Values

Hartmann Report - Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper’s planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn’t mess with their business interests should he be elected.“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”\\

What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.

Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.\

It wasn’t always this way.

— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Wealth.

— Joe Kennedy was a bank president at 25 and a millionaire by 30; he and his wife Rose pounded into their children the idea that, because of their great wealth, they had an absolute obligation to serve their nation and its people, particularly those most in need. From that simple childhood instruction came Joe Jr., who died when his plane was shot down during WWII, and the political careers of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy.

 — Foundations established by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller families have all done great good in America (until Timothy Mellon disgraced his family by giving millions to Trump), and self-made billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made funding good works central to their lives by giving away most of their fortunes.

But that noble old concept is now lost on most among the current crop of billionaires and multimillionaires. Instead of devoting themselves and their fortunes to bettering our nation, so many are instead promoting climate change denial, funding politicians who promise them tax cuts, and spearheading efforts to strip America of its social safety net and public education system. More