Businessweek published a list of what they term, ‘The Top Givers’, which, amongst others, included Bill Gates. What Businessweek forgot to mention is that many of these ‘Givers’ and ‘philantropists’ also range amongst the ‘Top Expropriators’ – that is, those who take what does not belong to oneself in the first place whilst being extremely successful in doing so.

In Truth,

A ‘Top Giver’ is one who ranks amongst the least of the Takers. This is not to say that the least amongst us ought to give the most from the limited pool of resources that we are allowed to retain after the expropriators have performed their traditional and most absorbent ablutions in them. Rather, we ought to bring about a system where ‘Top Givers’ are not undone by their simultaneously and oxymoronically being ‘Top Takers’. Where the amount expropriated via ‘taking’ exceeds ‘giving’, the latter becomes nothing but insincere and insufficient restitution.

We ought to aspire towards a society where everyone is a ‘Top Giver’ where ‘taking’ equals ‘giving’. This can only be so where the disparity between ‘taking’ and ‘giving’ is eradicated with extreme prejudice. And this can only be achieved by complete and utter eradication of the disparity between classes via the eradication of class-based systems.

When one thinks about it, for global misery to be attributed to nature, we cannot have a sector of society taking more than it gives. If this is the case, then we can never say that we have done everything that is humanly possible to eradicate misery. It is the humanitarian disbursement of that amount that makes up the difference between what is taken and what is given that argues for us having done our best.(i.e. we take a $100 and give $20, we are short of $80 in our purported attempt to eradicate global suffering.)

For a slideshow of some of those who hold the difference between taking and giving in their bloated coffers, and who, with the connivance of the political, economic and psychological infrastructure of the capitalist system, have perpetuated the conditions that give rise to millions of deaths annually, go here.