Bill Gates on Charlie Rose

Last night I saw a few minutes of Bill Gates explaining to Charlie Rose how Good he and all the other 85 billionaires who own the world and everyone in it are. I had to click it off, it was so revolting. Ordinarily, I can at least stand to look at and even listen to Gates pontificate, but last night, he was in some sort of alternate universe, protecting his class at all costs ("You know, Warren and I are of the opinion that the rich could be taxed just a little more in this country without harming the economy....") and knowing he's full of shit.

Rose was trying to fluff him up with all this talk about the "expanding middle class" -- whereas he said nothing at all about the shrinking and vanishing middle class in this country and much of the rest of the world.

"Redistribution" got Gates's panties in a wad, so I said, "That's it," and turned it off.

Give It Away

Ordinarily, I don't watch '60 Minutes,' haven't for years. Problems with their coverage have been noted many times in other venues, so I won't go into them here, but I happened to catch a rhapsodic segment featuring billionaires and their 'giving' in a previous episode that has me gobsmacked. It was an episode which included a piece on the Recycler Orchestra of Paraguay. Simply bizarre, and really, why should we care?

I know that these days the billionaires who own our governments and rule us with rod and staff are looked to as near-divinities by many of the Rabble, just as many of said billionaires expect groveling and supplication by their inferiors. It is their due.

It is a strange and disorienting circumstance for someone who grew up as I did, a rebel, who came to understand that no human, let alone any 'god,' was owed a god-damned thing simply for being. This attitude, which I still hold, didn't sit well with my Betters, of course, but there you are. There simply is no situation in which I find that anyone is intrinsically worthy by reason of wealth or status -- or for that matter religiosity.

Thus it was with some amusement at first that I watched the segment about billionaires and their 'giving pledge' hoo-hah, a commitment to give half their fortune -- at least -- to... erm... "charity".

Been Catching Up...

We're off to another IAIA event in Santa Fe and there will be more arts'n'culture stuff coming next week.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on some of the details about events in the Outer World, specifically more about the various strains on the Government and this Omidyar character and the world of the Silicon Valley Billionaires' Club that he belongs to. It's not much of a pretty picture. I knew this about that place and its highest priced hooligans (now, now) from times gone by; criminy, my first contact with them was in the '80's, and I sometimes still get a shudder from it.

These guys were fully hooked up and in bed with the Dreaded Government from the get. Make no mistake about it. And surveillance was a big part of their portfolio.

But anyway, I'm catching up on a lot of stuff, and as the weather chills I'm more and more interested in following some of my other Bliss, so erratic postings may be routine for some time to come.

Billionaire's Butt Boys -- Or The Other Way Around

By now, everyone knows that Greenwald is leaving -- or has already left -- the Guardian to "pursue other opportunities," as they say in the Media Business, and become the editorial head of a new media venture along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill (among unnamed others) to be funded handsomely by none other than Billionaire Pierre Omidyar, chair and co-founder of eBay.

Well then.

Something like this was almost bound to happen, as Greenwald has made clear throughout his media career (as apparently he did as early as law school) that he had no problem whatsoever hooking up with and serving the interests of corporate masters, the higher the profile, the better.