An Unholy Mess

Too Big to Fail

Oxfam, which depends upon UK Government largesse, regularly hectors and lectures the world (especially the West) on its moral obligations to humanity.  It regularly takes up Left-wing causes into its megaphone and trumpets them forth, doing its best to make other human beings feel guilty (and so give Oxfam more money).  

Now it appears the organization is an unholy mess.  This, from the Daily Telegraph:

Oxfam refused to ban staff from using prostitutes saying it would "infringe their civil liberties", a training manual has revealed.   The guidance, still available on the charity's website, says that they "strongly discourage" their workers from paying for sex but a total ban would be "impractical".

The same manual reveals that Oxfam has "dismissed staff for exploiting or abusing beneficiaries or members of the local community in virtually every recent humanitarian response".

The document has emerged as the charity faces a growing scandal over its handling of use of prostitutes by its staff in Haiti, where sex work is illegal and some of whom were alleged to be underage.  The charity has since faced revelations of sex for aid and abuse of teenagers in British charity shops. 

Oxfam receives 32 million pounds of taxpayers' money annually.

Government Overreach

Speech is Free, Only When the Bureaucrats Approve

Oh, what a silly mess we have made for ourselves.  Apparently it is not kosher to be a registered charity in New Zealand and also be involved in political advocacy.  As soon as a charity calls upon the state to take a certain course of action or dole out money for this or that cause, or the Parliament is pressured by a charity to legislate in a certain way, it ceases to be a charity.  Well, it ought to be de-registered as a charity, apparently.

Maybe not.  Around about this point, these "positions" of the government's Charities Services begin to experience the deaths of a thousand qualifications, carve outs, "on the other hands" and "maybes".   It all began when the DIA Charities Services threatened to de-registered Family First as a charity.   According to a report in the NZ Herald:

Modern Mouthpieces for Marx

Deformed Charities

It seems that more-than-a-few charities end up morphing into partisan hucksters promoting Leftist propaganda.  It is understandable, if deeply regrettable.   More than a few Christian based charities have travelled this road to corruption, which is even more deeply regrettable.

Those charities with a global horizon end up being confronted by genocides, famines, and gross injustices.  Of wars and rumours of wars there is no end.  Relying upon faithful donors in the "private sector" (that is, non-state parties) means that every such charity has to live with the dissatisfaction of never being able to make a difference in a global sense.  That is, they can only "win" in a micro, isolated sense.  They cannot win globally.

Faced with this perpetual failure many such charities go over to the dark side.  That is, they seek more and more support and funding from governments.  Why?  Because governments have the big bucks; with support from state-parties they can really make a difference--or so they tell themselves.  Within a decade or so, these now-State-dependant charities become fronts and mouthpieces for Leftist propaganda.  They increasingly look to governments to fulfill their mission.

The Institute of Economic Affairs profiles one such compromised charity: Oxfam.

Letter From the UK (About Pseudo Charities)

Fake Tories Cheer on the Long March of the Left

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph
February 8, 2014 

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical". Thomas Jefferson, 1779.

One of the curses of modern life is the plethora of "charitable" lobbying groups demanding that the government take more regulatory action in areas where most of us believe the state has no business interfering.

Almost every day you read in the papers that some apparently grassroots movement, supposedly speaking for all of us, thinks more should be done to stop us drinking, smoking, eating sugar or salt, make us less sexist, force us to spend more on foreign aid or environmental issues. But if that wasn't annoying enough, here's the worst thing of all: we're paying for these unrepresentative, mostly left-leaning lobby groups with our taxes.  [NZ also is awash with the same egregious travesty, Ed.]