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Billionare's Son Takes Wealthy to Task for Giving as Guilt Washing

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Peter Buffett, Op-Ed

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism. Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex. But now I think something even more damaging is going on. As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. [link]
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Ruth McCambridge, Ed. NPQ said…
Peter Buffett calls charity a “Perpetual Poverty Machine” That conscience laundering, he implies, comes complete with a kind of mass brainwashing that papers over structural injustices and abuses of people and environment. He ends by saying, “Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market…(but) as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.” Peter Buffett is mostly right, but we are not right if we act like this is a new notion or if we accept that all nonprofits are somehow complicit in giving capitalism a pass in return for a grant. (Though, frankly, our sector has been structurally dependent, and therefore at risk for keeping silent when we should be loud—for acting like addressing the symptoms of injustice is the same as challenging injustice). Until we see that wealth gap start to close, women making as much as men, and the health indicators in communities of color begin to move decisively to the good nationwide…until our jails and prisons start to empty out and people with mental illness are not incarcerated for their illness on the street or in jails or prisons…we should not go home at the end of any day feeling self-satisfied. I believe that Buffett is attempting to say that this sector has been bought off, and indeed that is somewhat, though not as completely as he claims, the case.

http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/22667-peter-buffett-calls-charity-a-perpetual-poverty-machine.html
Tue Jul 30, 08:43:00 AM EDT
Ernest Disney-Britton said…
I recently attended a day-long seminar on understanding the Millennial generation: defining characteristics and strategies for engaging these sons/daughters of younger boomers. While it was billed as an opportunity to learn, it had a decidedly party-like quality of commercialism. Most of the presenters were not there to inform, but to sell their product. Instead of insights into a generation, it was a marketplace of wares by entrepreneurs and prized journalists. Over and over, philanthropy and charity took on the role of side-kick to commercial enterprises, like a capitalist version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Their charity works felt self-serving and in the worlds of Buffet, it took on an appearance of "guilt-washing." Once upon a time, philanthropy was about sacrifice. Once upon a time, service was about giving our whole self to the movement of fixing problems. This time with Millennials left me thinking more of how to build more wealth with charity than how today's philanthropy is changing the world.
Wed Jul 31, 06:58:00 AM EDT
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