Great new feature on framing
Sorry about the light posting this past week. Still in a scramble to finish up Projectus Monumentus before the snow falls, and getting into the term paper part of the semester for school. Yippeee.
Anyways, I just wanted to let you know about a new feture on Buzzflash, called “Ask Rockridge”, a Q&A feature with George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, a group focused on framing the progressive issues properly. Part of why the right wing has been so dominant in the last two decades is because they have mastered the art of language to support their agenda in subtle ways (i.e. “death” tax vs. “estate” tax, tax “relief” instead of tax “cuts”). The Rockridge Institute is hoping to change that.
This week’s question is particularly pertinent, offering a strong rebuttal for those who think tat helping people should be left to charities, not the government. Some highlights:
Philanthropic organizations allocate resources in a manner that reflects the priorities of the private interests who control the money – the board of directors decides which issue areas are most important and who the money should go to. So, a foundation’s funding decisions may not necessarily coincide with the needs of Americans as a whole.
The moral mission of government, as it pertains to the debate between public programs and private philanthropy, is to pool the common wealth of the populace to address the needs of the public. The agenda is set through our democratically elected government and represents the public interest and needs of all people – including disenfranchised groups whose priorities may not be the same as those of wealthy families.
Non-profit organizations serve a different function than government, filling the gaps where government intervention is inappropriate, ineffective, or devastation has been caused by harmful government policies. For example, a non-profit organization may open a soup kitchen to feed people living on the street. But the deeper systemic causes of ongoing poverty and chronic homelessness can only be addressed through our collective action, which is government policy and programs.
In other words, non-profit organizations should be used to address the immediate symptoms of societal problems. A soup kitchen does an excellent job serving meals to the hungry, but it cannot improve the job market or raise minimum wage to empower the poor with reliable opportunity. Government policy is needed to address these root causes of hunger in American cities.
