The Clintons this week revealed their tax returns and claimed $108 million over the past eight years, gleaned primarily from speaking engagements where the faithful dole it out and Bill Clinton commands up to $250,00 per speech. What is remarkable about their returns is that they claimed only $10.2 million in charitable deductions over eight years. But it turns out that small amount was in fact dolled out to their own charity: They gave the money to themselves. And further, they gave none of it out until last year when Senator Clinton declared her Presidency.
NYT's article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Charitable giving brings a recognition that although we may not feel it in our every day preoccupations, there is a world which goes on outside our own ego. That world is often in pain and that pain is our pain. This was Siddhartha's first awakening when he traveled out of his castle and found sickness, suffering and death. The Clintons have yet to journey out of their castle.
By giving to charity we recognize our helplessness in the world and we enter in with the suffering in the world - we share the suffering with the poor and the sick as the Christ did if only we share it symbolically and in the spirit of the poor.
This kind of behavior by the Clintons reveals them to be what they have always been: childish, adolescent narcissists who think of nothing but themselves and see no world outside of the own Leviathan visions.
I find it remarkable that Hillary Clinton wrote her college theme on Saul Alinsky, the master organizer of the Back of the Yards neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1930s who trained leftist organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In his day and shortly thereafter dilettante performers and entertainers of the gentry like the Clintons would have been taxed up to 100% because it was characteristic of new elites and the "new rich" to not give a dime to charity as the Clintons have not given a dime. In my generation the "new elite" was sparked when Sixties revolutionary Jerry Rubin called a large part of his generation to switch from Marx and Trotsky overnight to Goldman Sacks. Bill Clinton is avatar of this group.
Question to the Clintons: Who raised you?
