The teeny tiny testicles of the coward billionaire Pierre Omidyar: Chapter the Tenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

April 25th, 2010

Curious about who Pierre Omidyar really is?

Read this, read this also, and watch the feature documentary

“Eat the Rich and Save the Whales”.

 

Trust me,

I don’t want to

perpetuate the rumor that

Pierre Omidyar — founder and chairman

of Ebay, multi-billionaire, and gentleman publisher

of the esteemed new launch Honolulu Civil Beat — is the owner

of the largest collection of Christian Louboutin

come-fuck-me pumps and tiaras in the

world, because I don’t believe it.

That’s actually Danielle

Steel:

“You know, I love it

when women say to me, ‘Oh, I am your

biggest customer — I have 15 pairs of your shoes!’”

says Louboutin, climbing the stairs back to his design studio.

“I’m like, ‘Darling, you have no idea.’ For me, a big customer

has to own at least 500 pairs of shoes. I’d say about

3,000 women have 500 pairs,” he declares.

“But those aren’t the biggest customers.

Those customers have about six

thousand pairs.”

These are truly

the queens of the world, a clique that

includes a Moroccan princess and, he says, Betty

Lagardere, widow of French mogul Jean-Luc Lagardere,

who is rumored to have a whole floor of her home reserved for

Louboutins. Elite women who may own fewer of his shoes receive special

service as well, like, he says, imperious Mme. Hariri of the billionaire Lebanese

family. “With Madam, she will come to you first, but once you know her, you

must come to her,” says Louboutin. “It is usually the same with the very

rich, especially from the Middle East. On the first floor of her residence

in Paris, there are 10 salons, and it seems that the entire luxury

world is waiting in each one — the man from Van Cleef and

so on. There she is in her makeup with the eyes done and

everything, but still in her robe — she just woke up

at four p.m., fully groomed. And you explain to

her what you can do for her. It is

very en prive.”

But the super-top customer?

“Danielle Steel, for sure. She has at least 6,000 pairs,

if not more. She comes to Paris, and she literally buys everything.”

He leans in close. “You know, I have one client in Paris, a psychoanalyst,

who only comes to shop when I am in the store, and I must select the

shoes for her, in a very coded ritual,” he trills. “One day, I helped

her to her car, and when she opened the trunk it was stacked

to the top with my shoeboxes. She’s buying the

shoes, and she doesn’t even

wear them.”

Vanity Fair

Lordy.

Hoarding is grotesque, even

en prive, eh? You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes

at once, but some folks are immune to that logic. You and I would think that

beyond a few hundred pairs, a person would start to feel very silly in the

closet, playing with shoes. But some are terribly fond of their closet

games. And billionaires love the closet best of all — that’s

why they’re billionaires, after all, they hoard

more frantically than

anyone else.

Some billionaires

are especially repulsive

about displaying their closetware —

see, e.g., Roman Abramovich and

his five mega-yachts:

Others crush everyone

in their path pimping dogshit to buy all

those shoes, and then crown themselves noble when they

give a pair back to the little people — see Bill Gates,

his hideous software, his 75,000 s.f. house,

his jetting about to implement

vaccination programs.

 

“He who desires

the admiration of the world will

do well to amass a great fortune and then give

it away. The world will respond with admiration

in proportion to the size of his treasure.

Of course, this is meaningless.”

Lao Tzu

What a peculiar

way to be, in times

like these:

“As another way

of mitigating our paralyzing horror

at seeing our society’s future as one of decline

in so many respects, we should ask: decline to what?

Are we facing a complete disintegration of everything we hold

dear, or merely a reversion to lower levels of population, complexity,

and consumption? The answer, of course, is unknowable at this stage. We could

indeed be at the brink of a collapse worse than any in history. Just one reference in

that regard will suffice: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year

analysis of the world’s ecosystems released in 2006, in which 1300

scientists participated, concluded of 24 ecosystems identified as

essential to human life, 15 are “being pushed beyond their

sustainable limits,” toward a state of collapse that

may be “abrupt and potentially irreversible.”

The signs are not good.

“Addressing the

economic, social, and

political problems ensuing

from the various looming peaks

will require enormous collective effort.

If it to be successful, that effort must be coordinated,

presumably by government, and enlisting people in that

effort will require educating and motivating them in numbers

and at a speed that has not been seen since World War II. Part of

that motivation must come from a positive vision of a future worth

striving toward. People will need to feel that there will be an eventual

reward for what will amount to many years of hard sacrifice. The reality

is that we are approaching a time of economic contraction and that consumptive

appetites that have been stoked for decades by ubiquitous advertising messages

promising “more, faster, and bigger” will now have to be reined in. People

will not willingly accept the new message of “less, slower, and smaller,”

unless they have new goals toward which to aspire. They must feel

that their efforts will lead to a better world, and tangible

improvements in life for themselves and their families.

The massive public education campaigns that will

be required must be credible, and will therefore

be vastly more successful if they give people a

sense of investment and involvement in

formulating those goals. There is a

much-abused word that describes

the necessary process –

democracy.”

Richard Heinberg,

Peak Everything

…

I’ve been having

a conversation with the peak shoe-hoarder

Pierre Omidyar for coming on seven years about funding

EarthNationLive, a highly democratic public education and engagement

engine that could enlist, motivate, and direct the energies of the billions of people

that it will actually take to turn our mad world around, to save our rapidly

perishing ecosystems, to end the practice of war as a means of conflict

“resolution”, to put us on a viable course toward a sustainable future

for ourselves, the creatures we share this planet with, the

planet itself. If billions aren’t working for those things,

billions are, ipso facto, working

against them.

It’s a very one-way

conversation, this one. Because Pierre,

relatively admirable billionaire that he is (in the

sense to which Lao Tzu alluded, that is, the one where

you break off a crumb or two for others), is too busy with his

shoes to even talk with me about sharing. I’ve asked nicely to borrow

some millions from him — chump change, in his terms — for nine months or

a year to build something colossal to feed people and save whales and provide

access to capital for the truly desperate. I could paper my house and yours

with my oh-so-polite communications. He knows that I could pay it back

at the end of that time, too, but that’s not a hoarder’s idea of big sexy

fun. So he won’t chat with me about it — won’t say yes, won’t say

no, won’t say boo. It’s not that Pierre Omidyar is

universally unfriendly. He’s happy enough

to chat about other

matters:

But not money.

Not word one in seven years.

Not for something that demonstrably

could move the critical mass of people it will take

to end the genocide in Darfur his wife so tweeterifically campaigns

against, nor to prevent the coming bloody attack on the land of his origins,

nor to keep people from living in sewage and having their limbs hacked off unnecessarily.

He’s not uncommon in this, I guess — the nauseatingly rich rarely like to talk about

sharing their money; it’s beneath them. They’re a bit like the prettiest,

snootiest WASP daughter-of-the-bank-president cheerleader you

knew in high school: certain they have something in

their pants made of golden taffy, certain God

loves them best, certain you’re

untouchable.

(area of detail)

But still: wanna

hear the really sick part?

One of the things that EarthNationLive

could do, which I’ve been explaining to Pierre

for years and years, is to solve one of the world’s most

singularly intractable and awful problems — to dramatically

reduce the two week period it takes for the UN, Red Cross, and

governments to distribute aid after a disaster like a tsunami or an earthquake.

That period is known as “the disaster after the disaster”, and for good reason:

it usually kills about ten times as many people as the disaster itself. (Read

the first nine chapters of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth” if you

want the gory details: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 — and then, just

because you shouldn’t take the word of a loony

untouchable and the NY Times for how real

and how solvable this problem is,

read this new article

in Wired.)

The disaster

after the disaster caused

hundreds of thousands to die in

Port-au-Prince in January, tens of thousands

to have their limbs amputated (including Fabienne Jean,

former prima ballerina and now the tender of The Pam Omidyar

Memorial Stump), thousands to be raped in lawless refugee camps —

and nearly every bit of that preventable, as I’ve been explaining to Pierre and

his hypocritical wife Pam through disaster after disaster now. Through Katrina,

Thailand, Banda Aceh, Myanmar, Haiti. Through hundreds of thousands of

children and aunties, dead in sewage, with the Baron and Baroness

Omidyar aware all the while of something that would save them –

something that runs on the same internet that made them

their billiions.  And them perched and whistling on

more money than God to put such things in

motion. But also, alas, golden taffy

in their panties.

Ah, me.

There but for the grace

of being-a-lowly-Taoist-poet go I, no doubt.

As Logan Pearsall Smith put it, “To suppose, as we all

suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave,

is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep

absolutely sober.” No doubt with Omidyar money

I’d turn my nose up at

my own dog.

Sigh.

Well, as Rumi says,

“Where there is ruin, there is hope

for a treasure.” Maybe Pierre will grow some

balls in his teeny weeny sack one day. Or maybe he’ll

send some lawyers after me, and the attendant ruckus will

cause an even greedier hoarder — Jeff Bezos, say, or Sergey Brin –

to see the truly ginormous social network (ad cash!) inherent in ENL,

leapfrog sackless Pierre, and build the citizen’s union that can save the world. Maybe

neither, and then this post will just sit here for his kids to read while Rome burns.

Maybe one day they’ll say to him, “We’re not so interested in hoarding money

like you, but it would’ve been nice to have had some fish in the

oceans, and to have seen Fabienne Jean dance,

you dickwad.” Maybe then he’ll get it.

Probably not.

Our lives begin to end

the day we become silent about

things that matter.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Never give up hope in the Beloved.

Hope is the trailhead of the path to refuge.

Even if you’re not on the path, at least guard 
the trailhead.

“I’ve acted crookedly,” you say. 
Remember Moses’s staff, which,

becoming a snake, ate the wands 
of Pharoah’s magicians.

When you find the straight way 
it

eats up all the crookedness

of your past.

Rumi

A person with a new

idea is a crank until the day the

idea succeeds.

Mark Twain