A Neoliberal Christmas Carol

 How do billionaires and celebrities avoid looking like complete jerks as they jostle to be among the first in line to receive the Covid-19 vaccine?

Easy - they pretend that it's all for charity. 'Tis, after all, the season for noblesse-obligin' -  that special time of year when the wealthy suck up public acclaim for their do-goodery as they continue screwing everybody else.

So to avoid giving the awful impression that they're cutting in line to get the vaccine, economist Richard Thaler suggests in a New York Times op-ed that they simply bribe nudge their august selves into their accustomed and deserved places as Alpha-dogs at the head of the pack. 

First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. Think of it as a voluntary wealth tax. This money could be used to help people who have suffered most in the pandemic: those who have lost their jobs and face evictions, whose health has been permanently impaired, who face grievous hardship of all kinds.

Depending on the prices and quantities, billions of dollars could be raised that could be spent to help those who need it most. Robin Hood in action!

Of course, with a single payer health care system, a federal guaranteed public housing policy and a basic universal income we wouldn't need the selective and voluntary self-serving charity and bribery schemes of the rich, would we?

Thaler, at the very height of the 2008 financial meltdown that resulted in 94 percent of all the "lost" household wealth geysering up to the same wealthy miscreants whose speculative crime spree had spawned the crisis, actually released a book called Nudge, cowritten with Obama adviser Cass Sunstein. It was widely praised by corporate types as a kind of neoliberal bible for centrist policy wonks and technocrats who want to be seen as caring and concerned as they craft such austerian solutions to misery and want as cutting Social Security and unemployment benefits.

Thaler was duly rewarded with the "Nobel" memorial economics prize the following year for his paternalistic libertarian work positing that credentialed experts, both inside and outside of government, know what is better for people than people do themselves.

 One of the book's more whimsical policy prescriptions was to make it harder, if not impossible, for people to sue doctors and hospitals. If patients were required to waive their legal rights at the time of treatment, the authors claimed, then doctors and hospitals will be less likely to commit malpractice. And the obscene costs of the for-profit mess known as the US healthcare system would magically go down. In other words, with tort reform, who needs Medicare For All?

 It should come as no surprise that Thaler was also among the first "public intellectuals" to peddle the magical thinking concept of "herd immunity" when the pandemic erupted last spring. It's a way to force people back to work and discontinue their benefits before a vaccine becomes available.

And now that we still will have to wait for many long months before everybody gets vaccinated, the New York Times has given Thaler a platform from which to sell the junk theory of "trickle-down" inoculation as a natural adjunct to the equally fraudulent school of supply-side economics. This body of neoliberal thought falsely claims that since obscene wealth in just a few greedy hands will "trickle down" to the rest of us, there is no need for the wealthy to pay higher taxes to fund programs benefiting regular people.

Of course, since Thaler is on the "liberal" Democratic side of the oligarchy, he does magnanimously allow in his Times op-ed that vulnerable people like medical personnel, the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions should get the vaccine first. Only then should the rich and famous shove ahead of the rest of us and relabel their selfishness as charity. He writes:

  At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction. Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers. Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start , around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.

Thaler rationalizes this grotesque shamelessness by marketing it, as I mentioned above, as a kind of trickle-down protection for the unvaccinated teeming masses. He never mentions just how this voluntary largesse would be distributed to the poor and less fortunate. Maybe it's because philanthrocapitalists rarely give their cash directly to those who need it. Rather, they park it in one another's tax exempt foundations and other financial shelters.

Still not buying the charity auction of vaccine idea, proles? Not to worry. Thaler next grabs the concept of Lesser Evilism out of his bag of neoliberal tricks. If we don't allow the Elite to get the vaccine before we do, a "gray or black market" trafficking in precious vaccine is bound to emerge. So nudge yourselves into accepting the class system as an immutable law of nature. Rich and powerful people always have gotten superior health care, so it is no use complaining. Especially now, at this dangerous time. 

Thaler writes that eventually, we should all be required to carry a health photo ID and passport with proof of vaccination at all times. We need to be "nudged" in the right direction using whatever tactics of fear and intimidation that it takes for the Elite to get the Plutonomy (an economy for the richest) moving again and people toiling again.

 If Ebenezer Scrooge had found redemption today instead of nearly two centuries ago, he would have given Bob Cratchit a supermarket discount coupon instead of a Christmas turkey and a deferred tax credit instead of a raise. He would have promised to give Tiny Tim access to affordable health care once he reached early adulthood, or middle age at the very latest. He would have urged them all to hold on for just a little bit longer as he himself voraciously sought and received glowing publicity for the awe-inspiring miracle of his own new-found wokeness and the glory of his good intentions.

Rather than use their platforms to try to shame and pressure the Congress, which they have bought and paid for, to do right by the people, our own modern plague-profiting Scrooges are outdoing themselves with various humanitarian pledges. Even in the middle of a pandemic when millions of people are sickening and dying and going hungry and losing their homes and their jobs, the Season of Noblesse Obligin' must never be canceled.  The obscenely wealthy are at it again, investing in atonement hedge funds, and betting heavily on no-risk moral default swaps.

Miracle of miracles, their Christmas future is not at all the horrific nightmare one that Charles Dickens prescribed for Scrooge. Their Christmas future is right now, in the form of positive coverage of their aspirational  beneficence.

 If 2050 rolls around, and the world's worst polluting capitalists have not, after all, attained their noble goal of trapping all that excess carbon in special underground vats, will anybody remember what they promised back in 2020? Will anybody still be alive in 2050 to bother holding them to their promise?

The whole objective is to make environmentalists shut up during this sacred season and to "nudge" the Biden administration into going easy on its own aspirational executive orders. And the corporate media are only too happy to help spread feel-good propaganda messages like this one:  

CHICAGO, Dec 10 (Reuters) - United Airlines said on Thursday it had committed to a multimillion-dollar investment in a project to remove carbon dioxide from the air through air direct-capture technology as part of a plan to be 100% “green” by 2050. The project, 1PointFive, is a partnership between Occidental Petroleum Corp subsidiary Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital Management that plans to build the first U.S. industrial-sized direct air capture plant that would permanently sequester 1 million tons of CO2 each year.That’s the equivalent of what 40 million trees can do, but covering a land area about 3,000 times smaller, United said, adding that direct-capture technology is one of the few proven ways to correct for aircraft emissions.United declined to provide further details on the investment amount. (my bold)

(And the Reuters reporter certainly didn't insist upon any.)

Meanwhile, to deflect attention from the disproportionate Black morbidity and mortality rate from Covid-19 (as a direct result of  overcrowded housing and the higher rates of pollution in poor neighborhoods), a consortium of corporate CEOs have just announced, to great fanfare, that they will be hiring a million more Black employees.... by the end of the decade. They were shattered, they say, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. They have therefore pledged to begin a start-up to conduct a study to identify potential job applicants.

If these people think that we're all snoozing while they proclaim how Woke they are, then they're the ones who are dreaming. They can plaster the charity label on their massive campaign of theft, oppression and pollution all they want, they can try and "nudge" us into accepting their nonsensical nostrums and agenda of harm all they want. But we're on to the Con. Or at least we should be.

Who can't but notice, for example, the stark derangement of Special Climate Envoy John Kerry, who is actually trying to recast big polluting subsidized oil companies as sympathetic plague victims?

 "I'm reaching out to them because I want to hear from them," he told NPR. "I'm listening to what their needs are so I can understand what the possibilities may be."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'” -- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

Gates Foundation: Poor People Need Better P.R.

The problem with poor people is not that they don't have money. The problem with poor people is that they have horrible reputations. And billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates wants to repair those reputations by holding a contest to see who in the Creative Class can propose the best ways to "combat the false narratives" about poverty in America.

Ten lucky winners will receive grants of up to $100,000 each if their ideas meet the standards of a secret panel of "expert" judges. According to The Hollywood Reporter, entries may include the written word, performance pieces and documentary films.

The Gates Foundation still pretends to be utterly baffled about the root causes of the most extreme wealth inequality of modern times, in which eight or twelve oligarchs - including Bill Gates himself - have pocketed more cash than is owned by the bottom half of the entire global population. 

Thomas Piketty and other economists, along with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have thus proposed both domestic and global wealth taxes on these modern-day robber barons; their combined holdings could easily feed and house everybody on the planet who needs food and housing. But since the wealthy don't want to be taxed, they concern-troll instead, offering a mere pittance to "explore" ways to fix the very problems that they themselves have had an outsize hand in creating.

The poverty guru in charge of the Gates contest can't even explain its goals coherently. Although a Harvard-trained lawyer, Ryan Rippel sounds more like a graduate of the Joe Biden Culinary Institute For the Study of Word Salads: 

These stereotypes are so problematic in the search for solutions,” says Ryan Rippel, director of U.S. economic mobility and opportunity at the foundation.
“They cause us to demean people and not actually be in the conversation with a lens of humanity and a deep commitment to getting to the bottom of the nature of the challenge.”

Rippel never quite gets around to listing just what these stereotypes about poor people are.

His objective is the standard one beloved of philanthrocapitalism: to study the problems of poor people and in lieu of direct cash aid, to give money to experts who can study those problems some more. If poor people are consulted at all, it must be through the filter of rich people, or consultants and experts who get their funding from rich people and tax-averse corporations. Or, as Rippel so cogently explains on his web page, he is involved with "a number of partnerships to generate new data and public goods in service to those working to address barriers of opportunity."

Before poor people can ever hope to be housed and fed, the rich first must get to the bottom of the nature of the challenge. Because if Bill Gates's flunkies hope to fend off a wealth tax on his fortune, they must first pretend to commit to caring. And before they can pretend to commit to caring, they must dive into the deepest depths of their wells of greed and conduct more endless studies to help absolve them of all blame and responsibility.

Gates's new casting call to Hollywood is his foundation's first anti-poverty initiative designed exclusively for the United States. It comes just as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are ramping up their calls for taxing the wealthy, with the goal being to redistribute the wealth downward. The Gates Foundation's pushing of the narrative that poor people have a reputation problem is in itself a passive-aggressive narrative of poor-shaming. If something must be "combated" then there must be some basis for its actual existence. Right?

Since there are no rules restricting this contest to Hollywood and other media professionals, I suggest that poor people themselves should enter for the chance to win a hundred grand. A homeless person in California might chronicle her daily life on skid row with a borrowed smart phone. A struggling mother on a meager SNAP budget can write about visiting her poorly-stocked local food pantry every month. Somebody else could explain how they cut corners to meet rising rents on Walmart wages. The possibilities are endless.

Stories emphasizing solidarity among people would be even more compelling, such as Chicago teachers and nurses striking and marching right alongside their students and patients. An employee-produced documentary about the horrible working conditions in Amazon fulfillment centers and the resulting burgeoning labor movement would be similarly inspiring.

That way, when the Gates Panel of Experts ultimately awards the grant money for a film about Chelsea Clinton and her books-in-laundromats initiative, or to a heartwarming Joe Biden-inspired documentary about reputation-battered minority parents getting new record players to boost their kids' vocabularies, the poor themselves can cry foul and expose tax-avoiding philanthrocapitalism for what it is: a neoliberal greed racket to keep poor people down and out.

Deadline for entry is eight weeks away, so you'll need to come up with your ideas in a relative hurry so that the Gates Foundation can cut the checks in time for the big Democratic primaries next year.

But let the entrant beware. For buried deep within the Gates's criteria for winning their poverty propaganda funding is this neoliberal gem:

Change from a sole focus on lack of money to money, power, agency, and dignity.

In other words, they will fund only those portrayals of the "respectable" poor for whom the chronic and crushing lack of money is not their most pressing and selfish concern, for whom having enough cash to feed and house themselves and their families is of co-equal importance with such intangibles as identity and self-worth. Bill and Melinda Gates do not want to be parted from any of their own excess wealth. They do, however, want to feel good about themselves and their excess wealth. And they want you to feel good, too. Because through their embrace of the respectable, deserving poor as opposed to the undeserving poor, they can remind all the respectable "non-elites" in their audience that your own plight could always be worse. You might never even enjoy the privilege of seeing a poor person in her native habitat without Bill and Melinda as your anthropological field guides.

They want to discourage mass uprisings of increasing numbers of poor people by pretending to help poor people to help themselves with non-existent but optimistic "ladders of opportunity," along with helping Wall Street to help the poor with digitized financial services. And, of course, lots of Microsoft computers in classrooms in privatized, for-profit, non-unionized charter schools.

They also don't want Bernie Sanders to be president. His latest proposal to fund Medicare For All and other poverty-busting programs would literally cut the obscene Gates fortune right in half. Rival Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is only politely asking the tech mogul and his cohort for a mere two cents on the dollar.

Moralizing Collides With Spectacle: The Louis C.K. - Obama Effect

Disgraced comedian Louis C.K. has not only had his movie premiere and TV deals cancelled after he confessed to masturbating in front of women. He's also been slapped with the ultimate punishment dreaded by A-Listers everywhere - he's been unceremoniously dumped from the latest in an interminable series of star-studded charity spectaculars which have come to substitute for public policy in this country.

HBO execs made the moralistic announcement that the reality-based selfish depravity of a comic, whose filthy, funny mouth has been so lucrative for them, will not be tolerated:

"Louis C.K. will no longer be participating in the Night of Too Many Stars: America Unites for Autism Programs, which will be presented live on HBO on November 18. In addition, HBO is removing Louis C.K.’s past projects from its On Demand services....”

 Jon Stewart is hosting Night of Too Many Stars, which will include stand-up performances, sketches and short films. Created by comedy writer and performer Robert Smigel, it raises money for autism schools, programs and services. C.K. was scheduled to appear along with the likes of Stephen Colbert, Abbi Jacobson, Jordan Klepper, Hasan Minhaj, John Mulaney, Olivia Munn, John Oliver, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and more.

The autism fundraiser has been held for many years, but this is the first time it is being nationally televised as a true media spectacular. Because in this age of record wealth inequality, it increasingly behooves wealthy liberal celebrities to ostentatiously "give back" before the largest possible audience as they inveigle their millions of fans into sending money for causes which used to be funded by taxing wealthy people like themselves to the hilt.

Federal funding for autism research has declined in recent years, like most social programs a victim of the bipartisan austerity imposed during the Obama administration.  But not to worry -  the ensuing cascade of fundraising extravaganzas on TV gives celebrities all the more free P.R. and airtime to say how much they hate Donald Trump and to virtue-signal how much nicer they are than that mean old president.

More ominously, though, these nonstop neoliberal charity bazaars give the uber-rich a chance to actually dictate policy. Witness the XQ Superschool Live education "reform" spectacular aired in September on all four major broadcast TV networks. The propaganda product of billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the show was essentially one long infomercial against teachers' unions and for charter school privatization, corporate testing schemes, and the concentration of secondary school curricula to the STEM field.

Jobs... donated half of the reward for a $100 million competition calling for new high school designs. Roughly $10 million was awarded to 10 schools last year through the XQ Institute, an independent affiliate of the Emerson Collective, which Jobs started to focus work on social justice issues. XQ is continuing its work to use technology to “transform” high school, with the Web page promoting the show quoting Jobs as saying: “We all know America’s high schools need to be transformed to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist and a future that we can never see with perfect clarity.”

Into whose pockets all the money raised will actually go is also not seen with perfect clarity. But because Jobs inherited a fortune from her husband Steve, the co-founder of Apple, she apparently sees more clearly than most people, and therefore has no need to explain what, exactly, it is about high schools that actually need to be transformed. But I suspect that the technology used for this reform will have the ubiquitous Apple logo plastered all over it. With the magic  of unsullied star power, and billions of dollars and the co-optation of the "disruptive" discourse of social movements, public education is being turned into a private charity for the ultimate benefit, not of students, but of private corporations and oligarchs.

Laurene Jobs started her education privatization crusade in 2015 under the auspices of her think tank, the Emerson Collective, by enlisting the help of the Obama administration, including his first education commissioner, Arne Duncan. Duncan now serves as her managing partner, and both Obama and his wife Michelle began speaking at her think tank's events even before they left the White House. According to her website, Jobs plans a whole "series of ongoing conversations and efforts by the President and Mrs. Obama to explore partnerships with the private sector, non-profit organizations, NGOs, and other government entities that are committed to tackling violence, poverty, and unemployment in communities around the country. The Obamas say they look forward to working with organizations similar to CRED. Their eponymous foundation and the My Brother's Keeper initiative are both already committed to bringing much-needed opportunity expansion to Chicago neighborhoods."

Sadly, though,  Jobs's other brainchild, a liberal magazine to be run by former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, recently ran into its own Louis C.K.-type roadblock. It emerged that Wieseltier has had his own sordid history of sexual harassment in the workplace. If there's anything that the philanthro-capitalist class never likes to be confronted about, it's their hypocrisy. The dogma that their money possesses some kind of moral power over the rest of us must not be exposed as the fraud it is. And so we witness them breathlessly racing to cut all ties with the predators who give predatory capitalism such a bad rap. Laurene Jobs scrapped her whole magazine before the ink was dry on the revelations about her newest partner.

Celebrities, billionaires and former presidents are naturally drawn to natural disasters, as well as to the standard manufactured ones like "our failing public schools" and the "skills gap" which conveniently explains why workers are so poorly paid. So the trifecta of hurricane relief spectaculars this fall popped up almost faster than the ruling class racketeers can divest themselves of the latest predator. These disaster appeals are both substitute and supplement to the delayed and denied and deficient government allocation of funds to the victims.

Hurricane Harvey made the occasion especially heartwarming when all five living ex-presidents managed to put aside their pseudo-differences and war crimes to tell folks to send money, fast, and get FEMA off the hook. Their appeal for charity in lieu of a call for a massive public expenditure to get the downtrodden and displaced off the hook even garnered praise from the future living ex-president, Donald J. Trump.
 
 The stars got to show their faces, and their designer duds, and the regular folks out in the hinterland got guilted into sending in their ever-dwindling dollars to such money-laundering charities as the Red Cross. If George Clooney and Tom Hanks and Barack Obama are on the case, who needs the government? Meanwhile, actual hurricane victims are still faced with disease, homelessness, and joblessness as the stars go on to the next big noblesse-obligatory thing.

The next big thing for a few of them was canoodling at Barack and Michelle's  excellent propaganda reunion in Chicago last month. Although it didn't rate the star-studded TV spectacular treatment, it was live-streamed all over the planet. Chance the Rapper and Prince Harry of Britain showed up, along with Barack's favorite cultural sidekick, Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame.

Miranda has even taken time out of his busy charity performance schedule to schedule a few performances in Puerto Rico this winter. What's more important to starving, sick residents of a de facto US colony than a few hours of revisionist rap biography of the founding banker of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Slave?

Now, to be as perfectly clear as Laurene Jobs herself, the Obamas weren't money-grubbing for one specific cause or disaster other than their own future $500 million shrine. So to get the public on board with their zombie neoliberal agenda, they're just going the touchy-feely moralizing route for now. Any scolding they do is purely generic and not aimed at Louis C.K. or even at their erstwhile sugar daddy and BFF, Harvey Weinstein. The Obamas' new shtick is community organizing on an epic global scale.

According to Politico's coverage of the two-day event, Obama is staying true to form and still modestly "leading from behind." As political dynasty scion Caroline Kennedy schmoozed onstage with Miranda (or was it Prince Harry?) Obama had literally slipped into a back row seat, unannounced. Until he softly spoke up, that is, and the whole audience reportedly swooned at his blazing, amazing star power.

Who needs a roster of A-Listers when one is an A-List Superstar unto oneself? Who needs to agitate for gun control legislation just days after the latest massacre when all the world really needs is a 70s-style Encounter session with the Obamas? Their biggest claim to fame, after all, is that they avoided the usual slimy scandals during their entire eight-year stay in the White House. No extramarital affairs for Barack, no consulting astrologers or insider trading for Michelle. And let's face it: the Kill List president's extra-judicial drone assassinations of thousands of civilians simply do not count as a scandal in the moral political universe known as the USA. Unlike Louis C.K., Obama never operated the joystick himself. At the very worst, he just liked to watch.

As Politico frames it, if the Obama summit accomplished nothing else, it provided an escape from reality for the reality-based community. 

There was a morning meditation and yoga session, and an evening community concert with Chance the Rapper and The National. And in between breakout sessions with titles like “The Adventure of Civility” and “Who Narrates the World?,” people took pastel-colored chalk and filled out a blackboard customized with “I hope _______.” (Samples: “we speak better and listen,” “Americans will see each other,” “my nephews can escape toxic masculinity”).
“Therapeutic,” said one attendee. “The sanity bubble,” said another. An alternate reality, all the attendees at the kickoff of Obama’s new foundation acknowledged, some with nervous snickers, some with big, relieved belly laughs.

Who needs Louis C.K. with Obama still around to regale us into such paroxysms of yuks? He's even gotten the Emerson Collective's Arne Duncan to run interference for him against the hundreds of Chicago South Side residents who have turned out to protest the gentrification of their neighborhood and public park by his planned museum and professional golf course. To accomplish this repressive feat, the Obama Foundation has created a non-profit subsidiary whose only purpose is to convince residents that gentrification and globalization will literally save lives by helping get black boys off the streets and onto those strategizing ladders of opportunity. Now, where have we heard that joke before?

Obama even makes former President George H.W. Bush, who got a magical free pass from the media for hilariously groping women's behinds as "David Cop-A-Feel," look dour and dull in comparison.

Hilarity Ensues After Harvey: The Night of Too Many Presidents

Charity Begins in the Castle

Charity Of, By and For the Rich: the Berggruen Philosophy Study Center

Just because they're the feral rich doesn't mean they lack ethics. Far from it. When they call themselves philanthrocapitalists, they are not kidding. They quite literally love their own capitalistic humanoid gene pools above all else.

Their philosophical conceit - that one simply cannot help the teeming masses without first giving precedence to oneself and to one's own class - is all too evident in Town and Country's latest annual list of the Top 50 Philanthropists.

Each plutocrat (or more likely, the designated PR flack) was asked to give a brief synopsis (their "Grand Plan") of his or her goals for humanity. Following is a sampling of the winning entries - with the usual gratuitous supplemental explanations in parentheses provided by your helpful Sardonickist:

Whitney Williams's Grand Plan - "To help the high-profile - Ben Affleck, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, etc. - put their money and influence to seriously good use." (The serious good use is centered in extremely poor parts of Africa, which are in dire need of some good old fashioned high-profile corporate plunder investment. And this philanthrocapitalist should know: Whitney got her start as trip advisor to First Lady Hillary Clinton and later worked as finance chair for Clinton's first presidential campaign. )

Emily Tisch Sussman's Grand Plan - "Reduce gun violence, among other things, as campaign director at DC-based think tank Center for American Progress."  (Among the other things, presumably, is the election of the seriously high-profile Hillary Clinton, whose lobbyist-campaign adviser just happens to be the founder of the corporate-funded Center for American Progress. Emily's parents, donors to the Clintons, are part owners of the New York Giants football team.  Daddy founded the Loews Corporation, and Hubby is a private consultant to the Pentagon... among other things.)

John Steinbaugh's Grand Plan - "Stop deaths from hemorrhage among soldiers on battlefields through RevMedx's invention of the life-saving syringe." (Why have a grand plan to actually stop war when your company-slash-charity can also be the lucky winner of many a Pentagon contract for many an endless war? You can't get blood from a stone, after all. You still need human bodies.)

Jessica Seinfeld's Grand Plan - "Break the cycle of family poverty through the cookbook author's nonprofit Good+ Foundation." (No government-funded food stamp increases or jobs programs or wage increases for hungry poor families are needed as long as you have a wealthy comedian's wife to share her tips and tricks.  And just so you know, that cookbook she's selling to help poor moms feed their kids might be unoriginal, but it was not plagiarized. So shut up, all you haters and class enviers!)

Justin Rockefeller's Grand Plan - "Convince the wealthy not only to invest their money in a socially responsible manner, but to do it more effectively through the ImPact." (You can make a ton of money by slushing giving just a little of it away. Poor people are opportunities. Incidentally, Justin apparently is a real Rockefeller, unlike that con-man murderer Clark Rockefeller, who also convinced the wealthy to give him their money by way of class affinity fraud. Justin is redundantly described as both a venture capitalist and a Democratic activist. His daddy is former Senator Jay Rockefeller)

Bill Pulte's Grand Plan - "Rid Detroit of blight by tearing down houses and making room for safe communities." (Translation: buy up properties for pennies, evict tenants, tear down, gentrify, get rid of "black crime", re-sell to white people or rent back to evictees at a markup, ka-ching. Pulte is a private equity mogul, a/k/a Master of Creative Destruction. And wouldn't you know it, the brother of Mitt Romney  (the founder of vulture fund Bain Capital) just happens to serve on this "charity's" board. Double ka-ching!)

Deval Patrick's Grand Plan - "Prove that you can make money and do good at the same time by starting a new division of Bain Capital that focuses on investment opportunities that benefit society by still turning a profit." (It's a small world, after all. Patrick, like Romney, is a former governor of Massachusetts; they must have met on one of their revolving door trips.  Patrick also served on the board of subprime lender Ameriquest, which turned a profit by foreclosing on thousands of poor people's homes in Detroit and elsewhere.) 

Kim Fortunato's Grand Plan - "Reduce childhood obesity and hunger through Campbell Soup's  signature philanthropic program, Campbell's Healthy Communities." (One small serving of Campbell's Healthy Request soup contains more than half the daily recommended allowance of sodium. The company actually increased the salt in its products after an initial ballyhooed reduction depressed sales. Since the mega-charity, the American Heart Association. also added its healthy logo to the cans of salinated soup, both it and Campbell's were the subjects of a class action lawsuit, charging fraud.)

The Cucinelli Family's Grand Plan -"Prove that capitalism and humanism can co-exist through business and the Brunello and Federica Cucinelli Foundation..." (Never mind that capitalism is to humanism what cancer is to a body. In his native Umbria, Cucinelli, known as the King of Cashmere, reigns as a literal feudal overlord. In a real castle, no less, with real-live peasants toiling in the surrounding countryside to provide some co-existing ambience.)

Anida Kamadioli Costa's Grand Plan - "Ensure that an iconic brand puts its money where its mouth is on such issues as conservation through the Tiffany & Co. Foundation." (The issues apparently don't extend to Tiffany divesting from the part of its gem supply chain allegedly responsible for Middle Eastern massacres.)

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg's Grand Plan - "To give away 99% of their Facebook stock, currently worth $45 billion,  through numerous nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative." (As has been widely reported, this charitable endeavor is not only a tax dodge, it aims to supplant democratic programs, such as public education. The bulk of the excessive Facebook cash is parked in a Delaware LLC.)

Nicolas Berggruen's Grand Plan - "Create a space to shelter the world's elite thinkers in a peaceful yet intellectually fervid sanctuary for reflection and dialogue through the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center." (Even rich thought leaders need charity and safe spaces. Berggruen was once known as the "homeless  billionaire" because he was reduced to living in his private jet after losing a third of his fortune in the Wall Street crash. But now he's opened his new lush California Zen paradise to such wealthy war-mongering luminaries as Tony Blair and Condi Rice, who can fervidly shelter in place for "Thing Long" bull sessions with their class peers.

It's one more example of charity literally beginning right in the home. Or, if not in an actual castle, at least in the second, fourth or eighth vacation home.

Now, this isn't to say that all 50 of the winning philanthropists showcased in Town & Country are as crass as the individuals and corporate persons I highlighted above. There still exist the usual rich people giving and raising money to study diseases which have personally afflicted them or their family members. There are the usual celebrities and their sincere pet causes. For example, Matt Damon modestly aims to provide clean water for the whole wide world, while Stephen Colbert is merely trying to humor regular people into donating supplies to public, not private, schools. There's no money or investment opportunity in it for them, other than the positive publicity and maybe a clever tax write-off of some sort.

So read more about the leisure class at your own leisure. You are guaranteed to be amazed and perhaps even inspired to add an updated chapter or two to Thorstein Veblen's landmark sociological study on the rich. Stung by accusations that they're a bunch of wealth-hoarding greedsters, the plutocrats have joined forces to create their own "Idle No More" movement. They're very busy conspicuously helping one another to aspire to help others to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. It's a hard knock life for sure... for the rich.

Pop quiz questions: What, if any, difference is there between conspicuous consumption and conspicuous giving? 

Is it uncharitable to ask whether we can actually afford rich people?

Wassailing the Wealthy (Redux)

Despite all the toil and strife, dare I hope that there is renewed cause for optimism as 2015 grinds to a close? His name is Bernie Sanders, and he is the first presidential candidate since FDR to burst upon the scene and welcome Wall Street's hatred with open arms. His op-ed demanding financial reform in today's New York Times should have the plutes wailing all the way to the slopes of Aspen, drowning out the polluting noise of their own private Lear Jets.

In the spirit of the (hopefully) coming socialist revolution, here's an expanded and updated version of my Christmas post from last year:

The Christmas season is traditionally the one time of year that we're permitted, even encouraged, to burst forth from our hovels to guilt-trip the rich while spreading joy and fellowship throughout the land.

Key word: traditionally. Because according to government studies, the charity coffers are dwindling and fewer of us are reaching out to our fellow human beings in these hard times. In sixteen out of the twenty categories measured in 2013, the levels of social engagement by Americans have plummeted. People were either too busy working multiple minimum wage jobs, or they were too depressed about their worklessness to feel able to extend themselves. Volunteerism, as well as average household wealth, has dropped precipitously since the Great Meltdown of '08. An estimated two million fewer Americans volunteered last year than they did in 2012.

Besides the actual cost of volunteering (say, reliable transportation) are the increasingly erratic work schedules foisted upon the Precariat by the owner class during this New Abnormal Era. People working insecure crazy hours at Walmart or McDonalds, for example, are less likely to commit to helping and socializing because they never know, from one week to the next, what hours they'll be assigned to work. Increasingly, people no longer feel like they own their own time.

Here's a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the volunteerism rate dropped precipitously during the misbegotten reign of Bush the Younger, recovered somewhat at the onset of Barack Obama's second term, and is now sliding once again:

 According to the BLS, volunteerism is now at its lowest point since the agency started keeping statistics in 2002. The rate of "highly educated" volunteers is decreasing more than in any other demographic group.

A survey by Gallup reveals that while charitable giving increased worldwide last year, it fell in the United States, now the wealth disparity capital of the advanced world. The proportion of Americans who reported making a charitable donation decreased from 68% to 63% Nonetheless, the US is still far more generous than most: 

Despite its 12th place rank in giving, the United States retained the index’s designation as the most generous country in the developed world, with relatively high marks in helping strangers (third place) and volunteerism (sixth place).
Worldwide, the United States stood second overall behind Myanmar, where, the report says, the traditions of the overwhelmingly predominant Theravada branch of Buddhism lead to high rates of giving and volunteerism. More than 92 percent of Myanmar survey respondents reported donating money.

 But wait. The professional philanthropy/donor class is becoming ever more selective in its own generosity. The extremely rich are wont to "invest" in places rather than in causes and people, and insist that their charity be tax-deductible. They tend to give to the arts, to medical research (the rich get sick, too) and elite institutions of higher learning. They give to politicians via secretive "charity" slush funds. They give to each other's money-laundering family foundations. They set up charitable LLCs to protect their untaxed wealth. Living, breathing human beings who are not part of one's dynasty are not tax deductible  -- they are, however, eminently disposable. Charities such as the Salvation Army and United Way, that give aid more or less directly to the poor, are really hurting this year.

Charles Dickens had a description for the narrow-minded charity of the elites. He called it  "telescopic philanthropy."

In Bleak House, his satiric masterpiece on social class and greed and the evil that men do, one of the most memorable minor characters is Mrs. Jellyby. In her ostentatious zeal to concern-troll the denizens of a far-away African backwater, she neglects her own home and children. Mrs. Jellyby is the Victorian fictional counterpart of such modern-day philanthrocapitalists as Bill Gates and the Clinton Family, who set their sights on largely foreign, arcane initiatives while the wealth disparity and poverty and misery in their own country are allowed to continue as their own rich selves only grow richer in the process.

Dickens's trenchant definition of this kind of self-serving charity is "rapacious benevolence."

"There were two classes of charitable people," he wrote, "the people who did a little and who made a great deal of noise; the other, who did a great deal and made no noise at all."

Mrs. Pardiggle, another obnoxious character in Bleak House, sounds eerily like the presidential candidate who never tires of boasting how tirelessly she works for "the struggling, the striving, and the successful." 

 "I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The quantity of exertion (which is no exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!"

And her staged visits with ordinary folk -- "great shows of moral determination and talking with much volubility" -- are at carefully vetted, focus-grouped events, with the poor people acting as mere props.

"Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word."

As Hillary Clinton also said, "It's not easy, it's not easy. And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do." And, "everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion." 

According to her official (auto) biography on the White House website, Hillary Clinton has "worked tirelessly on behalf of children and families" from the time she was a child herself. Her work ethic and stamina are the stuff of legend. Even after falling and breaking her elbow while Secretary of State, she returned to working tirelessly almost immediately. Anybody who doesn't realize that she never spares herself from her grueling schedule just hasn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. She must astonish even herself as she temporarily divests herself from her family's charitable foundation and travels the country, making a Great Noise about how much she cares.  

But enough about everyday Americans. What about those everyday benevolent raptors, aka the philanthrocapitalists? What are they up to this season of Yule for the wealthy, gruel for the rest of us?

Says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "The favored charities of the wealthy are gaining in share of the philanthropic economy. The total amount of the money given away by the very wealthy is going up, not because they're giving away a greater share of their income, but because their total wealth itself has grown."

The wealthy are great hiders and hoarders of their record wealth. As well they should be, given that the 80 richest people on earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population combined.

And that brings us to the lost tradition of wassailing: directly accosting and assailing the uber-rich, Bernie Sanders-style, for a share of the pie that they stole right from off our collective windowsill in the dead of night. The modern substitute of representative democracy, in which the politicians we elect to represent us are supposed to tax the rich in order to even the playing field is yet one more tradition now relegated to the scrap heap of the public good.

The custom of orphans and beggars going door to door and serenading the ruling class right where they live dates at least as far back as the third century. The landowners and nobility would  briefly open their homes to provide a little warmth, food, and mystery liquid from the Wassail Bowl. The wassail songs themselves were but gentle, good-natured reminders to the rich that 'tis the season for noblesse-obliging.

During times of plague and famine, however, the wassailing tradition would often devolve into armed home invasions, leading to the siege mentality so common among our sensitive ruling elites today. Not that wassailing ever really caught on in Exceptional America anyway, founded as it was on a shiny, right-leaning hill. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrims actually banned the whole celebration of Christmas! Those Puritans we honor at Thanksgiving were the original Bah-Humbugs.

Let's face it: fast forward, almost 400 years, and anybody daring to go on a Wassail Jaunt through the Blackwater-guarded gated communities of the Forbes 400 is really taking his life in his hands.

In early 19th century New York City, the rich and the prominent were very upset when the rabble rabbled during Yule. Gunfire, bread riots, lots of sex and drunkenness and vice sent the privileged behind locked doors, where they've remained ever since. The evolution of Christmas in income-disparate America into insular closed-door gatherings was a direct result of elite paranoia.

New York City Christmas Riot, 1806

In the mid-19th century, just as unfettered capitalism and the Industrial Revolution were gearing up with a vengeance, an Englishman named William Henry Husk departed from the bland God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen feel-goodism and repurposed the traditional Wassail carol to fit those particular hard times. He might have titled it "Soaking the Rich at Christmas." It was during this same magical era that Karl Marx was stirring things up with his revelations of the capitalist war on labor, and when Charles Dickens was sticking it to the greedy rich in his popular novels. The Scrooge-like forbears of the oligarchs of Kochtopia and Walmartistan were just as annoying then as they are now.

Here's what greeted Ebenezer Robber Baron back in the day:

We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door.
But we are neighbours' children
Whom you have seen before.

Jo the street sweeper from Bleak House (Mervyn Peake)

  Tell that to Congress and the plutocrats who own the government. Our rulers have once again evoked the Ayn Rand Who Stole Christmas in order to fill the begging bowls of the too-rich by draining those of the less fortunate. The coal in recent stockings consisted of food stamp cuts and ending long-term unemployment insurance. The latest lumps for the Lumpen are pension cuts and transforming what's left of our savings into gambling chips for Wall Street casinos.

As Bill Moyers wrote in his eloquent Christmas essay: 

The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11. As Michael Winship and I described here last Thursday, the bill is a bonanza for the donor class – that powerful combine of corporate executives and superrich individuals whose money drives our electoral process. Within minutes of its passage, congressional leaders of both parties and the president rushed to the television cameras to praise each other for a bipartisan bill that they claimed signaled the end of dysfunction; proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media (including public television and radio), especially the networks and cable channels owned and operated by the conglomerates, didn’t stop to ask: “Yes, but work for whom?” Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin — repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not “a perfect bill,” it does a lot of good things. “But for whom? At what price?” went unasked.

We have got a little purse
Of stretching leather skin
We want a little of your money
To line it well within.

We asked Santa for a tax on high speed trades. This relatively modest surcharge and some relatively modest affordable tax increases on the richest .01% would fund health care, highway improvements and public education. Helping those less fortunate -- now commonly known as the refugees from the middle class -- would help the rich, too. A rising tide lifts all yachts. It's time for some trickle-up. Hell, it's time for a geyser. We ordinary people have been stretched and bled dry enough.

So let's get on with the sarcasm, shall we?

Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth
Bring us out a mouldy cheese
And some of your Christmas loaf.

It's not prime rib we want, but it would be nice if a few banksters went to jail for that subprime mortgage fraud. Just a slab of tainted cheese and some of that rock-hard fruitcake from last year to keep a little flesh on our ribs. A living wage of at least $15 to start would be nice, too. That thin Yule Gruel of platitudes and bootstrap-boosting Randian rhetoric just doesn't do it for us any more.

And while we're waiting for the inevitable revolution, here's one last rich-shaming stanza to tide you over:

Good master and good mistress
While you're sitting by the fire
Pray think of us poor children
Who are wandering in the mire.

Needless to say, this mildly socialistic version of the Wassail Song is probably not being piped through to plutocratic office parties. The various recorded versions still around are heavily bowdlerized. The mouldy cheese is transformed into "tasty" cheese in one rendition. In other version, the money for our purses is reduced to "a few coins." Nor is it likely to be heard on the automated loops of easy listening holiday tunes coming from a corporatized FM radio station studio devoid of any actual human wage-earning DJ. The Christmas music will be cut off precisely at the stroke of midnight on December 26th. That's when the annual mad stampede for the post-holiday sales and binge of gift returns will get underway.

This is not to say that actual Christmas caroling is not still around. You just have to know where to look for it. And look no further than the great American cultural center-cum-New Abnormal town square: the shopping mall. (or Galleria, if you prefer to be elite.) The voices are singing and the bells are ringing to get shoppers in the mood to spend and consume till they drop.

You can even find a modern version of the Wassail Bowl. It's over at the food court, and it's called a self-serve soda machine. And it'll cost you.

Cheers and happy holidays to Sardonickists everywhere!

P.S. And on a lighter note... If Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn ever goes wassailing, it'll probably sound something like this: 

Griftopolis, Part Two

Like two luxury ships of state, the Clintons and the Obamas will pass in the night. Or more accurately, they plan to spin past each other at the speed of blight through that proverbial revolving door between public-private and private-public life.

As told to one of his favorite stenographers, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Barack Obama has now found such a strong voice on race that he will parlay its dulcet tones straight into a post-presidential "initiative" (neoliberal code for any scam pretending to help the hammock-trapped poor) which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Clintons' own slush fund charity, itself unsurprisingly dubbed the Clinton Global Initiative.

Obama and Baker Share Tender Moment at WH Correspondents' Dinner

Baker displays an uncanny knack of his own for maudlin presidential mind-reading:

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

All you need is love. Love is all you need.

But wait. It gets worse:

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

Notice the passive voice. Obama didn't bail out the Wall Street banksters and throw underwater mortgagors under the bus. He was consumed by the economy. He didn't escalate the war in Afghanistan, bomb Libya into terminal instability, or assassinate thousands of people with drones. He was eaten alive by the war monster. He didn't reject universal single payer medical coverage, selling out the American people behind closed doors to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. He was gobbled up by health care. It was all beyond his control. Now he is ready to cross, if not race, across the Race Bridge. And it's not the Selma Bridge he crossed earlier this spring for a photo-op. It's the bridge from Wall Street-on-the-Potomac to Wall Street itself.

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

"Unrest" is the popular neoliberal buzzword for the citizen revolt against both racism and the oppressive economic policies that fuel it. Obama's post-presidency is staked by $80 million that can only metastasize to Clintonoid proportions.

I've criticized My Brother's Keeper before. Since its propaganda stems from Obama's own autobiography as a fatherless son, it specifically leaves out women and girls, and positively drips with noblesse oblige and the gospel of Bootstrapism.

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies (my bold) address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

 Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

There apparently will be no direct cash aid to the Bro's. It needs must recycle through corporations and politicians before (maybe) finally trickling down. See my published Times comment at the end of this post. But first, some hilarity (Hillarity):

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. (Peter Baker makes sure to brag that as an insider with unique access to power, he got a cushy ride on AF One) But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

They are very well aware of Obama's commitment to transparency. His administration has been widely and rightly called the most secretive in recent memory. Josh, earnestly and with tongue planted firmly in cheek, confirmed that the plutocratic grifter class has nothing to fear from Big Guy. He is utterly committed to them and their interests. That is why, in the same breath that Obama denied a direct role in the donations, he will be spiritually present when the money changes hands.

There's more to Baker's article, including the obligatory juxtaposition of Ted Cruz (R-Paranoia) which is designed to deflect possible criticism of Obama's motivations right into a stampede of tribal support from "the base." The only criticism permitted an airing (besides the smarmy, dainty tiptoeing into the Clintonoid sleaze arena)  is the crazy criticism from the Right, the better to transform Obama into a victim-hero for the ages.

Here is my published comment on Baker's piece:

Venture philanthropists have been out in full force ever since the 2008 meltdown, drumming up self-serving publicity as they pretend to alleviate the very economic misery they helped to create in the first place. Do-gooderism by corporations and billionaires is designed to deflect our attention from the fact that they have demanded -- and gotten -- the cruel austerian policies that cut food stamps, closed schools, ended long-term unemployment benefits and depressed wages.

So now it's time for some reputation-salvaging, as what Peter Buffett has called the Charitable-Industrial Complex deigns to bestow a few pennies from their corporate welfare slush funds upon the victims of 30 years of Reaganomics.

It is no coincidence that some of the same businesses donating money to My Brother's Keeper are also pushing hard (either directly or through their lobbyists) for passage of the job-destroying, poverty-creating Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And what a travesty that News Corp, which has made demonization of the poor and demonization of the first black president its raison d'etre, is now welcomed into the philanthro-capitalist fold with open arms. How nice that they're using the spoils of racism to now pretend to fight racism.

Charity is fine, but it's no substitute for good public policy. We need a wealth tax and a stronger safety net, not "promise zones" and the occasional handout from a tycoon in a board room.

We used to have a democracy. Now we have Downton Abbey.

One final thought. Since Bill Clinton was dubbed the first black president, is it PC to call Obama the first black Clinton?