THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED (R.W.N.B.F.)
Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Anthology of multiple authors edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2007)
Draft In Progress
This book made me cry a few times and this will be my longest review so far. The RWNBF is thick with knowledge. If you aren’t aware of the systemic illnesses defined as “industrial complexes (ICs),” here’s a short explanation before I review this book. In an article from The Gun Zone, we learn that the term was publicly popularized by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general “supreme commander” during World War II (then afterwards elected as the 34th president of the U.S.). He mentioned the term in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961, wherein John. F. Kennedy then became his successor. JFK also did work to develop ideas to counteract toxic IC during his presidency, before he was murdered in 1963 for doing so. Eisenhower was alluding to the “Military Industrial Complex (MIC)” in particular (which he knew best), as it is the the main IC that all other industrial complexes stem from.
“Eisenhower’s concern was not simply about the financial cost of maintaining a large military-industrial complex. He worried about the potential for it to shape national priorities, diverting resources from other crucial areas like education, healthcare, and infrastructure. He specifically stated, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He also highlighted the growing importance of scientific research and development, often funded by the military. While acknowledging the benefits of this research, he cautioned against the potential for it to become overly focused on military applications, neglecting other areas of scientific inquiry.” -(McCloud, 2024)
As somebody focused specifically on language ethics, I wouldn’t have said “neglecting” as McCloud did, since using “neg” as a prefix in this way alludes to “negro” and “negativity” in a way that seems bad. Being carbon-negative sustains a healthy planet, and being disease-negative sustains a healthy body- while both vitalize our populous. My other works on this site explain this issue of English bias for light-additive preferencing in its language art design, and its intersectionality within culture, ethnicity, race and gender. Either way, the point he makes reviewing Eisenhower’s warning is true; this country and world is overdeveloped by militaristic gains of greed, property, and cult corruption, while we must work to re-develop our world with health based intelligence & action instead. The nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) explains bureaucratic loop holes that’ve tried to mitigate and halt what activists were doing in community organizations before “nonprofit” organizations existed. It thwarted the war against injustice and re-categorized it into systemic laws that further forced people to rely on the rich in a different way, changing the culture of organizational duty.
“The notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTEL-PRO) of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) remains the most historically prominent incident of the undeclared warfare waged by the state against domestic populations, insurrections, and suspected revolutionaries. But the spectacle of Hooverite repression obscures the broader—and far more important—convergence of state and capitalist/philanthropic forces in the absorption of progressive social change struggles that defined this era and its current legacies.” -(Rodriguez, RWNBF)
It’s difficult to get the true papers on what occurred during the various COINTEL-PRO missions. Sadly, some people who were directly a part of it, such as Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, who published documents and lied about some of the facts regarding operations, are posing as activists revealing the truth about COINTEL-PRO. It’s actually dangerous for me to choose to share that fact with you, as I was personally warned not to by an activist elder that I did archival work for, who is being targeted for uncovering the fakeness of those two men. Although elder Vigil told me not to tell (maybe to keep me safe), he’s told others while authoring a book about those two men, and the truth of other involvement- but it’s not published yet. The more people who know Vigil is being targeted, the more community can seek to protect him and the truth he has.
“In historical context, COINTEL-PRO’s illegal and unconstitutional abuses of state power, unabashed use of strategic and deadly violence, and development of invasive terrorizing surveillance technologies might be seen as paradigmatic of the contemporary era’s revivified white supremacist hegemony” -(Rodriguez, RWNBF)
Let’s just say, some people who’re victims of crimes that perpetrators want hidden, get brainwashed by faux sources of “justice” to an extent. Sometimes those people are paid carry out tasks that counteract the values they claim to have. For example, even though RFK sr. and JFK were democrats (who were murdered), their descendent, RFK jr. is has an unconscious bias of what is “right“ that sometimes masks the true health intelligence that must be researched and upheld. Family members of revolutionaries that were killed look for answers, and sometimes they get the wrong answers. Similar issues go on for ordinary folks who are paid to carry out tasks that sabotage the future health of our planet, they get cognitive dissonance; allowing a sacrificial trade-off instead of politically organizing to do something about what’s being sacrificed (unless they are seriously enslaved)- which is why labor unions are so effective for systems change, but are too often busted by greedy powers. Organized intervention dispells dissonance by committing together, ways to make healthier active decisions:
“Taking a pledge commits the pledger to the beliefs expressed in the pledge. To avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, pledgers display the behaviour that aligns with the beliefs they have committed to, in line with Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory.” - (Cooper, Dolnicar, Grün, 2024)
However, this review about NPIC and what I learned from RWNBF, so let’s stay on subject. Too often we think of do-gooders when we see nonprofit marketing, but not all NPs work the same way despite being subject to the same tax laws (interpreted differently per org). Organizations tend to interpret charity and change in different ways. As the book explains, there’s far more money in conservative far-right leaning foundations than in egalitarian or BIPOC ones, and some of those orgs hide their wealth within foundations to avoid being taxed (making democratic taxation harder to enforce). The average donor gets a tax benefit from their donation also, but this systemic function tends to benefit the wealthy far more often, because they can donate massive amounts to a foundation they’re a part of, that further influences culture and politics in the way they want to.
This may not be too bad if you’re trying to cure cancer, or if you’re working on indigenous reciprocity, but let’s take a look at Turning Point USA as an example NPIC being 3 organizations in one: Turning Point Endowment, a grantmaking entity (501(c)3), America’s Turning Point, an events entity that receives $ from the endowment under the guise of “education” (501(c)3), and Turning Point Action, an advocacy & lobbying organization that conducts rallies (501(c)4). Most of the $ spent for TP operations goes to the travel and compensation of it’s top members.
“As Michael Shuman of the Institute of Policy Studies notes, while right-wing foundations give away less money than liberal foundations, the former use their funds more effectively. Progressive funders generally give their $ to specific issue-oriented campaigns, whereas right-wing foundations see the need to fund intellectual projects that enable the “right” to develop a comprehensive framework for presenting its issues to the public. These think tanks, research projects, journals etcetera may not have an immediate short-term impact, but in the long run, they altered the public consciousness” -(Smith, RWNBF)
The quote above also demonstrates the issue of the “fractured left;” being so secularized into separate views, that they cannot seem to work together well enough to assert the intense changes that “the right” enforce when they take the power. The language design of “the right” was founded in Europe, but was furthered systemically by American law language, and it’s our imperative as the people of this land to shift what is “right” into a more ethical function of coexistence. Language is one of those long-term research projects that command the prompts of action and sometimes tanks our thinking. Research on how language effects cognitive behavior has proven the latter, while more research needs to be done. If we go deep to reach the root causes of these ICs (language & law that leads to material & labor extraction) and replace the harmful ideologies that prompt the actions, we can replant a healthier system. One of my professors from the Nonprofit Leadership degree I’ve been working on, an African American Woman, told us that we can urge changes in Nonprofit Law to shift the way that NP taxation, governance, compensation, and donor advised funding investments are spent and conducted.
As it is today, a 501(c)3 is a “charitable entity” that organizes support for basic needs, or services that can be educational, religious, scientific, or for some other public-benefit purpose, while a 501(c)4 is supposed to be for the promotion of “social welfare” through political advocacy and lobbying, and while a 501(c)4 can endorse candidates, a 501(c)3 cannot. However, there’s a way for a 501(c)3 to avoid legal liability for their political involvement, such as advocacy or lobbying, as long as it’s bipartisan legislation and campaigns (not candidates), and the $ they spend on those actions do not exceed a certain amount of their revenue, while they must report what the activity is when they file taxes (can be ambiguous). This tax form page is specifically called the 501(h) and is part of the Form 990, and it’s how some 501(c)3 organizations and churches get away with being quasi-political entities of influence, while “the separation of church and state” is supposedly separated by the very fine line of how much $ in the org is spent, as long as it’s under a certain amount.
“…foundations essentially rob the public of monies that should be owed to them and give back very little of what is taken in lost taxes… their funds are derived from profits resulting from the exploitation of labor. That is, corporations become rich by exploiting their workers. Corporate profits are then put into foundations in order to provide “relief” to workers that suffer as the result of corporate practices in the first place” -(Smith, RWNBF)
The book mentions when Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which enforces a 4% excise tax on foundations’ net investment income, puts restrictions on foundations’ ability to engage in business operations, and required foundations to spend at least 6% of their net investment income per year (but was reduced to 5% in 1988), to prevent financial growth without giving in service to the charity they claim to represent. Further, the act tries to prevent insider-trading benefits: “There is hereby imposed a tax on each act of self-dealing between a disqualified person and a private foundation.”— 26 United States Code. § 4941(a)(1). A “disqualified person” according to the statute, are substantial contributors (people or businesses who’ve donated significant amounts of money or property to the foundation), foundation managers and kin (people who work for the foundation and their family members- a.k.a. nepotism), and a few other cases. So technically, Turning Point’s entities violate sections of this act because they unreasonably compensate themselves with lavish travel expenses and payrolls, despite having tens of millions in net income, rather than using most of their income for charitably giving to those whom they claim to serve, being at least subject to an excise tax for their “excess benefit transactions.”
However, this is why people like trump want to infiltrate the I.R.S. and reduce it’s ability to enforce tax codes, since they are the legal entity that technically extracts the money from the rich and gives it back to the populous through taxation, as long as the law allows them to and it’s enforced. There are advocates, and there are politicians- we’re all advocates for something, regardless of politics; we all add our voice to the case of what we care about, and doing so attracts poles of influence over the tickle of time. The people are supposed to influence the design of the law- but people have been taught not to care about politics enough, or that it’s too hard or dangerous to get involved- when it’s our advocacy actions, together, that secure freedom or take it from others. We must reclaim the gravity of the law before it’s too late. Back when this book was published in 2007, it cautioned us about the Heritage Foundation, and while we were warned by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence about it then, not enough people with political privilege and money have listened to them:
“Right-wing organizations such as Heritage Foundation claimed that tax dollars were going to subsidize left-wing causes, while on the left, progressives were arguing that foundations were pushing social justice into more conservative directions.” -(Smith, RWNBF)
Another critique from the book regarding the NPIC structure as it is today, cites that true change must be demonstrated by the masses, but has been systemically filtered down into this “careerist” field of newfound “nonprofit work” that categorizes the natural collective will to organize for change, into something that somebody else does (it’s not the bartenders’ job, it’s not the butchers’ job, it’s not the musicians’ job - you get the picture). It’s been made into a career field that people can either choose to go into or not- instead of people actively recognizing their inherent choices of civic duty to engage in the freedoms our ancestors have sought, and participate to exercise them, as an everchanging evolutionary use of resources- rather than harmful mal-mutations where solutions are being stunted by non-stop greed. In a way, the hypocritical notions of nonprofitism really draws a line for us to see the non-prophet motions.
“By trying to do grassroots organizing through this careerist model, we are essentially asking few people to work more than full-time, to makeup for the work that needs to be done by millions.” -(Smith RWNBF)
If people keep assuming that the future generations are going to fix our problems today, we’ve missed the chance for our present evolution tomorrow. China has a 100% solar powered car that doesn’t need to stop for gas or recharge at all, while the U.S. chooses to be stuck on oil, again and again every day, refusing to change- and it’s making us all sick, including our future generations. Oil is a huge fraction of the MIC priorities, rather than environmental safety. Choosing unnecessary competitive professionalism over a collaborative redirection of our system is hindering evolution and causing an illness-injustice overgrowth. It’s become more difficult to convince “the public” or rather, every-day ordinary people, that they should stop and do something effective, individually and together, such as purchase fair-trade, protect the vote, change your language mindset, call your representatives, and choose healthier forms of consumerism.
Since NPIC makes the competition for funding streams adhere to certain requirements, such as political unbias, it also keeps some people within organizations from really attaching themselves to any significantly impactful movements of change, and rather has them focusing on “support services” much like band-aids, rather than cures, for infected systemic wounds. Support services can only go so far, for example, shelters instead of homes, short-term holds & jail/prison instead of long-term rehabilitation & education, pills instead of justice. Back in the day, during the Poor People’s Campaign (Resurrection City), the Occupy Movement, the No DAPL gathering and others; people held long-term campsite protests that they lived at temporarily. These kinds of movements sparked “urban camping laws” that never existed before, spreading across cities like wild fire, seeking to ban people’s ability to camp in public space, making it so much harder for homeless people, and those who don’t want others to be homeless. These laws hide poor people’s truth while allowing greed to continue uninterrupted. Many NPICs house other versions of IC, such as the Homeless Industrial Complex.
Those who seek to spread prophetic messages of truth; the need for ethical change- are being further criminalized instead of being systemically honored and listened to by ordinary society. The criminalization then makes people fear getting involved. People too often choose to pay attention to T.V. shows and video games instead of the truth- instead of working within community organizations based on a collective willpower, to engage in memorable life-changing events of systemic outcry, and contribute to the mutual aid in our actual world.
To be continued…
