It sounds like a great idea

[[email protected]]

The fable goes that the boundaries of this sector are respected by the state and the "private sector," which leaves a safe space for non-governmental and non-profit organizations to advocate for things like civil rights, free speech, and accountable government.

But if it were real, it wouldn’t have existed for decades. Since at least the 1970s, “civil society” actors like unions and churches have succumbed to the relentless onslaught of free-market statism, which has turned “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests to exert influence at arm’s length.

The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of list of lebanon cell phone numbers think tanks and government NGOs whose purpose, hidden behind all their verbiage, is to carry out political programs by agreement.

And it’s not just the obvious front groups like the Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes pointless Western organizations like Freedom House, where naive but well-intentioned nonprofit careers are tied up in government funding streams to denounce human rights abuses outside the West while leaving domestic abuses as blind spots.

Citizens' conferences - which activists hold in developing countries around the world hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy alliance between "government and private actors" at geopolitical events like the Stockholm Internet Forum - simply could not exist if they were not supported by millions of government dollars each year.

If you look at the membership lists of the biggest American think tanks and institutions, the same names keep popping up: Save Summit, where Cohen was headed to seed AVE, or AgainstViolentExtremism.org, a long-running enterprise whose main backer, aside from Google Ideas, is the Gen Next Foundation.