By
Robert Reich
Not
long ago I was asked to speak to a religious congregation about widening
inequality. Shortly before I began, the head of the congregation asked that I
not advocate raising taxes on the wealthy.
He
said he didn’t want to antagonize certain wealthy congregants on whose
generosity the congregation depended.
I
had a similar exchange last year with the president of a small college who had
invited me to give a lecture that his board of trustees would be attending.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t criticize Wall Street,” he said, explaining
that several of the trustees were investment bankers.
It
seems to be happening all over.
A non-profit group devoted to voting rights decides it won’t launch a campaign against big money in politics for fear of alienating wealthy donors.
A
Washington think-tank releases a study on inequality that fails to mention the
role big corporations and Wall Street have played in weakening the nation’s
labor and antitrust laws, presumably because the think tank doesn’t want to
antagonize its corporate and Wall Street donors.
A
major university shapes research and courses around economic topics of interest
to its biggest donors, notably avoiding any mention of the increasing power of
large corporations and Wall Street on the economy.
It’s
bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits
that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from
criticizing big money.
Other
sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social
services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are
cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the
arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed.
So
what are non-profits to do?
“There’s
really no choice,” a university dean told me. “We’ve got to go where the money
is.”
And
more than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, the
money is now in the pockets of big corporations and the super wealthy.
So
the presidents of universities, congregations, and think tanks, other
nonprofits are now kissing wealthy posteriors as never before.
But
that money often comes with strings.
When
Comcast, for example, finances a nonprofit like the International Center for
Law and Economics, the Center supports Comcast’s proposed merger with Time
Warner.
When
the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s
economics department, it stipulates that a Koch-appointed advisory committee
will select professors and undertake annual evaluations.
The
Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities
across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on
inequality and environmental justice.
David
Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on
the boards of two prominent public-broadcasting stations. It also guaranteed
that a documentary critical of the Kochs didn’t air.
As
Ruby Lerner, president and founding director of Creative Capital, a grant
making institution for the arts, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer,
“self-censorship” practiced by public television … raises issues about what
public television means. They are in the middle of so much funding pressure.”
David
Koch has also donated tens of millions of dollars to the American Museum of
Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History, and sits on their boards.
A
few weeks ago dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups asked that
museums of science and natural history “cut all ties” with fossil fuel
companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.
“When
some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of
misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions … they undermine public
confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting
scientific knowledge,” their statement said.
Even
though gift agreements by universities, museums, and other nonprofits often bar
donors from being involved in decisions about what’s investigated or shown,
such institutions don’t want to bite hands that feed them.
This
isn’t a matter of ideology. Wealthy progressives can exert as much quiet
influence over the agendas of nonprofits as wealthy conservatives.
It’s
a matter of big money influencing what should and should not be investigated,
revealed, and discussed – especially when it comes to the tightening nexus
between concentrated wealth and political power, and how that power further
enhances great wealth.
Philanthropy
is noble. But when it’s mostly in the hands of a few super-rich and giant
corporations, and is the only game available, it can easily be abused.
Our
democracy is directly threatened when the rich buy off politicians.
But
no less dangerous is the quieter and more insidious buy-off of institutions
democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action
against what is occurring.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.
Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of
the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best
sellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest,
"Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding
editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new
film, "Inequality for All," is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD,
and On Demand.
