Challenge article on foundations

Forwarded by Bob Feldman


Buffet-Gates `Charity': Another Rulers' Tool to Suck Workers' Blood
Warren Buffet's $31-billion pledge to Bill Gates' $30-billion foundation has nothing to do with charity. Philanthropy's most insidious purpose is to legitimize atrocities inherent in the profit system. The rulers want us to think that Buffet's, Gates' and Rockefeller's missionary crumb-tossing will somehow alleviate extreme poverty and the plagues it causes. They would have us believe that supporting billionaire George Soros's Human Rights Watch can curb the U.S. military's torture and massacres. Above all, the "philanthropic" rulers seek to turn us away from the one road to the working class's betterment, communist revolution.

These foundations have become a major part of the state apparatus, functioning in many ways to perpetuate the capitalists' class dictatorship, with all its miseries for workers. (See article page 8) Ultra-rich families establish foundations to pass their stolen billions from one generation to the next tax-free.

Through foundations, leading capitalists wield tremendous influence in setting policy. Foundations funnel smaller bosses' money into serving the big boys' purposes. At times, the rulers employ foundations to seize the fortunes of renegade capitalists. Finally, foundations put a humanitarian fig leaf over outrages ranging from racist exploitation to imperialist war.

Buffet and Gates trail the Rockefellers in using philanthropy to shelter their wealth and steer society. A century ago, the latter established the General Education Board, which effectively bought control of Harvard University and other important ideology foundries. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission aimed at eradicating debilitating diseases like hookworm in the South. Prefiguring Gates' campaign against AIDS and malaria in Africa, its ulterior motive was to create a low-wage workforce healthy enough to toil in the region's new industries. The Rockefeller Foundation continues to bankroll the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which, respectively, lead in planning domestic police-state measures and overseas military adventures.

Although the media like to describe Buffet, of Omaha, and Gates, of Seattle, as "self-made" billionaires, their foundation deal actually represents a consolidation of Eastern Establishment power. The big shots forced Gates into his charitable pursuits, many of which operate jointly with the Rockefeller Foundation. Gates started his foundation in 2000 under the gun of liberal Clinton's anti-trust prosecution of Microsoft. Gates' Microsoft was running afoul of U.S. imperialism by indiscriminately peddling strategic technology to -- and boosting the economic and military capacity of -- potential foes like China. Battered by the courts (another instrument of the state), Gates finally heeded his masters, investing millions, for example, into the shipyard that builds Navy aircraft carriers.

In 2001, Gates' father joined George Soros, Buffet, and two Rockefellers in a full-page New York Times ad protesting a Republican proposal to repeal the estate tax. The tax, the ad read, "exerts a powerful and positive effect on charitable giving." Inheritance levies running to 55% compel the moderately rich to donate to tax-free ruling-class philanthropies. The conservative editors of the Wall Street Journal whined that Buffet favors "death taxes only for those whose estates are too small to hide in foundation tax shelters."

(6/28/06)
Gates' forcible conversion to "charity" recalls earlier confiscations by foundations. Henry Ford, a vicious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, opposed U.S. entry into World War II. Upon his son Edsel's death in 1943, the family began shifting Ford Motor stock to the Ford Foundation rather than cough up the 77% wartime estate tax. When Henry himself died in 1947, Wall Street-based trustees took over the foundation, the nation's richest at the time, devoting it to a host of liberal causes, pointedly including "international affairs."

When Time-Warner bought out Turner Broadcasting in 1995, the rulers attached a slight hitch to loose cannon Ted Turner's $1-billion personal payout: he couldn't keep it. Turner immediately pledged the same sum to an offshoot of the Establishment United Nations Association, which advances U.S. goals at the UN.

And how did Buffet acquire his billions?

Buffett Bilked Billions from Workers' Misery
The wealth amassed by the world's three richest capitalists -- two of whom are Warren Buffett and Bill Gates -- exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 48 poorest countries. In 1983, Buffet's net worth was a "mere" $620 million. With the ruling class's downsizing, wage-cutting and mass layoff assault on the working class in the 1980's, Buffett upped his riches to $3.8 billion in six years. Since then it has multiplied 1,000%, to $38 billion! How?

First he bought Dempster, a windmill manufacturing company, cut costs and laid off workers, generating enough cash to buy the textile firm Berkshire Hathaway, which became his springboard to empire. In 1985, he shut down its New Bedford, Mass. Plant, dumping 425 workers on the street. Buffett continued along these lines, buying one outfit, reaping profits, selling it to generate more profits. That same year he engineered a deal to buy ABC-TV. Rounds of budget-cutting and layoffs followed.

Five years later he purchased U.S. Gypsum which, facing asbestos suits from workers, sought bankruptcy protection against the misery and disease it had brought to thousands of workers.

In August 2004, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Fruit of the Loom moved its Cameron County, Texas production to Honduras, eliminating 800 workers' jobs, in a county that had double-digit unemployment and a 33% poverty rate. This was followed by shutting its Rabun Gap, Georgia yarn facility, dumping another 930 workers.

Then last year Buffet, being Gillette's largest stockholder, merged it with Proctor & Gamble, netting Buffett another $645 million, all of which sparked a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that led to P&G cutting 6,000 jobs.
Buffett's drive to increase Berkshire Hathaway's per-share value at any cost left a trail of closed plants and ruined communities behind him. These mechanisms which created his billion-dollar wealth contributed greatly to the poverty which he now says his stolen billions will "solve."

Such is the fraud that media like the N.Y. Times peddles as "magnanimous philanthropy" by the "captains of industry."