The US economic elite is buying not only politicians, but also nonprofits

[lpetrich]

Robert Reich: Colleges, churches and non-profits are doing the wealthy’s dirty work

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.

Seems like the US is in Gilded Age II, complete with this latter-day feudalism.

Among the several examples that Robert Reich cites is

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.”

 

[barbos]

Yes, it's expensive to be wealthy, you have to pay politicians, lawyers, journalists and universities, but especially politicians.

 

[tupac chopra]

Yes, it's expensive to be wealthy, you have to pay politicians, lawyers, journalists and universities, but especially politicians.

But the dividends on your investment make it all worthwhile

 

[untermensche]

Yes. It isn't collected wealth in itself that is the problem.

The problem is that money equals power. And some use that power merely to get more money at the expense of many, at the expense of the whole planet and this fragile experiment called humanity.

A man with sufficient money to simply live their days without worry who instead lives only to gain more money is insane.

 

[barbos]

The problem also is that power equals money.
It's not easy to separate corruption from extortion.
It may seem like business is buying politician through donation or something but in reality it could be politician running for office extorting money from business.

 

[untermensche]

The problem also is that power equals money.
It's not easy to separate corruption from extortion.
It may seem like business is buying politician through donation or something but in reality it could be politician running for office extorting money from business.

Power doesn't have to equal money.

But when elections do little but test fund raising skills you end up with the government you deserve.