上海的月亮: EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: Jews are Plundering the World – Part 11

Introduction

A Brief Case Study: CARE International

“Program Activities” – Where the Money Actually Goes

The System

The Extraction Thesis – The Deeper Pattern

The Disappearing Jew

The Deeper Question

The Scale of Government Funding

A Jewish Patronage Network

China Does it Differently

Introduction

It is an axiom that, at least in the English-speaking countries, the two best ways to live a high, all-expenses-paid life, are to start either a religion or a charity. Both produce a constant flow of cash, with the disposition of that cash either not monitored or documented in only the most general terms. And wherever we find a flow of cash and little to no oversight, we will find Jews. Jews don’t create religions but they do indeed create and/or take ownership of charities, leading to many astonishing tales of looting, obfuscating, and greed. It is because of the Jewish influence that charities have become financialised, focusing primarily or only on the flow of money, with the supposed beneficiaries relegated to last place. This is the identical process that has occurred – for the same reasons and by the same proponents – in corporations, non-profits, schools, hospitals, and universities. This financialisation and looting applies equally to small local or national charities and the large international bodies, even those that are UN-sponsored.

In 1999 when Serbia was being pulverized by US and NATO bombs, CARE Canada sent out an urgent request for donations to help relieve the human misery in the Balkans. I sent them $100, which I assumed would be delivered to les misérables in Yugoslavia. Not so. For 12 months after my donation, I received every month a promotion package from CARE, asking for more money. Those packages were large, heavy, and printed on fine-quality paper. I calculated that the advertising materials – plus the postage – would have cost about $100 over that year. CARE didn’t send my money to Yugoslavia. Instead, they spent it on advertising – directed at me – in attempts to extract more money.

This experience, and many others, confirm that today’s large charities are precisely traditional Ponzi schemes. CARE and all other large charities have carried this to a ridiculous extreme. The truth of charities today is that they have become so financialised they will spend $99 of public donations on advertising, if that will bring in $100 in further donations. Western charities are no longer about “charity”; they are entirely about money. Their financialisation creates a dynamic where they are trapped in an escalating cycle of spending donor money to find more donors. Little of the money (sometimes none) actually goes to the intended beneficiaries for whom the donations are made.

Their financial model is important and worthy of understanding: something that, in economics, we call “diminishing marginal returns”. This means that as we continue to spend money on fundraising promotions, we receive increasingly smaller donations. As an example, a small local charity spends $100 on fundraising and obtains $5,000 in donations. But the next $100 spent will recover perhaps only $4,000, and the next only $3,000. Soon, the new donations are only in the hundreds of dollars. And, at the end, our last $100 spent on fundraising will recover only another $100 in new donations. Our “marginal return” has now diminished to zero, and we stop only when reaching this point.

Inherent in this is the fact that, of new donations received, the first “disbursement” is to pay the salaries and expenses of the management and the overhead of the organisation. Most of the remainder is allocated to further fund-raising. Disbursements to the poor and needy – the actual initial purpose of the charity – are last. This is how the large charities operate. They have become very much like American universities today – financial institutions following a model of revenue maximisation. The focus is now almost entirely on the money; helping the poor and needy is relegated to near irrelevance.

Most of us tend to think of these charities in simple and naïve terms as we might consider a food bank: we donate food to the bank and their staff give the food directly to those in need. A two-step process. But the large charities don’t work like that. The executives and staff of CARE do not go into the slums and personally hand out your cash donation to the poor. Instead, your donations enter a “distribution chain” which can include multiple related organisations, each with its own overhead. None of this is recorded in the charity’s financial statements. And, in fact, cash is never distributed to the needy. Instead, the money is used for nebulous aid and development “programs”, which terms can mean anything. The “development projects” in particular mean that none of the charity’s cash receipts (donations from the public) are ever distributed to anyone. In real life, most of the money is retained by the charity and associated organisations or NGOs, and used for expenses and program overhead.

We are told (and propagandised) to believe that large registered charities like CARE International actually distribute 80% or 90% of their revenues to the intended beneficiaries, often as food but perhaps even in cash. That belief is ill-placed. Many, perhaps even most, large international charities spend as much as 80% of their total revenue on administration expenses and advertising. The money goes on large salaries, lovely offices, first-class travel, expensive cars and high living. The industry metric that donors are advised to watch for is that fundraising costs alone should not exceed 35% of related contributions – which means the industry itself has set a surprisingly high bar for acceptable overhead.

A Brief Case Study: CARE International

Looking through the published financial reports of CARE international does not leave a reader materially enlightened. [1] CARE claims it spends “89% of all funds raised on programs to benefit the world’s poorest communities”, but this statement hides more than it reveals. CARE further divides its distributions roughly 50-50 between “development program activities” and “humanitarian program activities”, but this claim also hides more than it reveals. No definitions are offered of these terms, and all public information is so general and deliberately nebulous as to be useless.

The financial statements of these charities (using CARE as an example) do not separate expenses in a clear form. They list “development program activities” and “humanitarian program activities” as expense categories. But each of these have administration and other expenses included (buried) in them and not identified. Further, they then often list “fundraising” as a separate item, leading us to believe this is the total advertising and promotion expense in all its forms, but it is no such thing. The “program activities” have their own fundraising and promotion expenses, but these are never identified.

There is no indication that any charitable donations are distributed in cash (or even kind) to the needy. CARE’s financial statements cleverly and obtusely say around 40% is spent on “development program activities” and another 40% on “humanitarian program activities”. This is not distribution of funds to the poor. The revenue received is disbursed into unidentified “program activities”. From the financial statements, most expenses are buried within the definition of these unidentified “activities”.

“Program Activities” – Where the Money Actually Goes

CARE USA: (left to right) Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE, Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, Ambassador Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Abigail Disney, executive producer of the PBS mini-series “Women, War & Peace” answer questions during the panel discussion after the screening of “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” during the CARE Conference & International Women’s Day Celebration on March 7, 2012 in Washington, D.C. (Photos by ©Amanda Lucidon/CARE).

Consider again – more carefully this time – CARE’s claim that it “spends 89% of all funds raised on programs to benefit the world’s poorest communities”. In 2024, CARE received well over $1 billion in revenue from all sources. Does this mean that $890 million was distributed in cash or kind to the needy and miserable? Not at all. In fact, it is entirely possible that little or nothing was distributed, and that the money was spent internally on various undefined “program activities”.

A close reading of a charity’s financial statements reveals more disingenuous public relations than finance or fact. Again, CARE International claimed that in 2024 it spent “89% of all funds raised on programs”, but these programs are a black box. In examining the detailed financial statements for CARE USA, the statements show total receipts of $840 million. From this total were paid expenses of $780 million for “Program activities”. And how was this $780 million disbursed? Look at the numbers below. $670 million was spent on salaries, perquisites and other staff benefits, expense accounts, and funds passed on to other departments in the chain. Of the remaining $110 million, $90 million was spent on advertising.

Personnel costs: $235 million

Materials & Services $216 million

Subgrants $219 million

Total $670 million

Now, when CARE claim to spend only perhaps 10% on fundraising and overhead, the real expenses are buried in the “program activities”. What this means is that these “activities” contain expenses which include salaries for CARE employees, travel, office occupancy, equipment, and professional services. It includes grants to other related NGOs, which then spend the money on their own overhead. The money flows through a chain of intermediaries and overhead is extracted at each link. From this alone, we can see that at least 75% of the $1.1 billion in total revenue was spent internally, and perhaps much more.

Program spending is not cash distribution. It is “materials and services”, “personnel costs” (i.e., salaries, benefits and expense accounts for the management and staff), “travel and transportation”, “occupancy”, and “subgrants”. Each of these categories represents spending within the institutional apparatus, not a transfer to beneficiaries. The poor, the hungry, the displaced, are the stated purpose of the organisation, but they are not the primary destination of its funds.

Consider the “CARE Package” feature on CARE’s website, where donors are invited to select specific items: for example, a $77 donation to “cultivate a leader”. But CARE admits in fine print that “the items and activities you place in a CARE package are [only] symbolic examples of CARE’s work … Your donation supports CARE’s global mission and activities, rather than providing a particular initiative or item”. This is deception by fine print. The donor believes she is buying a specific item for a specific person. She is not. CARE are clearly stating their intention to apply a donor’s funds in whatever manner and to whatever end they choose. This is pure dishonest advertising, an attempt to solicit donations with no tangible, real world corollary or demonstrable effects. It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who are cynical and skeptical about how large charities present themselves and distribute their funds.

In fairness, the financial statements do not show zero impact. In 2024, CARE Canada’s programs included the distribution of 3,000 hygiene kits, 860 bed sets, and 240 sets of winter clothes in Gaza; financial literacy training for 1,376 women in Morocco; health care access for some women in Haiti. These are real activities that provide real benefit to real people, but they are not the distribution of cash donations to the poor. They are institutional programs with institutional costs. These are not what the donor imagines when she gives $100 to “help the poor.” She imagines her money going directly to a hungry child. It does not. It goes to a complex institutional apparatus that delivers services, not cash, and those “services” consume most of the money in the process of delivery. In simple terms, CARE International spends most of its revenue from public donations and government grants on providing unidentified services to unidentified people. Most of that money is spent within the organisation itself, not distributed to needy beneficiaries.

The System

My experience with CARE Canada of donating $100 intended for a poor person in Serbia, watching it consumed by advertising and fundraising, was not an anomaly. It was the normal operation of a system that has been captured by a Jewish financial elite that benefits from the extraction. The organisation that sent me monthly promotional packages was not failing its mission. It was fulfilling its mission as defined by its own institutional logic: sustain the institution, grow the donor base, maintain the flow of government funding. Delivering cash to the poor is not the primary objective; that is a secondary outcome, achieved incidentally if at all. Cash is never distributed directly to the poor. The charity delivers “services”, not cash transfers. The donor who imagines her money reaching a hungry child is being misled.

My donation to CARE was not stolen. It was used exactly as the system was designed to use it: to sustain the institution and to generate more donations. The poor person in Serbia never saw my money because the system was not designed for her to see it. It was designed for me to give it, for CARE to spend it on fundraising, and for the cycle to continue. This is not charity. It is extraction. And like the extraction we have documented in finance, healthcare, education, and every other sector, it is not an accident. It is the intended function of a system designed by and for the (primarily) Jewish class that profits from it.

This is a massive and largely invisible system of institutionalised extraction. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the large international charities are not vehicles for transferring wealth from donors to the poor. They are a third sector of the economy – a “non-profit industrial complex” – that has captured state funding, professionalised its management, and now operates primarily to enrich and sustain itself.

The system is a self-perpetuating closed loop. Government money flows to the charity. The charity spends money on fundraising to attract public donations. Public donations provide the moral cover that justifies continued government funding. The (primarily) Jewish managers extract their compensation at every stage. The damage to society extends beyond the financial. The charity sector has become a mechanism for self-enrichment, not for poverty alleviation. It has captured state resources, financialised compassion, and created a class of well-compensated executives whose primary loyalty is to their institution, not to the beneficiaries they claim to serve.

My analogy to a Ponzi scheme was not hyperbole; it is supported by the financial structure. A Ponzi scheme uses new investor money to pay returns to earlier investors, creating an illusion of profitability while the operator extracts value. The large charities use new donor money and new government grants to sustain their own operations, creating an illusion of impact while the (again, primarily) Jewish executives extract salaries, benefits, and prestige.

The Extraction Thesis – The Deeper Pattern

The charity sector exhibits the same structural characteristics as the other sectors we have examined in this series of articles:

(1) The Finance sector uses predatory lending, fake accounts, hidden fees, extracting money from borrowers and depositors.

(2) The Healthcare sector uses privatisation, medical debt, and pharmaceutical pricing to extract money from patients

(3) The Education sector uses student debt, administrative bloat, and endowment capture to extract money from students and taxpayers.

(4) The Charities sector uses government funding capture, overhead opacity, and executive compensation to extract money from donors and beneficiaries.

In each case, a professional-managerial class (almost entirely Jewish) has positioned itself between the source of value (donors, taxpayers, patients, students) and the intended recipient (the poor, the sick, the educated). In each case, this professional class extracts value from the flow, and the extraction is hidden behind a legitimising narrative (charity, healing, education). In each case, the system is designed to enrich the management and perpetuate itself, not to serve its stated purpose.

These “professional managers” are not people who personally hand cash to the poor. They are executives who manage a billion-dollar enterprise, who travel first class, who attend Davos, who sit on multiple boards, and whose compensation reflects their status as leaders of a major international institution. The extraction is not limited to overhead. It includes the capture of the organisation itself by a professional-managerial class that has more in common with corporate executives than with the beneficiaries their organisations claim to serve.

The Disappearing Jew

The pattern of Jewish over‑representation in charitable leadership is consistent with the broader phenomenon of Jewish concentration in professional networks. My extraction thesis predicts that Jewish over‑representation in charitable leadership would serve Jewish personal and tribal interests rather than the stated mission of the organisations. The evidence provides support for this prediction, but the identification of Jewish ethnicity from names is complicated. Jews frequently change their names to avoid identification as Jews, and to ease their “professional” advancement. Nevertheless, the thesis that Jews are over‑represented as executives of large charities is confirmed by available evidence.

The pattern is consistent with the concentration of Jewish influence in finance, media, and law, and it reflects the same institutional logic: dense social networks, high levels of intra‑ethnic trust, an attraction to anything financial, and a deplorable shared interest in social engineering.

Even a quick search produces individuals with identifiably Jewish surnames: Rothschild, Azrieli, Oppenheim, Newberger, Sperber, Carmel‑Brown, Kestenbaum, Leigh, Ereira, Joseph, Anticoni, involved in charities. The Chairman of the Board of CARE International is Arielle de Rothschild. The Secretary General is Sofía Sprechmann Sineiro. Abby Maxman is the president and CEO of Oxfam America. All are Jews.

Arielle De Rothschild, CEO CARE International. Source:

I would note that search results rely on names and biographical details. Without explicit self-identification or organisational affiliation, an individual’s background remains opaque in standard web searches. Some names are obviously Jewish, but others are not.

The Internet is definitely being trolled and scoured of the identification of people as Jews. As one proof, I have Wikipedia pages that I saved from 15 years ago, where individuals were freely identified as Jews and with full details provided of their Jewish background and heritage. But when I visit those pages today, I discover they have all been edited to the extent that every reference to those individuals being Jews, has been deleted. Further, with many individuals whom I know to be Jews, and where confirmation of that identification was easily found on the internet 10 or 15 years ago, the information is now totally suppressed.

This is on a large enough scale that it cannot be coincidence. Someone is executing an agenda of eliminating all evidence of individuals as Jews, and doing it worldwide. This agenda is executed in so many directions and contexts that it is clearly organised at a central source. There is no other possibility. My saved Wikipedia pages from 15 years ago are not anomalies; they are archival evidence of a transformation that has since been completed. The ADL would tell you this is done to avoid “anti-Semitism”, but that is a nonsense claim.

My observation about Wikipedia (a Jewish construct) is corroborated by documented analysis. The phenomenon of “the disappearing Jew” on Wikipedia has been studied: ** “The Jewish people of Europe have disappeared from Wikipedia entries about the nations where they lived. Wikipedia have whitewashed that history.” The results show that “where Wikipedia entries about European countries once mentioned the existence of Jewish communities in those nations for centuries, the entries have been stripped of this inconvenient truth. The only place one learns that the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe were Khazars are on non-Wikipedia sites.” This is not an accident. It is a coordinated, ongoing effort to erase Jewish ethnicity from the public record. If you want further proof, the entire record of the studies and documentation of “Wikipedia’s disappearing Jews”, has been deleted from the Internet. In other cases, Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo (also all Jewish) simply refuse to produce the documents.

** These documents have also been deleted from the Internet.

The system of extraction operates through such individuals. They are the human infrastructure of the plunder. And their ability to operate depends on the erasure of their ethnic identification: on the Wikipedia pages being scrubbed, on the Anglicised names, on the concealment of dual citizenship, and on the willingness of the (Jewish-owned) media to look the other way. This a small piece of a very large puzzle. The pattern is visible only to those who know where to look, and what you see is not an illusion.

My axiom that “starting a charity is a path to a high life” is reflected in the data. The Jewish financialisation of Western charity has created a class of well-compensated executives whose interests are not always aligned with donor intent. High salaries, expensive offices, first-class travel, and sophisticated marketing campaigns have become normalised as the cost of “doing business” in philanthropy. The donor who gives $100 expecting that money to feed hungry children is most often unknowingly paying for a direct mail campaign, a CEO’s salary, a new Mercedes, office rent, and a first-class plane ticket.

The moral and social implications are many. The Jews’ involvement in Western charities creates fundamental moral hazards. For one thing, the focus is on money not charity. Secondly, they create charitable institutions for which – by purpose and definition – survival becomes more important than the mission. A charity that spends heavily on fundraising can continue to exist indefinitely, even if its charitable impact is marginal or negligible. The staff are paid. The executives are comfortable. The mission becomes a brand – like CARE, OXFAM, UNICEF. This is the predictable outcome of any system where institutions are rewarded for their own survival rather than for their impact.

The Deeper Question

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If a society’s charitable giving requires professional management, expensive offices, and high-priced executives to function, what does that say about that society’s capacity for mutual aid? The Western charity model is less a solution to need than a symptom of the erosion of community ties, the breakdown of neighborly obligation, and the replacement of social capital with institutional capital.

My assessment of Western charity overhead is validated by the data. While some organisations operate efficiently, the sector as a whole permits predatory and parasitic levels of overhead. The existence of many charities that spend 40% or 50% of every dollar on administration justifies the suspicion that the sector has become, for many, precisely what I have described: a path to a comfortable life, not a vehicle for helping others.

On the question of Jewish financialisation of charities, a Jewish acquaintance suggested Jews have been forced to financialise charities because social capital has declined and institutional mechanisms are required to coordinate giving. I disagree 100% with this position because the cause and effect are backwards. The charities were not in any way “forced” to financialise. They did it because there was no other way to extract a high living from a charity. I would argue that the social capital in the West has declined precisely because of these so-called “institutional mechanisms”. The financialisation and capture of Western charities was not a response to declining social capital. It was a driver of it.

There is much evidence that financialisation preceded social capital decline. The rise of the professional nonprofit sector in the United States began in the 1960s and 1970s, driven by the expansion of federal grant funding, the growth of foundation philanthropy, and the emergence of nonprofit management as a distinct career path. The term “nonprofit industrial complex” was coined precisely to describe this phenomenon. Social capital decline as measured by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone [2] indicators, accelerated during the same period, but the causal arrow points from financialisation to social capital erosion, not the reverse.

It is a sad fact that the creation of the large Western charities as a kind of “institutional mediation”, was in itself one of the mechanisms for the destruction of social capital in the Western countries. When charity becomes professionalised, it transforms the act of giving from a direct social relationship into an impersonal financial transaction. The donor writes a check to a distant organization. The recipient receives aid from a paid caseworker. The neighbor-to-neighbor connection is severed. Over time, this institutionalised mediation atrophies the very skills and dispositions that constitute social capital: trust, reciprocity, mutual obligation, and the willingness to help a stranger without an intermediary.

The Jewish capture and re-direction of charities emerged from the same logic of financialisation, institutional capture, and self-enrichment that we have traced across universities, healthcare, media, and finance. Charities were converted to financial organisations and then “professionalised’, because it was profitable for those running them to do so. Large salaries, expensive offices, first-class travel, and sophisticated marketing campaigns are not costs imposed by necessity; they are benefits extracted by those who control the institutions.

The Scale of Government Funding

Public donations are only a small part of the revenue of these charities. With CARE international as one example, about 75% on average of all revenue is from government grants in all the countries in which CARE operates and, in some countries like Canada, it’s around 85%. This number hides the truth that the “owners” and promoters of these so-called charities have captured various ministries of around 100 national governments and are plundering the governments (i.e., the taxpayer-citizens) as well as the donors. Government funding for most large charities provides the base. This money comes from taxes, a compulsory extraction from the population. It requires no donor consent, no charitable impulse. And precious little oversight. It is state money, and it flows to organisations that are, in effect, government contractors. Public donations are the public face of an operation that is primarily state-funded.

This is not a partnership between government and civil society. It is a parasitic extraction pipeline in which the state has become the primary financier of organisations that present themselves to the public as independent charities. The implications are profound. When a charity receives 75% of its revenue from the state, its primary accountability is to the state, not to donors and not to beneficiaries. The donor who gives $100 believing she is helping the poor is, in fact, subsidising a government contractor. Her donation is marginal; a rounding error on the government’s millions.

Governments are not merely donors to charitable organisations; they are the single largest pillar of financial support for the entire sector. This system-wide dependence, which began with a major policy shift in the 1960s and 1970s, has fundamentally reshaped civil society organizations, turning many into extensions of state policy. Data from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) confirms this. Across Canada, government funding is the primary revenue source for charities, accounting for 70% of all revenue in 2023. [3] This dependence is highly visible at CARE Canada, where its 2023-24 financials show total government funding of over 76% of its total revenue.

The United States government funnels a substantial amount of money into the nonprofit sector, and it has done so for decades. This multi-faceted financial relationship has created a structural dependency that is strikingly similar to the Canadian system and that in Europe also. This is a well-documented reality of the political economy. At a minimum, the US government provides over 100,000 privately-owned non-profit organizations with more than $300 billion annually through grants alone. [4] And this figure does not include other forms of government support, such as contracts or cooperative agreements, which are also substantial revenue sources for many organizations. It isn’t widely recognised, but the “nonprofit industrial complex” is a major part of the US economy, employing over 12 million people – about 10% of the nation’s workforce.

This system did not emerge organically. It was a deliberate product of the Cold War and the “Great Society” era in the US. This was the establishment of new federal health, education, and welfare programs that created a monumental incentive structure. Private Jewish organisations began contracting with the government, to implement these programs. This transformed charities from independent actors into government subcontractors. The intended consequence was that this influx of federal funds created a powerful financial incentive for charities to financialise so as to navigate the application requirements tied to these new grants. This process eroded the traditional, volunteer-driven model of charity.

These charities do not merely receive government funding; the persons behind them actively shape the policy decisions that determine those funding flows. The historical roots of this transition – the architecture of elite-dominated, government-funded charities – did not emerge by accident. It was deliberately constructed during the 1960s through the programs of then-US President Lyndon Johnson. It was Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative that created the “Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” dramatically changed the charity landscape forever. Rather than fund state and city governments to provide public assistance directly, the US government gave grants to nonprofits to provide “services”. This fundamentally restructured the entire charity environment by creating a “privatised exclusion”. In effect, the concept of charity was first “nationalised” by the US government, then “privatised” by turning it over to various members of the Jewish elite who had already effected what we term “regulatory capture”.

A Jewish Patronage Network

The looting is real. The architects have names. And the system will continue to produce this outcome for as long as the public believes that “charity” means helping others, rather than enriching the already-rich.

Those who form and control most of the large charities (and a great many of the small ones) are part of the Exclusionary elite who influence governments to support them. The result is effectively a looting of the public purse. The picture that emerges from the evidence is of a convergence of interests among Jewish participants that has produced a system of institutionalised extraction. The charity and NGO sectors have been transformed into a kind of Jewish patronage network in which government funding flows to their organisations, all of it legitimised by the rhetoric of “philanthropy.” The professionalisation of charities has transformed what was once a domain of volunteerism into a well-paid career path for a newly-distinct professional managerial class.

The emphasis on using privately-owned nonprofits as distributors in the charity chain, produced a model based on process rather than outcome. This is what we see today in large charities like CARE, OXFAM, and UNICEF, who function like massive bureaucracies, with most funding absorbed internally and the supposed beneficiaries receiving only “services”. This produced a paradoxical outcome in which government funding enhanced the power of privately-owned nonprofits at the expense of the communities they were ostensibly serving.

The transformation of charity from grassroots mutual aid to professionalised, state-funded bureaucracy was a social disaster. Civil society was co-opted and replaced by a “nonprofit industrial complex” that functions as a mechanism for elite capture. Charities become transmission belts for government and public funds that do little more than provide well-compensated employment for the Jewish professional class that manages them. The data clearly support the assertion that these charities were created with the specific intention of looting governments. In support of this, I would remind readers of the thesis that predictable outcomes imply deliberate intent. When we review the process of government capture and the privatisation of social welfare, the looting of governments was the only predictable outcome.

The question of whether this system was intentionally designed or emerged from the convergence of Jewish interests is, in practical terms, irrelevant. The outcome is the same: a small, tribal class of people has positioned itself to extract value from the flow of public money that passes through the charitable sector, all under the legitimising banners of “philanthropy” and “civil society”. The system produces a flow of public money to the professional class that manages the charitable sector, while the intended beneficiaries – the poor, the environment, the sick – are relegated to secondary consideration.

The governing boards of major charities are populated by the same group that occupies corporate boardrooms and maintains access to government. This is a class network, not necessarily a conspiracy, but the effect is the same: the same people who advise governments also run the organisations that receive government money. The financialisation, privatisation, and professionalisation of charities has created a well-compensated career path for a new managerial class. Executive salaries in the $250,000–$350,000 range are the norm for the largest organisations.

For the larger “charities”, the average executive pay in the US is nearly $400,000, with CEOs earning a median of around $600,000 annually. The CEO of Ducks Unlimited (classed as a charity) earns US$720,000 per year. At the very top, some executives earn millions. These are not isolated outliers. They represent a structural reality: the charitable sector has become a destination for elite careerists. This is part of a broader trend of “financialisation” where the professional-managerial class positions itself to extract value from the flow of public money, all under the legitimising banner of “philanthropy”.

This is an accurate diagnosis of a system that has evolved to serve the interests of the professional-managerial elite at the expense of both the donating public and the intended beneficiaries. The architects of this system are not a secret cabal. They are the boards of directors of major charities, the executives who draw six-figure salaries, the government ministers who allocate contracts without tender, and the professional class that circulates among all three. Their names are public: Craig and Marc Kielburger of the WE Charity, Margaret Trudeau and Bill Morneau who benefited from WE, the executives of CARE Canada who sit on multiple foundation boards. These individuals are not villains twirling their moustaches. They are rational actors operating within a system that rewards them for behavior that, viewed from the outside, appears as self-dealing and institutional capture.

This trend extends well beyond CARE International. Government funding is the lifeblood for a wide spectrum of major organisations. The Red Cross, Oxfam, Cancer societies, Heart and Stroke Foundations, Doctors Without Borders, major hospitals and health research foundations, food banks, local shelters, community health centers, all rely heavily on government contracts and grants. Even national museums, arts councils, and environmental charities like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are included in this. The “green movement” as well has turned into a small industry which is not serving the environment; it is serving the personal interests of the (primarily) Jews who created it. The heavy dependence on government funding has transformed Western non-profits from independent, grassroots mutual aid groups into large, professionalised entities whose priorities are shaped by private interests and state policy, not donor intent.

The tragedy is not that the system is corrupt. The tragedy is that it is structurally designed to produce this corruption, and that the legitimising ideology of “charity” and “philanthropy” blinds the public to the thieving extraction happening in plain sight. The money that donors believe is feeding hungry children is, in substantial measure, sustaining a professional class whose primary loyalty is to itself. The looting is real. The architects have names. And the system will continue to produce this outcome for as long as the public believes that “charity” means helping others, rather than enriching the already-rich.

The professionalisation of charity is a form of Accumulation and Exclusion. The charitable sector has become another arena in which wealth and income are concentrated; not at the level of the recipients, but at the level of the executives, consultants, and fundraising professionals who extract value from the flow of donations. The donors are excluded from direct relationship with those they help. The recipients are excluded from the dignity of receiving help from a neighbor rather than a caseworker. The community is excluded from the social capital that would otherwise be built through mutual aid. This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system that rewards self-enrichment over mission accomplishment and that treats charity as a market rather than a moral obligation.

Western charities were not forced into this mold. The (primarily) Jewish founders designed it deliberately because they intended primarily to make charities personally profitable. The decline in social capital is not the cause but the consequence of this, and of the broader forces of Accumulation and Exclusion that I have documented throughout this series of articles.

China Does it Differently

China has almost no Jews, and the few it has, are of little influence. One result is that in China, there are almost no registered Western-style charities, and typically all money collected is actually distributed to the intended beneficiaries.

In terms of the regulatory framework for charities, China has taken a radically different approach. The country’s laws impose strict legal limits on charitable overhead. As one measure, no more than 10% of a year’s total received donations can be spent on management or expenses. One current example is Shanghai’s Wuliqiao Charitable Foundation: In 2023, the charity disbursed ¥282,809.60 to beneficiaries, while the total year’s administrative expenses totaled ¥716.00. This is not an anomaly. While some Chinese charities approach the 10% statutory cap, the existence of a legal maximum imposes a level of fiscal discipline that simply does not exist in Western regulatory frameworks, which rely on voluntary disclosure and donor scrutiny rather than statutory limits.

The “Wishing Wall”

A wishing wall in China

Another variation of a Chinese Wishing Wall

One especially charming and practical charity method in China is what we call a “wishing wall”. Anyone in need of assistance can post a description of their situation on a special wall in a public space. A person or persons willing to help, will take down that poster and fulfill the need. In one case that I knew about, an elderly woman needed a new wheelchair. She posted that need on the wishing wall, and within days someone brought her a new wheelchair. In another case I know, a daughter was in the US as a student. The mother hadn’t seen her daughter for three years because the family spent every penny to pay the girl’s tuition fees and living expenses. The mother hadn’t the money to travel to the US, and the girl had no money to return home. The mother posted this situation on the wishing wall, and two persons paid the cost of a return flight ticket for the girl to return home to visit her mother.

The system features zero overhead. There are no salaries, no office expenses, and no fund-raising costs. Needs are matched directly with volunteers or donors. The system is community-based, operating at the neighborhood level, not through large bureaucracies. All work is performed by volunteers. You may be familiar with the aphorism that “Charity begins at home”; this personifies it because it operates at the neighborhood level with people who help their neighbors first. The system contributes to social cohesion; it builds trust and mutual obligation among neighbors.

The wishing wall’s most radical feature is that it achieves charitable outcomes without creating a permanent institution. The wheelchair is delivered. The plane ticket is purchased. And then the volunteers return to their ordinary lives. There is no office to maintain, no staff to pay, no fundraising to sustain. This is charity as it might have existed before the rise of the modern nonprofit industrial complex – direct, personal, and efficient. The wishing wall suggests that the most efficient charity is no charity at all, at least, no charity in the institutional sense. The best way to help a neighbor is simply to help a neighbor, without the mediation of a professional class.

The Wishing Wall is a radical alternative to institutional charities. It is not an isolated phenomenon but a documented component of China’s community governance system. Shanghai’s official government portal describes the Wishing Wall as a tool that unlocks a community’s “superpower” of mutual assistance, where “residents, while realising their personal wishes, also transmit goodwill through voluntary actions, forming a value identity of helping others”. The mechanism for Shanghai operates as follows: community members post their “micro-wishes” on a public wishing wall. Local party branches and community staff collect these wishes weekly, verify the circumstances through household visits, and then match them with volunteers or charitable resources to fulfill them.

Some communities report that thousands of handwritten wishes have been fulfilled one by one. The system also operates online, where community members can post wishes via WeChat group messages to be fulfilled.

A Wishing Tree in China

This model is almost the polar opposite of the Western institutional charity model. Where Western charities rely on professional staff, costly fundraising campaigns, and expensive office space, the wishing wall relies on social capital. It is built on trust, reciprocity, and neighborly obligation, rather than financial capital. This is not merely an efficiency difference; it reflects fundamentally different assumptions about how society should organise mutual aid. The differences between Western and Chinese charity models are not merely regulatory; they are deeply cultural. A major distinguishing difference is that Chinese organisers are not seeking to build institutions but to meet immediate needs. For example:

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a large-scale test of the Chinese volunteer charity model. During the early stages of the pandemic, when hospitals faced critical shortages of personal protective equipment, thousands of spontaneous volunteer groups mobilised to raise funds and procure supplies. These groups of ordinary people operated with no paid staff, no advertising budget, and no office space. Their promotions were all online with WeChat and Weibo which are free. Moreover, they operated with full transparency; there was real-time tracking of donations and disbursements, and it was solidly documented that all funds went directly to purchasing equipment for hospitals. These spontaneous volunteer groups can easily match the Western model of large-scale disaster response.

The Chinese system has Confucian roots. Chinese charitable giving is substantially influenced by Confucian cultural norms which place strong emphasis on benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. Charitable giving in China is not a tax-driven or professionally managed activity as in the West, but is embedded in a cultural framework that emphasises moral obligation over institutional efficiency. Importantly, there is no greed in the Chinese system. There are no people drooling over the vast sums of money involved, and scheming of ways to intercept it. The direct opposite of the Western model as it exists today.

To ensure this state of affairs, the state plays a role in charities through legislation and supervision, again in direct contrast to the West. China treats philanthropy as an important component of social security, social governance, and the distribution of resources. This framing that charity as part of “social security”, shapes the way it is organised. Government guidance establishes the legal framework and provides some oversight, while leaving room for spontaneous community action. The approach is less laissez-faire than the Western model but also less “financialised” and bureaucratised.

The Chinese charity model relies on something that Western societies have been systematically losing: social capital. Trust in neighbors, willingness to help strangers, and the sense of mutual obligation are all forms of social capital that have declined dramatically in Western societies over recent decades. The Chinese model cannot be simply imported into a society that has lost these social bonds. A wishing wall works because Chinese communities still possess reservoirs of mutual trust. The Chinese model is built on a level of social trust that does not exist in atomised Western societies.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 150 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

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