Roelofs, Joan. Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. 269 pages.

Few American scholars dare admit that capitalism could not survive without the support of the nonprofit sector. It helps to first get tenure, and then approach the topic very cautiously. Joan Roelofs, a political science professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, has broken through to the other side. While Karl Marx criticized the role of bourgeois philanthropy only in passing, due to a lack of evidence, Roelofs starts with the robber barons and continues through the twentieth century. That adds up to a hundred years of heavy evidence.

Beginning with the cold war, American philanthropy branched into foreign policy. The Ford Foundation (and to a lesser extent, Rockefeller and Carnegie) worked very closely with the CIA. Ford funded many leftist minority and special-interest groups during the 1960s, but it was all part of the same grand scheme to promote pluralism as an antidote to class consciousness. McGeorge Bundy, an architect of U.S. policy in Vietnam, became president of Ford Foundation in 1966. In his words, his role was "to make the world safe for capitalism." Now it is 2006, and Russia is finally realizing that they've been raped by capitalists using philanthropy as a cover, and are taking steps to stop it. They should re-read their Marx. While they're at it, they might want to pick up this book as well.
ISBN 0-7914-5642-0

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