You couldn't have written that great essay YOU ARE BLACK

From Tom Robinson on FB posting this type of poignant story as his contribution to our struggles. 

"Imagine how it might feel to a black child The "moment" that they realize they will be held in contempt, disdain, disgust and hated on in this country because of the color of their skin."

Desiree EqualRights Jordan wrote her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/desiree.o.jordan?fref=ts

I'll never forget that moment. It came late for me because I wasn't raised here in the US till I was sixteen. I was raised in Jamaica because my maternal parents are from there and my dad was a Navy man and my mom a nurse in England UK. I didn't even know I was "black" (with all that comes with the label) till I came to this country. I never saw a " white" teacher, policeman, barrister (lawyer) until I was sixteen. we didn't even get to watch TV when I was a child and when we did it was only the BBC News and my grandfather would "test" us on the content after the broadcast. When I took a test to get into the school here....When I completed the essay - the white teacher who had been sitting there monitoring the exam read my paper and told me that I could NOT have written it...and made me write another one. I did...and that essay was even better. To this day I remember how red she got from choking on her internalize d misconceptions of a black child ability to write. Smdh. I've used that one experience to propel me forward.

Contrast with the article from NY Post http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-madness-of-rich-penthouse-parents/

Tutor reveals Ivy-admissions madness of rich penthouse parents

August 25, 2013 | 4:00am

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WRITE STUFF: For a fee of $7,500, Lacy Crawford would help the sometimes indifferent children of wealthy New Yorkers write their college-entry essays.Photo: John Chapple

WRITE STUFF: For a fee of $7,500, Lacy Crawford would help the sometimes indifferent children of wealthy New Yorkers write their college-entry essays. (
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Lacy Crawford’s first novel, “Early Decision” (William Morrow), out this week, was inspired by the 15 years she spent working as an independent college-admissions counselor to the rich-and-powerful’s sons and daughters in Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles and London. For a fee, Crawford would help them with their entry essays and applications to get them the one thing they couldn’t always buy — a spot in an Ivy League school. She shares her stories (with the names and some characteristics changed) with The Post.

Though I worked for 15 years as an independent college-applications counselor all over the United States and Europe — with students whose parents thought nothing of flying me in every weekend to try to make Harvard say yes — nowhere was the college-admissions race more competitive than in New York City.

Here the frenzy is amplified by money and power as it only can be in New York; collegeadmissions are the culmination of a scramble that begins with nursery school. Here, too, the opportunities for obsessive parents to break a student’s heart seem sharper than anywhere else.

My abiding memory of tutoring New Yorkers is of sitting with one girl as night fell late in October. Tears coursed down her cheeks and onto the hem of the distinctive skirt of her elite private school. She was too upset to sip from the mug of hot chocolate her housekeeper had brought up. Her parents were working late, as they always did, and other than the staff, we were alone in the house. Spread on a table before us were college essay drafts.

“It’s hopeless,” she sobbed. “I’ve got nothing.”

From her bedroom window, where we sat, an unobstructed view of Central Park stretched north to the autumn sky.

How does a young woman with so much come to feel she’s got nothing? My students were almost all thoughtful and diligent, but their parents had fallen into a terrible trap, having raised their children to reach for the stars without teaching them how to so much as stretch out an arm.

For many of the children of the most ambitious, wealthiest parents in the city, the college-admissions process begins when a child is 2, with the hiring of a consultant to deliver nursery-school acceptances.

Once in school, if the child is slow in any subject, parents hire tutors. If the tutors fail, the parents will knock on doors until they find a learning specialist who agrees to identify a trumped-up deficit in a student’s capabilities — in other words, to label the child in some way learning-disabled — after which the parents will force their excellent school to exempt the child from certain obligations, so she no longer has to take four years of math, say, or timed tests.

The college list will be drawn up no later than sophomore spring, and it will include only trophy schools — the Ivy League, Duke, Stanford — selected not for fit but according to where the parents have influence. If a parent went to a college, it’s a “legacy school,” and it goes at the top of the list. If they know a trustee, that’s in Position No. 2. And so on down the line.

By junior spring, the “early decision” school is chosen, meaning a single application will be made by Nov. 1 with the promise that the student will attend if admitted. Statistically, this is the best chance a student has of acceptance at top schools, and it’s not a problem to apply so early for students who have had years to tour their choices and who don’t have to fill out financial-aid forms.

The summer before a student’s senior year, the parents work to secure the golden ticket — a recommendation letter from a trustee of the first-choice school — while the student interns for an exclusive institution (a neuroscience lab, a political office) or performs community service in a far-flung locale (building schools in Bangladesh).

Finally, after 15 or so years of parents managing every variable, there comes the time when a student is expected to do something all by herself: fill out the actual application. Write an essay in her own voice.

By this point, our coddled child has no faith in her own words at all. Her own ideas and feelings, like a language she has not practiced, have fallen away.

Her parents wanted more than anything to protect her, to give her the world. Instead they’ve taken away her capacity to know it.

Faced with that blank page, the students panic. They freeze. Their entire lives have been pointed toward this one test of their worth: Who wouldn’t suffer writer’s block? The parents yell. Everyone sobs.

That’s when they called me.

I had been an independent college-applications adviser for almost a decade when I moved to Manhattan in 2007. For the three years that followed, I tutored some of the city’s most elite high-school seniors, working under the radar, a hired gun who slipped in and out of penthouse apartments and jogged up the side steps of brownstones like someone’s mistress.

From 2000 to 2010, more than 90 percent of my students were accepted at their top-choice schools. My name was shared among wealthy families who would not have dreamed of hiring one of the big college-application consulting shops; they wanted exclusivity, someone other students couldn’t have.

In fact, often I was asked to create false invoices (substituting, say, “child-care services” for “educational consulting”) when I billed my $7,500, all-in fee. Five days a week, from August to December, I took the 6 train from Midtown to 68th or 77th and walked west to Park or Fifth, where I sat with wealthy students struggling to free themselves from their parents’ dreams so they might have some hopes of their own.

One father requested that my meetings with his son take place in the Midtown offices of his private-equity group. His son would take the train in from Greenwich and meet me there. I offered to meet the boy somewhere easier, but no. It wasn’t safe, the father explained, as he led me into the vast glass space of his office, where his son was sitting; in fact, he had personally walked to Penn Station to meet his son’s train and escort him here.

Then he took out his checkbook and asked me, in front of the boy, what I’d charge to write his essays.

You see the logic? I love you so much I won’t risk letting you take a cab in the city, and I wouldn’t dream of letting you use your own voice to apply to college. But you can’t expect a student to write effectively in the first person if his own father has no interest in what he might say.

One young man had been flown in from Paris to work with me. He was very bright, but his English was not good enough for a top American college. Even if we could get him in, he’d struggle. His mother would not hear of this. She was engaged in a ferocious divorce from her diplomat husband, and while the blond boy and I sat there, working in the two-story atrium of their living room, professionals in slim suits wandered the apartment with notepads and cameras, making appraisals of every item that might be removed.

One evening, the mother met me when I arrived.

“We will say he’s black,” she said.

Excuse me?

“My ex-husband, he’s not seeing the application, so we’ll say what we want. We lived four years in Senegal. Our name is exotic. So, we will check the box and say he is black.”

I said this was not a good idea.

“Why not?” she pressed me. “Can they ask for proof?”

Her son sat silent as a stone, blue eyes fixed on his notebook, while the appraisers’ cameras flashed on the Picassos on the walls.

In the months to follow, I failed to dissuade the mother of her plan. Her son was not admitted.

She, like so many others, was dumb-struck, devastated, when it didn’t work out. (This is why, year after year, new clients kept calling: They hear the horror stories of wonderful kids who got in nowhere.)

These parents haven’t anticipated that college-admissions officers might be able to hear the hollow pretense of the packaged student, the shellacked essays full of an editor’s semicolons but lacking a heart.

They don’t know a trustee’s letter can also be a curse: One trustee of an Ivy League school confided in me the secret code she shared with the dean of admissions. If she felt obligated to write the letter for social reasons, the student was referred to formally — Miss Cabot, Mr. Peabody. If she believed in the student, he or she was called by name.

“I’ve had about 100 percent success both ways,” she told me.

The girl whose bedroom window opened onto Central Park struggled all fall. She was writing boring essays about her community service (she interned relentlessly at charities all over the East Side) and sweating her “B” average.

She did not know that she was all but guaranteed admission to her top choice — let’s say it was Yale — where a building already bore her name. She didn’t think she could get in, and if it weren’t for that building, she’d have been right.

But her parents could not imagine her going anywhere else. The whole process seemed to my student a trap: She had to gain admission to and attend a school where she knew she didn’t belong. How could she write an honest essay?

We got out of that penthouse apartment and walked the park as winter bore down. I noticed she knew a great deal about Central Park; her nannies had taken her here often, of course. But there was more. And one day she confessed to me her secret: Afternoons, after school, she directed her driver to several pet stores in the city, where she bought the most miserable, chewed-up, sickly gerbils and hamsters she could find. She carried them in their cardboard boxes to the grassy spots in the park and set them free.

“I know they probably get eaten that first night,” she told me, crying. “Rats. Raccoons. Pale Male. But still, imagine that one day of freedom. It’s better than whatever would have happened in that store.”

And just like that, we had a college essay. She wrote about the rodents, yes, but she also wrote about the gardens she knew so well, and how the city of her birth had grown up around the park. She covered Manhattan history and the biology of raptors in 500 words. It was terrific.

Her parents were horrified. They forbid her to submit the essay — what would Yale think? But she did so anyway.

You’ll know how this story ends. She got into Yale, of course, early decision. But her real success was in giving the admissions officers the kind of honesty that is harder and harder to find in these days of tiger parenting. And, I like to think, in clearing a path to her own life, she graduated and became an apprentice gardener with the city Parks Service. She’ll have to work her way up to Central Park, her own front lawn, but she is finally doing what she wants to do.

This is the biggest secret to success in the college applications madness: It’s not about getting kids in. It’s about allowing them to grow up.

Wealthy elite donor class of 2014 lacks adequate love & gratitude for the continuation of capitalism's success

One of my goals is to explore what happened to change our ruling wealthy elite "donor class" as Justice Antonin Scalia called them whom he told lack the Christian value of love adequate to sustain the success of capitalism but admitted to no solution on what to do to change them. He also blamed lack of gratitude by those in the "entitlement class" (my paraphrase) to whom expectation of governmenthandouts basically, also an absent Christian virtue he didn't know what to do to change. The latter I will leave to others to the extent that the reality exists. Scalia's quote & story http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/antonin-scalia-capitalism_n_3894153.htmlhtml

I know my own experience now suggests otherwise, as my gratitude runs deep as does my sense of responsibility to give back, albeit, now not as a tax paying member but you know if you've known me for awhile, I work for free now on behalf of our national interests & mental health activism with social reforming plans outlined for future creative entertainment/workshop vehicles (newbies see links on profile page) for educating mass audiences & elevating/enhancing lives of those with mental health disorders.

But, I bow to Bill Clinton in humble thankfulness for the easily accessible student loans and readily well funded Pell grant program, as a recipient of two degrees thanks. I am eternally grateful for the ability to fight hunger I would have faced at a few different points during my life if not for SNAP and SSDI now since losing my job those 7 years of degree seeking education had prepared me. Hence, my career choice lost too (the most debilitating loss ever and destablizing, depression inducing hard to recover from loss as severe as I have ever known) after admission of my bipolar illness in the field where I was supposed to be and still am on the other side of the proverbial couch (in Freud or perhaps Woody Allen's psychoanalyst's office terms, at least). It was immediately following my self-exposure of diagnosis (not other identified by behavior anomalies) despite much evidence to the contrary- summa cum laude>ungrad cum laude>grad school, excellent professional performance reviews over multiple consecutive years for two different social services agencies, one the largest in Hawaii that hired me away from the first with a $10K/per annum salary increase and far superior benefits). I became an immediate POTENTIAL liability following their discovery of my diagnosis. But, I digress.

I am interested in how and what changed and can we return today's far different comparable class of ruling wealthy elite, Romney/Koch types, back to their Gilded Age counterpart's consciousness of personal/professional responsibility for use of their great wealth for building our nation and the worker's to whom they are beholden for such immense good fortune. Hence, gratitude.

Unlike Scalia, I'd say it's not just missing Christian value of love but the lack of thankfulness to a nation/workers from the donor class too. Remember when Obama tried to tell them,"you didn't do it alone" and Koch et al ads turned it around to make him a socialist or something vs. the Ayn Randian, self-deluded superior, job creator rugged individualistic, bootstrap pulling, ubermensch, elevated over and above all as business moguls and of course "job creators." All former inclusion of collectivist ideals tossed aside that earlier donor class held seemingly innately and understood.

Is it the fact the earlier cohorts were actually the poor bootstrap pullers, self-generating, innovators not heirs to established fortunes (a real entitled class, privileged from birth through best educations, to inherited businesses and/or Skull & Bones type connections, etc). Therefore, they believe themselves entitled to whatever they eye NEXT (US government functions dismantled, tax dollars saved, lowest wages/fewest benefits OMG mandated Obamacare) like spoiled kids because that's how it's always been as a result of never having to work too hard or know what is was to be a low income, struggling, have not EVER, like their early counterparts.

Instead of collective ideals carried on to build our nation, today's comparable group are proactively dismantling our national interests, guilty of perhaps, the greatest level ever of Federal income tax evasion in offshore havens, $32 trillion known).

The snakeoil sales con job of Reagan's trickle down (with 18 tax increases was it) or Bush II's actual HUGE cuts for corporations and con job on us all that the job creators would invest in national best interests with expansion to address massive unemployment during his administration (when it first began). 2.5 million jobs lost to cheapest labor nations just last year (Obama has tried to get congress to provide incentives to come back bills versus the Bush incentives for outsourcing jobs to cheapest labor nations, but...) destroying our middle class with profit only motivation, devoid of what's in the national best interest or workers helping to build great multi-nationals-okay Clinton & NAFTA have to get some blame here and God only knows the further damage TPP deal conceivably will contribute to our middle class demise.

to a collectivist consciousness, gratitude for national contribution to amassing wealth and sharing of prosperity with heart for people less fortunate and a desire to offer hand's out and up to help them.

"The great philanthropists (Gilded Age) hoped to use their resources to turn the working class into the middle class."

"Nor is it particularly surprising that they would do so. After all, a good many of the great industrialists had started life in the working class. Carnegie himself was born to a painfully poor Scottish weaver, and took his first job at age 13, working in a cotton mill, putting in 12-hour days, 6 days per week. John D. Rockefeller and Jim Fisk had been born to peddlers, while financiers Daniel Drew and Jay Gould were raised on hardscrabble farms. One study has found that the generation with the largest percentage of its “business elite” to have emerged from the ranks of the “lower” or “lower middle” classes was the generation born between 1820 and 1849.

"The Benevolent Trusts, when they come,” wrote Rockefeller in his 1908 memoirs, “will look the facts in the face; they will applaud and sustain the effective workers and institutions; and they will uplift the intelligent standard of good work in helping all the people chiefly to help themselves.” Rockefeller was clearly thrilled by the prospect. “When it is eventually worked out, as it will be in some form, and probably in a better one than we can now forecast, how worthy it will be of the efforts of our ablest men!”By the turn of the 20th century, Carnegie had achieved wealth on a scale almost unimaginable in Tocqueville’s America. He then dedicated his life to giving away as much of his fortune as he could. Carnegie and the other great business leaders of his generation inaugurated a golden age of American philanthropy. Their achievements, unfortunately, are often misunderstood, and their motivations are unfairly maligned. It is time to set the record straight.
As the Carnegie Corporation of New York celebrates its 100th anniversary, it is well worth our while to step back and reconsider the man, his peers, and their philanthropic legacy.

>>>Whatever else may be said of them—and there is much to be said—they created real and enduring wealth. Moreover, the wealth they created benefited all Americans. They introduced new products. They discovered startling efficiencies. And they launched businesses that created millions of new jobs.
America's great business leaders created real and enduring wealth that benefited all Americans.

To this day, the sheer creativity of the late 19th century is striking. A quick trip to the grocery store testifies to the era’s ingenuity. Pillsbury flour products owe their existence to Charles Pillsbury, who revolutionized the milling process and opened vast new markets for the hard winter wheat of the Dakotas. Hershey chocolates came into existence because Milton Hershey discovered a way to mass-produce milk chocolate. Campbell’s soups are the result of the partnership between Joseph Campbell and John Dorrance, who slashed transportation costs by discovering a way to halve the amount of water in canned goods. Equally inventive were Gustavus Swift and the Armour brothers with meatpacking, Henry Heinz with pickling, and Adolphus Busch with brewing. The list goes on.

Less visible than the flood of new products were the efficiencies the era introduced.

As American industry expanded and became more efficient, it provided a rapidly growing population with a steady stream of jobs. One study finds that real non-farm earnings rose more than 60 percent between 1870 and 1900. Another shows that wages grew, in real terms, from $1.00 daily in 1867 to $1.90 daily in 1893. But perhaps more striking evidence is found in the tens of millions of immigrants who "...swarmed to the United States in this period—sensing, as they did, that in America they could make more, live better, and rise faster than anywhere else on earth.

"...It was an invitation to opportunity—placing, as Carnegie famously put it, within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring could rise."

None of this is to say that businessmen in the Gilded Age were angels. They could be ruthless. They could be greedy. But they channeled their very real flaws into very productive channels, opening opportunity and creating real and lasting wealth. They did not simply inflict transaction costs. They were not robber barons.
Mark Twain in his final years; without Rogers, Twain acknowledged, he would likely have gone bankrupt. Henry Clay Frick built up a world-class collection of Old Masters paintings, which he donated, with a $15 million endowment, upon his death to the city of New York.

J. P. Morgan
He was a genuine polymath, fluent in French and German, steeped in literature and the arts, whose aptitude for mathematics prompted one of his professors at the University of Göttingen to encourage him to consider an academic appointment.
Morgan began collecting art while touring Rome, not long after finishing at Göttingen at the age of 19. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with the fine arts. He was the driving force behind the rise of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, serving as president and donating extensively from his personal acquisitions. “Almost single-handed, Morgan turned the Metropolitan from a merely notable collection into one of the three or four finest anywhere,” writes historian and art critic Paul Johnson. “Morgan obviously employed experts . . . but it is astonishing how few mistakes he allowed them to make on his behalf.”

The Morgan Library
Morgan was a man of truly catholic interests. In addition to his lifelong engagement with the arts, he was deeply interested in the natural sciences. A trustee of the American Museum of Natural History for 44 years, Morgan served on the board from the museum’s opening in 1869 until his death in 1913. He was often the museum’s lead donor—frequently giving under condition of anonymity—and he served as vice president, treasurer, and finance committee chairman. Among his many contributions to the museum, notes Strouse, were “collections of minerals, gems, meteorites, amber, books, prehistoric South American relics, American Indian costumes, fossil vertebrates, skeletons, and the mummy of a pre-Columbian miner preserved in copper salts.”
He quietly underwrote the salaries of scores of Manhattan clergymen and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars—$500,000 in 1892 alone—to the construction of Manhattan’s (as-yet unfinished) Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
This hardly exhausts Morgan’s intellectual interests or his philanthropy. Some of them were quite explicit about their desire to use philanthropy to undercut communist influences in the labor movement.

Nevertheless, some of the most impressive philanthropy of the Gilded Age was done quietly. During his lifetime, Rockefeller provided some $70 million to the University of Chicago, all the while insisting that not a single building bear his name—even rejecting an image of a lamp on the university seal, worried that it would be seen as a nod to Standard Oil.

Perhaps the greatest anonymous donor of the era was George Eastman. Eastman was the founder of Eastman Kodak, the entrepreneur who turned photography from a profession with prohibitively high startup costs into an affordable hobby for the middle class. He was also one of the most accomplished philanthropists of early–20th century America. Biographer Elizabeth Brayer estimates that Eastman gave away about $125 million, almost all within his lifetime.

“Men who leave their money to be distributed by others are pie-faced mutts,” he said in 1924. “I want to see the action during my lifetime.” He ranks as the third-most-generous philanthropist of the era, behind only Rockefeller and Carnegie.

Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman gave nearly $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all of it pseudonymously, under the name “Mr. Smith.” Without his crucial intervention, Boston Tech (as the school was commonly known) would likely have remained a small land-grant school serving commuter students.

George Eastman
Eastman dedicated himself to quiet (but not anonymous or pseudonymous) philanthropy, supporting dental clinics, musical conservatories, and, especially, MIT, the University of Rochester, the Hampton Institute, and the Tuskegee Institute.

>>>>>Rosenwald gave nearly $70 million over the course of his lifetime for the education and advancement of African Americans throughout the rural South. He led the construction of 5,357 primary schools, shops, and teachers’ homes throughout 15 states. Through it all, he declined to give anonymously, for reasons he outlined in November 1912, in a speech he gave in Philadelphia to the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In his lecture, Rosenwald urged his fellow donors to avoid anonymous gifts, arguing, as biographer Peter Ascoli put it, that “the name of the donor often carried as much weight as the gift itself and might encourage others to give.”


Andrew Carnegie “never quite washed away the bloodstains from the Homestead debacle, although the >>>>$350 million he gave to literacy, world peace, and numerous other worthy causes bought him as much earthly forgiveness as a man could ask,” writes historian H. W. Brands in his 2010 book American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism. “Like Carnegie, Rockefeller sought absolution by lavish philanthropy.”
The imputation would likely have confounded either man. For one thing, it was not an era when businessmen either felt or were expected to feel remorse for their success. They saw themselves as self-made men, conquering a continent and propelling the United States into the forefront of nations. “To imagine that such men did not sleep the sleep of the just would be romantic sentimentalism,” wrote Richard Hofstadter. “In the Gilded Age, even the angels sang for them.”
But even leaving aside the spirit of the age, the idea that the great philanthropists were motivated by guilt ignores an important piece of historical evidence. Neither Carnegie nor Rockefeller—nor, for that matter, a number of others—turned to philanthropy after making their fortunes. Some did, of course, although that need not mean they did so out of guilt. Many others, however, including both Carnegie and Rockefeller, took up charity early in their lives, increasing their giving as their fortunes grew.
In December 1868, a 33-year-old Carnegie sat down with a stub-nosed pencil and a scrap of paper. He and his mother had just moved into the posh St. Nicholas Hotel on lower Broadway, but a certain melancholy seemed to have settled over him. He itemized all of his investments and calculated his net worth and annual income. With assets of roughly $400,000—about $75 million today, estimates biographer David Nasaw—and an income over $56,000, he seemed to have become dissatisfied with his life.
Carnegie proceeded to write a letter to himself. In two years, he decided, >>>>>“I can so arrange my business as to secure at least 50,000$ per annum. Beyond this never earn—make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes. Cast aside business forever except for others.” He intended to “settle in London” and take >>>>>“part in public matters especially those connected with education & improvement of the poorer classes.” After all, he concluded, “Man must have an idol—The amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry.”

Rockefeller was committed to philanthropy from an even younger age. His pious and frugal mother had encouraged her children to drop pennies in the Sunday collection plate. Her lessons obviously stuck; years later, Rockefeller would credit her as the inspiration for his philanthropy. From the time he started working, he kept a small, red account book—Ledger A—in which he detailed his every expense. Even as a teenager, he was remarkably generous. As a first-year clerk, he regularly donated 6 percent of his wages to charity, and some weeks he gave considerably more.
m an early age. In his early teens, he began making regular contributions to St. Luke’s (and, later, Trinity) Episcopal Church; before his 18th birthday, >>>>he recorded a donation of $1 to a crippled boy. In his late 20s, while struggling to keep up a growing family, >>>>Julius Rosenwald made small but regular contributions to the Hyde Park Protective Association and the Associated Jewish Charities. By the age of 32, J. Pierpont Morgan was already an established presence within New York City. He helped launch the American Museum of Natural History in 1869, and was a founding patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a $1,000 donation in 1871."

Source: http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/seven_myths_about_the_great_philanthropists 

• This fits from mugwumper a comment following article below:One would like to believe that growing up in a democracy with every advantage would actually make people good citizens, but no, in the case of the Koch family as well as many others, it has simply translated into the need for more wealth, more advantage, and more power. Greedy, greedy.
  
  Maybe you need to start poor like Andrew Carnegie to realize that you owe your country (adopted or otherwise) and your fellow citizens a deep debt of gratitude. You could say that Andrew Carnegie gave away his wealth because he had no offspring, but then there is Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
  
  One does hope that the voters will react wisely to Koch brothers' exposure of their here-to-fore sneaky funding of Americans for Prosperity, Citizens' United, and the myriad of other Koch brain storms and corporate fund perverted "scientic" think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Reason Foundation. The American voter needs to understand how much of the information that is spun from these organizations could best be described by AZ Senator Jon Kyl's response to his Senate floor misinformation about Planned Parenthood. "Not intended to be a factual statement." The senator had the decency and conscience to remove his misstatement from the Congressional Record. . Do any of you credit the Koch brothers with such decent intentions? Will they recant?
  
  The longer the country stalls on dealing with global warming and carbon emissions, the more money the Koch oil and gas conglomerate will make. The Supreme Court decision for Citizens United that corporations are free to spend money that will remain undeclared for the corruption of our Congress and administrative agencies. The Tea Party candidates who are funded by Americans for Prosperity will go down fighting to ensure that these ultra rich, conscienceless brothers will have their continued tax breaks. Justice Thomas' wife Ginni is now a lobbyist for Liberty Consulting and working with the new representatives. Koch brothers again? Who knows.
  
  Isn't it nice when you have enough money that you can hire other people to do all your dirty work for you, and you can look the reporters in the eye and say, "Who me?" You can call as many of the other ultra rich together and pay their expenses to a meeting of the minds on how to run the country without taking the heat for the fallout. You can pay the expenses of supreme court justices like Scalia and Thomas to attend your meeting to give it the appearance of wisdom. Ah, such statesmanlike qualities!
  
  The forefathers gave supreme court justices life long appointments to avoid the need to subscribe to partisanship, to keep them above the political fray. Is it time to accept the partisanship of justices and have them run on their records every six years? Or should such justices be impeached for partisan behavior?

  3 hours ago · Like
• 

  Chrys Rosen http://www.alternet.org/.../koch_bros%27_citizens_united...
  

  
  

  Koch Bros' Citizens United Propaganda Exposed

  www.alternet.org

Tomorrow exploring the Japanese concept of amae (a collectivist almost maternal instinct) as applied to the relationship between their CEO's and employees considered one main factor in the Japanese "economic miracle" post WWII when all pulled together and with such an emotional bond/actions employers took care of workers until death basically and workers in turn died at their desks in mutual amae type connection of duty. Following Westernization this doesn't apply on the employers end although workers still die at their desks. It was rather extreme model nonetheless it is something worth understanding and considering or applying with more temperance. Versus the vulture capitalism of Bain/Hostess type USA model.