The Washington Post continues its aggressive reporting on Donald Trump’s charitable contributions, most recently putting the screws to the presumptive Republican nominee’s son, Eric Trump. “It’s disgusting. It is so disgusting what’s happening,” Eric complained last week. “I’m saving dying children. We do tremendous good for people. And you’re sitting there tearing us apart.”
America is facing a crisis: some of our most beautiful public spaces are being defaced by the “tags” of selfish, narcissistic individuals. Most of them are billionaires.
Those yellow clothing-collection bins behind your local gas station or convenience store aren’t actually particularly charitable, according to a Reveal investigation. Not only will your donations likely not be helping hungry kids in Africa, they may be directly supporting a Danish international fugitive named Mogens Amdi Petersen.
Billionaire Hollywood mogul David Geffen, whose ability to use charity donations to embody the principle of selfishness is truly astounding, made—spoiler alert!!!—another gaudy, wasteful, self-aggrandizing charity donation today.
Today, another very rich man has given an enormous amount of money to a very rich university that doesn’t really need it. This gift is supposed to make the world better. But it is a very big waste.
In a savvy PR maneuver, today Mark Zuckerberg used the birth of his daughter Max to advertise to the world the fact that he’s decided to give away 99% of his Facebook shares (roughly $45 billion today) to charity (over the course of the rest of his life, not all at once). It sounds angelic, but it will probably end up being, mostly, a big waste.
Very rich people sometimes make very large donations to educational or cultural institutions. In return, they ask for their names to be plastered atop buildings. These donations have no moral worth.
The founder of a charity group that was displaced from its Venice Beach office by Snapchat’s expansion says that “a Snapchat executive told her he had noticed one of her homeless clients sweeping the street with an old broom, so he offered to buy the organization a new one.” Kindness—it’s affordable :)
While Lil Wayne waits for the interminable legal battle over Tha Carter V to wrap up, he’s killing time by showing up hours late to concerts, having his tour bus shot at by rival Blood factions, and participating in charitable activities. Like this “Stop the Violence” celebrity basketball game, where he nearly incited a brawl by spitting on the ref, according to TMZ.
Do your charitable donations suck? Are you failing to save lives due to greed you don't even realize you have? Do poor people have the right to take all of our stuff? One of the world's most famous philosophers talked about these very topics with us.
The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America's economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.
Today is hashtag #GivingTuesday, a day when the act of charity transforms into an act of #viral #marketing for #brands. Reject it!
