Monday, June 21, 2010

Damon Vrabel - PR vs. Truth: Corporate Charity and the Billionaire’s Ruse

When I heard that Buffett and Gates were calling on all billionaires to donate half their money to charity, I instantly had many of the same thoughts as Damon - PR spin:
PR vs. Truth: Corporate Charity and the Billionaire’s Ruse

By Damon Vrabel

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are acting as if they’ve discovered the fountain of youth as they are now telling other billionaires they don’t need to spend their lives addictively pursuing and hoarding wealth. On the surface this is noble, even though most people learned such things from their pet as a kid. They’re inspiring other billionaires to follow their lead. So we’re supposed to cheer right? Many people are cheering. The comments range from “thank you!” and “bless you Warren!” to the more worshipful “you are a hero!” and “this proves Microsoft’s commitment to humanity!”

Wow—the power of corporate PR. It’s unfortunate that snake oil has always been a bestseller. So rather than cheer, I’ll give a different perspective on what this billionaire PR campaign might be all about.

The real reason Gates and Buffett are doing this in the media now is because they’re still doing what they’ve done their whole adult lives—serving their bosses, the moneyed establishment behind Wall Street. While the exponential growth machine was inflating, the establishment wanted them addictively pursuing EPS and share growth, and they dutifully did so better than most. But now that the machine is shutting down, the fact is that billionaires won’t be able to pursue wealth—the game is over for a while. And now that we’re headed for a major dose of deflation that will cause a lot of pain for a lot of people, the establishment wants Gates and Buffett on TV talking about charity. Why?

Among other things, it’s a preemptive strike against the rage of the lower classes that will result from the final reckoning with our broken monetary system and the fact that the corporate system has shifted American jobs and production offshore. This is an orchestrated billionaire PR campaign, kicked off at a dinner with David Rockefeller himself, “lord” of the US banking establishment. Gates and Buffett are providing strategic marketing through CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) mouthpiece Charlie Rose and other major media arms of the establishment, then companies and smaller billionaires are following their lead and giving away money in return for more PR effect. Two examples:
Corporate charity: JP Morgan Chase got a lot of bang for its buck on June 9th announcing a $5 million charity program for education. CEO, billionaire, and inner CFR member Jamie Dimon said, “As a company, we’re highly committed to serving our local communities…We’ve now seen that when corporations listen to the communities they serve, they can learn a great deal and, in turn, help worthy causes achieve goals that would have never been possible.”

Billionaire charity: Marc Benioff, CEO of, billionaire, and CFR member just gave away $100 million to a hospital in San Francisco. The PR master has stirred many on Facebook to lawd him with near religious fervor and thank him for caring so much for his community. It’s the corporate suit equivalent of a rock concert.
Again beyond the PR, this is part of an organized campaign being run by the corporate ruling class. While the most powerful folks at JPM Chase know the truth, the non-profit team inside the bank and an individual like Marc genuinely believe in what they are doing. They’re decent people. They just don’t realize how their compartmentalization within the mega corporate structure keeps them from seeing the truth of the debt-based corporate empire they’re serving. So what’s the truth?

Will the Real JP Morgan Chase Please Stand Up?
Let’s start with JP Morgan Chase. It is a voracious institution driven by ruthless usury putting people, towns, counties, states, and countries in debt. It has fed the multi-generational billionaire families that have controlled the bank through history (the merger of JP Morgan interests and Rockefeller interests behind Chase) while making a few of its operating officers like Jamie Dimon billionaires as well. It has done so by being the most powerful member of the Federal Reserve cartel that puts the US government in servitude and forces all of us to borrow and pay interest in order to have money, i.e. in order to survive. So the bank effectively controls the rest of us in an economic structure similar to the old days of feudalism.

Some specific examples are useful to help understand the true character of this institution. The bank, sometimes through foreign surrogates, has a track record of being involved in the financial crises that put foreign governments under even more debt from the Anglo-American banking establishment and give western corporations more power and control over natural resources and other assets. The bank helps drive smaller levels of government into insolvency, with Jefferson County Alabama being the most obvious current example. The bank has been accused of insider market manipulation, most recently in the silver market. The bank has participated in the general banking attack on much of the world having blown indebtedness, and therefore asset bubbles, to such stratospheric heights that major “discontinuous adjustment” is guaranteed, to use an innocuous Greenspan phrase for “unprecedented catastrophe.” And the bank showed how ruthless its operating officers can be in the aftermath of the collapse of 2008 when they had no problem jacking up credit card rates and kicking people out of their homes as Jamie Dimon went on CNBC to tell Americans they better pay up so his team can keep pocketing millions. At the same time, the powers behind the bank were extorting the government to put the nation in even more debt, transfer billions to them, and hand them valuable assets like WAMU.

This should reveal the truth behind Jamie Dimon’s claim that Chase “serves its communities.” That is PR spin straight out of Orwell’s 1984 where corporate propaganda from a smooth Harvard billionaire replaces truth. I also hope this helps put in perspective a $5 million charity handout designed to give them PR value. $5 million isn’t even pocket change to Chase. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean of money that has been stripped from the population in the first place through usury. So a helpful analogy to this Chase charity stunt might be a viciously abusive husband who gives his wife a Reese’s peanut butter cup after 10 years of broken bones, hospital visits, and psychological horror. Don’t be a sucker.

Marc Benioff and the Truth of the Tech Boom
In Marc’s case, the story is far less severe. He’s not in the dark usury business. He’s not evil. But the gap between truth and PR is still wide. He became a billionaire in the 2nd phase of the tech boom in which the establishment chose Web 2.0 technologies for its corporate empire vs. the old client/server architecture from the 1st tech boom. At the micro level, people inside his company think they’re benevolently serving human progress. But the macro perspective reveals that is just one small component of the overall new world economic order being built by the financial empire that rules much of the world. His product helps the corporate system go global and turn away from national and community loyalties. So’s gain is, for example, the industrial midwest’s ruin—so much for the idea that he loves community. As a few comfy employees in the company have gotten rich IN the tech bubble, manufacturing towns have been destroyed BY the tech bubble. His product also puts data in the “cloud computing” architecture on the internet beyond corporate firewalls and national borders so the banking establishment can further consolidate power and control. This explains why a CFR lawyer was a top officer at the company for a few years and why a public CFR representative like Colin Powell would speak at a Benioff conference for techies, not typically a venue where one sees national leaders who have more important things to do.

What’s really sad about the tech billionaires is that their wealth was driven by putting the rest of the world in massive debt. They don’t understand this. They think they really are “self-made” billionaires as described by establishment rags like Forbes. But as Teddy Roosevelt said, business elites don’t know much outside their own business, so they don’t realize the true mechanism that funneled so much wealth into the tech industry and their personal bank accounts. As a result of Greenspan and team driving the real estate debt boom and the US government massively increasing its debt at the same time, the Wall Street cartel had new unprecedented levels of liquidity to funnel into the corporate empire system. This gave corporations billions to allocate to new capital projects, and since Wall Street governs the corporate system, it dictated how that money would be spent. So guys like Marc saw their share prices shoot to the stratosphere as corporations funneled to them billions in funny money backed by the debt that would soon drown millions of people.

Truth vs. Corporate PR
This is the truth of the corporate system, our supposed captains of industry, and the tech billionaires we admire for entrepreneurial efforts. This is the truth that more and more Americans are waking up to. And this is therefore likely the reason the CFR corporate establishment is encouraging guys like Marc to dole out money in a coordinated campaign designed to make people admire billionaires and the corporate system that rules them. If they can buyoff enough of the population with charity PR, they might avoid the reckoning that would otherwise be coming their way. They will be able to stay peacefully in their billionaire enclaves separate from real communities as the rest of the population suffers in the next phase of deflationary decline coming our way.

So Warren, Bill, Jamie, Marc, am I glad some of the money that was sucked into your accounts by the debt system is being given back to the community? Absolutely. But will you go further? Will you learn the truths this article discusses? Will you actually get out in your communities, meet real people, learn about how their indebtedness is directly proportional to your wealth, and work with them to change the system rather than writing a check, hiding behind PR professionals, and serving the CFR agenda?
The people are awake to the truth now. The system is reverting back to reality. The PR matrix is coming down. You should move beyond the fake PR facades as well. Warren, you said the dinner with Lord Rockefeller was almost like a therapy session. I promise you’ll feel even better if you simply choose truth over PR. As opposed to the narcissists that Rothkopf calls the “superclass” which surrounds you, most people are forgiving by nature. You don’t have to hide behind PR any longer.