I love reading about billionaires telling us how magnanimous they are in giving away their money to help better human the condition. The big game for these people is called ‘philanthropy.’ Once upon a time, businesses before globalization created a new ruling class of billionaires had an expectation that some of the profits (tax free of course) be used within the communities in which they existed to help the less financially fortunate. Last year at the 2020 WEF, philanthropy was a main topic. I hear people I know go on about how wonderful these billionaires must be in giving away so much money. For instance, Bill Gates like to tell people how he has given over $36 billion to charitable foundations and even more to ‘support’ health initiatives worldwide. And that folks, is about as deep most people even bother to look. Once you decide to get beyond the bullshitting public relations (PR), you get a different picture of what philanthropy means to these financial elites.
A little bit of history. The ruling elites and royal families have always made a big deal of throwing pennies to the desperate poor to give themselves an air of graciousness, and probably to ease their own consciences of living in splendor while the masses grovel in the dirt to merely survive. There was a time, and still exists for small businesses were giving back 1-3% of net profits for social programs and benefit was an expected business practice (tax break of course). I apologize for the cynical approach, but these elites behave just like parasites living off their hosts while keeping them alive. I love it when the Gates, Zuckerberg’s, and Soros’s of the world for example claim to be self-made people. Bullshit. They became rich by having a great idea and them exploiting the society in which they lived to literally capitalize on their idea, which is rarely their own singular development. The notable American Robber Baron, John D Rockefeller, exploited society with his Standard Oil company during the late 1800s and used it to manipulate and control his empire of exploitation. He literally destroyed competitors to gain a monopoly, and even after his control was reduced by anti-trust laws, still continued to use ‘circular ownership (see last post) to maintain his empire. He spent the last years of his life pushing a public relations campaign of philanthropy to improve his public persona because he was such a miserable character.
So, if they give a lot of their money away to help the common people, isn’t that a good thing? The smoke and mirrors behind these PR illusions covers a truth that most people do not bother to look at. Don’t get me wrong, there are some wonderful philanthropic organizations, but most merely use the philanthropy term to hoodwink us, the general public, into accepting the BS they give to us – PR at its finest misleading role – propaganda (information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view). It’s to easy to dismiss my rantings about philanthropy here as the jaded views of a malcontent, but the facts when looked at show the true story of billionaire and corporate philanthropy.
These philanthropic givings are just tax shelters and ways to increase power and control without making it obvious. They all do this but I will focus on Bill Gates as a typical modern John D Rockefeller, although Mark Zuckerberg did this with 99% of his Facebook stocks to his private foundation. Between 1994 and 2000, he made a big PR deal of giving $36.8 billion of his private wealth to his Gates Foundation. How generous of him to only save $62 billion for himself. Oh wait, just like Zuckerberg, Gates invested much of that in his joint Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The media make a big deal of extolling the generosity but fail to report that these foundations are merely PR tax havens and vehicles for them to drive their larger agenda’s. Just look up the WEF 2020 and listen to the discussions to see them literally say this! For instance, Gates gets invited on all these talk shows where he extolls his own virtuous giving. He never mentions that while he may give a paltry million dollars here and to real charities, he gives major donations to corporate research and development in which he is a major shareholder of that corporation with expectations of 10-20-fold financial returns on his tax-free investment (sorry donation). And they all do this, and the WEF made a big deal that it was good for the billionaires and by some strange convoluted logic, must be good for the common people to get the benefits of the research.
I’m sure that all these billionaires jetting into space will benefit the hunger and abused in Mali sometime soon. Sorry, getting of track. Now many of these elites are busy pushing their agenda’s that also match the agendas of the corporate transnational corporations (it’s hard to see the blurry line between the two since the circular ownership is so convoluted. it’s hard to know whom owns whom. Gates wants to vaccinate the world many times over to ‘save it from disease’ and the fact that he is the major investor of Big Pharma (where he makes vast profits), the WHO, CDC, and other global health policy institutions is apparently just a coincidence. But, when you can wipe your ass with money because you have so much of it, it’s not about profits is it? Most corporate and elite philanthropy is not about compassionate giving but about pushing their, and their friends, more insidious agenda’s.
I recommend anything by investigative journalist Naomi Kline. She has a knack of capturing the nuances of societal issues and that includes the wealth divide and the Great Reset we currently see happening (see earlier post A New Beginning – Part 7: The Great Reset, Part 2 {February 2021}). I’m sorry, but whenever I hear about the stinking rich being generous, I cannot forget that we are talking about sociopathic minds that have zero compassion and no empathy. They have no respect for anything that isn’t serving them. Yes, that does sound cynical, but just make an effort to read broadly about any billionaire or large corporate system and whatever small acts of mercy they may seem to show is greatly outweighed by the social and ecological carnage they leave in their wake of passing by. While these elites may donate millions to causes in which they gain PR benefits, look deeper and note that they rarely do so with the idea of improving everyone’s quality of life, but more with improving their power, control, and financial benefits. Despite what they say, they really do not care about us. Indeed, their attitude sadly seems to infect so many in the consumer mindset because callous attitudes to others’ suffering is prominent. We need to care about each other and start living with empathy and compassion – to show Love for life in all its forms in all we do.
I fall foul of my own criticisms of people who complain but don’t offer solutions. So, in the next post I will offer up some ideas we can follow to ignore these elites and to start building a world where compassionate people honor and respect each other and being ‘neighborly’ is a way of living and not just living in close proximity. Do we need more meetings of the elites so they can tell us how much they are trying to help solve our global problems when they are responsible for causing them – I think not. We need to have more local meetings at solving our problems locally, which will then resolve our global problems.
To Be Continued ……………..
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