16:16, 26 Nov 2014 by Fleet StreetFox
Being beautiful, wealthy and famous does not mean that you can’t be very, badly, incredibly, misinformed, selfish, stupid and wrong
Angelina Jolie is good at telling us how good she is.
She says that war is a terrible bad thing and makes people starve and flee their homes.
“We seem to be completely unable to handle it and make ground, and help all of the people who are starving and dying at the moment,” she revealed in an ITN interview to promote her latest film.
“I think clearly if you look around the world you can say that we simply are not doing enough.”
She thinks sexual violence against women is so bad that she is prepared to stand next to William Hague and say so.
At a summit earlier this year she spoke of war zone rape as “a crime that thrives on silence and denial… it causes feelings of shame… and feeds ignorance such as the notion that rape has anything to do with normal sexual impulses.
“Worst of all, it allows rapists to get away with it because the law rarely touches them and society tolerates them.”
And she has said that she would consider a life in politics “if I feel I could make a difference”.
All good stuff. All of it quite right, too.
And much of it wouldn’t get discussed at all if someone of Angelina’s wealth, fame and beauty wasn’t the person who stood up and said it first.
But there is a problem with all that wealth, fame, and beauty, which is that when you are the most attractive refugee commissioner the United Nations has ever had people don’t care what you say so much as how you look while saying it.
She speaks, and we all gaze dumbstruck while the words wash over us.
No-one, be they the audience at home or the journalists ushered into her presence, have much hope of breaking the spell to hold Angelina to account for anything.
And she does need to be held to account.
Not because she’s wrong in what she says, but that she is such a raging two-faced hypocrite that she makes Nick Clegg look like pure backbone.
In a standard-issue actress or pretty person it wouldn’t matter a damn, but in someone who is toadied to by international statesmen and journalists who should know better her doublespeak is a recipe for mass delusion.
This is a woman who campaigns against sexual violence one day and sexualises it the next.
In Mr & Mrs Smith her and Brad Pitt’s married characters smash their house up and try to kill each other in a long scene that makes domestic violence look like “normal sexual impulses”.
She knows, as we all do, that domestic abuse thrives on silence and denial, yet she tolerated it in a movie that normalised marital abuse and charges the public a tenner to be titillated by it.
What’s that if it’s not society and modern culture “tolerating” abusers and “letting them get away with it”?
She’s made a big deal out of adopting children from poor and damaged countries.
Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam have no doubt received donations from her - but they would do even better if she had used all the money she has since spent on Maddox, Zahara, Pax to support orphanages, schools, or vaccinations.
Thanks to her, three children have benefited from a fabulous lifestyle when the same money spent more wisely could have stretched to helping hundreds of extra children who could have grown up to rebuild their countries and in turn improve the lives of thousands.
She may have given thousands to charity, but her adoption money could have benefited many more people.
But the thing that really makes me cough like a cat with a fur ball is her claim to want to make a difference, go into politics and bring her magic touch to humanity’s greatest problems.
Aside from the fact I doubt whether a deranged war lord will order his troops not to rape if Angelina asks him nicely, aside from the fact Syria can’t be healed if everyone in it is blowing each other to pieces, Angelina Jolie will make bugger all difference until she starts using her noggin.
This woman has a personal fortune of around £92million. Although she gives away eye-watering amounts of money to charity, she no doubt has a team of accountants who make sure she pays all the taxes she ought.
Yet, while talking about how much she’d love to live in the UK – “I have lived here before and in the future I think it would be really nice to have a foothold here for work” – she said the proposed Mansion Tax might change her mind.
“I’m quite responsible about money. That could put me off,” she said, in a way that sounded incredibly responsible and sensible and normal unless you actually thought about it.
Angelina earned £20m last year for Maleficent, her first film in three years. She has two more in post-production and expected next year. If you even it out and want to be fair you might say her annual income is £10million a year, and if you factor in investments and property it’s likely more.
The proposed Mansion Tax would be between £3,000 and £30,000 a year.
Considering Angelina’s security and staff considerations she’d probably need a £30m pad as a bare minimum, so she’d be paying the top rate.
Which would be £2,500 a month.
Or £82.19 a day.
With earnings of around £27,937 a day, making it 0.3% of her income.
No doubt Angelina has high overheads and gives plenty to charity, but she seems to be not so much “responsible” with money as “crushingly tight-fisted unless it’s a watch”.
There are lots of reasons to admire her. I don’t doubt she genuinely cares, and that this interview was probably the first time she’d heard of the mansion tax and she had no idea how little money it involved in comparison to, say, the wages bill for a team of six nannies.
It’s not her fault she doesn’t know what she’s talking about – but it’s our fault giving any weight to her words simply because she’s famous, wealthy, and beautiful.
We know war and rape and starvation are bad without Angelina telling us.
We also know she isn’t going to cure any of them, and that a millionaire’s best chance of healing the world is via taxation.
We also know she is an Oscar-winning actress currently casting herself in the role of the saviour of mankind but whose abilities, career choices and taxation opinions make it highly unlikely she’ll succeed.
People paying their proper taxes worldwide would do an awful lot to fix refugee camps, starvation, and the causes of war. Economic investment does far more than adoption to improve opportunities and human rights in the developing world.
And if everyone paid their taxes, perhaps domestic abuse services, rape crisis centres and refuges would remain open rather than close and leave us relying on the films of Angelina Jolie for relationship advice.
Unfortunately, being beautiful, wealthy and famous does not mean that you can’t be misinformed, stupid and wrong.
not mine.credit and source: MIRROR
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