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Friday, August 26, 2005

Non-Profits Can Be Corrupt Too

I have been told the non-profit sector of our economy is the fastest-growing part of our economy. That said, I believe there is a lot of fraud, personal greed and deceit in this sector and that does not include the highly-compensated (overpaid) execs running many of the non-profits.

The financial data for all non-profits should be 100% transparent and available for public scrutiny. There are three types of non-profits in this country:
  • The traditional church or religious organization that pays its employees below-average salaries and pays even less to its priests/ministers and nuns.
  • The small and struggling non-profit that scrapes by on its meager donations and the work of its volunteers.
  • And the mega non-profits like the Pew Foundation, bureaucratic paper-pushers like the United Way and mega churches like that run by Pat Roberson.

This last group (like Robertson's) is where the gross malfeasance typically occurs. Just today, the WAPO (link provided below) reported today that Pat Robertson is making a bundle in a for-profit company selling his special milkshake and he may have screwed one of the product developers out of the lucrative deal.

The Pew Foundation has billions of dollars and one of its initiatives is "The Internet and American Life" or some other such bull-crap. Can you imagine what the original Pew family donors would think about their gigantic bequest being wasted on something like that??? Yes, I said wasted. The Pew Foundation is always butting their noses into public issues like sufficient spending on education- why doesn't PEW (as an experiment) give a billion or so of its loot to a single school district to see if great gobs money can really solve education problems? Nah, that would never happen cause then the Pew Foundation would go out of business and the high-paid execs would lose their jobs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/25/AR2005082501806_pf.html

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