ALAN'S LETTER

Excessive wealth isn’t just limited to billionaires. Are you sitting down? There are 135,000 households in the U.S. (about 0.1%) with net wealth exceeding $50 million (the ultra-rich), with a combined total wealth of approximately $35 trillion! In jellybean talk, with each one worth one dollar and laid end to end, they would circle the planet 7,500 times.

Every week there is more outrageous news about the ultra-rich taking complete control over our politics, and dare I say, our lives. Last week we saw billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times defy their editorial boards and refuse to issue endorsements in a Presidential election, breaking with decades of tradition and policy.

This isn’t poker. It’s democracy. And it’s time to take one’s 501c3 chips and put them all on the table to support voter engagement and election protection. The Crises Charitable Commitment’s mission is to encourage donors to simply give more, without specifying a cause, but sometimes the compelling needs of a cause can make it easier for philanthropists to open their wallets. But for the next sixty days that cause is democracy.

Have you been reading the newspaper? What a month! I’m writing this letter on July 27, the one-month anniversary of the Presidential Debate, and I’m asking myself: When was the last time we’ve experienced thirty days like the last thirty?! The debate; the withdrawal pressure; Republican convention; JD Vance; the withdrawal; the Kamala anointment; the ear shot!

A few weeks ago I went north of Ukiah, California, to the Avenue of the Giants, the redwoods….OMG, they are so magnificent. But I realized I couldn’t leave “work” totally behind, because as I looked up hundreds of feet to the trees’ canopy, I imagined that must be where billionaires hang out–a different planet–so far removed from the ground below and indifferent to the fact that the canopy is only possible because of the roots below.

It is college graduation season, and it is hard to think of the occasion as anything but a mixed bag: On the one hand it is a supremely joyous occasion; on the other hand, one can’t help worrying about the future that awaits these graduates.

The most disappointing aspect of my sabbatical, and I suspect most sabbaticals, is that one leaves with the hope that upon return some of the problems one was dealing with were somehow resolved.  When I left, a former President had not yet been convicted for his crimes , war was raging in the Middle East, Congress was dysfunctional, wealth inequality was increasing, and the philanthropy-industrial complex wasn’t interested in changing. Regrettably, “was” is “is.”

Guest blog: Larry Ottinger

This month we are tilting at the windmill that is the broken and extreme MAGA Supreme Court, created over decades through an unholy alliance of the religious right (which is neither) and their billionaire partisans.

Guest blog: Gabriela Sandoval

We are coming up on the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic and while I’d like to say we’ve come out the other side of it, the treads of the pandemic’s impact remain. They remain vividly on our communal health–physical, mental and emotional, and they remain on our economic, democracy, racial justice, and other societal structures.