RE: <nettime> All right, I admit it -- I went to Davos

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

> I yield to no one in my admiration for Kermit Snelson, but at
> this point, I want to know who else from nettime was not down
> in Brazil with those zillion ineffectual leftists, but was
> hanging out with the globalist Great and the Good in Davos/NYC.

Relax, Bruce.  We Davos guys are paying your ineffectual leftist bills. :)

Kermit
======

Feeding the hands that bite
By James Harding
Financial Times
Published: October 15 2001
http://specials.ft.com/countercap/FT37OP0LUSC.html

Part two: Bankrolling the movement

John Sellers is wearing a woolly lime-green sweater. He has a big shaved
head, neat little ears and electric blue-painted toenails popping out of
his sandals. On a late summer's day in Berkeley, California, he bears more
than a passing resemblance to Shrek.

Like the cartoon ogre, the thick-set director of The Ruckus Society, the
civil disobedience group which trains activists for tree-sits,
banner-hangs and barricades, also has a giant laugh.

Particularly, when he mentions the origins of $100,000 worth of Ruckus
funding this year: "It is great that it is Unilever money. There is no
better way to launder corporate multinational largesse than giving it to
the movement that is confronting it."

The Ruckus Society trained activists who helped shut down the World Trade
Organisation meeting in Seattle in November 1999. It is also one of a
handful of radical activist groups which this year have enjoyed a big lift
thanks to Unilever, the consumer goods multinational.  [...]

The Unilever money has been a boon to several activist groups.

Ben and Jerry's foundation, through a special fund overseen by three
senior company staff including Jerry Greenfield, gave $1m over three years
to Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based group which campaigns to
abolish the World Bank and the WTO as well as name and shame irresponsible
big companies. Unilever has been a leading corporate advocate of trade
liberalisation.

United for a Fair Economy, which campaigns among other things against what
it sees as excessive chief executive pay, also got a grant. Niall
FitzGerald, the Unilever co-chairman, had total compensation last year of
£1.3m. [...]

The movement, critical though it was of burgeoning global companies, was
buoyed by the wealth which filtered through from an expanding
international economy. In fact, a large number of businesspeople have -
wittingly or unwittingly - become big donors to counter-capitalism.

FitzGerald from Unilever and Cohen and Greenfield from Ben & Jerry's are
just one case.

George Soros, the hedge fund operator, Anita Roddick, the founder of the
Bodyshop chain of stores, and Doug Tompkins, the founder of the Esprit and
North Face clothing lines, are among a new breed of philanthropist born of
the corporate world who are giving to protesters against corporate-led
globalisation.

Governments, too, have been significant financiers of protest groups. The
European Commission, for example, funded two groups who mobilised large
numbers of people to protest at EU summits at Gothenburg and Nice.
Britain's national lottery, which is overseen by the government, helped
fund a group at the heart of the British contingent at both protests.
[...]

Anita Roddick's Body Shop is currently being pursued by potential buyers.
If the sale goes through, Roddick, who is on the board of the Ruckus
Society, is looking forward to increasing support for anti-sweatshop
activists, independent media organisations, dissent groups, local
environmental start-ups, socially responsible ventures and a range of
others.

"I will not be funding large organisations, but poverty, human rights
abuses, civil rights, economic rights is where my heart lies," she says.

Depending on the terms of the sale, Roddick would have the kind of funds
at her disposal to be talked about as a radical funding figure in the same
league as one of the leading businessman-turned-philanthropists: Doug
Tompkins.

Tompkins gave the money to set up the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which
is based in California. Today, it has a roughly $90m endowment, according
to a Deep Ecology director. The money comes thanks to Tompkins' business
acumen. He started and built Esprit, the retail chain, and North Face, the
mountainwear business. Since he sold it, he has been using the money to
buy land for environmental conservation and funding anti-globalisation
projects.

To activists, Tompkins, who now lives out of telephone contact on a vast
environmental retreat in Chile bigger than Massachussetts, is the model of
the new philanthropy.

There are others. George Soros has diverted some of his fortune into the
Open Society Institute. In turn, it has been an important donor for the
Ella Baker Center, which campaigns against what it calls the "prison
industrial complex" and the creeping privatisation of public services
which it sees as a function of corporate-led globalisation.

Bob Young and Marc Ewing, co-founders of Red Hat, the designers of the
Linux software and Open Source systems, have established the Center for
the Public Domain, a group which has already made over $5m of
contributions to civic society initiatives. In the UK, some of the fortune
left by Sir Jimmy Goldsmith has gone into the JMG Foundation, which is
overseen by Jon Cracknell, one of the founder members of the Funders
Network on Trade and Globalisation. Mr Cracknell did not return phone
calls. (Sir Jimmy's brother, Teddy, is editor of The Ecologist and a
leading light in the movement.) [...]

Almost all the money which comes into the movement, whether from
foundations or inviduals, has some link to a corporate past.

The CS Mott Foundation, one of the bigger givers to groups campaigning
against the World Bank and the IMF, owes its wealth to General Motors. The
Ford Foundation, which has given widely to environmental groups, got its
money from the Ford Motor fortune. Richard Goldman, an insurance executive
and the descendant of Levi Strauss, has long had a fund established with
his wife, Rhoda, which, thanks to the jeans fortune, has been a big donor
to environmental and social groups. Likewise, the Rockefeller Brothers
Foundation and the Samuel Rubin Foundation have turned old business
fortunes into funding for a new breed of activists who are suspicious, if
not hostile, towards business. [...]

On the other side of the Atlantic, where smoke from stubby French cigars
wafts through the offices of Attac and Le Monde Diplomatique, the
intellectuals who run Europe's largest counter-capitalist group do not
need to worry about the vagaries of the stock market. The finances of
Attac - the Association pour la taxation des transactions financieres pour
l'aide aux citoyens - are provided mainly by its 30,000 members across the
continent and the organs of the European state.

Bernard Cassen, director of Attac and one of the top editors of Le Monde
Diplomatique, the French journal which has been an ardent critic of
corporate-led globalisation for nearly two decades, says donations of
FFr50 to FFr200 ($7-$28) per year from its members make up the bulk of the
E6m ($5.5m) annual budget [...] But the biggest single donor to Attac,
which estimates it sent nearly 5,000 people to protest in Genoa, was the
European Commission. The EU gave FFr800,000 over two years.

"In the European Commission, we have very few friends," says Mr Cassen,
who has used his columns in Le Monde Diplomatique as a platform for
persistent criticism of what he sees as the EU's failure as a democratic
insitution. "It was very difficult to obtain [the money], but we obtained
it." The Commission's directorate general for development gave most of the
money, while more is expected to come from a new unit for engaging with
civil society, according to Attac. [...]

Britain's World Development Movement, which over the years has taken on
the UK government in court over the Pergau dam, campaigned against Rio
Tinto and the governments of Europe and the US over Third World debt, is
described by its director, Barry Coates, as the "shock troops" of the
movement. It has also been a beneficiary of EU funding. In the last two
years, it has received nearly £100,000 from the European Union, the WDM's
biggest single donor.

The British National Lottery, which has provided just over £55,000 over
the last two years, is the third largest financial contributor to the WDM,
just behind the United Reformed Church.





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