The season of giving and taking

In Major Barbara, and even more explicitly in its Preface, George Bernard Shaw stated his position on charity:  It's what you do with your money that matters, not how you came by it.  Nearly all excess capital, Shaw believed, is generated by something we would rather not examine too closely because it exploits labor, despoils the environment or results from a product the world would be better off without.  (The examples in the play are cheap whiskey and weapons of mass destruction.)  

Shaw may have been thinking about Andrew Carnegie, the self-made millionaire best remembered for endowing free public libraries, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University and other monuments to his benevolence.  Only a few of the millions of readers served by those libraries will have come across the story of the 1892 Homestead strike that pitted Carnegie's steelworkers against armed Pinkerton guards and cost twelve people their lives.  Carnegie paid lip-service to organized labor, but when it made serious demands he fled to his Scottish castle and let his manager Henry Clay Frick play the villain.  If it was intended to cement his reputation for good deeds, it worked.  

But all the rapacious scoundrels of unregulated nineteenth century capitalism excelled at moral money-laundering.  Leland Stanford, Johns Hopkins and James Buchanan Duke, among others, founded universities.  John D. Rockefeller and his sons established the Rockefeller University, Foundation and other endowments.  Henry Ford's money started the Ford Foundation, though the old bigot would not be pleased with some of its projects.  Perhaps the most ironic use of money, however, was the Pulitzer Prizes for, among other things, outstanding reportage -- pretty rich from one of the founders of yellow journalism.  Of course, Joseph Pulitzer, another start-from-scratch immigrant, made better use of his fortune than the other purveyor of fake news, William Randolph Hearst, who spent on a big, goofy castle in California, his own political career, an imperialist war with Spain and a studio to make movies starring his mistress.  Unlike Pulitzer (but like Charles Foster Kane) he was always rich.

What started me on this meditation about giving it away -- even before there was an income tax to deduct it from -- was the news that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is removing the Sackler name from its galleries, including the one custom-built to house the Temple of Dendur.  The Sackler name has been muddied by Perdue Pharma, a company owned by the family, and its best-known product OxyContin, credited by the CDC with over 70,000 deaths in 2019 alone.  In Mingo County, West Virginia, there were thousands more pills than people.  Doctors were bribed to prescribe the stuff.  America is now said to be in the grip of an opioid epidemic.  The Sackler family probably wish they had taken the company public so they could share the financial penalties with shareholders.

The article says the Met "reached an agreement" with descendants of two of the Sackler brothers.  Does this mean they will give back the millions of dollars?  (Mortgage the Temple?)  I doubt it.  I remember when the other Met, the Metropolitan Opera, got a pile of cash from the financier Alberto Vilar back in 1998.  They were so grateful they named a chunk of the house after him, the Vilar Grand Tier.  It's not called that now because Vilar went bust and got ten years for fraud.  He also was not reimbursed.  There must be some "no-taking-backsies" clause when you share your good fortune with others, while it lasts.

Today those plutocrats would be included in this helpful, if partial, list of offshore cash-stashers provided by Wikipedia for those who don't have time to study the entirety of the Pandora Papers.  If these folks and organizations paid some tax we wouldn't need benevolence.  There are so many famous names here it's hard to single anyone out for naming and shaming like Jimmy Carr, who 'fessed up, paid up and survived a savage ribbing.  How about Rev. Luis Garza Medina, former Vicar General, and the Legion of Christ?  Are they supposed to need tax shelters?  Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine?  He'll be all right when the tanks roll in.  Laurent Lamothe, former prime minster of Haiti -- I wonder why it's so poor.  Tony and Cherie Blair?  This is my shocked face.  A suggestion:  Stop availing yourselves of the fire, police, sanitation and street-cleaning services the rest of us pay for.  Go live on an island with your money.

And tax the damn churches.