Nonprofits should not allow themselves to be used by the wealthy to scrub their consciences.
When it comes to blood money for the arts, how bloody is too bloody?
On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided that money made from selling the opioids that have killed several hundred thousand people is too bloody. It announced it would no longer take donations from members of the Sackler family linked to OxyContin. “On occasion, we feel it’s necessary to step away from gifts that are not in the public interest,” Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president, said.
“Gifts that are not in the public interest.” It is a pregnant, important phrase. Coming on the heels of similar decisions by the Tate Modern in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the spurning of Oxy-cash seems to reflect a growing awareness that gifts to the arts and other good causes are not only a way for ultra-wealthy people to scrub their consciences and reputations. Philanthropy can also be central to purchasing the immunity needed to profiteer at the expense of the common welfare.
Perhaps accepting tainted money in such cases isn’t just giving people a pass. Perhaps it is enabling misconduct against the public.
This was the startling assertion made by New York State in its civil complaint, filed in March, against members of the Sackler family and others involved in the opioid crisis. It accused defendants of seeking to “profiteer from the plague they knew would be unleashed.” And the lawsuit explicitly linked Sackler do-gooding with Sackler harm-doing: “Ultimately, the Sacklers used their ill-gotten wealth to cover up their misconduct with a philanthropic campaign intending to whitewash their decades-long success in profiting at New Yorkers’ expense.”
It was strong stuff: The State of New York was officially claiming that in taking Sackler money, arts institutions had allowed themselves to be used as lubricant in a death machine. “It’s a remarkable statement,” Benjamin Soskis, a historian of philanthropy at the Urban Institute in Washington, told me this week, “the sort of thing we heard from critics of philanthropy on the periphery of power but rarely, in recent decades, from those at the center.”
Are museums, opera houses, food pantries and other nonprofits to be held responsible for how their donors have made their money? It is a question being asked more and more as a century-old taboo shatters.
“No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,” Theodore Roosevelt said after John D. Rockefeller proposed starting a foundation in 1909. It was not a lonely thought at the time.
But in the decades since, not least because of the amount of philanthropic coin that has been spent (can it still be called bribing when millions are the recipients?), touching all corners of our cultural life, attitudes have changed. And, as I found in spending the last few years reporting on nonprofits and foundations, a deeply complicit silence took hold: It was understood that you don’t challenge people on how they make their money, how they pay their taxes (or don’t), what continuing deeds they may be engaged in — so long as they “give back.”
When I speak privately with people working in nonprofits, as I often do, especially younger people, I hear this complaint again and again: They agonize about having to stay quiet not only about their donors’ membership in a class that has benefited from an age of inequality but also about specific conduct by many donors that often worsens the problems the donors and nonprofits are working to solve.
And so the decision by the Met and the other museums may be a small sign that this compact is cracking — and perhaps that nonprofits are taking a broader view of their role in public life: not only as doers of good in a particular area of work but also, if they’re not careful, as enablers of broader, if more generalized, societal harm.
“Turning down money runs against the grain of the thinking that’s long governed charitable boards — that they are stewards of the interests of particular institutions, with considerations of broader public interest being peripheral,” Mr. Soskis, the historian, said when I asked him about the Met. “What we are seeing more and more of, through the spread of social media, and an increased willingness to critically engage major philanthropic gifts, is the assertion of the public’s interest in the philanthropic exchange.”
It remains to be seen whether other arts institutions will follow the lead of the Met, Tate and Guggenheim — and more broadly, whether the nonprofit sector will begin asking itself some deeply uncomfortable questions.
Should anyone working to make cities better and more equitable take money from JPMorgan Chase, which paid a huge sum for its role in helping to bring about the 2008 mortgage disaster and financial crisis? Should anyone working to help families affected by President Trump’s immigration policies take money from Mark Zuckerberg, whose soft-pedaling of Russian interference in the 2016 election allowed anti-immigrant hate to spread and potentially helped Mr. Trump gain votes?
It remains to be seen whether other arts institutions will follow the lead of the Met, Tate and Guggenheim — and more broadly, whether the nonprofit sector will begin asking itself some deeply uncomfortable questions.
Should anyone working to make cities better and more equitable take money from JPMorgan Chase, which paid a huge sum for its role in helping to bring about the 2008 mortgage disaster and financial crisis? Should anyone working to help families affected by President Trump’s immigration policies take money from Mark Zuckerberg, whose soft-pedaling of Russian interference in the 2016 election allowed anti-immigrant hate to spread and potentially helped Mr. Trump gain votes? Should any health institution take money tied to Pepsi or Coca-Cola?
Make no mistake: To ask these questions opens a can of worms. The Sacklers are an easy case. Once the complicity turns more diffuse, it is hard to say whether a nonprofit is participating in an injustice by taking money — or doing the best it can in a flawed reality. What’s next after this? Is there a statute of limitations on looking for blood money? What kind of moral purity test are these institutions supposed to use? Once you begin to raise these dilemmas, how do you actually draw those lines around what’s acceptable?
The Met has already drawn some lines. It won’t remove the Sackler name from its galleries; it won’t return money already donated. What it should do is go beyond a single act of rebuffing to model a new process for evaluating money.
Past and future donations could be judged on various criteria:
- Was the money legally and fairly made?
- Is the money owed to tax evasion or extreme legal tax avoidance?
- Is the museum effectively selling a modern papal indulgence for a sin that shouldn’t be so easily pardoned?
- Does the donor have a duty of reparation to people they have exploited or harmed that gives those parties more of a right to the money?
And the public should be brought into the process. Public-facing institutions enjoy the privilege of being untaxed, so citizens should be able to comment on and scrutinize prospective donations.
These questions will long be with us. These museums have forced an essential conversation. For far too long, generosity has been allowed to serve as a wingman of injustice; giving back disguises merciless taking; making a difference becomes inseparable from making a killing — sometimes literally. It is high time to reject these alibis for treachery.
Opioids: Kicking America’s Addiction (podcast)
America is now deep in an opioid epidemic…. With thousands dying from heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioid overdoses. If you want to know more about how we got here, go back and listen to last week’s episode. ..On today’s show we’re looking at treatment. Over almost 20 years, the number of people in the US looking for treatment for an opioid addiction jumped by more than 600% …. So the pressing question of the moment is this: how can we possibly help these people?
We’re Going to Miss Paul Ryan
Now Paul Ryan is announcing that he’s retiring — after saying “I ain’t going anywhere” in December — and the outlook for Republicans is grim, both in the 2018 midterms and beyond.
.. “Ryan has never loved the job; he oozes aggravation when discussing intraparty debates over ‘micro-tactics,’ and friends say he feels like he’s running a daycare center.”
.. By July, the House of Representatives had passed a slew of big bills, only to watch them slowly die in the Senate. He’s also trying to work with a president who flips from priority to priority (
- DACA!
- Guns!
- North Korea!
- Syria!
- Opioids!
- Infrastructure!
- ) and a constantly-changing White House staff. It’s hard to generate any sustained momentum for key legislation.
.. At least some of this year’s mass GOP retirements stem from a sense that little can really get done in Trump’s Washington, so you might as well do something else more lucrative.
.. The guy who liberals depicted throwing granny off the cliff . . . was also the kind of man goes into drug treatment centers, touches the scars from the “track marks” of heroin addicts, and prays with and for them. He was portrayed as some sort of heartless Ayn Rand acolyte when he emphasized how conservatives needed to find solutions for poverty. He was civil, well-informed, polite, and firm, the opposite of a table-pounding, demagogic extremist, and that probably just aggravated his critics on the left even more
British-Chinese Opium War
Lin questioned how Britain could declare itself moral while its merchants profited from the legal sale in China of a drug that was banned in Britain. He wrote: “Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified, and you may plead ignorance of the severity of our laws, but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut this harmful drug forever.”[56] The letter never reached the Queen, with one source suggesting that it was lost in transit.[57] Lin pledged that nothing would divert him from his mission, “If the traffic in opium were not stopped a few decades from now we shall not only be without soldiers to resist the enemy, but also in want of silver to provide an army.”[58]
.. The British Superintendent of Trade in China, Charles Elliot, protested the decision to forcibly seize the opium stockpiles. He ordered all ships carrying opium to flee and prepare for battle. Lin responded by quarantining the foreign dealers in their warehouses, and kept them from communicating with their ships in port.[58] To defuse the situation, Elliot convinced the British traders to cooperate with Chinese authorities and hand over their opium stockpiles with the promise of eventual compensation for their losses by the British government.[32] While this amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that the British government did not disapprove of the trade, it also placed a huge liability on the exchequer. This promise, and the inability of the British government to pay it without causing a political storm, was an important casus belli for the subsequent British offensive.[61] During April and May 1839, British and American dealers surrendered 20,283 chests and 200 sacks of opium. The stockpile was publicly destroyed on the beach outside of Guangzhou.[58]
.. Under this system, an incoming foreign captain and the Cohong merchant whom had purchased the goods off of his ship swore that the vessel carried no illegal goods. Upon examining the records of the port, Lin was infuriated to find that in the 20 years since opium had been declared illegal, not a single infraction had been reported.[62] As a consequence, Lin demanded that all foreign merchants and Qing officials sign a new bond promising not to deal in opium under penalty of death.[63].. Following the Chinese crackdown on the opium trade, discussion arose as to how Britain would respond, as the public in the United States and Britain had previously expressed outrage that Britain was supporting the opium trade.[84] Many British citizens sympathized with the Chinese and wanted to halt the sale of opium, while others want to contain or regulate the international narcotics trade. However, a great deal of anger was expressed over the treatment of British diplomats and towards the protectionist trading policies of Qing China. The Whig controlled government in particular advocated for war with China, and the pro-Whig press printed stories about Chinese “despotism and cruelty.”[85]