WINGSForum 2006: The Role Philanthropy Can Play in Progressive Policy Making

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute

Spanish version - PDF (provided by Daniel Maidana of Fundación SES, Argentina and with the author's permission)

Introduction

It is an honor to be here. I take hope from so many people in one room who are committed to using their resources to make this world a better place for all. I have enjoyed being here, hearing about your work and the vision that you represent from so many corners of the world.

I am with the Oakland Institute, a progressive policy think tank based in Oakland, California. Our mission is to increase public participation and promote fair debate on critical social, economic, and environmental issues. My comments today explore the role philanthropy can play in progressive policy making. Given the influence the United States yields in the world and its social-economic policies have worldwide implications, I will start off by focusing on the U.S.

Assessing the Republican losses in the recent mid-term elections in the U.S., liberals were quick to pronounce the end of the 40-year rise of the conservative movement. However, the morning after the elections, at the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform, Ken Mehlamn, chairman of the Republican party told the crowd, that the election was not a repudiation of conservative values…. Democratic opponents, he said, have staked out moderate to conservative stands on what had been the movement’ most potent issues – abortion, gun rights, religious expression, income tax and the federal deficit. Progressive forces in the U.S. have allowed conservative policy think tanks to seize the initiative in the domestic and international social and economic policy arenas, with disastrous results measurable in growing hunger and poverty and income inequalities in the U.S. and abroad.

So How Did This Happen?

This evolution began with Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who, in 1964, outlined a bold conservative vision rooted in reactionary values. The idea of conservatives creating institutions that could stand the test of time received boost from Lewis F. Powell, who would be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon. In a 1971 memorandum, Powell warned that the economic system was under a broad attack by “new leftists, and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic.” Powell recommended that the business community aggressively “confront” this by building organizations that would use “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

In 1975, the Trilateral Commission, an organization bringing together the chieftains of multinational capital and a host of the leading “centrist” political figures from Western Europe, Japan and the United States, put out a report, The Crisis of Democracy. The Trilaterists declared that the United States and the world was facing a crisis stemming from an excess of democracy and that the threat was coming from below, that is, from minorities, public-interest and women’s rights groups, and labor unions. The report called for their regulation – and this was just the leading edge of the “revolution from above.”

In 1978, William Simon, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford called for a radical rethinking of conservative principles and urged the Right to rise and create a new set of institutions capable of leading the United States and the world into a new age. Soon, with their resources and a strong political vision, conservative foundations and their groups started playing a major role in shaping public policy priorities and squeezing the people out of the debate on issues affecting public health, the environment, and employment. These conservative efforts eventually gave rise to the election of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1980.

Given the Constraint of time, I will fast forward to today.

George W. Bush is in the White House. After recent elections, Democrats do have a majority in the Senate and the Congress and yes, some Democrats did campaign for increasing the minimum wage, preserving the estate tax or prompt withdrawl from Iraq, but the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views and largely dropped their calls for major defense spending cuts, or talk of a national health insurance. The political Right has out-organized, out-fought and out-thought liberal America as a unified force. And its impact is being felt internationally. From welfare reform in the United States to mean spirited foreign policies, the intellectual force has come from the Right while the liberals and progressives have relegated themselves to fighting a rear-guard battle. Stated bluntly, we have been subjected to what can only be described as “class war from above”.

The rise of the Right is due in large part to its consistent investment – over the past four decades in the development of ideas, organizations and intellectuals, capable of articulating and defending their ideas.

What Will Happen if the Progressives Don’t Mount a Real Resistance?

We are already confronted with contradiction at every turn: global integration amidst ethnic division; a paradox of plenty amongst increasing hunger and poverty; a knowledge-based economy with failing public schools. This contradiction is clearly evident in the United States. No sensible democracy would opt for an economic system in which the wealthiest 1% of all households control approximately 38% of the nation’s wealth; where 39 million people live in food insecure households; where 46.6 million Americans, nearly 1 in 6 Americans, have no health insurance according to the latest surveys. Implications of this “Washington Consensus” are huge for the rest of the world I am talking about the supply-side economics, trade agreements such as NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, other regional and bilateral trade agreements, structural adjustment policies, racist immigration laws, war and conflict. Impact yes, but of the wrong kind. Let me share details of some:

Trade Agreements: Mexico has been growing corn for 10,000 years. But under NAFTA, which was supposed to level the playing field, Mexico opened its markets to imports from the United States, including corn. Mexican farmers, mostly operating small-scale family farms, were unable to compete against giant U.S. corn producers, the largest single recipient of U.S. government subsidies--$10.1 billion, or some 10 times the total Mexican agricultural budget in 2000.

NAFTA has been a death warrant for small farmers. Declining prices for the 15 million Mexican farmers who depended on the crop have meant declining household incomes, followed by forced migration from their land. In 1997, 47 percent of the Mexican population was engaged in agriculture, according to Food and Agriculture Organization figures. By 2010, that number will have dropped to 18 percent, the organization estimates.

Since the passage of NAFTA, an estimated two million Mexican family farmers have been displaced from land while corn-based tortilla prices have increased by nearly 50 percent. Millions of people gave been forced to migrate, desperate to escape poverty, many of them crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to feed their families. Rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have fallen. NAFTA has benefited a few sectors of the economy: the sweatshops known as maquiladoras , as well as the very wealthy. For the rest of Mexicans, including the vast majority of workers, it has increased inequality and reduced incomes and job quality.

In Korea, the farmers movement is challenging trade agreements that are destroying their livelihoods. In Cancun, Lee Kyung Hae, President of the KPL, wearing a sandwich board that said, “WTO Kills Farmers” took his own life with a knife to his heart. Hundreds of thousands have now mobilized against the U.S.-Korea FTA. The last talks in South Korea had to be discontinued with thousands marching in the streets. The Oakland Institute was honored to host some 150 representatives from the Korean peasant and labor movement in June 2005. We organized a Congressional press briefing where they testified alongside workers and farmers from the U.S. on the disastrous impact of the free trade agreement and its egregious impact on the South Korean democracy.

Foreign Aid: 854 million people are classified by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as being chronically undernourished. 206 million are in Sub Saharan Africa. 300,000 children in Sahel alone are estimated to die of hunger related causes. Food aid is the much publicized solution to end hunger. However U.S. insistence of sending in kind food aid makes it both late and expensive. The Institute’s work along with the others resulted in a bill in the Congress- to buy aid in Africa to feed the Africans. However it has been rejected by the Congress and the Senate.

In kind food aid does little to strengthen national economies while destroying markets and livelihoods of small farmers in recipient countries. When support needs to go to small farmers in developing countries so they can provide for their own populations. Subsistence farmers -- who make up 75 percent of the world's poor -- should be at the center of development policies. These policies should promote consumption and production of local crops raised by small, sustainable farms rather than encouraging poor nations to specialize in cash crops for Western markets. Of all the countries that report child malnutrition, 78 percent of them are food-exporting nations.

Foreign aid to Africa fell by 40 per cent during the 1990s and now stands at approximately $12 billion per annum. There is an urgent need for unconditional and non- paternalistic “Marshall Plan for Africa,” which would include 100 percent debt relief and a boost in Western assistance to Africa. Niger: 320 million versus over 380 billion in Iraq- a drop in the bucket.

Another panacea put forward to tackle hunger and poverty is technology. U.S. India Knowledge Initiative launched with ADM, Monsanto and Walmart on its board, basically opens up India’s genetic resources to corporations. The recent teaming up of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the Rockefeller Foundation to invest $150 million in a new development initiative that would bring a “new” Green Revolution to Africa, ignores the causes of hunger and poverty in Africa, as well as the failure of the first Green Revolution. The likely results of this $150 million altruistic offensive to promote technology packages that use irrigation, fertilizer and, genetically engineered seeds, will be higher profits for the seed and fertilizer industries, negligible impacts on total food production, and worsening exclusion and marginalization in the countryside. And it ignores the failure of GM cassava in Africa, failure of BT cotton in China, where farmers were the first to adopt the technology, and the farmer suicides that have shaken the very foundation of my country, India. The Indian government estimates that nearly 100,000 farmers have taken their lives between 1993-2003, the worst numbers being in the cotton belt in the last three to four years.

Partnership with the Grantmakers, Community Foundations, Philanthropic Sector

If progressives leave the policy arena to the conservatives, the safety net for the poor will be further weakened or be abolished outright as homelessness and hunger continue to increase. The prison industry will grow, constituting the only form of public service that is fully and willingly funded. The gap between the rich and poor both within and among nations will widen. We will see more xenophobic immigration laws. Unregulated industries will require employees to work in increasingly unsafe work place at lower wages, pollute the water and air, and set aside less and less money for worker’s health benefits and retirement. Nations will retain and build large military establishments even in peacetime. What can we do to stop this juggernaut?

Conservative foundations have played a major role in shaping public policy priorities and have had unmatched success in advocating for their right-wing political agenda. For instance, majority of their funding goes to organizations and programs pursuing policy agendas based on the privatization of government services, deep reductions in federal anti-poverty spending, industrial deregulation, and the transfer of responsibility for social welfare to the charitable sector.

Also, the Conservative “war of ideas” has been waged through the “conservative labyrinth,” an interconnected institutional apparatus , which has been developed and supported by the conservative foundations. At the Philanthropy Roundtable's 1995 annual conference, Richard Fink, president of the conservative Charles G. Koch and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundations, made use of economist Friedreich Hayek's model of the production process to advocate for social change grant-making. Fink argued that the “translation of ideas into action requires the development of intellectual raw materials, their conversion into specific policy products, and the marketing and distribution of these products to citizen-consumers.” Fink argued the need for grant-makers to invest in change along the entire production continuum, funding scholars and university programs where the intellectual framework for social transformation is developed, think tanks where scholarly ideas get translated into specific policy proposals, and implementation groups to bring these proposals into the political marketplace and eventually to consumers.

Basically Conservative funders pay meticulous attention to the entire production’ process, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a targeted, multi-dimensional and strategic manner. They think of it in terms of ‘a conveyor belt’ that stretches from policy think tanks, to single issue advocates, to service providers to grassroots activists. In comparison, most mainstream foundations prefer to make modest, on-the-ground improvements in specific neighborhoods. As a result, the policy implications and consequences of conservative foundation funding are profound. They help create policy ideas backed by enough money to dictate the political agenda – regardless of citizen viewpoint.

Reclaiming the high ground in the battle of ideas will require more than simply replacing the false promises of the Right. The challenge is to forge a new political vision that reflects shared values in the context of a New World Order. Effectively addressing socio-economic issues requires at least five elements. These are 1) moving the overall political environment, 2) specific issue-based advocacy and lobbying, 3) organizing and empowerment, 4) community development and 5) direct service delivery. In the absence of changing the overall political environment, placing most of our effort on direct service delivery is a recipe for sliding backwards. Each time a step is taken forward at the local level, the negative political environment usually drags us at least two steps back, erasing the gains.

I can offer some illustrative examples. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Mexico, working with small farmers to develop sustainable agriculture practices, have seen modest yield increases wiped out by what I mentioned earlier-- post-NAFTA trade policies. Lobbying for price supports has gained minimal relief, but lack of attention to the larger pro-trade political environment has proved fatal in this case as well.

Mohammed Yunus, came up with a winning idea that has transformed the lives of many millions of poor women, and perhaps for that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. Microcredit is now presented as a relatively painless approach to development. Microcredit has indeed allowed many poor women to roll back pervasive poverty. However, it is mainly the moderately poor rather than the very poor who benefit, and not very many can claim they have permanently left the instability of poverty. After 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren't able to meet their basic nutritional needs--so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business. In other words, microcredit is a great tool as a survival strategy, but it is not the key to development, which will require not only massive capital-intensive, state-regulated investments to build industries but also dismantlement of structures of inequality such as concentrated land ownership that deprive the poor of resources to escape poverty. Microcredit schemes end up coexisting with these entrenched structures, serving as a safety net for people excluded and marginalized by them, but not transforming them.

We must heed the example of conservative think tanks and foundations—focusing efforts at shifting the overall political environment—but go one better. They were far-sighted in seeing that the medium term payoff from focusing on the larger environment would be greater than from a merely local or single-issue focus. The work of their policy think tanks opened space for conservative grassroots movements like the Christian Right to operate and grow. We must learn that lesson and redouble our efforts to shift the political center on the issues that concern us. As progressives, our great advantage is our natural coalition that can be built among organizations focusing on each of levels 1 through 5, both in the U.S. and internationally, because we are all seeing the negative effects of having ceded the agenda setting to the Right.

This offers valuable lessons for a renewed partnership between the civil society and the grantmakers seeking to influence policy trends. Grantmakers will need to:

• Understand the importance of ideology and overarching objectives
• Help to build strong institutions by providing ample general operating support
• Maintain a national policy focus
• Recognize the importance of media, marketing and persuasive communications
• Create and cultivatepublic intellectuals and policy leaders
• Support multiple social change strategies including advocacy and constituency mobilization
• Take a long haul approach

A better world is possible. And we do know a few things about it:

• It is not an idealistic fantasy. It is grounded in international treaties and agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• It is about reclaiming our commons: seeds, water, and land. Our culture, traditions, stories and all that is sacred to us.
• It is about self-determination, sovereignty, and democracy. A challenge to the few who think they know more than the many for their own good. Rules, order, process. But whose rules? Whose order? What process? For whom?

We face some simple questions: Do we want democracy and self-determination or do we want oligarchic oppressive institutions? Do we want another world than the one envisioned by the International Financial Institutions, Wal Mart, Disney or Monsanto or do we want strong native cultures proud of their heritage.

The challenges that lie ahead are both awesome and formidable. We need legs of a marathon runner to lay a foundation for true democracy. But hey, what else have we got to do.

Sufi poet Hafiz wrote, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. My dear you deserve better living conditions.” So please accept my greetings and gratitude for having me here. Yes we all deserve better living conditions!