Someone has asked me to post about Save the Children giving their Global Legacy Award to war criminal Tony Blair–awash in the blood of Iraqi & Afghani children. Will it suffice to say they can stick their organization & the award where the sun don’t shine?

The leadership of Save the Children is entirely corporate–insurance companies, investment firms, pharmaceuticals, & the ubiquitous Coca Cola. They are clearly not an improvement on the Nobel Peace Prize committee that selects the likes of Henry Kissinger & Barack Obama. It’s all of a piece with neoliberal power-broking: “you scratch my ass, I’ll scratch yours.”

What’s important is that through these corporate front groups the ruling elite attempts to co-opt & preempt social justice. They do the exact same thing with human rights groups (like Human Rights Watch). A troubling variation on this theme is their co-optation of long-time civil rights groups like the NAACP & the National Organization for Women as well as immigrant rights groups by throwing substantial amounts of hush money at them.

The big bucks assure the ruling elite these organizations will operate within narrow parameters of political defiance, tied to the Democratic Party & electoral politics, & steadfast against independent political action (like the Civil Rights Movement). The big bucks assure that at a certain point what is left of political resistance to injustice becomes indistinguishable from outright groveling.

So it’s just swell Save the Children exposed themselves in this unseemly way. Maybe people will start vetting the trustees & boards of directors before dishing out money to save neoliberalism’s image.