Atlanta and the Philanthropic-Industrial Complex

The billionaire Bernie Marcus cofounded Home Depot, funded Israel’s national emergency and blood bank service and built America’s largest aquarium in Atlanta. There, in his hometown, the late oligarch’s name is scrawled on everything from the Marcus Jewish Community Center to the Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center and Marcus Autism Center. His philanthropic largesse in Georgia is rivaled only by that of his business partner and fellow billionaire Arthur Blank, who owns the Atlanta Falcons football team and its tax-swindling Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

If the city of Atlanta loves anyone these days, it’s billionaires like the DIY duo of Marcus and Blank, and Fortune 500 companies like Home Depot, which bolster the image of a center of innovation that leaders are desperate to perpetuate. But when Marcus died in November, the most impactful piece of his legacy may have been his final contribution: Donald Trump, the least charitable of presidents, whom Marcus once called “one of the most misunderstood men in America.”

“He was my supporter from the beginning and was always there when I needed help or advice,” Trump posted in memoriam of Marcus on Truth Social. “He strongly endorsed me for this election, as well as my other runs, and I will never forget him for that.”

Had he been alive for it, Marcus surely would have taken his place under the Capital Rotunda beside Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk during Trump’s swearing in. Far from unique, his rise to the highest echelon of American wealth was merely epitomic of this class. He was, after all, one of the reasons that the wonderful, idiosyncratic world of the neighborhood hardware store was run out of existence and replaced by cavernous warehouses and orange aprons. 

Though he gave back a fraction of the billions he made from putting those mom-and-pop shops out of business, Marcus did it in the least democratic way possible: doling out his fortune unilaterally and aggressively to GOP campaigns and right-wing causes (such as the Gary Sinise Foundation Avalon Network), that continue to ensure the collective labor of thousands of employees is used to prop up a wealthy elite.

“Countless lives improved and saved are an enduring testament to Bernie Marcus’ generosity,” noted Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has received millions in campaign funding from the home renovation magnate.

Wielding his cartoonish wealth like a character out of Ayn Rand, Marcus created and bolstered institutions that will ensure his voice continues to echo well after his death, urging wayward liberals to embrace the status quo and ignore systemic inequality rather than toy with any sincere notions of reducing the burdens of economic inequality.

Marcus crafted his billionaire image according to a playbook he helped write. It goes like this: Disrupt an industry and squeeze as much value out of the existing infrastructure as possible, then set up a charitable foundation to endow lavish celebrations of your own munificence, which constitutes a mere sliver of the pie you’ve gobbled up. Whether it’s the founders of Starbucks, Walmart or Handy Dan Improvement Centers, part of perpetuating the grift is portraying themselves as self-made business geniuses while appropriating value created by others and utilizing every possible advantage to get ahead. The best grifters also craft a compelling rags-to-riches backstory, like sleeping in their car before their big break. Marcus was just “a poor kid from Newark.” Fellow billionaire and Home Depot investor Ken Langone was “the son of a Long Island plumber.” How can you begrudge a person like that their monstrous fortune?

And when it came time to give back, Marcus always maintained that it was his immigrant parents who instilled in him the value of charity. “I grew up knowing that this is what you do,” he once said. “It’s bred into me.”

But supporting systemic changes to Georgia’s labor and tax system to help struggling families was out of the question. Even as Atlantans suffered through crises in housing, healthcare and employment — including the nation’s worst racial wealth gap — Marcus blamed labor unions, the foolishness of younger generations, the sloth of the American workforce and the stupidity of the left for the steady stream of beneficiaries of the Marcus Foundation.

In one of the last interviews he gave, Marcus railed against “the leftist forces of the Biden-Harris administration,” arguing that the administration was “looking to dismantle what made this country great: the free market.”

He pinned his hopes on fringe mercenaries like Steve Bannon and, sometimes reluctantly, on Trump, whose ultimate victory would “help expose the left’s lies” and “false claims about the evils of capitalism.”

“The media may be the biggest threat to our democracy,” Marcus wrote ominously back in March for the conservative news and polling aggregator, Real Clear Politics, urging conservatives to unite behind Trump .

In his words, Trump was the “most capable person to solve America’s problems.”

Philanthropy is a racket, its existence a sign that something has gone very wrong. Back in 2019, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman went viral at the economic summit in Davos when he argued for less philanthropy and more taxes on the super-rich, calling out the hypocrisy of private jets descending upon a conference where participants were supposed to discuss solutions to inequality and the climate crisis. 

“This is my first time at Davos, and I find it quite a bewildering experience,” he told the other members of his panel. “Almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance [and] of the rich just not paying their fair share.”

In fact, charitable exemptions are some of the means by which billionaires like Marcus destroy the world while posing as its saviors.

A report released last year by Inequality.org detailed all the ways in which “the ultra-wealthy use charitable giving to avoid taxes and exert influence while ordinary taxpayers foot the bill.” At best, funneling their donations through intermediaries like private foundations “delays the flow of funds to working nonprofit charities on the ground,” the report found. By warehousing charitable funds, donors “burnish their public image, amplify their political voice and protect their assets” while keeping their money in donor-advised funds and other intermediaries, not the hands of active charities.

At worst, as a number of the top billionaires who signed the Giving Pledge created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in 2010 have shown, the richest among us tap into their “philanthropy for self-serving purposes, such as taking out loans from their foundations or paying themselves hefty trustee salaries.”

Since signing the Giving Pledge, Marcus and other top pledgers including Langone and Blank have seen their net worth balloon in a decade during which direct taxpayer subsidies for charitable giving grew to $73.24 billion (more, if estate and capital gains tax reductions are factored in). Inequality.org estimates that taxpayers pay 74 cents in lost revenue for every dollar donated to charity by a billionaire, assuming that dollar doesn’t end up sitting indefinitely in a Vanguard account. Meanwhile, over the past decade, Marcus and Blank saw their net worths grow by 714% and 739%, respectively. 

As former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas wrote in his 2018 book “Winners Take All,” billionaire philanthropists

believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

When it comes to ameliorating systemic issues at their source, American billionaires have only private solutions to public problems, and those solutions are often very profitable for those who have the right connections. 

While Marcus gave to some worthwhile causes, he used his enormous fortune mainly to build shiny things that distract us from the bleak realities of life in contemporary Atlanta, where inequality thrives and even many working families can no longer afford stable housing. But tackling systemic inequality is hard work; it’s easier to build a really big fish tank.