HOW THE ELITE SABOTAGE BUSINESS, POLITICS AND HIGHER LEARNING

HOW THE ELITE SABOTAGE BUSINESS, POLITICS AND HIGHER LEARNING

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.

(The following is a comment on and summary of the excellent book “Winners Take All” and how the elites have taken over the business, political and higher learning institutions of the world.  Following this blog post are important pieces of discussion pulled from the book-forewarning: this is about 25 pages long)

Many are disillusioned by the all powerful control elites seem to have both politically and financially on the world.  The book “Winners Take All-the elite charade of changing the world” by Anand Giriharadas provides thought provoking ideas (as presented below) on how elites have been able to achieve their goals.

The Gilded Age and major changes in citizens’ financial lives helped to propel the advent of elite MarketWorld thought leaders who believe and promote ideas that social change should be pursued principally through free market and voluntary actions, not public life, the law and reform of systems that people share in common.

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.  It consists of enlightened business people and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action.  MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and a state of mind.

There are two kinds of thinkers who share a common desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach broader audiences.

First are “thought leader” thinkers who tend to know one big thing and believe their important idea will change the world.  Thought leaders use spreadsheets and statistical analyses to share their ideas which are often in the future tense like Venn diagrams without noting that the lion’s share of each circle (have and have-nots) remains outside the overlap of win-win.  They give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change while taking little risk.

Thought leaders have often presented problems in precisely opposite ways by using their power to cause us to “zoom in” and think smaller.  They focus on vulnerability of poverty, not the wage of inequality. They don’t like “social justice” and “inequality” words, but rather use “poverty” and “fairness” while speaking of “opportunity”.

It is possible to counteract thought leader thinking by getting people to care about problems first by “zooming in” on a vivid person and then getting them to care by “zooming out” from person to see a system.  These thinkers are the “public intellectuals” who as wide-ranging ‘critics’ feel they bear a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes”. They are the ones who might give some hope to changing the trajectory of elite MarketWorld thought leaders.

“Zooming in” is known as the “identifiable-victim effect”…..People react differently toward identifiable victims than to statistical victims who have not yet been identified.

The social psychological concept, the one involving “zooming out” is the formal term for the concept “assimilation effect”, and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context.

Re poverty, inequality and charity:  poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, but inequality is something more worrying:  It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with ideas of injustice and wrongdoing; it leaves many chasing work instead of building livelihoods; it is rational.

MarketWorlders believe poverty can be addressed via charity by writing cheques to reduce that poverty.  “But inequality you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back, but about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.”  Inequality is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change systems as a group of people. With charity the elite work ALONE.

The changes of feudal financial and Gilded Age systems helped to develop organized philanthropy (whose leaders earn million dollar salaries and get tax credits for their charities while getting to keep their wealth) and ideas that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism.  The elites today do this from behind private gates, schools, jets: private world-saving behind the backs of those to be saved. Passively they do not reject public solutions in theory, but pursue private ones in practice. The private sector doesn’t merely add to public spheres, they change the language in which public spheres think and act.  This market-based, monetized thinking over all other disciplines and conceptions of value have helped to quickly spur a rising anger, nationalism and right-wing populism.

Thought leader ideas have permeated higher learning institutions.  Young people are taught to see social problems in a “zoom in” fashion by confining questioning to what socially minded businesses they can start up (buy one, give one), but not inequality.  They are persuaded by surrounding cultures that only by learning higher learning protocols can they help millions of people.

The question that elites refuse to ask is:  Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place?  The very problems elites have self righteously only partially solved have caused unrest because they act and talk in ways that insult, alienate, and energize many of their fellow citizens.

And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also marred by its own “narcissism.”

When society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transactions, but also subjects of it–citizens with agency. When help is moved into private spheres, no matter how efficient , the context of the helping is still a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, helper and helped, donor and recipient.

History is not a straight line but a circle of events which repeat themselves such as the Gilded Age.  Many right and left political leaders have bought into the elite thought leader mythology. Are we being moved again to a Gilded age scenario?

To counteract MarketWorld our political institutions–laws, constitutions, regulations, taxes, shared infrastructure:  these million little pieces provide a counterbalance to help hold our democratic (capitalist) civilization together.

CONCLUSION

The one sided financial hegemony that elites have created has been helped by cutting funding to IRS and CRA budgets.  This means there is less money to prosecute financial high crimes of the elite. Shared economies–like Airbnb–do not help those persons of race, singles and poor who do not own homes. The present day college financial scandal provides evidence to the elite greed and graft.   The FAA allowing Boeing to “self-inspect” and SNC Lavalin corruption are clear examples of the private sector going amuck in the absence of laws and regulations counterbalance.

One word comes to the mind of this opinion writer-”brainwashing”. The elites have done a very good job of ‘brainwashing’ the political, financial and higher learning powers that be. At the very least it is “gaslighting”.

Counterbalance of MarketWorlders requires major public action for inequality and social justice change.  It is all about balance between MarketWord and government/politic worlds.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

 

WINNERS TAKE ALL-The elite charade of changing the world (Anand Giriharadas) Book

MARKETWORLD DEFINITION

Page 30 MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.  It consists of enlightened business people and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks.  It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action.  MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and a state of mind.

HOW DID WE GET TO WHERE WE ARE

P. 18  …In the years since, though, Georgetown and the US and the world at large have been taken over by an ascendent ideology of how best to change the world.  That ideology is often called neoliberalism, and it is, in the framing of the anthropologist David Harvey, “ a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”  Where the theory goes, “deregulation, privatization,and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” tend to follow, Harvey writes.  “While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and wellbeing.  This principle extends into the realms of welfare, education, health care, and even pensions.” The political philosopher Yascha Mounk captures the cultural consequences of this ideology when he says it has ushered in a new ‘age of responsibility,” in which “responsibility – which once meant the moral duty to help and support others – has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient”.

P. 19 ….Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as political figures rose to power by besmirching the role of government.  Reagan declared that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. Two centuries earlier, the founding fathers had created a constitutional government in order to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Now the instrument had been created, an instrument that helped to make the United States one of the most successful societies in history, was declared the enemy of these things….What their revolution amounted to in practice in America and elsewhere was lower taxes, weakened regulation and vastly reduced public spending on schools, job retraining, parks, and the commons at large.

The political right couldn’t pull off its revolution alone, however.  That is where the need for a loyal opposition comes in. Thus neoliberals cultivated the left half of the political spectrum a tribe they could work with.  This liberal subcaste would retain the left’s traditional goals of bettering the world and attending to underdogs, but it would increasingly pursue these aims in market-friendly ways.  Bill Clinton would become the paterfamilias of this tribe, with his so called Third Way between left and right, and his famous declaration, regarded as historic from the moment it was uttered in 1996, that ‘the era of government is over.”

P. 20 …stirred by a desire to change things, their own ideas and the resources available to them tended to steer them toward the market rather than the government as the place where problems were best solved…that if you really wanted to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism.

P. 26….Sonal Shaw…. established the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation under President Obama.  That office, according to its website, was “based on a simple idea: we cannot drive lasting change by creating top-down programs from Washington.”  It was striking statement from a liberal government – but not an uncommon one in an age dominated by market thinking – and it reflected a theory of progress that the rich and powerful could embrace.

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL (CRITIC) VERSUS THOUGHT LEADER

P.91-92….Two kinds of thinkers, who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach a broad audience.  One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual whom as a wide-ranging ‘critic’ and a foe of power, ….perhaps stays ‘aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and ….proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.”  The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend…to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world”; they are not skeptics but “true believers”; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful…..

Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change.  Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.”

THREE FACTORS THAT EXPLAIN THE DECLINE OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND THE RISE OF THE THOUGHT LEADER

P. 92 Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader.[1] one is political polarization….[2] another factor is a generalized loss of trust in authority…[3] the rising inequality has most altered the sphere of ideas.

….get pulled into MarketWorld’s orbit, how thinkers…are coaxed to abandon their roles as potential critics and instead to become fellow travelers of the winners….. Thinkers are invited to become the elite’s teachers on the circuit of “Big Idea”–TED, South by Southwest, the Aspen Ideas Festival….anything sponsored by The Atlantic.”  These thinkers often find themselves having become thought leaders without realizing it, after “a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to refuse”.

P. 93 It could be…that even as plutocrats were providing these alluring incentives, less corrupting sources of intellectual patronage were dwindling.  On American campuses in recent decades, the fraction of academics on tenure track has collapsed by half. Newsrooms, another source of support for those in the ideas game, have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1990.  The publishing industry has suffered as bookstores vanish and print runs dwindle.

MARKETWORLD IDEOLOGY

P. 27 …[History] Today’s problems were too hard for the government.  They had therefore to be solved through partnerships among rich donors, NGOs, and the public sector.  There was no mention of the fact that this method, by putting the moneyed into a leadership position on public problem-solving, gave them the power to thwart solutions that threatened them.

The solution of public problems through public action – changing the law, going to court, organizing citizens, petitioning the government with grievances went all but unmentioned.

P. 30 These elites [thought leaders] believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

P. 31….So successful is the belief in business as the universal access card for making progress, helping people, and changing the world that even the White House, with its pick of the nation’s talent, under Republicans and Democrats alike, grew dependent on the special talents and consultants and financiers in making decisions about how to run the nation.

P. 32 There was a case to be made that the very people being brought in to advise the government on the public good was implicated in many of the public’s most urgent problems.  Management consultants and financiers were critical protagonists in the story of how a small band of elites, including them, had captured most of the spoils of a generation’s worth of innovation.  The financial sector had extracted more and more value from the American economy, at the expense not only of consumers and workers but also of industry itself. More and more of the nation’s financial resources were swilled around Wall Street without taking the form of new investments by companies or higher wages for workers…..[Businesses had been taught] to optimize everything which made their supply chains leaner and their income statements less volatile.  This optimization, of course, made companies less hospitable to workers, who faced things such as layoffs,offshoring, dynamic scheduling, and automation as the downside of corporate progress.  This was part of why their wages stagnated while companies’ profits and productivity rose.

P. 33…. [This] seemed to contribute to the business world’s growing influence over social change.

P. 34….Many of them are trapped in what they cannot fully see. Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead – or also – be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve.  Many of them quietly wonder whether there is another way, and what their place in it might be.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE FINANCIAL WORLDS OF THE ELITES AND THEIR PHILANTHROPY

P. 26...Wealthy donors [like the Beecks who made their money in mining business in South America]often had a financial interest in the world being changed in ways that left things like taxation, redistribution, labor laws, and mining regulations off the table.

P. 35…A charity called Portfolios with Purpose calls itself  “ a powerful platform combining healthy competition with giving” – a short phrase that manages to hit the notes of techno-utopianism, capitalism, and charity.

P. 36 (It goes without saying, for example, that if hedge funders hadn’t been enormously creative in dodging taxes, the income available to foreign aid would have been greater).

P. 40 The increasingly extractive financial sector is in part responsible.  That sector could be arranged in other ways, including tighter regulations on trading, higher taxes on financiers, stronger labor protections to protect works from layoffs and pension raiding by private equity owners, and incentives favoring job-creating investment over mere speculation.  Such measures should help to solve the underlying problem by preventing the capture of the gains from growing productivity….It would serve to further increase an abundant thing likely to be hoarded by elites (productivity), instead of a scarce thing that millions need more of (wages).

P. 41…”-there’s a lot of things for-profit end endeavors are not suited to do, where you need the nonprofit sector, you need the government sector.  But one of the things the for-profit section is great at is self-sustaining because you don’t have to be constantly fund-raising”.

P. 45 The new win-win-ism is arguably a far more radical theory than the “invisible hand”. That old idea merely implied that capitalists should not be excessively regulated, lest the happy by products of their greed not reach the poor.  The new idea goes further, in suggesting that capitalists are more capable than any government could ever be of solving the underdog’s problems.

P. 46 …They describe “philanthrocapitalists” as “hyper agents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else.

P. 47 ….the founder of the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital firm in New York [writes] – Once seen as sacrificial to growth and returns, pursuing a social mission now plays a role when attracting both customers and employees.” [He] used a Venn diagram to illustrate the investment thesis that his firm has created in view of this trend.  One circle was labeled “Better for me (self interest)”; the other was labeled ”better for the world” (broader interest).  The overlap was labelled “exponential opportunity.” A charitable interpretation of this idea is that the world deserves to benefit from flourishing business.  A more sinister interpretation is that the business deserves to benefit from any attempt to better the condition of the world…..P.53 But in…. Venn diagram, it is worth noting that the lion’s share of each circle remains outside of the overlap of the win-win –what mathematicians call the relative complement.

P. 51 …[leader of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation] he was told to stop using the phrase “social justice”.  [So he started to use the word “fairness”].

P. 52 ….Fairness seemed to be more about how people were treated by abstract systems than about the possibility of the winner’s own complicity.

….What these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in – think charter schools over more equal public schools funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies.  The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them. Win-win.

….leaves many chasing working instead of building livelihoods.

P. 54 …. the effects of a generation’s worth of changes in the lives of working class Americans, rooted in policy choices and shifts in technology and the world situation–including outsourcing, stagnant wages, erratic hours, defanged unions, deindustrialization, ballooning debt, nonexistent sick leave, dismal schools, predatory lending, and dynamic scheduling while doing nothing about these underlying problems.

P. 57 [quote from real life example] “Society tells me that I have to  go to school, get a good job, and then I’ll get a salary, because I am in America….And that’s what I did, and now I’m in debt.  And now I’m suffocating”. [Psychological stress and physical illness].

[Real life] story exposed multiple malfunctions in the machinery of American progress.  It implicated the country’s health care system and the problem of unaffordable drugs, its public transport system, its wage and labor laws; its food system and food deserts, its student debt crisis, its so-called great risk shift, through which corporate America has stabilized its own income statements over a generation of off-loading uncertainty onto workers, and the ways in which shareholders were running companies more and more for themselves, to the detriment of every other stakeholder.

P. 64 …VCs [venture capitalists] and entrepreneurs are considered by many to be thinkers these days, their commercial utterances treated like ideas, and these ideas are often in the future tense: claims about the next world, forged by adding up the theses of their portfolio companies or extrapolating from their own start-up’s mission statement.  That people listened to their ideas gave them a chance to lauder their self-interested hopes into more selfless-sounding predictions about the world. For example, a baron wishing to withhold benefits from workers might reframe that desire as a prediction about a future in which every human being is a solo entrepreneur.  A social media billionaire keen to profit from the higher advertising revenue that video posts draw, compared to text ones, might recast that interest–and his rewriting of the powerful algorithms he owns to get what he wants–as a prediction that “I just think that we are going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.” [Mark Zuckerberg did this].

P. 67 …[Shervin Pishevar, a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley] was not only casting venture capitalists and billionaire company founders as rebels against the establishment, fighting the powers that be on behalf of ordinary people.  He was also maligning the very institutions that are meant to care for ordinary people and promote equality. He referred to unions as ‘cartels’…..

P. 74 ….the Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebooks and Googles of the world are at once radically democratic and dangerously oligarchic….

P. 77 As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out.  Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good. Diverting the public’s attention from an issue like offshore banking worsens the big problems, even as these MarketWorlders shower attention on niche causes.

P. 82 [Silicon Valley]….proposing “a new kind of economy,” as one of its digital pamphlets put it: For all the wonders the Internet brings us, it is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance.  Ordinary users retain little control over their personal data, and the digital workplace is creeping into every corner of workers’ lives. Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while promising to be the great equalizers.  Could the Internet be owned and governed differently?

“PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL” THINKERS

P. 82…..One heard from speakers ways of thinking that were all but barred from MarketWorld:  the idea that there were such things as power and privilege; that some people had them in every era and some people didn’t; that this power and privilege demanded wariness; that progress was not inevitable, and that history was not a line but a wheel; that sometimes astonishing new tools were used in ways that worsened the world; that places of darkness often persisted even under new light; that people had a long habit of exploiting one another, no matter how selfless they and their ideas seem; that the powerful are your equals as citizens, not your representatives.

The attendees didn’t confine their speech to win-wins.  They spoke of exploitation and abuse and solidarity. They spoke of problems.  They were not bound by the genteel MarketWorld consensus.

THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER

P. 87 …[Amy Cuddy, social psychologist at Harvard] …continued to work on….project to study how men’s hegemony, that most global of phenomena, adapts to local conditions so as to enroot itself.

P. 91-92 [Cuddy – with her Wonder Woman pose]…Without necessarily intending to, she was giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it.  She was, to use a metaphor she would later employ, giving people a ladder up across a forbidding wall–without proposing to tear down the wall.

HOW TO MOVE TOWARDS THOUGHT LEADER AND AWAY FROM CRITICAL THINKING

P. 97-100 …The culture was full of instruction….about how to become more hearable as a thinker–how to move toward the thought-leader end of the critic/thought leader continuum….You start to see a few basic dance steps in common–what we call the thought-leader three-step.

“Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator” is first of these steps…..the second step is to personalize the political….This second step was, in a sense, to do the opposite of what a generation of feminists had taught us to do.  That movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political”….”Personal problems are political problems”

…In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way.  They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic–injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives–but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller.  The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress.  The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his vulnerability because at least he is alive.  They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.

The third move is to be constructively actionable.  It is fine and good to write and say critical things without giving solutions–but not if you want to be a thought leader….

P. 103 [paid speeches]…may be right that each speech is its own thing, not enough to corrupt an honest person on its own.  But can a speaking career as a whole never form something like “ties” that have some degree of permanence and a two-way flow of influence and information?

P. 104 The idea that thought leaders are unaffected by their patrons is also contradicted by their very own speakers bureau website, which illustrate how the peddlers of potentially menacing ideas are rendered less scary to gatherings of the rich and powerful.

P. 106 Thought leaders can find themselves becoming like poets speaking a tax collector’s language, saying what they might not say or believe on their own.  And the danger isn’t only in what they say in this new language, but also in the possibility that they might somewhere down the line stop thinking in their native one.

CAN THOUGHT LEADERS TRANSCEND THE PITFALLS OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP?

P. 117 Amy Cuddy wants to believe the thought leader can use the tricks of her trade to transcend the pitfalls of thought leadership.  She wants to believe there is a micro way into the macro….She thinks the secret to cajoling them toward systemic reform may lie in blending two disparate concepts from her field.  One is about how to get people to care about a problem by zooming in on a vivid person.  The other is about how to get them to care by zooming out from person to see a system.

The first of these concepts is known as the “identifiable-victim effect”…..People react differently toward identifiable victims than to statistical victims who have not yet been identified.  Specific victims of misfortune often draw extraordinary attention and resources. But, it is often difficult to draw attention to, or raise money for, interventions that would prevent people from becoming victims in the first place.

P. 118 …Wondered if a thought leader could use feedback like this to her advantage.  If you want to talk about the structural power of sexism, first make people think of their daughters.

P. 119 ….possibilities of the second social psychological concept, the one involving zooming out.  She felt it might break up this limiting symbiosis. The formal term for the concept is the “assimilation effect”, and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context.

P. 120 When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators from a problem, she often gains a access to a bigger platform to influence change-makers–but she also adds to the vast pile of stories promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.

POVERTY VERSUS INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CHARITY

P. 120 What the thought leaders offer Market World’s winners, wittingly or unwittingly, is the semblance of being on the right side of change.  The kinds of change favored by the public in an age of inequality, as reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually unacceptable to elites….

P. 122 [Bruno Giussani, curator of TED organization].For example, ideas framed as being about “poverty” are more acceptable than ideas framed as being about “inequality”. The two ideas are related. But poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, and inequality is something more worrying:  It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with the idea of injustice and wrongdoing; it is rational. “Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity.”  A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequality you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.”  Inequality is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, “you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together.  With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone.”

PROGRESSION OF THOUGHT LEADER THINKING

P. 124 Many thinkers cut these moral corners and contort themselves in these ways because they are so reliant on the assent of MarketWorld for building their careers….”If they want to make potential benefactors happy, they cannot necessarily afford to speak truth to money.”

P. 125 It wasn’t necessarily malice or cynicism that sustained these patterns, but something more banal.  The people who served as tastemakers for the global elite were, like many, in an intellectual bubble…the sole way of thinking?  Everybody thinks the same way. In his world, he [Giussani] said, that meant an unspoken consensus (widespread but not total) on certain ideas:  Progressive views are preferable to conservative ones; globalization, though choppy, is ultimately a win-win-win-win; most long term trends are positive for humanity; making many supposed short-term problems ultimately inconsequential; diversity and cosmopolitanism and the free flow of human beings are always better than the alternatives; markets are the most realistic way to get things done.

What this…did was cause his tribe to “ignore a lot of issues that were relevant to other people and not to  us”, culture in a broad sense that then came back and is haunting us [in the form of] rising populist anger.

P. 139  [Sean Hinton, Economic Advancement Program]…..was learning the protocols to work his way into the arena of business….The protocols had grown out of corporate problem-solving, but increasingly MarketWorlders were employing them to elbow into the solution of social problems traditionally considered in other ways, by more public-spirited actors.  And the more people accepted the idea of the protocols as essential to public problem-solving, the more MarketWorld was elevated over government and civil society as the best engine of change and progress.

P. 140 ….young people…..are persuaded by the surrounding culture that only by learning the protocols can they help millions of people…..the bearers of the protocols elbow their way into the solution of social problems simply by offering their own style of diagnoses.

.It is possible to read into this that people are poor because of the absence of these linkages, not because of caste, race, land, hoarding, wages, labor conditions, and plunder, not because of anything anyone did–or is doing–to anyone else; not because of reversible decisions societies have taken.

[TechnoServe] Its managers come, in the main, from corporations, in areas such as investment banking, management consulting, health care, and fund management.

P. 141….Perhaps the clearest signal of…..faith in the power of the protocols to cure injustice–rather than, say, life experience–is the constitution of its board.  Of 28 board members listed online, 26 are white as of last check.

….If TechnoServe emphasizes the missing linkages between poor people and the right information, a rival firm…argues that too many good solutions are too small–another theory of what keeps people poor that, usefully, does not implicate the rich.

WHAT TO DO  ABOUT THE CRISIS OF INEQUALITY AND THE RISE OF ORGANIZED PHILANTHROPY

P. 154 …Ford Foundation and thus in the social justice business….

[from President of Ford Foundation]….letter….had raised, in sharp and provocative language, the question of what to do about the crisis of inequality.  This in itself was disturbing to many rich people, who preferred to talk about reducing poverty or extending opportunity, not about more thoroughgoing reforms that would perhaps require sacrifice….letter squarely blamed the very elites who give back to philanthropy for ignoring their complicity in causing the problems they later seek to solve.

P. 155….had broken what in his circles were important taboos:  Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.

….He was attempting to revise and update–or perhaps overturn–an old gospel that dates back to an era much like ours, a gospel that had itself transformed earlier American ideas of helping other people.

The late historian Peter Dobkin Hall….an authority on the American giving tradition, traces it back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the colonial trade in commodities magnified differences in wealth and created “an increasingly visible population of poor and dependent people for whom the public was expected to take responsibility.”

P. 156 A marked feature of American giving before the big age of philanthropy was the helping of the many by the many….

As the nineteenth century drew down, major changes in American life helped to develop this early tendencies into what is today called organized philanthropy.

P. 157 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a new industrial capitalism flourished. Incredible fortunes were made in railroad, steel, oil, and other factors of a booming nation’s growth.  Much as is the case today, inequality widened as some seized on the new possibilities and others were displaced.  Anger bubbled, and populist impulses surged. The money that was being made in this earlier gilded age was, in the view of the many, unseemly in its quantities, unjust in its provenance, untenable in the power it conferred over a republic breaking out in new populist sentiments.  It was also fuel for new ideas about giving: “Growth in inequality might be a foe to civic comity, but it is a friend to private philanthropy. [Robert Reich].

The new form of charity birthed by this era was the private foundation, which, Reich argues, was different from the charities of the past, both in its scale and in nature.  It was an entity with broad and general purposes, intended to support other institutions and indeed to create and fund new organizations (e.g., research institutes), seeking to address root causes of social  problems rather than deliver direct services (work “wholesale” rather than “retail”), and designed to be administered by private, self-governing trustees, with paid professional staff, who would act on behalf of a public mission.  One other aspect of these foundations was new: their vast resources enabled them to operate on a scale unlike other, more ordinary endowments.

P. 158 These foundations, were, in other words, allowing a small handful of wealthy people like Carnegie and Rockefeller to commit monumental sums of money to the public good and thus gain a say in the nation’s affairs that rivaled that of many public officials….

Despite the scale of the new generosity, there were criticisms.  One had to do with how the money being given had been made.  The new foundations were troubling, as Reich puts it,”because they represented the wealth, potentially ill-gotten, of Gilded Age robber barons.”No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in inquiring them, said President Theodore Roosevelt.  Memories remained fresh of Rockefeller’s less than benevolent monopoly in oil and less than benevolent allergy to labor unions.

P. 159 Other criticism focused on how the new philanthropy not only laundered cruelly earned money but also converted it into influence over a democratic society. Reich writes that the new foundations “were troubling because they were considered a deeply anti-democratic institution, an entity that could exist in perpetuity and that was accountable except to a hand-picked assemblage of trustees.”

P. 160-162 Andrew Carnegie…helped to found a new vision of philanthropy that not only rebutted the kinds of criticisms that he and others had faced, but effectively delegitimized critics and questioned their right to question….he argued that inequality was the undesirable but inevitable cost of genuine progress.  The “conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized,” he wrote. Inequality is a better thing than it may seem.

P. 161 This is the first step of the Carnegie’s intellectual two-step:  If you want progress, you have to let the rich people make their money however they can, even if it widens inequality.

P. 164 This is the compromise, the truce, distilled:  Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won.  The money will be spent more wisely on you than by you.  You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it.

Here lay the almost constitutional principles that one day would govern MarketWorld giving: the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism; that callousness and injustice in the cutthroat souk are excused by later philanthropy; that giving should not only help the underdogs but also, and more important, serve to keep them out of the top dog’s hair–and above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power.

P. 165 (gala for charity) ….The whole night is divided into two types of performances from the stage.  The young and the helped, mostly black and brown, repeatedly dance for their donors. Then, between performances, older white men are brought up to praise them and to talk about, and be applauded for, their generosity to the program.

Most of the [older white] men work in finance. They include the corporate raiders who, seeking to raise profits by cutting costs, having helped to do away with stable employment. They are the gentrifiers who have pushed real estate prices through the roof and made it harder for families like those of the young dancers to maintain a livelihood in the city.  They are the beneficiaries of tax laws that give carried interest a major break and help to keep the public coffers low and the schools attended by the city’s poor underfunded, thus driving them into the streets and occasionally, when they are lucky, into the charity’s arms.  But these men have been generous, and in exchange for their generosity, these issues will not come up.  No one will say what could be said:  that these precarious lives could be made less precarious if the kind of men who donated to this program made investments differently, operated companies differently, managed wealth differently,  donated to politicians differently, lobbied differently, thought differently about pretending to live in Florida to avoid a minor New York City tax–if, in other words they were willing to let go of anything dear.  It is one night in one city, but it speaks of a broad, unstated immunity deal: Generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these.

WHAT ABOUT CORPORATIONS WHOSE PRACTICES ARE HARMFUL WHILE GIVING HUGE SUMS TO PHILANTHROPY?

P. 176 The Sacklers, Purdue Pharma, developers of OxyContin.

P. 180 Contrary to the picture of helpfulness and cooperation Purdue attempted to paint, Purdue’s employees were actively and secretly trying to prevent West Virginia from imposing any control on the sale of OxyContin.

P.182 ….How did the Sacklers build the 16th largest fortune in the country?…Another answer to that question might be:  by thwarting the guardians of the public good every time they tried to protect citizens….[John Brownlee, U.S. Attorney in Roanoke, Virginia] It was later reported that Brownlee had received an unusual phone call the night before securing Purdue’s guilty plea.  A senior Justice Department official had called Brownlee ..and “urged him to slow down”…Brownlee rebuffed his superior.  “Eight days later,” the Washington Post said, “his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.”….It was part of a larger attempted purge of prosecutors by the administration of George W. Bush.  Brownlee kept his job; Elston (senior Justice Department official) lost his amid the controversy of the lists becoming public. And what had occasioned the phone call? According to Elston, his boss, a deputy attorney general name Paul McNulty, had asked him to place the call to Brownlee after receiving a request for more time from a defense lawyer representing a Purdue executive.

P. 185 Hooters [exploitation of women, but many, like Cole who started in Hooters restaurant would progress to upper management]

P. 187 This rather audacious rationalization mingled with other, more plausible-sounding ones such as that if there were going to be bad industries, good people should run them. “If in a free-market society there will be demand, whether it is for sugary products or alcohol or scantily clad waitresses in a restaurant concept, then it will exist.”

P. 188 Cole’s [Hooters] rationalization were strongly and sincerely held.  [If the President of the Ford Foundation] wanted to change the money-making system itself, to change how business is conducted, he was not only up against powerful corporate interests and their lobbyists.  He was up against the psychologies of thousands of people like Cole, and a way of looking at life that didn’t require cynicism or callousness to commit harm.  It was a way of viewing things that inured the viewer to the larger system around you, that made these systems not your problem.

P. 190-195   Laurie Tisch [heiress to Loews Corporation–Loews also purchased a cigarette company]

P .194 This difficulty in escaping the status quo was especially evident in Tisch when it came to the aspect of her fortune that gave her the greatest guilt: her cigarette money.

BRIDGING MARKETWORLD AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL WORLD

P. 171 At the heart of Carnegie’s message, as Walker [President of Ford Foundation] read it, was the idea of extreme inequality as “an unavoidable condition of the free market system” and of philanthropy as an effective remedy.,,,But then Walker began to go off script.  The giving world, he wrote, needed “to openly acknowledge and confront the tension inherent in a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system.”

P. 173 “….In most areas of life, we have raised market-based, monetized thinking over all other disciplines and conceptions of value.

P.174 …Walker pondered at the pushback he got..–the pleas to “stop ranting at inequality,” to speak of “opportunity” instead.

P. 196 …Walker spoke highly of his own experience in the financial services industry.  It had given him ‘skills’–some of which, presumably, were the protocols he could now tell himself he had redeployed in service of the weak.  It taught him how to multitask, manage a complex portfolio of projects, assimilate data and turn it into insight, have discipline. He wasn’t flattering his audience.  He was reciting the reasons why so many people…, who aspired to help millions of people, went to places like KKR before embarking on their work of changing the world.

P. 197 Eventually, he got to subject at hand.  “We have in America and in the world a level of extreme inequality that–I don’t mean to be hyperbolic–but I think really threatens our democracy.  Because at the core of the American narrative, in our democracy, is a very simple idea of opportunity.”  That’s how he did it: poking them with a thought that might not have been their favorite, and then quickly meeting them where they were, with the language of opportunity, that MarketWorld staple.

…Now, in front of a new generation of the “barbarians at the gate,” he was meeting them where they were.  “The more inequality we get in our system, the less opportunity there is.” he said….

P. 198 [from audience questions] And his subtlety and their imperviousness had conspired to ensure that he was not really heard.

He had been addressing people still in the fearful, climbing season of their lives [young professionals trying to establish themselves].  To get to the “rainmakers’, he said, you had to be in more private settings….

This thought led Walker to the observation that America was becoming privatized now. The American public had their big conversation out there in the messy democracy, and the elite had its own ongoing intramural chat….

P. 199  Walker looked at America today and saw his rich friends building their metaphorical buildings with gates on the outside and discos indoors.  Gated communities. Home theatres. Private schools. Private jets. Privately run public parks. Private world-saving behind the backs of those to be saved.  “Life goes more and more behind the gate,” he said. “More and more of our civic activities and public activities become private activities.”

P. 200 [Walker, President of Ford Foundation joining PepsiCo board] …..The move attracted some criticism, in part because this warrior against inequality would now be earning more than a million dollars a year from the Ford Presidency and this new, very occasional role, and in part because he now bore formal responsibility for what Pepsi did, including the company’s continuing choice to sell its harmful sugary drinks.  The critics could console, or depress, themselves with the thought that he was far from alone: Several of his counterparts at the major foundations served on the boards of firms like Citigroup and Facebook. The fear was that, yet again, MarketWorld would infiltrate and win…But Walker promised and seemed to believe that he would change them, not the other way around.  “I will bring my perspective as the leader of a social justice organization.”

P. 206 ….Walker (said)…. the new UN Week (Clinton Global Initiative) lived at “this intersection of doing well and doing well was doing good.”

P.207 However, Walker said, it was also the case that “philanthropists and commercial enterprises saw in CGI a platform that they could leverage for both doing good and building their brands.”  As a result, self-service flirted dangerously with altruism at CGI, in Walker’s view.

P. 209 ….Eight events had free registration, eight sold paid registration, and forty-eight were invitation-only.  The ratio told a truth about the new MarketWorld UN week: When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business.

FORMER PRESIDENT CLINTON’S PROGRESSION TO LIBERALISM

P. 201 Many of these people had been coming to Bill Clinton’s conference for years. Though they tended to label themselves as givers, philanthropists, social innovators, impact investors, at and the like, recent political upheavals has given their tribe a new name that was sticking.  They were coming to be known, by their friends and enemies alike, as globalists….Around the world, a suspicion seemed to be taking hold that jet-setters solving humanity’s problems in private conclaves was as much a problem as it was a solution.

P. 204  Clinton …(Yale Law School) …had embraced a liberalism that was….a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended towards entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied to see the big picture of their society…but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he started in public office, Clinton believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action. During the White House years, though, and even more decisively afterward, he had been won over by theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets and partnerships among entities private and public, which would find areas of common cause and work together on win-win solutions.

P. 235 ….Clinton’s globalist dream was admirable, but it was also intolerant of other dreams.  It sought to make hard choices seem inevitable and uncomplicated. It sought to blur what happened to be good for the plutocrats in the room with was was good for ordinary people…It was among the things inspiring the revolt by making so many people feel barred from decision-making about the future of their own world.

P. 238 Still, his political opposition as president does not tell the full story of why recent decades have been so gruelling for millions of Americans.  Clinton, like Obama after him, was up against militant conservatives and libertarians, backed by plutocratic donors, who loathed the very idea of public, governmental problem-solving.  To be clear, that is the movement chiefly responsible for market supremacy’s takeover of America and the bleak prospects of millions of Americans. Yet the Republican party represented less than half of the nation, and the Democratic Party had a chance to stand for a robust alternative to market hegemony.  And you could say that it did to an extent–but it often did, under Clinton, and Obama, in a tepid, market-friendly, donor-approved way that conceded so much to government’s haters that the cause lost the fire of purpose.

……Jacob Hacker, Yale political scientist, who was once described as “an intellectual ‘It boy’ in the Democratic Party said, “Many progressives still believe in a role for government that is pretty fundamental, but they have lost faith in the capacity to achieve it, and they’ve in many cases lost the language for talking about it.”  Republicans, he said, are straight forward in their contempt for government. Democrats, especially those of the Clinton school of centrist, triangulating, market-friendly politics, don’t counter the contempt with a vigorous embrace of government…instead speak in a “gauzy” language….Even their proposed policies, though, reflect ambivalence:  health care for all, but not through public provision; help paying for college, but not free college; charter schools, but not equal schools….

P. 239 [Yale political scientist]...this hesitancy and “loss of faith” in government” has “hugely asymmetric effects on the two parties.”  He said, “For Republicans and the right, it is–for the most part, though not always–conducive to their aims, because if the government doesn’t do things, it can often be consistent with what they would like to see happen.  But for the left and the Democrats, it’s a huge loss, because their vision of a good society is one in which a lot of valuable public goods and benefits have their foundations in government action.”

….From an ex-president without legal power but still with the ability to galvanize a movement one could imagine a campaign, modeled on the Progressive Era, to pressure the government to put an end to this abusive profiteering.  Yet his proposed answer was to make it easier for the offending companies to make money selling healthy products.

“If you want to get them to do less harm, it requires innovation, because they will still have to make money, especially for publicly held companies,” Clinton said….The needs of the market came first.  Even a man who had spent his lifetime in politics felt a duty to be solicitous of the business person’s concerns…..

P. 241 Such attempts to work with government, though, were not the same as a conviction in the power of government, the supreme power of government, to better people’s lives….

P. 244 Through it all, Clinton saw truths in the anger bubbling up around him.  He saw how MarketWorld-style change crowded out the habit of democracy. He genuinely worried about young people seeing social problems and, unlike in his activist-prone generation, confining their questioning to what socially minded business they could start up.

CONFLICTS WITHIN MARKETWORLD

P. 210 …the question being asked was: Why do they hate us?  The “they” were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarified fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion–and rejected some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs:  borderless, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship.

…..fellow MarketWorld elites had been drafted into a new class war.  It was no longer rich versus poor but rather people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck  somewhere–echoing his colleague’s notion of somewhere people and everywhere companies…What went wrong was that the Somewheres were simply no longer fooled by the Everywhere’s performance of concern and charity, and the numbers finally caught up with the Everywheres:  “No prizes for guessing which group is more numerous. No matter how many donations the global elite made, philanthropic and political, we could never quite compensate for that disparity.”

P. 212 [suggestion for change] A new approach has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good.  People also want to feel that they are shaping the societies in which they live.

Jonathan Haidt [psychology professor, New York University] offered another theory of what went wrong in an essay…”If you want to understand why nationalism and right-wing populism have grown so strong and so quickly, you must start by looking at the actions of the globalists…In a sense, the globalists ‘started it.’”  They started it…because the “new cosmopolitan elite”…acts and talks in ways that insult, alienate, and energize many of their fellow citizens, particularly those who a psychological predisposition to authoritarianism.”

[This blog author’s words–The very problems the elites have self righteously only partially solved have caused the unrest].

P. 213 In Haidt’s analysis, globalism and anti-globalism are both cogent worldviews with valid concerns and data behind them.  There are advantages to a world of free and rampant human mingling and motion, and there are different advantages to stable, tightly bound communities. But…the globalists had so convinced themselves of the moral superiority of openness, freedom, and One World that they were unable to process the genuine fear these things aroused in millions of people.

P. 215-219 [examples of five political figures (Including Clinton)]  P. 220 It was striking to have five political figures share a stage and have not one moment of real argument.  They all seemed to suppose that the good society of entrepreneurs, whose success was tantamount to that of the society itself…

THE ARGUMENT FOR POLITICS

P. 220 One could forget, watching such a civilized group, that traditional politics is argumentative for a reason.  It isn’t that politicians don’t know how to be nice, but rather that politics is rooted in the idea of a big, motley people taking their fate into their own hands.  Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incompatible interests and coming up with a decent plan, designed to be liked but difficult to love.  It solves problems in a context in which everyone is invited to the table and everyone is equal and everyone has the right to complain about being underserved and unseen. Politics, in bringing together people of divergent interests, necessarily puts sacrifice on the table.  It is easier to conjure win-wins in forums like this one, where everyone is a winner. The consensus was a reminder of all the kinds of people and perspectives that had not been invited in.

P. 222 Had the organizators of CGI truly been interested in why people resented the globalists, they could have invited…Dani Rodrik…an economist at Harvard….he had become one of the more incisive critics of how the globalists’ noble intentions undermine democracy.

”Today,” she [Theresa May, British Prime Minister] said, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street.  But if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.  You don’t understand what citizenship means.

P. 223 …In other words, politics is about actual places, with actual shared histories. Globalism, chasing a dream of everyone, risks belonging to no one.

For Rodrik, it isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens of their own national setting.” It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges–as opposed to  universal challenges ‘like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations.  In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.

P. 225 …”In an ideal democratic world, where citizenship is fully exercised and participatory, it’s a process of domestic deliberation where you’re testing your idea against other domestic citizens…”

P. 226 …”The locus of politics, I think, is the key issue here,” he said.  “What is the right locus of politics, and who are the decision-making authorities?  Is it these networks and these global get-togethers? Or is it at the national level?”  Who should make change, and where should they make it?

P. 227 …..’Probably people who get together in these congregations [CGI] don’t think of what they are doing as politics,” Rodrik said.  “But of course it’s politics. It’s just politics of a different focus and has a different view of who matters and how you can change things, and has different theory of change and who the agents of change are.”…The problem with the globalists’ vision of world citizens changing the world through partnerships, Rodrik said, is that “you’re not accountable to anyone, because it is just a bunch of other global citizens like you as their audience.”  He added, “The whole idea about having a polity, having a demos, is that there’s accountability within that demos.  That’s what a political system ensures and these mechanisms don’t.”

The political system that Rodrik speaks of is not just Congress or the Supreme court or governorships.  It is all of these things and other things. It is civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society.  It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working.  It is not reimagining the world at conferences.

P. 228 It isn’t necessarily that simple.  A pair of Stanford sociologists...investigated the question and came up with a surprising answer.  When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that disrupt it.  The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.”  But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.”  These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and the markets.”

WOMEN’S EQUALITY

P. 232 Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity.  This had become a near-constant refrain in the MarketWorld–some permutation of the words “women”, “equality”, and “trillion”.  If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit.  “Of course, you should do it because it was the right thing to do, but there’s a strong business case.”…..In other words, of course you should do it because morality is enough, but since we all know morality isn’t actually enough, you should know that the business case is fantastic.

HOW THE PRIVATE SECTION CHANGED THE PUBLIC SPHERE

P. 234 ….The private sector didn’t merely add to the public sphere activities.  It got to change the language in which the public sphere thought and acted.

P. 247 [Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute] …The fellowship is a prestigious finishing school to assist the transition from making it in business to making the world a better place.  Its mission is to mobilize a “new breed of leaders” to “tackle the world’s most intractable problems.” But it defines leader in a particular way:  “All are proven entrepreneurs, mostly from the world of business, who have reached a point in their lives where having achieve success, they are ready to apply their creative talents to building a better society.”

P. 248 [Founder of Freelancers Union]…She originally wanted to serve as a broker to help these workers [Uber drivers and magazine writers] buy health insurance as a group.  Then she realized it would be easier and more effective if she simply created the health insurance company herself.  But the economy wasn’t set up for people like (her). A company not run purely in shareholders’ interests risked lawsuits from its investors.  The dominant interpretations of corporate law,….has since the 1970s came to regard companies’ first duty as being to earn a profit from shareholders.

THE RISE OF B CORPORATIONS (BENEFIT)

P. 249 (B corporations) ….do business in a different way….Andrew Kassoy…batted around ideas for addressing this problem, and at last alighted on the vision of creating a parallel capitalist infrastructure, next to the traditional one, in which companies could be more responsible and conscious, and nonetheless raise money from capital markets and comply with the law.  Thus was born the B Corporation, or benefit corporation, as it is also known….

P. 250 …started a nonprofit called B Lab, which gives better-behaved businesses a certification based on a rigorous analysis of their social and environmental practices …Ben and Jerry’s….

…hoped that by certifying conscious companies, they could change the larger system of business….but in the MarketWorld way, they didn’t take on the system directly.  They simply sought to cultivate examples of a different way….

….But now,….B Lab was in the midst of a rethinking process, which was guided by his conviction that “what got us here is not going to get us where we’re going.”

P. 251 The thorniest questions…involved whether to stick to the MarketWorld mantra of “make good easier,” or whether instead to seek to make those who commit harm to pay a higher price–which meant changing the system of business for everyone, fighting in the arena of politics and law rather than the market, and elevating the stopping of bad business over the encouragement of good business….

For example, one of B Lab’s great victories had been the creation of a parallel corporate law, first enacted in Maryland and then adopted in other states, that allowed companies to embed a social mission into their work without fear of legal trouble such as shareholder complaints…Was it more important to make it easier for Etsy to do good, or rather to make it harder for ExxonMobil to do harm?  Was it possible to do both?

Kassoy felt drawn toward the systems work, even though he had devoted the last decade to the other approach.  “I’m not be sure everybody would say this, but I believe there’s a huge role for government regulation of business.  We’re not going to change everybody. We’re not changing human greed. Businesses act badly.”  There were, in particular, “extractive industries where just the existence of the industry” means harm and social costs being dumped on humanity.  “We’re not getting rid of all of those things”…

The United States had millions of corporations and, after a decade of B Lab’s evangelizing, just hundreds of B Corps.  Kasoy, saw now, more clearly than he did at the company’s founding, that solving problems like inequality, greed, and pollution would require more than making good easier.

P. 253 …B Corps were championed all over MarketWorld….the founders were regularly praised by recognized “thought leaders”.

CONFLICT BETWEEN POLITICAL LIBERALS AND MARKET SOLUTIONS

P. 252 He [Andrew Kassoy] was not the only MarketWorlder coming around to the thought that their ways of operating might be inadequate to the actual work of changing the world, or even just one’s own country.  These MarketWorlders, though, often lacked an understanding of how actual change did work, or they felt, sometimes dubiously, that pursuing the other kind of change called upon skills they lacked.  If government was the place you went to change systems, what could they as individuals do? They could petition the government.  They could join movements fighting to change law and policy.  But,…many in MarketWorld were daunted by this approach. He had the feeling that many in MarketWorld do that in their grounding in the norms of business made them ill-equipped for the realm of politics, where win-lose was normal and where fights often had to be picked instead of mutually agreeable deals being struck….It was peculiar, this idea of activism as manipulation; it sounded more like an excuse for not working on systems than a reason.

…..I don’t think that what we’re doing can change capitalism by itself.  But I do believe that what this does is creates a model.” On other days, Kassoy wasn’t so sure about this logic.  He kept coming backing to regulation. “I’m a big-government kind of a person,” he said.  “I believe there’s a very strong role for the state. And I don’t know how to make that happen.”

P. 253 Kassoy’s ambivalence is what Jacob Hacker, the Yale political scientist, seems to have in mind when he speaks of political liberals who are philosophically committed to government, to the public solution of public problems, but who have absorbed, like secondhand smoke, the right’s contempt for public action.  While people on the right believe actively in the superiority of market solutions, liberals like Kassoy do so passively–passively in that they do not reject a public solution in theory, but pursue a private one in practice….And so no one’s really told us government is a good thing for a very long time.” Saying this seemed to make Kassoy reflect on whether he had unwittingly become the last link in this change of liberals consolidating the war on government by proffering private solutions to public problems.

P. 255-256 failure of big banks

CRITIQUE OF MARKETWORLD

P. 256  Chiara Cordelli, an Italian political philosopher at the University of Chicago….sought to unravel some of MarketWorld’s self-justifications.

Take, for instance, the view that MarketWorld has a duty, and right, to address public problems–and indeed, to take a lead in developing private solutions to them.  This…was like putting the accused in change of the court system. The questions that elites refuse to ask, she said, is: Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place?  You should ask yourself: Have your actions contributed at all to that?….And, if yes, the fact that now you are helping some people, however, effectively, doesn’t seem to be enough to compensate.”

P. 257 Cordelli was speaking of both the active committers of harm and the passive permitters of it.  The committers are what she calls “the easy cases.”…”If you have campaigned against inheritance tax, if you have directly tried to avoid paying taxes, if you supported and directly, voluntarily benefitted from a system where there were low labor regulations and increased precarity,” then, she argues, “you have directly contributed to a structure that foreseeably and avoidably harmed people.”  That is “direct complicity.”

As for the people who don’t help run Goldman Sachs or Purdue Pharma, who live decent lives and attempt to make the world slightly better through the market, Cordelli called them the harder cases….She saw in each of these types of efforts not a single moral act but two.  Alongside the act of helping was a parallel act of acceptance.

P. 258-260…. Economic reasoning dominates our age, and we may be tempted to focus on the first half of each of the above sentences–a marginal contribution you can see and touch–and to ignore the second half, involving a vaguer thing called complicity….

P. 261 As harsh as her criticisms might sound to  them, Cordelli is giving…. others in MarketWorld a way out.  She is confessing, on their behalf, what some of them privately fear to be true: that they are debtors who need society’s mercy and not saviors who need its followership.  She is offering what MarketWorlders so adore: a solution. The solution is to return, against their instincts and even perhaps against their interests, to politics as the place we go to shape the world.

P. 262-263 ….Businesspersons calling themselves “leaders” and naming themselves solvers of the most intractable social problems represent a worrisome way of erasing their role in causing them.  Seen through Cordelli’s lens, it is indeed strange that the people with the most to lose from social reform are so often placed on the board of it. And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also, for Cordelli, marred by its own “narcissism.”…..

When society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transactions, but also subjects of it–citizens with agency. When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient.

When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen.  It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen.  “You are an individual”, she said. “You cannot speak in their name.  I can maybe speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children.”

“This is what it means to be free and equal and independent individuals and, for better or for worse, share common institutions,” she said.  Our political institutions–our laws, our constitutions, our regulations, our taxes, our shared infrastructure:  the million little pieces that uphold our civilization and that we own together–only these, Cordelli said, “can act and speak on behalf of everyone.”  She admitted, “They often don’t do that.” But that isn’t the way out that MarketWorld so often makes it out to be.  “It’s our job,” Cordelli said, “to make them do that, rather than working to weaken and destroy those institutions by thinking that we can effectuate change by ourselves.  Let’s start working to create the conditions to make those institutions better.”

P. 266 …Goldman Sachs- sponsored lunch…in which the company’s do-gooding was trumpeted and its role in causing the financial crisis went unexamined.

AUTHOR ANAND GIRIDHARADAS’ REMARKS

P. 267 This book is the work of a critic, but it is also the work of an insider-outsider to that which it takes on….

P. 268 (His Professor at Harvard)….was the first to plant in me the the thought that money had transcended being currency to become our very culture, conquering our imaginations and infiltrating domains that had nothing to do with it. (END OF POST)

WHY CONSERVATIVES AND PROGRESSIVES THINK THE WAY THEY THINK

WHY CONSERVATIVES AND PROGRESSIVES THINK THE WAY THEY THINK

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

The following blog post is based on George Lakoff’s research on moral politics.  It is impossible to outline all of his findings here, so it is worthwhile to read more of his research for a fuller picture of his findings.  The words in this blog post are primarily taken from the two source materials.  Words in italics are those of the blog author.   (This blog post was published in a local  newspaper in 600 word abbreviated format as submissions to newspaper are restricted to a certain number of words).  Updated August 9, 2017.

Why conservatives and progressives think the way they think

Thank goodness for local newspaper opinion letters of past few weeks highlighting why Conservatives message and Unite the Right in Alberta are failures for social democracy!

To understand conservatives and progressives George Lakoff, retired Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, in ‘Understanding Trump’ (understanding-trump) and ‘Your brain on Trump’ by Jennie Josephson (transcript-george-lakoff) states “politics needs to be understood metaphorically in family terms since we are all first governed by our families and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of family governance.   Family defines the self-definitions of people and people don’t vote against their self-definition.   Based on life and family circumstances neural circuitry in the brain follows two common forms of family life.  One is ‘strict father family’ (conservative) and the other ‘nurturant parent family’ (progressive).  All politics is moral.  Voters vote their moral values.  To vote against their moral values means rejection of self.

‘Strict father’ brain circuitry believes authority is justified by morality hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate, for example, rich above poor (increasing corporate/family wealth with no increase in minimum wage), Western Culture above other cultures, men above women, white above non whites, Christians above non Christians, straights above gays, corporate outsourcing or privatization for the sake of profit above unions, etc.  In conservative politics poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, while rich deserve their wealth (as evidenced by almost zero affordable housing during forty year Alberta Conservative oil boom reign sung to the tune of it is what the market can bear mentality). Responsibility is taken to be personal responsibility, not social responsibility.

Poor conservatives vote against their material interests, because they’re voting for their worldview. And the reason for it is that their moral worldview defines who they are. They are not going to vote against their own definition of who they are.”

Another type of dominance to add to the list is married above singles.  Singles are often invisible in the family definition and excluded in financial formulas (what-is-the-point)

“Conservatives see taxation, not as investment in publicly provided resources for all citizens but, as government taking their earnings (their private property) and giving it through government programs to those who don’t  deserve it.  They always want to cut taxes and cut public resources.  They fail to recognize that many public resources begin with business and that they themselves benefit from tax dollars used for public good in public roads, schools, hospitals, police, courts for business cases, the criminal justice system, sewers, water, electricity, Wall Street which is utilized most by the wealthy, etc.

They want to go back to ‘old time’ values as in “the Alberta I grew up in” and “Make America great again”.  They fail to realize it is impossible to go back, for example, to oil boom days when Britain and France and auto manufacturers are moving towards electric only cars.

Re conservative and progressive brain circuitry, Lakoff states “there is no middle in politics, but most people are not just all one or the other.  They are what he calls bi-conceptual or moderates.  Most conservatives have some progressive views and, likewise, most progressives have some conservative views.  And there are people who are both conservative and progressive, but one view is usually stronger than the other. How can they both reside in the same brain at the same time?  Both are characterized in the brain by neural circuitry.  They are linked by a commonplace circuit:  mutual inhibition.  When one is turned on the other is turned off; when one is strengthened, the other is weakened.  The more conservative views (Trump) are discussed in the media, the more they are activated and the stronger they get; both in the minds of hardcore conservatives and in the minds of progressive conservatives.”  (The three political parties in Canada – progressive conservative, liberal and new democrat also changes the political picture.)

“Far right conservative politicians may want to turn on the minor view in the other person and USA conservatives have figured out how to do this.  In fact, they set up leadership sessions to train leaders who want to be conservative to think and talk conservative.” What is really scary is that Lakoff says a fact that is set in the neural circuitry of the brain can be changed in less than a tenth of second.  Trump as a perfect salesman has learned how he can take the mind off of important facts.

Lakoff states that “conservative and progressive views often determine which college they are likely to attend.  Conservatives are likely to take business courses which means they will take marketing courses which teach them how to maximize marketing.  There’s a good chance they will study cognitive science, that is, how people really think and how to market things by advertising. So they know people think using frames and metaphors and narratives and images and emotions and so on. Progressives interested in politics are more likely to take political science, law, public policy, economic theory, not business, and therefore, they learn a different way of thinking.  They likely are not going to study either cognitive science or neuroscience.  Once a worldview is established and become fixed in a  lot of very complex circuits in the brain, the worldview becomes natural and automatic.”  (One professor after reading Lakoff’s research has added a cognitive science course to the curriculum).

According to Lakoff, “research has shown conservatives tend to reason with direct causation while progressives have easier time reasoning with systemic causation.  Examples of direct causation are Trump’s ‘immigrants are flooding in from Mexico so build a wall’ or cure for gun violence is to have a gun ready to directly shoot the shooter.  Those who think climate change is a hoax likely base this on direct causation.  Systemic causation in global warming explains why global warming over the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms in Washington DC:  masses of highly energized water molecules evaporate over the Pacific, blow to the Northeast and over the North Pole and come down in winter over the East coast and parts of the Midwest as masses of snow.  Systemic causation has chains of direct causes, interacting causes, feedback loops, and probabilistic causes, often combined.   Direct causation is easy to understand, and appears to represented in the grammars of all languages around the world.  Systemic causation is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language.  It just has to be learned”.

How do conservatives get their message across?

How do far right Conservatives get their message across?  Lakoff gives ten examples of unconscious brain mechanisms (98 per cent of thought is unconscious).  Some examples are repetition (we are going to win, win, win so much).  Then there is framing like ‘Crooked Hillary’, and repeating well-known examples over and over again like shootings by Muslims, Africans-Americans and Latinos.  In his tweets, salesman Trump uses preemptive framing, diversion or deflection, attack the messenger and trial balloons (test public reaction to nuclear arms escalation).

Lakoff states that even if Trump had lost the election, he will have changed the brains of millions of Americans, with future consequences.  This is why it is important that people know the mechanisms used to transmit Big Lies and to stick them into people’s brains without their awareness.  It is a form of mind control.

How to fight far right conservative ideology

So, how can we fight far right conservative ideology?  As stated by Lakoff responsibility rests with ordinary citizens recognizing unconscious brain mechanisms used to spread their message.  Then, recognize that it does not help to repeat false conservative claims and rebut them with facts.  Instead, go positive.  Use positive truthful framing in terms of public good to undermine claims to the contrary.  Use facts to support positively-framed truth with repetition.  Say it over and over again.   The best resistance is positive persistence.  Talk about the public, the people, public servants and good government.  And take back freedom.  Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and in private life.

Don’t go negative.  Keep out of nasty exchanges and attacks.  One can speak powerfully without shouting.

Rebuttal needs to start with values, not policies and facts and numbers. PROGRESSIVES ARE THE MAJORITY (in USA) so let’s make our values clear. Progressive thought is built on empathy, on citizens caring about other citizens and working through government to provide public resources for all, both businesses and individuals.  Values come first, facts and policies follow in the service of values.  Facts and policies matter, but they always support values”.  (The Democrats lost the election to Trump because their message was wrong).

From George Lakoff’s ‘Ten Points for Democracy Activists’ (condensed) (ten)

  • Understand the basic issues (see online: ‘a minority president why the polls failed and what the majority can do’)
  • Know the difference between framing and propaganda:  frames are mental structures in thought; every thought uses frames.  Frames, in themselves, are unavoidable and neutral.  Honest framing is the use of frames you believe in and are truthful.
  • Hold conservatives accountable (focus on Republican actions-minimize publicizing Trump – his image, his name, his tweets)
  • Focus attention on substance, not sideshows:  positively and strongly reframe Trump’s preemptive framing 
  • Focus on democracy and freedom (in government by, for and of the people, there is, or should be, no distinction between the public and government.  Government’s focus should be on empathy, transparency and freedom and opportunity)
  • Be careful not to spread fake news
  • Understand the brain’s politics:  All ideas are physical, embodied in neural circuitry.  The more the circuitry is activated, the stronger the circuitry gets and the more deeply the ideas are held. (Use real facts to filter out alternative facts).
  • Remember progressives are a powerful majority
  • Be positive:  frame all issues from a progressive moral viewpoint.  Take the viewpoint of the public good, of the impoverished and the weak, and of preservation
  • Join the Citizens’ Communication Network

Conclusion

Whether or not readers agree with Lakoff’s reasoning for conservative versus progressive differences is in the eye of the beholder.  However, it behooves all of us to fight dangerous Big Lies leading to authoritarian conservative governance.

This is only a small insight into what George Lakoff has to say about moral politics.  It also should be said that extremes on either side whether conservative or progressive can have dire consequences.  Far right conservatism can lead to authoritarian governance and far left progressiveness can lead to communism type governance where freedoms are taken away under guise of all persons are equal.  It also is wrong for governments to hand out numerous tax credits without looking at assets and wealth so that wealthy get tax credits and financial loopholes they don’t need.  It is all about balance!

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

CAPITALISM (PLUTOCRATIC) FINANCIALLY NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMUNISM, DICTATORSHIP, ETC. AS THEY ROB FROM THE POOR TO PAY THE RICH

CAPITALISM (PLUTOCRATIC) FINANCIALLY NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMUNISM, DICTATORSHIP, ETC. AS THEY ROB FROM THE POOR TO PAY THE RICH

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

This blog has given many examples of how singles and the poor are consistently being financially compromised by their governments who are supposed to be democratic in their financial decisions, (democracy – a form of government in which the power is controlled by the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free election system).  Instead, selective social democracy by Liberals and Conservatives and far right Conservative ideals that benefit the upper middle class and the wealthy over the poor are replacing social democracy.

Some examples of selective social democracy as outlined in this blog are 1)  Canada Pension Plan (CPP) enhancements that will benefit the wealthy more because the minimum wage on which CPP contributions are dependent is not being raised at equivalent levels to the enhancements, 2)  Old Age Security (OAS) clawbacks that don’t work so that almost all Canadian seniors receive OAS including the wealthy (oas), 3) upside down housing and food purchasing schemes that benefit the wealthy more than singles and the poor (affordable) (maslows-hierarchy-of-need), and 4) boutique tax credits which create a financial dependence on the nanny state (government) with resultant lower CPP pensions since CPP contributions are not collected on boutique tax credits (political-statements) (government).

This selective social democracy disparity has to be placed squarely at the feet of the Liberals and Conservatives as they are primarily the only parties that have been in power in this country.  Big business, Wall Street, outrageous salaries as in media and sports and big business, and gentrification can also be included here.

In the USA, far right Conservative policies like Donald Trump’s new tax plan give the top 1 percent more of a tax break than the middle class is yet another example.

Plutocratic capitalism and selective social democracy purposely rob from the poor to pay the wealthy.  They eliminate the middle class so that only the poor, the upper middle class and the wealthy are the prevailing classes and, therefore, are no different than governmental philosophies like communism and dictatorships which give financial wealth to one person or to the top very few.

Failure to recognize selective social democracy and to replace it with financial fairness for all citizens will only increase the financial disparity that the poor are facing in this country.  Children are being taught to be philanthropic with their lemonade stands and food drives to help the poor and underprivileged.  However, many parents fail to teach them how to handle finances or to think critically about how politicians like the Liberals and Conservatives are promoting selective social  democracy.  Continued programs like food drives and social community programs without providing an indexed living wage do nothing to eliminate the financial plight of the poor and disabled.

CONCLUSION

Financial intelligence and critical thinking of basic math, budgeting and common sense financial principles resulting in financially fair social democracy by governments and businesses for all citizens is required, not just for the upper middle class and wealthy.

DEFINITIONS

Online searching of definitions of communism, dictatorships, and plutocracy and many other -isms show that control is maintained by one person alone or by a very few wealthy persons.

Communism – a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.  In the case of Russia, the country is controlled by Putin who, as he sees fit, will distribute the country’s wealth to himself and only a few other persons.

Dictatorship – a country, government, or the form of government in which absolute power is exercised by a dictator.  The country’s wealth is controlled by the dictator.

Plutocracy is a form of oligarchy and defines a society ruled or controlled by the small minority of the wealthiest citizens.  In the cases of Canada and the United States and other democratic countries the wealth is increasingly being controlled by the top wealthy corporations and individuals of the country.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

BOUTIQUE TAX CREDIT INCONSISTENT AND FINANCIALLY DISCRIMINATING (Part 1 of 2)

BOUTIQUE TAX CREDIT INCONSISTENT AND FINANCIALLY DISCRIMINATING (Part 1 of 2)

These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.

Revisions were applied to this post on June 19, 2016.

(Preface:  Every political party has introduced tax credits to give financial benefits to certain members of the population more than others.  However, during the reign of the Conservative party under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a plethora of tax credits were introduced.  This led to coining of the phrase ‘boutique tax credits’.  Much of the following information has been taken from the ‘Policy Forum: The Case Against Boutique Tax Credits and Similar Tax Expenditures by Neil Brooks’ (brooks).  The Neil Brooks discussion provides an excellent overview of why boutique tax credits are so wrong and discriminatory.  While many families, especially poor families do not benefit from boutique tax credits, ever singles also do not benefit from most of the tax credits.  If there are any negatives to the study it is that financial discriminatory impact of tax credits and expenditures for ever singles and to some extent single parent with children family units is not fully recognized).

The author of this blog has long thought that boutique tax credits are financially discriminatory to singles.  However, we cannot even begin to articulate what Neil Brooks has so eloquently stated in his article.  The entire article is worth a read including the footnotes which provide excellent information on many commentaries and studies of this topic.  For this post, we attempted to condense the PDF from 68 pages to 8 pages, for example, by eliminating the many footnotes – see condensed version at the end of this post.  Blog author’s comments have been highlighted in blue).

This has been a very difficult post to write in terms of length as there is so many excellent points that have been made by Neil Brooks in his study, so be forewarned that the condensed version of the Brook;s article is eight pages long).

PROBLEMS WITH BOUTIQUE TAX CREDITS (AS IDENTIFIED BY BLOG AUTHOR)

SUMMARY OF TAX PROBLEMS:

Problem 1 – Conservative boutique tax credits purposely target traditional family values (single income families). Boutique Tax Credits initiated by the Progressive Conservative Party under Stephen Harper purposely target traditional family values. The party never gives a definition of traditional family values or who is included in the traditional family.  They talk about the family unit as ‘essential to the well-being  of individuals and society’.  A reflection of their belief in the importance of the role of the traditional family in society, another objective was to privilege single-earner families through the tax system (page 76).   (Blog author’s comments:  Ever singles are generally not included in these boutique tax credits).

Problem 2 -tax expenditures introduced by the Conservatives of Boutique Tax Credits were targeted at relatively narrowly defined groups of potential Conservative voters (page 67).  Finance Minister’s budget moved to put the finishing touches on building a new Conservative coalition through a series of tax cuts, rebates and other subsidies aimed at select segments of the voting population  (page 73).   By enacting these tax expenditures, as opposed to across-the-board tax cuts, the Conservatives were able, at a much lower cost, to favour middle-class families with children, middle-income and well-to-do seniors, and other much more narrowly targeted groups ( page 77).   (This is what this blog author calls ‘selective’ democratic socialism).

Problem 3 – Tax Credits and Expenditures ignore traditional tax criteria that apply to technical tax provisions, namely, equity, neutrality, and simplicity (page 69).

Problem 4 Conservatives were “pleasing their electoral base with . . . dollars in pockets for boutique programs rewarding wealth and socially conservative values  (page 69).  An example is pension splitting where wealthy married/coupled persons benefit the most, poor and married or coupled persons with equal incomes benefited to a lesser extent.(Blog author’s comment:  Ever singles and divorced/separated persons are not able to use this tax credit).

Problem 5Tax Expenditures Can Serve as a Bribe to Potential Voters (page 77)    By enacting these tax expenditures, as opposed to across-the-board tax cuts, the Conservatives were able, at a much lower cost, to favour middle-class families with children, middle-income and well-to-do seniors, and other much more narrowly targeted groups.

In 2011, the average taxpayer with an income between $100,000 and $150,000 paid $3,633 less in taxes.  The average taxpayer with a very modest income of between $20,000 and $25,000 saw only $475 back in the same period.  These numbers are before the impact of the new Family Tax Cut and the doubling of the Child Fitness Tax Credit – both of which are likely to accelerate the same trend.  (/canada2020).   (Blog author’s comment:  Poor families and ever singles including seniors are least likely to benefit (senior-singles-pay-more).

Problem 6 –  It is very difficult to get rid of tax expenditures or tax credits once they are  implemented.  Political parties are reluctant to eliminate them even if they are discriminatory for fear of losing votes.  Also, tax expenditures are extremely hard to repeal, even the truly awful ones, since eliminating a tax expenditure will be framed as a tax increase (page 78).   (Blog author’s comments:  Will it ever be possible to eliminate the pension splitting from which wealthy families benefit the most?  And, who is paying for this?)    Neil Brooks calls pension splitting an “outrageous pension income splitting scheme that should be repealed and the revenue used to enrich, or reduce the clawback, of the old age security pensions” (page 122).   Reducing clawback will not solve problem of inequality if clawback is not increased for singles and reduced for married or coupled persons through income-testing.

Problem 7 Tax expenditures that are relief measures transfer income from one group of individuals to another.  (Blog author’s comment:  Instead of these relief measures targeting lower income individuals and families, many have benefited wealthy families the most.  Ever singles benefit the least).

Problem 8Psychological impact of tax credits or expenditures (The Public Appears to Favour Policies Framed as Tax Breaks-page 83).  people’s psychological biases predispose them to favour tax expenditures, certainly over direct spending programs……label—tax relief versus direct outlay—matters.”  These studies are also consistent with other survey results in which respondents admit to have benefited from tax expenditures and yet deny ever having used a government social program.(Blog Author’s comments:  The reverse effects of Tax Credits and Expenditures are often not discussed, that is, the anger and financial despair that some citizens feel towards those that are receiving more of the benefits without, for example, application of income-testing  principles).

Problem 9 – Tax Expenditures Reduce the Political Pressure for Public Programs (page 84)  One of the Conservatives’ major political goals has been to resist the public provision of social programs. Hence, another explanation for the popularity of tax expenditures under the Conservatives is that they were a step forward in implementing a broader political project, a private-sector welfare state.Tax credits for private caregiving work reduce the political pressure for publicly provided long-term care facilities.. …. Supplementing the wages of low-income workers with a tax credit reduces the pressure to offer public service jobs to the unemployed…..The tax subsidization of tuition fees, textbooks, and interest on student loans reduces the political pressure for more direct government support for universities.

Problem 10 – Tax Expenditures Make the Tax System Less Transparent (page 94) and Tax Expenditures Divert the Resources of the CRA and Create Administrative Problems That Damage Its Reputation (page 94)

    • Complexity and number of tax credits make them very difficult to interpret and lawyers and accountants become intimately involved in their implementation.  As a result attention is directed towards interpretation of these credits instead of tracking abuse of the tax system.
    • Many are badly designed (page 96)
    • Tax Expenditures Often Do Not Serve Important Objectives of Government Policy (page 97)
    • Tax Expenditures Often Do Not Achieve Their Objectives Equitably (page 104)
    • upside-down effect of tax deductions
    • all tax credits should be refundable.

(Blog author’s comment:  Past posts have talked about upside-down financial effects (housing),  and tax credits should be refundable and income-tested.  To have someone else confirm these facts is reassuring.  It would be nice if political parties and governments also realized these facts.)

Problem 11 Education – Conservatives completely exempted certain scholarships and fellowships from tax in their first budget in 2006.  The exclusion of a $10,000 scholarship for a low-income student who has no other income provides that student with no implicit subsidy. However, the same exclusion will provide an implicit subsidy of $2,200 to a higher-income student in the 22 percent tax bracket. If the point of the exclusion was to benefit needy students, this upside-down effect is perverse (page 104)

Problem 12 – Low income individuals and families benefit the least.   A credit that can be offset against a taxpayer’s tax liability is of no value to a low-income person who has no tax liability because his or her income is less than the amount of the basic personal tax credit, for example. Hence, all tax credits should be refundable (page 106)…..In terms of delivering subsidies equitably through the tax system, if the primary purpose of a tax credit is to incentivize or assist low- or middle-income individuals, entitlement to the credit should be income-tested so that it vanishes when a taxpayer’s income reaches a certain amount (page 108).  Income-testing so that it vanishes when income reaches a certain amount should vanish quicker for for married or coupled persons than singles as it costs more for singles to live than married/coupled persons as a family unit.

Neil Brooks has also stated that analysis of  financial formulas such as distributional tables should show beneficiaries by income class, gender, household type, age cohort, and geographical region.  This is based on known facts that females and disadvantaged persons based on race likely benefit least from tax credits (page 111). (Blog author’s comments:  Analysis of household types is important as ever singles and early divorced singles are likely to benefit the least from all tax credits).

Problem 13 – The proliferation of tax expenditures, such as the boutique tax credits, gives rise to significant rent-seeking social costs. (page 114) and encourages relevant interest groups to lobby for analogous tax expenditures. (page 114).  (Blog author’s comments:  Powerful lobby groups such as families and seniors often lead to tax credits and expenditures targeting these groups.   Ever singles do not have this kind of financial and lobbying power.  As a result they are likely to receive less of these benefits).

Problem 14 – Boutique tax credits are useless when they target everyone in a group, for example, seniors.  Giving age credit to all seniors benefits wealthiest seniors more as poor seniors do not have enough income to apply tax credits (page 122).

Problem 15 – This problem as been added by the blog author, that is there is a compounding effect to tax credits when they are applied one on  top of another for specific groups.  An example is when child tax credits are given to married or coupled family unit, who then are also able to use pension splitting credits as seniors.  As a result, married or coupled persons with children are able to gain more wealth than ever singles who are not able to use any of these credits.

Problem 16 –  This problem has been added by the blog author,  that is the so called ‘merry go round credits and expenditures which disappear and reappear.  Some citizens can never  get on the merry go round because their place in line keep getting pushed back or they are kicked out of the line or they excluded from the lines.  For example, there are some parents who have never benefited from any the child tax credits because they had no children during implementation of some tax credits only to have these tax credits abolished when they do have children.

CONCLUSION

(Blog author’s comments: it would seem that a solution to the elimination of Tax Credits and Expenditures with fairness, equality, neutrality and simplicity for all, perhaps, should be to provide three government funded basic rights: healthcare, college/university education, and universal day care).

THECASEAGAINSTTAXCREDITSANDOTHEREXPENDITURESCONDENSED

This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.

‘SELECTIVE’ DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM FINANCIALLY DISCRIMINATORY FOR SINGLES AND THE POOR

‘SELECTIVE’ DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM FINANCIALLY DISCRIMINATORY FOR SINGLES AND THE POOR

These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.

Democratic socialism or socialized democracy has achieved some very good things for equalization of social rights in Canada such as the Canada Pension  Plan, Employment Insurance Plan and universal public healthcare as well as human rights policies.  Also included are benefits meeting the current basic needs of society for all – care for the elderly, school systems and social security systems such as Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement.  This has resulted in improving the lives of women, First Nations, racialized Canadians, the poor and the elderly by social equalization.

Worker benefits won by unions have greatly benefited fairness in working conditions: such as equal pay for equal work, weekends off, lunch and work breaks, vacation and sick leave, minimum wage, eight hour working  day, overtime pay, child labor laws, safety and health laws,workers compensation, pensions, health care insurance, etc.  The list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, some of  the social and economic equalization has been undone by governments giving tax cuts to profitable corporations and high income individuals, giving boutique tax credits to only certain parts of the population and replacing progressive tax systems with flat tax systems.  Results of unequal social benefits include lack of affordable housing (violating Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs), high student debt and less  job security.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour has been a contentious issue.  The ruling social democratic party in the province has said it is not fair for a single parent to work 50 hours a week and then have to stop at the foodbank to feed the family.  Review of research states the premise behind ‘a minimum wage policy supported by a strong social policy is an efficient mechanism against poverty and income erosion of the poorest households.  Minimum wage is one of the instruments which can control wage disparity and in this way reduce income inequality’.

An editorial view in the Calgary Herald, April 22, 2018  ‘Meddling with Wages’ (meddling-with-wages) argues against increasing the minimum wage :

‘a higher minimum wage of $15 will add further pain to employers and hurt those the measure is intended to benefit.’

The editorial implies that the single parent referred to in above paragraph does not happen very often and only occurs for two per cent of the provincial population.  The editorial  then goes on to state that most of the two per cent are not single parents, but youth getting a start in the labour force by working part time while living at home.

‘ The minimum wage was never intended to be something a single person could support a family on.  Raising the minimum wage….further imperils the the viability of small businesses and creating greater incentive to trim by shedding jobs and cutting hours.

Canadians are helping low-income families through generous supports from both the federal and provincial governments .  More should be done to lift people out of poverty, of course, but it should be achieved with programs that boost their skills and increase their employability.  It should  not be done by clumsy government meddling.’

Blog author’s comments:  Writer states that the minimum wage was  never intended to be something a single person could support a family on. Really?  REALLY?   The premise behind a minimum wage policy supported by a strong social policy is an efficient mechanism against poverty and income erosion of the poorest households.  Minimum wage is one of the instruments which can control wage disparity and in this way reduces income inequality.  To say that a young person still living at home does not deserve a wage equivalent to a single parent is like saying all those persons working in sweatshops in Bangladesh also don’t deserve a wage equivalent to the same jobs performed in non-third world countries.  Also, raising the minimum wage helps the economy through increased spending on the necessities of life and more taxes being paid to support social programs.

Two reader comments put a proper perspective on the results of not increasing the minimum wage.  First comment (from Canadian Poverty Institute at Ambrose University) ‘Businesses should pay decent wages’ (pressreader):

 ‘…..If  minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be around $15 today.  While education and training programs may reduce poverty, demands for austerity would cut exactly these programs.  In abdicating responsibility to pay decent wages, business uploads the cost of low wages to government.  Poverty costs the provincial government $7-9 billion annually.

A business model based on poverty wages is untenable. Decent wages are the cost of doing business.

Ensuring a decent income is a shared responsibility.  Individuals are doing their part by working.  Business must do its part by paying people appropriately, not relying on government and taxpayers to pick up the tab.’

 

Opinion letter from second reader ‘Creating a more humane province’ (pressreader):

‘By concentrating heavily on the economics of the minimum wage (and indeed, low wages in general), the editorial misses the central point that wages are more about increased opportunity for inclusion and participation.  To deny an expansion of these dimensions to low-income workers, simply because of stereotypes, economic short-termism and the assertion that only two per cent of people actually work for minimum wage, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a citizen of this province.

I’m glad our provincial government continues to act in the interests of ordinary citizens and realize that the expansion of justice has a cost.  A higher minimum wage, together with the provision of living wages, is the price we can and should pay for the creation of a more just, humane and inclusive province.’

Then there are those who have no regard for left-wing politics.  An example is Calgary Herald editorial comment: ‘How soon we forget the economic carnage of left-wing policies’ (calgaryherald). The argument made is that:

‘those who ignore socialist history are doomed to repeat it…..If nobody had ever tried left-wing policies before, we might be justified in giving this “new” socialism a chance.  Unfortunately, the world has long been a laboratory for socialist policies with mostly disastrous results.

Democratic socialism has left valuable legacies – like subsidized, widely available health care and education – but also has created a lot of economic carnage.  During the 1970s, big-spending, left-wing governments in Canada, Scandinavia and Great Britain created high unemployment and sluggish growth before buckling under the weight of their taxes and debt…

……The province’s premier doesn’t understand, or perhaps doesn’t care, that raising taxes makes struggling citizens poorer, and just transfers wealth from the already wounded private sector to the public sector.

She wants to appease her union comrades by massively raising the minimum wage , which will raise inflation , hurt less profitable industries and reduce employment…..How did our collective memories become so short?’

Reader’s opinion letter ‘Right-wing policies fail’ (pressreader) in response to this editorial states:

 ‘This column is nonsense….The highest rate of unemployment in the U.K. in recent years were under the reign of Margaret Thatcher.  Currently, the only people who benefit from the right wing U.K. government’s policies are the rich.

Food banks, unknown in my younger years, are common and very necessary.

It’s also true that the province’s unemployment rate is unacceptable, but to criticize the premier is wrong.  If our economy had been less dependent on oil and gas, we would be better off.

The right-wing trickle-down economic theory is utterly discredited.’

‘SELECTIVE’ DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

As noted in the above, there has been much that has been good about democratic socialism, but there also has been negative outcomes to democratic socialism.  One negative is what we will call ‘selective’ democratic socialism  where certain members of society get more social benefits than others.

Examples of ‘selective’ democratic socialism:

Women not being paid same amount as men for same job – Unions have forced the private sector to enforce social benefits such as eight hour day, overtime pay, vacation and sick pay, etc., and  above all equal pay for equal work, but the private sector in many cases still has neglected to pay women the same wage for doing same job as men.

There are many who object to the wages and pensions federal and provincial civil and public servants receive. They say these employees are paid too much money, thus causing economic concerns.  The irony of this negativity is that one reason why the budgets for civil, public and union employees is higher is that women are actually paid the same wage as men doing the same job.

It would be nice if right-wing financial think tanks used some outside the box thinking and conducted studies on how much of the budgets of unionized employees is dedicated to paying women equally to men.  Or, vice versa, how much more money would it take to pay women in the private sector equally to men?

Keep minimum wages low and don’t  consider living wages ‘Selective’ democratic socialism allows the top employees (elite one per cent and the rich) to outpace wages of those at the bottom.  Then, because they have the money to do so, they will bypass the democratic social programs of health care and public schools to pay for elite services of private health care and private schools.

Married/Coupled person get more benefits than singles and the poor (singles often excluded from these benefits) – Many persons leaning to political right and working in the private sector view defined contribution public pensions to be unfair as they perceive money for these pensions to be coming from the public purse.  However, they also refuse to recognize that singles receiving public pensions are supporting/subsidizing the public pension plans of married/coupled persons.  While married/coupled persons are receiving their public pensions, they have been given a boutique tax credit where they get to pension split (benefit added on top of benefit), thus paying less income tax.  Singles don’t get to do this and poor married/coupled persons do  not get the same benefits from pension splitting as the rich.  Yet another level of ‘selective’ democratic socialization is added to the mix when widowed persons (who now technically are single) get a supplementary public pension from their deceased spouses.

It is very difficult for political parties to eliminate the unfair pension splitting tax credit for fear of being voted out. A solution to making the playing field fair for singles versus married/coupled persons could be to give singles a fully refundable tax break during their pension years that is equivalent to amounts received in pension splitting by married/coupled persons.   For the widowed person’s public pension marital manna benefit, a solution to remedy this could be to give the widowed spouse whatever is left of the pension in a lump sum just like single deceased persons receive in their estates upon dying.  Again, it would be nice if financial think tanks would use some outside the box thinking to evaluate how fair the public pension system is to singles versus married/coupled persons and to analyze who really is getting the bigger slice of the pie.

Affordable housing prices out of reach for singles and poor families – Another ‘selective’ democratic socialist outcome is when affordable housing solutions are put in place, but the poor still pay more per square foot  for this housing.  The housing prices are out of whack when rich proportionally pay less per square foot (often the bigger the house the less they seem to pay per square foot), but ‘ever’ singles, early divorced persons and poor families pay more.  As a result, they also pay more in housing and education taxes, real estate fees and mortgage interest charges than the rich since these are based on price and not the square footage of the housing.

What better evidence is there of this than the case where a single person from San Francisco created a  ‘pod’ in the living room of an apartment so he could have a private place to sleep instead of the couch (singles-deserve-affordable-housing). Another is ‘free rent for sex’ advertisements resulting from the out of control Vancouver housing market (pressreader.)

Then there is the insanity of the charmed lives of the rich building luxurious playhouses for their children (pressreader).  These playhouses range from $7,000 to $100,000 and may include electricity, fireplaces and cabinets.  The sleeping pod of the San Francisco single man could probably be the size of the doghouse for the pets of the children owning these playhouses.

‘Selective’ democratic socialism where families get social benefits and singles are excluded – Many government and business financial solutions and social programs appear to include only families with singles being excluded.  One example is Habitat for Humanity who build houses for families only, not singles.

‘Selective’ democratic socialism above all means FAMILIES RULE – Government and politicians in their discussions talk mainly about family, family, family and the middle class instead of talking about ‘families and individuals’.  Singles are rarely included in the discussions.  ‘Selective’ democratic socialism by definition is exclusionary and selects families to receive benefits with singles rarely being included equally in the benefits.

CONCLUSION

These are just a few examples of ‘selective’ democratic socialism.  How positive or negative democratic socialism has been is in the eye of the beholder.  However, it is very hard to say that there have been more negatives than  positives when one looks at the list of all the accomplishments of union rights and democratic socialism.

Now, if only ‘ever’ singles, early divorced singles and poor families were included equally to other members in society in democratic social formulas, the world would be an even better place.

This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.