More reasoned? UN funded NGOs? What a hogwash. I can assure you that virtually no UN money goes to the nonprofits - on average nonprofits get about 40% of their revenues from *national* (either central or local) governments (grants and contracts) and about 50% from fees and charges, while remianing 10% from private donations (for more detailed info by country and field of service see Salamon, Anheier, List, Toepler, Sokolowski and Associates, _Global Civil Society_, Baltimore, 1999).
It seems that the attitude toward "civil society" can be used as an indicator of the fringe/cultish nature of the group holding it - the greater the hostility the more wacky and cultish nature of the group.
>San Francisco Bay Guardian had a great set of articles a while back on the
>dangers of taking dollars from the big foundations that attach demobilizing
>(i.e. get sucked up into relating to the elite centrist policy wonk arena,
>thou shalt not organize noisy troublesome grass roots) conditions to the
>grants. (Max, that rant doesn't apply to EPI, keep up the good work, OK, and
And how many grass roots troops do the SF Guardian and sundry "revolutionary" groups organized or mobilized? By listening to these crackpots one would belive that if it were not for the fifth column sponsored by liberal foundations, US would be engulfed in a proletarian revolution. This tripe is even more wacky than Alan Greenspan in a black helicopter planning a UN invasion of Amerikkka.
wojtek