Brett Favre has justified every brutal joke standup comedians have told about football players. The poignant side of the story, however, is the sinister side of charity that Favre’s abject stupidity exposes. Favre, whose net worth is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars (as judged by the $100 million contract extension he received in 2001), had the audacity to accept, willingly, welfare money from his home state of Mississippi in order to erect a volleyball court at his alma mater. Such financial dealings expose the typical understanding of the people in his tax bracket of charities–namely, that they are vehicles for self enrichment–but his obliviousness to protocol will likely lead to his being ostracized by the billionaire community for being a stupid jock. It will not effect any change in which way charities operate in the US.
Therein lies the real tragedy of this allegory. Favre gets singled out while the rest of the nonprofit industry continues to be used as a vehicle to enable the ultra-wealthy to bilk everybody else’s funds to create appearances of beneficence, like the paradigmatic Trump charity that was shut down by the state of New York for not accounting for the funds it received from donors. Given the excesses documented in the Panama Papers, it is difficult for one to resist cynicism every time one discovers that every charitable organization operated by the extremely wealthy is solely a vehicle designed either to enrich themselves or to avoid taxes. It is entirely obvious to everybody that the wealthy elite who control the political system through their patronage are the least qualified to operate it. Those who are complaining about millennials are oblivious to the world outside that hole in which their head is lodged.
Source: Texts: Mississippi governor knew of welfare payment to Favre
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Newly revealed text messages show how deeply involved a Mississippi governor was in directing more than $1 million in welfare money to retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Instead of the money going to help low-income families in one of the nation’s poorest states, as intended, it was funneled through a nonprofit group to Favre and spent on a new volleyball facility at a university that the football star and the governor both attended.
