Sir Elton – I Doubly Resent Him Now!

I don’t like to be taken advantage of and I don’t like to be misinformed. I think Sir Elton John has done both.

Earlier I wrote a commentary on the fact that if I wanted to attend an Elton John concert, I was being blackmailed into contributing to his charity. It was only a dollar but I resented it. If I paid $80+ for a ticket and a $10 handling fee and a credit card interest charge, then I still was required to pay an extra one-dollar to support The Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Again, I was opposed to the principle of the extra dollar, not the money. Sir Elton can select his favorite charities and I should have the same right to select my favorite charities.

The resentment of my charitable contribution to The Elton John AIDS Foundation doubled today. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that the money would be used to combat AIDS in some fashion. In today’s paper, there was a list of contributors to the Bill Clinton Foundation. Many of the gifts were from large corporations, individual billionaires and countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman. A contributor of $1 – 5 million that caught my eye was the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

I am a little confused as to why the Elton John AIDS Foundation should be contributing to the Bill Clinton Foundation, whose primary function is to fund the Bill Clinton Library. My one-dollar, that I was assured was helping to combat AIDS, was being donated to help build a library. It all sounded like a case of classic misdirection.

On further investigation, I was reminded that Bill Clinton also uses some of his foundation’s funds to address the global AIDS problem. So I guess I could assume that my one dollar was carefully passed from Elton John to Bill Clinton and then I am sure to a hospital for AIDS survivors in Botswana or Kampala. Or was it? If one foundation donates to a parallel foundation can I assume the later foundation is more effective and efficient? It would be far simpler if there were only ONE foundation that was focusing on AIDS, one on cancer, one on diabetes etc.

Having been blackmailed into contributing to some AIDS benefit, I want to be assured that my dollar has not been frittered away by inter-foundation ping-pong!