{"id":19,"date":"2005-05-09T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-09T17:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.brentnorris.net\/blog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2005-09-10T17:00:28","modified_gmt":"2005-09-10T23:00:28","slug":"letter-to-oneorg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/archives\/19","title":{"rendered":"Letter to one.org"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know if you have seen the commercial for one.org<\/a> or not, if you haven’t it is on their site. They are attempting to promote their cause using a lot of star power and it made my feel sick to my stomach.
\nHere is what I wrote them:<\/p>\n

I am concerned with several aspects of your organization’s goal. As stated on your website and commercial you aren’t looking for people to give money, you are instead looking for people to give their vote in order to urge congress and the government to help people in other countries.<\/p>\n

The first problem is that if congress were to agree to help these countries and decided to pass the 1% budget increase that you show on your website, that would be an approximate agreement of 26 billion dollars (based on the 2.6 trillion dollar figure reported by Yahoo News http:\/\/dailynews.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/congress_budget_dc<\/a>). Where do you think this money comes from? In case you haven’t figured it out, that money comes from tax payers, which means that not only are you asking for our vote, BUT you ARE asking for our money as well, just in a round about way. If it goes through the way you are asking for it, it isn’t even a voluntary thing, it is instead a mandated charity.<\/p>\n

The second problem is with the fact that you seemed to have rounded up a really large group of star power people for your commercial. Brad Pitt, P Diddy, Tom Hanks and of course Bono… wow lots of faces. What I haven’t noticed is any news about these people giving up their money to help in the cause. I noticed in the commercial that P Diddy is still wearing his extravagant diamond earrings and in recent pictures I have still noticed lots of the actors carrying plenty of “Bling”. I would think that P Diddy’s earrings would feed several hundred people if he were to sell them for the cash. Why is it that these celebrities have no problem getting on television to ask us to give our money when they seem to give so little a percentage of theirs? If I were to decide to give $10,000 to help that is a pretty big chunk of my annual salary, but if Brad Pitt gives $10,000 that is like a couple suits for him isn’t it? Do the actors feel bad that they have these lavish cars, houses, and boats while other people in the world don’t? Perhaps they should look into selling them and getting something more modest. Then taking the left over money and giving it to your organization. What is Oprah worth? 1 Billion? Perhaps you could get her to give you 500 Million dollars to help you along. I mean what can she do with a billion dollars that she can’t do with 500 Million? Does Tom Hanks have any plans to donate ALL the profit from his next movie to this cause? I’ll start thinking about casting my vote for you when I see George Clooney living in a three bedroom, two bath, ranch style house somewhere. Does he honestly need more than that?<\/p>\n

The third problem I have is with the fact that we have people that are experiencing these problems right here in the US. Perhaps these actors don’t notice it, because they live in the parts of the US that only have beautiful people in them. I guess they see more of the other countries when they are out on their multi-million dollar movie shoots and vacations. That would explain why they are so eager to help other people instead of spending some time and money to help people here. I hear Flint Michigan needs an influx of money maybe you should start there and work your way through the US, then head out to the foreign shores.<\/p>\n

Brent Norris<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t deny that their cause is a good one. People in other countries do need help, but their blatant use of the people that could do the most to help them as an advertising gimmick really made me mad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My comments on the one.org campaign and the problems that I don’t think it addresses. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[193,117,168,116],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-brent","tag-greed","tag-house","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brentnorris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}