Well he's right of course - but his "trickle-down" solution isn't the correct one either:


World’s Richest Man: ‘Charity Doesn’t Solve Anything’

By Robert Frank

Carlos Slim has always had a complicated relationship with philanthropy.

The Mexican billionaire, who Forbes still lists as the world’s richest man, said in 2007 that he could do more to help fight poverty by building businesses than by “being a Santa Claus.”

Mr. Slim’s signature also has been noticeably absent from the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge. At a conference in Syndey last month, Mr. Slim said that charity accomplishes little.

“The only way to fight poverty is with employment,” he said. “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the last 50 years, and they don’t solve anything.”

As for the Giving Pledge, he said: “To give 50%, 40%, that does nothing,” Slim said. “There is a saying that we should leave a better country to our children. But it’s more important to leave better children to our country.”

In a speech in Mexico City Thursday, he reiterated his point that the best way to fight poverty is to create jobs.

Now Mr. Slim isn’t un-charitable. He has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to his foundation and has funded millions of dollars in joint-venture projects with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

So he clearly isn’t against charity entirely. His point seems to be that society would benefit more if the wealthy channeled their creative energies and talents toward building job-creating businesses rather than doling out cash. It is the 21st century billionaire version of the old adage, “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”

In these populist times, some might argue that Mr. Slim is being a selfish billionaire who’s simply justifying his own wealth accumulation. But he raises two good questions–ones I have heard from an increasing number of wealthy entrepreneurs:

Would Bill Gates and Warren Buffett be doing more for society by putting their time and money into new businesses rather than funding philanthropy?

Has philanthropy solved any major social problems in the past 50 years?

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/10/15/worlds-richest-man-charity-doesnt-solve-anything/

what China needs to grow is 300 more years of occupation (based on his estimate that it took 100 years of occupation in Hong Kong..)

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/10/more-on-liu-xiaobo/64352/

Teach a man to fish, then skim off the profits and make more money for the rich guy. Make the fisherman into a wage slave.

Support corrupt politicians, avoid enviro regulations and labor rights at all costs, crush and co-opt local movements of any kind with international pro-development NGOs, and the empire of capital expands.

Mr. Slim is just articulating the way it already is. They use 'micro-loans' to 'self-empower' people. They drop stale rice from airplanes. They finance infrastructure projects that help no one but big business, forcing people form their land or whatever livelihood they may have and making them more dependent on 'charity' and multinationals for food and jobs and water and education. More dependent on global capital.

His assertion that previously 'charity' was somehow agenda-free is a lie.


Long article, here's some excerpts:



NGOs: In the Service of Imperialism
by James Petras
http://www.neue-einheit.com/english/ngos.htm

---snip---


Today most left movement and popular spokespeople focus their criticism on the IMF, World Bank, multi-national corporations, private banks, etc. who fix the macroeconomic agenda for the pillage of the Third World. This is an important task. However, the assault on the industrial base, independence and living standards of the Third World takes place on both the macro-economic and the micro-socio-political level. The egregious effects of structural adjustment policies on wages and salaried workers, peasants and small national businesspeople generates potential nationalpopular discontent. And that is where the NGOs come into the picture to mystify and deflect that discontent away from direct attacks on the corporate/banking
power structure and profits toward local micro-projects and apolitical "grass roots" self-exploitation and "popular education" that avoids class analysis of imperialism and capitalist exploitation.

The NGOs world-wide have become the latest vehicle for upward mobility for the ambitious educated classes: academics, journalists, and professionals have abandoned earlier excursions in the poorly rewarded leftists movements for a lucrative career managing an NGO, bringing with them their organizational and rhetorical skills as well as a certain populist vocabulary. Today, there are thousands of NGO directors who drive $40,000 four wheel drive sports vehicles from their fashionable suburban home or apartment to their well-furnished office or building complex, leaving the children and domestic chores in the hands of servants, their yards tended by gardeners. They are more familiar and spend more time at the overseas sites of their international conferences on poverty (Washington, Bangkok, Tokyo, Brussels, Rome, etc.) then at the muddy villages of their own country. They are more adept at writing up new proposals to bring in hard currency for "deserving professionals" than risking a rap on the head from the police attacking a demonstration of underpaid rural school teachers.

The NGO leaders are a new class not based on property ownership or government resources but derived from imperial funding and their capacity to control significant popular groups. The NGO leaders can be conceived of as a kind of neo-compradore group that doesn't produce any useful commodity but does function to produce services for the donor countries - mainly trading in domestic poverty for individual perks.

The formal claims used by NGO directors to justify their position - that they fight poverty, inequality, etc. are self-serving and specious. There is a direct relation between the growth of NGOs and the decline of living standards: the proliferation of NGOs has not reduced structural unemployment, massive displacements of peasants, nor provided liveable wage levels for the growing army of informal workers. What NGOs have done, is provided a thin stratum of professionals with income in hard currency to escape the ravages of the neo-liberal economy that affects their country,
people and to climb in the existing social class structure.

This reality contrasts with the self-image that NGO functionaries have of themselves. According to their press releases and public discourses, they represent a Third Way between "authoritarian statism" and "savage market capitalism": they describe themselves as the vanguard of "civil society" operating in the interstices of the "global economy." The common purpose that most resounds at NGO conferences is "alternative development."

--snip--

Contrary to the NGOers' self-image who see themselves as innovative grass roots leaders, they are in reality the grass root reactionaries who complement the work of the IMF by pushing privatization "from below" and demobilizing popular movements, thus undermining resistence.

The ubiquitous NGOs thus present the Left with a serious challenge that requires a critical political analysis of their origins, structure and ideology.

---snip---

The real boost in NGO mushrooming however, occurs in time of rising mass movements that challenge imperial hegemony. The growth of radical socio-political movements and struggles provided a lucrative commodity which ex-radical and pseudo popular intellectuals could sell to interested, concerned and well-financed private and public foundations closely tied with European and US multi-nationals and governments. The funders were interested in information - social science intelligence - like the "propensity for violence in urban slum areas" (an NGO project in Chile during the mass uprisings of 1983-86), the capacity of NGOers to raid popular communities and direct energy toward self-help projects instead of social transformations and the introduction of a class collaborationist rhetoric packaged as "new identity discourses" that would discredit and isolate revolutionary activists.

--snip---

Class Struggle and Co-operation

The NGOers frequently write of "co-operation" of everyone, near and far, without delving too profoundly on the price and conditions for securing the co-operation of neo-liberal regimes and overseas funding agencies. Class struggle is viewed as an atavism to a past that no longer exists. Today we are told "the poor" are intent on building a new life. They are fed up with traditional politics, ideologies and politicians. So far, so good. The problem is that the NGOers are not so forthcoming in describing their role as mediators and brokers, hustling funds overseas. The concentration of income and the growth of inequalities are greater than ever, after a decade of preaching co-operation and micro-enterprises, and self-help. Today the banks like the World Bank fund the export agro-businesses that exploit and poison millions of farm laborers while providing funds to finance small micro-projects. The role of the NGOs in the micro projects is to neutralize political opposition at the bottom while neo-liberalism is promoted at the top. The ideology of "co-operation" links the poor through the NGOs to neo-liberals at the top.

Intellectually the NGOs are the intellectual policemen who define acceptable research, distribute research funds and filter out topics and perspectives that project class analysis and struggle perspective. Marxists are excluded from the conferences and stigmatized as "ideologues" while NGOs present themselves as "social scientists." The control of intellectual fashion, publications, conferences, research fund provide the post-Marxists with an important power base - but on ultimately dependent on avoiding conflict with their external funding patrons.

Critical Marxist intellectuals have their strength in the fact that their ideas resonate with the evolving social realities. The polarization of classes and the violent confrontations are growing, as their theories would predict. It is from this perspective that the Marxists are tactically weak and strategically strong vis-a-vis the NGOs.

---snip---

Conclusion: Notes on a Theory of NGOs

In social structural terms the proliferalism and expansion of NGOs reflects the emergence of a new petit bourgeois distinct from the "old" shopkeepers, free professionals as well as the "new" public employee groups. This subcontracted sector is closer to the earlier "compradore" bourgeoisie insofar as it produces no tangible commodities, but serves to link imperial enterprises with local petty commodity producers engaged in micro-enterprises. This new petty-bourgeois at least its "middle age variants" is marked by the fact that many are ex-Leftists and bring to bear a "popular rhetoric" and in some cases an elitist "vanguardist" conception to their organizations. Situated without property or a fixed position in the state apparatus it depends heavily on external funding agencies to reproduce themselves. Given its popular constituency however, it has to combine an anti-Marxist, anti-statist appeal with populist rhetoric, hence the concoction of the Third Way and civil society notions which are sufficiently ambiguous to cover both bases. This new petty bourgeois thrives on international gatherings as a main prop of its existence, lacking solid organic support within the country. The "globalist" rhetoric provides a cover for a kind of ersatz "internationalism" devoid of anti-imperialist commitments. In a word, this new petit bourgeois forms the "radical wing" ... of the neo-liberal establishment.

Politically the NGOs fit into the new thinking of imperialist strategists. While the IMF - World Bank and MNCs work the domestic elites at the top to pillage the economy, the NGOs engage in complementary activity at the bottom neutralizing and fragmenting the burgeoning discontent resulting from the savaging of the economy. Just as imperialism engages in a two pronged macro-micro strategy of exploitation and containment, radical movements must develop a two prong anti-imperialist strategy.

The mass of NGOs have co-opted most of what used to be the "free floating" public intellectuals who would abandon their class origins and join the popular movements. The result is a temporary gap between the profound crises of capitalism (depressions in Asia and Latin America - collapse in the ex-USSR) and the absence of significant organized revolutionary movements (with the exception of Brazil, Colombia and perhaps South Korea). The fundamental question is whether a new generation of organic intellectuals can emerge from the burgeoning radical social movements which can avoid the NGO temptation and become integral members of the next revolutionary wave.

James Petras, Dept. of Sociology, Binghamton University, NY

Sort of a distillation of years of conversation around here. All it needs is an appendix titled, "What an Asshole".