A READER of ours brought to our attention this new article which helps explain how the Gates Foundation and fellow tax evaders really operate and why we, the public, should not be fooled by the stories they push into the mainstream media by buying out this media. To quote:
In June of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published his essay "Wealth" in the North American Review: a famous document, as remarkable for the author’s delusional self-regard as it is for the case he makes for private philanthropy. The steel baron launched his argument with the dumbfounding claim that until "the past few hundred years [of human history] there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, environment of the chief and those of his retainers." He then sails blithely along to insist that we should all welcome the changes in society that make violent wealth inequality inevitable, because the benefits of wealth must inevitably trickle down to the least fortunate, etc., an assertion that many of later generations have come to view with a certain skepticism.
Despite the self-congratulatory hallucinations, "Wealth" contains a genuinely noble philanthropic message. The rich man has a duty to live unostentatiously, Carnegie argues—to provide modestly for his own dependents, and "to consider [the balance of his wealth] simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer [...] to produce the most beneficial results for the community." He goes on to say, unblushingly, that the man of wealth is the ablest, best kind of man, who should therefore become "agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves." One may wonder how these last remarks would have been received by the jailed and brutalized strikers of Carnegie's Homestead Mill.
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Private foundations pay almost no taxes. In exchange for their expansive tax breaks, they are required to distribute 5 percent of their assets every year. And with wealth consolidating ever upward in America, private foundations are growing like topsy. More than 120,000 such groups controlled around $583 billion in 2010.
Foundations provide about 13 percent of the money given to charity in the United States, a proportion that currently works out to around $41 billion annually. The rest comes from bequests and individual philanthropists—ordinary people who write checks to Doctors Without Borders at the end of each year, or to the Red Cross when there is a disaster.
The total given to charity in the U.S. amounts to about 1.7 percent of GDP, a far higher proportion than in other developed nations. In the UK the figure is about 0.7 percent, in Germany 0.22 percent, and in France 0.14 percent.
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In other words, what‘s needed most of all is a recognition that philanthropy must do more than provide charity, as Oscar Wilde suggested in 1891. Foundations still need to supply the desperately needed overcoat, as Wilde did himself, and do whatever they can to address the immediate needs of people in distress. But the real task is to come to grips with the reasons why so many people are left out in the cold in the first place.