A Billion-Dollar Agenda
by Tony Chavira
You are kickass, Yu Pengnian.
The awesome dude of the day is Yu Pengnian, a billionaire in China who donated $1.2 billion to his own charity that is funding help to the Chinese people in a bunch of ways:
The amount, plus what he had donated before, raised the value of the Hong Kong-registered fund to $1.2 billion.
"This will be my last donation. I have nothing more to give away," he said.
"It will all be for charity, no part of it will be inherited by anyone, no part will be used to do business or for investments," he told reporters.
The foundation now has $260 million in bank deposits and a Hong Kong and Shenzhen property portfolio worth nearly $1 billion, which is expected to contribute an additional $50 million each year to the foundation.
The foundation, which is mandated to make donations to health, education and disaster relief, has so far funded over 150,000 cataract removal operations across China since 2003 and helped establish a number of Project Hope schools in the western rural areas.
Yu topped the latest Hurun Philanthropy List, released on Thursday, as he has done for five consecutive years for donating $910 million over the period.
I don't need to say this necessarily, but every Wall Street ass who walked away from the economic downturn with a slice of 1/3rd of the American economy in his pocket could learn a thing or twelve about humanitarianism from Yu. In fact, a big reason very conservative folk are anti-taxes is because they feel like most people with a ton of money would willingly donate their earnings to their favorite causes out of the kindness of their hearts. Sounds great in an ideal world, but if this were really the case, why would large donations like this even make the news? Wouldn't they be more commonplace?
Great for the poor in China though... hopefully more rich Chinese people will follow suit and give back. Meanwhile, in America, our rich people tie their personal finances to their corporations' earnings and take zero responsibility for inappropriate financial maneuvers or shady tactics. For example, this article in Preservation Magazine doesn't say "Joe Schmo, VP of Strategic Development for WalMart wants to steam-roll over a historic Civil War Battle site." 
It just says "WalMart wants to build on an old Civil War Site and we need to fight back" and that's a pretty clear example of how we have a bad tendency, as Americans, to distance the actions of a corporation from the actions from those who should be taking responsibility for the decisions they've made "on behalf of their company."
Not to say that WalMart (as a company) doesn't have a record for blatantly disregarding basic labor laws (or sometimes, basic human decency), but we have to remember that these corporations are a sum of both their corporate culture and their executive agendas. You can fine the company or sue the company all you want, but the blame always tends to fall on a single decision-maker (or a small group of decision-makers) who felt comfortable crossing that line in the first place. Whether it's a WalMart executive giving the greenlight to discriminate pay and promotions by gender, or a Massey junior VP deciding to ignore governent-mandate safety regulations to save money, it's always shocking to see human life put second to a few extra dollars.
That said, I'd like to propose a thought experiment for you to mull over today. You are the CEO of a multi-national company and you earn 5% of every million dollars earned (so $50,000). Now let's say that you found out that, by putting people slightly in harm's way, you could double your pay every year for ten years. Next year (2011) you'd make $100K, then you'd make $200K oin 2012, then $400K in 2013, etc. There's no guarantee that they will be hurt, and the first year nothing happens. And hey, there are risks with every job, right?
Are you willing to take that risk though? No? Well, how much money would it take in personal income before you might be willing to put someone in harm's way? $100K a year? $1 million per year? How about $25 million annually to put 20 people in harm's way? Or $50 million annually to discriminate against 3,000 company employees?
Ultimately, the most important question here is this: when in the course of human evolution did we begin to commoditize human life? What can $1 billion do to enable people when billions upon billions can be made disabling them?
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