“Eat the Rich and Save the Whales”: The Coward Billionaire Pierre Omidyar Pops the Hypocrisy Breaker (again), Wikileaks sets the overthrow of a second dictator in motion, and a genuine, no-faux hero waits in the wings

January 26th, 2011

Yesterday, as the coward billionaire

and monumental hypocrite Baron Pierre “PeeWee” von OMidyar

was watching “Eat the Rich & Save the Whales” for the first time, I was watching

some video of him.  It’s on a website called, aptly and hilariously,

Money Control, and you can and certainly

should go here to watch it.

At 2:03 in Part 2,

the following exchange begins

(I’ve redacted comments specific to India,

where he is being interviewed, for the sake of brevity,

but I haven’t altered a word of

Baron von OMidyar’s):

Q: You’re fairly passionate

about governance, about government transparency.

You have always made it the core of your philanthropic activity.

Why is that so important?

OMidyar: I really believe

government transparency, and our work there,

and the work that many people are doing there, is very very

important.  Because we can’t forget that the role of government is

to serve the people.  And the information that comes from government

is public information, which means that it belongs to the people. Yeah. So

we really believe that for societies to advance, for democracy to work,

people have to have access to information…It’s very very important.

We think that giving people access to information is

going to make government better…Increasing

the level of transparency can

really help society.

Q: How do you

measure success in government

transparency?

OMidyar: I would say

that you will find more effective

governance keeping people accountable,

actually.  So elected officials and heads of ministries

and bureaucrats and so forth, actually paying attention to,

Are they delivering the services their agencies are supposed to

deliver?  Are they following up on their commitments? So it’s very

clear in a democracy that the only way the government will be effective

is if people hold it accountable.  And the only way people can hold it accountable

is if they have information about how it’s working…Individual privacy is what

matters, not governmental privacy.  And I would say that in the case of

Wikileaks…my concerns about how the government has reacted are

even greater.  And I think we have to be very very careful — you

know, it’s our government, it’s a democracy.  It’s our

government!  They’re there to serve us!

And so when a government reacts

in a way that brings tremendous pressure on an agency

that is trying to publish information about how it’s working, even if

that information was leaked, right, in the United States we have the freedom

of the press, it’s a Constitutional protection, it’s very very important.

And so I’m concerned about government overreach and

overreaction and pressure to suppress

information that it doesn’t like.

If you’re like almost

everyone watching or reading those

words, you’re thinking, “Admirable stance,

my good fellow.  You’re a lovely chap even if you

are a bit of a hoarder!” And that’s precisely what Pierre

OMidyar wants you to think.  He’d rather you overlook a teeny

fact: he personally cut off the ability of people all over the world to

donate to Wikileaks — which Time magazine has said “could become as

important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act” –

via his company Paypal, which was the conduit far and away

used by the most people genuinely supportive of

governmental transparency to support

the organization.

So that video interview,

posted January 17th, pops the circuit

breaker for OMidyar hypocrisy yet again.

It’s not the first time. It likely won’t be the last.

He recently persuaded the editor of his newspaper —

that’s right, OMidyar is the publisher of the Honolulu Civil Beat –

a man named John Temple who used to edit the Pulitzer

Prize-winning Rocky Mountain News, to publish

this absolutely flabbergasting editorial

about the Wikileaks stink.

The editorial, like the interview above,

expresses an altogether feigned concern on OMidyar’s

part about governments oppressing people who strive for transparency

and accountability.  And smack in the middle, it includes the revelation that

no government was involved in crushing Wikileaks in America: Pierre OMidyar and

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos accomplished that all by themselves.  Bezos took Wikileaks

off the Amazon cloud of servers, and OMidyar stepped on their financial

oxygen hose. In other words, a pair of men made billionaires

by the open web closed it, for three hundred

million people, by themselves.

Just in case you’re not

convinced by me or by Time magazine’s

view of Wikileaks, here are the views of Reporters

Without Borders and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

They, like that other august journalistic enterprise New

York Times in this editorial, were decidedly troubled

by the acts of censorship undertaken

by Bezos and OMidyar.

You’re reading this,

mind you, on a day when for the second

time in weeks a Wikileaks-inspired overthrow of

the tyrannical government of a repressed country is underway.

That country is Egypt, where a genuine hero, Mohamed Elbaradei,

is waiting in the wings to lead if his country is successful in ejecting Hosni

Mubarak. Hillary Clinton and the US government would like to put

the kibosh on that; she indicated that yesterday by saying,

“The Egyptian government is looking for ways to

respond to the legitimate needs…

of the…people.”  Try telling

that to anyone in the

Arab world, or

anyone awake

elsewhere.

Borders,

nationalities have no meaning

to me right now, frankly. I live in the European Union.

I go from one country to another without a visa. It’s a domestic flight.

Whether they speak French or Greek, it doesn’t really

matter. Can you expand that to be

the world?

Yes.

Psychology

is as important as substance.

If you treat people with respect, they will go out

of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in

a patronizing way, they will go out of their

way to make your life

difficult.

Once you

give every person the right

to live in freedom, peace, and dignity,

a lot of the problems we see

today are going to

evaporate.

Mohamed Elbaradei