Please take the time to listen for the disinformation and do not be apathetic! If we do not get our media back to being free press holding power accountable....we will not be a democracy. Public media has always been the people's voice and it is now corporate and Wall Street. Fight against public funding of that programming. Comment and send letters to the editor to these news journals and stations that just repeat what politicians and people in power say!
RUSS FEINGOLD SHOUTED OUT AND ACTUALLY LEFT THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE IN THE SENATE BACK IN EARLY 2000s BECAUSE AS HE SAID THEN.......THE PATRIOT ACT GOES TOO FAR IN VIOLATING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND WITH HIS FIGHT AGAINST BIG BANKS AND AGAINST GLASS STEAGALL AND WALL STREET BAILOUTS.....HE WAS UNSEATED.
RUSS FEINGOLD IS THE CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 2016 FOR PROGRESSIVES AGAINST WHAT IS NOW A COMPLETELY NEO-LIBERAL LIST OF CANDIDATES!
LET RUSS FEINGOLD KNOW YOU WANT HIM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2016!
The NSA scandal is a good chance to see where your elected democrat stands....neo-liberal or progressive. Nancy Pelosi, the Clinton's, and all of Maryland's politicians are fighting to save it and are silent about the abuse to civil liberties....they vote for it at every stage. These are neo-liberals who stand with republicans in all but a few social issue policies. We have heard Wyden, Russ Feingold, and Bernie Sanders shouting out against this for years...decades. These are progressive, social democrats and pols.
IF PEOPLE DO NOT MAKE CLEAR IN THEIR MINDS THAT THE CURRENT DNC IS CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS CREATING THE SAME SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT THAT DEMOCRATIC VOTERS ARE FIGHTING AGAINST.....AND RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE AGAINST THESE POLS IN PRIMARIES....WE WILL BECOME AN AUTOCRATIC SOCIETY!
With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear
Charles Dharapak/AP - “If we don’t take a unique moment in our constitutional history — in our political history — to fix a surveillance system that [is] just off the rails, I think we’ll regret it,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: July 28
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill: For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.
The big story
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has told a Russian official that the United States will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden.
Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information he had learned as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Wyden (D-Ore.) was bound by secrecy rules, unable to reveal what he knew.
Everything but his unhappiness had to be classified. So Wyden stuck to speeches that were dire but vague. And often ignored.
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden said on the Senate floor in May 2011.
Two years later, they found out.
The revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — detailing vast domestic surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications — have filled in the details of Wyden’s concerns.
So he was right. But that is not the same as winning.
To change the law and restrict domestic spying, the low-key Wyden still must overcome opposition from the White House and the leaders of both parties in Congress.
“If we don’t take a unique moment in our constitutional history — in our political history — to fix a surveillance system that [is] just off the rails, I think we’ll regret it,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.
Now, in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, Wyden is pressing his case on two fronts.
One uses Congress’s power to ask questions. Wyden has sought to force spy agency leaders to clarify — in public — the nature of their intelligence-gathering on Americans.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. responded to a letter co-authored by Wyden with new details.
Clapper said the government was not using its authority under the Patriot Act to collect bulk data on Americans, beyond two programs already disclosed. One gathers data on phone calls. The other, now shut down, gathered data on electronic messages. Clapper also conceded that there had been “compliance problems,” in which the NSA had not met the terms of secret-court orders that allowed the data-gathering.
In addition, Wyden is seeking legislative change, including an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“It’s the most one-sided legal process in the United States,” Wyden said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that aired Sunday. “I don’t know of any other legal system or court that really doesn’t highlight anything except one point of view.”
He said later that lawmakers should seek to “diversify some of the thinking on the court.”
‘The right questions’
Wyden, 64, is not possessed of a troublemaker’s personality. He has been an earnest, cordial presence in Congress since 1981. Before that, he got his political education as an activist with the Oregon chapter of a group known as the Panthers — not Black, but Gray. As a 20-something, Wyden was a leader of the Gray Panthers, an activist organization for seniors.
____________________________________________
Regarding WBAL TV ---NBC's local news CEO and his opinion piece:
There is a meme on Facebook that is going viral that has a Community Chest character hitting the jackpot with a caption that says " It's not a recession......it is robbery"! It is a Visigoth raiding of the Treasury by the 1%.
When we have media heads coming on with the evening news programming making statements like......beware the fate of Detroit coming to Baltimore.....we have the exact same media that gave us the Bush Administration buildup for war with Iraq and the fake claims of weapons of mass destruction....SAME THING. We have this situation with media because we elected what we thought was a progressive President because he campaigned as one who turned out to be neo-liberal and to the right of Bush in his policies. Therefor we have the same corporate media....not a reformed one.
Detroit is nothing like Baltimore. Detroit has much larger infrastructure problems and no anchor institutions to stabilize the city. Baltimore's financial situation is tied directly to the Master Plan created in the city in the 1980s and the massive amounts of fraud and corruption that empties government coffers. It is all avoidable if we had public justice organizations and Rule of Law. Detroit's problems would be mitigated as well if those same issues were resolved. What the WBAL CEO was trying to do is to set the stage for what he calls 'austerity' reasoning with the citizens who are outraged that it is for our own good. This is City Hall's approach as well and of course both this CEO and City Hall work for the city's 1%. There is no threat of bankruptcy that is not a deliberate public policy cause. We have politicians who are deliberately setting the stage for municipal collapse through outsized debt and open channeling of city revenue legally and illegally into the pockets of the rich. THAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH DEBT AT ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT AND ESPECIALLY IN BALTIMORE! The solution is simple.....simply reinstate Rule of Law, rebuild white collar criminal agencies and government oversight, end all of the privatization of public services that are rife with fraud.....and VIOLA.....NO THREAT OF BANKRUPTCY AND IN FACT....THE CITY IS IN THE BLACK! Recover all the fraud from these few decades and we have surpluses and fully funded programs and services and a first world quality of life.....RULE OF LAW does that!
So fear-mongering on Baltimore local media means that citizens must get active and organize for change. We want to see community forming Democracy Now groups separate from the O'Malley/Rawlings-Blake community organizations headed by people who simply move the 1% policy through all communities. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AND SEND INCUMBENTS AND THEIR FARM TEAM PACKING! DON'T ALLOW A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES!
Planning, austerity measures will solidify Baltimore's future Baltimore can avoid bankruptcy route, unlike Detroit
UPDATED 10:45 AM EDT Jul 25, 2013 WBAL -TV
As city leaders across the country watch Detroit, the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, it is a sign that times have changed.
Once bustling American cities swelling in population and wealth have experienced a slow but steady decline. The flight of industry overseas, residents to the suburbs and high rates of poverty and violent crime have depleted city coffers, including Baltimore.
Simply put, fewer taxpayers mean there is less money to fund city services.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake started righting the ship when she took office in 2010. Once a major center for steel and shipbuilding, Baltimore is now a hub for health care, biomedical research and the federal government, which has provided some stability.
The mayor's 10-year plan to control costs and increase revenue require difficult decisions to put the city on a sustainable path. Some of the changes are frustrating to citizens and employees, but planning and austerity measures will ensure Baltimore does not end up like Detroit.
__________________________________________
This is a good look at how the private non-profit industrial complex creates all of the policies that have captured democracy and defunds all public justice and it has totally captured Baltimore's government and public non-profits.
The first article shows an organization for women of color making it known in the 1960s that these private non-profits were not working for them.....the second article is from Utne....a solidly middle-class white journal stating the same thing today!
It is simply the 1% gathering control at the local level and it empties government coffers and allows corporations to circumvent public routes for funding that are open and transparent! All of the policies I shout out against are directed by this PRIVATE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX......work to be rid of it!
If your incumbent is not shouting out against these institutions.....they are not working for you and me!
Left Turn Magazine's issue on The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.)
“I’m very much afraid of this ‘Foundation Complex.’ We’re getting praise from places that worry me.”- Ella Baker, June 1963
"I want us all to be real creative about our tactics and strategies to dismantle the empire."- Joo-Hyun Kang, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference, 2004 In 2004, along with women of color at UC Santa Barbara, INCITE! organized the conference: "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex." This conference drew in hundreds of organizers and activists searching for a space to address the ways in which the non-profit/NGO structure often obstructs radical movement building. At this conference, speakers and attendees addressed the following questions:
WHAT IS THE "NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?"The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:
WHAT DOES INCITE! THINK ABOUT THE "NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?"In 2004, INCITE! learned the hard way that the revolution will not be funded. When we began in 2000, we took a stand against state funding since we perceived that antiviolence organizations who had state funding had been co-opted. It hadn't occurred to us to look at foundation funding in the same way.
However, in a trip to India (funded, ironically, by the Ford Foundation), we met with many non-funded organizations that criticized us for receiving foundation grants. When we saw that groups with much less access to resources were able to do amazing work without foundation funding, we began to question our reliance on foundation grants.
Our suspicions were confirmed when, in February 2004, INCITE! received an e-mail from the Ford Foundation with the subject line "Congratulations!" and an offer of "a one-year or two-year grant of $100,000" to cover our general operating expenses in response to a grant proposal the Ford Foundation had solicited from us. We committed to two major projects (SisterFire multimedia tour and Color of Violence III conference in New Orleans) based on this funding. Then, unexpectedly on July 30, 2004, the Ford Foundation sent another letter, explaining that it had reversed its decision because of our organization's statement of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.
INCITE! learned firsthand the dangers of relying on foundations for our movement building. But we also learned that social justice organizations do not always need the foundation support they think they do. Strapped with this sudden loss of funding but committed to organizing two major projects, INCITE! members started raising money through grassroots fundraising -- house parties, individual calls, T-shirt sales, and so on -- and we were able to quickly raise the money we lost when the Ford Foundation rescinded their grant offer.
This story is not an isolated incident. The NPIC has a long and complicated legacy. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded anthology reviews this history and political context, but offers no simple answers. The contributors are a multigenerational assembly of organizers working inside and outside the NPIC from a variety of -- even conflicting -- perspectives. However, we hope the book and conference continues a conversation about how to think beyond state-proctored models like the non-profit system for organizing political projects for social change.
MORE RESOURCES & DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX (NPIC)
__________________________________
YOU ARE BEING FORCED TO WRITE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS FOR GRANT MONEY RATHER THAN SIMPLY WRITING GRANTS TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES....NOW THEY ONLY SEND GOVERNMENT GRANT MONEY TO THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS WHO THEN DECIDE IF YOUR PROJECT MEETS THEIR GUIDELINES!
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded It’s time to liberate activists from the nonprofit industrial complex
from the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
March-April 2009
This article is part of a package on rethinking charity in the economic crisis. For more, read Giving When It Hurts; Ladling Soup, Raising Hell: Nonprofit Insider Robert Egger Is Out to Reform Charities from Within; and Tips for Practical Giving: Where to Give, What to Ask, and the Lowdown on Emerging Philanthropic Trends.
The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms.
This argument—that reformers have morphed into cogs in the nonprofit industrial complex—is explained and explored in the fiery anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective (South End, 2007).
One piece of the puzzle: “Foundations provide tax shelters for wealthy families and thereby take away tax income that could be used for social programs and entitlements,” Andrea J. Ritchie, an INCITE! member, told Make/shift. “And then [the foundations] dole out little bits of money for nonprofits to replace the services that the government no longer funds.”
The book brings together 21 experienced radical activists to explore the shortcomings of nonprofits as movement makers; here are excerpts from three chapters. —The Editors
Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida
Sista II Sista Collective, Brooklyn, New York
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. We as activists are no longer accountable to our constituents or members because we don’t depend on them for our existence. Instead, we’ve become primarily accountable to public and private foundations as we try to prove to them that we are still relevant and efficient and thus worthy of continued funding.
RUSS FEINGOLD SHOUTED OUT AND ACTUALLY LEFT THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE IN THE SENATE BACK IN EARLY 2000s BECAUSE AS HE SAID THEN.......THE PATRIOT ACT GOES TOO FAR IN VIOLATING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND WITH HIS FIGHT AGAINST BIG BANKS AND AGAINST GLASS STEAGALL AND WALL STREET BAILOUTS.....HE WAS UNSEATED.
RUSS FEINGOLD IS THE CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 2016 FOR PROGRESSIVES AGAINST WHAT IS NOW A COMPLETELY NEO-LIBERAL LIST OF CANDIDATES!
LET RUSS FEINGOLD KNOW YOU WANT HIM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2016!
The NSA scandal is a good chance to see where your elected democrat stands....neo-liberal or progressive. Nancy Pelosi, the Clinton's, and all of Maryland's politicians are fighting to save it and are silent about the abuse to civil liberties....they vote for it at every stage. These are neo-liberals who stand with republicans in all but a few social issue policies. We have heard Wyden, Russ Feingold, and Bernie Sanders shouting out against this for years...decades. These are progressive, social democrats and pols.
IF PEOPLE DO NOT MAKE CLEAR IN THEIR MINDS THAT THE CURRENT DNC IS CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS CREATING THE SAME SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT THAT DEMOCRATIC VOTERS ARE FIGHTING AGAINST.....AND RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE AGAINST THESE POLS IN PRIMARIES....WE WILL BECOME AN AUTOCRATIC SOCIETY!
With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear
Charles Dharapak/AP - “If we don’t take a unique moment in our constitutional history — in our political history — to fix a surveillance system that [is] just off the rails, I think we’ll regret it,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: July 28
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill: For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.
The big story
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has told a Russian official that the United States will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden.
Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information he had learned as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Wyden (D-Ore.) was bound by secrecy rules, unable to reveal what he knew.
Everything but his unhappiness had to be classified. So Wyden stuck to speeches that were dire but vague. And often ignored.
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden said on the Senate floor in May 2011.
Two years later, they found out.
The revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — detailing vast domestic surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications — have filled in the details of Wyden’s concerns.
So he was right. But that is not the same as winning.
To change the law and restrict domestic spying, the low-key Wyden still must overcome opposition from the White House and the leaders of both parties in Congress.
“If we don’t take a unique moment in our constitutional history — in our political history — to fix a surveillance system that [is] just off the rails, I think we’ll regret it,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.
Now, in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, Wyden is pressing his case on two fronts.
One uses Congress’s power to ask questions. Wyden has sought to force spy agency leaders to clarify — in public — the nature of their intelligence-gathering on Americans.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. responded to a letter co-authored by Wyden with new details.
Clapper said the government was not using its authority under the Patriot Act to collect bulk data on Americans, beyond two programs already disclosed. One gathers data on phone calls. The other, now shut down, gathered data on electronic messages. Clapper also conceded that there had been “compliance problems,” in which the NSA had not met the terms of secret-court orders that allowed the data-gathering.
In addition, Wyden is seeking legislative change, including an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“It’s the most one-sided legal process in the United States,” Wyden said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that aired Sunday. “I don’t know of any other legal system or court that really doesn’t highlight anything except one point of view.”
He said later that lawmakers should seek to “diversify some of the thinking on the court.”
‘The right questions’
Wyden, 64, is not possessed of a troublemaker’s personality. He has been an earnest, cordial presence in Congress since 1981. Before that, he got his political education as an activist with the Oregon chapter of a group known as the Panthers — not Black, but Gray. As a 20-something, Wyden was a leader of the Gray Panthers, an activist organization for seniors.
____________________________________________
Regarding WBAL TV ---NBC's local news CEO and his opinion piece:
There is a meme on Facebook that is going viral that has a Community Chest character hitting the jackpot with a caption that says " It's not a recession......it is robbery"! It is a Visigoth raiding of the Treasury by the 1%.
When we have media heads coming on with the evening news programming making statements like......beware the fate of Detroit coming to Baltimore.....we have the exact same media that gave us the Bush Administration buildup for war with Iraq and the fake claims of weapons of mass destruction....SAME THING. We have this situation with media because we elected what we thought was a progressive President because he campaigned as one who turned out to be neo-liberal and to the right of Bush in his policies. Therefor we have the same corporate media....not a reformed one.
Detroit is nothing like Baltimore. Detroit has much larger infrastructure problems and no anchor institutions to stabilize the city. Baltimore's financial situation is tied directly to the Master Plan created in the city in the 1980s and the massive amounts of fraud and corruption that empties government coffers. It is all avoidable if we had public justice organizations and Rule of Law. Detroit's problems would be mitigated as well if those same issues were resolved. What the WBAL CEO was trying to do is to set the stage for what he calls 'austerity' reasoning with the citizens who are outraged that it is for our own good. This is City Hall's approach as well and of course both this CEO and City Hall work for the city's 1%. There is no threat of bankruptcy that is not a deliberate public policy cause. We have politicians who are deliberately setting the stage for municipal collapse through outsized debt and open channeling of city revenue legally and illegally into the pockets of the rich. THAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH DEBT AT ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT AND ESPECIALLY IN BALTIMORE! The solution is simple.....simply reinstate Rule of Law, rebuild white collar criminal agencies and government oversight, end all of the privatization of public services that are rife with fraud.....and VIOLA.....NO THREAT OF BANKRUPTCY AND IN FACT....THE CITY IS IN THE BLACK! Recover all the fraud from these few decades and we have surpluses and fully funded programs and services and a first world quality of life.....RULE OF LAW does that!
So fear-mongering on Baltimore local media means that citizens must get active and organize for change. We want to see community forming Democracy Now groups separate from the O'Malley/Rawlings-Blake community organizations headed by people who simply move the 1% policy through all communities. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AND SEND INCUMBENTS AND THEIR FARM TEAM PACKING! DON'T ALLOW A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES!
Planning, austerity measures will solidify Baltimore's future Baltimore can avoid bankruptcy route, unlike Detroit
UPDATED 10:45 AM EDT Jul 25, 2013 WBAL -TV
As city leaders across the country watch Detroit, the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, it is a sign that times have changed.
Once bustling American cities swelling in population and wealth have experienced a slow but steady decline. The flight of industry overseas, residents to the suburbs and high rates of poverty and violent crime have depleted city coffers, including Baltimore.
Simply put, fewer taxpayers mean there is less money to fund city services.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake started righting the ship when she took office in 2010. Once a major center for steel and shipbuilding, Baltimore is now a hub for health care, biomedical research and the federal government, which has provided some stability.
The mayor's 10-year plan to control costs and increase revenue require difficult decisions to put the city on a sustainable path. Some of the changes are frustrating to citizens and employees, but planning and austerity measures will ensure Baltimore does not end up like Detroit.
__________________________________________
This is a good look at how the private non-profit industrial complex creates all of the policies that have captured democracy and defunds all public justice and it has totally captured Baltimore's government and public non-profits.
The first article shows an organization for women of color making it known in the 1960s that these private non-profits were not working for them.....the second article is from Utne....a solidly middle-class white journal stating the same thing today!
It is simply the 1% gathering control at the local level and it empties government coffers and allows corporations to circumvent public routes for funding that are open and transparent! All of the policies I shout out against are directed by this PRIVATE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX......work to be rid of it!
If your incumbent is not shouting out against these institutions.....they are not working for you and me!
Left Turn Magazine's issue on The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.)
“I’m very much afraid of this ‘Foundation Complex.’ We’re getting praise from places that worry me.”- Ella Baker, June 1963
"I want us all to be real creative about our tactics and strategies to dismantle the empire."- Joo-Hyun Kang, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference, 2004 In 2004, along with women of color at UC Santa Barbara, INCITE! organized the conference: "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex." This conference drew in hundreds of organizers and activists searching for a space to address the ways in which the non-profit/NGO structure often obstructs radical movement building. At this conference, speakers and attendees addressed the following questions:
- What is the history of the non-profit model? What drove its development? How did it impact the form and direction of social justice organizing?
- How has reliance on foundation funding impacted the course of social justice movements?
- How does 501(c)3 status impact social justice organizations' relationship to the state?
- How does non-profit status allow the state to co-opt and control our movements?
- Are there ways the non-profit model can be used subversively to support more radical visions for social change?
- What are the alternatives for building viable social justice movements? How do we resource our movements outside the non-profit structure?
- What models for organizing outside the NGO/non-profit model exist outside the U.S. that may help us?
WHAT IS THE "NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?"The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:
- the State (or local and federal governments)
- the owning classes
- foundations
- and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations
- Monitor and control social justice movements;
- Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
- Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
- Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
- Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through "philanthropic" work;
- Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them
WHAT DOES INCITE! THINK ABOUT THE "NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?"In 2004, INCITE! learned the hard way that the revolution will not be funded. When we began in 2000, we took a stand against state funding since we perceived that antiviolence organizations who had state funding had been co-opted. It hadn't occurred to us to look at foundation funding in the same way.
However, in a trip to India (funded, ironically, by the Ford Foundation), we met with many non-funded organizations that criticized us for receiving foundation grants. When we saw that groups with much less access to resources were able to do amazing work without foundation funding, we began to question our reliance on foundation grants.
Our suspicions were confirmed when, in February 2004, INCITE! received an e-mail from the Ford Foundation with the subject line "Congratulations!" and an offer of "a one-year or two-year grant of $100,000" to cover our general operating expenses in response to a grant proposal the Ford Foundation had solicited from us. We committed to two major projects (SisterFire multimedia tour and Color of Violence III conference in New Orleans) based on this funding. Then, unexpectedly on July 30, 2004, the Ford Foundation sent another letter, explaining that it had reversed its decision because of our organization's statement of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.
INCITE! learned firsthand the dangers of relying on foundations for our movement building. But we also learned that social justice organizations do not always need the foundation support they think they do. Strapped with this sudden loss of funding but committed to organizing two major projects, INCITE! members started raising money through grassroots fundraising -- house parties, individual calls, T-shirt sales, and so on -- and we were able to quickly raise the money we lost when the Ford Foundation rescinded their grant offer.
This story is not an isolated incident. The NPIC has a long and complicated legacy. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded anthology reviews this history and political context, but offers no simple answers. The contributors are a multigenerational assembly of organizers working inside and outside the NPIC from a variety of -- even conflicting -- perspectives. However, we hope the book and conference continues a conversation about how to think beyond state-proctored models like the non-profit system for organizing political projects for social change.
MORE RESOURCES & DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX (NPIC)
__________________________________
YOU ARE BEING FORCED TO WRITE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS FOR GRANT MONEY RATHER THAN SIMPLY WRITING GRANTS TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES....NOW THEY ONLY SEND GOVERNMENT GRANT MONEY TO THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS WHO THEN DECIDE IF YOUR PROJECT MEETS THEIR GUIDELINES!
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded It’s time to liberate activists from the nonprofit industrial complex
from the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
March-April 2009
This article is part of a package on rethinking charity in the economic crisis. For more, read Giving When It Hurts; Ladling Soup, Raising Hell: Nonprofit Insider Robert Egger Is Out to Reform Charities from Within; and Tips for Practical Giving: Where to Give, What to Ask, and the Lowdown on Emerging Philanthropic Trends.
The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms.
This argument—that reformers have morphed into cogs in the nonprofit industrial complex—is explained and explored in the fiery anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective (South End, 2007).
One piece of the puzzle: “Foundations provide tax shelters for wealthy families and thereby take away tax income that could be used for social programs and entitlements,” Andrea J. Ritchie, an INCITE! member, told Make/shift. “And then [the foundations] dole out little bits of money for nonprofits to replace the services that the government no longer funds.”
The book brings together 21 experienced radical activists to explore the shortcomings of nonprofits as movement makers; here are excerpts from three chapters. —The Editors
Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida
Sista II Sista Collective, Brooklyn, New York
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. We as activists are no longer accountable to our constituents or members because we don’t depend on them for our existence. Instead, we’ve become primarily accountable to public and private foundations as we try to prove to them that we are still relevant and efficient and thus worthy of continued funding.
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