Free Republic

Steve Miller’s December 12 RealClearInvestigations article, “How Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections,” is both jarring and informative and helps frame many important questions facing philanthropy, conservatism, and conservative philanthropy. Miller describes the general size and scope of activities being conducted a progressive nonprofit infrastructure that has “taken on an outsized part of the Democratic Party’s election strategy” and, specifically, how they “work around legal restrictions on nonprofits that accept tax-deductible donations by selectively engaging in nonpartisan efforts including boosting voter education and participation.” The infrastructure also includes nonprofit grantmaking institutions, which are...

If you read the headlines about Bill Gates, you might be led to believe he’s a modern-day Santa Claus, dedicated to helping humanity and generously distributing his fortune for the greater good. ... It might seem like a brilliant marketing strategy, but is there more to Bill Gates’ story than meets the eye? Absolutely, according to RFK Jr., who’s exposing what he calls Bill’s scheme to “monetize philanthropy.” He argues that Gates has ingeniously found a way to monetize his charitable efforts. So, while Bill claims to be donating his fortune for humanity’s sake, RFK Jr. suggests he’s actually profiting...

America’s Sweetheart from the silent movie era, Mary Pickford, died, aged 87, on this day, 44 years ago, in 1979. “If you have made mistakes, even serious mistakes, there is always another chance for you.” she is renowned to have said, “And supposing you have tried and failed again and again, you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” On set, Pickford’s habit was to hang a bucket and ask everyone working to put some money for other film workers who were not...

As in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, we are witnessing a generational drama in which inheritors kill their proverbial father to marry their mother, in this case Mother Earth. The psychology behind this pattern is above my pay grade, but many of the richest people on the planet, and their heirs, now seem anxious to disparage the economic system that created their fortunes. With few exceptions, the new rich, and particularly their children and ex-wives, embrace a racial, gender and environmental agenda that, while undermining merit and economic growth, still leaves them on top of the heap. The ideology of the...

A California doctor plans to offer abortion services to women in Southern states such as Alabama, via a boat that operates as a floating clinic in federal waters off the Gulf Coast, according to news reports. Dr. Meg Autry, an OB-GYN in San Francisco, aims to raise about $20 million for the project known as PRROWESS, or Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes. “The project is being funded with philanthropy and the patients care is on a needs basis, so most individuals will pay little to nothing for services,” Autry said in an interview with NBC Bay...

The split between Bill and Melinda Gates, announced last week, has been in the works for a long time. Ms. Gates consulted with divorce lawyers roughly two years before she filed for divorce from Mr. Gates, saying their marriage was “irretrievably broken,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The 56-year-old philanthropist has been working with lawyers at several firms since at least 2019 to unwind the marriage of more than 25 years, according to these people and the documents. Last Monday, the billionaire couple announced they were ending their marriage. In...

A small Iowa town received a big surprise last week from an anonymous donor who shipped every household in town $150 worth of gift cards good at local small businesses. All 549 households in the town of 1,400 people received three $50 gift cards, according to the Des Moines Register, one each for West Side Bar and Grille, Hometown Market and Trostel’s Broken Branch. Collectively, the cards added up to $82,350, or $27,450 to each locally owned business. Mayor Jeff Lillie was in on the secret. On March 26, he was called by a man who said he was the...

As Chick-fil-A expands globally and into more liberal parts of the U.S., the chicken chain plans to change which charities it donates to after years of bad press and protests from the LGBT community. Beginning next year, Chick-fil-A will move away from its current philanthropic structure, Bisnow has learned. After donating to more than 300 charitable organizations this year, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain will instead focus on three initiatives with one accompanying charity each: education, homelessness and hunger. "There's no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are," Chick-fil-A...

President Trump awarded one of the nation's highest civilian honors to Roger Penske, a businessman, professional racer and founder of one of the world's most successful motorsports teams. Trump heralded Penske, a veteran racer who has won hundreds of races, as a "champion and winner," before awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Thursday. Penske, who was joined by his wife and children in the Oval Office, said that "to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom is something special and means more to me than any business success or motorsport trophy." The medal honors civilians who have made "an...

When libertarian billionaire David Koch passed away last week, the left couldn't -- and wouldn't -- hide its glee. Finally, an important funder of right-wing causes had died! Bill Maher even said that he was "glad" that Koch had passed away, adding he hoped "the end was painful." That's the kind of hate the left had and continues to have for Mr. Koch, a man who became extremely rich and who then proceeded to use that wealth to support causes he believed in. Although he was most famous for donating to political causes, Mr. Koch was extremely generous to other...

Accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, a subsidiary of the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton was a frequent Epstein travel companion. Malia Zimmerman reported in 2016: Attorneys for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein touted his close friendship with Bill Clinton and even claimed the billionaire helped start Clinton’s controversial family foundation in a 2007 letter aimed at boosting his image during plea negotiations “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global...

Congress is still scrambling to find ways to pay for its tax cut, so perhaps it should pay closer attention to last month’s news that George Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune to a private charity that he controls. There it will be sheltered from the Internal Revenue Service forever. This may be the single biggest tax dodge in U.S. history, yet no one on the right or left seems to have raised an eyebrow. True tax reform is predicated on the principle that all income should be taxed at a low rate once, and only once. But...

https://www.wwjdinc.org/2017/07/24/a-few-pieces-of-useful-information/ A 1950s report on foundations in Carroll Quigley's Tragedy & Hope, showed that the top foundations were calculated by some smart gnome to be elaborate tax dodges which divert money away from public control to ultimately result in massive international public shakedown operations like K Krime Korp. The Placer County CA WWJD charity is toward the opposite end. To see the ultimate opposite of the Klintons, Mother Theresa told a story of giving a bag of rice to a desperately poor Hindu woman with a starving family. The woman could hardly get the thanks out of her mouth before...

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are two investors in Bridge International Academies. But in Uganda, the group's 63 schools have been "ordered to shut down in a matter of weeks, leaving the lives of thousands of pupils in limbo." An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Uganda's High Court has described the Bridge International Academies...as unsanitary and unqualified, and has ordered it to close its doors in December because it ignored Uganda's national standards and put the "life and safety" of its 12,000 young students on the line. The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the...

'The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.' Major media outlets in the US have ignored the leak of thousands of emails from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by the activist hacker group DCLeaks. The OSF is the vehicle through which Soros has funneled billions of dollars over the past two decades to non-profit organizations in the US and throughout the world.

Donald Trump fired back Tuesday at reports questioning his fundraising haul from a high-profile veterans event in January, releasing an extensive list of charities he said received the donations -- and slamming the media for questioning him. During a press conference at Trump Tower, the presumptive Republican nominee said he's raised $5.6 million and more is coming in. He rattled off the list of charities and the amounts they received, while taking scathing and sometimes-personal shots at the media for pressuring him to disclose the information. “I have never received such bad publicity for doing such a good job,” Trump...

Where's all the good news about Trump My heads going to explode with this controlled media and it's starting to permeate the www. Tried searching the web for "minority employee of Trump" because I saw a youtube vid of a hispanic/black (I forget which) woman praising her employment at Trump. I'm sure I can find it in my browsing history but all I find via a web search is negative/opposite. Likewise, searching for "good things Trump has done" brings up the exact opposite. Trump the man and the company pages on wikipedia have no mention of anything good. I know...

The latest batch of publicly-released State Department emails provide more evidence that a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio was made as a result of pressure from Bill and Hillary Clinton. The loan to a company named InnoVida, owned by Osorio, was supposed to be for building houses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, but Osorio used the money to finance a lavish lifestyle. Osorio is currently in prison for fraud. OPIC is an independent agency but submits its budget through the State Department. The Clintons’ efforts to push the OPIC loan...

New film, ‘Rosenwald,’ tells story of philanthropist Julius Rosenwald who transformed black lives, including those of writer Langston Hughes and opera singer Marion Anderson.PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — Alex Bethea, the son of cotton and tobacco farm workers, was in sixth grade in 1965 when his family moved from Dillon, South Carolina, to the tiny town of Fairmont, North Carolina, where he attended a school called Rosenwald. But it wasn’t until this week, 50 years later, that Bethea learned that his school was named for Julius Rosenwald, the Jewish philanthropist who is the subject of a new documentary by Aviva Kempner. The...

The Ford Foundation vows to fight inequality but will have a hard time beating Henry’s example. On June 11, the $11 billion Ford Foundation announced that it will pour its resources—about $500 million in giving a year—into fighting inequality. “We are talking about inequality in all its forms—in influence, access, agency, resources, and respect,” Darren Walker, the charity’s president, wrote in a letter. Oh, the irony. I won’t join the public intellectuals having hissy fits over how people choose to give away their money, beyond being annoyed that since the Ford Foundation is tax-exempt, we’re all subsidizing it. Here’s the...