The fluorescent hypocrisy of the coward billionaire Pam Omidyar: Chapter the Eleventh of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

April 28th, 2010

This lovely young

green woman is, for my money,

the biggest rich hypocrite on the planet Earth.  Now, there

are bigger hypocrites, possibly, and there may be richer hypocrites,

there’s a ghost of a particle of a sliver of a chance of that.

But biggest rich hypocrite on Earth?

Pam Omidyar owns that

title cold.

As you can see from her tweets,

Pam Omidyar believes in some things: less war,

less genocide in Darfur, save the whales, stop soiling her

Hawaiian beaches with plastic,

like that.

And you know what?

I’m with her!  I’m for whales and

against war and genocide and plastic in my crack

at the beach, too!  And who

wouldn’t be:

I’m so against

all that stuff that I’m trying

to start something that can actually change it:

EarthNationLive. I say “actually” change it because there are

a lot of things that don’t actually change anything.

Tweeting doesn’t change much.  Petitions change

little.  And this kind of happy horseshit

changes absolutely

nothing:

Not only that,

it’s hypocritical as fuck.

Because when you have billions and

billions and billions of dollars in this world,

as Pam Omidyar does, you ain’t powerless to prevent injustice.

You ain’t powerless to save the whales — you can just drop a sack of

money in Paul Watson’s lap, and Sea Shepherd can have a fleet of Steve Irwins

instead of just one, and whaling will by God end.  Because Paul Watson isn’t a hypocrite.

Paul is against whaling, so he sinks whaling vessels, and rams whaling vessels, and

chases whaling vessels literally to the ends of the Earth to harass them and keep

them from killing whales.  And he’s awesome at enlisting people to staff his

ships and help him.  And if someone with a lot of money enabled him a lot,

that would just be the end of whaling on planet Earth, because Paul

could buy more ships and fuel and food for his crews and

they could make it so painful and impossible for

whalers to whale that they just wouldn’t,

because they just couldn’t.  It’s real,

real simple math.

There is a mountain in you.

Please get in touch with it.

Thich Nhat Hanh

You ain’t powerless,

either, to stop war or genocide or plastic

when you have billions of dollars.  Because you know

what stops all that stuff?  Critical mass.  Critical masses of people.

Which money and organization can rally very effectively.  And I have

explained this real simple math to Pierre and Pam Omidyar until I’m blue

in the face.  Not that one ought to have to get blue in the face, because it’s pretty

goddamn basic:  Vietnam?  Ended because a critical mass of people got organized

and walked out into the street and hollered about it.  Segregation in the South?

Ended because a critical mass of people got organized and walked out into

the street and hollered about it.  Nelson Mandela on his own prison

island for 27 years?  Ended because a critical mass of people

got organized and walked out into the

street and hollered about it.

Like that.

People who do

bad shit like carving up whales

and their baby calves, or setting other people’s

children on fire with Predators or torches, or making water

bottles out of something that has an environmental half-life of forever

do it because they can. Because nobody gets in the way and hollers about it,

or not enough people.  And as I’ve explained to Pam, the combination

of music (the world’s biggest gathering place) and the internet (the

world’s most powerful organization tool) offers a really excellent

way of getting a whole lot of people together to holler

about stuff.  To holler

effectively.

You’d think that

kind of thing might appeal to someone

who cares about changing things.  Especially someone who

so knows the power of the internet that she’s a multi-billionaire —

a multi-billionaire! — because of it.  You’d think that perhaps

a half a dozen years of polite conversations on

my part with Pam and her hypocritical

husband Pierre –

– who is the founder and

chairman of Ebay and the gentleman

publisher of the new  Honolulu Civil Beat

(hey, HCB editor John Temple, story idea, maybe

for your launch on May 4: plastic beaches perpetuated

by publisher of the Honolulu Civil Beat!) — would have led to something.

Especially because EarthNationLive would create the world’s

largest-by-far social network, which could be advertised

to, thus creating more of the money they

so deeply revere.

But no.

No movement.

Why?  I dunno.  They’re

friendly enough about some things,

but not about sharing a little money for a few months.

Not even about just chatting about it.  Because

money is sacrosanct. Like, you know, even

more important than war or genocide

or whales or plastic in

their children’s

ocean.

Like I said:

really big, really rich

hypocrites.

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 of ”Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

A person with a new

idea is a crank until the day the

idea succeeds.

Mark Twain