Ethical Business Owners as Prospects for Social Justice Philanthropy

More than 60% of GNP is in the hands of closely held firms. As the baby boom ages, these firms will change hands. The money can go to taxes, charity, or children. 49% of wealthy people say, per US Trust, that they have no interest in leaving a financial legacy to heirs. This means that properly planned, business owners will leave, or could leave, a massive amount of money to charity. They can give it at death or live it while alive. I believe that properly planned they will live their giving for the final third of their lives. Read this post in the light to the Mother Jones data on how American is becoming a Banana Republic without the Bananas or the Republic, but with fewer and fewer Constitutional protections from the kind of wealth that backed Pinochet and called it Freedom, dropping social justice advocates from the transport planes in chains. We can sleep through into the nightmare, leaving it for our children, or we can quietly plan for the Resurrection, in this world, in our lifetimes, and that of our children. Yes, my progressive friends, there are ethical closely held business owners. How to address them? With Interfaith Worker Justice we may find a way to convene and plan with them. <Insert prayer here. A prayer for peace and justice, and my not getting hurt. If that is too much, O Lord, give me long life, wealth, health, and personal comfort. Amen.>

Comments

[Jim Schaffer]

I wish you all the best with this new Interfaith Worker Justice initiative. Thanks for your thoughtful post and for your continued leadership in this all-important effort to bring peace and justice solutions to this roiling debate.

[Phil Cubeta]

Thanks, Jim, family philanthropy for business owners who care about the fate of their community, including the poorest in that community. Where does one house such an initiative? I have found few takers. IWJ seems willing to at least give it a shot.

[Curator]

A prayer worthy of Sister Lucy. I never see her and Dr. Chadwallah on the same post at the same time. Beginning to suspect they're the same person. Perhaps it's text all the way down.

[Phil Cubeta]

I take exception to that innuendo, Curator. Actually Sister Lucy and Father Simon Brennan have been unjustly accused of being the illegtimate twins born to my Generous Patron and an itinerant minstrel, who went on to create a site to pirate music back into the commons, from whence it came, a crime for which he is now serving 50 years in solitary confinement. My generous patron, hearbreakingly to me, is the one who brought the suit. "Intellectual property," she said chortling, "trumps any personal feelings I might or might not have, to any particular person living or dead." Chadwallah is an illegal immigrant, serving at the suffrance of Candidia, finding hidden meangings where he can, though he finds them less and less often as the awful truth about Wealth Bondage becomes more and more overt. After Citizens United what else is there left to hide? Well, maybe the Chinese money and the drug money in the Superpacs, but it is all money and as such Free Speech. Even drug lords deserve their say in the public square, or before the Supreme Court, or providing perks to the Supremes themselves, their wife or wives, or husband or husbands, lovers and mistresses or gigolos. It is all Wealth Bondage, afterall, Freedom on the Cloven Hoof.

[Isiah Grumble]

The world will be a classier place when the classes collaborate!

Is that the IWJ's new slogan?

[Phil Cubeta]

No, not yet. It's history is more in union advocacy.
To raise funds from the 1% I am suggesting we recognize that we are all God's children. What do the poor have that the rich prize and will not otherwise have? That is the riddle. The answer is justice.

[Isiah Grumble]

"Justice" is an ethical substance, possessed or perhaps produced in excess by poor subjects, which can be leveraged as a commodity for subscription by the sovereign? The We desires to become an I?

Perhaps I don't understand what union advocacy involves. I thought it had more systemic aims, and that solidarity was not about personal redemption, although it may indeed have that side-effect - usually for a limited span.

[Phil Cubeta]

Think worker rights and how to enforce them.

[Phil Cubeta]

I think the vision and the faith element might be large enough to encompass programs for the rich. But that is a new perspective. We are for the poor, against the rich. That is standard and self defeating logic. 1% we are against. 99% we are for. Labor? For. Management? Against. I am for each of us making the best possible decisions for ourselves, our family, and our community. I think those are all nodes on one network, one being pulsing through all. The community dies, or retreats behind a gate, and something in us and our children dies too, or becomes walled off and gated in.

[Isiah Grumble]

Are you pro-milk, too?

[Phil Cubeta]

Depends on who is milking whom.