give/UP

I urge all of my billionaire (or otherwise elite) readers to check out this video of Anand Giridharadas' recent conversation with David Leonhardt at Washington DC's Politics and Prose bookstore on the subject of his 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.  I was led to the video in my internet wanderings by coming across one dazzling appearance after another in which Giridharadas, a former McKinsey analyst and New York Times correspondent who is currently an Aspen Institute fellow, literally speaks truth to power in settings such as Bloomberg panels, Google Talks and so forth.  

Giridharadas suggests that his book is perhaps the Good Cop on the subject of how the 1% is screwing it up for the rest of us (including themselves if they survive the revolution) to Jane Mayer's (and I would add Nancy MacLean's) Bad Cop accounts of the actively destructive lifework of the Koch Brothers and their anti-equality elite comrades.

In a nutshell, in his book, Giridharadas critiques corporate philanthropy through the prism of the experience of its practitioners, from the bright eyed idealistic graduates of elite academies who are pressured into channeling their idealism through the auspices of Goldman-Sachs, to the ex-presidents with their expensive global initiatives who think the way to solve a problem such as childhood obesity is to work with corporations to sell smaller cans of Coke in schools. Before you book your Davos ticket, please take a look.

Corporate giving unfailingly comes with strings attached and if conditions are not agreed to, not at all.  Thanks to civic credulity about the power and innovation of capitalism, in this way, Exxon intends to get ahead of the curve on public policy addressing global warming, and Altria on accountability for public health.  Corporate philanthropy-- whether its goal is merely to glorify the donor or to commandeer the social conversation on an issue as a deliberate means of throttling challenges to the private hegemony of the funders of its foundations-- is always done in a way that above all preserves the status quo, and specifically, the inequality inherent in the system. 

At one point, Leonhardt asks Giridharadas whether the subjects of his book know what they're doing.  Giridharadas uses the language of Paolo Friere to suggest that his subjects range from "the naïve to the shrewd."  The shrewd perhaps need no introduction (hello  Koch brothers), but it's worthwhile to consider the breadth of naïvety that leads the young idealist recently graduated offspring of the 1% to swallow the punch that no problem is so large and complex that it cannot be solved (of course always to the extent that the solution fits within a limited set of parameters that are amenable to immediate corporate bottom lines) by a board of directors from the same small cluster of elite academies and corporations and a budget composed of charitable deductions.  Meanwhile, the only problems being solved by these foundations appear to be related to corporate image and public relations (as long as it is not at the expense of profit margin).

Following up an anecdote about a testy conversation he had with Bill Clinton about the benefit of political movements versus corporate hobnobbing to solve global problems, Giridharadas concluded with these thoughts.

So what could he have done to build those movements and what could the rest of us do?  I think my simple answer is in an ideal world there'd be less billions laying around for rich people to allocate by their whims.  But we're in the world we are in now, and so what would you do if you're in that position?  I think ... my simple answer would be to shift your giving from "giving back" to giving up, and from crowding government out to crowding it in...  Giving back is keeping the system that you're standing on top of. It's keeping unequal public schools.  It's keeping a world in which women have no maternity leave.  But it's throwing some scraps. It's telling women to lean in here and there.  It's building that one charter school.  It's essentially solving the problem just enough to [not have to] solve it.  Giving up would be solving some of these problems in a way that hurts you. ... I'd love to see a billionaire giving a billion dollar donation to an organization that is trying to figure out how to crack down on global tax havens.  That would be giving up.  (nervous laughter) Right? I don't see that foundation.  A billion dollars to out where the money is.  To bribe some Swiss ofiicials to leak some names... If they are able to do what they've done on AIDS they could do some real work on this issue.    

Coincidentally, Le Butcherettes released a video just this week on the same subject:

Any takers?