The normal response of most people hearing about a large donation to a nonprofit charity is admiration and goodwill.  After all, giving away one's hard earned money so that others may benefit seems noble.

But the problem is that whenever large sums of money are combined with large, permanent organizations, human nature comes into play, and selflessness recedes as avarice advances, with no countervailing pressures.  Unlike commercial organizations, which face market competition to keep them honest and focused on better performance, charities have no such automatic compulsion to focus and improve their performance in reaching their stated goals.  It falls to trustees or boards of directors, and to government regulators, to keep them honest and disciplined.

After a lifetime of observing large and small nonprofit organizations, I am convinced that all the good intentions in the world are insufficient to keep them on the straight and narrow path.  Because most nonprofit trustees or boards of directors are self-perpetuating — that is, they nominate their own successors — and because they typically have only a little time to devote to their responsibilities, they become dependent on the professional staffs of their organizations, who channel to them the information that they deem will serve their own interests.

In other words, a multi-trillion-dollar industry of nonprofit organizations has an inherent tendency toward self-serving behavior.  Moreover, in the last several decades, leftists/progressives have infiltrated and taken over nearly all of the large foundations and universities, directing them toward political goals that may be at cross purposes to the wishes of the founders who originally endowed the charities.

As the old saying goes, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant," and I am encouraged to note that a new source of sunshine directed at what is termed "False Philanthropy" has just debuted on Substack.  (Click here.)  Its author is Charles Ortel, whose work is familiar to American Thinker readers.  Charles has been a Wall Street analyst, sports a Harvard MBA, and knows how to exhume the telling details from the financial statements and publicly available reports that nonprofit organizations are required to file by state and federal authorities.  His work on the Clinton  Foundation and associated charities is a landmark.

The Substack will have free content for all members of the public, exploring corruption in the world of nonprofits, as well as more detailed subscriber-only content that will be useful for regulators, law enforcement, and other observers who want the nitty-gritty.

Charles Ortel writes in the debut post:

Welcome to a new media approach devoted to winding down large, complex and false "charities" that, instead, are seemingly used to purchase influence from politicians, launder vast streams of money, and protect privilege-seeking donors. Together, we can hunt down charity thieves even as some major governments refuse to do so.

What a shame that one must continue documenting and analyzing bold examples of entities passing themselves off as "charities", when they are, judging from their public filings, outright scams. Why? Because bureaucrats and even national leaders across the modern world are apparently in on the crooked game of letting "charities-in-name-only" steal on ever-expanding scale. 

So, in summary form for free browsers, and in greater detail for paid subscribers, False Philanthropy hopes to give you the essential resources you need, using the fine services of substack, to tilt the playing field against charity con artists who operate outside and inside of government. With the materials you will read and confirm for yourselves, we can, together, push hard at local, state, federal and foreign levels to demand fair accounting and proper recompense through numerous channels that are, in fact, available to members of the wider public.

And, what a further shame, that taxing and other government authorities resolutely refuse to investigate and then prosecute rampant, ongoing charity frauds in this moment, when most local, state, and federal government agencies are trying to service mammoth debt loads, while at the same time spending far more than they earn in receipts.

There is considerably more to read, and it is available to all.  If you agree with me that the giant nonprofit sector is less a boon than a problem for American society now, consider bookmarking the site, or even subscribing.

Graphic credit: Nick Youngson, CC BY-SA 3.0, Alpha Stock Images.