the heartfelt dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
I think it’s sad that rich people have nothing better to do with their money than to throw it at non-profits, especially political non-profits.
It’s especially sad that publicly traded firms that have never paid a dime in dividends can throw away billions on these taxi exempt scams. Where is the SEC? Who is protecting investors? Director primacy should not shield this level of abuse.
It has been going on for a long time.
Look up the biography of F. Engels.
I think that, at least nowadays, rich people’s political behavior may be best explained by inverting Marxism. Poor, working, middle class, even moderately wealthy people care a about their material well-being, but once you’re so rich that your standard of living is completely unmoored from public policy, you have no reason to worry about your financial self-interest, and can pursue goals based on pure ideology. From that perspective, it’s not surprising that there are so many ultra-rich radicals.
Arnold, you mean the selling of America. Read
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-elite-tom-friedman
And remember: in addition to malice, there’s stupidity
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
To Jack Hirshleifer and Carlo M. Cipolla,
Yes, we have failed to contain the dark side of the force.
If rich people were investing money into noble non-profits, even noble political non-profits, great. Invest in biotech or longevity tech. Invest in a superior education system. Invest in space travel.
Investing in Defund the Police and BLM protests seems horrible. A large part of those movements are zero-sum status competitions where your raise the status of some groups and insult and belittle other groups, which seems like quite a terrible thing to invest in.
You assume “zero-sum status competitions where your raise the status of some groups” isn’t the explicit goal: it would seem nothing has really changed from a century ago in this regard, as the comment below also points out.
A century ago the Bolsheviks were financed by rich American businessmen (see Anthony C. Sutton, https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X ) and nothing has changed since.
You may “think it’s sad that rich people have nothing better to do with their money than to throw it at non-profits, especially political non-profits” but those rich people don’t feel sad at all, they are eager and happy to intervene in politics, especially to stir up trouble which they expect to help them, personally, to stay on top of the heap (by diverting and destroying potential competitors).
As for the rich folks’ organizations, the “non-profits,” the political ones are all vehicles for the personal aggrandizement of those who contribute to them. They’re just tax dodges, not actually charities.
Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life (see:
https://ballotpedia.org/Center_for_Tech_and_Civic_Life_(CTCL). ) is perhaps the more relevant funding source for the Revolution having delivered the presidency to the Democratic Party previously and now the Senate last night. Zuckerberg will want repayment and will be an outsize influence in the design and implementation of the internet regulations he has been so desperately lobbying for to keep Facebook afloat.
Zuckerberg will get something like Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Disorder Bill outlawing behavior expressing antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult of protected groups. This would allow the government to shut down right wing web sites like Breitbart. John Roberts’ Supreme Court is eager to open up new frontiers in which he and his fellow high priests get to pick and choose whose speech is worthy of protection, a potential goldmine of litigation for the legal guild.