Opinion Sur
Open letter to eight people whose wealth is equivalent to the assets hold by 3.6 billion people in our planet
Assigning a significant part of their wealth and related income to a Trust devoted to two purposes: upholding the dignity of the poorest 3.6 billion people of our planet and assuring the protection of essential environmental processes that make for the preservation of planet Earth. This neither replaces nor postpones the thousands of currently working initiatives towards such end but, if it got implemented, it would reinforce them. Some might consider this proposal naïve or idealistic; hopefully not you who carry a huge responsibility.
This Open Letter is addressed to Bill Gates, Microsoft founder; Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder; Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder; Carlos Slim, President of Grupo Carso; Amancio Ortega, Inditex CEO; Warren Buffett, CEO of various investment funds; Larry Ellison, Oracle Director and Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg CEO and former New York City major. As we are neither related nor have access to any of you, we publish this letter in this modest website in the hope that people of goodwill might bring it to your attention.
The proposal is to form a Trust, which could be called Dignity, geared towards upholding the dignity of the world’s poorest 3.6 billion people and ensuring the preservation of the planet.
The first step would be to form a team, designated by you, to suggest the structure, governance, financing and functioning of the Trust.
If the conformation of the Trust is approved, you would be invited to contribute a significant part of your wealth and related income to it. Then, the Trust will be set into motion and open to a wide subscription of contributions, including those from other billionaires.
The activity of the Trust could cover a diversity of activities, submitted to the approval of the Board, always oriented towards fulfilling the double bottom line adopted. The Trust would establish operation agreements with public and private entities and especially with social organizations whose voices and capacity for action might be exalted and reinforced.
The proposal is simple in its conception and complex in its structuring and implementation. However, the experience of your group in conceiving and managing entities and innovations may well serve to elaborate effective answers to the challenges that need to be confronted and the following implementation through appropriate organizational solutions.
There are more than a few explanations that try to understand how so much wealth has concentrated in such a small group of human beings but that is not the purpose of these lines. Instead, it is about establishing appropriate instruments to channel a good part of the substantial resources that you control to solve the pain, misery, and environmental destruction that is expanding and enlarging over time. The challenge is neither for an individual nor for a group as yours alone to take over; rather, it involves the humanity as a whole and millions of existing organizations throughout the globe. However, times are shortening to avoid a social and environmental tsunami of incalculable consequences. All of us must actively join in the effort of repairing injustices, contempt, and environmental destruction. In this perspective, what you can do, will add up talent, experience, and implementation capacity. It would be senseless that such critical assets would only serve to unlimitedly fatten your own wealth while the planet and those punished 3.6 billion people are thrown into destructive spirals that God-knows where they might lead us.
Individual philanthropies, of which you certainly participate, might be valuable but are insufficient to adjust the collective course. An initiative with global scope and local management, geared towards the prevailing of justice, equity, and protection of our mother Earth, that could grow and get improved along the way, born open to add other wills, that privileges giving instead of pillage, that promotes peace and understanding between peoples, that operates with the highest effectiveness in achieving its objectives, is something that could make a difference in what is left of the XXI Century.
There will be those who will stigmatize this proposal as naïve or idealistic; others might say that is unfeasible. It might well be that way if it does not reach its destination or if it is discarded without an in-depth exploration of what it can contribute to contemporary processes.
Greetings from the end of the world (Argentina)
