Less Philanthropy, More Profit-sharing.

Barbara Ehrenreich, writing for The Nation, has this pithy critique of "mainstream" political economics in the U.S.

"But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein.... Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?

In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem..."
Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.
First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?
Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy."

Nowhere on Earth is the political process not tilted in favor of the wealthy. But when the super-rich gobble up an ever-larger share of the pie, they begin to command an ever-larger amount of the political classes' attention. Thus, all but one of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate so identified with big money that they just voted to block consideration of the Employee Free Choice Act. This Act doesn't seek to dramatically redistribute the nation's wealth, or to impose "confiscatory" levels of taxation on the incomes of the most wealthy. It merely seeks to allow some of those who work very hard to generate huge profits--now exclusively enjoyed by the wealthy-- to band together and seek modest improvements in their wages, benefits, and working conditions.