Saturday 11 December 2010

Moments of insight...

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Sometimes a paragraph of great significance pops up:

Considering their donations come from the public, would they donate the cure to the NHS in recognition of where the funding originated? You know, give the country's money back to the people who provided it. Or would it be handed over to the pharma industry so that they can then charge the NHS (and thereby, us) for a profitable eternity?


Perhaps you should ask the collector next time you pop 50p in the tin?

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2 comments:

FH said...

The post you refer to had also caught my eye earlier. I have a ‘certain thing' about charities, so I placed a desktop link to the post so that I can go back to it tomorrow as it may open more avenues of thought on the subject.
The interest I have in charities, or should I say the leading figures in them, stemmed originally from discovering, during my twenty years of daily commute into London, that several managers and directors of charities were travelling in first class railway carriages into London, often from much farther afield than I did (which was 85 miles each way at a cost of £142 per week in those days) my ticket being paid for by myself with money out of my own pocket that I had paid income tax on. These individuals had their ticket paid for by the charity they were involved with, charities that little old ladies had gone door- to-door in the rain or stood in draughty supermarket entrances to collect donations for. It didn’t seem very charitable to me that these people were travelling first class.
Since that time I have come into contact with a charity that is run by an ex forces officer and his wife, they at least once a month have a lunch meeting in my friends bar/restaurant where they and all of their staff have, no expense spared, meals and drinks with the invoice being made out in the name of the charity. Judging by the lifestyle of the husband and wife team who run this organisation I presume they are both also drawing good salaries from it. Additionally, there are frequent trips to the country their charitable work concerns, these are usually over subscribed and appear to be ‘jollies’ for the staff in my opinion.
On top of this I found out quite recently that one of the high profile well respected charities the Red Cross have a large amount of people working with the Taliban in Afghanistan teaching and assisting them in the art of battlefield medicine, it appears to me that they are patching up injured Taliban so that they are fit enough to go back to kill more of our troops on another day, the mind boggles on that one entirely, I did sent a letter of complaint but have heard nothing back as yet.
My thoughts over the weekend will be along the lines of are there any real charities or are they all just a cash and ‘jobs for the boys’ exercise or as in the post you mentioned, just R & D organisations with the aim of making more cash and even more ‘jobs for the boys’ at a later date?

Chuckles said...

Better not to pop the 50p et al into the tin in the first place.