An excellent article. Our economic structure is simply insane. It makes my head spin and my heart hurt every time I hear how our economy is strong and doing great. Such a lie! 40% of Americans are living in poverty or paycheck to paycheck. Everywhere there are people living in tents and standing on street corners with signs that say “Please Help.” We the people can’t afford housing and healthcare and food and education and to retire and other basic human needs. Our current economic system has long been poisoning our Earth, dooming our children’s lives today and in the future, engaging in endless war and dehumanization of the “Other,” and throwing people off the cliff into poverty and prisons and addictions and depression and despair. This toxic late stage neoliberal capitalism that’s based in the vast redistribution of wealth upwards and is the cause of unfathomable suffering, destruction, and death is pure madness and evil. And yet people defend this poisonous neoliberal capitalism and demonize democratic socialism. Just pure madness!
Another world is possible! A world based on caring and integrity and truth and a cherishing of life. And this paradigm shift will not occur as long as we continue to be attached rather than questioning our belief systems and values. It will not occur as long as we are blindly electing corrupt neoliberal candidates in either major political party who make promises they will not keep because they’ve sold their souls to their corporate donors in the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial complex, and other poisonous huge financial interests. And this great transformation will also not occur as long as we believe our only obligation is to vote.
We have a moral obligation to inform ourselves using resources of integrity and a profound commitment to truth and to a higher good — AND to use what we are learning to propel us to rise up and do our part, whatever that is, to act individually and collectively in the national and global movement to heal, awaken, and transform our nation and our world. The time for evolution and revolution is here! — Molly
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” — Honore de Balzac
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| Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos attend The Aspen Institute 26th Annual Awards Dinner at The Plaza Hotel on November 5, 2009, in New York City. |
MacKenzie Bezos, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has signed the “Giving Pledge,” promising to donate at least half of the fortune she received after her separation from Jeff to charity. This is many billions more than the $2 billion Jeff, literally the richest person in the world, has pledged to give to charity. It’s also not nearly enough.
Big Philanthropy is simply plutocracy, “an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidized,” Stanford professor Rob Reich, one of the faculty directors of the university’s Center for Ethics in Society, told The Atlantic. But let’s give Bezos, like we give Bill and Melinda Gates, the benefit of the doubt: Let’s believe that she’s a humanitarian, and that she’s trying to help humanity. Then why isn’t she giving more?
It’s true that half of $37 billion is more money than I’ll ever give to charity in my life, and that I’m unlikely to donate half my net worth anytime soon. But I’m not a capitalist; I don’t exploit workers; and I’m not a billionaire. Statistically speaking, none of us are. Billionaires are simply illogical. Money loses coherency at that level — not to mention numbers themselves.
We’re not even talking about the comparatively “impoverished” 1 percent, the millionaires. A billionaire like Jeff Bezos — who hasn’t signed the “Giving Pledge” himself — could lose over 99 percent of their wealth and still have over a billion dollars. Try to imagine how much of a difference an extra $1,000 a week would make for you — either to receive or to lose — and then realize that even with only $1 billion, Bezos could spend $1 million a week for 20 years before going broke. And that’s without taking into consideration interest.
Which is assuming that spending that kind of money is humanly possible. Even the wildest luxury goods imaginable — diamond-encrusted sports cars, ultra-luxury yachts, private islands — won’t get you to a billion.
Statistically speaking, you don’t need it, either. According to more than 1.7 million people surveyed by Gallup World Poll, “optimal emotional well-being” is achieved between $60,000 and $75,000 a year, with $95,000 a year ideal for “life evaluation.” At that rate, the $1 billion left over from Jeff Bezos’s hypothetical 99 percent donation — or a 97 percent one by MacKenzie — would last over 10,000 years.
Billionaires don’t acquire such unimaginable levels of wealth in a vacuum. The giving of wealth under capitalism is funded by the stealing of wealth, and Amazon is one of the best examples: the company neither treats its workers well nor pays them enough, and the fruits of that exploitation wind up directly in Bezos’s wallet. And, of course, they don’t pay taxes.
Anyone who chooses to be a billionaire has chosen to keep a psychologically inconceivable amount of money for themselves. That kind of wealth should never escape the laboring hands that actually produce it in the first place. No one on Earth deserves praise for donating billions of dollars because absolutely no one on Earth should have billions of dollars to donate in the first place.
Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/want-to-be-a-principled-billionaire-stop-being-a-billionaire/
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