alternet | Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic
policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the market of
country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate
philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all
time.
Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade, and channel
their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard through a system
of elite clubs and think tanks, whose members overlap and move in and
out through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy
theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is
nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is
not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and
offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the
currency is power, not money.
The transnational equivalent of the
CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller,
the former US national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski
(founder-member of the Afghan mujahidin, forefathers of the Taliban),
the Chase Manhattan Bank, and some other private eminences. Its purpose
was to create an enduring bond of friendship and cooperation between the
elites of North America, Europe, and Japan. It has now become a
pentalateral commission, because it includes members from China and
India (Tarun Das of the CII; N. R. Narayana Murthy, ex-CEO of Infosys;
Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director of Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani,
director of Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO of Avantha Group).
The
Aspen Institute is an international club of local elites, businessmen,
bureaucrats, and politicians, with franchises in several countries.
Tarun Das is the president of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar
is chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey Global Institute
(proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are members of the
CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and the Aspen Institute.
The Ford
Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller
Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936.
Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear,
well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US State
Department. Its project of deepening democracy and “good governance” is
very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardizing business
practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second
World War, when communists replaced fascists as the US Government’s
Enemy Number One, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the
Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a
military think tank that began with weapons research for the US defense
services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to
penetrate and disrupt free nations,” it established the Fund for the
Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, whose brief was to wage the Cold War intelligently,
without McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to
view the work that the Ford Foundation is doing with the millions of
dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers, and
activists, its generous endowment of university courses and
scholarships.
The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future
of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements
locally and internationally. In the United States it provided millions
in grants and loans to support the credit union movement that was
pioneered by the department store owner Edward Filene in 1919. Filene
believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by
giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time.
Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what
Filene believed in was a more equitable distribution of national income.
Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion and, by
disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working
people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in
debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.
Many years later,
this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of
Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit
to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. The poor of the
subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the
local village usurer—the Baniya. But microfinance has corporatized that
too. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of
suicides—two hundred people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national
daily recently published a suicide note by an eighteen-year-old girl who
was forced to hand over her last 150 rupees, her school fees, to
bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note read, “Work
hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”
There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
