How Foundations Exercise Power

• Author: Joan Roelofs
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12112
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015

How Foundations Exercise Power

By JOAN ROELOFS*

ABSTRACT. Foundations (and philanthropy in general) have great

political power in the United States and worldwide, yet this is hardly

noted by political analysts or journalists. Their power is exerted in

many ways, such as by funding progressive organizations and

movements; sponsoring policy “think tanks” and organizations of

public officials; influencing the political culture through media,

academic researchers, and university programs (including public

interest law in law schools); and co-opting activists and potential rebels

among the rich and poor. Because of their resources and prestige, they

are powerful members of coalitions and collaborations with overt and

covert government departments, U.N. agencies, universities, and

nongovernmental organizations. Foundations have been major actors

in the “Cold War,” which continues as the attempt to deflect any

movement towards socialism here or abroad. Globalization has

amplified the power of foundations, for many of the global institutions

were created by foundations and continue to be fostered by them. The

sponsorship of civil society institutions worldwide by private

foundations, now with additional billions from governments and

international governmental institutions, supports U.S. hegemony:

military, political, and economic. We cannot know what the world

would have been like absent foundation activities, but the current one

does not appear to have a democratic, peaceful, or sustainable future.

***

*Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New

Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism

(Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask

of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).

She has translated, with Shawn Wilbur, Charles Fourier’s World War of Small Pastries

(Autonomedia, 2015 [in press]). Roelofs is an anti-war and red-green activist, and an

editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Website: www.joanroelofs.wordpress.com

Contact: joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 4 (September, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12112

V

C2015 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

In recent years we have again been reminded that our political sys-

tem is overwhelmingly responsive to the interests of the wealthy

(Gilens and Page 2014). It was designed to be that way, and the evolu-

tion of political parties into conglomerates of interest groups and clien-

tele relationships has not fostered much change in responsiveness

(Roelofs 2008).

In addition to the visible and somewhat measurable political institu-

tions and politicians’ activities, our unequal and destructive system is

sustained by philanthropy. This is especially true of the large founda-

tions and their grantees. They define much of our political culture,

while channeling social change to protect corporate wealth and power.

The major “liberal” foundations and progressive organizations (like the

earlier and related Progressive movement) are not only silentabout mil-

itarism and imperialism, they are often complicit with it and benefit

from the profits of military contractorsand global resource extraction.

Yet philanthropic capital, its investment, and its distribution are gen-

erally neglected by the critics of capitalism. Most studies of philan-

thropy are generously funded by the nonprofit sector itself; few

researchers have followed up on the observation of Marx and Engels in

The Communist Manifesto:

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in

order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society ... To this

section belong the economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers

of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of

societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics,

hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.

The foundations’ elegant reports describe their extensive charitable

activities, butthey do not illuminate their relationships with the national

security state or the scope of their investment portfolios (Roelofs 2009).

Lacking any political institutions that can propose and carry out poli-

cies for needed reforms, for example, programmatic political parties,

foundations have become the “planning arm” of our system, according

to historians Barry Karl and Stanley Katz (1981: 238). They and their

grantees exert a dominant influence on our politicalculture.

Almost all progressive organizations look to corporations and foun-

dations for funding. Small donations or dues are rarely adequate for

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