In No Logo, Naomi Klein makes the point that when taxes are high, the government can do good things, but when taxes are low the only public projects are philanthropic. Lots of museums named after industrialists date from the 1920s - less from the 1950s.
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How do you feel about think tanks with a more progressive outlook like The Center for American Progress? Donations to CAP are also tax deductible.
In keeping with the fashion for charity, not change
Here’s out contribution–we’ve called it Slag Aid
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A great talk and i look forward to reading the book. I am curious if he picks up on Mark Dowie’s investigative work on american foundations and his suggestion that anti-trust action should be brought against them (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/american-foundations) and also the INCITE collection: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-will-not-be-funded. He’s discovering stuff that others have researched before and his analysis of how philanthropy is actually part of the machinery of keeping things as they are (and, in particular, protecting the rich/elite from having to change) hearkens back to Antonio Gramsci’s analyses of the power of common sense to maintain and protect regimes of power against efforts to change them. His reporter’s approach and his engaging way of telling this story is one that i hope get these ideas out to a critical mass of people who might act to make things better. We’ll see.
That said, it’s highly weird to see this talk happening at Google and it makes me feel that Google is so secure in its power and that its employees have so little power to change anything that there is little risk in giving someone a platform to “speak truth to power” as Giridharada quips a few times. And i’m reminded of some words from Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theatre: “… this one-directional culture uses and misuses not only my production but also my protest against these uses and misuses because my protest is part of its pluralistic glory which is part of its world governing economic order which presents itself as a religion and is as fervently believed in as a religion and extracts from its believers the fanaticism of a fervently believed in religion and the chief characteristic of this self-righteous world governing order is that it is marching on and on and on and on and this marching on and on and on and on has no opposition because it eats opposition for breakfast.”
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Yeah, that’s the trouble: Who gets to define what’s really charity and what’s not?
I guess my problem is with these massive self-perpetuating funds that carry old money and attitudes down the generations. Even if the founders are progressive, the funds turn very conservative. They hand out some shiny dimes, but are dedicated to preserving the conditions where generational funds can survive prosper.
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Good stuff! I never would have thought of “win-win” as a negative in any circumstance.
One roadblock to us performing the large painful expensive solutions is a form of choice paralysis. We cannot afford to do everything. So we do nothing, or at least few of the transformative large painful expensive things. I do not have an answer as to how we get past that without dictatorship.
Election cycles and constituent reactions dominate political will. Not many politicians, and fewer of the general public, are willing to do much short term sacrifice for long term gain. How do we get past that? We’re in a low point for such will, the lowest we’ve been in many years.
I’m glad he had a chance to speak at Google. If he sets even just a few people into new internal activist trajectories then he did a good thing.
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Yeah, charity under modern capitalism is a joke. Don’t pay for a foundation with your name on it with 1% of your money; just pay a 19% Tax rate so the government can actually do things that matter with it. (Note: Many of you will say “But the government doesn’t know what to do with money as well as the smart people who earned it,” and really, then, my advice to you is a) shag off and b) if you don’t like things the government does, have fun driving home cross-country, as I’m sure you’ll avoid them taxpayer-funded gummint roads like the plague.) The tax code should end charitable status for all religions and most charities – if you wanna give to the Catholic church, lovely, but considering the fire department comes to your church when it’s on fire, they can kick down like they’re part of society too) and also tax every stock purchase transaction at 5% – two simple changes which would fill the government coffers with money for schools, roads and hospitals while making the rich and religious pay their fair share like the rest of us. Oh, and this is why I laugh loudly and rudely in the face of anyone who mentions they think Bitcoin is going to be a transformative technology – Blockchain, maybe – but bitcoin and other crypto currencies are just useful tools for tax evaders and criminals, and should be treated as such.
Again, as I often think reading BoingBoing: People actually need to be told this?
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And yet, in the whole of the Gospels, the only time Jesus takes direct, violent action, it’s against the financial and commercial sectors.
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if someone is sttanding on the street begging i will give them money.
I always thought it rather obvious that relying on alms from disgustingly rich people to inadequately mitigate the problems of society that wouldn’t exist in the first place without the bizarre inequality that makes such wealth possible was a bad concept, but it’s nice to know there is a book about that now.
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That man had such a way with words…
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Many readers miss the “sell everything you have to benefit the poor” thing, too.
Though the unpopularity of this aspect of Jesus’ thought is nothing when compared with that “turn the other cheek” thing.
These tenets are v hard to live by, of course, but the NT isnt the Webelo manual where you cherry pick what you’d like to do and what you have time and inclination for.
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This speaks to a core belief of mine; if you are really wealthy, it came at the cost of someone else.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-curse-of-charity-in-haiti-1476653140
I spent quite some time doing charity work in Haiti. Finally came to the realization that if you are providing something for free, in some ways you are preventing someone else from actually making a living doing the same thing. Why would people support a local industry if they can get the same service or item for free? Support in terms of education and microloans have been shown to be very beneficial, direct gifts and services much less so.
Part of the problem, according to Callahan, lies in the broad way that philanthropy has been defined. Under the federal tax code, an organization that feeds the hungry can count as a philanthropy, and so can a university where students study the problem of hunger, and so, too, can a think tank devoted to downplaying hunger as a problem. All these qualify as what are known, after the relevant tax-code provision, as 501(c)(3)s, meaning that the contributions they receive are tax deductible, and that the earnings on their endowments are largely tax-free. 501(c)(3)s are prohibited from engaging in partisan activity, but, as “The Givers” convincingly argues, activists on both sides of the ideological divide have developed work-arounds.
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Damn, now here’s what I’m talking about with long-lasting trusts preserving old horrible ideas down the generations:
[National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer] has additionally received funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation established in the 1930s to promote the study of eugenics and racist pseudo-science (especially studies that “prove” whites are more intelligent than other races). Over the years, a number of racist, anti-Semitic and nativist groups and individuals have received various amounts of money from this fund. However, the Pioneer Fund seems to have become inactive since the death of its previous director and its future, if any, remains unclear.
It’s like the movie Iron Sky, only the Nazis didn’t go to the Moon, they left trust funds.
https://www.erieri.com/Form990Finder/Details/Index?EIN=510181036
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