A bailout package is ready to be voted on by Congress, but that doesn’t obviate the concerns of Nonprofit Quarterly readers who by and large believe that the bailout and the conditions that led to it reveal something fundamentally wrong about our society. The so-called Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) may even be necessary to jumpstart liquidity and credit in the financial sector, but it is for many a bitter pill to swallow.

We asked NPQ readers to “sound off” on the bailout, and boy did they ever. Rather than moaning about the loss of potential philanthropic grants from now semi-comatose or dead Wall Street behemoths, NPQ’s commentators went to the heart of the issue. They know that no amount of charitable grantmaking from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, or Lehman Brothers makes up for the shortfalls nonprofits face everyday as a result of long-term disinvestment in the systems on which the least well off Americans depend.

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In the wake of the federal government’s intervention in the financial markets this past week—unprecedented since the Depression era banking legislation put through by Franklin Delano Roosevelt—nonprofits should not look to philanthropy from commercial banks and investment firms to soften the blow of the ailing economy and the inevitable impact on the nonprofit sector.

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Whether one likes or dislikes the policies promoted by Barack Obama in his run for the presidency, he is impressively committed to transparency and disclosure. Obama appears unafraid of the cleansing role of sunshine in American politics, even if the disclosures spark some critical commentary.

Last month, Obama released a list of every — every! — earmark he had requested, successfully or not, in the federal budgets for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has not released her earmarks list, nor has she disclosed the names of contributors to her family’s and husband’s foundations or released her tax returns.

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There is something wrong with the debate about “diversity” that has roiled the foundation sector. The problem is simply diversity itself. Like much of modern political syntax, it is the term of art because it is increasingly devoid of meaning — or because it is more palatable than other, older, more politically charged variations on the theme.

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Remember Chuck Quackenbush? Barely avoiding a perp walk, Quackenbush had to resign his post as California insurance commissioner in order to avoid impeachment as a philanthropic miscreant. There’s something of Shakespearean tragedy in his story, plummeting from hotshot California state government official to foundation abuser to Hawaiian scofflaw—and now a Florida deputy sheriff under investigation for shooting an unarmed man.

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