Oaxaca, Thursday 26 July 2007
Friends,
Carmelo Ruíz Marrero is the friend whose fury at Alexander
Cockburn's arrogance and stupidity about his position on global warming
first restirred my interest in the Science for the People listserv. We
lost Carmelo, who is doing yeoman's work in a way I believe SftP ought
to function. We lost him because of the childish personal attacks then
going on within the group. Carmelo, like Charlie Welch at TecsChange
and Eric Entemann teaching at Roxbury Community College, are DOING
Science for the People. Here's an item Carmelo sent today that rings
true to all my experience. In particular it ought to speak to all of us
who think of ourselves as middle class and yet want to be part
of the struggle for human emancipation. The link is
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_6262.cfm
.
The article begins
How Foundations & Non-Profits Prop Up Corporate Control
- The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism
By Joan Roelofs
NameBase.org, Posted on July 25, 2007
Straight to the
Source
Those who wish to promote change should look closely at what sustains
the present system. One reason capitalism doesn't collapse despite its
many weaknesses and valiant opposition movements is because of the
"nonprofit sector." Yet philanthropic capital, its investment and its
distribution, are generally neglected by the critics of capitalism.
Most studies of the subject are generously funded by the nonprofit
sector itself; few researchers have followed up on the observation of
Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:
"A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances,
in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.... To
this section belong the economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,
improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable
kind."
The United States is unique in the size and scope of this sector which
spends over $400 billion annually. Its tax-free wealth is largely
unaccountable: just imagine the land, the buildings, their contents,
and the investments of churches, private universities and schools,
museums, zoos, teaching hospitals, conservation trusts, opera houses,
etc.
_______________________________________________
What the middle class does with the wealth over which we have
control is a significant part of the problem, in my opinion. We ought
to think about it. Maybe it would be good if more of us were, like
Eric, compulsivly frugal (referring to the thread on the internet
divide).
Sincerely,
George