Plutocrats, in the oligarchy that is the United States of America, want affection for their attempt at assuaging their consciences, known as philanthropy.
The plutocrats are:
Speculators
who made enormous fortunes by moving money from here to there, supposedly
(without actual evidence thereof) creating value, on Wall Street.
Microsoft
made it's fortune when IBM made a massive mistake of undervaluing
it's creation of the PC.
Intel
made money for it's shareholders on that same IBM mistake.
Apple
made money for it's stakeholders from Xerox's mistake, similar to
IBM, when they misunderstood the Graphic User Interface (GUI) as a
toy created at their (tax write-off) Palo Alto Research Center.
There
are many similar stories, across the country, of the almost unbelievably
wealthy... And yet those wealthy folks would have everybody else
think the world was clusters of peasants, living in lean-to shacks
(located on packed earth trails), till there was THEM.
All
these companies, individuals/stakeholders who created them, made
major profits off technology created by the innovations developed
under the auspices of the Federally Funded Research and Development
Centers (FFRDCs). Check 'em out. If you're a taxpayer, you made 'em
happen.
All
the, “stakeholders/shareholders,” inundated by said wealth paid
lobbyists to help them avoid taxes... Even though they were, still
are, massive users of common-carrier infrastructure, GPS, Internet, public
education, electric/telecommunication grids/backbones and FFRDCs; the
stuff they spent decades avoiding the costs of.
We, the
taxpayers, were largely responsible for the basis of all that wealth;
individual fortunes. The donations that philanthropists make now
rarely do anything but help build more wealth, while still avoiding
taxes on all that booty.
Would
that they were to try to pay back the value of the taxpayer funded
assets they've depended upon, they'd all be much more modestly
wealthy; multi-millionaires, approaching a billion, instead of
multi-billionaires.
Pity
them that they don't get credit for being generous with the money
taxpayers made possible... Not!
