When Haiti got destroyed by a Hurricane, the American Red Cross sprang to action like a well-oiled machine: Vivid News videographs of very needy people in dire need of aid, broadcast around the world. See the destruction, see the suffering, we must do something; send money to 555 con-me-more. They collected (officially) over 400 million dollars. The tangible result of their efforts on the ground? Accusations of child prostitution, maybe even abduction, and eight (or four) a very few little houses built as their contribution to “rebuilding a shattered community.” Four hundred million dollars, six sub-economic housing scheme example structures. And child smuggling. That’s charity for you.
George Bernard Shaw lived to see the first institutionalised “child farms”, as he called them. Orphanages, believe it or not, are often (not always) very profitable organisations. What with government grants, subsidies, and those delectable, unaccountable and unarguably necessary public donations. There is a continuous stream of evidence that many (not all) of these child institutions are used as brothels by those privileged above common law. This seems to be an international problem, but pointing out obvious links may be libellous. In all fairness, it must be pointed out that this service is available only to the top echelons of our society, it’s not just any jerk that gets to get jerked off by a child raised to the purpose, oh no, you have to be a very senior police officer, priest, mayor, provincial commissioner, that sort of thing, only the best class of person is allowed free range as pederast, only the most respectable scum get to screw kiddies with no repercussions. The poor are only allowed on the supply-side of this industry, they are judicially very much discouraged from actual participation in The Lifestyle. Poor people supply kids for the orphanages where the rich will employ them usefully, or at least profitably while they’re still young and pretty. I am not aware of instances where the children shared significantly in the admission fee. You don’t get invited to that sort of party for free, and the cost is never advertised. If you do get in for no money, be assured you will pay, one day, maybe not tomorrow or the day after, but one day someone will show you the pictures they took at that orphanage party…and now you know how politicians are made! By shamefully compromising venal idiots who have delusions of adequacy, and they remain in power as long as they remain subject to blackmail… all politically influential parties operate this way, it is the way of the CACASTOCRACY.
Of course, you can only party so often, parties need money, and this is where our compassion for poor and neglected children becomes a business plan. It starts with that shiny lady with her table full of distressing imagery at the entrance to your local shopping mall or maybe you got one of those that come knocking at any unguarded door. After a minute of targeted guilt, you hand over as much as you can afford, and with a gracious smile that accuses you of holding back the proper portion of your wealth, the money disappears into a little metal lockbox. You have given to charity, doesn’t that feel swell? Well, in actuality, you have injected a certain amount of cash into an elaborate and well regulated industry, populated by financiers and fund managers and financial vehicles and all of them are consciously committing serial fraud the likes of which you may find hard to believe. For every buck you donate, three cents goes to whomever you gifted it to. Well-run organisations have been known to get five cents onto the street. Really professional ones, like the Gates or Clinton foundations, turns every cent you give into another sent of government subsidy, without ever getting anything more useful than a couple of branded t-shirts and some cool photo-opportunities onto the streets they vowed to uplift. That’s when they are not busy killing children with experimental medical and/or nutritional programmes, Always subsidised by taxes. Always.
It works like this: Bill manufactures vaccines at ten cents each. He markets them at a dollar, then he travels the world, where he meets political decisionmakers at elaborately staged and publicised events where he makes them an offer they cannot refuse: “Match my charitable gift of vaccines cent-for-cent, or I’ll get the entire press to scream out your unwillingness to accept a gift to the dear people of the land.” After ten million injections, five million of which our government paid for, mister Bill sits with five million bucks in the bank, twenty thousand worth in manufacturing cost he will probably recover by not paying taxes, and a big, charitable smile for the cameras. But this is how the real big blokes play, let’s get back to the shiny lady at her table.
No matter how much concern our smiling angel with the sad pictures and the collection tin manages to radiate, we can safely assume she is not flying off to Tibet to hand over our contributions for the week to the poor suffering Kawasakistanians whose village fell off the mountainside. She does not even know where Kawasakistan is. More importantly, you are not allowed to just slap together a shrine to someone’s suffering and start collecting cash. As said, the charity industry is very well managed, and the tax collector certainly wants his cut if there’s money lying around. To prove that you are indeed a (tax exempt) charity, you need to show your official Fund-Raising Number. How you obtain this number is a matter of much discussion, especially amongst unsuccessful applicants for such a number. The shiny lady in her small but luxurious sedan and thick lipstick probably does not have one of these magic numbers, so she is collecting on behalf of someone who does have a number, further up on the charity ladder.
As nice as she tries to smile, she does not stand there for her health, she might be a volunteer, but that only means she is not an employee, she still gets paid. As a free agent, she works on commission; she takes a percentage. It is difficult to guesstimate the median percentage held back by the Table, but 15-65 percent is a realistic spread. That is if the donor waited to see his donations recorded; quick change hardly ever make it to the books… It is hard work, standing in the sun in a business suit and so much hair dye it hurts to carry your head. Grant them their cut, surely, and then it is handed over to those who have the actual FR Number. The Number is usually a formal business-like operation. The Number has Overheads. The Number is known to take 75%, but most stick around 45% or so, according to the very occasional news article, usually about fraud. The Number, of course, belongs to some one entity. No organisation run by committee could ever collect, manage and distribute the many millions flowing over many thousands of Tables in thousands of cities the world over. As a fact, your Number is only good within a specified municipal district, from there it gets handed over to more serious people; financiers and banksters. The fees at this junction may shock you into never donating a cent again, so let’s be civil and keep it at 45%.
Your money may be destined for some foreign state, so you need another layer of legitimacy; you cannot just send money around the world, taxes and all that, plus we know you-all are a bunch of crooked money-washers, and the only way to prevent criminals from sending money to other criminals, is to have it scrubbed, rinsed and re-sanctified by the World Bank, IMF or other organ of repute. Your one dollar donation to some poor drek in Africa has just turned into half a dollar’s of interest-bearing LOAN. We shall not discuss IMF and GOOD GOVERNANCE here, suffice to say no poor man ever benefits long-term from anything the international banksters touch. Let us, instead, imagine you donated to something closer to heart: say child cancer.
When the Number hands your money upstream, they do so in elaborate ceremonial settings, much like Black Masses or Blood Orgies. Flashing lights, flashing smiles, flashy clothes and cars and tiny little titbits for the guests to daintily criticize with their mouths full. The people you sent that money to, will never see the insides of one of these do’s. Not even as waiters, these people are serious about their personal security, their servants come in boxed sets, it seems. Of course, these very elaborate parties cost a lot of money, but you were not the only one to donate, and tonight, we present a cheque representing sixteen or twenty percent of the original offering. We can do some arithmetic later, for the examples used so far, let us assume 23% of your donation gets handed over to the Cancer Association du jour. That’s way more than the 3% we initially stated. That’s because the story has only just gotten crazy:
From the Cancer Association, your money is given to the Child Welfare Group, who donate to two groups: Sick Children and Medicine for Children. The medicine portion goes to Chronic Meds office, who gives to oral medication department, who gives to the oral medicines research group, who gives to the cancer group, from there the child cancer group, from there to the Lymphoma team you saw on the Table diagram. The Sick Children portion will be administration-fee’d and Overheaded in a similar manner, and presto! Three cents to the buck ends up as subsidised sandwiches to a graduate student working for free. Don’t think for one moment the CANCER INDUSTRY is going to slaughter the golden goose by suggesting we clean up the food chain instead of researching little pills. And here is the most despicable facet of that little cancer pill: it’s frigging expensive!
Every year, the poor of the world donate hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to medical research. If you add the glamour-gifts from the painted faces on TV and business pages, it must add up to trillions by now. When and if anything useful comes of the research we so generously sponsored via Shiny Ladies and taxes and subsidies and special state-sponsored programmes, if anything good comes out of it and a useful new drug or procedure is discovered, then it goes to market as expensively as possible. The excuse for this is that the pharmaceutical corporation that is offering us their marvellous new miracle cure, had to spend soo-oo-ooo much money, and sooo-ooo much resources, “do you realise how expensive research is?” that they could not possibly sell it for a cent less, they also have a right to outlandish profits, you know! Where the hell did our donations go, then? Oh, right, back to the top of this page then, “The Economics of Charity”, I think this rant is called?
If you gave your money to save melting ice bears or to fight poverty in Africa (or anywhere else) I am afraid the news is not even as good as the story about the pharmaceuticals. Last we followed that money, it got stuck at the IMF. The IMF only lends money to deserving partner governments that have submitted to the rules, regulations and processes of GOOD GOVERNANCE. Your donation, after it has been leached by every bankster and shiny do-gooder that could manage to ‘touch’ your money and extract a fee, what is left, is LENT to that deserving government. A deserving government is one that understands the money is to be spent on pre-specified projects, executed by pre-approved contractors, who will be paid from the IMF fund, to keep our dirty little fingers off it, they will be paid predetermined rates, and all cost overruns will be for the account of the client state. Anyone that has ever had but one lesson in business principles can follow that thread to its ultimate conclusion: Predatory business practices by multinational corporations with total disdain for local laws and customs will ensure not one concrete thing is left over by the time the local community has recovered from the shock of environmental destruction and economic degradation by imported workers who could afford to turn an entire local tribe into prostitutes and drug-runners. Then we must raise taxes to pay for this wonderful advancement, because that IMF loan is a loan, not a donation, even if they call it things like “aid” and “development” it is still a loan, a loan that will probably never be paid back, and that’s when we suddenly have another influx of urbanizing rural youth, because their traditional hunting ground was turned into a DEER FOREST by that other army we all love, the World Wildlife Fund, the caretaker of sovereign territory ceded to international bond-holders. Then we all stand in queue at the gate of the former tribal homeland, waiting for the privilege to pay for the honour of watching a deer or elephant running around looking for a way out, like fish in a bowl. The tribe will get little or nothing for the loss of their heritage, but they will soon make beautiful photographs of poverty and need to decorate the next Table for a Shiny Lady to shake her tin at you in a guilt-inducing way.
Around here, we never donate, but when a man weak of hunger asks for a ten-bob, at least buy him a bread and a quarter chicken, in case you feel his drinking habits are not your problem. If he feels a beer will fill him better than a sandwich, who am I to argue, I’ll still buy him a meatpie if I can, but like hell will I put my hard-earned money into some rattling can at the end of a perfumed arm that supports a waxy death-mask grimace as it tries to guilt me into turning out my pockets. Especially the ones that promise to use the money for the purpose of locking unwanted children away from public view, there to be dehumanised and serially raped by those who call themselves my betters.
Three cents to the rand. We can change that, but then it won’t be tax-deductable.
