Peter Buffett looks at charity:
This weekend in an extraordinary opinion piece in the New York Times, The Charitable-Industrial Complex, Buffett’s son Peter, a musician, describes what he calls his journey as a philanthropist.
“As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few,” Buffett declares,” 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.”
in a book called Consumed, published a year after Warren Buffet turned over the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, political philosopher Benjamin Barber discusses the explosive growth of philanthropic giving as part of our society’s rush to privatization:
“First a privatizing ideology rationalizes restricting public goods and public assets of the kind that might allow the public as a whole to rescue from their distress their fellow citizens who are in jeopardy; then the same privatizing ideology celebrates the wealthy philanthropists made possible by the market’s inequalities who earnestly step in to spend some fragment of their market fortunes to do what the public can no longer do for itself. Better philanthropy than nothing, but far better than philanthropy is a democratic public capable of taking care of itself with its own pooled resources and its own prudent planning. The private philanthropist does for others in the larger public what they have not been enabled to do for themselves, as a public; democracy, on the other hand, empowers the public to take care of itself.” (131)
Building the political will to curb the power of private wealth also requires us to name the problem. Peter Buffet helps us here. He calls the spreading of philanthropic wealth as an act of charity, “philanthropic colonialism.”
This week, in Philadelphia, where there have been huge cuts to public schools:
In Philadelphia, a long-running education crisis is coming to a head.Many city teachers and students still don’t know where they’ll go to school in September, after the city laid off 4,000 employees — including almost 700 teachers — and closed 23 schools earlier this summer.
“The school officials were referring to this as ‘The Doomsday Budget,’” WHYY reporter Holly Otterbein told Here & Now. “It’s just a skeletal staff that remains.” The budget shortfall was caused by a number of factors, Otterbein said. Stimulus funding dried up, which resulted in less state funding to Philadelphia schools, and federal funding also decreased. Add to that rising pension costs.The budget cuts and school closures in Philadelphia are affecting even the most successful schools in the most affluent parts of the city.
Perhaps understandably, meetings on philanthropist-funded plans not going well:
About 75 people came to the first of six District meetings Monday night seeking public input on a new school report card to replace both the School Performance Index (SPI) and the school annual reports. The District has used these performance measures in decisions such as which schools to close and which to convert into charters.
But the sentiment in the meeting room at District headquarters was overwhelming: Please. Just forget about it.
A preliminary design for the new report card is due in late August from Tembo Consulting, whose founder and CEO, David Stewart, struggled to explain the process over a chorus of cross-examination and catcalls.
“You don’t need to be condescending in your comments,” Stewart told Alison McDowell, parent of a child at Masterman High School..
“We are being condescended to constantly,” replied Rebecca Poyourow, who has two children in Cook-Wissahickon Elementary.
Stewart said that no District funds will be used for the report card. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation of Austin, Texas is footing the bill. But this appeared to make the parents even angrier.
“We’re using consultants to grade schools instead of spending more time fixing them,” said school activist Helen Gym.
Several saw the report card as little more than a thinly-veiled effort to use consultants to justify closing more schools or turning them over to charter operators.
Some parents said that with resources cut to the bone in the coming school year, many schools were almost destined to flunk on any new report card.
Do these gifts make anyone else feel we’re going to be paying for them one way or another, or am I just ungrateful and overly wary? I am ungrateful and wary, obviously, in general, but what about this specific area, the “gifts from billionaires that we didn’t ask for” area? I already know I don’t want a gift that comes with an undisclosed price attached. I call those sorts of exchanges “transactions” not “gifts” and I like to discuss the terms before I accept the offer.
Mary G
I find it infuriating that one of the Koch brothers gives a fortune to opera companies – is that really an efficient use of money? He doesn’t pay taxes and spends the money on something that maybe .0005% of the American people will benefit from. Why does he get to make those choices?
tybee
yup. education is hosed. and it’s not gonna get better until the rethugs get voted out. which means never.
catclub
“school activist Helen Gym”
Nominative determinism.
The wheelchair bound senator from North Carolina (a few years back) was Helms on Wheels.
catclub
@Mary G: The number of ‘charities’ that primarily benefit rich people is very large. At least Carnegie gave libraries.
Koch gives amounts that other people would consider fortunes.
angler
nice putting the dots together Kay.
No One of Consequence
We can either pay now, or we can pay later. Increased societal problems stemming from drastically reduced services to children. Education. Pre-school. School lunches. Safe public spaces for play and recreation. Safe water. Clean air.
Or…
Increased crime. Prison populations. Increased unwanted pregnancies. Increased societal cost of taking care of the problems the conservative mind set sees as necessary to create through shared sacrifice. Heh. Or at least the collective lower-classes sacrifice.
I really don’t understand this country sometimes.
Peace all, an try to keep your chin up. It’s getting harder and harder to do that.
– NOoC
Richard Shindledecker
The Raj needs servants, our children are convenient for the purpose. Think of Bill Gates as a latter day Cecil Rhodes. Kinda fits.
Zifnab
@Mary G:
Cause people keep buying paper towels.
Mary G
And don’t even get me started on churches. Most of their good works either are limited to people they approve of or come with strings attached or benefit the ministers.
BGinCHI
If you think a gift comes without strings, you haven’t gotten many gifts from rich people.
See also Mauss, Marcel.
Southern Beale
Thanks Kay, I read Buffett’s editorial and was blown away. I meant to do a post on it but kept forgetting to.
Chris
There’s a Doctor Who quote for this that always occurs to me when listening to someone go on about what generous and charitable people 1% right wingers are.
“You let one of them go, but that’s nothing new. Every now and then a little victim is spared because she smiled, ’cause he’s got freckles, ’cause they begged…and that’s how you live with yourself. That’s how you slaughter millions, because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind’s in the right direction, you happen to be kind.”
When you’ve spent decades tearing up all the institutions that people rely on for a decent living, you don’t get credit for rescuing a few of your own victims on a whim.
Politically Lost
“I like to discuss the terms before I accept the offer.”
THAT is the true danger of wealth inequality. Unequal and unconscionable bargaining power.
The Moar You Know
Billionaires don’t give away one cent without there being something in it for them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mary G: That opens another kettle of fish entirely. Why should there be any support for the arts of any kind while some are in want? I reject the premise behind that question.
Ash Can
Public goods whose existence is dependent upon the whims of one or a few wealthy individuals aren’t much “good.”
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Expect a full and accurate report from you re: the Madison Meet-Up.
Chris
@Mary G:
They can also do this sweet thing where they apply all that charity money to anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Muslim and other bigoted causes, then turn around and rely on government grants for their actual “charity” (e.g. helping the poor) work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ash Can: Nor are they really public.
Baud
We have a whole industry of people who will rail against government dependency, but no one seems to mind dependency on the charity of wealthy oligarchs.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I may avoid it in a fit of pique. I am like that, you know.
kc
@Mary G:
I find it infuriating that one of the Koch brothers gives a fortune to opera companies
That doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me is the fortune the Kochs spend trying to influence public policy to screw the rest of us.
Another Halocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: If art comes from the people they go out of their way to suppress it. In their minds, art should serve
the statetheir egos.Either their rarified and meritorious taste or just straight up gives them oral sex for being richie riches.
I was looking at some ballet (traditional style) on Youtube just the other day and … jesus. Jesus H. Christ.
It’s not quite pure orphan tears water but it’s pretty close.
beltane
I worked for a while as a grant writer for a non-profit serving low-income rural children. The main thing I learned was that charitable giving is, almost by definition, tailored to suit the needs and/or whims of the donors and usually has little connection to addressing the real needs at hand. Thus it was very easy for us to obtain funding for non-essential and often redundant programs that made the grantors feel that they were participating in something exciting and “innovative” (God, how they love that word), but virtually impossible to acquire funding for anything to do with operating expenses. Relying on the vanity of rich people has got to be the most inefficient way to deliver needed services to the people who actually need them.
Another Halocene Human
Looks like Real Americans getting a taste of the condescending “help” they offer to rural Haitians, gee maybe if the oligarchs hadn’t stole all the land–gee whiz, that’s crazytalk.
Roger Moore
No, this is exactly right. The 0.01% are making themselves fabulously wealthy at the expense of the rest of the nation, and then tossing a few baubles our way and expecting us to fawn on them for their generosity. And, of course, what they deign to give us isn’t necessarily what we want or need.
PeakVT
Do these gifts make anyone else feel we’re going to be paying for them one way or another, or am I just ungrateful and overly wary?
The problem is that these “gifts’ tend to go hand-in-hand with other “gifts” designed to lower taxes so that people become dependent on the first set of gifts. Make the schools poorer, then they’ll be more likely to respond to the explicit and implicit strings attached to any “gift”.
Another Halocene Human
@beltane: I’ve heard similar things about donations of goods, although as a long-time thrift store shopper I’m grateful to those people who donate stuff there.
Inflating the value of your used crap is a good one, also donating unusable shit.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: If you are dead set on having a fit, pique is the best one.
Chris
@beltane:
Of course. It’s shorthand for “I’m special.”
slag
Yes yes yes!
@beltane:
And holy shit yes! I was having this very conversation with someone just this morning.
How to address this self-reinforcing problem is a whole other question.
Mike G
The Dell or Gates foundations’ tentacles in “school reform” stinks of self-interest — schools are a major market for computer hardware and software.
At least Gates’ involvement in disease prevention in Africa doesn’t appear to have any business angle (that I know of).
Kay
@Mike G:
I was at a Christmas party last winter and we were laughing about “blended learning” which is one of the Gates-Dell-Whoever-the-hell-else school reforms.
Kids take online classes half the day and then have “manager-teachers” for the rest, it’s complicated, anyway, it’s a LOT of screen time, and fewer expensive and demanding… human beings necessary.
Parents have been told for YEARS to limit “screen time” and now all of a sudden they’re like “just put ’em in front of that screen, there!” You really do start to wonder what they’re up to.
RSR
@catclub: Like that gif/jif thing, Helen’s last name not is pronounced like the place your phys ed class is held.
She is a great public schools activist, too. She’s on twitter @ParentsUnitedPA .
RSR
A lot going on in the City of Brotherly Love on the ed front today-
When does Philly schools crisis become A CRISIS?!!!
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Yo-Philadelphia-When-does-this-become-A-CRISIS.html#WFJpO41QjF8ldt4f.99
In a nutshell, even the little bit of money that might be helpful is getting tied up in details and bureaucracy. Close to $100 million dollars is tied up, and the superintendent announced that unless he gets some answers, he’s not sure he can open schools on time in Sept.
In the comments on Will Bunch’s post, I see a number of right wingers picking up the rallying cry we heard from a Utah a few weeks ago: “Here’s an idea. Let children who don’t want to attend schools quit and spend more time and money on those children that actually want to and can learn. The world needs ditch diggers too you know.” “Cut out the requirement that all children must attend school and spend the money on those who excel at academics.”
Throwin Stones
Kay,
Thank you for keeping on top of educational ‘reform’ (I’m in Ohio). We haven’t ‘conversed’ in ages, but it’s appreciated.
katie5
It reminds me of this:
Roger Moore
@beltane:
This. In almost any organization, it’s much easier to get money for a building that can have somebody’s name slapped on it than to pay the people who will work in the building. Donors apparently want their egos stroked more than they want effective programs.
Scott
Kay, Don’t know if you found out yet but Tony Bennet, Florida Superintendent has resigned.
Mnemosyne
@RSR:
Yes, I’m sure that there will be plenty of millionaires who decide that their kids don’t need an education and don’t send them to school.
Linda
In the movie Mask, Cher says of her kid’s babydaddy, “If you take their money, you gotta take their shit.” This is not just true of babydaddies, but life. We have been bullshitted into believing that cutting taxes and letting the private sector fund everything would give us something for nothing. It has given us plutocrats who use cities and neighborhoods as living labs to test their sometimes crackpot theories of social improvement, and to exercise their shitty attitude toward public servants who they consider too dumb to be as rich as they are, and too insolent to know their place. We should have seen this coming.