“American NGOs are nowadays involved in the activities which in the 50s- 70s of the 20th century were actually CIA domain”. This is a quotation from Adrian Karatnizki, a representative of the widely known American NGO Freedom House. No comment.
Now it’s absolutely plain why numerous American non-profit organization keep their finance matters not so much transparent. Common practice with them is to escape declaring their financial activities. Sure thing. How can they make public that the enormous sums of money come to feed up radicals and terrorists and journalists, to illegally trade arms and traffic drugs, to bribe officials or kill them, to buy real estate via dummies and so on and so forth? How can they make public their coup plans for lots of countries in the world? Sure, they can’t plainly state they are CIA actually. But that’s bitter piece of truth and we should be fully aware of it. I prefer to call things their true names.

Not sure which NGOs you're referring to... especially considering that NON GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION pretty much describes every company and nonprofit in the U.S.

But I can assure you that nonprofit organizations in this country must follow stringent rules of reporting both income and expenses to the IRS, who are on a constant watch to take away non-profit status if they don't meet the criteria to keep it.

Which leaves me a little confused. Want to further explain your opinion on this subject?

SMW

Not sure which NGOs you're referring to... especially considering that NON GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION pretty much describes every company and nonprofit in the U.S.

But I can assure you that nonprofit organizations in this country must follow stringent rules of reporting both income and expenses to the IRS, who are on a constant watch to take away non-profit status if they don't meet the criteria to keep it.

Which leaves me a little confused. Want to further explain your opinion on this subject?

SMW
My wife works with a couple of NGOs in Vietnam, helping the country with agricultural and pre-primary school educational development.

I can assure you that if the CIA were involved, the Vietnamese government would have nothing to do with these activities. What interest the CIA would have seems farfetched anyway.

Many NGOs are, frankly, like a lot of charitable organizations, mainly controlled by high salaried administrators and run to make them wealthy--any helpful charitable activity being just a sideline and the way to attract funding. My wife's running complaint about NGOs is that Westerners (and more and more non-Westerners) come to the country and live like a king and hurt the locals more than they help with their chauvinism and profit orientation.

Some NGOs have a distinct ideological flavor to them, which of course only makes them worse--but these are not much different (except in political orientation) from the Christian missionaries in the harm they do.

My wife works with a couple of NGOs in Vietnam, helping the country with agricultural and pre-primary school educational development.

I can assure you that if the CIA were involved, the Vietnamese government would have nothing to do with these activities. What interest the CIA would have seems farfetched anyway.

Many NGOs are, frankly, like a lot of charitable organizations, mainly controlled by high salaried administrators and run to make them wealthy--any helpful charitable activity being just a sideline and the way to attract funding. My wife's running complaint about NGOs is that Westerners (and more and more non-Westerners) come to the country and live like a king and hurt the locals more than they help with their chauvinism and profit orientation.

Some NGOs have a distinct ideological flavor to them, which of course only makes them worse--but these are not much different (except in political orientation) from the Christian missionaries in the harm they do.
Interesting reply, T. Care to share WHICH organizations you refer to as, "controlled by high salaried administrators and run to make them wealthy--any helpful charitable activity being just a sideline and the way to attract funding."

I can't do that since I could get sued, and these groups have no qualms.

I can't do that since I could get sued, and these groups have no qualms.
I see. Guess if you're scared of 'em, they must be pretty bad!

Like I said before... any nonprofit in the US answers to the IRS. Now if you said you were scared of THEM, I'd have to agree!

:)
SMW