NGOs as the opium of the Left. 

A visit to the developing world, be it Palestine or Pakistan , shows a
disturbing trend. Increasingly, NGOs are luring away middle class youth
away from political participation and membership of political parties,
to what Tariq Ali refers to as "virtual politics," where good money can
be made while satisfying the youth's guilty conscience as well--the NGO.

Questioned about the role of NGOs at the recent World Social Forum in
Karachi , Tariq Ali said, "We can't generalize, but by and large, NGOs
have taken people away from politics. It's a misnomer, and I like to
think of them as WGOs - Western Governmental Organizations. This is not
just peculiar to Pakistan but all over the globe. Nevertheless this is
not a substitute for political process. It's not real politics; it's
virtual politics." 

Some estimates say there are today over 5,000 NGOs, just in occupied
Palestine, sucking up the best and brightest from political
participation and leaving the field open to religious organisations and
their militias. 

Where in the 60s someone would have joined the PFLP, today they set up
an NGO and get funding from European or North American foundations or
universities to "build civil society". 

From Hanan Ashrawi to Mustafa Barghouti, it is said they all run their
own NGOs. In Pakistan , one party of the Left operates its own parallel
NGO! 

Locally in Canada , many who would otherwise have been active in the
political process, are today employed by such NGOs. Conveniently
labelled as the harmless "non-profit sector," they are funded by the
very governments these activist purport to oppose. Being smart,
articulate and suave, these activists, who shy away from political
parties, should not be expected to cut the hand that feeds them! 

I see NGOs and the so called "Non-Profit Sector" as the opium of the
Left. Here is a well researched article on the phenomena of NGOs and who
is behind them. 

Read and reflect. 

Tariq 

------------ ----- 

http://www.counterp unch.org/ roelofs05132006. html 

The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy 

Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too 

By JOAN ROELOFS 

In recent years, nations have challenged the activities and very
existence of non-governmental organizations. Russia , Zimbabwe , and
Eritrea have enacted new measures requiring registration; "Open Society
Institute" affiliates have been shut down in Eastern Europe; and
Venezuela has charged the Súmate NGO leaders with treason. In Iraq and
Afghanistan , staff of Western charitable NGOs (CARE and Doctors Without
Borders) have been assassinated. 

What are these organizations, and who or what is behind them? 

They are heirs of the missionaries, who did many good deeds, bringing
sewing machines to Bulgaria , ideas of women's liberation to Chinese
footbinders, and life-saving medicines to the less industrialized world.
Yet the missionaries also served as scouts for corporations and
colonizers, tying knots with the most ambitious local people, especially
those adept at bilingualism. 

Missionaries are still operating today, but the field has become more
intensely populated and diverse. Today's NGOs are elephantine,
serpentine, and Byzantine. They may be international organizations,
their local affiliates, or seemingly spontaneous grassroots groups. 

Most funding and direction come from the wealthy nations. Often the
donors form a conglomerate creating mutual responsibility and
considerable ambiguity. CIVICUS, a partnership to promote "civil
society" worldwide, is funded by, among others, American Express
Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Carnegie Corporation,
Canadian International Development Agency, Ford Foundation, Harvard
University, Oxfam, and United Nations Development Programme. 

If the source is confusing, the message is usually clear:
"democratization" strives for civil rights and elections, but it also
must include an open door to foreign capital, labor contracts, resource
extraction, and military training. These networks also define "civil
society" to include rock concerts and street mobs, but not
government-provided maternal health clinics, child care, or senior
services. 

Affluent nations' government agencies are important NGO funders. The
most notorious is the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED;
ostensibly a non­governmental foundation), created by Congress in 1983
to do openly what had been CIA cold war covert activities. When these
operations were revealed in 1967, there was shock, not so much because
the US was covertly funding foreign political and labor groups, but
because organizations such as the National Education Association,
American Newspaper Guild, American Federation of State, County, and
Municipal Employees, and the National Student Association were secretly
used as pass-throughs, and all but the top officers were unwitting.
Actual and phony foundations also distributed CIA funds. 

NED changed this-but not very much. It distributes grants both directly
and through other organizations, now overtly. Its "core grantees" are
the Center for International Private Enterprise (of the US Chamber of
Commerce), the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (of
the AFL-CIO), and, affiliated with the parties, the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican
Institute. Some private foundations chip in, for example, Smith
Richardson and Mellon-Scaife. The Mott Foundation gave the NDI $150,000
in 1998 "to increase public confidence in democratization and the
transition to a market economy in Ukraine ." Foundations also directly
co-fund NED's ultimate grantees. Thus, the Lilly Endowment supports the
Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru , headed by Hernando de Soto
, which offers free-market remedies for poverty. 

Other capitalist democracies now have government foundations similar to
NED, and they work collaboratively, e.g., the Canadian Rights and
Democracy and the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
Additional US agencies have joined NED and the CIA in this work,
notably, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and United
States Information Agency (USIA), which support and create foreign NGOs
and media. 

Germany, France , the Netherlands , Greece , Italy , and Sweden fund
their political parties' foundations. The European members of the
Socialist International' s fund, the European Forum for Democracy and
Solidarity, distributes "democratization" aid. 

The European Union has worldwide grant programs for sustainable
development and democratization. NATO grant programs support
environmental organizations, among others. United Nations agencies such
as UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNDP, and FAO have long operated this way, and
the World Bank funds, sponsors, guides, and coordinates grassroots poor
people's organizations. 

NGOs in prosperous nations have extensive grant programs overseas. These
include not only the obviously international ones, e.g., Rotary,
American Friends Service Committee, and Oxfam; but also labor
organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers Educational
Foundation. Corporate foundations are active throughout the world, and
sometimes have separate funds directed by employees, for example, the
Boeing Employees Fund, which supports charities in Japan and England . 

Why would these philanthropic efforts offend anyone? Why do they hate
our kind hearts? 

In the first place, these public-private philanthropies have worked
together to fund and direct overthrow movements. We had a "Subversive
Activities Control Board" here, but export was encouraged. The grantees'
activities included destabilization, the creation of mobs preventing
elected governments from ruling, chaos, and violence. Among those funded
were the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia , Solidarity in Poland , Union of
Democratic Forces in Bulgaria , Otpor in Serbia , and, more recently,
similar groups in the succession states of the USSR . Sometimes mobs
(especially of young people) have been moved around from one country to
another to give the impression of vast popular opposition. The NED,
Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Soros philanthropies have been
particularly active in these operations. Human Rights Watch (formerly
Helsinki Watch) has nurtured opposition groups. Reformers seeking social
democracy or democratic socialism were excluded; such systems might
oppress the "vulture capitalists. " 

It is hard to know how much native support existed for the
Western-funded revolutions, as media and information (especially if we
can't read Mongolian, Bulgarian, or Uzbeki) are produced by the same
conglomerates. Of course, all revolutions are made by minorities, often
with assistance of foreign allies. However, by today's standards as
embodied in the UN Charter, subverting with the intention of
overthrowing foreign governments is a grave violation of international
law. Many were shocked by the NED activities complementing other
instruments of intervention that helped to destroy the Sandinista
revolution in Nicaragua . Yet the 1990 election was judged by the NGO
observers to be a free one; neither threats of physical annihilation nor
millions of foreign dollars violated the purity of that process.
"Cold-war liberal" policymakers have advocated covert actions as a
peaceful alternative to invasion, but it isn't as if military action has
faded away; they work together. 

Such attempts are ongoing. The Venezuelan indictment is just one
indication of a larger NED-NGO operation. Plans for annihilating the
Cuban revolution, via "independent libraries," "Red Feminista Cubana,"
and other created organizations, are clearly spelled out on the NED web
site(http://www.ned.org/). 

NGOs are also used to disrupt revolutionary or even reformist movements
that might interfere with neo-liberal goals, hampering the ability of
corporations to go anywhere and do anything. Thus, as James
Petras(http://www.monthlyreview.org/1297petr.htm) has reported, radical
social groups and their leaders are co-opted into NGOs dedicated to
worthy, ameliorative projects that are no threat to Western interests.
Instead of broad movements challenging systemic causes of oppression,
activists are recruited into discrete, well-funded "identity" politics
and single-issue organizations, and poverty is just another minority
status. 

In India and South Africa, the very poor have been organized into Slum
Dwellers and Shack Dwellers Associations, which meet with the World Bank
people to discuss what is to be done. Protesters against the Free Trade
Area of the Americas (FTAA) were channeled into groups that were invited
and funded to attend the meetings preparing this treaty. Those concerned
with the devastation of oil, lumber, and mineral extraction throughout
the world can utilize the "participatory mechanisms" of the Earth
Council, one of whose board members is Klaus Schwab, director of the
World Economic Forum. Conferences for the protesters "parallel" to the
globalization elite's are supported by that same elite. These do create
fruitful interaction among dissidents; yet they may also function as a
diversionary tactic. We won't know unless these possibilities are
investigated. 

Amelioration is important to keep those societies newly "marketized" on
a steady course despite crushing poverty. In Mongolia (as elsewhere),
"shock therapy," decimating both employment and social services, has
resulted in street children, child prostitution, and increasing maternal
mortality, none of which occurred in its "undeveloped" or communist
phases. However, the rock concerts and street mobs have attained
freedom. Enter PACT (originally, Private Agencies Collaborating
Together; funders now include the Ford Foundation, US AID, Mercy Corps
International, the Nature Conservancy, the World Bank, Citigroup,
Chevron, Levi Strauss, and Microsoft), which provides some substitutes
for the former socialist institutions, while desperation drives
Mongolia's leaders to welcome foreign garment industries and copper and
gold extraction. 

For many nations far from the North Atlantic , NATO seems to promise
economic security. This inclination has been abetted by the creation,
through NATO's grant programs, of NGOs to foster the NATO spirit, and in
Bulgaria , a charitable NGO to provide employment for their former
military officers, who wouldn't fit in. NATO also supplies research
funds for universities in Eastern Europe, which now have little
government funding, and is attempting to expand its charities throughout
North Africa and the Middle East . 

Prominent insiders, who sit high in the democracy-promotion turrets of
the foundation-NGO international world, have problems with the system,
although they may ignore or applaud the overthrow operations. What
concerns them is the feudal relationship existing between the wealthy
Western institutional patrons and the clients in poorer lands, and the
NGOs lack of a genuine local constituency. Thomas Carothers, of the
Carnegie Endowment, has written: "Transnational civil society is . . .
very much part of the same projection of Western political and economic
power that civil society activists decry in other venues." 

Others are concerned about the "brain drain" drawing the scarce educated
people away from government service or authentic grassroots
organizations, neither of which can offer comparable pay or perks. They
protest the imposition of a foreign culture that denigrates indigenous
knowledge, and paradoxically, programs such as microcredit in South Asia
that reinforce the more oppressive patriarchical aspects of traditional
cultures. 

NGO staff members have been accused of being spies. Whether or not this
is the case, the system allows access to remote native cultures, where
the lay of the land and sociograms of local influentials can be charted
for any purpose. This type of missionary penetration, attained through
Bible translation in the Amazon River basin , has been recounted in Thy
Will Be Done, by Colby and Dennett. 

NGOs are now extensively occupied in the relief of disasters, whether
natural or man-made, and the US military (with its "coalition") is
deeply involved in both the comforting and the afflicting. To receive US
funds, humanitarian organizations must support US foreign policy.
Consequently, some, such as Oxfam UK , have withdrawn their workers from
Iraq . Those remaining are often regarded as collaborators, which is not
surprising, as many international NGOs have been handmaids to
subversion, overthrow, and occupation. Some have even supported
"humanitarian" bombing, especially in the case of Yugoslavia . 

It is hard to assess accurately NGOs' complicity because there are few
incentives for critical studies by journalists or academics, and
anti-capitalist activists are often knotted up in some way. Information
about NGOs mostly comes from the same funding sources, such as
"Transitions on Line" of the Soros enterprises, or OneWorld.net,
sponsored by the Ford Foundation and others. A networking resource,
Ngo.net, is administered by Freedom House and funded by the USAID. 

The peak of international NGOs, the World Social Forum, meets at the
same time as the World Economic Forum, only far away. The WSF's general
funding is rarely scrutinized by the participants, whose travel expenses
come from similar sources. An exception is a report by the Research Unit
on Political Economy-India, which explains why foundation funding was
refused for the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, and discusses critically the
activities of the Ford Foundation in India . 

It is news when any NGO nibbles at the hand that feeds it, as did a
Pakistani theater group last November. Invited to a women's theater
festival in India , they were sent home because the organizers deemed
their contribution too anti-US for a Ford Foundation-sponsore d event. 

As all generalizations have exceptions, let it be noted that some NGOs
are impeccable, and even peccable ones often have humanitarian staff and
directors. A recent attempt by dissidents seeking international donors
to "democracy promotion" in the US , the International Endowment for
Democracy, could give an effective jolt. Yet it may be that democracy,
justice, or equality are not readily attainable by such means. For
several centuries NGOs have been providing "disaster aid" for societies
being "marketized. " What can we learn from this history?