Mark Zuckerberg's Charitable Contribution is to Himself  So He and Other Elitists Can Shape the World in Their Own Images Against the "Useless Eaters"

The move is not surprising given that five years ago Zuckerberg signed the "Giving Pledge" — along with other tech billionaires such as Bill Gates — to give away the majority of his wealth.

Bill Gates and other elitists claim that their plans will reduce global poverty. And they will, but not in the way they would have you believe. The elitists plan to reduce global poverty by eliminating the poor in the world through vaccines, control of the global food supply, GMOs, control over growing your own food, control of vitamins and herbal supplements, control of clean water, control of health care, and control of cheap forms of energy. If you think this won't affect you, just remember that the gap between rich and poor is growing rapidly until one day soon there will be only the rich and the poor, and you will be the next target for elimination. The power elite want to reduce the world's population down to 500 million — chances are, you're not one of their chosen few.  

Let me explain how this works for those of you that know absolutely nothing about asset protection. Remember my words whenever you hear some really rich guy telling you he is donating all his money to charity rather than leave it to his kids....IT IS ALL A SCAM. Here is how it works... A charitable trust is established which focuses on the interests of the person for whom the trust is established. (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have theirs.) Over time, assets that generate income such as stocks are transferred to the trust to support the causes as previously mentioned. Upon the establishers death the remaining assets are transferred to the trust to continue the mission.....Thus avoiding the 55% estate tax.... So where's the scam? Guess who manages the charity? The kids of the person who established the trust, and they are paid a respectable amount per year for their service...say about 3%. That is $1.25B per year to Zuckerberg's heirs for NOTHING. The tax laws protect the ultra rich. Just don't think they are really giving anything away. They are protecting their wealth. [NeoGeo at Yahoo]

Let's not be naive - without knowing anything about this story, we can all still assume it's first and foremost a way to shield his money from taxes and regulation. Probably taking a page from the success of the Clinton Foundation. If he owns Facebook stock there are all kinds of rules about insider trading, reporting, taxes, announcing planned sales, etc... But if you put all the money in a "charity" that you control then there are suddenly a lot fewer rules and penalties to deal with. I'm sure any money going out of the charity will go to quasi-political organizations that promote increasing immigration so he can hire cheaper workers and fire Americans or other groups that promote his liberal leanings or that help his business. I doubt we'll see much of the money going to soup kitchens and Special Olympics. And as long as he keeps making donations to the right politicians he can guarantee he will never get audited or even questioned by law enforcement. [Raul at Yahoo]

People are inexplicably upset about Mark Zuckerberg's decision to "give away" 99% of his fortune

December 2, 2015

Yahoo Finance - Mark Zuckerberg's announcement on Tuesday that he would be giving away 99% of his Facebook stock to "advance human potential and promote equality" was greeted with universal cheers, right?

Well, no.

There were a lot of people who found bad things to say about the announcement.

They fell into several camps.

The 'gotcha — it's not really a charity!' camp

BuzzFeed pointed out that the organization they're donating to, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is a corporation — an LLC — rather than a nonprofit charity. In addition, the initiative won't necessarily be donating all the money to charitable causes — it will also make private investments and do things like advocacy work and lobbying.

Entrepreneur Anil Dash called the structure of the giveaway "clearly flawed," but admitted that:

It's impossible to know how much of those flaws are about ulterior corporatist goals and how much are accommodations of arcane regulations. For example, almost all non-profit organizations are founded as conventional corporations and then converted after the fact, so starting as an LLC may not be an indicator of future purpose.

As Bloomberg explains, setting up the organization as an LLC allows it to spend money on lobbying, earn money to reinvest in the organization, do joint ventures with fewer restrictions, and lets them give away money at a pace they determine rather than the mandatory 5% per year for non-profits.

The 'Zuck sucks' camp

Gawker pointed out that Zuckerberg's donation is going toward furthering the things that he thinks would help the world, which are not necessarily the things that other people think would help the world.

For instance, the writer called Zuckerberg's question "Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today?" a "patently hellish" vision that could only be hatched by a "technocrat." 

The "billionaires don't know anything" camp

There were several takes with this angle. Dash pointed out that most charitable contributions don't really help society:

No matter how good their intentions, the net result of most such efforts has typically been neutral at best, and can sometimes be deeply destructive. The most valuable path may well be to simply invest this enormous pool of resources in the people and institutions that are already doing this work (including, yes, public institutions funded by tax dollars) and trust that they know their domains better than someone who’s already got a pretty demanding day job.

 

A lot of folks linked to a 2010 Der Spiegel interview with businessman Peter Kramer, who argued that billionaires in the U.S. who give their money away are implicitly saying that they know better how to help society than government does:

It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

Devon Maloney at The Guardian had a similar caution and linked it to white imperialism:

But it also means that the rich are still effectively buying the future they’d like to see, no matter how selfless their intentions may be. International philanthropy and the western world’s desire to eradicate poverty and disease can’t ever truly rid themselves of their imperialist roots; as many critics have pointed out, the white savior industrial complex has never been more pervasive in global culture.

Phony Generosity: the Self-Serving Charity of Mark Zuckerberg

By Ted Rall
December 3, 2015 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg promises to give 99% of his Facebook shares to charity — eventually.

Exact phrasing: the stock, currently worth $45 billion, will be donated “during [he and his wife’s] lives.” He’s 31 and she’s 30, so actuarial tables being what they are, by approximately the year 2065.

If Facebook or the Internet or the earth still exist.

Whoop de doo.

I would be far more impressed if Facebook would put some money into the American economy. How? By hiring more workers — a lot more workers. Facebook’s market cap is $300 billion — almost ten times more than GM. GM has 216,000 employees. I’m not sure Facebook could find work for 2 million workers — but 12,000 is pathetic. They might start by hiring a few thousand 24-7 customer service reps so they could respond quickly when some antisocial pig posts your nude photo.

The part of the “ain’t Zuck nice” philanthropist suck-uppery that really has me annoyed is the “charity” bit.

Disclosure: I’m on record as being not at all into charity. If something is important enough to require funding — helping hurricane victims, sending doctors to war zones, poetry — it ought to be paid for by society as a whole, out of our taxes. We shouldn’t allow billionaires to aggregate enough wealth to billionaires in the first place. Partly, this is because it’s unfair. No one can work hard enough to earn one billion dollars. Also because it gives too much control to individuals at the expense of the 99.99% of everyone else.

Unfortunately, we await the revolution. So we still have billionaires running around pretending to be nice (as opposed to where they belong, hanging from a lamppost).

Even by our current dismal standards, however, Zuck is full of crap.

Point one: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charity. It’s a limited liability corporation (LLC) that, like any other company, can donate to actual charities but can also invest in for-profit companies.

Point two: this is all about control.

A donation to an independent, classic 501(c) charity can come with strings attached — the money is only for a children’s wing of the hospital, no adults — but it’s ultimately spent by the charity based on its directors’ decisions. Under the LLC structure Zuckerberg will maintain nearly dictatorial control over the funds he’s “donating” to “charity.”

It’s the difference between you giving a hundred bucks to the United Way, and taking a hundred bucks out of your wallet and dropping into a coffee can in your kitchen. Maybe the C-spot in the coffee can will go to the poor. Maybe not. It certainly isn’t accurate to claim you gave it to charity.

If Zuck wants a “gives 99% of his stock to charity” headline, he ought to earn it — by giving 99% of his stock to actual charities. Charities that aren’t named after him. Charities he doesn’t control.

“Zuckerberg To Maybe Eventually Do Things He Deems Good With Some Of His Fortune” would be more accurate.

The vagueness of the Zuckerbergs’ announcement highlights how little anyone should be impressed. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they said.

Sound familiar?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in 2000 with billions of dollars Microsoft extracted from American consumers via price gouging and gangster-style monopolistic tactics, so ugly the feds almost broke up the company. The charity’s (it’s charted as a 501(c)) mission sounds remarkably similar to those of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative:

“Our foundation is teaming up with partners around the world to take on some tough challenges: extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries, and the failures of America’s education system.”

Which, right out of the gate, meant donating PCs to schools so that fewer kids would grow up using Macs.

If you’re a conservative who thinks government can’t do anything right, let me show you a charity that’s worse. The Gates Foundation wants to destroy teachers’ unions to take away their benefits and drive down their wages — hardly a way to attract the best and brightest young college graduates into the profession. And it has poured millions into the disastrous Common Core, which has created today’s “teach to the test” culture in public schools. 

Given Zuckerberg’s previous involvement in public schools, a $100 million fiasco in Newark, New Jersey that declared war on teachers, fetishized standardized testing and led to so many school closures that kids wound up walking miles through gang territory to new schools chosen for them by, really, an algorithm — it isn’t a stretch to guess that Chan Zuckerberg will look a lot like Bill and Melinda Gates.

I wouldn’t expect much — much good, anyway — from Zuckerberg on the poverty front, either. After all, Facebook is spreading poverty among American STEM workers by pushing Congress for more H1C visas for foreign workers hired by big tech companies to replace better-paid Americans. Odds are that, here too, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s approach will be similar to the Gateses.

Too young and too rich to have a clue — and the only people they know are over-privileged corporate pigs. How do you think this will turn out?

In 2010, for example, Bill and Melinda drew fire for subsidizing African projects by agribusiness conglomerates Cargill and Monsanto, both notorious for crushing small farmers, to the tune of $23 million. They’re way into sketchy genetically-modified foods. They wind up propping up authoritarian and dictatorial political regimes by focusing on technocratic short-term “quick fix” projects that don’t address the underlying causes of poverty (psst — capitalism). It’s a safe bet Zuck’s anti-poverty stuff will make more people poorer.

It’s Zuckerberg’s billions. He can do what he wants with his money. But let’s not make the mistake of calling him a charitable giver, much less a great guy. 

Related:

• They Call Us 'Useless Eaters'
• The World's Richest Give Billions to Remake the World in Their Image
• Bill Gates' Agenda for the 21st Century 
• The Bill and Melinda Gates (of Hell) Foundation
• The Gates Foundation, Vaccines and Population Reduction 
• Paul Ceglia Has Been Falsely Charged by the U.S. Government and Will Not Get a Fair Trial, Which is Why He is 'On the Lam'
• Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange and the Carbon Trading Scam  
• Obama, the Chicago Climate Exchange, and the Climate Billionaires
•  Man-made Global Warming Scam is About Creating Climate Billionaires Via Carbon Trading Schemes While Lowering the Standard of Living of Everyone Else 
• UN Climate Change Deal is a Transfer of Wealth from Public Treasuries [Funded by Income Taxes and a Future Carbon Tax] to "Private Investors" (the Power Elite) Through the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, the Emissions Innovation Program, and the Clean Tech Initiative Announced by Bill Gates on November 29, 2015