Rich people love to give away money for charitable causes to convince you that they’re not so bad after all. Don’t be fooled: we need to dispossess the benevolent rich of their ill-gotten gains, too.
Outside billionaires have flooded a single school board race in Los Angeles with $10 million. That’s because they know the race is about more than just the swing vote on the LA school board — it’s about the future of public education.
We shouldn’t have to dump buckets of ice water over our heads to end ALS.
Advocating private charity instead of public aid, neoliberals in Britain are threatening to take the country back to the Victorian era.
Workers need independent and strong unions, not corporate-sponsored NGOs, to fight their bosses and support their families.
Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign isn’t just an obnoxious distraction — it's a case study for the danger that billionaires pose to democracy.
As badly as Michael Bloomberg performed in his first debate last night — and he was gloriously bad — he’s not going anywhere. Even if he doesn’t get a nomination, his billions will be a massive weapon for Bernie Sanders opponents within and outside the Democratic Party.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.
In a new interview, Bill Gates apologized for his ties with Jeffrey Epstein even as he downplayed their relationship. That’s self-serving nonsense: their friendship was a grotesque demonstration of what happens when you give a small group of people unfathomable wealth and power.
Billionaire electronics magnate Barre Seid has secretly used his wealth to influence the lives of millions, funding climate denialism as well as a national network of state-level think tanks that promote business deregulation and fight Medicaid expansion.
Sam Bankman-Fried, apostle of “effective altruism,” has done one good thing for humanity: he’s revealed that finance, and particularly crypto, is a wasteful cesspool that must be reined in.
The new series The Curse, starring Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone as rich, clueless gentrifiers, follows a married couple filming an HGTV reality show. It’s a low-key cringe comedy that makes everyday selfishness and awkwardness feel like a horror movie.
Social impact bonds offer private interests yet another opportunity to enrich themselves at public expense.
The role of philanthropy in Bill Gates’s global empire is well known. But the Gates Foundation’s contributions to media organizations are huge, underexamined, and a significant part of how one of the world’s wealthiest men has built and protected his image.
A British bus company recently reversed its plans to cut a bus route, but only after a wealthy local offered to fund it himself. A decent society can’t rely on wealthy do-gooders to save public services.
Without cultivating a strong sense of solidarity with mass numbers of people we’ll never meet, we’re doomed to slip further into atomized isolation and defeat.
Philanthrocapitalists like George Soros want us to believe they can remedy the economic misery that they themselves create.
Black activists might have initiated the fight for community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968. But the Ford Foundation not only played a key role in the idea’s conception; they shaped its execution according to elite, liberal aims.
The megacorporation Tata has shaped Indian capitalism for 150 years. Despite its best efforts to sustain an image as an ethical company, Tata's roots in war profiteering and the opium trade, and its sophisticated suppression of worker organizing, is testament to the fact that "ethical capitalism" is only ever a contradiction in terms.
After a nine-month strike to prevent drastic cuts to jobs, wages, and benefits, the San Antonio Symphony has dissolved. As long as they rely on the largesse of the wealthy, orchestras and the musicians who comprise them are in danger.