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May 24, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
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May
24, 2002
"All politics
is local?"
The Unbearable Lightness of NGOs
by
Gavin Keeney
NGOs KNOW
BEST
NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in one form or another
have been part and parcel of the theory of civil society since
at least the 18th century. Today, the Enlightenment-era philosophy
underwriting such institutions has been hijacked by conservative
ideologues to support the downsizing of everything, including
federal, state, and local government. This is the neo-faith-based
version. Critically, this twisted vision of civil society has
attempted to downsize the rights of individuals and call into
question the rights of dissent and civil disobedience through
perverse, fundamentalist readings of its founding texts. Plugged
into the mantra of "family values" this doctored concept
of civil society reaches back to the Middle Ages when an individual
conscience was a liability and radical statements could land
one in the stocks, or worse. Giordano Bruno died for your pre-modern
sins.
NGOs were originally conceived as agencies to mediate between
government and the individual, but oddly, today, 85% of NGOs
are funded by governments. As such, few any longer represent
possible venues for significant action influencing both government
and citizens. This is the other side of the two-headed coin.
In fact, it may be more accurate to say that most NGOs are set
up to influence citizens versus government. Today these
institutions, once organized from below, are staffed by professionals
who work through mediation, compromise, deal-making and the impressive
sounding amici curiae, or statements on behalf of everyone
else in public hearings and legal proceedings. In the case
of the neo-conservative version of civil society and the NGO,
the favored writ is sure to be the auto-da-fé,
or the virtual death sentence for anyone wandering outside the
prescribed circle of acceptable subjectivity. Despite this vicious
social whipsaw, that the present-day NGO represents, the pure
idea of civil society remains the last, best chance --
in the absence of activist government -- for collective action
in the face of wholesale corruption and influence peddling, or
that which passes for "public policy" in the age of
globalization and corporatization of nearly everything.
Were not the French, American, and Russian revolutions provisional
NGOs?
NGOs WITH
MBAs
Once upon a time, NGOs were primarily philanthropic organizations,
neither fundamentalist rear-guard club nor well-endowed lobby
for special interests, populated by a now nearly extinct class
of beings, amici humani generis (friends of the human
race). Today, however, the majority of NGOs are plush parking
groves for the upwardly mobile, de luxe finishing schools
(places to polish one's social skills), and elite bazaars for
the nouveaux riche, while the new conservative minority lot participate
in the sell-down of individual liberties and public policy. Are
churches and/or madrassahs NGOs? Sic transit secular society.
In the former East Bloc countries of Central and Eastern Europe,
the NGO is still the preferred means of rebuilding the rudiments
of civic culture destroyed by the communists, and for installing
new checks and balances in the high-octane, cowboy- and crony-capitalist
systems that have replaced the crude-diesel, crony-communist
dictatorships of the recent past. The super-rich Soros Foundation
pours millions into these countries every year through its Open
Society Institute, a late-modern philanthropic operation based
on the civil society ideal. OSI-Budapest spent $17,606,000 in
2000 on programs throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including
efforts to help the persecuted Romani (Gypsies) and monitoring
the ups and downs of integrating the economies of the East with
the EU. The ideology of the NGO is in fact pervasive, and both
the World Bank and the United Nations maintain congenial relations
with NGOs throughout "the developing world." In the
case of the U.N., these groups include champions of human rights,
such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International,
but also champions of free trade, such as the International Chamber
of Commerce.
Given this high profile, high flying late-modern version of civil
society, one has to ask if certain international NGOs are not
stalking horses for globalizing the free-market ideology of the
West. Since the ideals of Enlightenment rationality do not automatically
translate into the hegemony of the wealthy and powerful, is it
not possible that the NGO combined with the lofty rhetoric of
neo-civil society is nothing more than an elegant rope trick?
NGOs &
COWBOY CAPITALISM
In the Czech Republic, the principal agent of market reforms,
after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, was Václav Klaus,
a Thatcherite economist (schooled in the hifalutin nonsense of
conservative economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek). Klaus
was finance minister from 1989 to 1992 and served 1.25 terms
as Prime Minister (1992-1997) before resigning. During the Klaus
period, Czech state assets were pillaged by newly-wired consortia
formed by businessmen, financial institutions, and politicians
who legally "tunnelled" (looted) the assets
of state industrial and financial structures and dumped the depleted
carcasses into the bankruptcy courts. Klaus famously believed
that civic culture was the "seasoning of life" and
not much more. The absence of a competent press and an independent
judiciary, for example, plus a dearth of laws to enforce "transparency"
in business transactions, made the scorch-and-burn practices
of Czech neo-capitalists all but inevitable. Civil society --
with or without NGOs -- simply did not exist. Klaus, the die-hard
free-marketeer, apparently believed all too much in the hidden
hand of the market (even if that hand was stealing state property
and buying off politicians). Once a colleague of Vaclav Havel,
in the early days after the Velvet Revolution, Klaus became his
most bitter enemy.
Havel returned the favor in 1997 (the year Klaus fell from grace)
with a speech before the Czech Parliament regarding the post-communist
morass: "Human beings are social animals who feel a need
to form associations and to take part, even if it were only within
their small worlds, in the management of public affairs and in
the pursuit of universal benefit. This, too, was somehow forgotten:
under the motto the citizen and the state, the citizen was thrown
into a hopeless solitude. In order that he would not feel too
lonely, and because it was appropriate, the word family
was added from time to time. Beyond that, nothing but emptiness."
State assets continue to be plundered today in the Czech Republic,
most recently banks and heavy industry, and the highly-respected
journal Respekt is being sued by every single member
of current PM Milos Zeman's cabinet for publishing damning articles
about the machinations of the so-called "elite". The
absence of civil society, and meaningful recourse to law, continues
to haunt the post-communist world. What in the world could NGOs
do in such an environment to make even a pittance of a difference?
Civil society was supposed to engender an elite which would look
after the welfare of the nation -- this in a time when the Nation-State
was in ascendance and when many of the more powerful states were
undergoing imperial expansion. This elite, however, schooled
in the art of deal-making, soon became the Master (re
Nietzsche's Master/Slave dialectic) and the levers of civil society
became a means for enriching oneself. Most NGOs, now and then,
are/were the parlor for learning the games of power politics.
In the Czech Republic, today, as elsewhere, a coalition government
(combining the worst elements of Klaus' ODS (Civic Democratic
Party), pronounced odious, and Milos Zeman's CSSD (Czech
Social Democrats) has effectively meant stalemate for everyone
except those feeding at the trough. The dispossessed have nowhere
to turn. One recent story told concerns an elderly woman who
jumped off an overpass into the onrushing traffic of a busy expressway
in Prague. So many people had jumped from this same bridge in
the '90s that the authorities were forced to erect a fence along
the bridge. Not to be deterred, the poor woman brought along
her own ladder. Some climb the ladder to enrich themselves, others
to end it all.
Civil society in the Czech Republic for the most part remains
the romantic dream of President Václav Havel, see Summer
Meditations (1992), imprisoned in an all but rhetorical presidency.
Havel made the fatal error shortly after 1989 of vesting absolutely
no power in the presidency except that of moral authority, something
that will be hard to replace once Havel has left the stage. Perhaps
he was right, after all? Havel's faith in civil society is nostalgic,
reaching back to the days of the First Republic, the 1920s, before
the Nazis and before the Russians, when Tomas Masaryk crafted
a Czechoslovak state out of the ruins of the Habsburg Empire.
To be fair, however, Havel does not equate the complicity of
the NGO with the autonomy of the individual bad conscience --
the latter is much worse. He does, however, recognize that criminality
runs unchecked -- high, low, and in-between -- without some form
of cultural buffer zone between the elite and the dispossessed.
NGOs TILL
THE COWS COME HOME
Here in New York, New York, the typical NGO spends 50% of its
time fund-raising, 48% navel-gazing, and 2% hell-raising. This
latter percentile is both a result of the exertions required
of the first and a byproduct of the lethargy induced by the second.
Necessarily middle-of-the-road, or neo-liberal, the vast majority
of NGOs are terrified of their own shadow. That shadow is the
shade/ghost of civil society past, or the activist origins of
the NGO prototype -- a radical coalition of citizens. It is a
very long shadow.
Most NGOs in Manhattan (a.k.a. New York, New York, New York)
are plugged straight into the plutocracy and bank on first-class
(upper-class) credentials. The boards are stocked with big fish
and the collective aquarium has tinted glass like the limousines
that deliver the well-heeled philanthropists to catered banquets
that pass as board meetings. Such de luxe NGOs have devolved
into a bathetic version of noblesse oblige making real activism
by the majority of such outfits all but impossible, save in such
glamorous causes as saving Grand Central Terminal from demolition,
and etc. The annual meetings for the privileged NGOs are star-studded
affairs and one has to wonder how much of their budget is blown
on self-congratulatory hype and gala events. Such telling details
are buried in the annual report.
The modern NGO is clearly not a substitute for activist government,
a very unpopular idea, nor should they lull individuals into
thinking that sending $50 a year absolves them of doing anything
else. In fact, the bulk of contemporary NGOs form a layer of
intermediate fog between individuals and government making it
well-nigh impossible to stop the wretched machinery of perpetual
deal-making and self-aggrandizement. Given the source of much
their money, foundations and government, and given the uncomfortably
similar corporate strangle-hold on funding, pimping, and gilding
today's breed of neo-politician (part businessman, part lawyer,
part-time talking head, future consultant, future lobbyist, future
television commentator, and/or prototype for post-human existence),
it is not rocket science to conclude that a landscape of NGOs,
as far as the eye can see, is a very gloomy picture indeed.
OUTTAKES
DYING FOR DOLLARS--The
World Bank--"The World Bank recognizes the important
role that nongovernmental organizations play in meeting the challenges
of development and welcomes the opportunity to work with civil
society. The purpose of this website is to keep civil society
groups informed about increasing opportunity for interaction
with the Bank."
MULTI-NATIONAL NGOs (!QUANGOs!)--United
Nations NGOs Index
LEFT-LEANING EURO-NGOs--Platform
of European Social NGOs--"The Social Platform is
an association of 37 European non-governmental organisations,
federations and networks that work in the social sector and uphold
the interests of a wide spectrum of European civil society. The
Platform includes associations of organisations representing
women, older people, people with disabilities, unemployed people,
migrants, people living in poverty, gays, lesbians, young people,
children and families. The member organisations also include
NGOs working on social issues such as social justice, homelessness,
life-long learning, health and racism."
ORIGINS--Essay
on Civil Society by Adam Ferguson (1766)
DOUBLE-TALK IN DUBLIN--Adam
Seligman (ISTR--Dublin)--"Thus, for right of center
thinkers as well as for libertarian followers of Friedrich Hayek,
the quest for civil society is taken to mean a mandate to deconstruct
many of the powers of the State and replace them with intermediary
institutions based on social voluntarism. For many liberals,
civil society is identified with social movements, also existing
beyond the State. And while many of the former refuse to recognize
that voluntary organizations can be of a particularly nasty nature
and based on primordial or ascriptive principles of membership
and participation that put to shame the very foundations of any
idea of civil society; the latter are blind to the fact that
the achilles heel of any social movement, is its institutionalization
which--one way or the other--must be through the State and its
legal (and coercive) apparatus. In the meantime both communitarians
and liberals continue to assimilate the idea of civil society
to their own terms, invest it with their own meanings and make
of it what they will; identifying with everything from multi-party
systems and the rights of citizenship to individual voluntarism
and the spirit of community."--"Civil society is thus
that arena where--in Hegelian terms--free, self-determining individuality
sets forth its claims for satisfaction of its wants and personal
autonomy."--"For we know that world-wide 85% of advocacy
NGO's are funded by Government or Inter-government budgets. In
the USA the percentage is 65% in Europe only 30%."
VACLAV KLAUS--Markets
& Virtue (Acton Institute, 1992)--"Klaus:
People always pursue their self-interest, no matter what system
they live in. Only ways and methods differ. Market systems, I
am sure, encourage people in pursuing their self-interest to
follow such ways that require and strengthen human virtue more
than human vice."
VACLAV HAVEL--Summer
Meditations (1992)--"The return of freedom in an
environment of total moral delinquency has roused what probably
had to surface, and what thus was predictable, but which is incomparably
more serious than was foreseen: the terrible explosion of the
worst human faults. It is as if all the most questionable, or
at least the most ambiguous, characteristics were unknowingly
cultivated for years in this society and without our knowledge
built into the daily functioning of the totalitarian system,
so that when suddenly freed from its restraint, they have free
rein to burst forth. A kind of regulation -- if you can call
it that -- that the totalitarian regime imposed on them (and
by which they were 'legitimized') has been ruptured, while a
new regulatory system which, instead of taking advantage of these
negative aspects, would control them -- in other words a system
of responsibility freely undertaken by the community toward the
community -- has not yet been established; nor could it have
been, for these things take time."
MORE HAVEL--Address
to the Czech Parliament: The Post-Communist Morass (1997)--"Fascinated
by our macro-economic data, we disregarded the fact that this
data, sooner or later, reveals also that which lies beyond the
macro-economic or technocratic perception of the world: the things
that constitute the only imaginable environment for any economic
advancement, although their weight or significance cannot be
calculated by accountants--things like rules of the game; the
rule of law; the moral order behind that system of rules, that
is essential for making the rules work; a climate of coexistence.
The declared ideal of success and profit was turned to ridicule
because we allowed a situation in which the biggest success could
be achieved by the most immoral ones, and the biggest profits
could go to unpunishable thieves. Paradoxically, the cloak of
liberalism without adjectives, which regarded many things as
leftist aberrations, concealed the marxist conception about a
fundament and a superstructure: morality, decency, humility before
the order of nature, solidarity, regard for those who will come
after us, respect for the law, a culture of human relations,
and many other things were relegated to the realm of the superstructure,
and slightly derided as a mere 'seasoning' of life--until we
found there was nothing to season: the fundament has been tunnelled."
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New
York. He gave $50 to both Médecins Sans Frontières
and Amnesty International in 2001. He is the author of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at:
ateliermp@netscape.net
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