The Hershey's Trust - Charity, Corruption and Child Abuse
Background
In this post, we’ll explore another prominent charity located in Pennsylvania where child abuse is rife and both democrats and republicans man the board of directors who use the well-funded charity as a feeding trough for cash and lavish lifestyles.
I should also note that this piece should be set in context of the reporting by Disobedient Media's @elizbethleavos who, along with her team, has made some crucial connections implicating US politicians to an East Coast Child Trafficking Ring.
If you take anything away from this piece – the reality that politicians on both sides of the aisle are spineless self-serving money whores who shamelessly profit off the backs of under privileged kids are some of the very same people implicated in child sex trafficking on the east coast of the United States.
Ed Rendell
- Former DNC Chair
- Former Gov. of Pennsylvania
- Former Mayor of Philadelphia
- Advisory Committee – Asia Imperial
- Author- America a Nation of Wusses
- Clinton Supporter
Ed’s ex-wife is Marjorie Rendell, a Federal Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
As noted in the Disobedient Media article, shortly after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti Ed Rendell lead a group of Pennsylvanian “philanthropists” and politicians on a mission to “rescue” dozens of Haitian “orphans” and relocate them to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and a crew of medical personnel traveled aboard a plane with the 54 Haitian children, who landed in Pittsburgh Tuesday morning. The orphans — who are all under age 4 — will be taken to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to be examined by doctors.
As Secretary of State in 2010, Hillary Clinton played a pivotal role in the relief effort in Haiti devastated by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake. The Clinton Foundation lead by the secretary’s husband and former US president Bill Clinton spearheaded the international response and rebuilding effort.
Just days after the quake flattened the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Ed Rendell and a number of political players from Pennsylvania were intently focused and eager to participate directly in the relief effort. Whether this eagerness stemmed from goodwill, attempts at scoring humanitarian political points or more nefarious intentions is up for debate.
What is certain is that several groups of politicians from Pennsylvania were desperately trying to evacuate 54 Haitian children. Rendell flew to Haiti with a delegation and extracted the young children and flew them back to the United States.
Rendell and company maintain that they ‘rescued’ these orphans from eminent danger by removing them quickly to the safety of America. However, many saw the so called ‘rescue mission’ as straight up (plain) kidnapping taking advantage of the confusion and disarray caused by the humanitarian crisis.
One of the most glaring issues that remains is the fact that many of these children were not listed by the Bresma orphanage in Port-au-Prince.
A number of State Department emails leaked by Wikileaks detail the concerns about Rendell:
January 18th, 2010
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/10620
February 19th, 2010
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/10811
July 7th, 2010
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/10681
Will brief you on this - just se email b/1.
This is the ed rendell matter when he put more kids on plane than we authorized.
Cdm
The Hershey Trust
The Hershey Trust was created by non-other than the famous chocolate baron himself Mr. Milton Hershey. Unable to have kids of his own with his wife, Catherine Hershey, established the Hershey Trust for underprivileged boys and orphaned children. This monumental act of goodwill and charity towards the most vulnerable in society was unparalleled at the time of its establishment.
The Milton Hershey School (MHS) is the jewel of the Hershey Trust that houses 1800 of youth/children in their academic program.
The Milton Hershey School
- Founded in 1908
- Town of Hershey, PA
- Enrollment 1800
- Over 10,000-acre campus
- 143 Student Homes
- 3 Instructional Centers
Hershey Trust Company
Most likely, you’ve never heard of the Hershey Trust but it is one of wealthiest trusts/foundations/charities in the United states.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=46&v=bA5oXpEMfI8
Today, Milton Hershey School continues the tradition of preparing students to lead productive and fulfilling lives by providing a cost-free, private, coeducational home and school for children from families of low income.
The legacy and vision of Milton and Catherine Hershey lives on in the thousands of students and alumni touched by the generosity of the Hersheys every day.
In 1970, the Hershey Trust assets was worth $200 million and today the fund has swelled to $12.5 billion USD.
Though the net worth of the trust has increased dramatically over the decades the number of children it serves has only increased by 200 individuals over the same time period.
According to the Nation Magazine
While serving as governor, Rendell ignored allegations of misconduct at the Hershey Trust, such as excessive compensation, child crowding (including an unsuccessful experiment in creating twenty-child bedrooms) and the luxury golf course purchase. Rendell’s former chief of staff and law partner, John Estey, was recently named Hershey Trust Company general counsel. Were the Democrats preparing to make their own move on the charity, seeking merely to displace Republicans?
Both Democrats and Republicans salivate at the idea that they could find themselves on one of the boards connected to the Hershey Trust company. The Trust has been described as a bipartisan slush fund. Therefore, instead of investigating corruption allegations at the Trust, the governor’s office chooses to look the other way in hopes of winning future positions on the lucrative Hershey boards.
Subsequently, the appointment of Governor Rendell’s former chief of staff to an executive position at Hershey’s came as little surprise to those who have been following the corruption and shenanigans inherent in the members of the Hershey boards. In addition, John Estey also acted as interim president at the MHS for a period of one year. In 2016, Estrey pleaded guilty to wire fraud.
Estey secretly cooperated with the FBI in a corruption sting in Harrisburg while on the charity's payroll. The charity fired him after learning of his guilty plea.
Estey’s last reported annual compensation from MHS was $935,112.
Rendell’s former chief of Staff is just one in a long list of former state government employees who have enriched themselves after landing a seat on the Hershey Trust board. A distinct pattern of greed, personal advancement and debauchery has plagued the Hershey’s Trust for decades. Sadly, rather than improving the lives of underprivileged children, the board of trustees of the extremely well financed organization and has become a cesspool of the highest order.
Former Gov. Tom Ridge has been a longtime board member at the chocolate company, earning more than $1 million over time.
Former two-term Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman headed the charity and sat on its three boards — for the Hershey Trust Co., the chocolate company and the entertainment-and-resorts company — earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year until he resigned.
Ultimately, it’s the children of Pennsylvania who needlessly suffer with the scandalous betrayal of the vision and generosity that Milton Hershey intended when he originally established the charity all those years ago.
Unfortunately, this is not just a simple story of political corruption and unchecked greed, the Hershey Trust, set up for low income families and orphans, has been embroiled in cases of child abuse, pedophilia and sexual molestation.
Corruption and Child Abuse
The Milton Hershey School has a number of parallels to Jerry Sandusky’s Second Mile charity, where allegations of sexual molestation and abuse have been leveled against staff members at the institution.
Meanwhile, the national interest in the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State could draw new attention to a Hershey pedophile scandal that emerged in 2008. The perpetrator was Charles Koons, whose mother was a Hershey group-home substitute housemother.
Koons admitted to molesting seventeen children in the area, and used his access to MHS to victimize several Hershey students as well. In early 2011, MHS paid $3 million to five of Koons’s Hershey victims—a settlement that included a confidentiality clause.
Despite a 1998 sworn affidavit from the mother of one of Koons’s MHS victims, along with multiple complaints from MHS children dating as far back as the 1980s, Koons was not arrested until 2008—and even then by a neighboring town’s police force on the basis of acts committed beyond Hershey. Koons had continued molesting children in the area for a decade after 1998, eventually pleading guilty and receiving a sentence of thirty-five to 100 years.
This timeline matches up almost identically with the Sandusky abuse case as knowledge of Sandusky sexually molesting a young boy in a shower room was made clear to the Penn State University police in 1998 by the victim’s mother. However, action was not taken by Penn State police officials or the appropriate authorities including prosecutor Ray Gricar. (Which will be explored in an upcoming post).
Jerry Sandusky would go on to molest and sexually assault multiple victims before finally facing charges in the spring of 2012. Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse.
The Disobedient article provides witness testimony by Greg Bucceroni connecting Ed Rendell, Tony Podesta, convicted child molester Denis Hastert and convicted child sexual abuser Jerry Sandusky to a potential East Coast child trafficking ring.
Moreover, the pattern of predators hiding behind charities, who’s stated aims are to improve the lives of vulnerable and at-risk boys, claiming to be their defenders is once more clearly on display.
- Jimmy Savile – Multiple Children’s Hospitals and Charities
- Lawrence King – BoysTown (Franklyn Scandal)
- Jerry Sandusky – Second Mile
- Mr. Koons - Milton Hershey School
- Douglas Perlitz – Haitian Orphanage (Order of Malta)
To this list, we can also add the members of the board of directors of the ICMEC who are closely connected to the Dutroux Scandal
We even have a governor, Ed Rendell, who is said to have known Sandusky, traveling to Haiti to ‘rescue’ children from an orphanage with the justification being to protect them from the dangers of child trafficking in the wake of a natural disaster.
Milton Hershey School
Last year, an MHS administrator named William Charney Jr., who was in charge of training houseparents, went to prison for receiving and distributing child pornography. The Philadelphia Inquirer exposé described how yet another administrator, Peter Gurt, mocked a sexual act involving several students, reportedly seeking to elicit laughs from this at a senior roast. Gurt was later promoted and is rumored to be in line today to become the next MHS president. Another two MHS teachers were fined and disciplined in 2006 and ‘07 for engaging in sex with students.
All this happened while an unbroken string of Republican attorneys general, from Zimmerman in 1981 to Corbett in 2011, did nothing but make matters worse.
Although the Nation magazine describes the Hershey Trust as a “Republican slush fund” it’s apparent that party affiliation is not a determining factor.
More instances of child sexual assault occurring at MHS have been described to have been ongoing for years without any action being taken though knowledge of the abuse was wide spread.
.png)
Charities and Corruption
A disturbing and recurrent pattern seems to be playing itself out over and over again.
Corruption, greed and all kinds of abuse seem to be endemic in large charities who claim to be the defenders of society's at risk children.
In just the past several weeks, another scandal involving child sexual abuse in Haiti involving the humanitarian giant Oxfam has been made the headlines.
A common thread binding these charities is that they are not what they appear to be on the surface. With some of these organizations it would appear that they provide would-be abusers with easy access to potential victims wittingly or unwittingly. It's possible in some instances that there are 'a few bad apples' but when we look closer at many of these organizations such as the Hershey Trust, the Second Mile or the Clinton Foundation we see rampant corruption across the board. And all too often there are no consequences for these heinous crimes.
If you’ve followed my work here on Steemit, you’ll know that I’ve done extensive research on the NCMEC/ICMEC organizations. Past and present board members at the ICMEC have links to multiple organizations for missing children across Europe. Former directors can also be directly linked to individuals named in Belgium’s Dutroux Scandal. Yet more examples of organizations that are not what they appear to be.
https://steemit.com/dutroux/@v4vapid/dutroux-360-cercle-de-lorraine
Very illuminating (and depressing) piece of work. Corporations can't corner the market without government, but I didn't realize that pedophiles can't really abuse without government, either. Pennsylvania state government has been complicit. I made this to supplement:
Excellent Post @v4vapid and excellent complement @geke em lo particular knew little of the scandals or the scandals themselves linked to Hershey's but if you do not open the discussion before people about this would be just another triumph of local interests and works on children people in need. And five decades of that is enough. "
Greetings from Venezuela
Wow! this is awesome, really love how your Venns make things so clear. Thank you, much respect!
You need to step up your Venn game, V.
I know right? But there's no way I can make them as nice as @geke, I think I'll have to enlist her help in the future!
Maybe V can be for venn. 😉
This is quite similar to the Haut de la Garenne children's home in Jersey, UK. It allowed politicians and powerful people to access vulnerable children under the guise of 'charity'. Sickening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_child_abuse_investigation_2008
It’s a complete disgrace V.
Thieves and deviants seem to flock to these charities like moths to a flame, we’ve had more info coming out here in the UK regarding our biggest charities covering up child abuse and misappropriation of funds.
The corrupt political systems of the west are hand in glove in the theft and abuse, it’s beyond disgusting.
The Jimmy Savillle case should have been a catalyst for change in the UK regarding the abuse of children (and in his case disabled adults and corpses!) within charitable organisations however all we saw was the usual political hand wringing and cover ups.
Haiti was devastated and these bastards saw it as an opportunity to steal and abuse, what a horrific state of affairs.
Sadly I’m not surprised by the info you’ve given us here, it’s indicative of the sickness that pervades western society now with vile creatures parading as politicians and philanthropists robbing and abusing the most vulnerable at every opportunity.
No surprise also to see the Clintons involved, wherever there is a buck to be made or a kid to be violated you find them and their despicable ilk.
Great work bringing this to us mate however depressing it is it needs to be out in the open.
Resteemed buddy.
I believe this to be the primary problem with such institutions, as those seeking power and wealth are shown to be expert at infiltrating even organizations originally intended for good works to suborn them for their private aggrandizement.
The state itself is the primary mechanism that perpetuates slavery, through taxation, and worse, incessantly broadening the laws creating criminals that can be held captive and forced to work as slaves.
This is the draw for psychopaths that want to abuse that power themselves. Their success at it is reflected in geopolitics today.
There are so many examples of 'charities' being used as fronts for child abuse and other major crimes that if I 'ran things' I would consider abolishing charities as a concept. I am reminded of this character who I recently posted about who was jailed for child rape while - he had operated as one of UNICEF's experts on 'child protection':
https://steemit.com/news/@ura-soul/unicef-children-s-rights-campaigner-is-jailed-for-rape-of-boy-13-why-it-s-tough-to-find-an-honest-charity-and-what-we-can-do-to
It's not really surprising to see a junk food company involved with child abuse either - considering that junk food kills more children than guns
Interesting read and it's surprising that you posted this today. There has been a really big scandal going on in Belgium involving multiple charities that used charity funding to pay for (underage) sex workers. In some cases food or other aid was even exchanged for sex by these so called charity workers.
I'm not even talking about small charities, Oxfam was one one of the most prominent ones featured in the investigation.
yeah, this is turning into a bigger scandal all the time. Do you have a link to the Belgium article? I'd be really interested in reading it. Or if you know the names of some of the other charities.
Thanks for your comment, very interesting.
Yeah for sure, I have an English source for the one mentioning Oxfam. The guy that was accused (Roland Van Hauwermeiren) is a Belgian. All other sources are in Dutch, this Reuters report is the best I could find in English
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-oxfam-haiti-exclusive/exclusive-haiti-president-says-many-aid-organizations-hid-misconduct-idUSKCN1G02GN
Thanks so much for your reporting and bringing this to the Light! I have never heard of the Hershey Trust until today. Sharing the eff out of this all over the internet.
Thanks, until i researched this article I had no idea it existed either and it has billions in its coffers.
The corruption at the board of directors is out of control. I only included a small amount in this piece.
Hello @v4vapid
Hello @lyndsaybowes
Damn that's really sad the vision and mission of Mr. Milton Hershey is being tempered and used for personal benefits. People these days are such selfish, greedy bastards they don't even realise that karma is a bitch. I believe that they will have to repay for the debts they have caused to humanity. Corruption, molestation they have no fear as they have politicians and money in their pockets. This is really heartbreaking.
Good post!
Adding this article for reference. Three men were arrested in 2011 for smuggling kids from Haiti.
http://www.icenews.is/2011/04/21/swede-arrested-in-germany-for-haitian-paedophile-ring/
It's not surprising really; sadly, this sort of thing is probably far more common than most people are aware of.
Yes, it's great that we can expose these horrors and all this corruption and let the world see the true nature of the puppet masters; however, I tend to end up back at the same root question (as I also shared on @geke's post earlier): whereas being addicted to power, influence, money, control and other "vices" are psychologically understandable on some level... what happened to these people? As in who dropped them on their heads as babies so their brains took this turn where preying on children becomes part of their "status quo?"
My point being, we can keep exposing one corrupt and vile group after another, but someone else will flow in to fill the void they leave behind. WHY? What can be done to redirect that aspect of someone's psyche, so fewer or nobody takes over the empty spot? Or are humans just inherently that twisted?
Thanks for doing what you do.
My sentiments exactly. Always shocking but no real surprise. How do people arrive at this point you ask? Checks and balances are pitiful at best. Our institutions continue to fail us. I watch with hope that organisations like The International Tribunal for Natural Justice can gain some traction.
Great comment and those are excellent questions.
As we know there' s most often a cycle of abuse in these people's lives, perhaps they were abused or torture in some manner? By no means should this be an excuse to continue abuse but we see this time and time again.
Power corrupts, and people who start off with good intentions may be lead astray as they are often surrounded by people who have been corrupted long before their arrival. But we're all trying to figure out why the abuse of children?
I don't have the answers but I'm very intrigued by the possibility of Brownstone Operations being implemented.
This theory offers the most plausible reason for systemic child sexual abuse, imho.
I boycotted Hershey quite a few years ago when they pledged to eliminate child slavery from their supply chain by 2020, I figured they would all be grown up slaves by then.