Used Material from:Organic Rooibos Tea
This week I was honored to guest lecture at the prestigious Monterey Institute for International Studies. The topic was nation building but because I am the founder of MicroCredit Enterprises, which finances microloans for poor women in the developing world, the discussion shifted to people building.
My talk was open to the public (what a splendid idea for all universities!) and in the audience a raised hand came from a gentlemen with deep faith convictions. He described how his church addresses the multidisciplinary nature of poverty in African villages by drilling wells, building schools, erecting health clinics, etc. while also distributing bibles and proselytizing the gospel.
photo credit: Danny Gallant
As I suggested to the class (pictured here) that all economic development promotes one sort of gospel or another. Microfinance, for example, inherently proselytizes the virtues of free market capitalism. Microfinance embeds gender equality, women’s empowerment and human rights — development for the whole person, if you will. Enduring economic development upsets the status quo.
What disturbed me about this particular gentlemen was not his faith motivation which was genuine, but his unwavering conviction that his church’s time and money is actually doing good on the African continent. Whether it is or not, he is never going to know because he is not asking any self-examining questions about his impact on the lives he purports to save.
From beginning to end, he unconditionally follows the personality cult of his Savior and the doctrine of his religion. He is a change agent without doubts.
He not much different than the donors, journalists and other apostles who believed in Greg Mortenson, best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea and founder of a school-building program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. His compelling (but allegedly hyped) personal story created a media blizzard of belief in him and a dearth of data about his impact.
For two very thoughtful commentaries read Three Cups of BS by Alanna Shaikh and It’s Not About The Tea by Kevin Starr.
One regrettable defense for Mortenson is that he is simply a bad manager. This narrative feeds an urban legend pushed by ideologues and market fundamentalists who want to believe an alternate reality. Nonprofit is a tax status, nothing more. It does not establish management quality or results. It is certainly not an excuse for anything.
Yes, some nonprofits are poorly run, as the Mortenson dustup and opulent church altars surely suggest. However, by the same fuzzy yardstick, British Petroleum confirms the mendacity of all corporate chieftains and Donald Trump is an icon of political truth-telling. We can reject the charlatans of social change without concluding that dedicated nonprofit executives don’t care a whit about the efficacy of what they do, wantonly waste money or poorly evaluate programmatic results.
Let’s reject social change by personality cult and embrace empowering the poor to speak up, speak out and speak for themselves. That’s what good nonprofit leaders have always done.
Ron Paul was Tea Party before Tea Party was cool.
A candidate of the fringe and the Libertarian college-age set in 2008, the 75-year-old representative from Texas announced his second run for the Republican nomination for president during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday.
But if Mr. Paul remains the same, blunt-spoken, small-government rabble-rouser that he was four years ago, he and his top aides are betting that the times — and the Republican primary electorate — have changed in the interim.
“Time has come around to where the people are agreeing with much of what I’ve been saying for 30 years,” Mr. Paul said on ABC. “The time is right.”
The rise of the Tea Party movement offers Mr. Paul an opportunity to be embraced as a kind of mainstream candidate that he never was while running last time around.
Well, not mainstream, exactly. He still advocates the legalization of heroin, the elimination of half of the federal agencies and an immediate end to virtually all military “adventures” overseas. Plenty of Tea Party activists would say they are uncomfortable with many of those positions.
His path to the nomination, much less the Oval Office, is still difficult to imagine — perhaps even for Mr. Paul himself — given his apparent disregard for the niceties of political accommodation or any obvious effort to woo the party’s leaders.
And despite Mr. Paul’s remarkable ability to raise millions of dollars from his committed followers, it remains unclear whether he could raise tens of millions — if not hundreds of millions — from the nation’s wealthiest interests to compete with his Republican rivals and, ultimately, President Obama.
But there is no ignoring the sense that Mr. Paul’s timing may be spot on for the political times. And running for president gives him a national platform for the issues he has cared about for decades, as well as a chance to spotlight the new leaders of the movement, including his son, the new Republican senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul.
The new energy in the Republican party appears to come from the Tea Party activists whose primary issues are close to Mr. Paul’s: a rabid desire to cut government spending, a fear of the mounting national debt, a dislike of the politics of compromise and a distrust of the Republican establishment that goes almost as deep as their disgust with Democrats.
In fact, Mr. Paul claims to be the founding father of the movement.
“Of course, the Tea Party movement was started during the last campaign when there was a special day where they raised $6 million spontaneously,” Mr. Paul said during a debate among potential Republican candidates last week in South Carolina. “And that was the beginning of it.”
The reference was to Dec. 17, 2007, when supporters of Mr. Paul’s raised more than $6 million for his presidential candidacy on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Issues of spending, taxes, debt and freedom helped fuel the fund-raising “moneybomb” that kept Mr. Paul in the 2008 race well into June.
But even that infusion of cash didn’t make Mr. Paul a real contender in 2008. With no real campaign infrastructure and a reputation as a fringe candidate, Mr. Paul did not win a single state during the primary process.
And while he entered the Republican convention with close to three dozen delegates (he came in second place in a dozen or so states), Mr. Paul was never taken seriously by those running the convention on behalf of the party’s nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
In 2012, Mr. Paul enters a presidential race that is, if anything, even more unsettled than the 2008 Republican campaign was at the same point in time.
His supporters say he is poised to make a more serious run at the nomination. Drew Ivers, a member of the central committee of Iowa’s Republican Party, is a committed supporter of Mr. Paul’s.
“The spending. The war. The financial crisis,” Mr. Ivers said recently. “That’s how snowballs develop, you know. They start small, and they get bigger as they roll downhill.”
And while it may seem unlikely that the Republican Party would choose an irascible man in his mid-seventies to be their standard bearer, Mr. Paul tends to shrug off all the second-guessing with an affable humility.
Asked at the debate whether he was suggesting that heroin and prostitution are an “exercise of liberty,” Mr. Paul thought for a moment — clearly recognizing the political trap — and then barreled ahead.
“You put those words someplace. But yes, in essence, if I leave it to the states, it’s going to be up to the states,” Mr. Paul said. “Up until this past century, you know, for over 100 years, they were legal.”
He went on, clearly enjoying himself: “What you’re inferring is, you know what, if we legalized heroin tomorrow, everyone is going to use heroin. How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would put the hand up, ‘Oh, yeah, I need the government to take care of me, I don’t want to use heroin so I need these laws.’ ”
The sarcasm was evident, and the transcript of the debate accurately captures what happened next: Cheers, applause.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 13, 2011
The Web summary for an earlier version of this post stated incorrectly that this was Ron Paul’s second run for president. He has run three times for president, twice for the Republican nomination and once as the Libertarian Party candidate.
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