Pierre Omidyar - Libertarian GG's Libertarian Billionaire Boss

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28. Six Degrees of Omidyar

http://tomslee.net/2013/09/six-degrees-of-omidyar.html

Six Degrees of Omidyar
September 8, 2013

Start with an old story. Back in 2006 the world of microfinance split between “pure do-gooders and profit-minded do-gooders”, between Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus and eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Yunus’s Grameen Bank had pioneered group-based credit for the impoverished, but had stayed away from making the Bank into a public company; Omidyar wanted to turn microfinance into a fully commercial, profit-making sector.
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Microfinance operates at the border between charity and business. LAPO was for several years a major partner of Omidyar-funded “peer-to-peer” lender Kiva, until Kiva cut ties in 2010. The episode highlighted a fact that was worrying some observers, including David Roodman: “peer-to-peer” lending is not actually peer-to-peer, instead Kiva works with intermediary partners which in turn make loans which were not, as many thought, interest-free.

[Update: a version of this post, re-edited in the light of the Omidyar/Greenwald news venture, is now at The New Inquiry: Charity Assets.]
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/charity-assets/

Charity Assets
By Tom Slee

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Change.org is one example of how adopting the Omidyar vision can boost “enterprise” at the cost of “social”, and has many parallels to the new journalism venture. The site has long presented itself as a non-profit organization (a .org), and has gained widespread support on that basis. But it was actually privately owned, and in 2012 it stepped out from behind its non-profit front, allowing “corporate advertising, Republican Party solicitations, astroturf campaigns, anti-abortion or anti-union ads and other controversial sponsorships (insert fucking puke).” Then in May 2013 it took venture capital from the Omidyar Network and others in order to scale up, and the nature of the organization changed.

The Omidyar/Change.org press release uses the standard language of social entrepreneurs: blandly inspirational and content-free.