Buffet Warns 'Conscience Laundering' is the New 'Philanthropic Colonialism' -

[xchrom]

http://www.smartmemestudios.com/index.php/wearemadeofstories/entry/buffet-warns-conscious-laundering-is-the-new-philanthropic-colonialism



"Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism... Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed... As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to 'give back.' It’s what I would call 'conscience laundering' — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place..." - Peter Buffet (Warren Buffet's son), Chairman NoVo Foundation

Peter Buffet in his scathing New York Times OpEd attack on the "charitable-industrial complex" leaves out the grassroot activism on this front that has been ongoing for years. Buffet in the OpEd though pleads guilty to being a naive foundation head and so his familiarity with the ongoing internal revolution within the nonprofit world is understandable, as he puts it, "I noticed that a donor had the urge to 'save the day' in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms."

His comments echo almost verbatim the fiery rallying cry in the 2007 anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective, "What has happened to the great civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s? Where are the mass movements of today within this country? The short answer: They got funded. Social justice groups and organizations have become limited as they’ve been incorporated into the nonprofit model."

Forbes and Matthew Bishop the US Business Editor at The Economist were quick to jump to the defense of the so-called nonprofit industrial complex. Bishop writes in defense of investment managers, "Take Mr Buffett’s own father for example, one of those investment managers: what have any of his investments done to create the sort of problems philanthropists are trying to solve? (Okay – maybe his investing in CocaCola has contributed to the obesity epidemic.) Likewise, his partner in doing good, Bill Gates: it is hard to see how anything he has done, or indeed what any other philanthropist today has done, has contributed to, say, all those children dying from malaria that he is trying to save."

- See more at: http://www.smartmemestudios.com/index.php/wearemadeofstories/entry/buffet-warns-conscious-laundering-is-the-new-philanthropic-colonialism#sthash.36DZUwNF.dpuf

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Huge K&R! n/t

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. I'd just love to talk to him over a few bourbons, he is a walking contradiction and

that's always fascinating.

[gulliver]

3. Um, Peter Buffet

It's presumptuous and counterproductive to assume the wealthy need to salve their consciences. They don't. They aren't bad for accumulating wealth, and the people aren't bad for taxing it heavily. The point is to achieve the greater good with the wealth, not to bog everything down in an unresolvable and stupid morality play.