In my last post to this blog, “Charlie’s
Angels They Ain’t,” I pointed to another in a series of examples1 of Loaves & Fishes’
unprincipled money-raising efforts ‒ specifically, the faked-urgency ruse.
It is not surprising, though, that Loaves’ practices aren’t atypical of what often goes
on at other charities.
A recent e-newsletter from GuideStar [one of the many charity
trackers that pretend to be on the donors’ side], includes a link to an interview with a “veteran fundraising expert,” Jerold Panas. Panas, we are told, has, in his career, helped
raise over $11 billion for various organizations.
In one question, Panas is asked “To be successful in asking [potential donors for money], what factors
have to be present?”
He responds [emphases, mine]:
As I discuss in my book, Asking, three pieces are important. The first
is that the organization and the project must be relevant. The donor has to
feel this is something that's significant.
Next, what you're
raising money for has to have emotional appeal. I like it best when the
hair on the back on the neck stands up! I want it to be exciting and have snap,
crackle, and pop.
But most important,
there has to be a sense of urgency. The donor must feel this can't be
postponed. The project has to move forward and the decision to give must be
made as soon as possible. Time is working against us. Lives are being lost.
Kids aren't being served.
Note that for Panas ‒ like Loaves ‒ something urgent doesn’t
motivate the effort to appeal for people’s money, it is the desire to get money that creates the context. And
Panas advises for context that
organizations always [it’s “most important”] manufacture a faked sense of
urgency with their appeals (unless, I suppose, there is handy a highly rare
instance of a valid absence of funds for a true calamity).
What goes on at Loaves & Fishes is very similar to how
TV station UBS2 in the movie Network became a shameless
organization.
At the beginning of Network, UBS has a mostly responsible,
principled news division. But since
the network is losing in the rating wars to other TV networks, and its news production division is very expensivce, new ownership pushes for tawdry
content to snag a higher viewership and improve earnings.
As with UBS in Network, Loaves became a low-standards operation – or, in L&F's case, possibly, has always been unethical in its practices.
Here, a bit from early on in the Network screenplay. Tawdry-content-advocate Diana Christensen lobbies
high-minded journalist Max Schmaucher to jump into the skanky slime without
holding back:
Diana Christensen: I watched
your 6 o'clock news today; it's straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half
of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had
less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex,
scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost
puppies. So, I don't think I'll listen to any protestations of high standards
of journalism when you're right down on the streets soliciting audiences like
the rest of us. Look, all I'm saying is if you're going to hustle, at least do
it right.
Basically, network news – in this 1976 movie that accurately predicted things as they are now -- has to "hustle right" by getting mean spirited. It shows how everything became a race to the bottom. Sliminess pays off. So when you are competing for audience share – or, really, money; everything converts to money – to function best for shareholders seeking ever-higher stock prices – you have to move in the direction of hyped filth.
While Loaves & Fishes makes claims for being high-minded
– in associating itself with Dorothy Day and tying itself to the Catholic Church
when that momentarily serves to its benefit – it is really, fully splashing around in the oozing mud as an organization.
Not-recent photo of Friendship Park at Loaves & Fishes |
League of Revolutionaries for a New America’s former name is the Communist League, founded by Nelson Peery. Peery is still active in his eighties, writing books and playing a part at directing the activities of LRNA. A short video on Perry's life, shows Perry IS a nice man. But Peery, also, is surely the most vile American Communist you can imagine, continuing (at least until rather recently) to justify Stalin’s wholesale slaughter of Ukrainians and Belarusians and others as a necessary sacrifice to further the Communist Revolution. “The end justifies the means,” is the Machiavellian concept that is being embraced here. According to Russia’s records, about 61 million people in the USSR were summarily slaughtered by direction of Stalin. That is the equivalent of just short of one-fifth the current population of the United States.
Call me silly, but I think it should get people’s attention
when Loaves & Fishes [and its associated, spin-off charities SHOC,
SafeGround – both at the L&F compound – and others, which have weird
Left-of-Neptune political moorings] align themselves with some people who stand
next to perhaps THE greatest work of evil that ever came to our planet. Hitler was a piker at Evil, compared to Stalin. [At the defunct website American Red Groups, LRNA is cited as being Stalinist and — of communist and communist-leaning groups — one of the ones most opposed to Democracy.]
Here is Peery’s justification of Stalin’s slaughter of the
innocent people: “Nelson
Peery on Stalin and Revolution.”
A key statement from the text:
Let us look at "Stalin's crimes" in this light. There
was no physical "liquidation" of the kulaks3 or other reactionary
classes. They were eliminated as classes by the liquidation of their economic bases. Soviet power crushed the resistance to industrialization. Millions died in the 25 defensive wars fought between 1917 and 1940. A large number went to labor camps and many died there.
…
Stalin understood that counterrevolution was possible. His monumental place in history is precisely because he relentlessly, almost daily, worked to crush every spontaneous impulse or plan for counterrevolution.
---
FOOTNOTES
FOOTNOTES
1 Other ‘Sacramento Homeless blog” posts about Loaves &
Fishes skanky money-raising programs:
3 It is my understanding that "kulak" in Russian literally means "fist" -- as in tightfisted. Kulaks were small-business people who were, many of them, cruel. Actually a great many kulaks were physically eliminated, usually after having first been sadistically tortured. Other kulaks who escaped being apprehended starved to death among the 2.5 million in the Ukraine who saw their farm produce apprehended. Ukraine, by the way, was part of the Soviet Union at the time.
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