Pam Omidyar Saves the Whales! Chapter the Fourteenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”: Hunger vs. Hypocrisy

June 16th, 2010

You may recall

that some time ago I offered billionaire

hypocrite Pam Omidyar an opportunity to save the whales

she so dearly loves. She didn’t take it. And evidently she was made

jumpy by having people pay attention to the hypocritical

words she utters, because she deleted her Twitter

account (I’ve saved some gems for you,

which are below).

It’s a big honking

responsibility to be a billionaire.

It’s a position of enormous power, and power

isn’t easy to come by in this world. It comes in myriad forms,

but fundamentally they all boil down to these three:

popularity power, military power,

or monetary power.

One hot blonde cheerleader

can wrap a whole high school around her pinky finger;

a clever shaman or guru can control an entire village or sect; a charismatic

Harvard-educated politician can turn a Presidential election into his own 747,

a guaranteed fortune for generations of his family, and crackerjack

bodyguards for life. That’s popularity power,

and on the Earth in 2010,

it’s real.

If you’ve got a big

standing army or a passel of ICBMs

or some squadrons of F-16s, you can holler “Jump!”

at folks, and they’ll salute and holler back, “Sir, how high, sir?!”

If they fail to satisfy you with their jumping or their saluting or their sir-ing,

you can raze their hamlets and rape their women and bayonet

their children. That’s military power, and

on the Earth in 2010,

it’s very real.

And if you’ve got money,

you can buy up some of the most

respected and coveted newspapers and

media outlets in the world and fill them from

front to back with tired, hateful, cynical slop, and

people will still pull out your chair for you and feed you

the finest cuts of Kobe beef: just ask Rupert Murdoch. If you’ve

got money, you can fill a nation’s cities with vulgar skyscrapers, equip

them all with faux-gold toilet fixtures, plaster your name all over them, and

run your stubby fingers over every vapid beauty contestant in the land: just ask

Donald Trump. If you’ve got money, you can openly crush every competitor your

business has, no matter how wretched your product, stifle innovation

everywhere you see it, and then polish your personal reputation

to a high luster in short order by simply passing out some

vaccinations and mosquito nets and a small portion

of your plunder: just ask Bill Gates. That’s

monetary power, and on the Earth

in 2010, boy howdy is

it ever real.

Pam Omidyar has

beaucoup monetary power.

She’s half of Pam and Pierre Omidyar,

the multi-billion dollar fortune spawned in

a few short years by Ebay. Pam is a bit of a hypocrite,

alas, and she’s also My Personal Billionaire. She’s a hypocrite

for reasons I’ve outlined at considerable length in the first

thirteen chapters of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth” —

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 – and she’s My Personal

Billionaire because she’s lovable, relative to

most billionaires, and because her

hypocrisy sticks in my

craw the worst.

Hypocrisy among the

powerful is turrible stuff. If you have

the power to stop setting other people’s daughters

on fire with your war machines — and Barack Obama does –

and you don’t do it, well, that’s turrible. If you have the power to

keep people from having their limbs amputated with

hacksaws, sans anesthesia, and Pam Omidyar did,

and you don’t pull the trigger, that’s

turrible, turrible indeed.

And if you have the power

to save the whales, and the same gal does,

and you don’t do it, well, heck — your children should

at least be able to read about your  “let them eat

whale sashimi” attitude toward

the world.

Herein, therefore,

yet another in a long line of

attempts to reform My Personal Billionaire,

or die trying (more on that part shortly). Someone else

will have to take on the hard cases like Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison

or Paul Allen — my pet project is Pam Omidyar, and thus do I announce, in the

quiet calm of this little website, exactly how Pam Omidyar can save the

whales. That’s right, one little redheaded girl, shy, retiring,

a biologist and surfer and mommy, can save all the

whales on the planet Earth from being murdered

with exploding harpoons. Hard

to believe, isn’t it?

But it’s true.

But first let’s establish

that this is an idea that even Pam

(since it’s her dough that’s involved) should be able

to get behind. Here’s Pam, and some of her fab tweets from

@pamomidyar over the last few months, before she got

all shy about saying one thing and doing

another and deleted her

Twitter account:

All right, then.

That’s just plain as day.

Pam Omidyar cares about the fishes

and the dolphins and the whales and the deep

blue sea. She also hates guns, which is

precisely what exploding

harpoons are:

And hey, by gosh,

she doesn’t just believe in jabbering

about stuff, she believes

in action, too:

Most important of all,

she believes in going big! For the children!

(Because what child wants to see the world’s most

magnificent mammals torn apart

by exploding harpoons?)

So Pam Omidyar loves

the ocean and its creatures and believes

with all her heart in going BIG after big goals and in leaving

a proper legacy for our children, right? She establishes that beyond

a shadow of a doubt with her own words. So naturally she’ll be up for saving

the whales! Knowing all that, I went to the greatest savior of whales

this planet has ever seen, Paul Watson, founder of the the

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,

and I asked him:

In short order

I got back a very complete

answer:

Paul’s email is long

and substantial and filled with charts

and tables and calculations. Before we tell Pam

Omidyar how little money it would take to save the whales,

and how infinitesimally tiny a portion of her net

worth it is, a bit about Paul

and Sea Shepherd:

Paul Watson’s bona fides

as an environmentalist and a defender

and savior of marine mammals are beyond dispute.

One of the original founders of Greenpeace, he left when it

became clear that they were about hanging banners and he was

about getting in between marine mammals and their

murderers. What he’s done in the three-plus

decades since is well encapsulated by

this screen grab from

his email:

There’s no need

for me to comment on that.

Just for emphasis, though, read

the first two paragraphs

again:

No injuries,

no criminal convictions,

no lawsuits; whaling by five nations shut down;

whaling by two remaining damaged; thousands of whales saved.

I refer anyone with further doubts about Sea Shepherd or Paul to SeaShepherd.org,

or to Whale Wars or Wikipedia. He knows what he’s doing — if you get between

the whale and the harpoon, the whale can’t be harpooned.

That’s what they do at Sea Shepherd.

It’s that simple, and

it works.

So, Pam Omidyar,

without further ado, here is the number

Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd need from your purse

to save all whales from commercial whaling on the

planet Earth, from 2010 going

forward in perpetuity:

$57,700,000.00.

For that eminently

affordable price — a sandwich, in your terms —

here’s what you get:

Except ever so much more so.

Because as Captain Watson details in the

report I requested, with a little financial help,

Sea Shepherd can completely end whaling on planet

Earth.  They just need a few things:  a third long range vessel

for the Sea Shepherd navy, 60 to 80 metres, ice strengthened, heli-equipped,

capable of launching small interception boats, complete and in service by fall 2010;

annual re-fits of its three vessels and three helicopters; the non-negotiable fuel, berthage,

and port fees that are an enormous part of their operating budget; the tiny crew fees that

are a smaller part of their operating budget (and which can always be negotiated

downward, the commitment of these folks being what it is); upgraded satellite

systems for all three vessels to enable instantaneous transmission of video

and images; full coverage of all sea and air operating expenses for 2011

and 2012, the first two years in hundreds of years in which not

one whale will be killed for commercial purposes on Earth,

thanks directly to you; and the establishment of a

modest Permanent Fund to fully provide an

operating budget for the Sea Shepherd

three-vessel three-heli navy

going forward.

I have the whole budget

here if you’d like to read it; you know how to reach me.

But maybe instead of picking through that, you should get off your

hypocritical duff and write a check — a check you won’t

feel, a check which will

allow this:

That would result directly

in results like these, only increased substantially

in number, and compounded over time…

…as well as expansion

and massively increased effectiveness of

all other Sea Shepherd campaigns — dolphins, baby harp seals,

sharks, bluefin tuna, Galapagos, and the Gulf Rescue Campaign —

as well as the campaigns which we all know are going

to come, the state of the oceans

being what it is.

That amount is —

if the Forbes 400 is correct in its

estimation of your wealth as the 40th richest

American, at $5,500,000,000 — roughly 1% of your

net worth. Is saving the largest and smartest and most

harmless mammals on Earth worth 1% of your massive fortune

to you, Pam? Put another way, could you part with one-tenth of the

interest on your fortune this year to “go big” and seal the deal on saving

the whales? And to “enable the service of others”, which enabling will do for the

bluefin tuna and the shark what it has historically done for whales? Is the

ocean worth 1% to you, you who surf and wear blue and sign Save the

Whales petitions and celebrate “The Cove”?  Would you like

to save whale sharks from being finned for soup and left

to sink and die, which very much needs doing, too?

Is any or all of that worth one-tenth of the

interest on your fortune

this year?

If it is, let me know,

and whaling can end this very year.

These are the janjaweed, Pam:

These are the peacekeepers

who follow the janjaweed all over the world

and keep them from killing:

If there were

a janjaweed killing mammals near you –

say, native Hawaiians — ripping their meat from their bones,

selling it in open markets in Honolulu, and feeding it to the Omidyar children

in their school lunches — which is precisely what the Japanese do

with whale meat in Tokyo and Kyoto and Hokkaido —

would 1% of your massive fortune be

available to stop it?

If you’re paying any

attention to what the IWC is up to this week,

you understand how apropos is this sentence from Dr. Martin Luther King:

“This is no time to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”  The

janjaweed are gathering strength.  If ending the janjaweeding

of the whales isn’t worth a tenth of the interest on your

fortune this year, then carry on

with your hypocrisy.

I’ve asked you to do

some things like this before, and you

do listen to the requests, but you never act.

This time, I offer you this tiny added incentive:

I promise you that from the time I post this until I hear

from Sea Shepherd that you’ve made a financial

commitment to save the whales,

I won’t eat again.  Ever,

if necessary.

I know you’re shy

and retiring and wouldn’t want

to be made the subject of a big public hunger

strike. So I won’t climb a tree near your house in Honolulu

and unfurl a banner.  I’ll do this as quietly as I possibly can and still

have you know it’s going on. Let’s call it Hunger Against Hypocrisy.  This will

be the quietest one man hunger strike to save the whales the world has ever seen,

or will see, until either (a) you’ve made a commitment to get off your crazy-rich ass

and save the whales and make a significant contribute to the health of the ocean

that you so claim to love, or (b) someone in my family posts the

notice of my death by starvation.  Until one of

those occurs, I’ll just be

here, hungry.

Send me a new email address —

for some curious reason, my emails to all your

previously working addresses are bouncing at the moment! —

and I’ll email you a photo or video privately from time to time so you can

see how far out my ribs are sticking, just so there’s no question that I’m keeping

my promise. Otherwise, I won’t bother you. This post will be here.

The opportunity will be here: maintain your hypocrisy

and starve a man to death in the bargain,

or end it and save the whales.

Had you given a damn

when I began talking to you about

EarthNationLive over six years ago, Sea Shepherd

would’ve been fully funded and long ago ended whaling on Earth,

Fabienne Jean would be a ballerina rather than the tender of the Pam Omidyar

Memorial Stump today, and a whole lot else would be different. But let’s look forward.

Given what’s written here, you own the world’s whales from this date forward.

Do you prefer them dead? Or alive, these the largest mammals on Earth,

the smartest, the most peaceful, the ones who sing songs that

travel all the way around the world, the ones

who have enduring friendships,

just as we do?

Do tell.

Try to go big, and to

enable the service

of others.

When a great moment

knocks on the door of your life, it is often no

louder than the beating of your heart,

and it is easy to miss it.

Boris Pasternak

Cautious, careful people,

always casting about to preserve their reputation

and social standing, never can

bring about a reform.

Susan B. Anthony

The healthy being craves

an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality,

a sharpening of the edge of appetite,

a brief excursion from

his way of life.

Robert MacIver

What is more mortifying

than to feel you’ve missed the plum for want

of courage to shake the tree?

Logan Pearsall Smith

Act boldly and

unseen forces will come

to your aid.

Dorothea Brande