A tale of two billionaires

MACKENZIE Scott parted amicably last year from former husband Jeff Bezos, the richest American and the also world’s richest person, with the largest settlement ever in the history of divorce proceedings, estimated at D3U billion. The Amazon founder just required one thing — the former wife would be without voting rights on her Amazon shares. The wealth tracker of Forbes listed her as the fourth wealthiest American woman.

According to written accounts, this was how the global behemoth started. The rough draft of Amazon’s business plan, selling books online, was written as the couple left the investment house D. E. Shaw for the adventure in the Seattle area, with MacKenzie at the wheel and Jeff Bezos at the passenger side jotting down business notes and operational plans.

Amazon, from the initial online book selling, is now an online juggernaut (consistently in the Top 3 global companies in terms of market cap), with Bezos’ wealth piling up even during the coronavirus pandemic. Mackenzie Scott is preoccupied with another thing — giving money to worthy causes such as racial justice, climate change and global health.

Last year, Miss Scott gave away a total of $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, including two historic Black colleges. There was one divergent point from the usual philanthropy work of American billionaires — she would rather leave it to the leaders of the beneficiary institutions on how to best use the money, a rare hands-off approach to large-scale-giving work.

Miss Scott has also signed the Giving Pledge, the Bill Gates-Warren Buffet initiative that commits the bulk of the billionaires’ wealth to worthy causes, with little to be left to their families. She said she would give everything away “until the safe is empty.”

The Princeton- trained MacKenzie Scott is a novelist.

Her out- of- the- box philanthropy work was the reason she was in the news recently. Let this sink in: she will give away her wealth “until the safe is empty.”

In the Philippine context, a Philippine senator, Cynthia Villar, wife of the country’s richest Filipino, was recently in the news and on the contentious, free- wheeling space called social media.

It was about her reaction to a call of Philippine health workers, burdened to the last sinew of their bodies by the heavy load of caring for the country’s sick during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But before going to that, let us first go to the pivotal role of Senator Villar in the Senate. She is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and the head of the congressional oversight on all important matters related to agriculture. I am a small farmer, a part of her natural constituency.

Senator Villar was the main sponsor of the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), which to small rice farmers like this typist is the worst law passed in the 21st century. The scrapping of the quantitative restrictions on rice imports paved the way for massive rice dumps that were unprecedented in the history of the country’s rice production.

For less than 10 months of frenzied, non-stop importation of rice last year, around 3 million metric tons of rice were dumped through the local ports, 2.1 million MT of which came from Vietnam. The surge of rice imports depressed farm gate prices of palay (unhusked rice) to historic levels. In remote areas far from private buying stations, palay prices went down to as much as P8 per kilo. The wide-scale depression the massive rice dumps dealt on small rice farmers is too depressing to recollect.

Palay prices recovered a bit this year but not enough to reverse the miseries of last year for the country’s 3 million small rice farmers.

In lieu of the quantitative restrictions, the RTL imposed tariffs on imported rice, 35 percent on imports from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and 50 percent on imports from outside the region. The tariff collection is to be pooled under an amelioration program for small farmers. Again, greed, corruption and bureaucratic incompetence failed to make the most out of the tariff collection to maximize the money pool for the amelioration program.

According to the Federation of Free Farmers, total tariff collection from last year to May this year could have been P2.7 billion higher had the authorities imposed the proper valuation on the rice imports. Having passed a brutal law that wrecked the lives of the voiceless and neglected small rice farmers, the oversight work — a mandate of Senator Villar — should have exercised the oversight function to push the authorities into doing the proper valuation of the rice imports to at least shore up the money pool for the small rice farmers.

No oversight function was exercised. The suffering small rice farmers were dealt a second blow by the undervaluation of the rice imports.

Under Senator Villar’s chairmanship of the ever-critical committee on agriculture, the Land Bank of the Philippines (LandBank) lent billions of pesos in unsecured loans to bankrupt South Korean shipbuilder Hanjin Heavy Industry Co. Ltd. while starving Filipino agrarian-reform beneficiaries and small farmers of their muchneeded loans. If the LandBank lent at all, it was to agri-business corporations, Big Ag, giant grains entities and local government units acquiring dump trucks and bulldozers. I don’t think a Senate investigation was conducted to inquire into why the LandBank, whose charter was to lend to small farmers and agrarian-reform beneficiaries, lent money to a bankrupt South Korean shipbuilder while failing to serve its reason for being.

No inquiry into a shift of priorities at the Department of Agriculture was also ever conducted, with the department more focused on rolling out sham programs mostly for propaganda than doing the brick and mortar work to help the neglected small farmers and the long-suffering agriculture sector.

Of course, Mrs. Villar gets into the news not because of agriculture. When asked for her reaction to a recent clamor from the overburdened health workers to place Metro Manila and other virus-stricken areas under modified enhanced community quarantine or MECQ, her reaction was this. “Huwagnasiguro.Pagbutihin nalangtrabahonila.” After that display of unalloyed insensitivity fired up netizens, she clarified that she was not referring to the health workers in particular but to the health authorities.

Too late. I was reading the accounts of MacKenzie Scott’s generous giving during the time Mrs. Villar was flogged by netizens for unfathomable indifference. You can see the contrast between the two billionaires: extreme humanity versus extreme insensitivity.