White Courtesy Telephone

Hey, President Obama: Lose the Strut!

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From the Philadelphia Daily News via The Field Negro:

IT WAS BASEBALL pioneer Satchel Paige who warned: “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.”

In the wake of the midterm elections, that’s one bit of advice that President Obama would do well to follow. If his presidency is to survive, he must look forward and must begin to make changes now.

But exactly what should Obama do, and how and why? ...

Lose the strut …. The president has a way of pushing himself up on the balls of his feet as he walks. I call it “the strut,” and I suspect I’m not alone in finding it off-putting.

Hear that, you Democratic handlers? Better get busy!  If you want my man to be re-elected in 2012, you had better start polishing up that Brand Obama now.  First thing you want to do is help him lose that uppity strut, that confident “I’m the President of the United States” walk that seems to be annoying so many people.  Maybe try dressing him in camo and getting him a guest appearance on that eight-part mini-series TLC is donating to the Palin for President campaign.  Have him shoot a large Alaskan mammal—and be sure to script him, nothing over two syllables: something like, “Gummint will never take away my right to kill me this big-ass moose.”  Whatever you do, don’t let him be photographed stooping over some rabbit turd of a tarball in Prince William Sound!  You dig?

All right.  Re-electalicious!

Why I Return to New Orleans

This guest post was originally delivered as a sermon on November 14, 2010, by the  Reverend Dennis McCarty at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus, Indiana.  We publish it here with his permission.  The reading for the sermon is from an Associated Press article published on March 3, 2010, by Remy de la Mauviniere and Elaine Ganley.

To anyone who doesn’t actually live there, I suppose it does look like a recipe for disaster, to live in a city that’s below sea level. But it’s not that simple. For one thing—below sea level or not—this city is a major seaport. It has a population of a half-million people. Because it sits just a few miles upstream from the mouth of the largest river on the continent, it guards a very important waterway.

Even long ago, when people first began to live here, the land was barely above sea level. Centuries of human habitation, land development, and land reclamation have caused it to settle even more. Now, the lowest points of this city are twenty feet or more below sea level. In the past, storms blowing in off the sea, have caused major damage and loss of life. If the sea walls, water gates, and levees were to fail again, the death toll could be enormous. For that reason, I suppose it is natural that someone from an inland state would suggest that the citizens just leave this place to the elements and build somewhere else, on higher ground.

But again, it’s not all that simple. For one thing, there is no ground that’s much higher, not till you get many miles away. For another, more than a million people earn their livelihoods from the commerce, tourism, and manufacturing located in and around the city right where it is. And that’s not even counting the music, museums, educational centers, and festivals. So the people stay. They do the best they can. Oddly enough, they don’t seem worried by a situation we inlanders might see as nerve-wracking.

I’m not talking about New Orleans, though. Welcome to the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which for centuries has been the busiest, most successful seaport in the world. Nor is Rotterdam the only city besides New Orleans that lies below sea level. Twenty percent of the whole Netherlands—and twenty-one percent of the country’s population—live below sea level. Another thirty percent lie three feet or less above sea level. Any mildly healthy North Sea wave, looks down on more than half the country.

What is Social Justice Philanthropy?

Editors’ note: This article will appear in the December issue of Alliance Magazine, a respected international journal on philanthropy and social investment.  Why a respectable journal  would invite WCT blogger Albert Ruesga to submit his usual screed is anybody’s guess.  The article will appear as part of a special feature on social justice philanthropy.  To find out more, visit the Alliance Magazine website.  Subscription information is available here.  We kept the British spelling and orthography because we thought it looked classy ...

Pick a hundred foundations at random and examine their grantmaking guidelines, and you’ll be struck by how many of them are committed to helping low-income and otherwise marginalized communities. Programmes to alleviate hunger and eliminate homelessness; initiatives to increase access to quality healthcare and education; efforts to help immigrants integrate into their adopted countries – all these are common. Talk with those who work in the philanthropic sector and you’ll find many who’ve dedicated their careers to helping the poor. Given this significant investment of philanthropic money and effort in addressing the needs of the indigent, one might wonder why there’s a felt need for a special kind of philanthropy, a ‘social justice philanthropy’, which purportedly aims to do more for marginalized communities than typical, run-of-the-mill grantmaking.

Is it a conceptual error to append the words ‘social justice’ to the word ‘philanthropy’? Is it a redundancy, perhaps, or some kind of provocation?

If you interview those who self-identify as ‘social justice grantmakers’, you’ll notice a significant degree of dissatisfaction with philanthropy as it’s usually practised. A programme designed to assist the poor, for example, might help a few lucky families lift themselves out of poverty, but it will not generally address the factors that drive families into poverty in the first place and then keep them there. These factors include, among others, structural racism, unfair laws and just plain bigotry. Social justice grantmakers aim to go one step beyond teaching a man to fish, to borrow an old saying. They ask why so few people in this man’s community can afford to own a fishing pole; why the county incinerator is being sited in his neighbourhood, befouling his pond rather than that of his wealthier townsmen; and why he’s being taught to fish when he’s more likely to earn a living wage as an accountant or engineer.

Beyond these critiques of philanthropy-as-usual, social justice philanthropists embrace ends, practices and values that tend to set them apart from other grantmakers. To achieve a world without injustice, they begin their work with an analysis of the forces that contribute to inequities. They attempt to understand the effects of membership in oppressed classes of people, looking at their work through the lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and membership in other social categories that experience unjust treatment. Because the mechanisms of oppression sometimes appear faceless, they analyse the myriad ways in which institutional structures contribute to injustice. These structures include the policies that govern institutions, their practices, their cultures and their relationships with one another and with the communities they’re meant to serve. These grantmakers also try to understand how power in its various forms is acquired, held, and brokered in a given context. Effective social justice grantmakers work in meaningful partnership with the communities they aim to serve. They recognize that they’re ultimately accountable to these communities. In practice, this means that they will learn from them and, whenever possible, take direction from them.

 The difficulties of definition

Despite these lofty aims, and despite the fact that a number of faith traditions embrace ‘social justice’ as a value, social justice philanthropy has not been universally well received. Some see in it a kind of unsavoury radicalism, a throwback to the fist-waving days of the 1960s. Others regard its champions as malcontents in the grip of an ideology. But what is social justice philanthropy really? What are its essential characteristics?

Glenn Beck on George Soros

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The New World Order.  The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.  And now, Glenn Beck’s attack on George Soros as the mastermind who seeks to take over the United States by creating a shadow cabinet, gaining control of the media, destabilizing the government, manufacturing an election crisis, and, finally, encouraging duped citizens to take to the streets. 

It’s not surprising that the the mid-term elections have brought with them new intimations of elite conspiracies to control America’s minds as well as her economy.  At times such as these, Noam Chomsky continues to be one of my touchstones.  His greatest virtue as a social analyst, in my view, is his ability to explain the structure and actions of elite control without appealing to shadowy conspiracies.  In his 1987 book, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures, he sketches a simple framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean:

The first principle is that U.S. foreign policy is designed to create and maintain an international order in which U.S.-based business can prosper, a world of “open societies,” meaning societies that are open to profitable investment, to expansion of export markets and transfer of capital, and to exploitation of material and human resources on the part of U.S. corporations and their local affiliates. …

A second and related principle is that an ideological system must be constructed to ensure that the population remains passive, ignorant and apathetic, and that none of these matters are understood among the educated, articulate and politically active classes in the United States or, indeed, in the world in general.

What’s interesting about this ideological system is that it has no architect, there is no cabal of puppet masters writing its secret constitution and taking a blood oath to uphold it.  The system is “constructed” by human actors—sometimes acting individually, sometimes collectively—who take advantage of their power, wealth, and relationships in predictable ways to maintain their status.  No other motive force is needed.  The ideological system that Chomsky alludes to is simply an emergent property of the complex whole that’s the sum of all these actions.  As it begins to take shape, it’s reinforced by the elites who explicitly or implicitly understand its value in maintaining elite control. 

The ravings of Glenn Beck are unremarkable, coming as they do from the unofficial propagandist news organ of the conservative movement in the United States, owned by a man who has himself been accused of attempting to buy control of the American mind.  While conservatives made gains in the midterm elections, they’re still smarting from the Democratic rout in 2008.  There’s bound to be some plaintive grunting when one set of elites nudges another away from the trough.

We’re in little danger of secret societies overthrowing the United States government.  The far greater danger lies in our failing to understand that left- or right-wing conspiracies are an explanatory extravagance; that the keys to social change are simultaneously simpler and more complex than many of us realize.

The Countess Apraxina on Fundraising

Editor’s note: We occasionally publish letters written to us by the Countess Apraxina.  We’ve asked her to join the White Courtesy Telephone family of bloggers, but she steadfastly refuses, stating firmly that “Apraxina does not blonk.”  Never having learned his name properly, she consistently refers to WCT blogger Albert Ruesga as “Alyosha,” the Russian nickname for Alexei.

My Dearest Alyosha:

Thank you for sending Apraxina pictures of your new home in New Orlinks.  At first, my sweet, I thought you were sending me pictures of place where you keep your livestock, but then I remember you do not own any—not one little piglet!  How silly of me!

I also receive your note and yes, yes, my little zaychik, I am not forget I promise to help inject little glamour into uninspiring life you lead as foundation laborer, and I mean this only in nicest way.   I am ask new assistant, Raul, former Chilean miner, to cutpaste article from San Jose Mercury News.  Is about glorious fundraiser for X PRIZE Foundation:

For starters, there were the unusual auction items:

Zero Gravity Corp. of Ft. Lauderdale contributed “eight minutes of weightlessness” to the top bidder and 31 friends.

Space Adventure of Vienna donated … a private tour for 10 people of the Balkonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson … invited the auction winner and one travel companion to be his guest on his South African game reserve.

These ideas I like very much, Alyosha.  For weightlessness, Uncle Sergei suggest we enclose auction winners in bubble wrap and push them off top of Flatiron building where he has office.  Not eight minutes weightless, he say, but more exciting, and if you survive fall, you get go again.  As for tour in Kazakhstan: Я предпочел бы съесть бутерброд какашка!*  Why not poke auction winners with cattle prods instead?  No, no, my dear! Apraxina will find more suitable alternative, like suggestion of Mr. Richard Branson.  Visit to game reserve is quite good idea since many people enjoy killing things when on holiday.

I am forget mention I saw Mr. Shamrock recently at Tea Party meeting.  I hope you are not jealous.  Such handsome man, and you, Alyosha, always fighting him like Russian bear!  We were discussing welcome back party for Lord Conrad Black when we heard appeals court had upheld his conviction.  Such a shame!  So many good men behind bars—and out of work ever since your Mr. Hopey Changey took office!  But this is good opportunity for your foundation, Alyosha.  I am telling you, you can buy, for—how you say?—bargain basement prices lawyers willing to write briefs supporting state-sponsored torture.  At one conservative think tank I visit recently there is big sale on economists who say tax cuts for rich are essential.  This same think tank is practically giving away scientists who deny climate change!

Anyway, I must go my dear.  Miss you terribly.  Call me on my cell.

— Countess Apraxina

_____

 * Translates roughly as “I would rather eat a turd sandwich.”

 



Twenty-Five Theses ...

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... about foundations, with apologies to Martin Luther: 

1. The foundation world is filled with many people of good will who desire through their work to advance the common good. Many have in fact succeeded. 
2. Taken together, however, the collective actions of foundations have failed to address, in any significant way, some of the most basic injustices in our society. After decades of work, foundations have failed to alter the basic condition of the poor in the United States. The gap between the rich and poor has widened in recent years. Individuals can work hard all their lives, manage their finances prudently, and still fail to have income security in their retirement. Racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry still affect the destinies of whole communities of people. Millions of people lack access to quality health care.  Urban public schools do not provide a world class education to our children.  Because of lax lobbying and campaign finance laws, politicians and elections are routinely bought and sold. Our economic prosperity is still tied to the ongoing degradation of our environment.
3. With few exceptions, if we were to examine the histories of some of the great social advances in our country—the winning of women’s suffrage, the ending of Jim Crow—we’d see that foundations had played a minor role at best. In spite of the resources, independence, and power available to them, the effect of foundations on the common good has been embarrassingly marginal. The claim that organized philanthropy is more effective than simple charity needs to be challenged and may be, as some have claimed, largely a fiction.
4. Some liberal foundations have made strides in asserting and supporting the rights of individuals in marginalized communities, but they have been almost completely silent on the subject of our responsibilities as citizens.  We see this asymmetry in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.”  Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights.  One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.
5. Foundations and their staffs often lack a sense of urgency about the challenges facing marginalized communities.
6. Unlike academic disciplines, foundation work lacks a tradition of vigorous debate and self-criticism. Because of this, our most bone-headed beliefs and practices go unchallenged. This is one of the great failings of our field.
7. Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined profession is not worth pursuing.  But most of us who work at foundations—especially those of us who lead foundations—fail to ask the most fundamental questions about our work: What does human flourishing look like? What is my vision of the Good? What’s our responsibility to one another in a complex, industrial society? How much suffering at "the bottom" should a community tolerate if the overall statistics look pretty good? What is the role of a foundation in society? etc.
8. The positive aspects of foundation culture are significant. These include an immense pool of talent, a commitment to those who are least well off, a respect for the work of nonprofit leaders, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world. There have been and there continue to be many "great souls" in the world of organized philanthropy.
9. The negative aspects of foundation culture are also significant and tend to go largely unaddressed. These negative aspects include the following:

   Foundations are generally averse to collaboration, even though collaboration is essential for making progress on difficult issues such as poverty, universal access to quality health care, etc. There are a number of reasons for this aversion, including the desire to claim bragging rights for this or that piece of work. In the United States, this one failing perhaps above all others has had enormous negative repercussions for people in low-income communities.

   Foundations are notoriously risk averse. The psychology of this phenomenon was brilliantly explored by Joel Orosz in his book Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them.

   Foundations and their staffs are subject to the same forces that beguile us all: consumerism, careerism, a lack of media literacy, etc.

   Foundations frequently fall prey to the Cult of the New.

   Foundations sometimes succumb to the Cult of Personality—a strong leader who makes his or her pet peeves, prejudices, fears, aversions, moods, etc. the measure of all things.

10. Because those of us who work at foundations are largely unaware of the history of our field, we frequently reinvent the wheel. We pay far too little heed to what has already been attempted, and to whether and why it has succeeded or failed. This in spite of the fact that there are resources available to help us overcome our professional amnesia. 
11. There is a clear difference between bad, good, and inspired grantmaking.  The distinction between bad, good, and inspired grantmaking can be taught (but rarely is).
12. Foundations generally do not know how to relate to the people and communities they aim to serve.  This relationship tends to range from command and control to benign neglect.
13. Evaluation is our friend, not our enemy. Unfortunately, it’s often used as a blunt weapon against grantees. Worries about evaluation have become the math anxiety of philanthropy.
14. The language foundations use to describe their work is frequently tortured and moribund. More often than not, foundations fail to communicate effectively the good they’ve able to accomplish.
15. There will typically be more problems (and solutions) around the table, than there are on the table.
16. There can be no significant social change without systemic change.
17. At the same time, we must be careful to avoid the Systems Heresy: the idea that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair outcomes.
18. We must also be careful to avoid the Gadgets Heresy: the idea that new tools—new social media sites, B corporations, more "efficient markets," etc.—will save us from ourselves. Our greatest progress will come not from chasing the latest Shiny New Object, but from attending to the field’s moral and intellectual failings.
19. The social entrepreneurship movement is important and worthy of support. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there is important work a civilized people must do that will forever require subsidy either through public tax dollars or private donations. If it really were possible for a business-minded individual to turn a profit by providing health care to the penniless, it would have happened long ago. The not-for-profit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or will, but rather a sober assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely.
20. We will forever knock our heads against some of our society’s most intractable problems and make little progress addressing them as long as we ignore their social justice dimensions. It’s absurd to believe that we can effectively address the challenges faced by low-income communities, for example, by ignoring the effects of race and class or by side-stepping issues of power and privilege.
21. Teach a man to fish, certainly. But also ask why so few people in this man’s community can afford to own a fishing pole; why the county incinerator is being sited in his neighborhood, befouling his pond rather than that of his wealthier townsmen; and why he’s being taught to fish when he’s more likely to earn a living wage as an accountant or an engineer.
22. Most foundation work is transactional rather than transformational.  To borrow a phase from Nietzsche, its very meanness cries to heaven.
23. Philanthropy is and should be primarily a moral rather than a technocratic tradition. This doesn’t absolve foundation professionals from using all the knowledge and resources available to them to make their grantmaking better along every possible dimension—spiritual, technical, and otherwise.
24. There is currently a great battle on for the soul of philanthropy.  We oppose "technocrats" to "social justice grantmakers," "liberals" to "conservatives."  But these are skirmishes on the edge of a larger battle about the role each of us will play in either contributing to or subtracting from the common good.  What will future generations say about us, about our engagement as citizens, our stewardship of the planet, our ability to defend the common good against the ravages of narrow interests?  I believe my own ears would burn with shame.  We’ve left future generations one hell of a mess.
25. Insert your own 25th thesis here (or in the comments below).

The A-List: New York in This Time of Fireblazing Movements

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As I watch The A-List: New York, a new reality series on the Logo Channel, I think back to a talk I once heard by an activist who spent his life advocating for the poor of Rio’s favelas.  ‘Please don’t fight for the poor,’ he said, ‘because you think you should like them.  Many of the poor I’ve met are not especially pleasant.’  If I extend that lesson to the The A-List I’m forced to conclude that vapid, self-absorbed, fashion-obsessed gay men should have as much a right to make me want to disown my species as anyone else.

And yet I watch.  I watch.

It’s very pre-postmodern of me, but I always look for the moral center in works of art, whether high or low.  In the case of the The A-List, this appears in the form of an avuncular figure, Mike Ruiz, a fashion photographer who wears tight tee shirts emblazoned with words like “Love Muscle.”  Mr. Ruiz is kind enough to give modeling advice to the beautiful young men who seek his help.  After criticizing one model’s portfolio for being “too Miami,” he sets up a photo shoot to give his oeuvre more of a New York edge.  This involves smearing the young man’s face and arms with grease and photographing him while he evinces looks of world-weariness.  I assume from this ritual that no one can make the A-list in New York unless he still manages to look alluring after having been run over by a cab.

Austin Armacost, aged 22, a “model turned fashion connoisseur” whose antics upend the other characters’ attempts to behave like self-contained professionals, reminds us that “We’re in the middle of a very fireblazing human rights movement right now, so it’s time that people see we’re not freaks or molesting young boys—we’re regular people too.”

Art, he suggests, should function as a mirror held up to Nature.  For a man like me, a man not aging especially well, the mirror thing has gotten pretty old.  Each morning as I stand at my bathroom vanity, I inspect myself and see my Human Nature just barely concealed by my age spots and thinning hair.  At least on The A-List, the characters’ Human Natures spend a lot of time in the gym and look rather fetching parading about in yellow Speedos.

And so I watch, I watch, careful not to let this fireblazing human rights movement pass me by, as so many others have: the sagging pants movement, the tiny little backpack movment, the-rising-inflection-at-the-end-of-your-sentence? movement.  I watch as I might watch a train wreck: awestruck, horrified, but still unable—OK, unwilling—to avert my gaze.



Incensed But Not Stupid

Over at Gift Hub, Phil Cubeta, Morals Tutor to America’s Wealthiest Families, is railing about corporatism gone amok.  I would join the chorus of voices protesting these assaults on democracy, but I fear I might miss my chance to win a free iPad.

There are only so many causes I can reasonably support.