"The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

"The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby JackRiddler » Sat May 26, 2012 1:56 am

There must be a compilation thread on the foundations here. No? Let's go!

This is an excellent start, a look at the biggest names.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/20/ ... ower/print

Weekend Edition April 20-22, 2012

The Philanthropies of American Imperialism
Foundations and American Power


by JOAN ROELOFS


Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard (1997) noted that “Cultural domination has been an underappreciated facet of American global power.” United States philanthropic foundations skillfully applied this weapon during the Cold War. If we define this war as a conflict between two ways of organizing societies, capitalist and socialist, we can see how broad were the fronts and diverse the weapons. We may also conclude that the Cold War is not over; targets such as Cuba, India, and Nepal are still under attack, and the small news we receive from Eastern Europe suggests considerable activity in the trenches.

Knowledge networks created in the service of American global hegemony are the main subject of Inderjeet Parmar’s book Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012). These, he argues persuasively, promote technocratic capitalist economics while failing to eradicate poverty. His focus is on the “big three” foundations: Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller, traditionally the ones most active in foreign policy. Even given this limitation, the title and introduction are somewhat misleading, as only a slice of their activity promoting U.S. power in the world is discussed.

Nevertheless, the sponsorship of university programs and institutes, think tanks, and government policy agencies (and promoting links among them) worldwide has had dramatic results, as “intellectuals” are crucial to the support or overthrow of regimes (note Crane Brinton and Antonio Gramsci). Networks funded by foundations can offer status, wealth, travel, an exciting collegial atmosphere, or simply provide a living wage to those who wish to become or remain intellectuals. Failing to obtain this recognition may doom one to obscurity and/or poverty. “Intellectual” in the broadest sense includes teachers, professors, administrators, public policy specialists, activists, non-governmental organization staff, as well as artists, writers, philosophers and other cultural workers.

From the other side, journalists and politicians gain credibility by relying on the supposed “impartial, nonpartisan, scientific” publications and spokespeople of think-tanks—often the only source of policy ideas.

Parmar documents his theme in great detail:

The modern foundation mediated between the modern university and the state and between universities and big business. The foundation organized crucial state agencies, international corporations, and the universities behind a hegemonic project of domestic federal-state building and U.S. global expansion: Progressivism and imperialism went hand in hand (p. 66)

In addition to the incorporation of elites, mass public opinion and propaganda were not neglected by the foundations. Before and during World War II, The Rockefeller Foundation funded Princeton’s Office of Public Opinion Research led by Hadley Cantril, to enhance the “case for belligerence and to crush the case for isolation and neutrality.” “The U.S. Army. . . even went so far as to open an office at Princeton. . . a ‘Psychological Warfare Research Bureau.’” (p. 81)

The Foreign Policy Association, a project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (see Horace Coon, Money to Burn, on CEIP), aimed for the second rank of intellectuals—League of Women Voters, other local political discussion groups, organized labor et al. It was as well an advisor to the State Department. FPA sold or distributed thousands of books—the Headline Series—to high school international relations clubs.

During the same period, FPA produced and distributed maps, study guides, and bibliographies for students, teachers, and club leaders and organized teacher-student seminars and a college students’ conference. . . . [W]ritten . .in a style “readily understood by young people.” (p. 84)

This is the way to go. I have without any evidence of success implored my radical colleagues to produce children’s books, computer games, textbooks comprehensible to high school and actual college students, videos, TV cable channels—whatever format is “in,” yet so much energy is expended in dialectical discourses that even we learned professors find repetitive and tedious, and not always comprehensible.

Parmar also describes how the foundations worked abroad to fight anti-Americanism. He mentions the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the excellent study by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The foundation-funded Salzburg Seminar in American Studies was “targeted at European men and women at the cusp of leadership positions in their own society. . . a ‘Marshall Plan of the Mind.’” (p. 108) The CCF enhanced the right wing of British Labour Party at the expense of those in the party protesting nuclear weapons and persisting in socialist schemes.

Bilderberg is briefly mentioned, but more description is needed. Many don’t know what this is and others are afraid to find out, as the very inquiry is tarred with conspiracy theory. How will we ever know if it is a conspiracy or reject that description if we don’t know what it is?

Parmer concludes that foundations were successful in their goals; so far, this assessment is justified. It can help to explain, for example, the “normalization” of NATO, even among social democratic and green parties and regimes, and the “partnership” status in NATO of “neutral” countries—Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland.

The second half of Parmar’s book consists primarily of three case studies, covering some of the ground earlier reported in Edward Berman’s The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy.

In Indonesia the Ford Foundation-sponsored knowledge networks worked to undermine the neutralist Sukarno government that challenged U.S. hegemony. At the same time, Ford trained economists (both at University of Indonesia and in U.S. universities) for a future regime supportive of capitalist imperialism.

This was a useful tactic; those on the left or right seeking to overthrow a government had better have people who know how to manage the new dispensation. Thus, the Fabian socialists created the London School of Economics to train administrators of a future socialist society, although this was considered elitist by socialists of other varieties. However, the LSE soon strayed from its original mission, and enjoyed Rockefeller enhancements during the early 20th century.

Parmar’s labors in the Ford archives netted him clear evidence that Ford worked closely with the CIA in planning for the Indonesian massacre and transition to the U.S. friendly Suharto government.

In Nigeria, the big three foundations created institutes, networks and university departments, providing resources that were otherwise very scarce, and thus incorporating even progressive Nigerians into the pro-Western, pro-capitalist camp.

Parmar provides details about the transformation of economics departments at Chilean universities (well before the military coup of 1973) under the aegis of Ford, Rockefeller and the Chicago Boys. Gradually radicals and Marxists were excluded and choices of different capitalist strategies were the only ones permitted.

When the Pinochet government took over, leftists in government departments as well as university posts were dismissed; the resourceful Ford Foundation created non-governmental organizations and research institutes to harbor them. Ford was very successful in this cooptation strategy, because by the time the military government ended and “normalcy” returned to Chile, those harbored had become convinced of the technocratic rationality of the Washington consensus and globalization.

Discussing current operations, Parmar identifies a new rationale for US power: promoting democracy on the premise of “democratic peace theory.” This argues that democracies, interpreted as nations with “market” systems open to the globalized economy, are inherently peaceful. Now “regime change” through subversion or violent invasion becomes the road to peace—in our Orwellian vocabulary. Parmar does not mention the Carnegie Endowment doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” proffered just in time for Clinton’s destruction of Yugoslavia.

In the service of U.S. hegemony, our wars work together with the “soft power” of foundations. They have created huge international philanthropy networks, and sponsor and fund the World Social Forum, where critiques of the market system may be aired. Parmar mentions that at the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, India, Ford money for the conference was rejected, because of the Foundation’s role in India’s Green Revolution. It would have been good if Parmar had included more discussion of the Ford, Rockefeller, and now Gates Foundations’ projects for remaking the agriculture of the world with the promise that they will end hunger. This premise of the Green Revolution is now questioned even by the very establishments nurtured by foundations, the United Nations agencies. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) “report concluded that modern biotechnology would have very limited contribution to the feeding of the world in the foreseeable future. The conclusion was that a viable food future lies in the creative support of ecological agriculture in which small-scale farmers will continue to play a major role.”

The evidence in Parmer’s book adequately supports his conclusion: “The foundations remain primordially attached to the American state, a broadly neoliberal order with a safety net, and a global rules-based system as the basis of continued American global hegemony.” (p. 265)

However, there is much more to the story of the foundations and U.S. global power. Its scope includes the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the European Union. There were vast interventions beyond universities and think tanks into cultural and grassroots organizations throughout the world. Parmar mentions briefly the Ford/CIA effort to counter “anti-Americanism” in postwar Europe via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This was only one prong of an intricate undertaking, as detailed in Stonor’s Cultural Cold War, and Phil Agee’s Dirty Work.

There was much regime change work to subvert Eastern European political systems, including Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch) and subsidies to dissenters and overthrow groups via the East European Cultural Foundation and other “ pass-throughs.” In South Africa, the “big three” foundations played a role in the transition from capitalism with apartheid to capitalism without apartheid, despite the African National Congress commitment to socialism (see Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy). Throughout Latin America, radical protest was shepherded into NGOs fragmented by identity politics; this is well described in the work of James Petras. Traditional religion was employed against godless Marxism when Ford funded rupee editions of religious tracts in India, while a Bible translation project in South America was used by Rockefeller to co-opt indigenous people (see G. Colby and C. Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done). The Philippine Educational Theater Association (street theater inspired by Brecht) was formed to question imperialism and exploitation; after Ford funding it gradually became a theater of “empowerment,” presenting plays about domestic violence and reproductive health.

The full story may be too large for one book and one researcher, yet it is important to include a sketch of the larger picture for the guidance of future investigators. Even in the university-think tank area, there are mysteries requiring further sleuthing: Ford funding of economics education in China prior to its embarkation on the capitalist road, and funding of economics institutes affiliated with the Communist Party of India.

Many U.S. and foreign foundations are partners in global knowledge networks. However, one of those younger than the big three is so significant that a fuller discussion would be appropriate in the context of Parmar’s book: Soros’ Open Society Institutes, which reconstructed Eastern European universities and had a large role in creating the FIDESZ party in Hungary, along with a host of worldwide interventions.

As the foundations date only from the second decade of the 20th century, a more complete historical context could easily have been provided. Parmar says that in the early 20th century the United States was a society relatively content to expand within continental limits. Although there was an anti-imperialist movement, and there were proponents of international law, even outlawing war, most of the elite was not on that train. Progressives, including the foundations, were enthusiasts of “cultural imperialism” (see Robert Arnove’s anthology, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism). Public-private partnerships, which have diluted democracy for the sake of efficiency, were advocated in Recent Social Trends (1933), itself a collection created by a Rockefeller Foundation-President Hoover partnership.

Nevertheless, Parmar’s book is a valuable contribution to the tiny field of critical foundation studies. He notes that foundations are rarely discussed by political scientists. One reason may be the enormous support they provide to individuals and institutions in that field, including the International Political Science Association.

The work is based on hours spent in foundation archives, where unpublicized gleanings often make intentions clear. He reports on a few rejected grant proposals. A comprehensive study of the rejectees might help us to understand what happened to all that idealism that shone throughout the world in 1945–social democracy, human rights, equality of persons and nations, international law, and an end to imperialism and war.


Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). Web site: www.joanroelofs.wordpress.com Contact: joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net



Roelofs speaking:

http://www.grassrootspeace.org/edrussel ... Imedia.mp3
http://www.grassrootspeace.org/edrussel ... Imedia.mp3

Amazing collection of interviews with many others:
http://www.grassrootspeace.org/edrussell/
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby PufPuf93 » Sat May 26, 2012 3:14 am

This post is old but shows there is little new under the Sun.

Also regards to time in convergent with POTUS Obama's time in Indonesia; step-father Soetero was Indonesian military educating in HI when recalled to Indonesia when
communist Sukarno was couped by military led by Suharto.

Hope this isn't too long.

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo.html

From Steve Weissman, ed., with members of the Pacific Studies Center and the North American Congress on Latin America, The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1975 revised edition), pp. 93-116.



Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia
by David Ransom

____________
Author's note: Much of the material appearing in this article was gathered in numerous personal interviews conducted between May 1968 and June 1970. The interviews were with a broad range of past and present members of the State Department and the Ford Foundation, faculty members at Harvard, Berkeley, Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of Kentucky, and Indonesians both supporting and opposing the Suharto government. Where possible, their names appear in the text. Other information in the article is derived from a wide reading of the available literature on the history and politics of Indonesia. Consequently, only those items are footnoted which directly quote or paraphrase a printed source.
____________

In the early sixties, Indonesia was a dirty word in the world of capitalist development. Expropriations, confiscations and rampant nationalism led economists and businessmen alike to fear that the fabled riches in the Indies -- oil, rubber and tin -- were all but lost to the fiery Sukarno and the twenty million followers of the Peking-oriented Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Then, in October 1965, Indonesia's generals stepped in, turned their counterattack against an unsuccessful colonels' coup into an anti-communist pogrom, and opened the country's vast natural resources to exploitation by American corporations. By 1967, Richard Nixon was describing Indonesia as "the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area."1 If Vietnam has been the major postwar defeat for an expanding American empire, this turnabout in nearby Indonesia is its greatest single victory.

Needless to say, the Indonesian generals deserve a large share of credit for the American success. But standing at their side and overseeing the great give-away was an extraordinary team of Indonesian economists, all of them educated in the United States as part of a twenty year strategy by the world's most powerful private aid agency, the billion-dollar Ford Foundation.

But the strategy for Indonesia began long before the Ford Foundation turned its attention to the international scene.

Following Japan's defeat in World War II, revolutionary movements swept Asia, from India to Korea, from China to the Philippines. Many posed a threat to America's well-planned Pax Pacifica. But Indonesian nationalists, despite tough resistance to the postwar invasion by Holland in its attempt to resume rule over the Indies, never carried their fight into a full-blown people's war. Instead, leaders close to the West won their independence in Washington offices and New York living rooms. By 1949 the Americans had persuaded the Dutch to take action before the Indonesian revolution went too far, and then to learn to live with nationalism and like it. American diplomats helped draft an agreement that gave Indonesians their political independence, preserved the Dutch economic presence, and swung wide the Open Door to the new cultural and economic influence of the United States.

Among those who handled the diplomatic maneuvers in the U.S. were two young Indonesian aristocrats -- Soedjatmoko (many Indonesians have only one name) and Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, an economist with a Ph.D. from Holland. Both were members of the upper-class, nominally socialist PSI, one of the smaller and more Western-oriented of Indonesia's myriad political parties.

Distressed by the specter of Sukarno and the strong left wing of the Indonesian independence forces, the American Establishment found the bland nationalism offered by Soedjatmoko and Sumitro a most comfortable alternative. The Marshall Plan strategy for Europe depended on "the availability of the resources of Asia," Soedjatmoko told a New York audience, and he offered them an Indonesia open to "fruitful cooperation with the West."2 At the Ford Foundation-funded School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in early 1949, Sumitro explained that his kind of socialism included "free access" to Indonesian resources and "sufficient incentives" for foreign corporate investment.3

When independence came later that year, Sumitro returned to Djakarta to become minister of trade and industry (and later minister of finance and dean of the faculty of economics at the University of Djakarta). He defended an economic "stability" that favored Dutch investments and, carefully eschewing radicalism, went so far as to make an advisor of Hjalmar Schacht, economic architect of the Third Reich.

Sumitro found his support in the PSI and their numerically stronger "modernist" ally, the Masjumi Party, a vehicle of Indonesia's commercial and landowning santri Moslems. But he was clearly swimming against the tide. The Communist PKI, Sukarno's Nationalist PNI, the Army, the orthodox Moslem NU -- everybody, in fact, but the PSI and Masjumi -- were riding the wave of postwar nationalism. In the 1955 national elections -- Indonesia's first and last -- the PSI polled a minuscule fifth place. It did worse in the local balloting of 1957, in which the Communist PKI emerged the strongest party.

Nevertheless, when Sukarno began nationalizing Dutch holdings in 1957, Sumitro joined Masjumi leaders and dissident Army commanders in the Outer Islands Rebellion, supported briefly by the CIA. It was spectacularly unsuccessful. From this failure in Sumatra and the Celebes, Sumitro fled to exile and a career as government and business consultant in Singapore. The PSI and the Masjumi were banned.

America's Indonesian allies had colluded with an imperialist power to overthrow a popularly elected nationalist government, headed by a man regarded as the George Washington of his country -- and they had lost. So ruinously were they discredited that nothing short of a miracle could ever restore them to power.


That miracle took a decade to perform, and it came outside the maneuvers of diplomacy, the play of party politics, even the invasion of American troops. Those methods, in Indonesia and elsewhere, had failed. The miracle came instead through the hallowed halls of academe, guided by the noble hand of philanthropy.

Education had long been an arm of statecraft, and it was Dean Rusk who spelled out its function in the Pacific in 1952, just months before resigning as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs to head up the Rockefeller Foundation. "Communist aggression" in Asia required not only that Americans be trained to combat it there, but "we must open our training facilities for increasing numbers of our friends from across the Pacific."4

The Ford Foundation, under the presidency of Paul Hoffman (and working closely with the Rockefeller Foundation), moved quickly to apply Rusk's words to Indonesia. As head of the Marshall Plan in Europe, Hoffman had helped to arrange Indonesian independence by cutting off aid funds to Dutch counterinsurgency and by threatening a total cutoff in aid to the Dutch. As the United States supplanted the Dutch, Hoffman and Ford would work through the best American universities -- MIT, Cornell, Berkeley, and finally Harvard -- to remold the old Indonesian hierarchs into modern administrators, trained to work under the new indirect rule of the Americans. In Ford's own jargon, they would create a "modernizing elite."

"You can't have a modernizing country without a modernizing elite," explains the deputy vice-president of Ford's international division, Frank Sutton. "That's one of the reasons we've given a lot of attention to university education." Sutton adds that there's no better place to find such an elite than among "those who stand somewhere in social structures where prestige, leadership, and vested interests matter, as they always do."

Ford launched its effort to make Indonesia a "modernizing country" in 1954 with field projects from MIT and Cornell. The scholars produced by these two projects -- one in economics, the other in political development -- have effectively dominated the field of Indonesian studies in the United States ever since. Compared to what they eventually produced in Indonesia, however, this was a fairly modest achievement. Working through the Center for International Studies (the CIA-sponsored brainchild of Max Millikan and Walt W. Rostow), Ford sent out a team from MIT to discover "the causes of economic stagnation in Indonesia." An interesting example of the effort was Guy Pauker's study of "political obstacles" to economic development, obstacles such as armed insurgency.

In the course of his field work, Pauker got to know the high-ranking officers of the Indonesian Army rather well. He found them "much more impressive" than the politicians. "I was the first who got interested in the role of the military in economic development," Pauker says. He also got to know most of the key civilians: "With the exception of a very small group," they were "almost totally oblivious" of what Pauker called modern development. Not surprisingly, the "very small group" was composed of PSI aristocrat-intellectuals, particularly Sumitro and his students.

Sumitro, in fact, had participated in the MIT team's briefings before they left Cambridge. Some of his students were also known by the MIT team, having attended a CIA-funded summer seminar run at Harvard each year by Henry Kissinger. One of the students was Mohammed Sadli, son of a well-to-do santri trader, with whom Pauker became good friends. In Djakarta, Pauker struck up friendships with the PSI clan and formed a political study group among whose members were the head of Indonesia's National Planning Bureau, Ali Budiardjo, and his wife Miriam, Soedjatmoko's sister.

Rumanian by birth, Pauker had helped found a group called "Friends of the United States" in Bucharest just after the Second World War. He then came to Harvard, where he got his degree. While many Indonesians have charged the professor with having CIA connections, Pauker denies that he was intimate with the CIA until 1958, after he joined the RAND Corporation. Since then, it is no secret that he briefs and is briefed by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Highly placed Washington sources say he is "directly involved in decision-making."

In 1954 -- after the MIT team was in the field -- Ford grubstaked a Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell. With an initial $224,000 and periodic replenishments, program chairman George Kahin built the social science wing of the Indonesian studies establishment in the United States. Even Indonesian universities must use Cornell's elite-oriented studies to teach post-Independence politics and history.

Among the several Indonesians brought to Cornell on Ford and Rockefeller grants, perhaps the most influential is sociologist-politician Selosoemardjan. Right-hand man to the Sultan of Jogjakarta, Selosoemardjan is one of the strong-men of the present Indonesian regime.

Kahin's political science group worked closely with Sumitro's Faculty of Economics in Djakarta. "Most of the people at the university came from essentially bourgeois or bureaucratic families," recalls Kahin. "They knew precious little of their society." In a "victory" which speaks poignantly of the illusions of well-meaning liberals, Kahin succeeded in prodding them to "get their feet dirty" for three months in a village. Many would spend four years in the United States.

Together with Widjojo Nitisastro, Sumitro's leading protégé, Kahin set up an institute to publish the village studies. It has never amounted to much, except that its American advisors helped Ford maintain its contact in the most difficult of the Sukarno days.

Kahin still thinks Cornell's affair with Ford in Indonesia "was a fairly happy marriage" -- less for the funding than for the political cover it afforded. "AID funds are relatively easy to get," he explains. "But certainly in Indonesia, anybody working on political problems with [U.S.] government money during this period would have found their problem much more difficult."

One of the leading academic Vietnam doves, Kahin has irritated the State Department on occasion, and many of his students are far more radical than he. Yet for most Indonesians, Kahin's work was really not much different from Pauker's. One man went on to teach-ins, the other to RAND and the CIA. But the consequences of their nation-building efforts in Indonesia were much the same.


MIT and Cornell made contacts, collected data, built up expertise. It was left to Berkeley to actually train most of the key Indonesians who would seize government power and put their pro-American lessons into practice. Dean Sumitro's Faculty of Economics provided a perfect academic boot camp for these economic shock troops.

To oversee the project, Ford President Paul Hoffman tapped Michael Harris, a one-time CIO organizer who had headed Marshall Plan programs under Hoffman in France, Sweden, and Germany. Harris had been on a Marshall Plan survey in Indonesia in 1951, knew Sumitro, and before going out was extensively briefed by Sumitro's New York promoter, Robert Delson, a Park Avenue attorney who had been Indonesia's legal counsel in the United States since 1949. Harris reached Djakarta in 1955 and set out to build Dean Sumitro a broad new Ford-funded graduate program in economics.

This time the professional touch and academic respectability were to be provided by Berkeley. The Berkeley team's first task was to replace the Dutch professors, whose colonial influence and capitalist economics Sukarno was trying to phase out. The Berkeley team would also relieve Sumitro's Indonesian junior faculty so that Ford could send them back to Berkeley for advanced credentials. Sadli was already there, sharing a duplex with Pauker, who had come to head the new Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies. Sumitro's protégé Widjojo led the first crew out to Berkeley.

While the Indonesian junior faculty studied American economics in Berkeley classrooms, the Berkeley professors turned the Faculty in Djakarta into an American-style school of economics, statistics, and business administration.

Sukarno objected. At an annual lecture to the Faculty, team member Bruce Glassburner recalls, Sukarno complained that "all those men can say to me is 'Schumpeter and Keynes.' When I was young I read Marx." Sukarno might grumble and complain, but if he wanted any education at all he would have to take what he got. "When Sukarno threatened to put an end to Western economics," says John Howard, long-time director of Ford's International Training and Research Program, "Ford threatened to cut off all programs, and that changed Sukarno's direction."

The Berkeley staff also joined in the effort to keep Sukarno's socialism and Indonesian national policy at bay. "We got a lot of pressure through 1958-1959 for 'retooling' the curriculum," Glassburner recalls. "We did some dummying-up, you know -- we put 'socialism' into as many course titles as we could -- but really tried to preserve the academic integrity of the place."

The project, which cost Ford $2.5 million, had a clear, and some times stated, purpose. "Ford felt it was training the guys who would be leading the country when Sukarno got out," explains John Howard.

There was little chance, of course, that Sumitro's minuscule PSI would outdistance Sukarno at the polls. But "Sumitro felt the PSI group could have influence far out of proportion to their voting strength by putting men in key positions in government," recalls the first project chairman, a feisty Irish business professor named Len Doyle.

When Sumitro went into exile, his Faculty carried on. His students visited him surreptitiously on their way to and from the United States. Powerful Americans like Harry Goldberg, a lieutenant of labor boss Jay Lovestone (head of the CIO's international program), kept in close contact and saw that Sumitro's messages got through to his Indonesian friends. No dean was appointed to replace him; he was the "chairman in absentia."

All of the unacademic intrigue caused hardly a ripple of disquiet among the scrupulous professors. A notable exception was Doyle. "I feel that much of the trouble that I had probably stemmed from the fact that I was not as convinced of Sumitro's position as the Ford Foundation representative was, and, in retrospect, probably the CIA," recalls Doyle.

Harris tried to get Doyle to hire "two or three Americans who were close to Sumitro." One was an old friend of Sumitro's from the MIT team, William Hollinger. Doyle refused. "It was clear that Sumitro was going to continue to run the Faculty from Singapore," he says. But it was a game he wouldn't play. "I felt that the University should not be involved in what essentially was becoming a rebellion against the government," Doyle explains, "whatever sympathy you might have with the rebel cause and the rebel objectives."

Back home, Doyle's lonely defense of academic integrity against the political pressures exerted through Ford was not appreciated. Though he had been sent there for two years, Berkeley recalled him after one. "He tried to run things," University officials say politely. "We had no choice but to ship him home." In fact, Harris had him bounced. "In my judgment," Harris recalls, "there was a real problem between Doyle and the Faculty."

One of the younger men who stayed on after Doyle was Ralph Anspach, a Berkeley team member now teaching college in San Francisco. Anspach got so fed up with what he saw in Djakarta that he will no longer work in applied economics. "I had the feeling that in the last analysis I was supposed to be a part of this American policy of empire," he says, "bringing in American science, and attitudes, and culture ... winning over countries -- doing this with an awful lot of cocktails and high pay. I just got out of the whole thing."

Doyle and Anspach were the exceptions. Most of the academic professionals found the project -- as Ford meant it to be -- the beginning of a career."This was a tremendous break for me," explains Bruce Glassburner, project chairman from 1958 to 1961. "Those three years over there gave me an opportunity to become a certain kind of economist. I had a category -- I became a development economist -- and I got to know Indonesia. This made a tremendous difference in my career."

Berkeley phased its people out of Djakarta in 1961-62. The constant battle between the Ford representative and the Berkeley chairman as to who would run the project had some part in hastening its end. But more important, the professors were no longer necessary, and were probably an increasing political liability. Sumitro's first string had returned with their degrees and resumed control of the school.

The Berkeley team had done its job. "Kept the thing alive," Glassburner recalls proudly. "We plugged a hole ... and with the Ford Foundation's money we trained them forty or so economists." What did the University get out of it? "Well, some overhead money, you know." And the satisfaction of a job well done.


In 1959 Pauker set out the lessons of the PSI's electoral isolation and Sumitro's abortive Outer Islands Rebellion in a widely read paper entitled "Southeast Asia as a Trouble Area in the Next Decade." Parties like the PSI were "unfit for vigorous competition" with communism, he wrote. "Communism is bound to win in Southeast Asia ... unless effective countervailing power is found." The "best equipped" countervailing forces, he wrote, were "members of the national officer corps as individuals and the national armies as organizational structures.5

From his exile in Singapore, Sumitro concurred, arguing that his PSI and the Masjumi party, which the Army had attacked, were really the Army's "natural allies." Without them, the Army would find itself politically isolated, he said. But to consummate their alliance "the Sukarno regime must be toppled first." Until then, Sumitro warned, the generals should keep "a close and continuous watch" on the growing and powerful Communist peasant organizations. Meanwhile, Sumitro's Ford-scholar protégés in Djakarta began the necessary steps toward a rapprochement.


Fortunately for Ford and its academic image there was yet another school at hand: SESKOAD, the Army Staff and Command School. Situated seventy miles southeast of Djakarta in cosmopolitan Bandung, SESKOAD was the Army's nerve center. There, generals decided organizational and political matters; there, senior officers on regular rotation were "upgraded" with manuals and methods picked up during training in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

When the Berkeley team phased itself out in 1962, Sadli, Widjojo and others from the Faculty began regular trips to Bandung to teach at SESKOAD. They taught "economic aspects of defense," says Ford's Frank Miller, who replaced Harris in Djakarta. Pauker tells a different story. Since the mid-'50s, he had come to know the Army General staff rather well, he explains, first on the MIT team, then on trips for RAND. One good friend was Colonel Suwarto (not to be confused with General Suharto), the deputy commander of SESKOAD and a 1959 Fort Leavenworth graduate. In 1962, Pauker brought Suwarto to RAND.

Besides learning "all sorts of things about international affairs" while at RAND, Pauker says, Suwarto also saw how RAND "organizes the academic resources of the country as consultants." According to Pauker, Suwarto had "a new idea" when he returned to Bandung. "The four or five top economists became 'cleared' social scientists lecturing and studying the future political problems of Indonesia in SESKOAD."

In effect, this group became the Army's high-level civilian advisors. They were joined at SESKOAD by other PSI and Masjumi alumni of the university programs -- Miriam Budiardjo from Pauker's MIT study group, and Selosoemardjan from Kahin's program at Cornell, as well as senior faculty from the nearby Bundung Institute of Technology, where the University of Kentucky had been "institution-building" for AID since 1957.

The economists were quickly caught up in the anti-communist conspiracy directed at toppling the Sukarno regime and encouraged by Sumitro from his Singapore exile. Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, Army commander-in-chief, had drawn around him a "brain trust" of generals. It was an "open secret," says Pauker, that Yani and his brain trust were discussing "contingency plans" which were to "prevent chaos should Sukarno die suddenly." The contribution of Suwarto's mini-RAND, according to Colonel Willis G. Ethel, U.S. defense attaché in Djakarta and a close confidant of Commander-in-Chief Yani and others of the Army high command, was that the professors "would run a course in this contingency planning."

Of course, the Army planners were worried about "preventing chaos." They were worried about the PKI. "They weren't about to let the Communists take over the country," Ethel says. They also knew that there was immense popular support for Sukarno and the PKI and that a great deal of blood would flow when the showdown came.

Other institutions joined the Ford economists in preparing the military. High-ranking Indonesian officers had begun U.S. training programs in the mid-'50s. By 1965 some four thousand officers had learned big-scale army command at Fort Leavenworth and counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg. Beginning in 1962, hundreds of visiting officers at Harvard and Syracuse gained the skills for maintaining a huge economic, as well as military, establishment, with training in everything from business administration and personnel management to air photography and shipping.6 AID's "Public Safety Program" in the Philippines and Malaya trained and equipped the Mobile Brigades of the Indonesian military's fourth arm, the police.

While the Army developed expertise and perspective -- courtesy of the generous American aid program -- it also increased its political and economic influence. Under the martial law declared by Sukarno at the time of the Outer Islands Rebellion, the Army had become the predominant power in Indonesia. Regional commanders took over provincial governments -- depriving the Communist PKI of its plurality victories in the 1957 local elections. Fearful of a PKI sweep in the planned 1959 national elections, the generals prevailed on Sukarno to cancel elections for six years. Then they moved quickly into the upper reaches of Sukarno's new "guided democracy," increasing the number of ministries under their control right up to the time of the coup. Puzzled by the Army's reluctance to take complete power, journalists called it a "creeping coup d'état."7

The Army also moved into the economy, first taking "supervisory control," then key directorships of the Dutch properties that the PKI unionists had seized "for the people" during the confrontation over West Irian in late 1957. As a result, the generals controlled plantations, small industry, state-owned oil and tin, and the state-run export-import companies, which by 1965 monopolized government purchasing and had branched out into sugar milling, shipping, and distribution.

Those high-ranking officers not born into the Indonesian aristocracy quickly married in, and in the countryside they cemented alliances -- often through family ties -- with the santri Moslem landowners who were the backbone of the Masjumi Party. "The Army and the civil police," wrote Robert Shaplen of the New York Times, "virtually controlled the whole state apparatus." American University's Willard Hanna called it "a new form of government -- military-private enterprise."8 Consequently, "economic aspects of defense" became a wide-ranging subject at SESKOAD. But Ford's Indonesian economists made it broader yet by undertaking to prepare economic policy for the post-Sukarno period there, too.

During this period, the Communists were betwixt and between. Deprived of their victory at the polls and unwilling to break with Sukarno, they tried to make the best of his "guided democracy," participating with the Army in coalition cabinets. Pauker has described the PKI strategy as "attempting to keep the parliamentary road open," while seeking to come to power by "acclamation." That meant building up PKI prestige as "the only solid, purposeful, disciplined, well-organized, capable political force in the country," to which Indonesians would turn "when all other possible solutions have failed."9


At least in numbers, the PKI policy was a success. The major labor federation was Communist, as was the largest farmers' organization and the leading women's and youth groups. By 1963, three million Indonesians, most of them in heavily populated Java, were members of the PKI, and an estimated seventeen million were members of its associated organizations -- making it the world's largest Communist Party outside Russia and China. At Independence the party had numbered only eight thousand.

In December 1963, PKI Chairman D.N. Aidit gave official sanction to "unilateral action" which had been undertaken by the peasants to put into effect a land-reform and crop-sharing law already on the books. Though landlords' holdings were not large, less than half the Indonesian farmers owned the land they worked, and of these most had less than an acre. As the peasants' "unilateral action" gathered momentum, Sukarno, seeing his coalition endangered, tried to check its force by establishing "land-reform courts" which included peasant representatives. But in the countryside, police continued to clash with peasants and made mass arrests. In some areas, santri youth groups began murderous attacks on peasants. Since the Army held state power in most areas, the peasants' "unilateral action" was directed against its authority. Pauker calls it "class struggle in the countryside" and suggests that the PKI had put itself "on a collision course with the Army."10 But unlike Mao's Communists in pre-revolutionary China, the PKI had no Red Army. Having chosen the parliamentary road, the PKI was stuck with it. In early 1965, PKI leaders demanded that the Sukarno government (in which they were cabinet ministers) create a people's militia -- five million armed workers, ten million armed peasants. But Sukarno's power was hollow. The Army had become a state within a state. It was they -- and not Sukarno or the PKI -- who held the guns.11

The proof came in September 1965. On the night of the 30th, troops under the command of dissident lower-level Army officers, in alliance with officers of the small Indonesian Air Force, assassinated General Yani and five members of his SESKOAD "brain trust." Led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the rebels seized the Djakarta radio station and next morning broadcast a statement that their September 30th Movement was directed against the "Council of Generals," which they announced was CIA-sponsored and had itself planned a coup d'état for Armed Forces Day, four days later.

Untung's preventive coup quickly collapsed. Sukarno, hoping to restore the pre-coup balance of forces, gave it no support. The PKI prepared no street demonstrations, no strikes, no coordinated uprisings in the countryside. The dissidents themselves missed assassinating General Nasution and apparently left General Suharto off their list. Suharto rallied the elite paracommandos and units of West Java's Siliwangi division against Untung's colonels. Untung's troops, unsure of themselves, their mission, and their loyalties, made no stand. It was all over in a day.

The Army high command quickly blamed the Communists for the coup, a line the Western press has followed ever since. Yet the utter lack of activity in the streets and the countryside makes PKI involvement unlikely, and many Indonesia specialists believe, with Dutch scholar W.F. Wertheim, that "the Untung coup was what its leader ... claimed it to be -- an internal army affair reflecting serious tensions between officers of the Central Java Diponegoro Division, and the Supreme Command of the Army in Djakarta...."12

Leftists, on the other hand, later assumed that the CIA had had a heavy hand in the affair. Embassy officials had long wined and dined the student apparatchiks who rose to lead the demonstrations that brought Sukarno down. The CIA was close with the Army, especially with Intelligence Chief Achmed Sukendro, who retained his agents after 1958 with U.S. help and then studied at the University of Pittsburgh in the early sixties. But Sukendro and most other members of the Indonesian high command were equally close to the embassy's military attachés, who seem to have made Washington's chief contacts with the Army both before and after the attempted coup. All in all, considering the make-up and history of the generals and their "modernist" allies and advisors, it is clear that at this point neither the CIA nor the Pentagon needed to play any more than a subordinate role.

The Indonesian professors may have helped lay out the Army's "contingency" plans, but no one was going to ask them to take to the streets and make the "revolution." That they could leave to their students. Lacking a mass organization, the Army depended on the students to give authenticity and "popular" leadership in the events that followed. It was the students who demanded -- and finally got -- Sukarno's head; and it was the students -- as propagandists -- who carried the cry of jihad (religious war) to the villages.


In late October, Brigadier General Sjarif Thajeb -- the Harvard-trained minister of higher education (and now ambassador to the United States) -- brought student leaders together in his living room to create the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI).13 Many of the KAMI leaders were the older student apparatchiks who had been courted by the U.S. embassy. Some had traveled to the United States as American Field Service exchange students, or on year-long jaunts in a "Foreign Student Leadership Project" sponsored by the U.S National Student Association in its CIA-fed salad years.

Only months before the coup, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green had arrived in Djakarta, bringing with him the reputation of having masterminded the student overthrow of Syngman Rhee in Korea and sparking rumors that his purpose in Djakarta was to do the same there. Old manuals on student organizing in both Korean and English were supplied by the embassy to KAMI's top leadership soon after the coup.

But KAMI's most militant leadership came from Bandung, where the University of Kentucky had mounted a ten-year "institution-building" program at the Bandung Institute of Technology, sending nearly five hundred of their students to the United States for training. Students in all of Indonesia's elite universities had been given paramilitary training by the Army in a program for a time advised by an ROTC colonel on leave from Berkeley. Their training was "in anticipation of a Communist attempt to seize the government," writes Harsja Bachtiar, an Indonesian sociologist and an alumnus of Cornell and Harvard.14

In Bandung, headquarters of the aristocratic Siliwangi division, student paramilitary training was beefed up in the months preceding the coup, and santri student leaders were boasting to their American friends that they were developing organizational contacts with extremist Moslem youth groups in the villages. It was these groups that spearheaded the massacres of PKI followers and peasants.

At the funeral of General Nasution's daughter, mistakenly slain in the Untung coup, Navy chief Eddy Martadinata told santri student leaders to "sweep." The message was "that they could go out and clean up the Communists without any hindrance from the military, wrote Christian Science Monitor Asian correspondent John Hughes. With relish they called out their followers, stuck their knives and pistols in their waistbands, swung their clubs over their shoulders, and embarked on the assignment for which they had long been hoping."15 Their first move was to burn PKI headquarters. Then, thousands of PKI and Sukarno supporters were arrested and imprisoned in Djakarta; cabinet members and parliamentarians were permanently "suspended"; and a purge of the ministries was begun.

The following month, on October 17, 1965, Colonel Sarwo Edhy took his elite paratroops (the "Red Berets") into the PKI's Central Java stronghold in the Bojolali-Klaten-Solo triangle. His assignment, according to Hughes, was "the extermination, by whatever means might be necessary, of the core of the Communist Party there." He found he had too few troops. "We decided to encourage the anti-communist civilians to help with the job," the Colonel told Hughes. "In Solo we gathered together the youth, the nationalist groups, the religious Moslem organizations. We gave them two or three days' training, then sent them out to kill Communists."16

The Bandung engineering students, who had learned from the Kentucky AID team how to build and operate radio transmitters, were tapped by Colonel Edhy's elite corps to set up a multitude of small broadcasting units throughout strongly PKI East and Central Java, some of which exhorted local fanatics to rise up against the Communists in jihad. The U.S. embassy provided necessary spare parts for these radios.

Time magazine describes what followed:


Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote jails.... Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves.... The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages. The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been seriously impeded.17
Graduate students from Bandung and Djakarta, dragooned by the Army, researched the number dead. Their report, never made public, but leaked to correspondent Frank Palmos, estimated one million victims. In the PKI "triangle stronghold" of Bojolali, Klaten, and Solo, Palmos said they reported, "nearly one-third of the population is dead or missing."18 Most observers think their estimate high, putting the death toll at three to five hundred thousand.

The KAMI students also played a part -- bringing life in Djakarta to a standstill with anti-communist, anti-Sukarno demonstrations whenever necessary. By January, Colonel Edhy was back in Djakarta addressing KAMI rallies, his elite corps providing KAMI with trucks, loudspeakers, and protection. KAMI demonstrators could tie up the city at will.

"The ideas that Communism was public enemy number one, that Communist China was no longer a close friend but a menace to the security of the state, and that there was corruption and inefficiency in the upper levels of the national government were introduced on the streets of Djakarta," writes Bachtiar.19

The old PSI and Masjumi leaders nurtured by Ford and its professors were home at last. They gave the students advice and money, while the PSI-oriented professors maintained "close advisory relationships" with the students, later forming their own Indonesian Scholars Action Command (KASI). One of the economists, Emil Salim, who had recently returned with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, was counted among the KAMI leadership. Salim's father had purged the Communist wing of the major prewar nationalist organization, and then served in the pre-Independence Masjumi cabinets.

In January the economists made headlines in Djakarta with a week-long economic and financial seminar at the Faculty. It was "principally ... a demonstration of solidarity among the members of KAMI, the anti-Communist intellectuals, and the leadership of the Army," Bachtiar says. The seminar heard papers from General Nasution, Adam Malik, and others who "presented themselves as a counter-elite challenging the competence and legitimacy of the elite led by President Sukarno."20

It was Djakarta's post-coup introduction to Ford's economic policies.


In March Suharto stripped Sukarno of formal power and had himself named acting president, tapping old political warhorse Adam Malik and the Sultan of Jogjakarta to join him in a ruling triumvirate. The generals whom the economists had known best at SESKOAD -- Yani and his brain trust -- had all been killed. But with the help of Kahin's protégé, Selosoemardjan, they first caught the Sultan's and then Suharto's ear, persuading them that the Americans would demand a strong attack on inflation and a swift return to a "market economy." On April 12, the Sultan issued a major policy statement outlining the economic program of the new regime -- in effect announcing Indonesia's return to the imperialist fold. It was written by Widjojo and Sadli.

In working out the subsequent details of the Sultan's program, the economists got aid from the expected source -- the United States. When Widjojo got stuck in drawing up a stabilization plan, AID brought in Harvard economist Dave Cole, fresh from writing South Korea's banking regulations, to provide him with a draft. Sadli, too, required some post-doctoral tutoring. According to an American official, Sadli "really didn't know how to write an investment law. He had to have a lot of help from the embassy." It was a team effort. "We were all working together at the time -- the 'economists,' the American economists, AID," recalls Calvin Cowles, the first AID man on the scene.

By early September the economists had their plans drafted and the generals convinced of their usefulness. After a series of crash seminars at SESKOAD, Suharto named the Faculty's five top men his Team of Experts for Economic and Financial Affairs, an idea for which Ford man Frank Miller claims credit.

In August the Stanford Research Institute -- a spinoff of the university-military-industrial complex -- brought 170 "senior executives" to Djakarta for a three-day parley and look-see. "The Indonesians have cut out the cancer that was destroying their economy," an SRI executive later reported approvingly. Then, urging that big business invest heavily in Suharto's future, he warned that "military solutions are infinitely more costly."21

In November, Malik, Sadli, Salim, Selosoemardjan, and the Sultan met in Geneva with a select list of American and European businessmen flown in by Time-Life. Surrounded by his economic advisors, the Sultan ticked off the selling points of the New Indonesia -- "political stability ... abundance of cheap labor ... vast potential market ... treasurehouse of resources." The universities, he added, have produced a "large number of trained individuals who will be happy to serve in new economic enterprises."

David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, thanked Time-Life for the chance to get acquainted with "Indonesia's top economic team." He was impressed, he said, by their "high quality of education."

"To some extent, we are witnessing the return of the pragmatic outlook which was characteristic of the PSI-Masjumi coalition of the early fifties when Sumitro ... dominated the scene,"22 observed a well-placed insider in 1966. Sumitro slipped quietly into Djakarta, opened a business consultancy, and prepared himself for high office. In June 1968 Suharto organized an impromptu reunion for the class of Ford -- a "development cabinet." As minister of trade and commerce he appointed Dean Sumitro (Ph.D., Rotterdam); as chairman of the National Planning Board he appointed Widjojo (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1961); as vice-chairman, Emil Salim (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1964); as secretary general of Marketing and Trade Research, Subroto (Harvard, 1964); as minister of finance, Ali Wardhana (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1962); as chairman of the Technical Team of Foreign Investment, Mohamed Sadli (M.S., MIT, 1956); as secretary general of Industry, Barli Halim (M.B.A., Berkeley, 1959). Soedjatmoko, who had been functioning as Malik's advisor, became ambassador in Washington.

"We consider that we were training ourselves for this," Sadli told a reporter from Fortune -- "a historic opportunity to fix the course of events."23


Since 1954, Harvard's Development Advisory Service (DAS), the Ford-funded elite corps of international modernizers, has brought Ford influence to the national planning agencies of Pakistan, Greece, Argentina, Liberia, Colombia, Malaysia, and Ghana. In 1963, when the Indonesian economists were apprehensive that Sukarno might try to remove them from their Faculty, Ford asked Harvard to step into the breach. Ford funds would breathe new life into an old research institute, in which Harvard's presence would provide a protective academic aura for Sumitro's scholars.

The DAS was skeptical at first, says director Gus Papanek. But the prospect of future rewards was great. Harvard would get acquainted with the economists, and in the event of Sukarno's fall, the DAS would have established "an excellent base" from which to plan Indonesia's future.

"We could not have drawn up a more ideal scenario than what happened," Papanek says. "All of those people simply moved into the government and took over the management of economic affairs, and then they asked us to continue working with them."

Officially the Harvard DAS-Indonesia project resumed on July 1, 1968, but Papanek had people in the field well before that joining with AID's Cal Cowles in bringing back the old Indonesia hands of the fifties and sixties. After helping draft the stabilization program for AID, Dave Cole returned to work with Widjojo on the Ford/Harvard payroll. Leon Mears, an agricultural economist who had learned Indonesian rice-marketing in the Berkeley project, came for AID and stayed on for Harvard. Sumitro's old friend from MIT, Bill Hollinger, transferred from the DAS-Liberia project and now shares Sumitro's office in the Ministry of Trade.

The Harvard people are "advisors," explains DAS Deputy Director Lester Gordon -- "foreign advisors who don't have to deal with all the paperwork and have time to come up with new ideas." They work "as employees of the government would," he says, "but in such a way that it doesn't get out that the foreigners are doing it." Indiscretions had got them bounced from Pakistan. In Indonesia; "we stay in the background."

Harvard stayed in the background while developing the five-year plan. In the winter of 1967-68, a good harvest and a critical infusion of U.S. Food for Peace rice had kept prices down, cooling the political situation for a time. Hollinger, the DAS's first full-time man on the scene, arrived in March and helped the economists lay out the plan's strategy. As the other DAS technocrats arrived, they went to work on its planks. "Did we cause it, did the Ford Foundation cause it, did the Indonesians cause it?" asks AID's Cal Cowles rhetorically. "I don't know."

The plan went into force without fanfare in January 1969, its key elements foreign investment and agricultural self-sufficiency. It is a late-twentieth-century American "development" plan that sounds suspiciously like the mid-nineteenth-century Dutch colonial strategy. Then, Indonesian labor -- often corvée -- substituted for Dutch capital in building the roads and digging the irrigation ditches necessary to create a plantation economy for Dutch capitalists, while a "modern" agricultural technology increased the output of Javanese paddies to keep pace with the expanding population. The plan brought an industrial renaissance to the Netherlands, but only an expanding misery to Indonesia.

As in the Dutch strategy, the Ford scholars' five-year plan introduces a "modern" agricultural technology -- the so-called "green revolution" of high-yield hybrid rice -- to keep pace with Indonesian rural population growth and to avoid "explosive" changes in Indonesian class relationships.

Probably it will do neither -- though AID is currently supporting a project at Berkeley's Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies to give it the old college try. Negotiated with Harsja Bachtiar, the Harvard-trained sociologist now heading the Faculty's Ford-funded research institute, the project is to train Indonesian sociologists to "modernize" relations between the peasantry and the Army's state power.

The agricultural plan is being implemented by the central government's agricultural extension service, whose top men were trained by an AID-funded University of Kentucky program at the Bogor Agricultural Institute. In effect, the agricultural agents have been given a monopoly in the sale of seed and the buying of rice, which puts them in a natural alliance with the local military commanders -- who often control the rice transport business -- and with the local santri landlords, whose higher returns are being used to quickly expand their holdings. The peasants find themselves on the short end of the stick. If they raise a ruckus they are "sabotaging a national program," must be PKI agents, and the soldiers are called in.

The Indonesian ruling class, observes Wertheim, is now "openly waging [its] own brand of class struggle."24 It is a struggle the Harvard technocrats must "modernize." Economically the issue is Indonesia's widespread unemployment; politically it is Suharto's need to legitimize his power through elections. "The government ... will have to do better than just avoiding chaos if Suharto is going to be popularly elected," DAS Director Papanek reported in October 1968. "A really widespread public works program, financed by increased imports of PL 480 commodities sold at lower prices, could provide quick economic and political benefits in the countryside."25


Harvard's Indonesian New Deal is a "rural development" program that will further strengthen the hand of the local Army commanders. Supplying funds meant for labor-intensive public works, the program is supposed to increase local autonomy by working through local authorities. The money will merely line military pockets or provide bribes by which they will secure their civilian retainees. DAS Director Papanek admits that the program is "civilian only in a very broad sense, because many of the local administrators are military people." And the military has two very large, and rather cheap, labor forces which are already at work in "rural development."

One is the three-hundred-thousand-man Army itself. The other is composed of the one hundred twenty thousand political prisoners still being held after the Army's 1965-66 anti-communist sweeps. Some observers estimate there are twice as many prisoners, most of whom the Army admits were not PKI members, though they fear they may have become Communists in the concentration camps.

Despite the abundance of Food for Peace rice for other purposes, there is none for the prisoners, whom the government's daily food expenditure is slightly more than a penny. At least two journalists have reported Sumatran prisoners quartered in the middle of the Goodyear rubber plantation where they had worked before the massacres as members of a PKI union. Now, the correspondents say, they are let out daily to work its trees for substandard wages, which are paid to their guards.26

In Java the Army uses the prisoners in public works. Australian professor Herbert Feith was shown around one Javanese town in 1968 where prisoners had built the prosecutor's house, the high school, the mosque, and (in process) the Catholic church. "It is not really hard to get work out of them if you push them," he was told.27

Just as they are afraid and unwilling to free the prisoners, so the generals are afraid to demobilize the troops. "You can't add to the unemployment," explained an Indonesia desk man at the State Department, "especially with people who know how to shoot a gun." Consequently the troops are being worked more and more into the infrastructure labor force -- to which the Pentagon is providing roadbuilding equipment and advisors.

But it is the foreign-investment plan that is the payoff of Ford's twenty-year strategy in Indonesia and the pot of gold that the Ford modernizers -- both American and Indonesian -- are paid to protect. The nineteenth-century Colonial Dutch strategy built an agricultural export economy. The Americans are interested primarily in resources, mainly mineral.

Freeport Sulphur will mine copper on West Irian. International Nickel has got the Celebes' nickel. Alcoa is negotiating for most of Indonesia's bauxite. Weyerhaeuser, International Paper, Boise Cascade, and Japanese, Korean, and Filipino lumber companies will cut down the huge tropical forests of Sumatra, West Irian, and Kalimantan (Borneo). A U.S.-European consortium of mining giants, headed by U.S. Steel, will mine West Irian's nickel. Two others, U.S.-British and U.S.-Australian, will mine tin. A fourth, U.S.-New Zealander, is contemplating Indonesian coaling. The Japanese will take home the archipelago's shrimp and tuna and dive for her pearls.

Another unmined resource is Indonesia's one hundred twenty million inhabitants -- half the people in Southeast Asia. "Indonesia today," boasts a California electronics manufacturer now operating his assembly lines in Djakarta, "has the world's largest untapped pool of capable assembly labor at a modest cost." The cost is ten cents an hour.

But the real prize is oil. During one week in 1969, twenty three companies, nineteen of them American, bid for the right to explore and bring to market the oil beneath the Java Sea and Indonesia's other coastal waters. In one 21,000-square-mile concession off Java's northeast coast, Natomas and Atlantic-Richfield are already bringing in oil. Other companies with contracts signed have watched their stocks soar in speculative orgies rivaling those following the Alaskan North Slope discoveries. As a result, Ford is sponsoring a new Berkeley project at the University of California law school in "developing human resources for the handling of negotiations with foreign investors in Indonesia."

Looking back, the thirty-year-old vision for the Pacific seems secure in Indonesia -- thanks to the flexibility and perseverance of Ford. A ten-nation "Inter-Governmental Group for Indonesia," including Japan, manages Indonesia's debts and coordinates Indonesia's aid. A corps of "qualified" native technocrats formally make economic decisions, kept in hand by the best American advisors the Ford Foundation's millions can buy. And, as we have seen, American corporations dominate the expanding exploitation of Indonesia's oil, ore, and timber.

But history has a way of knocking down even the best-built plans. Even in Indonesia, the "chaos" which Ford and its modernizers are forever preventing seems just below the surface. Late in 1969, troops from West Java's crack Siliwangi division rounded up five thousand surprised and sullen villagers in an odd military exercise that speaks more of Suharto's fears than of Indonesia's political "stability." Billed as a test in "area management," officers told reporters that it was an exercise in preventing a "potential fifth column" in the once heavily-PKI area from linking up with an imaginary invader. But the army got no cheers as it passed through the villages, an Australian reporter wrote. "To an innocent eye from another planet it would have seemed that the Siliwangi division was an army of occupation."28

There is no more talk about land reform or arming the people in Indonesia now. But the silence is eloquent. In the Javanese villages where the PKI was strong before the pogrom, landlords and officers fear going out after dark. Those who do so are sometimes found with their throats cut, and the generals mutter about "night PKI."
User avatar
PufPuf93
 
Posts: 1884
Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2010 12:29 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby PufPuf93 » Sat May 26, 2012 3:33 am

This article is much newer but historical about the relation of American Anthropological Association history with the CIA.

Recall that Stanley Anne Durham (Obama) (Soetero) was an anthropologist funded by Ford Foundation prior and post communist Sukarno's coup by Suharto et al.

Some of her work was on the outlying islands where some of the largest massacres of "red-cleansing" occurred post coup.

BTW, I am a life long Democrat that is registered in the Democratic Party for 40 years as of 2012 and campaigned for McCarthy then RFK and LBJ before of age. I voted Obama and expect to vote Obama again.

However, I did not want nor expect neo-liberalism and more war and empire reach; still beats crazy.

The most interesting chapter in Dreams of My Father, is where Obama talks about his relationship with stepfather Soetoro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolo_Soetoro

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/price.html

Anthropology News, November 2000, pp. 13-14

The AAA and the CIA?
by David Price

With little notice by anthropologists, there has been increasing documentation of the extent to which American intelligence agencies monitored and influenced the development of American social sciences throughout the Cold War. One of the ways these agencies accomplished this was through covert contact with professional associations -- either as silent observers at professional meetings or as silent partners entering into secret agreements with individual members or official bodies within these associations.
A wide literature has developed that documents some of the interactions between American social science professional associations and intelligence agencies. Benjamin Harris documented the FBI's monitoring of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues since the 1930s. In Stalking the Sociological Imagination (1999, Greenwood), Mike Keen used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to document the FBI's surveillance of prominent sociologists as well as the meetings of the American Sociological Association. Christopher Simpson likewise established that the "FBI and US military intelligence agents kept the American Sociological Society conventions under surveillance in an effort to smoke out radicals." Sigmund Diamond's book, Compromised Campus (1992), used FOIA to painstakingly declassify CIA and FBI documents revealing the extent to which post-war Area Studies centers were manipulated by the CIA and Pentagon.

While the history of the American Anthropological Association has been punctuated by inquiries into accusations that anthropologists have undertaken work for intelligence agencies, there has been little research into links between the AAA and these agencies. A variety of documents released to me under FOIA establish that the CIA and FBI have monitored activities within our Association. Further, documents from the Association's archives establish that, in the 1950s, the AAA entered into a series of covert relationships with the CIA. One of these relationships involved working to establish a liaison position between the Association and CIA. Another involved the Executive Board agreeing to secretly give the CIA a cross-indexed roster of the Association's membership detailing individuals' backgrounds and areas of expertise.

The chronology and historical background of these events are complicated and are described in another paper. Only a brief overview of the Association's documents relating to this episode appears below.

In February 1951, AAA Executive Secretary Frederick Johnson wrote the Executive Board that, due to numerous requests by various governmental agencies, he believed the Association needed to produce a detailed roster of its membership. Johnson -- an unelected, non-voting, ex officio member of the board -- recommended that the AAA work with the CIA on this project. Throughout the Board's decision process and during later negotiations with the CIA, Johnson maneuvered -- even to the point of exceeding his ex officio role -- to bring the CIA and their computers into this project.

AAA President Howells wrote Johnson (3/3/51), that "the CIA proposal is ideal," and that under this proposal the CIA would keep a copy of the computerized roster data for their own uses. Howells indicated that if "a reasonable questionnaire, suitable to both parties, can be worked out, we will both get what we want, and except for the mailing [the CIA] will put the whole thing through from beginning to end, and the chances are we will get something that we want."

Board members received ballots with two action items regarding this proposed relationship between the Association and the CIA. The first item proposed that Johnson be authorized to continue negotiations with the CIA regarding the production of a detailed roster of Association members; the second item requested authorization for Johnson to seek means for producing future rosters. The first ballot item is reproduced in full below because it clarifies the Executive Board's awareness of the CIA's involvement in compiling the roster, as well as the arrangements whereby CIA would keep a copy of the final product for their own uses:


The Executive Secretary is empowered to continue negotiations with Central Intelligence Agency for the purpose of compiling a roster of Anthropological Personnel. The final agreement will be based on the idea that the Anthropological Association will sponsor the roster and the Agency will do the technical work connected with it. The [Central Intelligence] Agency will be allowed to keep one copy of the roster for its own use and it will deliver to the Association a duplicate copy the use of which will not be restricted. The final agreement between the Association and the Agency shall be such that the Association shall be liable only for mailing charges and such incidental expenses as it may be able to afford. The final agreement shall be approved by the Executive Board.
On March 29, 1951 Johnson informed the Board that the "Proposal that Executive Secretary continue negotiations with the Central Intelligence Agency to arrange for compilation of a roster of Anthropologists" had passed, as did the second ballot item authorizing Johnson to negotiate the production of future rosters. Negotiations with anthropologists working at the CIA were undertaken and a plan of action was proposed.

Johnson wrote the Board that the CIA offered the best opportunity for the Association despite its insistence on secrecy (4/21/51). Johnson wrote that, "In searching for the ways and means of setting up a roster of Anthropologists I have a general proposal from [the] Central Intelligence Agency. This agency is reluctant to have its name connected with the proposal. It will do the work as generally and tentatively outlined below provided the Association will sponsor the project." In keeping with CIA's wishes, these arrangements were not made public.

The kinds of information to be collected by mailed questionnaires were negotiated in the summer and fall of 1951. The final questionnaire collected information on AAA members' geographical, linguistic and cultural expertise as well as their military background. What became of the information collected for the roster is presently unclear. Association records for this period do not contain a copy of a completed roster, and public and private searches for copies of the final roster have thus far been fruitless. FBI records reveal that the questionnaire was sent to the AAA membership and further indicate that the FBI believed this roster to have "been initiated by some Governmental agency, such as CIA, for the express purpose of obtaining intelligence data." The CIA has been uncooperative with my efforts to clarify the nature and extent of its contact with the AAA and its membership. At present we are left to wonder about the uses to which the CIA might have put such data as it engaged in anti-democratic and counterinsurgency activities in the decades that followed. I have hopes that some member of the Association reading this article knows the outcome of these negotiations with CIA, or what became of this roster.

All this raises troubling issues for our Association. These issues involve questions about a variety of only partially documented links between anthropologists and intelligence agencies, as well as fundamental issues concerning the ethics of allowing secrecy in research. While raising these issues complicates our relationships with those we study, not confronting these issues stands to potentially damage both the interests of anthropologists and those we study.
_________________

David Price is assistant professor of anthropology at St. Martin's College in Lacey, Washington.
Last edited by PufPuf93 on Sat May 26, 2012 7:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
PufPuf93
 
Posts: 1884
Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2010 12:29 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby American Dream » Sat May 26, 2012 7:29 am

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/06/the-i ... lanthropy/

The Ideology of Philanthropy
by Michael Barker / June 12th, 2010

Massive not-for-profit corporations, like the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, that were created by the world’s leading capitalists have “gone to great lengths to rationalize the contradiction between democratic principles and elite dominance.”1 Seen through the eyes of their elitist foundation executives, democracy only functions when it is ran by the few for the many. Education thus takes a key place in the successful promotion of elite governance both on domestic and international planes of action; and although not well known, Edward Berman, professor emeritus of the University of Louisville, has written an important book that examines just this subject. By reviewing Berman’s study The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983), this article aims to publicize his vitally important, though oft neglected, ideas on the anti-democratic nature of liberal philanthropy.

While the history of elite governance is long and troublesome, in Berman’s book we are invited to study the honing of such management strategies from the early twentieth century onwards. Today of course, the Gates Foundation is the most financially powerful philanthropic body in the world (distributing $3 billion in grants last year), but until their relatively late arrival on the scene, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations (the “big three”) had dominated the philanthropic arena. Indeed, exporting the ideology of the capitalist state has been a key function of these foundations, a care of duty that fell securely on their shoulders as they “represented one of the few sources of unencumbered ‘risk’ capital available during the period from 1945 to 1975.”2

As Berman acknowledges, the interest shown by these foundations in creating and financing “various educational configurations both at home and abroad cannot be separated from their attempts to evolve a stable domestic polity and a world order amenable to their interests and the strengthening of international capitalism.” Their simultaneous promotion of elite governance and massive levels of worker exploitation consequently required the forging of a “liberal consensus” among the ruling class and their allied funcationaries, which would actively prempt radical structural alternatives, and legimitate capitalism – by fostering public acquiesence to elite priorities. To sucessfully facilitate the building of this consenus, the creation of right-thinking educational institutions was essential to generate a “worldwide network of elites whose approach to governance and change would be efficient, professional, moderate, incremental, and nonthreatening to the class interests of those who, like Messrs, Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, had established the foundations.” Far-sighted elites evidently recognized the popularity of alternatives to capitalism, so in turn advocated progressive reforms which attempted to find the “middle ground between the extremes of oligopoly on the one hand and socialism on the other, while encouraging an atmosphere congenial to increased levels of productivity.”3

This is not to say that the individuals who launched foundation “education” programs during the Progressive Era were not seriously concerned with improving the lot of the poor and downtrodden: just that many of these people with “a deep and abiding concern for the plight of the poor” failed to tackle the root cause of injustice, that is, industrial capitalism. Therefore, as many “charity workers refused to recognize the roots of this mass misery, their palliatives focused more on attempts to reform the existing system and to adjust their clients to it, than to search for alternative organizational structures that might result in a more equitable society less destructive of the immigrants’ communities.”4 (For more on the topic of charitable motives, see “The Russell Sage Foundation and the Manufacture of Reform.”)

Many people, even during the Progressive Era, did however challenge the growing power of foundations to define the parameters of legitimate discussion, but the foundation worlds success in fending off such attacks has meant that today far fewer people are aware of the co-optive nature of liberal philanthropy. This is in large part because “[v]iewpoints and perspectives that support the position of the dominant class are funded by the foundations, while those that are seen to threaten that position are not.” Books critiquing liberal foundations, like Berman’s, tend not to fit comfortably within a society whose educational structures prioritize capitalist growth imperatives. Consequently the strategic funding of certain causes enables major foundations “to legitimate particular viewpoints while simultaneously devaluing others.”5 At this point it is important to note that the ideological orientation of foundations should not be surprising given their capitalist origins, but the lack of sustained critical inquiry from progressive activists is certainly far more alarming. Either way:

The foundations’ influence in foreign-policy determination and in the extension of their worldview into the domestic polity – and beyond – derives from several interrelated factors: (1) their possession of significant amounts of capital, which can be allocated as their self-perpetuating directors deem appropriate; (2) their ability to allocate this capital to certain individuals and groups strategically located in the cultural apparatus (universities, the arts sector, the media, authors, and publishers), who in turn produce works frequently (but not always) supportive of the worldview of the foundations themselves, thereby providing an important source of legitimation for their perspective; (3) their links to and incorporation into the decision-making stratum of the capitalist state; and (4) their shared view that the development of the domestic polity and polities abroad can best be advanced through the aegis of the world capitalist system, dominated by the United States. (p.38)

Berman suggests that one of the key projects supported by the major foundations to evolve a consensus for US foreign policy elites was the War-Peace Studies Project, which ran between 1939 and 1945, and whose “conclusions… present in outline form the basics of United States foreign policy after World War II.” Two “major recommendations” from this project were integral to the propagation of US global hegemony: the first “involved American financial support for and control of” the World Bank (which along with the International Monetary Fund “grew from seeds planted in War-Peace Studies Project recommendation P-1323 of July 1941”); and the second foresaw the need for the development of bilateral assistance agreements, currently operationalized by the US Agency for International Development.6In this regard, Berman writes that:

Foundation officers have always recognized the importance of [foreign] markets and mineral resources for the continued health of the United States and the world capitalist economy, and… they designed their overseas programs with this in mind. The cornerstone of these overseas activities was the development of educational institutions, particularly universities, in those areas that foreign-policy architects determined to be of strategic economic and geopolitical importance to the United States. (p.66)

The ideology of liberal imperialism, that is “modernization” theory, was “summed up succinctly” in W. W. Rostow’s book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 1960) – a book which was written “during a ‘reflective year’ away from his academic responsibilities, made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.” And as Berman observes: “An important aspect of this developmental model emphasized the role of the leadership cadres in the new nations.”7 This meant that a new Third World elite had to be developed and courted by the foundation world via the use of educational exchange programs, “whereby students benefiting from their fellowships studied certain subjects at universities whose faculties could be counted on, minimally, to provide the ‘correct’ perspectives.”

Early programs bringing African students to the United States were organized in the 1920s by the Phelps-Stokes Fund and by the Rockefeller philanthropies International Education Board, the latter of which provided funding for bodies like the International Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Such programs provide effective, but generally unrecognized, mechanisms to further the foundations’ cultural hegemony”; thereby “complement[ing] the cruder and more overt forms of economic and military imperialism that are so easily identifiable.”8

Berman points out that subsequent contributions to this important side of the cultural cold war like the Congress for Cultural Freedom included the Ford Foundation’s Foreign Student Leadership Program, which was initiated in 1955 and “designated the National Student Association [which already “worked closely with the CIA”] as the agency responsible for the selection of ‘responsible’ foreign student leaders to participate.”9 Yet here it is important to emphasize that:

There was no apparent coercion involved in these fellowship programs. The foundations have not overtly manipulated potential fellowship recipients. Such blatant methods are unnecessary because of the understanding on the part of fellowship aspirants that their identification with certain methodological approaches or areas of investigation or their demonstration of certain behaviors will serve to stigmatize them as ‘irresponsible’ among the funding agencies, thereby eliminating any possibility of receiving a grant. (p.95)

As I have demonstrated previously, foundations also played a major role in shaping academic research agendas in the United States (and overseas). Berman, for instance, explains how: “The Ford Foundation almost singlehandedly established the major areas-studies programs in American universities.” Likewise, important more general research centers supported by foundations during the 1950s and 1960s included MIT’s Center for International Studies (see footnote #7), Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University, the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley, the Stanford University Institute for Communications Research, and the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. In addition, other foundation-backed educational institutions that worked closely with universities included the Institute of International Education (which “was established in 1919 with a grant from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”), the African-American Institute (which was founded in 1953 with most of its funding during its early years coming from the CIA), and Education and World Affairs (which was founded in 1961 with $2 million from the Ford Foundation and $0.5 million from the Carnegie Corporation). In 1971, Education and World Affairs “was absorbed into yet another foundation-created organization, the International Council for Educational Development, [a group] whose key officers were former Carnegie vice-president James Perkins and former Ford officer Philip Coombs.”10

By way of supplementing and extending the influence of educational exchange programs foundations quickly moved on to provide direct support for “trusted” Third-World intellectuals, “enabling research to be conducted in Third-World countries on socially and/or politically sensitive topics that United States Policy makers considered important.” In some instances researchers worked based in the US, but more often than not, the foundations extended their philanthropic reach to the Third-World countries themselves by financing local research centers.11 Research findings generated by such regional research networks were then used to better manage those in Third-World periphery states for the benefit of the imperial home state, or metropolitan center.

These networks serve to encourage the production and dissemination of ideas and data deemed important by universities and agencies in the metropolitan centers. At the same time, this arrangement helps to deflect Third-World researchers from concerns that these same agencies are less anxious to have investigated. This is a conscious foundation policy. As [Robert] Arnove notes: ‘[f]oundation support prevents Third-World activists from coping with their domestic problems in their own terms and addressing them with a level of resources consonant with their level of development. Foundation-induced reform efforts, then, tend to divert Third-World nations from more realistic, and perhaps revolutionary, efforts at social change.’ The foundations are as effective in limiting the production of certain kinds of knowledge as they are in disseminating ideas that they consider important.

An important factor in the extension of one group’s hegemony is its ability to encourage intellectuals to investigate certain problems, those which are ‘important,’ while ignoring or devaluing others. Once the selection process assumes an autonomy of its own, the direct presence of the dominant group – the foundations in this instance – decreases while its hegemony increases accordingly
. (p.174)

Despite the evident success that foundations have had in shaping ideology in the twentieth century their power is “not monolithic” and they “do allow differing points of view to be expressed, although these never or only infrequently form the basis for policy.” Indeed, most of their power is simply derived from the fact that their hegemony remains unchallenged, even from anti-capitalist activists. Yet with the increasing availability of the internet it is now much easier to break the ideological clout of foundations, and while in the past many criticisms of foundations have been rendered inaccessible to most people, this is no longer the case.

Many people are already familiar with the historical role fulfilled by conservative foundations in driving the neoliberal revolution, and so now is a good time for activists to more thoroughly scrutunize the insidious influence of liberal foundations. This however is easier said than done as many of the organizations that regularly challenge the legitimacy of for-profit corporate power are in fact funded by foundations, and many such groups would actually cease to operate without foundation support. This problematic state of affairs has led some people to describe the domination of the non-profit sector by not-for-profit corporations as the non-profit industrial complex. Yet in spite of these serious obstacles it is vital that concerned citizens break through the humanitarian rhetoric shielding the foundation world from valid criticism, because if their motives are “repeatedly questioned by those for whom these were ostensibly designed… the influence of these institutions could be seriously challenged.”12 As Berman concludes:

The reproduction of a particular kind of cultural capital has historically been the primary activity of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations. There now exists the ironic possibility that some recipients of that cultural capital will utilize part of their capital (in the form of their education and training) to examine in greater detail the foundations’ programs. Such investigations might reveal contradictions between the foundations’ public rhetoric and their institutional activities, thereby presenting a challenge to their continuing cultural hegemony. The foundations’ liberalism, as well as their hopes for continued legitimacy, effectively preclude them from trying to prevent this examination through overt censorship, although they can of course place numerous obstacles in the paths of would-be investigators. It is to state the obvious to say that the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations are powerful institutions. At the same time, we need to understand that they are not omnipotent, nor is their continuing influence as purveyors of capitalist hegemony assured or unassailable. (pp.178-9)

Edward Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy, p.6. [↩]
Berman, p.38. [↩]
Berman, p.16, p.15, p.16. [↩]
Berman, p.19. [↩]
Berman, p.30. “In a system of state capitalism, for example, where institutions like the foundations are linked to the state, it is fanciful to deny that the foundations enjoy a distinct advantage in their attempts to impose their ideological and cultural hegemony over, say, the American working class, which enjoys very little state support because of its traditional confrontational position vis-a-vis capital.” (p.29) [↩]
Berman, p.43, p.50, p.51. [↩]
Berman, p.67. Rostow had developed the ideas developed in this book, during his tenure at MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS) – a research center that was backed by the CIA and the Ford Foundation during the 1950s (Max Millikan resigned from the CIA in 1952 to direct CENIS’s research).
Before becoming a revolutionary writer, Gunder Frank noted: “In 1958 I spent three months as visiting researcher at MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS) and met Ben Higgins, W.W. Rostow and the others. Rostow wrote his Process of Development (1952) and Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1962). Although Rostow and company dealt with Keynesian type macro economic and even social problems, they did so to pursue explicitly the neo-classical counter revolutionary, and even counter reformist, cold war ends. The quintessential modernization book, David Lerner’s (1958) Passing of Traditional Society, appeared while I was there. At the same time, Everett Hagen wrote his On the Theory of Social Change (1962), David McClelland his Achieving Society (1961), and Ithiel de Sola Pool his right libertarian/authoritarian political works.”

During the 1950s and 1960s: “The major foundations regularly supported the work of … structural or technological functionalists, not least because of their shared ideology. Many of the academic ’stars’ of the functionalist persuasion received funding to enable them to apply their perspectives to developing nations as well as to the United States. In this respect the work of such scholars as Edward Schils, Reinhard Bendix, Daniel Lerner, S.N. Eisenstadt, Seymour M. Lipset, and Marion Levy, among others, on developing nations takes on particular significance.” (p.107) Funding grants tended to be channeled via the foundation created Social Science Research Council. “While an occasional ‘radical’ viewpoint (e.g., [Barrington] Moore or Robert Heilbroner’s) might be funded, generally through the Social Science Research Council, there was little chance that his isolated voice could be of consequence as it contested with the more numerous voices of developmental orthodoxy.” Berman, p.120-1. [↩]

Berman, p.93, p.3. [↩]
Berman, p.94. With regard to creating a trustworthy elite of “learned men” for the United States, Berman writes that the Ford Foundations “concern for nurturing an academic elite, which would play the leadership role in the domestic polity, found its best expression in the work of the Ford-created and supported Fund for the Advancement of Education.” (p.72) [↩]
Berman, p.102, p.129, p.131, p.137. For a critical examination of the role of universities and educational exchanges in South Africa, see “Human Rights Watch Brings Neoliberalism To Africa.”
For a detailed examination of the influence of philanthropic foundations on education in Africa, see Kenneth J. King, Pan Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Clarendon Press, 1971). [↩]

Berman, p.173. [↩]
Berman, p.178. It is important to note that many radical scholars have been supported by foundations. Yet while radical scholars like Barrington Moore’s views… have received a polite response from academics, the implications of his work have been largely ignored.” (p.76) Thus, while “an occasional ‘radical’ viewpoint (e.g., Moore’s or Robert Heilbroner’s) might be funded, generally through the Social Science Research Council, there was little chance that his isolated voice could be of consequence as it contested with the more numerous voices of developmental orthodoxy. Indeed, it is conceivable that occasional funding of a study contravening the established position was even advantageous for the foundations. The dissenting viewpoint could be used to counter foundation critics who charged that the organizations only subsidized researchers supportive of the foundations’ preconceived positions on particular issues.” (p.77) “Contradictions occasionally surface within the foundations as well. Examples include the funding provided by the Ford Foundation for the avowedly Marxian interpretation of American education authored by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in 1976, or the Russell Sage Foundation’s 1972 support of three leftist sociologists to study that foundation’s organization and operations. Other examples might include the funding provided for such “radical” researchers on Third-World development as Denis Goulet, the support afforded several left-wing Latin social scientists, or the support and advice given by the Ford Foundation to enable Tanzania to further its program of African socialism.” (p.39) [↩]
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby American Dream » Sat May 26, 2012 9:28 am

Bill Gates, Philanthropy, and Social Engineering? (Part 1 of 3)

July, 16 2008

By Michael Barker


Like many of the world's richest businessmen Bill Gates believes in a special form of democracy, otherwise known as plutocracy, that is, "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor". Following in the footsteps of the robber barons, like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, who founded two of America's most influential liberal foundations (e.g. the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation), Gates, like most capitalists, relies upon the government to help regulate and protect his business interests from competition, but is less keen on the idea of a government that acts to redistribute wealth to the wider populous. Dean Baker surmises this idea when he writes that Bill Gates is after all "one of the heroes of the conservative nanny state." In the minds of such massively powerful would-be capitalists, the State is merely a tool to be harnessed for profit maximization, and they themselves, the ones who have acquired their wealth by exploiting and manipulating the economic system then take it upon their own shoulders to help relieve global inequality and escalating poverty - the modern day's white man's burden. As one might expect, the definitions of the appropriate solutions to the capitalist-driven inequality that are generated by the world's most successful capitalists neglect to seriously challenge the primary driver of global poverty, capitalism. For the most part the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism remains anathema to all, instead liberal philanthropists industriously fund all manner of ‘solutions' that help provide a much needed outlet valve for rising resistance and dissent, while still enabling business-as-usual, albeit with a band-aid stuck over some of the most glaring inequities.

With huge government-aided financial empires resting in the hands of a small power elite, the ability of the richest individual philanthropists to shape global society is increasing all the time, while the power of governments to influence society is being continuously undermined by many of the powerful philanthropists. This situation is problematic on a number of levels least of not which is that existing theories of democratic governance find no legitimate role for liberal philanthropists acting as extra-constitutional planners. Democratic governments rely on taxes to stabilize existing structures of governance; however, by exploiting specifically designed legislation, billionaire capitalists are able to create massive tax-free endowments to satisfy their own particular whims or interests, but not necessarily those of the wider public. This process in effect means that vast amounts of money is regularly ‘stolen' from the democratic citizenry, whereupon is redistributed by unaccountable elites, who then cynically use this display of generosity to win over more supporters to free-market principles that they themselves do their utmost to protect themselves.

Bill Gates' Microsoft Corporation and his associated liberal foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - which is the largest of its kind in the world - are only one of the more visible displays of capitalisms hypocrisy. However, to date within the scholarly literature no attention has been paid to the activities of this powerful philanthropist, thus this article will provide the first critical overview of Bill Gates' global social engineering. Given the paucity of studies that have incorporated critiques of liberal philanthropy many readers may not be familiar with the numerous critiques of liberal philanthropy, however, these will not be reviewed here as I have reviewed this literature elsewhere.[1] Instead using a Gramscian conceptual framework, supported by Joan Roelofs critical insights into the democracy manipulating activities of liberal foundations, this article will concentrate on providing much needed historical context to Bill Gates' philanthropy. Subsequently, the article will provide a brief overview of the business that generated Bill Gates' fortune, the Microsoft Corporation, and will then examine some of the people and projects that are links to his global philanthropic activities.

Capitalists cum Philanthropists: the roots of Gates' philanthropy

At this present historical juncture, neoclassical free-market economic doctrines - in theory at least - are the favored means of promoting capitalism by business and political elites. Unfortunately, in many respects this neoliberal dogma has been adopted, arguably against their own best interests, by a sizable proportion of the citizenry of the world's most powerful countries (e.g. in the United States and UK). This widespread internalization (but not necessarily acceptance) by the broader populous of the economic theories that consolidate capitalist hegemony over the global market did not happen naturally, but actually required a massive ongoing propaganda campaign to embed itself in the masses minds. The contours of this propaganda offensive have been well described by Alex Carey who fittingly observed that: "The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

There are many reasons why corporate giants engage in liberal philanthropic endeavors: one is to have a direct influence on political decisions through what has been termed political philanthropy,[2] but another important reason is that such charitable efforts help cultivate a positive image in the publics' mind that serves to deflect often much warranted criticism, while also helping them expand their market share. However, although liberal foundations like the Gates Foundation may engage in such ostensibly progressive activities this does not mean that the capitalist enterprises from which their endowments arise (i.e. Microsoft) refrain from engaging in normal antidemocratic business practices. So while the Gates Foundation directs some of its resources to progressive grassroots initiatives, its corporate benefactor actually works to create fake grassroots organizations (otherwise known as astroturf groups) to actively lobby through covert means to protect corporate power.

For instance, in 1999 Microsoft helped found a corporate front group called Americans for Technology Leadership - a group which describes its role as being "dedicated to limiting government regulation of technology and fostering competitive market solutions to public policy issues affecting the technology industry." In 2001, Joseph Menn and Edmund Sanders alleged that Americans for Technology Leadership orchestrated a "nationwide campaign to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement" to help defend Microsoft from monopoly charges. The founder of this front group, Jonathan Zuck, also created another libertarian group in 1998 called the Association for Competitive Technology, a group which was part sponsored by Microsoft to fight against the anti-trust actions being pursued against Microsoft in the United States. Such antidemocratic campaigns waged via front groups and astroturf organizations, however, were just one part of Microsoft's democratic manipulations: this is because as Greg Miller and Leslie Helm demonstrated (in 1998), this was just one part of a program that Microsoft and PR giant Edelman had been planning as part of a "massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company."[3] None of this should be surprising because in 1995 it was also revealed how Microsoft were using "consultants to generate computer analyses of reporters' articles, enlist industry sources to critique writers they know and - less frequently - provide investigative peeks into journalists private lives". Amongst the rare spate of critical articles surfacing in the late 1990s, to add insult on injury it was also shown that Microsoft had also made a $380,000 contribution to the conservative corporate-funded astroturf group Citizens for a Sound Economy (now known as FreedomWorks).[4] Unfortunately, these examples only represent the tip of the iceberg of Microsoft's democracy manipulating activities, as the corporate media while able to make occasional critical enquiries into corporate misdemeanors can hardly be relied upon to act as a corporate watchdog.

Like what were formerly known as the "big three" liberal foundations - the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation - whom exhibited a long history of working closely with the US government's Central Intelligence Agency, Microsoft also has its own ties to the shadowy intelligence community. Thus in the aforementioned astroturf campaign involving Americans for Technology Leadership, another group that worked alongside this coalition on Microsoft's behalf was a group called Citizens Against Government Waste. This anti-regulation group was founded in 1984 by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and the late J. Peter Grace (1913-1995); however, Grace's role in creating this group is particularly noteworthy as he had formerly chaired the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development (or Solidarity Center), a group that has a long history of working closely with the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy to promote the US's imperial interests overseas. Of course, Grace who died in 1995 was not part of the Microsoft campaign, but the point here is to merely indicate the types of conservative groups that Microsoft associates with. Moreover, in 1999 it was revealed that Microsoft has direct ties to the intelligence community as "special access codes for use by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) ha[d] been secretly built into all versions of the Windows operating system".

These CIA-connections should be expected as one of Microsoft's main clients is after all the Pentagon. Furthermore, Microsoft's board of directors itself is also home to a key member of the ‘defense' establishment, as in November 2003 Charles Noski joined their board. Shortly thereafter, in December 2003, Noski joined the Northrop Grumman Corporation - which happens to be the third largest arms manufacturer in the world - as their corporate vice president, a position he retained until March 2005 (he also served on their board of directors during these years). Another Microsoft director, James Cash, Jr., also serves on the board of General Electric, yet another major military contractor; while Noski also serves as a director of the Rockefeller-linked investment banking giant, Morgan Stanley, and fellow Microsoft board member Dina Dublon is the former chief financial officer for the Rockefellers' financial services company JPMorgan Chase.

Finally last but not least the CEO of Microsoft, Steven Ballmer, who has served in this position since 2000, has links to another controversial group called the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Here he serves on their World Chairman's Council, a council that is composed of a "select group of people who have demonstrated an enduring commitment to Israel and JNF" by donating over $1 million. This group was formed in 1901, and is widely considered to be an environmental organization, which as their website notes, has "planted over 240 million trees, built over 180 dams and reservoirs, developed over 250,000 acres of land, created more than 1,000 parks throughout Israel and educated students around the world about Israel and the environment." However, this benign sounding apolitical description warrants closer scrutiny when it is known that JNF's president, Stanley Chesley, also serves on the executive committee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Indeed, although "throughout the Jewish world the JNF is seen as a highly responsible ecological agency" in actual fact, "JNF was the principal Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine". In a recent interview Illan Pappe put it simply: JNF is simply a "colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing."[5] This is a very controversial link for a corporation that created the Gates Foundation: however, having provided a critical overview of the corporation that allowed Bill Gates' philanthropic work to thrive, the following part of this article will introduce some of the people and projects that have been supported by the various Gates foundations.



Michael Barker has just submitted his doctoral thesis, and is currently co-editing a book with Daniel Faber and Joan Roelofs that will critically evaluate the influence of philanthropic foundations on the public sphere. This article was presented as a refereed paper at the Australasian Political Science Association conference.



Notes


[1] Michael Barker 2008. 'The liberal foundations of environmentalism: revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford connection.' Capitalism Nature Socialism, 19, 2, 15-42; Michael Barker 2008. 'The liberal foundations of media reform? Creating sustainable funding opportunities for radical media reform.' Global Media Journal.

[2] Sims estimated that the ‘corporate outlay on political philanthropy in the 2000 election cycle [in the US] was... a minimum of $1-2 billion. This compares to roughly $200 million on PAC contributions and $400 million on soft money contributions" (pp.167-8). Grechen Sims 2003. Rethinking the political power of American business: the role of corporate social responsibility. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Stanford University. (See related article.)

[3] Greg Miller and Leslie Helm 1998. 'Microsoft Tries to Orchestrate Public Support.' Los Angeles Times, 10 April 1998, p. A1.

[4] Microsoft representative, Thomas Hartocollis, serves on the board of directors of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship - a group that is funded by various conservative foundations and to teach children about the benefits of capitalism.

[5] Illan Pappe writes that: "The true mission of the JNF, has been to conceal [the] visible remnants of Palestine not by only the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence." JNF's ‘ecological' sites "do not so much commemorate history as seek to totally erase it". Ilan Pappe 2006. Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, pp.228-9, 17.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18198
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby American Dream » Sat May 26, 2012 9:44 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/05/28/ ... ic-crisis/

MAY 28, 2009

Where Were the Foundations?

The Philanthropies and the Economic Crisis

by JOAN ROELOFS


We in the United States have been endowed with enormous philanthropic foundations, which have been fixing up the world for the last 100 years. One might wonder how their activities relate to the current economic crisis. News on this subject is not found in the headlines, or even on page 23. There is more exposure of foundation garments than of the opulent structures overpinning our system.

We should remember that these institutions, taking to heart the “robber baron” accusation, were not intended to dispense charity, but to apply resources and “social engineering” to forestall the “evils of capitalism.” Thus the Sage Foundation created the field of professional social work. The Rockefeller Foundation, directly and through its subsidiary, the Social Science Research Council, helped to shape New Deal programs, including social security. Its massive manual, Recent Social Trends, was a blueprint for the reform of laissez-faire capitalism. The Ford Foundation created prototypes for the “War on Poverty” programs, and more recently was the designer of Individual Development Accounts to provide funding for worthy low income people.

In addition to the billions donated to non-profit organizations, economic development, and policy-oriented think tanks, foundations have been prime creators of international organizations designed to promote and defend capitalism against any and all threats. After World War I, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations originated the Council on Foreign Relations. Coordinating with its foreign affiliates, it is still going strong. Post World War II, the Bilderberg group was formed (named after the hotel in the Netherlands where the first meeting was held in 1954), an informal palaver that meets in secret (no press and don’t tell) at a different high-security location each year. It gathers the elite of North America and Western Europe; its originators included David Rockefeller, Dean Rusk (then head of the Rockefeller Foundation), Joseph Johnson (head of the Carnegie Endowment), and John J. McCloy (Chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation), along with European notables. While this encounter does not conclude with any formal plan of action, the idea is that these powerful people have the means to implement the sense of the meeting. The list of attendees provided by aggressive investigative journalists at http://www.bilderberg.com will give an idea of the clout involved. As with similar gatherings, Bilderberg is an arena where rookies are fielded for selection to the big leagues; Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Mary Robinson were invited when aspiring politicians.

Bilderberg was too narrow a selection, as “non-Western” nations are becoming economic “giants.” Primarily initiated by Rockefeller institutions, the Trilateral Commission (Europe, North America, Japan) was convened in 1973 to deal with political threats and economic instabilities in the capitalist world. An even more inclusive gathering became necessary, and foundations and corporations created the World Economic Forum in 1974. In addition to the prime ministers and corporate and foundation executives, it includes rock stars, “emerging young leaders,” and representatives of non-governmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Third World Network. While some of its sessions are in secret, it has a vast public component, welcoming the press, webcasting the panel discussions, and so forth. Its consistent theme is that globalization and economic growth will promote wealth and happiness for all, although participants are divided among advocates of the “free market” and government regulation.

Foundations are concerned about the dysfunctions of globalization, and consequently fund many groups active at alternative summits such as the World Social Forum, initiated as a radical response to the World Economic Forum. The protesting organizations at the WSF receive grants from pro-globalization foundations and corporations, which also provide general support for the Forum and its regional affiliates. There is now a Funders Network on Trade and Globalization created primarily for the WSF that includes the Ford, Rockefeller, Mott, Tides, and Levi Strauss Foundations, along with progressive funders such as the Funding Exchange and the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program. The group of 160 funders sends a special delegation to the WSF. A major purpose: “The participation of funders and donors has allowed them to build a common analysis, in partnership with their grantees, of the underlying structural causes of community problems: the institutions involved, the flow of money, the constraints on democracy and other factors.”

While promoting/saving/improving capitalism over the long term, foundations are also deeply entrenched in the corporate sector, including the military-industrial complex and finance capitalism, through their trustees and investments. In 1971, the Ford Foundation established the Commonfund for managing the investments of private universities, schools, and foundations. Its charge was to break away from the traditional conservative investment policies of these entities in order to produce more robust returns.

As a consequence, the largest foundations became “powerhouses” in investing, seeking to increase their yields through hedge funds, distressed debt, venture capital, buyouts, real estate, and international resource and energy ventures. The investment committee of the Ford Foundation’s board is headed by Afsaneh Beschloss, who was recruited from the Carlyle Group where she was a specialist in hedge funds. According to Commonfund’s report, about 40% of foundations screen their investments; however, the major evil avoided is tobacco.

While critical scrutiny of foundations is rare, it is almost entirely absent from major media. A notable exception was Charles Piller’s 2007 investigation of Gates Foundation investments (published in The Los Angeles Times) that concluded: “The Gates Foundation reaps vast profits every year from companies whose actions contradict its mission of improving society in the United States and around the world, particularly the lot of people afflicted by poverty and disease.”

Foundations are quick to publicize their “cause-related” investments, but for the bulk of their portfolios they go along with the crowd, and that has made all the sameness.



JOAN ROELOFS is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Apex-Bootstrap Press, 1996).
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Aug 07, 2012 1:57 am


http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/the-p ... c-complex/


The Philanthropic Complex

By Curtis White · In Spring 2012

Image


In the fall of 2009 I was approached by Hal Clifford, executive editor of Orion Magazine, and asked to write an essay about American philanthropy, especially in relation to environmentalism. From the first I was dubious about the assignment. I said, “Not-for-profit organizations like you cannot afford to attack philanthropy because if you attack one foundation you may as well attack them all. You’ll be cutting your own throat.”

Hal assured me that while all this might be true someone had to take up the issue, and Orion was willing to do so. And I was the right person to write the essay precisely because I was not an insider but simply an honest intelligence. So, with many misgivings I said I’d try.

I interviewed about a dozen people on both sides of the field, both givers and getters, and some in the middle. The people I spoke to were eager to articulate their grievances even if they were just as eager to be anonymous. I also should acknowledge that the development of these grievances was no doubt colored by my own experiences as a board member and president of the board of two not-for-profit organizations in the arts.

After working for several months writing and revising the essay, Hal Clifford announced that he would be leaving Orion. My first thought was “uh-oh.” The editor-in-chief, Chip Blake, took over my essay and at that point things got dicey. Ultimately he explained that he hadn’t been fully aware of my assignment, that he hadn’t known the essay would be an attack on “the oligarchy,” that it didn’t seem to be fully a part of the magazine’s usual interests, and that–fatally–from the magazine’s point of view publishing the essay would be an exercise in “self-mutilation.”

Which was exactly what I said at the beginning! They had come to their senses even if it had taken a long time and cost me a lot of work to get there.

But, secretly, I was pleased. This editorial catastrophe was the best possible confirmation of everything I argue in the essay.


Part One:
What Organizations Experience


In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic cultures that they appeal to.

The conservative foundations happily fund “big picture” work. They are eager to be the means for disseminating free market, anti-government ideology. Hence the steady growth and influence of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, the American Majority Institute, the Cato Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institute, and on (and frighteningly) on.

On the other hand, progressive foundations may understand that the organizations they fund have visions, but it’s not the vision that they will give money to. In fact, foundations are so reluctant to fund “public advocacy” of progressive ideas that it is almost as if they were afraid to do so. If there is need for a vision the foundation itself will provide it. Unfortunately, according to one source, the foundation’s vision too often amounts to this: “If we had enough money, and access to enough markets, and enough technological expertise, we could solve all the problems.” The source concludes that such a vision “doesn’t address sociological and spiritual problems.”

Indeed.

The truth is that organizations whose missions foreground the “sociological and spiritual” go mostly without funding. Take for instance the sad tale of the Center for the New American Dream (NAD), created in 1997 by Betsy Taylor (herself a funder with the Merck Family Fund). NAD’s original mission statement gave a priority to “quality of life” issues.

We envision a society that values more of what matters—not just more…a new emphasis on non-material values like financial security, fairness, community, health, time, nature, and fun.

This is exactly the sort of “big picture” that philanthropy has been mostly unwilling to fund because, it argues, it is so difficult to provide “accountability” data for issues like “work and time” and “fun” (!). (To which one might reasonably reply, “Why do you fund only those things that are driven by data?”)

In any event, in 2007 NAD ran an enormous deficit, $500,000 in a budget of less than $2,000,000. In 2008, however, NAD staged a remarkable recovery. Suddenly, its restricted grants grew from $234,000 in 2007 to $647,000 in 2008. The cavalry, apparently, had arrived. NAD’s savior was the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation which had given a restricted grant of $350,000 for 2008.

Good news except that the money did not fund NAD’s vision; it was restricted to a narrow project. NAD was now in the bottled water business, as in “don’t buy bottled water.” NAD’s 2008 Take Action! section in its newsletters was devoted to the Goldman Gospel: get local athletic teams off bottled beverages, etc. In short, a visionary organization had become a money chaser.

One source summarized the general situation in this way, “Progressive funders say all things are connected, but act as if all things are disconnected. Conservative funders never argue that all things are connected, but then they act—and spend money—as if they were.”

§

One of the most maddening experiences for those who seek the support of private philanthropy is the lack of transparency, that is, the difficulty of knowing why the foundation makes the decisions it makes. In fact, most foundations treat this “lack” as a kind of privilege: our reasons are our own. One of the devices employed by philanthropy for maintaining this privilege is what I call the mystique of the foundation’s Secret Wisdom.

So you want to ask, “What do you know that I don’t know? What do you know that makes your decisions wise?” The closest thing to an answer you’re likely to hear is something like this: “The staff met with some Board members last night to discuss your proposal, and we’re very interested in it. But we don’t think that you have the capacity [a useful bit of jargon that means essentially that the organization should give up on what it thought it was going to do] to achieve these goals. So what we’d suggest is that you define a smaller project that will allow you to test your abilities [read: allow you to do something that you have little interest in but that will suck up valuable staff time like a Hoover]. Meanwhile, we’d like to meet with your Board in six months and see where you are.”

And on you go one year at a time. But cheer up, you’ve made your budget for the year!

The uncertainty and opacity of this reality leave organizations frustrated and bewildered. No matter how many meetings are held, no matter how carefully the questions are posed, the fundamentals remain maddeningly elusive. It is as if grant seekers were Kafka’s K in The Trial searching absurdly for someone to tell him exactly what crime he has committed.

The foundation has money but it has no organic idea (no idea that is native to its being) what to do with it. Perhaps the foundation really would like to help someone somewhere, but it can’t quite bring itself simply to trust the organizations it funds and set them free to do their work, in part because it fears that once freed this intelligence and competence might produce results not in keeping with the interests of the foundation.

Not wanting to acknowledge that brutal fact, all that the foundation is left with is the chilling satisfaction of its own undiminished and unaccountable authority. None of this, of course, can be said, least of all by the organizations that are still hoping for support.

Like the system of patronage that served the arts and charity from the Renaissance through the 18th century, private foundations have the rarest privilege of all: they do not have to explain themselves. They do not have to justify the origins of their wealth, or how they use that wealth, or what the real benefit of their largesse is.

§

In the end, what the foundation can be trusted to understand is not forest health, or climate change, or the imperatives of recycling; what it can be trusted to understand is the thing that gives it its privileges: its endowment. Unfortunately, managing how the endowment is invested often leads to conflicts with the stated social purpose of the foundation.

For example, one of the emerging controversies in the world of private philanthropy is the 95-5 question. Foundations are required to give away just 5% of their endowment each year. The other 95% is invested. But invested where? Environmentalists are particularly sensitive to this question because if the money is invested in companies that continue to pollute, you have a very disturbing reality. 5% does (theoretical) good while 95% does demonstrable bad: chasing profits in the same old dirty and irresponsible way.

This issue came to a head when the Los Angeles Times concluded a long investigation into the investment practices of foundations by revealing that the Gates Foundation funded a polio vaccination clinic in Ebocha, Nigeria, in the shadow of a giant petroleum processing plant in which the Gates Foundation was invested.

The Los Angeles Times report states:

But polio is not the only threat Justice [a Nigerian child] faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


Say what you like about the need to invest wisely for the future of the foundation, but this is prima facie evidence of a deep moral conflict not just at Gates but in all of private philanthropy. The simple fact is that most boards actually don’t know if their investments and their missions align. When pushed on the matter, most foundations respond as Gates did: investments are the foundation’s private concern and no business of ours.

But the problem remains, when organizations receive funding, what confidence do they have that this happy money is not itself the expression of a distant destruction? (Perhaps your funder owns stock in British Petroleum. Of course, for the people of Louisiana, that’s anything but distant.) When philanthropy proceeds without acknowledging this reality, it proceeds without conscience. It proceeds pathologically. It destroys the thing it claims to love. And it makes the organizations it funds complicit.

§

Because this culture of unaccountable authority is rarely challenged, especially by the organizations that receive funding, the foundations become little more than, as one source put it, dramas of “self-aggrandizement.”—the lavish year-end celebrations in which many indulge being a particularly noxious demonstration. They like to be thanked for their generosity, and they like the warm feeling of virtue that washes over them when they receive their thanks.

It is as if they could not tell which was the more worthy: the organization for its work or the foundation itself for its generosity. You can sense this tension in the films that the big foundations underwrite for PBS. “Support is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,” emblazed on the screen with heraldic force, as if it had been struck with a single blow into brass.

Without an understanding of this psychology, it’s difficult to explain the most perplexing question asked of private philanthropy: why do most foundations give away only 5% of their endowment each year, the legal minimum?

Let’s say the funding is going to address the problem of global warming. If that problem must be successfully addressed within the next two decades, if it’s really the critical moral issue of our time, or any time, why spend only 5%? For a simple reason: spending 5% annually will allow the foundation to do its work into eternity. Sadly, a world without a livable climate is easier for the philanthropist to imagine than a world without the dear old family foundation.

§

Most of the sources that I contacted for this essay requested anonymity. The reasons for this may be obvious and hardly worth mentioning except that what’s hardly worth mentioning is a powerful emotion: fear. Fear of losing a grant or a job, fear of harming a client, or fear of becoming persona non grata in the field. Everyone has skin in the game, so “discretion is the better part of valor,” as Falstaff put it. One source spoke of being threatened with blackballing by one wealthy donor. His error? He’d supported Ralph Nader rather than Barack Obama.

Mark Dowie reports in his book Losing Ground that in the early 1990s the Pew Charitable Trust entered the fray over public land forestry. Josh Reichert, Pew’s environmental program officer, created a foundation coalition, the National Environmental Trust, to address forestry among other issues. Once the money was held out, large organizations like the Sierra Club fell in line, talked the talk, and took the money.

The downside was that this program was not allowed to consider a “zero cut” position. The organization would be about moderating policy on behalf of corporate interests. Smaller, more principled organizations like the Native Forest Council were “left out in the cold.” But Reichert was unapologetic. According to Dowie, “Reichert stipulated that no one advocating zero cut, criticizing corporations by name, or producing ads that did so would be eligible for membership in the forest coalition—or for funding.”

All of this leads to the reasonable assumption that to criticize is to invite punishment. All that’s left is a lot of smiling and bad faith.


Part Two:
Why Organizations Experience What They Experience




In the end, philanthropy wants the wrong thing. It may think that it ought to want what the lovers-of-nature want, but its actions reveal that, come what may, it loves other things first: the maintenance of its privileges, the survival of its self-identity, and the stability of the social and economic systems that made it possible in the first place.

This is not an inhuman feeling. As Nietzsche put it, it is “all-too-human.” The people who live within the culture of wealth can’t do the things that grassroots environmentalists want them to do without feeling that they are dying. They can’t fund the creation of ideas that are hostile to their very existence; they can’t abandon control over the projects they do fund because they fear freedom in others; and they can’t give away all of their wealth (“spending out”) without feeling like they’ve become the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’m melting!”). Instead, philanthropy clings to the assumption of its virtues. Its very being, it tells itself, is the doing of good. It cannot respond to criticism because to do so might lead it to self-doubt, might lead it to honesty. And that would be fatal.

The great paradox of environmental philanthropy is this: How do institutions founded on property, wealth, and privilege (in short, plutocrats) seek to address the root source of environmental destruction if that source is essentially the unbridled use of property, wealth, and privilege? And yet when we ask that foundations abandon their privileges and simply provide funding so that we activists can do our work without hindrance, what the foundation hears is a request that they will their own destruction. Not unreasonably, they are bewildered by the suggestion and unwilling to do so.

§

There’s an old saying on the Left that goes something like this: Capitalism accepts the idea that it will have enemies, but if it must have enemies it will create them itself and in its own image. In fact, it needs them in the same way that it needs the federal government: as a limit on its own natural destructiveness.

The periodic Wall Street meltdown aside, the most dramatic problem facing capitalism for the last thirty years has been its tendency to destroy the very world in which it acts: the environmental crisis in all its manifestations. The response to this crisis has been the growth of the mainstream environmental movement, especially the Environmental Protection Agency and what we call Big Green (the Sierra Club, et. al.). But, it should go without saying, Big Green was not the pure consequence of an up-swelling of popular passion; it was also the creation of philanthropic, federal, and corporate “gift giving”.

For instance, the Natural Resources Defense Council was created by the Ford Foundation, just as Pew created the National Environmental Fund. (Pew itself was first endowed with money from the Sun Oil Company. At its inception, Pew’s political views were deeply conservative. It advocated free markets and small government, and funded the John Birch Society.) These large environmental organizations are more dependent on federal and foundation support, and accordingly tend to take a “soft” line on economic and industrial reform. As Mark Dowie reports, “They are safe havens for foundation philanthropy, for their directors are sensitive to the economic orthodoxies that lead to the formation of foundations and careful not to do anything that might diminish the benefactor’s endowment.”

As with the Environmental Protection Agency, Big Green is not so much an enemy as a self-regulator within the capitalist state itself. The Sierra Club is not run by visionary rebels, it is upper management. It really does have effects that are beneficial to the environment (many!), but in no way are those benefits part of an emerging new world that is hostile to the industries that are the most immediate origin of environmental destruction.

Consequently, a given industry may attack environmentalism when it interferes with its business, but the plutocracy as such is dependent on Big Green and will regularly replenish its coffers so that it may stay in existence, never mind the occasional annoyance for an oil company that wants to spread its rigs and pipelines across delicate tundra.

Capitalism has taught environmentalism how to protect it from itself. Federal and philanthropic funding allows Big Green to play a forceful national role, but it also provides the means for managing and limiting the ambitions of environmentalism: no fundamental change. Sadly left out of negotiations between government, industry and environmental NGOs are the communities of people who must live with whatever decision is reached. As Paula Swearengin of Beckley, West Virginia, commented after House Republicans stripped the EPA of its authority to refuse a permit for yet another project for mountain top coal mining, “The people of Appalachia are treated like we’re just disposable casualties of the coal industry. We live in the land of the lost, because nobody wants to hear us.”

Will environmental philanthropy ever convince the federal government to limit the ability of the coal industry to destroy mountaintops in West Virginia? Maybe. But will they seek to curb that industry’s constitutional freedom to deploy capital in their ruinous “pursuit of happiness”? No. Absolutely not. In the aftermath of the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, no one understands the importance of environmentalism better than the stockholders of BP. They will be very happy for environmental groups to put pressure on the oil industry to provide more safety for deep sea drilling. But they are most unlikely to welcome the end of deep sea drilling itself, and putting an end to the reign of corporations is utterly beyond the pale.

Philanthropy and the organizations it funds are what they are. They are not in the revolution business. They are in risk management.





Curtis White is a novelist and social critic. His recent work includes The Barbaric Heart: Money, Faith, and the Crisis of Nature and Requiem, a novel.



If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing.




From the Blog
Gore Vidal, dead. And yet Henry Kissinger still lives.

© 1789 - 2012
Jacobin Press


We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 07, 2012 4:36 pm

Superb: "In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter."
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby wetland » Tue Aug 07, 2012 5:00 pm

The Parmar book is worth a read. It is at once seriously fascinating and horrifying.
Last edited by wetland on Tue Aug 07, 2012 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
wetland
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Thu Aug 12, 2010 1:56 pm
Location: At large, United States of America
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby wetland » Tue Aug 07, 2012 5:21 pm

I was reading up more on this subject over the weekend and came across this piece from 1990.


Note: Odendahl has continued to work in the foundation world, mostly based out of Colorado and New Mexico. She is currently CEO of something called Global Greengrants
http://www.greengrants.org/2009/01/29/t ... e-officer/


http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/13246-1/ ... ndahl.aspx

Transcript:

C-SPAN Booknotes
Teresa Odendahl: Charity Begins at Home
Program Air Date: July 22, 1990
For more information about this program, visit http://www.booknotes.org
____________________________________________________
BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Teresa Odendahl, author of "Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite." Why do we need a book like this?

TERESA ODENDAHL, AUTHOR, "CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME": Well, several reasons. One, I think in the last decade the two conservative administrations have been cutting back on the provision of basic human services and saying that the private sector is going to take over the provision of these services through philanthropy and charity and so on. And so I decided to interview some multimillionaires and find out what it is that they give their money to. And, in fact, I found out that they tend to support the types of institutions that benefit them and their class to a much greater extent than programs that serve the needy. So I'm calling the government to task on their assumption and President Bush's rhetoric about 1,000 points of light and how this will make up for government lack.
LAMB: Where do you come from?

ODENDAHL:San Diego, California.

LAMB: How did you get to this point? Where have you been since birth?

ODENDAHL:Well, I worked at -- I don't know if you want to go all the way back to my birth, but I worked at two different foundations. And through working at the first foundation, the Business & Professional Women's Foundation, which is here in Washington, DC, I was drawn into the kind of arena of non-profit organizations and foundations, in particular, and I attended professional conferences where I met trustees of foundations and wealthy people and so on. So that sort of brought me into researching this field. And then I was recruited to Yale -- after I got my PhD, I was recruited to Yale University to head up a project in which we studied the health of foundations, in general, across the country. And out of that project, the idea for this book emerged, although it's a very separate project.
LAMB: Where did you go to school?

ODENDAHL:The University of Colorado at Boulder.

LAMB: You got all your schooling from there?

ODENDAHL:No. I went to San Diego State College and then the University of Colorado. And I'm an anthropologist.

LAMB: And I noticed in your past that you have been supported, from time to time, by foundations. How often and what foundations?

ODENDAHL:The foundations that supported the project at Yale were the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Kellogg Foundations. And this was a very large study. I was the project manager, but we had a team of seven other researchers on it. Prior to that, I did a study of foundation career patterns, and the foundations that supported that project were the Russell Sage Foundation and the John Hay Whitney Foundation. So I've gotten a lot of support from foundations. At the point, though, that my analysis began to become more critical of philanthropy in general, I began taking a little heat for the direction that my research was taking -- both because of that and, also, I made a personal decision not to take any more philanthropic funds. So this book was actually written without any funds, although much of the research was done on other projects that were funded by foundations.

LAMB: The people that are mad at you, are they from the right or the left?

ODENDAHL:I seem to be hearing sounds from both sides. In other words, people on the left say to me, “We always knew this, what's new about this particular issue?” People on the right, I would say, though, are more angry than people on the left.

LAMB: What is a foundation?

ODENDAHL:There are many types of foundations, but, generally, it's an endowed institution that makes grants, primarily out of interest income. These are the so-called independent foundations or family foundations around the country.

LAMB: OK. Let's go back to the word “endowed.” What does that mean?

ODENDAHL:Endowed means that a corpus of capital is put aside, is invested, makes more money out of itself. An endowment is established -- for example, major institutions, universities, have endowments and so on. It's the same as those type of endowments, except foundations make their grants out of the interest that is made off of the endowment from the investments.

LAMB: How many millionaires did you interview?

ODENDAHL:I interviewed 140 multimillionaires. And then I also interviewed 100 additional advisers to the very wealthy.

LAMB: Can you make any general statement about a millionaire or multimillionaire?

ODENDAHL:They have a lot of money. No, in fact, I can't. It was very interesting. As the study proceeded, I found that people from -- with all different kinds of personalities, with all different types of politics find themselves with lots of money. I would say there were a few characteristics I noticed. One is most of these people tend to be private. They don't want much to be known about their wealth because they're afraid that they'll be inundated with requests for funding and so on.

LAMB: You go to some lengths to talk about the methodology, including the fact that most of your multimillionaires that you interviewed gave you an hour time.

ODENDAHL:Generally, that was about the average time that I spent with them. Sometimes I spent a full day; sometimes I spent only 20 minutes.

LAMB: Tell the story about the 20-minute interview.

ODENDAHL:All right. This was a very wealthy man, a self-made entrepreneur, who told me that he could give me 20 minutes of his time and he kept very strictly to that. He looked at his watch when I came into his office. We were interrupted by a phone call, which I believe was from his wife. He told me that later. He timed the phone call so that he could tell me exactly how much time I had remaining. He was extremely brusque, but to the point. And I felt, although I only had 20 minutes, that he told me a good deal.

LAMB: Did you tape-record the interviews?

ODENDAHL:I tape-recorded all the interviews where I was allowed to do so. Most -- the vast bulk of these people wanted confidentiality, and some people felt uncomfortable, even with the promise of confidentiality, even having the interview taped.

LAMB: Who did not want confidentiality, or ask for it, that you name in your book that you can talk about?

ODENDAHL:Well, there's one person that I name in my book, a young woman, Tracy Gary. I interviewed her once, and she wanted confidentiality, and then I chose to interview her again. I wanted some additional information. And during that interview, which was about two years later, she agreed to let me use her name publicly, and this was because she had made some personal decisions about being forthright concerning her philanthropy. So that's an example. Most of the people I name in the book, however, I may or may not have interviewed them. The information that's associated with their name comes strictly from public records -- either published records or records that would be readily available to almost anyone -- newspaper accounts, magazine articles, so on.

LAMB: Is public policy good to people that have money?

ODENDAHL:Extremely good to people that have money. In fact, my findings seem to indicate that -- it depends on what kind of public policy you're talking about. I'd like to keep myself within the arena of charity and philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. But the tax code, in general, both the income tax code and the estate tax system, are extremely helpful to wealthy individuals.

LAMB: Can you give us an example of how?

ODENDAHL:Sure. The more money you give away, the more you can deduct from income tax, up to a certain limit. Also, in terms of estate planning -- and I won't get too complicated here, but essentially you can give almost all of your fortune to your heirs tax-free if you set up certain instruments, with good tax attorneys, that allow -- wherein you give a certain amount of interest income to certain charities. These can be charities you choose yourself. And once that interest income has been given away, then the bulk of the fortune can be passed on to heirs.

LAMB: Millionaires -- -- money that they have left over, do they like to give it on to their heirs?

ODENDAHL:Well, let me clarify that the people I interviewed tend to be the most generous millionaires. In other words, these are people who give a good deal of money to philanthropy, so if anything, my study is somewhat biased toward the most generous multimillionaires. And I estimate that only about half of the very richest people in the country give vast sums of money away. So just to sort of set the context there, if that's helpful. And you'll have to repeat your question, I'm sorry; I got away with myself.

LAMB: No. The question was -- what do millionaires think about giving money to heirs?

ODENDAHL:Yes, that's right. Then, of the most generous people, most people want to pass money on to their heirs. A few people are like, Carnegie, for example, and they don't believe their heirs should get anything. But almost everyone I talked with has a desire to pass their fortune on, also has a desire to do some good with the money during their lifetime and after their death.

LAMB: You saw a bias in your study about where people like to give their philanthropic money.

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: Where was that?

ODENDAHL:Well, I found that, among elite philanthropists, among these multimillionaires, they primarily tend to fund the kinds of institutions that they've been personally involved with their whole lives. So these would be the prep schools that they attended, the private colleges and universities from which they graduated. On the whole, these are Ivy League universities or very prestigious institutions -- what I call the high arts -- that is, ballet, opera, the symphony, art museums, things of this sort. They tend to fund cultural events. They don't, on the whole, tend to give very large grants to programs that serve the needy, the poor, the bulk of the population. So my basic argument here is the government is cutting back, but wealthy people, at least, are not going to find it in their interests to begin providing for the kinds of things that the government has stopped doing.

LAMB: You think the government ought to make it easy for a wealthy person to give money to art?

ODENDAHL:Yes, I do. I'm not at all opposed to the incentives for giving to art. In fact, I think the current controversy revolving around the National Endowment for the Arts is something that we need to take a close look at, because a lot of philanthropic money has supported the arts. I'm not saying that philanthropy shouldn't be a matter of choice for the individual. I'm saying that the federal government should be providing for certain programs so that philanthropy can play a different role; so that philanthropy can be innovative; so that people can make choices about where they want to put their money and so on -- so that experimental programs can be funded -- so that advocacy organizations can do their work.

LAMB: Can you give us your ideal -- I mean, maybe you can name a person in your study that would be your ideal multimillionaire?

ODENDAHL:Just my own personal ideal multimillionaire.

LAMB: Yes, just your personal ideal.

ODENDAHL:So you're asking me to make a value judgment. Well, that's very difficult because, you know, all of these people are individuals with their good qualities, and possibly their flaws. But I'm going to name Tracy Gary again, only because this is an example of a woman who has given at least half of her fortune away to charity; who has tried to direct the money to a certain extent through women's foundations. She helped to establish the Women's Foundation in San Francisco. She served on the board -- oh no, I don't believe she ever served on the board, but she was key in getting it started. And then she let a board that was a more representative board make decisions about where the money actually went, instead of as an individual or with her advisers making all the decisions about where the money should be disbursed.

I guess I admire the group of individuals who often are called the "rich kids." They inherited their wealth. They're three or four generations removed from the source of the fortune. They're in about my age range. They grew up in the '60s. And they feel uneasy about the kind of the noblesse oblige that their parents and grandparents were involved in. And they're trying to give over some of their privilege, some of their power -- the power that's bestowed within philanthropy -- to a more representative group of people.

LAMB: Give us an example of one that you -- I don't want to put words in your mouth -- one that you don't admire; one that -- the opposite of ...

ODENDAHL:Well, the opposite would be someone like Donald Trump, who, by the way, didn't let me interview him, and who we could characterize as not being among the philanthropic elite. In other words, he's a self-made millionaire, or he -- it's questionable how self-made he is -- this is just reading from published documents. I understand his father owned a great deal of real estate as well. But he's one of these people who wants to have, and does have, the biggest yacht in the world, his own private jet, the biggest penthouse at the top of Trump Tower, the biggest mansions, and so on.

He represents the other end of the spectrum. Most of the people with whom I talked do not live ostentatiously. They live relatively simply, although they're, you know, not lacking anything materially. It would be difficult to tell them apart from the middle class, for example -- from professionals, in terms of most of the houses that most of them live in, the cars that most of them drive. They choose to give conspicuously rather than to live conspicuously. I don't know. Do you want -- is that what you were looking for?

LAMB: Yeah. Well, you just mentioned something -- I'm looking at a footnote here in the back under your notes: “During the course of this research I observed cars of almost every make parked outside of rich people's homes.”

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: Why did you make that note?

ODENDAHL:Well, I think we make a lot of assumptions about wealthy people, you know, that they're all driving Rolls-Royces, or they're all driving Mercedes. And, in fact, I found it quite interesting that it was difficult to tell immediately what the net worth of these people was. I tried to do so through public records. Very often, these people don't even think of themselves as wealthy, and they don't live the kind of lifestyle that you'd see, for example, depicted on "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous," or a television program of that type. So cars were just one way to give the reader a sense of that. Another very interesting example that one millionairesses, who had inherited her wealth, told me is that she considered herself a Volvo liberal, rather than Cadillac liberal. And I tried to understand what it was she was getting at. And it's humorous in a way, because I actually called some car dealerships and found out that Volvos and Cadillacs are virtually comparable in terms of their price. But she had an image of a Volvo as being a more middle-class kind of car: less showy, possibly more dependable. Cars are one way in which we judge people's status in the world -- what kinds of cars they drive; what kinds of houses they live in; whether or not they wear designer clothes.
LAMB: What's the difference between old money and new money?

ODENDAHL:Well, most of the people that I inherited, two-thirds of them came from old money. That is ...

LAMB: That you interviewed.

ODENDAHL:That I interviewed.

LAMB: You said “inherited.” I want to make sure that ...

ODENDAHL:Oh, I beg your pardon.

LAMB: That's all right.

ODENDAHL:Most of this money had been made at the turn of the century by the so-called robber barons and others who were associated with them, and had been in the family for several generations. That's old money. It's very difficult to tell where old money begins and ends. New money, of course, is money that's made -- I try to do it by generations in the book, as an easy shorthand way. New money is first-generation money. It's money that's made by the individual themselves. I identified, during the course of this research, what I called a culture of philanthropy. In other words, these people find meaning in their lives through their giving to non-profit organizations and through their volunteering with these types of groups. And that culture is very much a part of the family tradition of people with so-called old money. So it's old-money people who sort of set the standards, establish the cultural mores and so on, that then the additional third of the new millionaires that I interviewed choose to follow, choose to learn, choose to live by.

LAMB: Statistics. One percent of the American people have 26-point-something percent of the wealth?

ODENDAHL:Yes. It's simply a statistic about how great the concentration of wealth is in the United States, and that's from a government study, as a matter of fact -- and the concentration of wealth is increasing in the United States.

LAMB: What is the other statistics? It's 68 percent of the wealth in this country is held by 10 percent of the population?

ODENDAHL:Right. Right. So it's kind of like an inverted pyramid, if you ...

LAMB: Do you have any chance, if you don't have money today, of getting in that 10 percent or that 1 percent?

ODENDAHL:Well, of course, you have a chance. And I'm not an expert on that, because I simply interviewed people who had money. But you have much less of a chance. What I found is that fortunes grow once you have them. If you have, at least, a little bit of capital, then you're able to make that capital grow and grow and grow, especially if you're a member of some of these old-money families that I talked about that made the decision, a generation or so ago, to invest the money in common, almost as a corporation, to keep the family money together, instead of breaking it up. Is this the line of reasoning that you wanted me to pursue here?

LAMB: Yeah.

ODENDAHL:OK. If the decision is to pass the fortune on -- let's say one individual has three children. A self-made millionaire has three children and he -- excuse the sexist language, but on the whole the individuals making the money were men -- he passes it on to his three children, and then they have three children each. That's nine children by the third generation. That money can have started to disappear and be much smaller. On the other hand, if the decision was made in the first or second generation to keep the family money together, possibly to invest it out of a family office -- that's often what it's called, a "family office" -- then I found, with those that I interviewed and from the public records that I investigated, that the fortunes tend to grow. The Mellon family, for example, is a good illustration of that, and I portray them in the chapter on people with old money.

LAMB: Statistic: “There are 25,000 -- nearly 25,000 private foundations in the United States.” What's the difference between a private foundation and a public foundation?

ODENDAHL:A private foundation is controlled by a board of directors that has no particular constraints upon it, although it's a board of directors. Generally, most of these 25,000 private foundations are family-controlled. The people serving on the board are family members, friends of family members or advisers to family members. In comparison or contrast, a public foundation is a foundation wherein the board is somehow representative of the community. Now a community foundation, for example, is a public foundation. And very often, community foundations have businessmen in the community on them. And I would question how truly representative even many community foundations are. But, by law, a public foundation has to have a different kind of government structure, which is more democratic than a private foundation.

LAMB: And most of your millionaires, multimillionaires, when they create a foundation, create a private foundation?

ODENDAHL:A private foundation, that's right. And ...

LAMB: What's the largest in the country, do you happen to know?

ODENDAHL:The largest private ...

LAMB: Private foundation?

ODENDAHL:The Ford Foundation. Now I want to caution you that the Ford Foundation is a foundation we all think about because it is the largest, because it gives so many grants. It's rare, though, in comparison to many other foundations, which are like charitable checkbooks of the wealthy family. The Ford Foundation is a truly "independent foundation." It has a board of directors that no longer has any association whatsoever with the Ford family. Another example of a foundation which will be among the largest -- is to be among the largest, is the Packard Foundation, established by David Packard and his wife, Lucille. And that is a private foundation in which, at this time, it's almost totally family-controlled -- that is, family members serve on the board. And it's also a large foundation.

LAMB: David Packard. We've seen a lot of him. He was the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: He headed up the Packard Commission. Who is he and why did he -- how did he make so much money?

ODENDAHL:Well, he's one of the co-founders, co-creators of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation, which, as most of you know, is a high-technology corporation, builds a lot of computers. I believe the bulk of his money was made through his company. At some point in his life, he -- and from the records that I was able to pull out, it seems his wife had a great deal of influence -- decided to put much of that money into a foundation, a private foundation, which they established, which serves communities in the Northern California area, where the Packard family lives, where Mr. Packard lives presently.

LAMB: You open up chapter six by saying, “In the spring of 1988, 75-year-old David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, a leading computer and electronics firm, announced that he would donate $2 billion of his fortune to the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.”

ODENDAHL:Right. And I chose to open the chapter on self-made millionaires this way because it was timely; he had just made the announcement; there was a lot of public information about the Packards. The Packards fund a lot of interesting projects but, on the whole, I found that they -- like other individuals who I actually interviewed -- in the cases where I name people, I might not necessarily have interviewed them, so it's only the materials that are available to me that I could go on. Anyway, he and his family tend to fund the sorts of projects that interest them, the sorts of projects in which they are very involved. For example, his wife before her death was quite involved in a number of projects supporting the arts, supporting a children's hospital. He is -- both of them, I believe are alumni of Stanford University; they've contributed huge amounts of money to Stanford University. An example of the type of university -- although not technically an Ivy League institution -- Stanford is the type of university that most of the individuals I interviewed would give their largest donations to.

LAMB: What do they want from the money they give to these universities?

ODENDAHL:Well, it varies. I describe it as a spectrum. Some wealthy individuals simply want to choose where their money goes. They'd rather make the decision rather than paying the money in taxes and somehow having the government make the decision about where the money goes. And they get certain self-satisfaction out of their donations. They give to things they believe in and they think they're doing good in this way. So that's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum are individuals who want control over the organizations that they fund. They're willing to give possibly, let's say, $10 million to an institution, but they want to have something to say about how the institution uses the money and so on.

Someplace in the middle of that spectrum are where most people fall -- most of these wealthy individuals fall. They want the self-satisfaction, they want their name associated with a wing of the hospital or, in the case of universities, the library or a building or an endowed professorship. But they're not necessarily going to say the money should only go to this. On the other hand, just coming back to Packard to make the example more concrete, a good deal of this -- of these funds -- have gone to support programs in the sciences at Stanford, programs in engineering at Stanford. Now we can readily understand why this happened. I believe I have my facts right that David Packard, himself, has a degree in engineering from Stanford and he wants to support his alma mater, just as you and I would want to support our alma mater. The difference is, I argue, that he gets a large tax break for his contribution -- let's move away from him in particular, but multimillionaires get large tax breaks both on income tax and in their estate plan -- on inheritance taxes for giving to the institutions that they choose.

LAMB: Well, let's just go to the core of the matter. When you see somebody that's just given -- I think Walter Annenberg just gave $50 million to the United Negro Colleges -- I may have the wrong title there. Are we supposed to ooh and ahh and say what a terrific thing he's done or are we supposed to say, “Well, if you really look at it, this is a tax break'?

ODENDAHL:Well, I think we should do both. Mr. Annenberg made this contribution since the book was already written, so it's not included in the book. I think we should ooh and ahh. I think it was a good decision on his part. I think it's a somewhat exceptional grant in that it didn't go to his own alma mater, but he obviously had given a great deal of thinking to what kinds of institutions he wanted to bolster up and he chose black colleges and universities.

What I think we need to do is scrutinize the giving of the wealthy much more closely. We need to not make the assumption that it's always doing good. We're all very proud in the United States of philanthropy, of the so-called non-profit sector of charity in general. And what I call for in this book is a reassessment of how does charity actually function in our society? Is it truly charity? I think most of us would think charity was assisting the needy. And yet I found that most wealthy people don't actually assist the needy with their charity. So I suppose we could make the distinction between charity and philanthropy there.

LAMB: Is there a time in your past where a light bulb went off and you say, “This really makes me mad. I'm going to do something about it and I'm going to write this book”?

ODENDAHL:Yes. It was during the course of the study, late in the study, at about my third year at Yale. The interviews ...

LAMB: What year?

ODENDAHL:That would be 1986. And I was completing the study of the health of the foundation field and I was beginning to write up results and working with the research team; we worked very collaboratively. And I would write something that my other team members -- fellow researchers -- would call me on. I would say things like, “Foundations help to perpetuate the status quo in the United States,” and they'd say, “Well, you can't write something like that.” And I'd say, “Well, why not? It's here in the data.” And I began to see that, even as researchers, they had profound reservations about calling to task something that we consider to be almost "holy" within our society.

In other words, we think of these kinds of activities as being such good activities, and especially given the political climate when people like President Bush are saying, “Our problems will be solved by the 1,000 points of light.” It wasn't very politically popular. Anyway, this is the time period -- '86, about four years ago -- that I began really seriously thinking these things through in a different way, kind of looking at it differently. And I began presenting some papers also, just on my own, which presented my own analysis and interpretation of the data. And I received hostile receptions to these papers.

LAMB: Where'd you present them?

ODENDAHL:Now if the papers were presented to a group of strictly academics, there was no problem at all. The academics listened attentively, asked good questions. But if I were to present the paper to an audience of grant-makers -- that is, people who either work for a foundation or are wealthy themselves and give funds away to non-profit organizations -- there are a number of professional organizations of this sort -- or to the kinds of organizations that represent non-profit groups in this country -- perhaps lobby for non-profit groups and so on -- then the reception would be almost cold, and people weren't even willing to listen to me. It was as if I was saying, “The emperor has no clothes.”

At one particular conference, the keynote speaker chose to point me out and say, “Yes, Teresa, there is no Santa Claus.” And I gave a lot of thought, “What did he mean, ‘There is no Santa Claus’?” This was Dick Lyman, by the way, who was the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. And I don't know how consciously he chose his metaphor, but it seems to me that he was saying that I was revealing -- everybody knows there is no Santa Claus, but we shouldn't be revealing it because Santa Claus is good, because we think of Santa Claus fondly.

Anyway, I'm going on at some length. But then I did have another experience which more or less confirmed for me what I had begun to suspect from the interviews and from my work with the interviews and my additional conversations with the wealthy, and that is that I was employed as the first executive director of the Women's Foundation of Colorado. This is one of several new foundations that are springing up around the country, created by women, funded by women to serve women's causes. And in the course of that employment, which turned out to be rather brief, I became a participant observer with -- at least with the wealthy women who had helped to establish the foundation, and began to see that -- and I don't mean to single them out because, in a way, I am singling them out but they're not that different from any other type of enterprise of this sort -- which is that they were just as interested in creating the foundation to establish their own power base, to increase their own influence, as they were to provide for other women, to improve the status of women in the state of Colorado.

LAMB: Did you do all the work on this by yourself?

ODENDAHL:On this particular book I did. I didn't do all the interviews myself. There was a team of interviewers. However, I listened to every tape again and read every transcript again and reanalyzed all of the interviews since the Yale study ended, so that the book is a work of a single person.

LAMB: Dedication: for Michael Bernstein. Who is he?

ODENDAHL:He's my partner, the father of my daughter, an economic historian at the University of California at San Diego. And he was a great support to me throughout the whole project, both literally and figuratively. [Note: Provost of Tulane University (2008- ). No longer "partners" with Odendahl.]]

LAMB: You also mention -- let's see if I can find it; I had it underlined here in the beginning -- a couple of other
Odendahl.

ODENDAHL:Right. My parents.

LAMB: An Eric and a Mary.

ODENDAHL:Those are my parents. My father painstakingly edited the entire manuscript and commented on it for me -- he's a journalist, and he teaches at San Diego State University. And my mother, who works for the Presbyterian Conference of San Diego, also read the manuscript and commented on it. A lot of friends and family supported me in this project.

LAMB: When did you finish it?

ODENDAHL:Well, the book literally came out less than a month ago, so I guess that's what you'd call actually finishing it. It was in press almost a year, however, so I finished it just about a year ago.

LAMB: A couple of things I underlined: “I have tried to be honest about my biases.”

ODENDAHL:Right. And my ...

LAMB: Was it hard?

ODENDAHL:Well, I think very often social scientists like to present themselves as if their research is value-free, as if they're methodology somehow -- they've erased any of their own biases because they've used a statistical methodology or whatever. And I just wanted to make the point, especially since these were personal interviews, since they're open to a great deal of interpretation, that -- right at the beginning I wanted to let the reader know what my overall arguments were and what my biases might be.

LAMB: Another ...

ODENDAHL:Everyone has biases. I'm not sure that everyone admits to them, that's all.

LAMB: Another note here: “I am not a member of the class I describe.”

ODENDAHL:Right. I'm not wealthy. I grew up sort of solidly middle-class and I've never wanted for anything in my life, but actually, until these interviews, I'm not certain that I really was ever personally acquainted with any multimillionaires before.

LAMB: Quote, your comments: "It is the burden of my argument that the rich do not find it in their interest to fund or provide social programs on a sufficient scale."

ODENDAHL:Right. I am not trying to say that the wealthy individuals should be putting all their money into programs that serve the needy. I'm rather saying that we have a structural situation in which the federal government is not providing what you could call a basic federal safety net. We can see it all around us with more homeless people on the streets and so on. I'm not trying to show how that safety net can be provided; I'm simply trying to show how the particular role that this group of wealthy individuals play in supporting a structural situation that may, in many senses, exacerbate inequality instead of helping to redistribute wealth.

LAMB: Go back to that chapter -- first generation men and their families. Another person that you mention in here is George Klepper. Real name?

ODENDAHL:No, that's a pseudonym, and actually, George Klepper is, I believe, five individuals. And what I had to do in order to protect the confidentiality of the people we interviewed was to take individuals who were all of the same gender, who were all of the same generation from wealth -- in this case, Mr. Klepper was a first-generation millionaire who generally were just about the same age. He was an older man. I think he was, in fact, over 60 years of age. So all five of these individuals had those traits. In addition to having those demographical, personal traits, they all said very similar things in their interviews, so that I collapsed them together, formed a composite and then was able to present material that didn't identify any one of the five of them through this one individual.

LAMB: This is a question of no substance. Where did you invent the name George Klepper?

ODENDAHL:I don't know; I think I just made it up.

LAMB: OK.

ODENDAHL:I do know other names -- where they came from -- sort of people I once had known and I picked up on that name or people's friends had known -- I was asking friends what names I should use. I did try to avoid any actual names. In other words, if I knew that there was a wealthy person who had the name Klepper, then I wouldn't have used the name Klepper. In fact, I think I had invented a name Paul Mitchell. It was just a pseudonym for one of the self-made millionaires that I feature, and then I realized that there was this line of products that are called Paul Mitchell products, so I had to change that name.

LAMB: I want to read you what you said under the George Klepper part of this chapter. You quote him as saying -- or this composite -- "We have about 80 guys working on our income taxes."

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: "Eighty guys working on our income taxes." The income taxes of the family?

ODENDAHL:I think he's talking about the trusts that he established. This individual and the other individuals that make up the composite had decided to establish -- to put all their money into trusts and, in fact, the corporation, I believe, was in the form of a trust. And what he was saying was that it took 80 individuals to actually -- it was so complicated, the trust arrangements, that it took this many government employees to actually check out their tax situation.

LAMB: How much was he worth?

ODENDAHL:I don't recall, although all of the individuals who were included in the 140 -- the count of 140 -- by the way, I did interview other people who didn't quite make the 140, but who supplemented my general characterization. They had at least $5 million of net worth. His particular corporation -- I may have mentioned it there -- it's quite a large corporation, though, and I believe that if it isn't him there are some others who would qualify to be on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest people in the country.

LAMB: You say he is one of the 400.

ODENDAHL:OK. I wasn't sure whether that individual was. So he's incredibly wealthy.

LAMB: OK. Let me read you a little more here. "We have five members of the United States government who do nothing but check us.”

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: Five members of the United States government.

ODENDAHL:Right. That's a direct quote. On the whole, I decided to treat the statements made to me as truth.

LAMB: Let me just read a little more so I can complete this. “To check us through the whole year, they sit and work on us. We had to rent another place for them.”

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: For the government.

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: When you hear that, does that make you feel good, that there are five people that work for the government that have to spend ...

ODENDAHL:No, it doesn't make me feel one way or another. This isn't a question of how I feel. The point I was trying to make, though, in that particular vignette, is that this individual, and the other individuals whom he represents, are very against taxation -- and this is the case with almost all of the millionaires that I interviewed. It's one of the reasons that he set up the trust instruments, so that he could avoid taxation. And then what happened in his trying to avoid taxation is that he made more work for these officials as well.

LAMB: “Brian Dolan owns a large construction and land development firm in Chicago endowing non-profits, not the next generation.” You quote him here as saying, "The kids are well taken care of and too much money will kill you just like liquor."

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: What's Brian Dolan's story?

ODENDAHL:Well, he's ...

LAMB: A composite again, by the way?

ODENDAHL:A composite again. he is an individual who said that he didn't want to pass the bulk of his fortune on to his children, that he would rather give the bulk of his fortune to non-profit organizations. I think he betrays himself, however, in that particular quotation, by saying “The kids are well taken care of,” and then later he tells me that he has actually already passed some money on to his kids. He's used some charitable trust instruments. But he is an individual who is very committed to giving to non-profit organizations. In his case, he is a graduate of Harvard University, as I recall, or institutions like Harvard ...

LAMB: It's Harvard.

ODENDAHL:... and he's given a good deal of money to Harvard University. And that's quite typical of the individuals that I interviewed.

LAMB: By the way, let me stop there at the university thing. And I may be wrong about this, but I think I read recently -- because they did an article here in town about all the universities and their endowments -- when the president of American University had to quit in a controversy, that they had something like an endowment of $20 million -- American University.

ODENDAHL:Right.

LAMB: And I just read that Harvard University has an endowment of $5 billion.

ODENDAHL:Billion dollars. That's right. Harvard has the largest endowment of any educational institution.

LAMB: How does one university get $5 billion and another well-known university $20 million?

ODENDAHL:Well, Harvard University has a much more elite reputation than American University. Harvard University has graduated many more individuals in hat I would put in the "philanthropic elite," although they're both private universities. Harvard University is, in a sense, the personification of the kinds of things I'm talking about here. This is the kind of institution that wealthy people are going to tend to fund. Now a self-made millionaire who might have graduated -- who might have been more likely to have graduated from American University, let's say, could very well decide to give quite a large sum of money into American University's endowment, but, simply by virtue of the fact that people with old money have attended these institutions, very often generation after generation, and generation after generation have supported these institutions and have given funds into their endowments, means that the endowments of the Harvards, the Yales, the Princetons, the Stanfords are going to be much larger than the endowments of other kinds of organizations.

LAMB: Talking about the book "Charity Begins at Home," and here's another chapter. I want to ask you -- -- I think it's chapter seven. Why a chapter titled “Elite Jewish Giving”?

ODENDAHL:Well, as I said, we did interviews throughout the United States, mostly in metropolitan areas, and every major metropolitan area that we visited, when we were asked, “Who are the leading philanthropists in this city?” we were given at least several names of Jewish philanthropists. Part of the way in which I was able to arrange these interviews was that one individual who would allow me to establish rapport with them and interview them would introduce me to another individual, and so on. So we discovered -- and this had not been something that I anticipated -- that Jews are quite active in philanthropy in much greater numbers and proportion than their percentage in the population.

I believe that there are many -- fewer than 10 percent of the total population is Jewish, and yet I found that we actually interviewed 40 out of 140 Jewish philanthropists. There's also a separate chapter on Jewish giving, as there is on people with old money, people with new money and women philanthropists. Jewish philanthropy is the fourth category that I established, because Jews have a different -- you might call it style of giving as well, and I felt there were enough differences between this group and the other groups to highlight them. One of them is that the fund-raising practices of many Jews are different from that of non-Jews, such as the practice of card calling.

I don't know if you're familiar with that. That would be at a social function, generally honoring someone who is quite a generous giver. That giver would announce what his gift is going to be this particular year to the institution that he's choosing to make a donation to. Generally, the gift is going to be larger than the gift he made last year. He's going to publicly announce that gift, and he's essentially going to call off cards in which everyone else in the room -- their contribution last year is going to be mentioned, and they're going to be embarrassed into raising their contribution in basically the same proportion of his contribution -- a very successful fund-raising technique that would never go over in the WASP community as a fund-raising strategy.

In fact, among the old-moneyed people, talking about money is taboo. People will talk about their sex lives more readily than they'll talk about money. So that's one thing, fund-raising techniques. Also, I felt that Jews, getting back onto the subject at hand, walk a very fine line -- these are wealthy Jews -- between maintaining their Jewish identity and also being accepted into high society, into the culture of philanthropy that I describe throughout the book. And they want both. They want to continue to think of themselves as Jews, and they also want to be accepted. So one of the strategies that, either consciously or not so consciously, both Jews and self-made millionaires have developed is to give into the high arts, to give to the same kinds of institutions that other members of the culture of philanthropy does. Tthis helps them to become members of that culture. In the case of Jews, they also give, in general, about half of their charity to specifically Jewish causes -- either Jewish social services within the United States or projects in Israel or to their synagogues and so on.

LAMB: Alright. You say you have this large -- or you have this small Jewish group that give lots of money, and you talked about WASP. Is there any other segment of our society that has the unique habit that they -- how they deal with money and becoming multimillionaires?

ODENDAHL:Well, I talked -- I also have a separate chapter on women, and I think that women are very important -- in fact, central -- to the culture of philanthropy, because in many respects they bring their families into the culture. Now women are in a somewhat curious position, in that they don't have -- even wealthy women do not have as much status as the men of their class, but they certainly have more power and influence than both men and women in other classes. And so they have power, and one of the ways in which they exercise it is through their philanthropy.

On the whole, women are much more involved on a day-to-day basis with volunteering, with being involved in non-profit organizations, with putting on charity balls, with serving on non-profit boards at the community level than are men. Now elite men would tend to either serve on or head up the boards of national organizations, whereas elite women would head up the boards of local organizations. At any rate, I found that women play a key role in non-profit and also in socializing their children to accept this kind of culture, to become members of the culture, to live by the values of the culture.

And also it's the case -- this is the case with women who inherit wealth or marry into wealth, and it's also the case with women who may be married to self-made millionaires. They may actually bring their families into the culture of philanthropy through their involvement in non-profit endeavors, while their husbands are still helping their fortunes to grow, making money. And then only later in life does the husband normally become as involved with philanthropy.

LAMB: We talked some early about some of the people you remember the most that you interviewed. Other than the 20-minute interview, who were some of -- you probably don't have names of most of these. What are some of the other types of instances that you had when you went to interview that you'll always remember?

ODENDAHL:A couple of things. One, there was quite an elderly woman who spent the whole day with me, and wanted me -- in fact, there were a number of elderly women -- and this relates to the earlier topic we were discussing -- who were basically giving me an oral history of their life, and we spent all day talking about what they'd done and their involvement and so on. There was also an elderly man who had me -- for some reason, the interviews were much more memorable if the individuals had me to their homes to conduct the interview than if they had me to their offices. Now on the whole, it was either very young people or very old people who had me to their homes, and also it tended to be more women than men. But he had me to his home, and he described a situation when he was very young in which he'd had to have bodyguards and so on because the family had been so scared of the possibility of kidnapping, because the family was wealthy and so on. So those were memorable interviews as well.

LAMB: Did you ever find any strange situations where you showed up at a multimillionaire's house and they had 35 cats or something like that?

ODENDAHL:No, I didn't find any situations like that. There is a situation that I detail in the first chapter, which is somewhat exceptional in that it was one of the few mansions that I actually visited. And I came -- and it was also the first interview that I conducted. I came to the front door and I was greeted by the woman herself, who had invited me to her home, and she told me that she was going to show me through the formal part of the home, which was the downstairs of the mansion. And there was almost no furniture, as if this area was meant for parties, was meant for crowds of people, although there were some very exotic flower arrangements placed on exquisite pieces of furniture in different places.

She took me into a room which she said was the large dining room, and this was a massive dining room with a huge dining table. And then she said, “The big kitchen is over in this direction,” although she didn't take me into it. And she took me into another room which she called the music room, and there was a grand piano at the end of the room and then plenty of space for an audience to perhaps listen to a recital. And it became clear from her description that this was the part of the house that was used for public and charitable events. And then she took me upstairs for the actual interview, and it was almost as if the upstairs of the house was like any other kind of middle-class home that you might enter into.

The furniture was, you know, quite tasteful, but modest. And this is where she had me interview her. And she didn't show me around here; this was the private part of the house. This was her home. This was where she and her family lived. But it seemed to me that, for some psychological reason, she and her family chose every day to remind themselves of their wealth by walking through this very public area. So that was a little different, because most people just live in -- I mean, you know, possibly they live in five-bedroom houses, but other than that, they aren't huge mansions.

Let me think of some other instances that seemed interesting. I think some of the people that are often called "rich kids" were interesting. These are the young people who grew up in the '60s and inherited their wealth and live extremely modestly, some of them even in poor parts of town, and I might have interviewed them there. But you notice on the inside of their apartments, even, they display art. Many of these people have, both in their business setting and in their home setting -- have much more art than you would typically find in a middle-class home in ...
LAMB: In the few remaining moments, where do you live now?

ODENDAHL:I live in San Diego, California.

LAMB: What next?

ODENDAHL:Well, I'm not sure. I have a general idea about the non-profit sector and the way in which -- you could even consider it an exploitive sector, in that people tend to be paid less in this sector. Many more women work in this sector, both for less pay and as volunteers than do men -- a different way of looking at the whole endeavor of charity, not just wealthy people and their philanthropy.

LAMB: And this book -- has it caused enough of a controversy in your life that it's hard for you to get another job?
ODENDAHL:Well, I am currently unemployed, and I do think that working on this book has had a bearing on that. I think that if I'd chosen a very standard career path and a less controversial topic, that I might have a job at the moment. I can't blame it all on the book, though. I think that I've made untraditional types of decisions in my life as well, and I always seem to make those hard choices and probably will continue to.

LAMB: When it comes to the controversy, what is it that most people do? I mean, why do they react so strongly about something like this? And oes it say something about the country?

ODENDAHL:I think because it is our giving and volunteering which -- in the United State -- which is always touted as making us different from other countries, you know. And Alex de Tocqueville is, almost without exception, quoted as saying, "These people are constantly forming voluntary associations" and so on. It's something we really believe. It's a kind of an ideology about our life and our way of providing services that, in a sense, I'm taking to task. Now I'm not the only one who is taking a very serious, scholarly look at these issues; others have, as well. But it's beginning to question the assumption about charity and particularly the charity of elite, that it's all doing good.

LAMB: This is the name of the book: "Charity Begins at Home." Teresa Odendahl is our guest. And thank you for joining us.

ODENDAHL:Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.
User avatar
wetland
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Thu Aug 12, 2010 1:56 pm
Location: At large, United States of America
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Aug 13, 2012 10:44 am

"The liberal foundations of environmentalism: revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford connection."

Behind a paywall, but I would love to get ahold of that.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... 0802091495
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 13, 2012 1:42 pm

The journal is Capitalism Nature Socialism. Search for it in quotes:

http://www.cnsjournal.org/

They offer the manuscript versions of all back-issue articles older than 18 months for free, here:

http://www.cnsjournal.org/backissues.html

When you hover over the contents page on the article you want...

Image

You can download it. Or just right-click and save as:

http://www.cnsjournal.org/articles/Jun% ... Jun.08.doc

This may differ slightly but not significantly from print version, they warn.

Interesting passage:


Industry found an ally in former two-time EPA administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, who had recently returned to private life and headed his own lobbying firm specializing in environmental issues. Ruckelshaus’s firm organized a corporate coalition that included some of the “leading culprits in hazardous waste pollution—General Electric, Dow, Du Pont, Union Carbide, Monsanto, AT&T and others” to do a study of the Superfund law. “Select environmentalists” along with the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Audubon Society were also invited to take part. But the environmental groups accused the Superfund Coalition of being “a scheme to undo the new Superfund law,” so Ruckelshaus came up with a new plan: the Conservation Foundation, headed by soon-to-be EPA administrator William K. Reilly, would undertake a $2.5 million study of the Superfund Law—funded in full with money from the EPA. Although there were objections to this plan, the Superfund Coalition got its way, which meant that in 1988, U.S. taxpayers paid “for research the polluters had originally envisioned as their political counterattack” against the Superfund legislation. This was all part of an elaborate, expensive, and long-term “deep lobbying” and public relations strategy to turn the public against what was intended to be very effective public health regulation. [...]



By then googling a complete sentence in quotes (the bolded one) you find what appears to be the full article online, here:

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker07.html

I quickly saw it was a variant article with the identical passage, but much abridged and with sections from the doc missing.

All this not so much for you but in general for How To Find Things (If They're Really Out There).

Often, they really are not out there.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Aug 14, 2012 3:48 pm

Wow, just noticed this info-packed thread. Thanks, everyone
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 14, 2012 6:56 pm

Found the full paper and many more besides -- Michael James Barker is a serious resource on this subject and he just f'd my whole week up cuz now I have to read all this shit

http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com ... ed-papers/
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: "The Tiny Field of Critical Foundation Studies"

Postby hanshan » Wed Aug 15, 2012 1:54 pm

...

bump


...
hanshan
 
Posts: 1673
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:04 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests