Fantastic Interview On How America's Worship Of Money & The Superrich Is Poisoning Everything

[hatrack]

“We talk a lot here about what we should be doing more of,” Anand Giridharadas said during a speech in Colorado in 2015. “We don’t talk about what we should be doing less of.” Mr. Giridharadas, a writer who had participated in a fellowship at the Aspen Institute, was addressing a gathering of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists — capitalism’s “winners,” essentially — who were participating in the institute’s Action Forum, which encourages attendees to work on ways that they might change the world, preferably through win-win endeavors.

The privileged and powerful, Mr. Giridharadas said in his speech, are great at creating foundations and giving away money to good causes. The problem: These elites are also fiercely protective of their own interests, which often makes them resistant to the kinds of sacrifices that would create real change. For instance, they’re happy to donate money to a few schools (and be celebrated for their generosity), but they will lobby aggressively against a corporate tax increase that could mean more funding for tens of thousands of schools.

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A repeated comment I’ve heard about your book is that people wish there was a solutions chapter at the end, which you did not include. Was that intentional — not offering your views on how to fix things?

If you ever go to a doctor and the doctor pokes around for a couple minutes and immediately brings out a knife or starts to give you pills, you should run. Diagnosis is a prerequisite for prescription. The theory of the book is that we are in a moment of extreme inequality, of political stasis, of democratic erosion, because our common culture has been infected by a phony religion. And that phony religion tells us that the best society is achieved by unleashing people to make money, as much as possible, in every way possible, cutting every corner they can, exploiting people, underpaying taxes, degrading the environment, evading regulation, manipulating government, and then donating some of the spoils of that, or repurposing some side part of their businesses, and claiming to save the world.

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I often feel that the desire for an instant solution among some of the more business-minded folks who read the book is actually a desire for premature absolution. I think they want to skip the whodunit part. I think they want to get straight to the things we can do because they don’t want to deal with the fact that, if I’m right in this story that I tell, there’s a whole lot of complicity that needs to be dealt with first.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/anand-giridharadas-global-elites.html

[Garrett78]

1. And that "democratic erosion" is intentional.

Undermining democracy for self-enrichment is what unites Republicans and Putin.