The Wine, Women and Song Foundation

American Thinker ^ | March 24, 2013 | Clarice Feldman

[jazusamo]

I have watched over the years how publicly unaccountable foundations have amassed billions of dollars, tax free, and spend it on dangerous, leftwing, often anti-American and anti-Israeli outfits, conferences and promoters. Taxpaying citizens opposed to abortion without restrictions, open borders, balkanization of the country, erosion of their constitutional rights, dumbed down education of their children and environmental extremism are fighting opposition very generously funded by these groups.

The irony of this development is that capitalists -- like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pew -- who owed their fortunes to American free market policies, started most of these foundations. Further, the notion of permitting many of the thousands of foundations to exist tax free developed during the Depression when public funds were tight and, it was argued, these foundations could supply the money to provide for necessary public services in the absence of any other resources that could do this.

Today the Ford Foundation sits on about $11 billion in assets. The Rockefeller Foundation holds about $5 billion in assets. The Carnegie Corporation holds about $2.5 billion in assets and the Pew Foundation about $5 billion. Those are just a few of the most well-known of the "charitable" foundations.

The normal pattern with these is that the benefactor's family and/or associates who held his views sat on the board that determined how these funds would be spent. In time, they died or drifted away and the sums, which kept growing, were under the control of people who held views diametrically opposed to those of the founders.

While tax- exempt foundations are by law supposed to spend down a percentage of their assets annually, they've invented numbers of dodges around this and their fortunes grow as those of the taxpayers and government treasuries diminish.

[Tax-chick]

Good article. Sultan Knish wrote a piece recently about how organizations to “do good” mainly did harm, while paying their employees top dollar to feel good about themselves. On the other hand, any sports figure, entertainer, or lottery winner can use his ill-gotten gelt to pay others an honest wage to provide a product or service. Which is better?

[jazusamo]

Feldman’s writing on the foundations reminded me of some articles I read sometime back about WalMart. Sam Walton was pretty conservative and built the company on providing decent products for a good price.

After he passed and his heirs are running the show they've gone more and more to the left and are supporting many liberal causes.