The Damned Sneering Plutocrat Do-Gooders

Comes word today via the NYT that a Sneering Plutocrat couple, apparently having sleepless nights over the plight of the 'third world,' has decided to 'give' Stanford University $150 million to found some sort of BS think tank to support ideas to make people in poor countries rich. We are not making this up. One would think that such idiotic behavior, in the face of 50 million without health care here, with 16% underemployed and 9% unemployed, they would find some cause of value here in the USA. But no. They want Stanford (itself one of the richest private institutions in the words with a multibillion dollar endowment) to set up a foundation, and one of their first ideas seems to be some kind of plan to give money to Bhutan to fund planting hazelnut trees in the denuded Himalaya foothills, denuded by the Bhutanians themselves, of course, probably to provide the Chinese with cheap tropical hardwoods to make chopsticks out of.
Why is this important? Two things: first, it shows the folly of giving Sneering Plutocrats huge fortunes, flayed from the backs of workers, and then trusting them to give it to whomever they please, without the citizens of the country that allowed them to make the filthy lucre in the first place having a say.
Second, this tree-planting idea is cockamamie. Here's why. Hazelnut trees are not native to Bhutan, so they will be replacing a high-diversity tropical hardwood forest with essentially a monoculture. And the idea is of course that the Bhutanians will pick the nuts and make millions exporting them. To whom? You might well ask. Why, probably to US. And who will be harmed by this idea of subsidizing hazelnut growing in Bhutan? Why the hazelnut growers in Oregon's own Willamette Valley! That's right, friends, it is one of our main cash crops, and we make sure they harvest it doing as little environmental damage as possible.
Which is sure as shit more than we will be able to say about Bhutan. So the next time you go to the unemployment office in Salem, or Eugene, or Corvallis, say hello to those hazelnut growers in line for their unemployment checks.