Philanthropy, generally understood as the generous donation of money by the rich to good causes, has a much less understood dark side. In Tragedy and Hope, historian Carroll Quigley explains the origin of the major tax-exempt foundations such as the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations:
In spite of the great influence of this “Wall Street” alignment, an influence great enough to merit the name of the “American Establishment,” this group could not control the Federal government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions thoroughly distasteful to the group. The chief of these were in taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating, above all else, in the inheritance tax. These tax laws drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations, which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the Federal government.
The tax-exempt foundations, a response to unwelcome tax laws, were quickly turned to advantage by some of the richest people in America. Writing in 1966, Quigley tells us:
More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could “blow off steam,” and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went “radical.”
“There was nothing really new about this decision,” Quigley informs us, “since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier.” We can, I believe, safely assume that the elite have not in the meantime abandoned such a successful strategy for controlling the terms of public debate.
To clarify, I’m just following the advice of Deep Throat to Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” That applies to right and left, liberal and conservative, to those causes we like, and those we despise. It’s worth pointing out that concern about the influence of tax-exempt foundations on public opinion is not an idiosyncratic pursuit, but has been studied by many academics such as Edward H. Berman, Rene Wormser, Frances Stonor Saunders, James Petras among others, but it’s not something the corporate-owned media are likely to bring to your attention. It’s also worth noting that at least two authors, Carl Oglesby and Kirkpartrick Sale, distinguish between two major groups of foundations, each representing the dominant power elites in the United States, namely the Yankees and the Cowboys to use Oglesby’s terms (or the traders and the Prussians, as Peter Dale Scott calls them). All agree that power has shifted from the Eastern Establishment to the Southern Rim, or from the CFR to the American Enterprise Institute. All this is of more than academic interest, and should not be casually dismissed as another “conspiracy theory.” As Joan Roelofs, points out in “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism”:
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.
Rene Wormser: “An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value.” (page viii)
Roelofs: “The environmental movement has also been a threat to “business as usual,” especially when degradation is linked to corporate activity. The response from the foundation world has been the creation and funding of many organizations, think tanks, university institutes, and conferences on “sustainable development,” as well as the ideology itself of sustainable development.
Foundation influence was substantial in every aspect of the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Many of the nongovernmental organizations at the Global Forum, the “grassroots arena,” were funded by foundations, if not their creations. Even official governmental delegates were tutored by the foundation network, which “provided technical assistance to developing-country governments that lacked the resources to participate fully in the debate, and provided texts to governments that didn’t know the issues well enough to draft the subtle language needed for compromise.”3
(3. J. Maughan, “The Road from Rio,” The Ford Foundation Report, Summer 1992, p. 16.)
In “Philantrophists at War,” Daniel Brandt concludes:
“Whenever and wherever big money is on the move, with interlocks to other big money as well as to the secret state, we would do well to agree with Oglesby: “Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”"
This Namebase review of Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms reveals the ostensibly surprising links between corporate imperialism and progressive politics:
“The Bundy brothers were born to rule, and they knew it. From the Boston elite, through Groton, Yale’s Skull and Bones, and Harvard, their superiority was widely acknowledged. William Bundy joined the CIA in 1951, worked in senior positions in the Pentagon and State Department during the Vietnam War, and was editor of “Foreign Affairs” at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1972-1984. McGeorge Bundy was a Harvard dean from 1953-1961, a national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1966, and head of the Ford Foundation from 1966-1979. He died in 1996.
“Both brothers were cold war liberals, which meant that their foreign policy tended toward imperialism. They knew that it was never a question of dominoes falling, yet the lure of hegemony led them to share much of the responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGeorge also shares responsibility for nearly starting World War III during the Cuban missile crisis. Later, at the Ford Foundation, a limo would pick McGeorge up in the morning, and he’d spend his days giving millions to minority activism centers, women’s studies programs, and writing essays in defense of affirmative action, presumably to balkanize and destroy the New Left. When Henry Ford II naively objected and left the board in 1976, Mac Bundy defended himself by telling reporters that the Foundation was “making the world safe for capitalism.” He wasn’t kidding.”
Notes
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p.938
Daniel Brandt, “Philantrophists at War,” NameBase NewsLine,
http://www.namebase.org/news15.html
Review of Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth, Namebase
http://www.namebase.org/sources/dN.html
