When donors approach a nonprofit, “they’re more likely to say not ‘How can I help you?’ but ‘Here’s my agenda,’” Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told me. Mainstream news organizations haven’t caught on to this new activism, he said, adding that most of them are into covering “the ‘giving pledge,’” by which the rich commit to giving away at least half their wealth in their lifetime. David Callahan, the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a website that tracks this world, says that “philanthropy is having as much influence as campaign contributions, but campaign contributions get all the attention. The imbalance is stunning to me.”
.. As John Cassidy observed in The New Yorker, “The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate.”.. As a number of the above examples suggest, much of today’s philanthropy is aimed at “intellectual capture”—at winning the public over to a particular ideology or viewpoint. In addition to foundations, the ultrarich are working through advocacy groups, research institutes, paid spokesmen, and—perhaps most significant of all—think tanks. These once-staid organizations have become pivotal battlegrounds in the war of ideas, and moneyed interests are increasingly trying to shape their research.. Naked Capitalism, an influential financial blog, recently ran a long post about how private equity companies “are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth at the expense of workers and communities” than are CDOs (collaterized debt obligations) and the other finance instruments that once drew such attention... as Susanne Craig reported in the Times in 2012, the company has exerted “enormous influence as a behind-the-scenes adviser to troubled governments” in places like Greece and Ireland. When seeking to analyze the health of a bank, the US Treasury Department often turns to BlackRock, leading a senior bank executive to call it (in an article in Vanity Fair) “the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government.”.. They described how in the spring of 2012 Google—facing possible legal action by theFTC over the dominance of its search engine—played a behind-the-scenes part in organizing a conference at George Mason University, to which it is a large contributor. It made sure that the program was heavily weighted with speakers sympathetic to Google and, according to the Post, it arranged for many FTC economists and lawyers to hear them. In the end, the commission decided against taking legal action. Just why could be a good subject for inquiry. Today, Google is working hard to protect its right to collect consumer data and to that end has sought the support of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation. The type of string-pulling described by the Post goes on routinely and deserves more routine coverage... As a 2014 Oxfam briefing paper explained, most of Slim’s wealth derives from his having gained near- monopolistic control of Mexico’s telecommunications sector when it was privatized twenty years ago... Earlier this year, Slim more than doubled the number of shares he owns in The New York Times Company (to nearly 17 percent), making him its largest individual shareholder (though the Sulzbergers retain control). It’s interesting to note that Slim rarely appears in the paper’s news pages. On the surface, this seems a glaring conflict of interest.
Donald Trump’s Unstoppable Virality
“Hate, fear of the other, anger — they come directly from the nonconscious, and that’s why they’re so easy to evoke,” Professor Rapson said.
Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, similarly found that news stories were more likely to be shared if they elicited emotions like awe, anger and anxiety.
.. And people with certain political leanings may be more predisposed to sharing. According to Bradley M. Okdie, a social psychologist at Ohio State University at Newark, conservatives are more likely to share a given piece of content than liberals are, especially if it provokes a negative emotion.
“Conservatives tend to be a lot more reactive to negative information and they also tend to be a lot more insular in nature, and they also tend to have less tolerance for ambiguity,” Professor Okdie said. “Conservatives would prefer a negative concrete statement to a slightly positive, uncertain statement.”
Mandy Patinkin: Let’s Desensitize Ourselves to Terrorism
Mandy Patinkin: I’m not afraid of terrorists because I’ve been desensitized to it. (22-24 min)
Donald Trump Scraps the Usual Campaign Playbook, Including TV Ads
His advisers have not revealed the existence of any pollsters on their staff or any advertising team. He has no real research operation to examine his own vulnerabilities or those of his opponents, and, based on Federal Election Commission filings, little in the way of a voter contact operation to identify and turn out his supporters.
.. If Mr. Trump’s team had researched Mr. Cruz’s weaknesses, for example, then incorporated them in Mr. Trump’s heavily covered speeches and ceaseless television appearances, as well as in paid advertising, he may have been able to pre-empt or at least slow the senator’s rise there.
.. In 2000, when Mr. Trump was toying with a possible third-party presidential candidacy, he had a contract with the motivational speaker Tony Robbins to make $1 million for giving speeches at some of Mr. Robbins’s seminars. Fortune reported that Mr. Trump had engineered his political events so that he would give speeches in the same cities.
“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Mr. Trump told the magazine.
In the most recent period for which there are records, the third quarter of the year, Mr. Trump raised just under $4 million from donors. He contributed only $100,779 of his own money in that quarter, and has lent roughly $2 million since the start of the campaign.
But some of the money Mr. Trump’s campaign spends is on reimbursing him: His largest expense in the last filing period, $723,000, was on a company he owns, Tag Air, which controls the fleet of aircraft he uses to fly to all his events.