US Tax-Free Foundations Underwrite Global Mad Cause Disease

The body politic and the social order of the modern industrial and informational is sick. A world built on the ideals of free-market Capitalism, personal rights, free speech, equality under the law, honest elections, and sovereign nation security is under attack like a healthy body fighting cancer. The US and the rest of the free world are infested with political, ideological, and cultural upheaval.

The symptoms smack us right in our faces, metaphorically speaking. Absurd and farcical policies, dogma, and acceptance of aberrational behavior are the basis for powerful popular movements. Any opposition is denounced, degraded, and demonised.

Manufactured crisis after crisis debilitates our ability to maintain a first-world standard of living, personal or national security, or freedom. Some major free-world cities are already descending to almost third-world levels. Free radical transformation and revolution are impossible without creating a climate of chaos.

Albert Mohler Jr., writing "The New Left and the radical transformation of America"[i] correctly says, "If you want to understand the ideological controversies behind today's headlines, you need to look to the past…As we know it today, America has been reshaped by the ideas and energies of the New Left—and the revolution continues." Mohler believed the origin of the revolution began in the 1960s. But the political, social, and economic revolution was established by the progressive collectivist movement of 100 years earlier and continues today. Neither the nature of money nor human beings change.

The Human Element In Politics

Individuals and masses of people can act delusional. It is what Charles Mackay wrote in 1841 about in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Current scientific studies reveal that individuals and whole societies, when facing out-of-the-normal circumstances or situations, regularly respond in predictably irrational ways. People act on their emotions rather than using thoughtful analysis.

We function daily because we act on our habits and customs built up since birth. In nature, these act as energy-saving shortcuts for human beings. People automatically operate following those learned beliefs. The deeper the habit and custom are ingrained, the stronger the mental resistance to change will be. Philosophers, logicians, and psychologists have long recognised that incongruency bias or cognitive dissonance distorts a person's or crowd's perceptions.  It is perception that controls how people act and behave.

In politics, it is the social groups, the tribes, and a person’s place in the relevant hierarchy which is determinative of perception. The idea of someone or a group being “left” or “right” makes no sense.  There is no fixed philosophical reference point, the baseline, of a single and enduring point of view from which to measure variances or degrees of ideological polarisation.  People are either coerced into acting in a certain manner or they voluntarily accept it because they do not know they have a choice otherwise.

This aspect of human behavior was explored by Étienne de La Boétie who, in 1552 or 1553, wrote "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude”. He delved into both tyranny and the nature of State rule. People will obediently follow inculcated beliefs mostly because they do not know otherwise; and learn early on to accept their position in life without thinking. It becomes an ingrained habit.  

Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince, understood that power must be used to control the people. He advised the Prince that it is better to be feared than loved.  Unlike Boétie’s view of voluntary obedience, Machiavelli favoured coercion when it came to ruling.

Political populism, national economic movements, or revolutions are nothing new. Current scientific studies have not yielded any better explanations for them than Gustave Le Bon, who in 1890 wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind; or Eric Hoffer, who in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) related that a true believer can be easily led or manipulated to follow no matter what. Elias Canetti, author of Crowds and Power (1960) told us that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or mob for that matter – there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. 

Follow The Money

Hierarchies or stratification of classes of people (feudal lords and peasants for example) are the norms of society historically. It is built into us as basic instinct. Those with power rule over those without. Human nature being what it is, people equate wealth with the power and control over everyone else's political, economic, social, and cultural life.

It takes money, and lots of it, to fight a war or any other political, economic, social or cultural battle.  Examples of the power of money are seen in the United States from colonial days. The Revolutionary War was an international affair. General George Washington is credited with winning the Revolutionary War and creation of the United States. However, it was Haym Salomon, an immigrant Jewish financier, who skillfully arranged for the money from European sources, and using his own, who ultimately paid for victory.

In Women's Quarterly Magazine Summer 1997, Gil Troy wrote "Money and Politics: The Oldest Connection". Troy relates that President Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, stated, "Money is power". He tells us, "In the United States of America—and everywhere else—politics is about power, and money is a form of power.”  

By the 1850s, America's evolution from an agrarian society to an industrial one gave rise to great fortunes. Concurrently, starting in the mid-1800s, immigrants from Europe brought with them the Marxist ideal of class warfare, underpinning the political movement of socialist collectivism. The Socialist Party of America was born and flourished from 1900 to 1912.

The Progressive movement then absorbed most of the members of the Socialist Party while the Communist Party members stayed loyal to the international power structure. Progressive political interests, like Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, combined to achieve President Wilson's election and bring Progressivism into fuller bloom.

Under Wilson, the Constitution was amended, and the Income Tax Act was enacted in 1913, followed by establishing the Federal Reserve as the country's central bank. The Creel Committee was formed in 1917 by Wilson to control the flow of public information. It began and formalised propaganda and censorship as a governmental function.

Tax-Exempt Foundations

By the beginning of the nineteenth-century, socialist ideals and progressive politics combined and became the prevailing governmental philosophy. The educational system, supported by progressive leaning educational foundations, became its training ground.  The graduates and others of the same beliefs began infiltrating political offices, governmental bureaucracies, and private financial businesses.  

The uber-rich of the day, the elite international minded oligarchs like Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and others, established foundations. These contained vast amounts of money, which enabled them to leverage the power of their wealth to influence or direct the social, economic, and political policies of the United States and other countries. And that wealth was held tax-free in perpetuity.

After World War I, the economy of the United States moved toward global expansion. Then came the depression, and under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal was implemented, dramatically altering the allocation of political power and turning the government into a massive social engineering machine. Tax-exempt foundations with their massive wealth influenced policy and, at the same time, provided a fluid cover-story for the foundation founders to make more money.  We still see this in operation today. While foundations promote and persuade everyone to slow down climate change by creating sustainable energy, the founders or their friends privately own and operate the solar or wind farms, or otherwise build solar panels and windmills – all receiving governmental tax benefits and financial support on top.

The New Deal established the Welfare State—for the poor and the rich – along with the dramatic enlargement of the federal bureaucracy called the Administrative State. Its enforcement power is exercised by the Deep State. The Supreme Court and concomitantly the entire federal judiciary played their part as the Shadow Government. And Congress with its nefarious financial dealing became The Swamp. The lowly taxpayers who pay all the bills are the Dupes.  

The end of World War II dampened socialist and communist political interests and the other collectivist deadly dogmas of fascism (under Mussolini) and Nazism (The National Socialist German Workers Party). Collectivism is neither left nor right.  The differences are primarily a matter of whether the government as senior is in partnership with private industry as junior, owns all the means of production, or some hybrid of those – like Maoism.

From the early 1900s through the 1950s, the original tax-exempt foundations grew massively and were joined by thousands of other foundations. That they have benefitted society is not be denied. But billions upon billions of dollars were hidden from public view by effectively de minimis accountability. It became obvious that substantial amounts of money went for prohibited political purposes. The stench from the controversy became so great that the House of Representatives could no longer ignore it.    

In 1952, the Cox Committee began hearings on "To Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations". It was met with limited success. The more determined Reece Committee followed in 1953, providing detailed information on the extensive misuse of tax-exempt foundation money to advance a collectivist ideology to radically use their resources "for un-American activities and subversive activities or purposes not in the interest or tradition of the United States."

The two-part Report, over 1000 pages, reads as if it was an investigation of today's circumstances. 

"Large foundations… seem to be dedicated to promoting specific views on such matters as the welfare state, the United Nations, American foreign policy, the nature of the American economy, and so on, rather than presenting an objective and unbiased examination of these issues." Emphasis Added (Part 1 page 28).

" in the realm of the social sciences many foundations have not observed the highest standards of scholarship and ethics, … In fact, the want of ethics and the misrepresentations of some foundations are so low that a business corporation doing the same thing would be condemned by the Federal Trade Commission and held guilty of false advertising. " Emphasis Added (Part 1 page 29).

In a part focused on education and the socialist revolution, the Report states:

"We propose to offer evidence which seems to indicate that this "revolution"…(and) "this money and found their way into the powerful agencies of education and Government. Here in these pivotal centers were combined the professors, the politicians, and lawyers… Foundations, education, and Government form a triangle of influences… (page 469)… Evidence of actual Communist entry into foundation organizations is supplied in the Cox committee record". (Part 1 page 471).

In looking at the influence of Government and the attempts to radically transform America, the Report states:

"Over the past 50 years sweeping changes have occurred in this country in the functions and activities of the Federal Government …, that the departure has been referred to as a "revolution"… Much of this planning was done with the aid of social scientists in Government employ and of outside individuals or groups… receiving very substantial aid from the large foundations… … A well-organized central core of administrators with a large number of uninformed followers is standard practice in such organized effort." Emphasis Added (Part 1 page 627).

Creating The Global Totalitarian State

A video interview, "Tax-Exempt Foundations, The Enemy Within", of Norman Dodd, Chief Investigator of the 1953 Reece Committee, was made by Dr Stan Monteith in 1982. Dodd discussed the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations. He revealed that major US foundations have been promoting a social science and political agenda that has little to do with charity or good works. The objective has been to move the US into acceptance of a world government, based on the principles of socialism, which is to be ruled covertly by those same interests which control the foundations with everyone else being obedient.

The global elite have not been secretive about their goal to rule over a New World Order. For example:

James Warburg, part of the Warburg banking family and financial advisor to President Franklin D, Roosevelt, testified before a Senate Congressional subcommittee in 1950, saying, "We shall have world government whether you like it or not, by conquest or consent."

David Rockefeller, of the Rockefeller financial family, speaking at the Trilateral Commission meeting in 1991, said, in thanking the national press for their discretion for almost 40 years as the march toward a "World Government" was being prepared… "The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

In "Forget the Marxists: Here’s the Real Enemy of America"[ii], Frederick Hink writes that "Today, we see the WEF [The World Economic Forum] …." He quotes Larry Fink’s, CEO of Black Rock, 2022 Letter to CEOs: "Capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change…When we harness the power of both public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things." And quoting from the World Economic Forum, The Great Reset, "Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum's communities, The Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honors the dignity of every human being."

Conclusion

For decades the progressive/socialist/communist/fascist and now Maoist movement has been underwritten by financially enormous tax-exempt foundations. No one doubts that much of the money distributed by these foundations goes towards worthy causes. But foundations are also massive sources of money being used to radically transform our society and its governance. In frank terms, as the Reece Committee reported, foundations are financing a revolution. 

The news of the today reaches us from varied sources. Whatever their point of view, slant, or spin-of-the-day, the world suffers from people believing in absurdity and acting on it. 

There are only a few things that can be done when dealing with people. While human beings normally suffer from dysfunctionality, intentionally manufactured Mad Cause Disease should be ended. It is obvious that if the funding from tax-exempt foundations ended so would a great deal of the manufacturing of sickness and the histrionics of wedge political issues.

The course of treatment is straightforward enough. Make foundations subject to a reasonably short rule against perpetual existence. Require detailed reporting that is public information. Since the donors do not need the money, then eliminate any estate or gift tax benefits. Money for charitable, scientific, or artistic endeavors are tax-exempt while anything in the social or political fields are not. It may not cure the problem of the world suffering from Mad Cause Disease but it’s a course of treatment that will work to ease the sufferings. 

As George Orwell said in Animal Farm where the pigs decide all animals have to build windmills, “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?” As Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Footnotes:

[i] https://wng.org/opinions/the-new-left-and-the-radical-transformation-of-america-1655293131

[ii]https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/forget_the_marxists_heres_the_real_enemy_of_america.html

Denis Kleinfeld
Denis Kleinfeld is highly regarded as a lawyer, teacher and author. His private legal practice, Kleinfeld Legal Advisors, is located in North Miami Beach Florida. He is an Adjunct Professor at the LLM Wealth and Risk Management Program, Texas A & M School of Law. His private practice focuses on strategy planning of domestic and international tax, legal, financial, matters involving the wealth and risk management for private clients and private businesses. He is co-author of the two-volume treatise, “Practical International Tax Planning,” 4th Ed. published by Practicing Law Institute. He is the contributing author on Foreign Trusts published in “Administration of Trusts in Florida” by The Florida Bar and authored chapters for the American Bar Association’s in “Asset Protection Strategies: Wealth Preservation Planning with Domestic and Offshore Entities Vols. I and II.” He is a contributing author to the “LexisNexis Guide to FATCA”.