DOES INVESTMENT IN CHARITY CORRUPT GOVERNMENT?
Which Republican candidate is right?
Herbert Hoover or Donald Trump?
August 31, 2016
In 1928, Republican presidential
candidate Herbert Hoover had made his national political reputation in the wake
of World War I first as head of the American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee’s
relief efforts first in Belgium, thence to the American Relief Administration
for Europe generally, and ultimately Secretary of Commerce. He was a believer in small government, of
private economic growth, whose entry into government rested on his reputation
as a not-for-profit charitable entrepreneur.
He had the misfortune to become president just months before the 1929
stock market crash, and sudden onset of the Great Depression, even as he tried
to obtain government funds for the public projects that became his 1932
Democratic opponent FDR’s New Deal.
Today, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump calls Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s relations with the internationally well-regarded
charities funded and administered by the Clinton foundation founded by her
ex-president husband.
Every politician has a
constituency, a calling to become informed directly, as Eleanor Roosevelt did
for her husband. The only corruption I
look for in charities is the percentage of income they spend for administrative
costs, and that of the Clinton Foundation is low.
Excessive administrative and
shareholder profit-taking aside, “corruption” to me connotes inside government
tracks for contractors who promote shareholder profit at public expense, as for
instance in military contracts and contracts for private for-profit
incarceration administration and services.
To suggest that ties with internationally recognized charitable
organizations in itself implies corruption rather than collaboration is
remarkably, profoundly un-Republican, and virtually oxymoronic. No wonder Republicans are divided. Love and peace, hal
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