Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

I hope you enjoy this informational, conversational post which comes from a systematic lookup of “Partners” link at a single university website combined with my awareness of similar related activity.  Read the “tags” for a generic idea of just a few organizations using the words shown in the post title.  The post has undergone a few changes (significant, and to a middle section) in the two days after it was published on 7/22/2016 and is currently about 12,000 words.  I expanded some on “MDRC” and because of its tax return reference to “Atlantic Philanthropies” which I already knew had been registered outside of the US for anonymity purposes, and which wealth was based on marketing duty-free products internationally, to military and tourists to start with, it got longer.

In the process of not shutting up or stopping “just one more” lookup, I discovered that the Atlantic Philanthropies which provided MDRC a $7M matching grant in 1999 (not long after it was forced into the public when one partner of the underlying company “DFS” (Duty Free Shops, I guess) decided to sell it for around $3.8B, and the other partner protested via lawsuit,  resulting in a pre-emptive disclosure to the public of who — and where–  it was.

It announced in 2002 it would be winding down (distributing everything), and I learned that, announced this past May, 2016,  the two final largest grants totaling around $200M would BOTH go to British institutions — one of them which exactly matches this post title:  “International Institute on Inequalities” at the London School of Economics (and the other to the Rhodes Trust to set up scholarships — see Fulbright, Rhodes famous scholarships — under the Atlantic Philanthropies name).  This Institute was only launched in 2015.

Another major sponsor of the same institute was the well-known (in the UK) “Leverhulme Trust” (since about 1925), with the underlying corporate wealth behind it (Lever Brothers, later Unilever) involving a Lordship who made his initial fortune in SOAP on the backs of Congolese laborers, in part from a close friendship with the King of Belgium (per Wiki, anyhow).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lever,_1st_Viscount_Leverhulme  (1851-1925).

A 2014 book by David Hollett (Amazon.com link) “The Dark Side of Sunlight – The Story of King Leopold, Lord Leverhulme and the Congo.”  Abstract:

With a great deal of political manoeuvring, and the able assistance of the famous explorer, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, in 1885 King Leopold II of Belgium founded the Congo ‘Free’ State. However, this was not as a Belgian colony, but as his own private domain which extended to 905,000 square miles of Central Africa. Leopold then set up a system of forced labour under which millions suffered and died due to brutal treatment, exhaustion, hunger or disease. Eventually, in 1908, the Belgian government took control of the Congo away from Leopold and the worst excesses of his despotic rule came to an end. However the forced labour system established by Leopold remained largely in place. It is against this historical background that Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers of Port Sunlight, became significantly involved in the affairs of the Congo. In 1911 the Belgian Government offered the company land “Concessions” to develop as oil palm plantations. A decade later William Hesketh Lever was controlling vast palm plantations, oil mills and a fleet of 74 steam vessels on the Congo River. In 1930 the firm was employing no less than 28,000 Congolese workers. The rise and rise of Lever Brothers wealth and good fortune was to continue, throughout the Congo and West Africa in general

A 1987 article in The New Internationalist is interesting reading on how the US fits in (what other brands were bought up, the UAC (United Africa Company) and more:

Today Unilever is one of the world’s largest corporations, employing
300,000 people and spanning 75 countries – with pre-tax profits in
1986 of $1.8 billion. This is the story from its humble beginnings

Three other things I noticed from Wiki on William Hesketh Lever — his involvement in freemasonry (founding lodges), and his practice of “monopoly”, as learned, it says, from the Rockefellers, it’s said, and with this wealth, buying up Villages or setting up model villages with which better to control (intrusively) the workforce.  If THAT doesn’t remind you of current situations in the USA, urban areas and welfare policies, you are simply asleep!  “PORT SUNLIGHT” (the brand was “Sunlight Soap”)

In 1887, Lever looking to expand his business, lought 56 acres (230,000 m²) of land on the Wirral in Cheshire between the River Mersey and the railway line at Bebington. This site became Port Sunlight where he built his works and a model village to house its employees. From 1888, Port Sunlight village offered decent living conditions in the belief that good housing would ensure a healthy and happy workforce. The community was designed to house and support the workers. Life in Port Sunlight included intrusive rules and implied mandatory participation in activities. The tied cottages meant that a worker losing his or her job could be almost simultaneously evicted.^[15]Even workers’ social lives were policed from the head office. W.H Lever stated “a good workman may have a wife of objectionable habits, or may have objectionable habits himself, which make it undesirable for us to have him in the village.”^[16]

REMINDER — my only connection of the above info. to this post comes by way of a look at NY-based “MDRC:  Knowledge to Improve Social Policy”‘ involvement with Atlantic Philanthropies; the interesting history of Atlantic Philanthropies and its (first-generation US from Ireland) Chuck Feeney, and in that Mr. Feeney felt the International Institute for Inequalities at the London School of Economics, was worth a big chunk of the Atlantic Philanthropies’ final distributions, this Leverhulme Trust also agreed. In the US, the MDRC, studying the poor, is still maintaining $56M of investments, while taking $41M in government grants — I’d say something is “off-kilter” in that scenario.

Which all just goes to show why many philanthropies all around the world had BETTER make a good show of caring about the poor, given what they’ve done to perpetuate inequalities worldwide and maintain riches by avoiding taxation in the first place.

http://iip.rutgers.edu

The International Institute for Peace (IIP) at Rutgers University, Newark is a UNESCO Category II organization dedicated to peacebuilding, conflict transformation through nonviolent struggle, and the promotion of peace education and a culture of peace. The IIP builds partnerships locally and globally by working with grassroots organizations, youth leaders, activists, journalists, educators and researchers to promote peacebuilding, nonviolent conflict transformation, and just and sustainable peace. The IIP promotes research on issues of peace and conflict as well as education about peacebuilding and nonviolent struggle.

IF there was a genuine intent to relieve poverty within the US first, instead of restructure the world according to some private visions (and saving women overseas while attacking women, as women, in the United States, is a pretty sorry state of affairs indeed), it would not be done this way.