An Organization Gone Bad

10 or 20 years ago, I received my 50-year member pin from the American Chemical Society. Looking back over those years, I have been generally satisfied with my membership in the ACS. Even today, the ACS significantly contributes to the advancement of chemistry as a science and gives financial advice to its members, as it has done for these many years.
    

However, I notice a distinct change in the political ideology of the organization. Whereas, it was once seemingly oriented toward private enterprise, it has now become much more socialistically oriented, particularly involving so-called financial benefits from big government for ACS members.
    

The February 6 issue of Chemical and Engineering News has an article entitled, "ACS Revamps Policy Statements". An excerpt from that article is as follows:
   
    "In another move this year, ACS consolidated seven funding position statements released in 2010 into a single funding statement, says ACS Board Chair William F. Carroll Jr. With federal programs coming under intense pressure, ACS has moved away from drafting funding statements that set specific spending targets or spending growth rates for various agencies, he says. Those agencies, which promote science education, research, and development, are the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Standards & Technology, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Education.
    “We all recognize that the funding-doubling track we were once on now seems obscure and not at all in sync with what is going on in the economy,” says Carroll, referring to previous congressional authorization to double the physical sciences budget in the same way that NIH’s budget had been doubled in the previous decade. “We’re now hoping for predictable, sustained funding in science and technology that leads to innovation. And we know that innovation leads to new jobs and better economic health in the U.S.,” he adds. “Given that the prior agency-specific funding statements were similar to one another in logic and justification, it makes sense to combine them to simplify and clarify our position.”

 

    

In the above quotations, note the mention of various agencies. There is no mention that these are US government agencies, with the implication that the agencies are so all-important no further specification is required. Notice also the use of the word "funding". The whole essence of these two paragraphs involve ACS is complicity in aiding members to obtain monetary grants from the federal government.
    

Many years ago, ACS was complicit in obtaining what was then called jobs for ACS members. The jobs always involved salaries, which in the traditional sense is payment for "work". The opportunity for jobs involved private industry, academic institutions, and government departments. In all cases, the implication was that through job fairs and other information about where jobs would be available, including "want ads" in C&E News, members could obtain adequate compensation for their work. It should be noted that employers had the opportunity of evaluating the work contributions of employees, and if the financial gain to the employing organization was insufficient, the employee could be fired.
    

With the new socialistic agenda involving big government, monetary compensation still exists through salaries, but a more significant "funding" source has developed for members. Federal government has now become so big with the handling of tremendous monetary assets that various government agencies have instituted grant programs to university professors and private industry. I personally find this regrettable, because this new type of funding is from taxpayers, who only have a very remote opportunity to control the amounts spent and the purposes for spending. Note the difference between this and an employer who can easily identify competence of a worker and take immediate action, if performance is found wanting. In other words, we have apparently gone from a complete system of efficiency in worker compensation to a partial modification where there is at best only partial control through a third-party bureaucrat. The bottom line is that since the general public has only a periodic four-year control over this system through voting, the general public, which is also the taxpayer and fund supplier, is being fleeced.
    

With the present situation and the position of the ACS as described in the above excerpt, I find this ACS complicity abhorrent, and the ACS policy should be changed to avoid promotion and complicity in federal grant programs. Since these programs exist, it is not possible to ignore them, but is also unnecessary to become a part of them.
    

I rewatched the TV program "Nuremberg Trials" the other evening. The essence of the program was whether four local judges were guilty of cooperating with the Nazi government and were in part responsible for the ultimate devastation of World War II. The judging international tribunal found the local judges guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment. It was also implicit that the total German citizenry also had a high degree of responsibility, even though it was not on trial.
    

The question here is, whether the ACS in its promotion and complicity with the socialistic principles of large government grants, which are likely to lead to the financial destruction of the US, will bear its responsibility in the event of such disaster.