Episode 2 Transcription

[Music Strumming]

Voice 1 (Edgar Villanueva)

Philanthropy as a sector exists because of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth in the first place…

Voice 2 (Stephanie Acosta)

There is no such thing as making wealth that isn’t part of a community…

Voice 3 (Karen Finley)

Why I was so committed to non-profits or NEA or funding for the arts is because then people do not have to be dependent on only the wealthy...

Voice 4 (Sara Juli)

It’s still at the end of the day, you fighting for your work, which... we fight for our work in all sorts of other ways

MIGUEL

[Sung with playful music] Art and money and dance and money and what is the right thing to do with that? When the system's so fucked up, [gets louder and harmonizes] are you for sale?

MIGUEL

Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back! My name is Miguel Gutierrez and this is the second episode of “Are You For Sale?”, a podcast where we look at the ethical entanglements between money and art making. 

I want to begin by acknowledging that I’m joining you from the unceded lands of Lenape peoples, which we now refer to as Brooklyn. 

Now if you haven’t listened to the first episode I recommend that you go back and do! But if you’re a person who’s into being confused and just wanna stay and keep listening, I celebrate you. I looooove confusion.

Today we are going to start getting into the real heart of the matter and that heart is - PHILANTHROPY - [sound effect: philantropía] yes! 

Philanthropy, this word which comes to us from the Greek, philanthropos, love of people, has come to mean something very specific in this day and age. But how it’s thought about now is not how we’ve always thought about it. And how we think about it now is changing. [guitar strumming begins]

At the end of the last episode I talked about how one of the things that got me into making this podcast was reading a book that came out in 2018 by Edgar Villanueva. That book is called Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. Villanueva is an indigenous member of the Lumbee Tribe who works in social justice philanthropy. In his book, he lays out how philanthropy perpetuates the “divide, control, and exploit” dynamics of settler colonialism. He explains how, historically, philanthropic wealth has been built on the backs of poor people and people of color. These same people, generations later, are then pitted against each other when applying for financial support from philanthropic foundations. Using the metaphor of the plantation, Villanueva talks about how the structure of the foundation itself reflects a system that is more concerned with maintaining its power and wealth than with actually changing or truly recalibrating the vectors of societal and economic power. Bringing in a world-view from his Native American background, he asks, what if we could use money as medicine? He recommends that the world of philanthropy should welcome a new paradigm of “connect, relate and belong” and he recommends a seven step approach for healing the field of philanthropy. 

Through Bay Area based choreographer Hope Mohr’s initiative called The Bridge Project, I was able to speak with Edgar Villanueva last June (of 2020). We’ll be listening to snippets of that interview during today’s episode. I started out by asking him how he describes the work that he does…

[Interview Audio with Edgar Villanueva]

EDGAR

I work inside the sector of institutional philanthropy. And I say institutional because philanthropy in itself is something that typically means love of people and philanthropy has always existed organically in our communities and it’s a feeling or a point of view or action a human to human thing that’s been institutionalized into an entire sector. And So philanthropy as a sector now represents tens of thousands of foundations, these are charitable institutions in the United States who sit on 900 billion, with a B, billion dollars of philanthropic capital. And frankly, or you know anyone who is a person who has wealth, or any corporation that has wealth can start a foundation in this country, which is simply creating a what, I might, I kind of think of it as a tax sheltered organization, not pay taxes on money, and then that funding is then used to support charitable causes, like art, like healthcare, like education. So I’ve worked in the field as a person not with wealth but a person who is responsible for being sort of a bridge between the community and the sources of wealth to deploy capital into communities. 

MIGUEL

I think I never had really even understood quite literally the the structure of what a foundation is and something that I read is like the word foundation doesn’t actually tell you anything about what the organization is and there are so many of you know, you’ve worked in family foundations and then there’s also these kind of larger in the arts field there’s like family foundations that became more sort of institutional and large. Can you kinda walk us through the way that you understand the structure of the foundation particularly with regards to something like the 5% rule which I think is so fascinating, which I didn’t know about. 

EDGAR

You know one reason a lot of people don’t know about the sector philanthropy is because it’s relatively new like there there are foundations like the Rockefellers that I’ve been around for a long long time but probably about I would say 85% or more of foundations that exist were created in the last 20 years. And that’s because we're seeing the wealth inequality in the US you know grow like crazy and the folks who have money have more and more money and of course wealth advisors to those folks are like “Hey, maybe starting a foundation is a good thing” so it’s almost become like a uh popular thing for your family to have a foundation if you have money, and there’s very little regulation in this field and so you know literally it’s like if you apply for scholarships when you know when you were in college you probably noticed they are like thousands of them and there’s a scholarship for everything you could name right? Like a scholarship for people who have red hair who are studying the anatomy of frogs, I don’t know, like very specific things right? So in philanthropy is the same thing like I could start a foundation if I had the resources today and fund who I wanna fund who don’t want to find and there’s um  put who I want on my board or not and no one could tell me what to do with that. 

[Miguel Narration Audio]

MIGUEL

I agree with Edgar’s assertion that we don’t really know that much about foundations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. So how did we get to the modern concept of philanthropy as we know it?

[Miguel harmonizing singing] Time to take a history break!

MIGUEL

[sci-fi music begins] Philanthropy has a long history. Different religions have traditions of giving - almsgiving in Christianity, tsedakah in Judaism, zakat in Islam for example. The basic idea is you give to those in need. So sometimes it’s about justice, addressing the inequalities in a society, and sometimes it’s about purifying or giving merit to the giver. 

From what I’ve read, it seems that most historians agree that what we think of as philanthropy now emerged in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, [overlapping male voices murmuring in the background] when a whole bunch of dudes got REAL rich from the various industries they headed - 

you got your John D. Rockefeller, (Miguel Aside: Oil) [cash register sound]

you got your Cornelius Vanderbilt, (Miguel Aside: shipping and railroads) [cash register sound]

you got your Leland Stanford, (Miguel Aside: also railroads) [cash register sound]

you got your J.P. Morgan [Chase bank phone call audio “Welcome to Chase “para Español oprime él asterisco”] [cash register sound]

you got your Andrew Mellon, (Miguel Aside: banking, oil, steel, whiskey, what?, ships!) [cash register sound seven times]

and you got your Andrew Carnegie (Miguel Aside: steel [-ing all the money])

(Miguel Aside: Bitch, I know all this!)

MIGUEL

Ok but did you know that in 1889, Andrew Carnegie wrote an essay that would come to be known as The Gospel of Wealth (“Glow Worm” a song from 1908 begins) in which he argues that rich people should give away all of their wealth in their lifetime. The logic went something like this:

Rich men should invest the money they make from their business so that it yields a return. Because without earning this interest the wealth will just get spent, and that is, apparently, a terrible thing. But by investing, you create this excess of wealth, and it’s only right that you should give it away. You shouldn’t give it to your kids cuz that will just make them lazy, and you shouldn’t wait till after you’re dead to give it away because that’s just plain selfish. 

He also argued that wealth inequality was not only inevitable, but necessary, because competition among the wealthy amounted to “progress of the race.”  

Anyone who argues that this wealth should get spread around is just a lazy socialist! 

Rich people (Miguel Aside: uh, men, meaning, of course, white men), by virtue of having gotten rich, are the appropriate people to call on for administering money. Does this all sound familiar yet? 

Hey, don’t take my word for it, let’s hear from the horse’s mouth himself!

[Andrew Carnegie recording]

ANDREW CARNEGIE: 

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth.

[Miguel Narration]

MIGUEL:

Ok ok, so that’s impossible to understand soooo instead I’ve asked my friend, Tess Dworman, who is a choreographer AND a  voice-over artist extraordinaire to say it instead:

TESS DWORMAN

“This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, (cough) experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”

MIGUEL

Thank you, Tess (applause).

MIGUEL

“Doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.” Does this sound as patronizing to you as it does to me? 

But basically the thrust of the argument here is this - you can spread this “excess wealth” evenly and benefit just a few individuals a little bit, (spacey background music comes in) OR you can use the money to create a big gesture which benefits a LOT of people. For example he suggested funding schools and colleges, libraries, hospitals, public parks, concert halls, public baths, church buildings, etc. That’s all great, right? Buuuut he also cut wages for his workers. He extended the work day from eight hours a day to twelve hours a day to save costs on personnel. One of the workers in a Carnegie mill at the time said, “After working twelve hours, how can a man go to the library?” 

So, right there you see the stakes of the trade-off, right? But history break’s not over yet! Another one of these old white dudes that I want to touch on (Miguel Aside: oooh) is John D. Rockefeller, not to be confused with Rockapella (excerpt from Rock around the clock begins) (sound effect “Yikes.”)

In the early 1900’s, (pizzicato background music starts) Rockefeller became interested in creating a foundation to distribute wealth. He first attempted to do it at the state level but states capped philanthropic endowments at three million so he decided instead to try and get a federal charter, which, that just means a law, right, for his foundation..

In 1909 he invested 50 million dollars in the Rockefeller Foundation and he sought out, quote, “congressional approval of a bill to incorporate the foundation and sanction its size, open ended purpose and local, national and international scope of activity.” 

Buuuuuuuut he met resistance! Teddy Roosevelt. (alien voice sound effect: “the former president”) William Taft (alien voice sound effect: “then the current president”). Samuel Gompers (alien voice sound effect: “famous labor leader”). They all believed that a foundation was an anti-democratic institution because the private donor gets to affect public action. Like why should a rich person, just by virtue of being rich, get to have so much power? They also didn’t like that this foundation would exist in perpetuity and only be accountable to a small group of trustees. So, over the course of four years, this bill was re-drafted to include the following provisions: the foundation would be capped at one hundred million dollars, any income the endowment earned had to be spent, all the principal had to be spent within 50 years and governance of the foundation had to be partially public. But even with these stipulations, it still didn’t pass the Senate. So Rockefeller just went back to NY, took out all of those amendments and had it passed at the state level. 

Anyway, I bring up the Rockefeller example because I think it’s so interesting that at the dawn of what we consider to be the modern age of philanthropy in the U.S., it was seen as potentially threatening to society and, more importantly, democracy. Contrast that to today, where philanthropy is regarded not only as esteemable, but almost like a necessary part of our social fabric. 

But let’s get back to my interview with Edgar.

[Interview Audio with Edgar Villanueva]

EDGAR

The only regulation you know that the common regulation of people know about is this thing called the minimum payout rule. So what happen when foundations begin trending and people started putting money into institutions there was no law in the United States that said well you can put the money in the foundation get a tax write off of there is there is no nothing that was forcing that money to leave the foundation to go to community. So people were starting foundations and that capital was never reaching communities at all. Foundations were not even making grants. So it took an act of Congress in 1976 to force foundations to actually pay some of that money out to community and this is what is called the minimum payout rule and that number is 5% and so of all the assets that you may have the $900 billion approximately of assets that that foundations are sitting on, the law only requires that 5% about money actually ever leave the door of the foundation to get to community and so you know the public benefit of foundations [chuckles] is something that we could, that is up for debate right? If so little of those resources are actually leaving the doors of foundations. And that number has not changed there have been initiatives through the years to push foundations to increase that payout rule but, that’s it's always, there's never been a political will for you know to to get that legislation passed. And so we’re still sitting here, you know, 40 something years later with the same amount of money being required for payment. 

[Miguel Narration] 

As Edgar lays out, it wasn’t until the 1969 Tax Reform Act [marimba like background music begins], some fifty years or so after the creation of the first big foundations, that the Government, under Nixon of all people, stepped in to say “Hey Foundations! You need to distribute a minimum of your assets to the people!” And yeah it was originally six percent and, sure enough, in 1981 they changed it to five because apparently the foundations were worried about spending down their assets too quickly.

I decided to ask my friend and fellow artist Stephanie Acosta, who’s always got something super smart to say about, well, everything...

[Interview with Stephanie Acosta]

STEPHANIE

I’m an interdisciplinary artist and DIY scholar

[Miguel Narration]

MIGUEL

...what she thought about foundations, philanthropy and regulations....

[Interview with Stephanie Acosta]

STEPHANIE

Yeah philanthropy, right, and like what it means and idea of it being about like the etymology of love is so important because I think it’s really mis- this is just an American problem of misreading and misnomering philanthropy when it comes to money as charity. This idea of like “something we give to those that don’t have and it’s our excess” in this kind of dismissal and also an expectation it has all these other things but just that that brings up a lot of feelings for me because I think about philanthropy and I think about the idea of like if you’re part of the reason that organizations or the very wealthy are expected to share some of their wealth in this way is because we’ve really undone any of their taxation in a way that makes sense proportionately to what they gain from... there is no such thing as making wealth off… that isn’t part of a community involvement. It’s like, do your trucks drive on roads?

MIGUEL

Sure. 

STEPHANIE

So, for me whenever I think about philanthropy one of the main things that I start to think about is taxation, the way in which philanthropy is art laundering your money and gives you an opportunity to both get credit for something that you actually owe it’s not a gift it’s not charity that would be excess - this is what you owe. 

[Miguel Narration]

MIGUEL

As Stephanie, herself, would say: Facts.

[Interview with Stephanie Acosta]

STEPHANIE

And it's a way of avoiding that aspect of it. They get like three things out of giving that money away compared to the damage done and the the resources extracted from the community and the community’s contracts, so yeah so it’s just it’s like you talk about like money being triggering but its like even just the word philanthropy for me is so triggering because it sends me into this anger about all I imagine it’s just people like hiding their wealth in spaces that feed them back or aggrandize them when it’s about a respons- to me it should be about a responsibility, and should be in addition to the money that they owe us already that should be coming to us as like supported beings as part of a supportive culture

MIGUEL

But what about the argument that says that people with money should get to do what they want with it?

STEPHANIE

What America does really well is create like the lie that gets all these poor people to agree on this idea that’s about a freedom idea like anyone should be able to, why wouldn’t we want people that are good at business, right, to be there. But it’s like they’re not good at business, they’re good at scamming because no one earns a million dollars, you steal a million dollars. (Miguel Aside: ooooh). There’s no such thing as earning a million dollars. There’s nothing anyone does that is that valuable. When I think about something like the minimum and the idea of that literal hoarding and the idea that you have to pass laws to demand this thing instead of passing a law that makes it illegal to hoard resources. That it should be illegal to be sitting on that much when human beings are dying from a lack of. (soft horn background music begins) That is an unconscionable illogical structure for any community to coexist and claim that they are together in it, you know? It’s not about limiting someone’s potential it’s about saying no matter who you are no matter what happens we have each other because no one singularly earned anything. [background music starts]

[Miguel Narration]

MIGUEL

Yeah [sigh] so this hoarding of wealth… and this perpetuity issue… The idea that this foundation money should just exist… forever. It’s interesting, or depressing, to note, how rarely we talk about wealth ceilings. We’re in this endless cultural debate about raising the minimum wage, but we never talk about setting a standard maximum wage. And for all his talk about spending all your wealth in your lifetime, Carnegie also ended up creating a grantmaking organization in 1911, six years before his death: The Carnegie Corporation. and it’s still up and running today. That said, his ideas still have traction. In 2010, Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates initiated something called “The Giving Pledge,” a call to billionaires to commit at least half of their wealth toward philanthropy. And two hundred plus billionaires have signed onto it, like Mackenzie Scott, Elon Musk, and power couple Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. (though notably, the richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, has not signed onto the Pledge)

But yeah, so all this money… just moving around in the stock market, some of it going to the public and to organizations as grants and the rest of it doing… who knows what? It does beg the question, can you actually decolonize wealth? What is the role of government here? Wait, the government? [car skidding to stop sound effect] Doesn’t the government also give money to art? It sure does. [upbeat techno music begins] The National Endowment for the Arts! 

 We’ll be talking about various forms of government funding, the NEA, and the culture wars of the early 90s, over the next couple episodes. So please come back and listen because the plot thickens.

Are You For Sale? is supported by the National Performance Network’s Storytelling fund, Brown University Arts Initiative and Dance NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund.

Our managing producer is Michelle Fletcher, our production assistants are Jake Cedar and Camryn Stafford. Thanks again to Tess Dworman, for that uncanny impersonation of Andy Carnegie.

The title of this podcast comes from a line in Morgan Parker’s poem Welcome to the Jungle and yes I made the theme song and all the weird background music. [alien voice effect “and I edited it”] 

You can learn more about what we talked about today and everyone you heard from, including a link to the whole interview I did with Edgar, at our website areyouforsalepodcast.com, where you can also sign up for our mailing list. You can also write to us at areyouforsalepodcast@gmail.com.

Please subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you got to us from, and follow us on Instagram @areyouforsalepodcast

Until next time, stay weird, make art, stay blessed, not stressed. Adios everyone!

STEPHANIE

You just want me to have public feelings? Cause I’m ready to have public feelings, at all times…

This episode sources information from The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich, and The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age by David Callahan.