The hypocrisy of Pam Omidyar, billionaire do-gooder (Chapter the First of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

January 30th, 2010

Forgive me,

Lord, but I’m going to make

a billionaire squirm a little.  It’s for a good cause,

the one you sent me here to implement,

it seems.

The altogether

lovely smiling person above

is Pam Omidyar, wife of Pierre Omidyar,

founder of Ebay.  Together they share a fortune of $5.5 billion,

if the Forbes 400 is correct in their estimate.  I’ve never

heard or read a dark word about her.  Alas, I’m

going to contribute the first, albeit

reluctantly.

If you

read this blog regularly,

on January 23rd, you read this. It’s one of about

a zillion such things I’ve written to the Omidyars and the

other tech billionaires of the world, a few of them on this blog,

most of them (by far and for many years) privately.  It’s a proof-of-concept

of EarthNationLive which shows that you can use music to get people all over the

world to contribute money to help people who have suffered in disasters.

Here’s one from January 16th which demonstrates that a network like

EarthNationLive can provide effective emergency

medical care, food, water, shelter, and

policing within hours of

a disaster.

You may

or may not know this,

but the first bags of rice were handed out

in Haiti on January 28th.  The earthquake occurred on

January 12th.  16 days.  And that’s typical of emergency relief efforts

run by the UN, Red Cross, and the U.S. and other governments.

Here’s how folks got food in Port-au-Prince

during that sixteen day

interval:

They looted.

Others drew knives on the looters

and stole their lootings from them.  Often this

resulted in violence that looked

like this:

I just

fasted for five full days

to get a fresh sense of real and prolonged

hunger.  I’m a relatively non-violent person, I worship

Dr. King and his teachings to the level of having a portrait of him

tattooed on my right shoulder, but if you forced me to go without

food long enough, I might use a knife or a stick on someone

to get some.  I might set someone on fire who

took mine from me.  Most

of us would,

I wager.

Here’s

something that at

first glance seems calmer and

more restful to gaze

upon:

That’s a

report from the tracking

software that measures traffic to this blog.

It shows someone at Chez Omidyar in Honolulu reading

that January 23rd proof-of-concept post, and others.  I have

a whole bunch of these.  So Pam is taking in all this information

about how ENL could be used to prevent the disaster

after the disaster and get aid to

people in a hurry.

And yet:

Those are

Pam’s tweets on Twitter

from the last couple of days.  If you

read the bottom one, it says, “Even after the

media spotlight on Haiti fades, there will be patients

with extensive orthopedic needs.”  And that couldn’t be more true.

There are now thousands of people in Haiti who have had limbs amputated,

who are going to need follow-up surgeries, who are, woe, going to need

artificial limbs in the poorest country in the western hemisphere,

one where multitudes of people can’t afford food

or shelter, much less a

bionic limb.

And here

is the rub, Pam, Pierre,

fellow billionaires, world: the lion’s share

of those limbs were amputated because they received

a relatively minor injury of some kind in the initial shock of the

earthquake — they were struck by something falling, the skin was opened

in a gash, a bone was broken in a fall down collapsing stairs.  Some were

crushed catastrophically and could never have been saved, but

thousands upon thousands were just simply injured and

could have been rehabilitated — had their owners

had access to antibiotics and

emergency medical

care.

But they didn’t.

Because the UN and the Red Cross

and the US Navy take a couple of weeks to get all

that going after a disaster, as I have explained on the

EarthNationLive website and in private communications to

the Omidyars and their fellow billionaires through a whole

series of disasters-after-the-disasters for years now:

Katrina.  Banda Aceh.  Thailand.

Cyclone Nargis.

Haiti.

So.

I’m sorry,

Pam Omidyar, but you’re

a hypocrite.  You’re well aware of what

the term “the disaster after the disaster” means,

as your tweet shows.  No one who works as hard as you do

at helping others is unaware of that, but your tweet proves it positively.

And I’ve been showing you for nearly seven years how to get aid to people in

a hurry after a disaster to prevent the disaster after the disaster.  That

solution uses a technology, the internet, with which hardly

anyone in the world is more familiar than you and

your husband Pierre.  And you

steadfastly ignore

it.

I don’t

know why this is.

I don’t really care, either.

I know this is an uncomfortable moment —

for you, for others reading this, for me.  I take no pleasure

in calling someone a hypocrite, believe me.  (Okay, unless it’s, say,

Dick Cheney — but you, madam, are no Dick Cheney!)  However, I take less

pleasure by far in people maiming and killing one another to get at a rotting

banana or a bottle of water, in children losing arms and hands and feet

and legs because they got infected from a cut, or because gangrene

set in after a break.  People being burned alive because

a hunger-mad mob went wild bothers me

more than putting you on

a hot seat.

Nothing

would please me more

than to delete all these oh-so-personal

Haiti posts and get about building something like

EarthNationLive.  Until I have the money to do it, from you

or another billionaire or the 100,000 people who end up reading this

and donating to build ENL, I’m going to keep writing them.  I’m a geezer and

I’ve been through a lot, as you know, and I just don’t have the energy to go

knock on doors for 15 years, give a spiel, and collect $5 donations from

people strained by a devastated economy.  Don’t want to watch

the next disaster, either, and all the ones after that,

while I knock on all those

doors.

You can

get mad if you like.

I might.  Most people would.

Send the lawyers.  Sue me, the publicity

might do wonders for the cause.  Call the White House,

they’ll take your call, we both know that.  Call Erik Prince

and get the number of someone who can swing by and drown me

in the creek in front of my house.  Or reach into that colossal sack of money

the gods dropped on your head and loan me .36% of it for nine months,

as I’ve asked again and again. I’ll pay it back with generous

interest, as I’ve promised again and

again, and proved I could do

again and again.

Better yet,

call Bezos and Gates and Allen,

call Myrvhold and Skoll, call Page and Brin and

Schmidt and Dell, and have them kick in.  Lessen your

suffering all you like.  I just want children to

stop suffering in sewage, and

dying of sewage.

I don’t care

how we get there.

I do care that we get there.

I care enough that I’m willing to act like

a bona fide fanatic and communicate with you this way,

since all the others haven’t worked.  I’ll do that as

long as it takes.  If it doesn’t work, I’ll find

something more outlandish and

annoying.

I’m sorry to

pick on you.  You have a kind

countenance.  I’ve no doubt you’re a good soul.

No one exactly deserves a hiding on the internet.  On the other

hand, it could be argued that no one deserves $5.5 billion

when billions of people can’t eat or drink clean water

or save their limbs with a simple

antibiotic tablet in a

catastrophe.

I’d like

for you to be happy,

to be rich and surf and love your children.

I don’t want you to give up all your crazy big piles of money

and wear burlap and minister to others’ wounded children in Haiti,

or the next place, which is just around the corner.  I just want you to facilitate

it, given that you know it’s needed.  Given that you can do it so incredibly

easily.  Given that the cost to you would be the equivalent of my loaning

one of my bicycles to you for a few months.  Or just the tire pump,

if you enroll your fellow billionaires.  Literally.

Does that bring it

home?

Tomorrow,

you’ll be glad to know,

you guys get a day of rest.

It’s another billionaire’s turn.

(Hint: he’s even richer.

I hope the audience

can bear it.)