(CORRECTED) Urvashi “Urv” Vaid, in her atrociously typeset book Irresistible Revolution (excerpted, echoes noted):
Vassar changed my socioeconomic class status forever – from immigrant working class to upwardly mobile and securely middle class. Attending Northeastern Law School changed it again – to the professionally employable and credentialed managerial class. Working at the Ford Foundation changed it once more – giving me a truly comfortable upper-middle-class life₁, for the first₁ time in my adult life₂, including the first₂ pension plan I ever had. And working to help a billionaire build his foundation changed my status yet again – from comfortably upper middle class to a platinum-card-carrying member of the small group of people that staffs, supports, and serves the ruling elites in this country.
She couldn’t state it any more plainly: Urvashi Vaid is an elite accessory to a billionaire.
The Ford Foundation isn’t the only place that paid her well. Public filings show that, for working just the first half of 2010 at the Arcus Foundation and Arcus Operating Foundation, Vaid was paid $533,282 (not $485,944 as I previously reported). That surely would pay for years of unprofitable stand-up-comedy appearances by Vaid’s missus, Kate Clinton. (Vaid didn’t answer my question about how much the Ford Foundation paid her. I asked the Ford Foundation if they even publish “executive compensation,” and was told about what I knew already – the top five earners are listed on nonprofits’ IRS Form 990. Only the Ford Foundation’s 990s from 2009 through 2011 are available; Vaid was not on those lists. I doubt she would have been in the top five anyway.)
The paragraph following the one excerpted above cheerfully recounts the mock chiding by a friend over Vaid’s socialist bonafides. A cute attempt to pre-empt criticism, but futile. For, elsewhere in the book, this champagne socialist has the gall to lecture the “LGBT” movement thus:
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The overall silence of mainstream LGBT policy, legal, and advocacy organizations on bread-and-butter economic-justice and social-welfare issues is noticeable and rather remarkable…. The avoidance of the pressing need for economic security by many parts of the mainstream LGBT movement ignores hard data that now show… large numbers of lesbians with children live in poverty [and] gay men earn less than straight men because of workplace discrimination. [False!]
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[T]he LGBT progressive movement will need to find new ways to finance its work. Existing mechanisms of reliance on individual people with money and [on] foundations are not sustainable for groups working for economic security and the rights of poor and economically vulnerable populations. Foundations are dominated by the values of high-income or wealthy people…. Dependence on philanthropy is the antithesis of progressive politics. It invariably requires conformity to ideas, values, and practices that are in the self-interest of the wealthy who fund and control those institutions
and of their executive staff, like Urvashi Vaid.
Tim Gill may be a millionaire, but at least he isn’t an outright hypocrite.