Philanthropy

Despite official denials from Her Majesty’s Government, the son of Libya’s strongman says the British government cut a deal with his country to release a despicable terrorist in order to promote trade between the two countries.

Moammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, was quoted by Reuters as saying to Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi upon his return to Libya

In all British interests regarding Libya, I always put you on the table. All the visits of the ex-Prime Minister Blair and the big secret and public work that all the parties entered into was carried out in order to release you. The exploitation of British-Libyan political and trade interests was always done with the aim of releasing Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

Gaddafi’s son has been using his charity for years as a form of public diplomacy. As Capital Research Center’s executive vice president Robert Huberty noted Friday, al-Islam is chairman of Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, identified two years ago in a CRC paper by Eliza Gheorghe as a public relations gimmick to manipulate world opinion.

The disgusting welcome of the Lockerbie bomber to Libya is a reminder of the immorality of international politics. Here is a photo of Saif al Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, welcoming the terrorist in Tripoli.  Here is another photo of Gaddafi as he signed an agreement last month with the London School of Economics giving it $2.5 million in support of LSE’s Centre for the Study of Global Governance, a program that claims to promote corporate social responsiblity.

The junior Gaddafi is a philanthropist. He is chairman of Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, identified two years ago in a CRC paper  by Eliza Gheorghe as a public relations gimmick to manipulate world opinion. It appears to be succeeding. The LSE’s statement accepting the foundation’s money says, “It is a generous donation from an NGO committed to human rights and the promotion of civil society.”

The British government disclaims responsibility for the terrorist Megrahi’s release, claiming it is all Scotland’s doing, notwithstanding that Peter Mandelson, heir apparent to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, met Gadaffi junior a week before the release. One can only hope the news media makes an effort to determine who benefits (and here) from this injustice.

The Catholic News Agency reports that Catholic Charities USA has been awarded a five-year contract by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Administration for Children and Families (ACF) section.

Under the $100 million agreement, the charitable group will render disaster aid nationwide. Although CCUSA has long received federal funding, Roger Conner, a spokesman for the group, said that this is the first contract CCUSA has ever had with the federal government in its 100-year history.

Last Friday the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center held a symposium on a new monograph entitled “How Public is Private Philanthropy?” issued under the auspices of the Philanthropy Roundtable. The symposium addressed what might at first seem to be a legalistic or semantic question concerning the status of nonprofit organizations. In fact, the issue is decidedly political. It concerns who is entitled to decide what organizations will receive donors’ money?

Leftwing activists argue that private foundations and charities are really “public.”  After all, they say, if the IRS rules that a nonprofit is a “public charity” serving a “public” purpose it will then exempt the organization from taxation and it will allow contributions to it to be treated as tax-deductible. Moreover, foundations and charities are chartered by government, which lays down strict rules under which they are permitted to operate. For instance, nonprofits may not undertake activities that principally benefit their trustees, they must not engage in for-profit business activities, and they must payout 5% of their assets annually to qualified charitable recipients. According to the activists, this means nonprofits are “public” not “private.”

Liberal foundation-watchers say the argument is just a matter of semantics, but conservatives suspect that radical activists are making the claim in order to prepare the way for more government regulation of the nonprofit sector. Conservatives point to efforts by California’s Greenlining Institute to promote AB 624, a bill introduced in the state legislature that would have required large California foundations to report on the extent of their efforts to assist charities designated as minority-led and serving minority and “marginalized” groups. The bill required foundations to report on the race and gender of their board members and it wanted reports on whether the foundation assisted charities serving seven designated minority groups. A California legislator withdrew the bill from consideration by the legislature only after the big foundations promised to voluntarily share this information and increase their giving to these specified groups.

Recently the leftist National Center for Responsive Philanthropy issued a report that also called upon foundations to be “inclusive,” which it defined as 1) giving 50% of their money to low-income groups, “communities of color” and other “marginalized” groups and 2) giving at least 25% of their money to advocacy groups promoting “equity, opportunity and justice” in our society.

This appears to be the start of an organized pressure campaign by activist groups working in concert with politicans to shakedown grantmakers. In its starkest terms, gifts to Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push could count as support for inclusive and marginalized giving; gifts to the Heritage Foundation won’t. One might also expect the zoo, the opera and the local historic preservation society to adapt their missions to include support for and representation from preferential groups in order to stay solvent. They and their donors will have an incentive to remain within the giving guidelines of the Greenlining Institute, the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy and potentially the California state legislature.

Glenn Lammi, legal counsel at the Washington Legal Foundation and a speaker at the Bradley symposium, said government oversight of charities is traditionally intended to assure donors that charities and foundations are fulfilling their chosen missions and that their managers are not using their positions to benefit themselves. But the new efforts to narrow the definition of what is in the ” public interest” or the interest of the “underserved” constitutes an attack on democratic pluralism and individual freedom. Lammi asks:

“Will the poor and disadvantaged really benefit from the political logrolloing and special interest favors that will ultimately result from a politicization of charity?”

To read Lammi’s statement, click here. (Word file)

Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner has another good article on ACORN (which we profiled in the November editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch).

It begins:

Donations from financial institutions to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now during the past several years for community redevelopment are open to misdirection and misappropriation, according to ACORN dissidents. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup made grants to the ACORN Housing Corporation and other ACORN affiliate groups. The three banks are also among the top recipients of federal bailout money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). [...]

The “dissidents” to whom Mooney refers are the ACORN 8, a group of long-time ACORN activists who are angry about ACORN’s lawbreaking and corruption. I’m quoted in the article too.

I wrote about the ACORN 8 in the American Spectator earlier this year and have an article in this week’s Human Events arguing that ACORN should be probed for racketeering (RICO) law violations.

The William J. Clinton Foundation, which we profiled, is looking for a silver-tongued spokesperson to help it cover up misdeeds promote its programs.

The want ad, found at PR News Online, looks like this:

The late hotel magnate Leona Helmsley wanted the bulk of her estate to be spent on the care and welfare of dogs, but her trustees had other ideas.

Instead, they have decided to give only $1 million of the $5 billion estate for canine care.

“This is a trifling and embarrassingly small amount,” according to Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. “Mrs. Helmsley’s wishes are clearly being subverted.”

With just one 5,000th of the total estate of the animal lover being devoted to dogs, I am inclined to agree with Pacelle for a change.

Perhaps Helmsley sabotaged herself by not being specific enough. As the New York Times reports

After Mrs. Helmsley’s death in 2007, it was revealed that she had drafted a mission statement four years earlier listing two specific priorities for the distribution of her estate. The first was helping the poor, which she struck from the document a year later. The second was to provide for the care of dogs, although she added “and such other charitable activities as the trustees shall determine.”

Our senior fellow, Martin Morse Wooster, has explored at length what happens when philanthropists are not specific in their bequests or when their fortunes are hijacked by trustees who have different views. Wooster’s book is called The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of “Donor Intent.”  The third edition of the book is available at Amazon.com.

In a step forward for transparency in government, the White House has posted online the joint 2008 tax return (PDF file) of President and First Lady Obama. As far as I know this is a presidential first.

On adjusted gross income of $2,656,902, the couple received a $26,014 refund which they applied to their 2009 estimated taxes. The Obamas reported at pages 28 and 29 that they gave $172,050 to charity.

Loren A. Smith Jr., senior fellow for Labor and Employment Policy at the Institute for Liberty, has a good op-ed at the Fox Forum on the Obama administration’s attack on the charitable tax deduction in his budget. An excerpt:

Many observers were surprised when President Obama suggested cutting back the charitable tax deduction in his budget. However, that was only the latest left-wing threat to charity, and as of this writing, that idea may be defeated in Congress.

Potentially a much larger threat is a move among members of Congress and special interest groups to regulate how and where charitable giving takes place. If enacted, it would result in a vast thicket of federal regulations on how well-meaning individuals and groups can spend their charitable dollars. Many philanthropists would conclude that it’s just not worth the trouble, and many more would see some of their giving siphoned off to groups and causes they do not support.

How could this happen?

The Berkeley, California-based Greenlining Institute purports to support empowerment for minority communities, including urging foundations and philanthropists not to neglect those communities. It’s a worthy goal, but it doesn’t stop there. The Greenlining Institute supports government regulation to evaluate whether a private foundation’s giving is “diverse” and “local” enough. This would be followed by government regulations to compel charities to give money out according to government standards.

What’s Greenlining’s M.O.? Last year, the organization prompted a California state Assemblyman to introduce a bill, AB 624, which would have required some private foundations to disclose the race and gender (and in the bill’s initial form, the sexual orientation) of their board members, staff, and grantee staff. [...]

We published papers by John Gizzi on both topics. Here are links to his article on AB 624 and on the Greenlining Institute.

I wrote in the American Spectator about the Greenlining Institute and how it and other groups such as ACORN and La Raza helped caused the subprime mortgage crisis.

Larry Brilliant, a public health activist appointed to head Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, in February 2006, is leaving the post to become the corporation’s “chief philanthropy evangelist,” whatever that means.

John Reosti profiled Google.org in the November 2007 Foundation Watch.