Postmortem: Profile of the Complex
While I failed miserably at getting a substantial number of NGOs' endorsements, I had succeeded in demonstrating to myself anyway that I had encountered the complex. I decided to probe it a bit to find out more about its funding, its people, its activities, and its outcomes (I am assuming that the five endorsing NGOs are not part of the complex).
NGO Missions
On every NGO website is some form of a mission statement. Here is a small sample: To halt and reverse the terrible program of war, repression, and theocracy. To protect and advance the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To enhance democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption, and betrayal of trust by powerful public and private institutions. To build a new economy that emphasizes the well-being of people and the planet. To empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see. To end domestic violence. To advance the cause of justice for all Americans, strengthen the public-interest community's ability to influence public policy, and foster the next generation of advocates. To foster the economic and social welfare, security, and opportunity of all Americans. To secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system. To improve the lives of Americans through ideas and action. To curb corporate abuses and make corporations publicly accountable. To end corporate rights that destroy the environment, our future, and democracy. To stop the nuclear-power industry. To transform our elections to achieve unfettered, fraud-free access to participation, a full spectrum of meaningful choices and majority rule with fair representation and a voice for all. To build a cleaner, healthier environment and safer world. To inspire, empower, motivate, and teach civic participation that makes a difference. To help build an unstoppable grassroots movement that demands and delivers lasting reforms. To enact long-term structural reforms. To develop progressive leaders.
What a list of make believe! If NGOs actually expected to achieve their missions they would set "tall objectives."[4] Among many other things, they would be clear and specific, track-able and appraisable, tough but doable. I only found a handful of NGOs that went beyond their mission statements to describe their goals and not one single NGO came even remotely close to having a tall objective. If these NGOs do indeed represent the complex their missions are not their real purpose, for if they were to achieve them the corpocracy would no longer exist and neither would the NGOs. The real purpose seems to be just to exist by getting funded and to show some activity. But even if that were not so, the NGOs either realize they do not have the capability, divided as they are, to achieve their missions in any lifetime, or they are massively deluding themselves.
NGO Funding
Looking over the NGOs' financial status and doing some calculations such as extrapolating for the NGOs for which no data were available and taking inflation into account, I estimate that the 176 NGOs are handling about $1.4 billion worth of money and that doesn't include total assets that were not freely available in many cases. Hardly chicken feed, underestimate or not. The median amount is about $1.4 million per NGO, but 19 NGOs each account for $10 million or more and four of them over $100 million each!
While the NGOs solicit and accept individual donations, memberships, and in some instances sales from mostly promotional merchandise, most of the funding is through an umbilical chord from government grants and/or foundation donations, and in some cases, also directly from corporations, some of which ought to be in jail. Enabling this flow of money is the tax-exemption status the government gives the funders and NGOs.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
