming their documentary in 2015.
We won’t know what happened in 2019 until about this time next year. One thing we do know: at the time of writing, there is still no documentary.
Sawyer promoted to his audience in August 2018 that his “Contraland” film was going to be screening on NetFlix. It is now almost a year since that whole situation blew up. As far as I know the production company has not been charged with any crime, despite Sawyer’s claims at the time that “this was now a criminal matter”.
Sawyer provided an update on Contraland last week on Doug Hagmann. He said he now has completed the documentary and they are just looking for distribution. We will give him the benefit of the doubt that this is true. He also claims that the production company manager is about to get convicted, and they have retrieved all of the original Contraland footage that was stolen. The music composer is spending 5 weeks on the music score, Sawyer hopes to have the movie out by November 2019.
Now expected “Fall 2019”
The 2018 V4CR report claims that 9 pedophiles were arrested as a result of sting operations. While this is great, none of them were child sex traffickers. As far as I can tell, no children were rescued. Sawyer’s own (adult) daughter participated in some of the operations. A runaway was taken in by the couple who worked with Sawyer organizing the sting operations.
In 2018 and 2019 we have seen active participation from V4CR at NASCAR events. A lot of fun for the team, I’m sure.
Aspen Sawyer in Ferrari gear and Craig Sawyer in a V4CR T-Shirt. Fun, but how many children does this rescue from trafficking?
The company spent $36,378 on advertising and promotion. Billboards? Sponsoring race cars? That’s what is visible.
Their nationwide volunteer team performed 35 public outreach events. Is each NASCAR appearance included in this count? Just wondering…
Meanwhile how many children are imprisoned and being smuggled? How many rape trees are still out there?
Admitted Tier One Operator Craig Sawyer with suspected FBI Provocateur Michael Louis Arthur Meyer, aka “Screwy Louie” at the beginning of their 2018 #BackyardBrawl mission
For more on the “Rape Trees” episode see #govLARP.
Sawyer made 50 media appearances – about 1 a week, for $1.2 million. Nice work if you can get it. I know many YouTubers who are doing interviews every single day and would be delighted to get 1/100th of that for their troubles.
The arrestees in V4CR stings have been pedophile johns, responding to ads on the Internet; not traffickers, politicians or high-level elites.
Sawyer claims 14 arrests total, plus his daughter’s attacker. That is $85,000 per pedo arrested. Far more children could be rescued from sex trafficking just by spending $1.2 million buying them from the traffickers.
Veterans for Child Rescue was founded specifically to help bring an end to child trafficking. 2 and a half years in, it’s hard to point to anything they have done that actually advanced that mission. Busting pedos will not stop child trafficking, or rescue children who are the victims of it. Maybe a movie will wake people up, make them say “no more child sex trafficking”. But is there really anyone out there condoning it right now? I would think most people would be horrified by the thought of it. Perhaps I’m out of touch with modern values.
The Numbers
The Combined column gives the best picture of what has been going on.
In 2018, almost 33 cents out of each dollar people gave Vets4ChildRescue went back out to the Sawyers. The costs of the sting operations seem to be paid by the local law enforcement that conducts them. If travel is required, V4CR has a nice budget for that.
Another 10 cents out of each dollar ended up just sitting there in the organization’s bank account, unspent surplus.
52 cents in each dollar has gone to making a documentary. Stay tuned…coming soon. I hope it’s great. So far I just see great marketing.
They misplaced a couple of bank accounts with about $10,000 in them on last years’ tax return:
This may account for a discrepancy we found in the 2017 returns, where Alex Jones said he had donated $100,000 but was only recorded in the books for $90,000.
The budget for vaccines is higher than the budget for surveillance. Maybe these guys already have all the surveillance gear they need to stop child sex trafficking.
As well as paying himself a salary, and whoever and whatever “contract labor” and “other professional fees” represent, Sawyer draws from the company indirectly by charging them for “security” services. We previously presented multiple pieces of evidence indicating that Sawyer charged the movie production company for these services also.
How much protection did these former Navy SEALs really need from 9 pedophiles to do these “stings”? Could they not bring one of their handguns for free? Arizona is a “Constitutional Carry” state, which means you do not even need a permit to carry a concealed firearm if you are over 21. This should not matter anyway, since Sawyer’s team are filming law enforcement who are the ones actually arresting the predators in these sting operations.
Is this protection, or a racket?
It will be interesting see what happens to these accounts in the future when Contraland comes out. Will the distribution revenues and related expenses pass through this organization, or another one?
A massive amount of money was taken from the donations and given to the production company, about $620,000 or 52%. It is hard to see how they could be charged for theft when Sawyer was paying them and now has the footage. Seems more like a civil matter. I’m still not sure if Sawyer plans to release a movie or a TV series, but either way, it doesn’t sound like an outrageous budget. I will reserve further judgement until I see the final product.
