Stakeholder capitalism or social entrepreneurship has been cultivated in Brazil by the Aspen Institute, The Inter-American Development Bank, The International Finance Corporation, the Catholic Church through the First fund, and Oikocredit (World Council of Churches) going back at least to 2003. Brazil is one of thirty-three member nations of Sir Ronald Cohen’s Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, which was launched in 2017.
Aspen Institute, with assistance from the University of St. Gallen in São Paulo, documented impact investing opportunities in Brazil in 2014, targeting BOP (base of pyramid) favela residents. The report identifies investment potential in the areas of education and healthcare access and banking since Brazil is one of the fifteen countries with the greatest income inequality. Favelas would be seen by venture philanthropists and social entrepreneurs as significant and potentially profitable sources of data if they can be “properly developed” with “evidence-based solutions.” This game of speculation can only proceed once rules are created, consensus is established, players are recruited, and the gameboard is set up. The human capital finance game runs on metrics.
In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.
Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.
The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business.
Blended Finance, Impact Subsidies
When structuring deals around “green,” “sustainable,” “social impact” projects, investments from a combination of sources are generally used. This is called blended finance, and concessional or catalytic capital is deployed to grease the skids and advance initiatives that would not normally be considered economically viable – a subsidy of sorts.
This strategy of seeding markets comes with the understanding that an early-stage loss or break-even has the potential create opportunities for greater returns down the line. Concessional or catalytic capital often takes the form of foundation grants or donations from high-net-worth individuals and include allocations of public funds. “Stakeholder capitalism” will require continual infusions of sacrificial up-front money to “de-risk” the many projects now advancing aligned with the “build back better” agenda and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
In 2015, financiers and development program managers met in Addis Ababa, hosted by Tedros Ghebreyesus, at the time Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, to hammer out how projects aligned with the UN SDGs would be financed. From that gathering came Convergence, an organization tasked with educating investors about blended finance deal flow and gathering intelligence on impact opportunities in the developing world. The World Economic Forum and the OECD sponsored the effort, pulled together by Dalberg Advisors and Global Development Incubator. According to the Convergence website its market-building partners include the governments of Canada, the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Australia and NORAD, which is strange until you realize that the data analytics that structure social impact markets run through GPS satellite connected sensor networks.
Raul Diego of Silicon Icarus notes in his investigation of education Development Impact Bonds in India that Geneva-based Dalberg prepared the first corporate citizenship rating system in 2007 as the United Nations laid out the groundwork to pull in labor, civil society, business, and governments into a global systems engineering endeavor advanced on behalf of technology, defense, and finance industries under the guise of saving the planet and solving poverty.
Convergence’s members come from the corporate, government, and philanthropic sectors. None of these deals would be possible without public private partnerships and healthy dose of venture philanthropy. The Jack Dorseys of the world, with their crypto-stocked donor advised funds, are poised to deploy their immense wealth to cultivate an ever-expanding of network of “social impact” poverty-management channels through which their capital can be directed only to loop its way back to the digital gold reservoirs at the top. Two years after the UN’s Global Compact Leaders’ Summit was held in Geneva, the Rockefeller Foundation in partnership with JP Morgan and USAID launched GIIN, the Global Impact Investors Network and IRIS, Impact Reporting and Investment Standards. Omidyar Network was among the founding members.
Jack Dorsey Venture Philanthropist
In 2020 Dorsey ramped up his venture philanthropy game with a public commitment to give away $1 billion through Start Small LLC for Covid relief, girls’ health and education, and universal basic income (UBI). Owen Thomas of the San Francisco Chronicle offers valuable insights in a 2018 investigation titled “Where is Jack Dorsey’s Charitable Foundation?” Dorsey talks a big game about giving, but the particulars are murky. The 2015 SEC filing for Square’s IPO mentions plans to move 1,350,000 shares into a Donor Advised Fund (DAFs) with the troubled Silicon Valley Community Foundation. DAFs provide an immediate tax write off for donors and are not subject to the same public disclosure requirements as private foundations are. Dorsey did in fact create a Start Small Foundation that same year with $1 in revenue. 990 documents between 2015 and 2018 indicate no additional funds were placed in the foundation and no distributions were ever made to charity. The foundation is no longer included on the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations.
A June 2020 profile of Dorsey in Vox notes that the grants made through his DAF have largely been handed out through his personal network of friends and business partners rather than a formal review process. At the start of the pandemic, Dorsey sent $1 million to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s public-private partnership distance learning initiative that distributed devices and hot-spots to low-income families to “close the digital divide,” or extend the reach of Silicon Valley’s electronic prison depending on how you look at it. California has seen the some of the harshest lockdowns and testing protocols in the nation. Other donors to the “Closing The Digital Divide Task Force” were: Amazon, Apple, Verizon, Chan Zuckerberg, T-Mobile, AT&T, HP, Zoom, Box, Microsoft, VIPKid, PayPal, John Doerr, Craig Newmark, Gordon Moore, and Scott Cook. The tech / telecom sectors have enacted a mass digital enclosure using health-status geofencing. Online education is a tool to extract value from children being held captive to screens, forced acculturation into the Metaverse.
Dorsey’s fund started with $3.1 billion in assets, and after disbursements it is now valued at $2.7 billion. You can view a Google sheet of the projects Dorsey is funding here. Associacao Projecto Crescer is the third most recent entry with $224,000 allocated on December 7, 2021.
Dorsey also maintains a Donor Advised Fund in the troubled Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the second largest community foundation in the country where an enormous hoard of crypto assets awaits global deployment. Austerity is the precondition that allows private interests to step in to fund “evidence-based” “solutions” that run on data – lots and lots of data. Data, of course, is Dorsey’s business. Over the years, Dorsey, who studied at NYU for a few years, has maintained an ongoing collaboration with Michael Bloomberg, the data analytics “what works” mayor who brought social impact bonds over from the UK. A decade ago, Dorsey was toying with the idea of moving to New York to run for mayor, describing the technocrat Bloomberg as a guiding light and his inspiration.
Source: Washington Post, 2013
Source, Politico 2013
Timeline of Stakeholder Capitalism
A briefing document prepared by The ImPact, a global organization that advises high net-worth families to shift assets into social impact projects, specifically references education and healthcare as target areas for Brazil. ImPact was co-founded by Justin Rockefeller and Liesel Pritzker Simmons. Their Brazilian contact is Fernando Scodro, an NYU graduate whose family made its money in baking and confections. Fernando interned at UNESCO after graduating, worked in international finance for a few years, then turned to managing his family’s assets with a focus on alternative energy and food innovation through Grupo Baoba, which he set up in 2014. Since August 2020 Scodro has been working on a communications plan for Zurich’s Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth run in partnership with Harvard University.
Here are key dates, many drawn from Navigating Impact Investing in Brazil, that show how a culture of social innovation is cultivated over time.
1995 – GIFE Network of Social Investment / Entrepreneurs
2002 – LAVCA Launched, Program of IDB – The Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America
2001 – United Way Brazil Establishes Office in Sao Pao
2003 – Oikocredit, World Council of Churches Microfinance
2005 – International Finance Corporation – Inclusive Business Models Group
2006 – Impact Hub Sao Paulo Launched
2007 – Inter-American Development Bank – Opportunities for the Majority
2008 – SITAWI Finance For Good Established – Modelled On Nonprofit Finance Fund
2009 – LGT Venture Philanthropy and VOX Fund Established
2012 – MOV Established, First Social Impact Conference Held
2012 – Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Pilot Planned for State of Parana
2014 – Mapping The Impact Investing Sector In Brazil – Aspen Institute
2014 – Brazilian Task Force On Social Finance Established
2015 – Brazil Joins Global Steering Group (GSG) Formerly G7 Impact Investment Task Force
2016 – Brazilian Task Force On Social Finance Signs Cooperative Agreement With Ministerio do Desenvolvimento To Lead Creation of National Strategy for Impact Business and Investing – ENIMPACTO
2016 – First Social Impact Bond Proposed, Technical Assistance from Social Finance UK
2017 – First Brazilian Philanthropy Forum Promoting Social Impact Held
2018 – Social Finance Impact Business Forum Conference Held
2018 –Task Force for a Latin America Impact Fund of Funds (LIFF), Ronald Cohen
2018 – Data for Good Brazil Movement, UN Sustainable Development Goals Launched
2019 – Softbank Creates First Fund For Technology Investment in Latin America, $5 Billion
2019 – National Learning Standards Implemented
2019 – International Seminar of Early Childhood, Boa Vista Blockchain ID Home Visit Pilot
2020 – Convergence Capital Conference Held
2021 – Lightrock Spins Off LGT (Lichtenstein) for Impact Investing, Sao Paulo Office
2021 – United Way Brazil Hosts Collective Impact Finance Conference With Aspen Institute
According to an abvcap (Brazilian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association) report from March 2020, impact investing was still an emerging market with sixty nine active projects focused on ICT (individual communication technology), tech-mediated education and health projects, financial inclusion, housing, and natural resource preservation. Expansion of financial inclusion programs must be understood within the larger context of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development goals, now gaining recognition through the high-profile, corporate branding of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. If you want to know more, I did an extensive report in March 2020 right before the pandemic was announced. It can be read or listened to here.
Interesting, too, the developments with China at Davos,
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/01/19/mr-xi-plays-davos-man/
Compounding the trends, China’s GDP per capita has reached $12,551, crucially above the notorious “middle income trap”; above the global average GDP per capita; and now entering “high-income country” territory, as defined by the World Bank.
Xi’s key message, when it comes to addressing “Davos Man” – the trademark WEF audience – was unmistakable: China is and will continue to remain the safest of havens for global Capital. The Masters of the Universe – from BlackRock down – duly nodded their approval.
But then, there are “countercurrents”. And that ominous, imminent global economy crisis.
Now we enter the deeper enigma of how interpenetrated Xi’s vision and the Davos agenda may, or may not, be.
Xi’s main theme is multilateralism. And that’s the context in which he introduced his rich “countercurrents” metaphor. Xi de facto held the collective West as “countercurrents” in the river of History – incapable of stopping its inexorable flow to the sea.
Yet these “countercurrents”, as Xi defines them, are not merely trying to stop the flow of economic globalization. He leaves it subtly implied they are trying to stop the flow of Globalization 2.0 as led by China: a very strong economy working in tandem with an arguably successful “zero Covid” policy.
He didn’t even have to refer to the West. He just needed to suggest that China forged its own way to tackle the current challenges. And the Chinese way beats the West’s.
The global economy is being confronted, across the board, by manpower shortages – from harvest workers to truck drivers to supermarket cashiers. Costs for everything from raw materials to container shipping went through the roof. Supply chains are horribly over-extended and in many cases broken.
The hegemonic narrative blames exclusively the proverbial Covid-19 variants for the very real possibility of causing the mother of all supply chain breakdowns that may hit most of the planet in 2022.
In contrast, variants of guerrilla analysis sustain that the global economy is being deliberately being driven over the cliff. The supply chain breakdown is being facilitated by the multi-restriction “war on Covid” – which directly subverts production, trade and services.
Global Capital would never allow a comprehensive public debate about the toxic role of the financial system – which has been kept under artificial respiration since 2008, with central banks unleashing storms of helicopter money, inflating real state markets, stocks, precious metal prices. In real life, what’s nearly inevitable next in the horizon is the bursting of a massive stock and real estate bubble all across the West.
A good one over at Mint Press — Twitter and Spooks in Penal Colony Land:
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA – Social media giant Twitter raised many eyebrows recently when it announced that it had partnered with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in its fight against disinformation and fake news. ASPI, Twitter revealed in a blog post, had helped identify thousands of accounts that “amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives” around China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. These accounts have now been permanently deleted.
This is of concern because the ultra-hawkish Australian think tank is actually the source for many of the most incendiary claims about China and its foreign policy, and, as Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told MintPress, has been a driving force in the ramping up of tensions between China and the West, something he explored in his 2016 documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Pilger stated that,
ASPI has played a leading role – some would say, the leading role – in driving Australia’s mendacious and self-destructive and often absurd China-bashing campaign. The current Coalition government, perhaps the most right-wing and incompetent in Australia’s recent history, has relied upon the ASPI to disseminate Washington’s desperate strategic policies, into which much of the Australian political class, along with its intelligence and military structures, has been integrated.”
Importantly, neither ASPI nor Twitter claimed that the deleted accounts were fake or operated by the Chinese state, strongly implying that merely agreeing with Beijing or questioning bellicose Western narratives was reason enough to be banned.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/aspi-think-tank-controlling-twitter/279490/
The mention of Dorsey, ‘Web 3.’ I tend to watch everything, in places where I do not agree, use thought experiments to try and push myself when I can, so that definitely can allow for some bizarre observations. One of note, involving Dorsey, was part of the emerging, what you might call ‘Nationalist 2.0’ scene, which is a sort of ‘post-Richard-Spencer Alt-Right’ that has pivoted in its strategy to address what are mostly rural poor and formerly-working, now poor, audiences, many who’ve dealt with decades-long brunt of the Opioid crisis (see Trey Garrisons new Book, ‘Opioids for the Masses’), been told to ‘learn to code’ while having manufacturing jobs outsourced, and centuries old mining work/business suddenly uprooted and sabotaged. And that was before Covid hit, doing its damage. I think the cynicism, undeniable facts, especially after the riot violence which goes back-and-forth (great books- Valentines ‘Strength of the Wolf/Pack’ duology, and Jones’ ‘Slaughter of Cities,’ along w Gary Webbs Journalism), and the new ‘white nationalist’ targeting of Surveillance Capital priority, made them have to market themselves differently to gain any traction. One of these new characters is a Keith Woods, an Irish guy, with an entourage that is a little sharper than the previous troupes that followed Spencer, but making some very strange pitches, a recent one being that ‘Web 3’ was a kind of hope because of Paul Singers replacing Dorsey, and how ‘Dorsey wasn’t really all that bad of a guy.’ Seemed a really anomalous, odd pitch to me, especially for a so-called ‘Nationalist Conservative’ to be making, considering Dorsey’s obvious biases and political leanings. But it gets stranger.
I have to admit I’m not against Nationalization on some economic levels myself, from a practical standpoint, as some have been assassinated for recently when trying to resist some of this transnational tyranny, like your Magafuli, for instance. These ‘Conservative’ (heavy air quotes) groups, though, are full-on Evola-revivalism for the under mensch, and have been an adjunct of the ‘accelerationist’ troll-sabotage-to-censorship strategies of the Thiel-network, notably the NRx/Yarvin ‘Post-Liberalism’ movement and their open promotion of an ‘East Asian Centric style Governance,’ going back six or seven years at least on those admissions without any checks/balances. Anyhow, you have these mostly European Pagan revivalists, supposed Nationalists, that suddenly are coddling Dorsey, then they are running this ‘China is Based’ argument, that China is actually ‘Based’ because and that is ‘why they are defeating America, because they are actually National-Realists, like Fascists of the past in an upgraded form.’ Whoa. Ok. Well, I’d said before that China was more of your Market-driven, Global-Bankster-Trotskyite ‘Communism’ than your technical Maoist, Stalinist, by-the-book Communism, but to hear some so-called ‘Alt-Right Pagan Nationalists’ singing their praises, along with Dorsey, a bit suspect. Especially when you see the sudden numbers some of these influencers get. The last, in the trinity of these pitches has now been ‘Pro-Transhumanism,’ using Nietzchean power dynamics, social-Darwinism-via-Ariosophy, to get this demographic, broken from all the crap I listed earlier, to put on the Oculus and drive drones into ‘Target X’ for enough crypto to pay for their painkiller habit. Or maybe just rent, or to feed themselves or their families. Anything to have it all mean something. I tried to warn them, like you’ve dealt with on a much larger level, any time you try to go against this tide-of-industry, they’ve got an army of A.I. Bots, Troll Farms, etc waiting there to swarm you. Or just memory-hole your statements altogether. And maybe I have him all wrong- but it seems to me, just like they co-opted the environmental movement, they are co-opting the aboriginal/’pagan’/’back-to-earth’ religions along with it, to build a narco-militarized, techno-agrarian Kibbutz grid.
And I say ‘narco militarized’ for a reason. It ties right into your work on Latin America, and the corruption there involving the Techno-Militant Arm of the Catholic Church and Kabbalism, Zionism. There is a dynamic there that may be worth looking into, because it will probably be playing out exactly as this garbage is with what I just described above, as depressing as that sounds. Partially why I think there will have to be a pretty dynamic resistance on a religious/ethical level because they can so easily co-opt anything that can fit the Kabbalist, Freemasonic, ‘Noachide’ Green-Fascism Blueprint. The dynamic here, which concerns Latin America, is that of the cult of Santa Muerte. Not sure if you’ve ever looked into it, but it is quite dominant within the Cartel Structures, even though some of the Narco-Warlords are, ironically, sometimes Evangelicals (sound familiar?). It doesn’t take long- just searches on Youtube, image searches, a bit of reading, until you see the obvious Kabbalistic link into the Santa Muerte religion. A ton of these priests are even wearing garb with the ‘Seal of Solomon’ imprinted on the back of them, various Enochian magic symbols adorning the walls of their little temples. Being an advocate of a healthy relationship of all peoples to their indigenous pasts- what you’ve done for a living- this is relevant because in a number of instances, and I didn’t have to look far, referred to it as ‘a rejection of the Church, and a return to the roots of Latin America, in the nature religions of the Aztec People.’ Just like with the Pagan Revivalism in Germany (‘Aryanism’), Italy, and Japan, it seems this dynamic is being utilized once again, probably because it fits the new ‘Green’ narrative, as well as people’s returns to their ‘tribal roots,’ to racial/ethnic reactionary associations, where they can be rounded up in City-State style ‘Reservations,’ and have drone-wars gamed out at each other, perfect for culling an uneducated, angry, hopeless population.
I’m not sure what the relationship of the Church is with this down there, but there seems to be a back and forth, some of which could be genuine empathy, other which could be greed, strategy-of-tension dynamic, as with the Neocons and ‘Satanism’ in the US (which Anton Levey himself admitted was nothing but ‘Ayn Rand in Whole Cloth’). The Santa Muerte cult is just one of these, primarily affecting certain narco-culture, but I’d be willing to bet this is a broader strategy, given they seem to be targeting many different demographics with this kind of Green-Evola, techno-tribalism. They just had a huge drone dropping C4 across the way- may not be too long before we have various ‘kibbutz-reservations’ and their gaming-signatures piloting those from their oculus headgear.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/18/the-border-crisis-is-bad-but-in-mexico-a-larger-crisis-looms/
You can even see that dozens of Catholic priests have been murdered along these lines, so if there is a Church-Connection, it isn’t at a normal, everyday level. Those people tend to be good people, trying to help.
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/search/?q=santa+muerte
China was never communist. Pre-1949 it was a feudal society dominated for over a century by imperial powers. After Mao’s taking full control of the country in 1949, it became state capitalist, a la Stalin, who basically followed Lenin’s blueprint, though Lenin had the honesty to admit that this was state capitalist, which “one day” will be socialist. By the late 1960s, there were numerous contacts with western corporate interests, especially British and mainland European ones. After the Nixon-Mao summit, the country began welcoming US capital as well, and once Mao died in 1976 there was an accelerated change to more western style capitalist social forms of domination, though with a particularly powerful state. Nowadays, the nation has more billionaires than any other country, and these billionaires are also members of the “Communist” Party, in fact run it, while it runs the state on their behalf. This was written in 1967, updated in 1974, before the really obvious changes, but quite clear that the author saw through the BS.
https://libcom.org/library/theses-chinese-revolution-cultural-revolution-cajo-brendel
On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period. During this time, 850 million Chinese people were lifted and lifted themselves out of poverty; that is to say, 70 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction took place in China. In the most recent ‘targeted’ phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government spent 1.6 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others. Since 2013, millions of people, state-owned and private enterprises, and broad sectors of society have been mobilised to ensure that – despite the pandemic – China’s remaining 98.99 million people from 832 counties and 128,000 villages exit absolute poverty.
From 1949 to 1976, under Mao’s leadership, the Chinese government focused on improving the quality of life for its population, which had grown from 542 to 937 million people. In the first years of this period, poverty was addressed by transforming private ownership of the means of production into public hands and redistributing land from landlords and warlords to poor peasants. Poverty, after all, is an issue of class struggle. By 1956, 90 percent of the country’s peasants had land to till, 100 million peasants were organised in agricultural cooperatives, and private industry was effectively abolished. People’s Communes organised collective ownership of the land and means of production and distributed collective wealth, enabling the agricultural surplus to be invested into industrial development and social welfare.
In the twenty-nine-year pre-reform period (1949-1978), China’s life expectancy increased by thirty-two years. In other words, for every year after the Revolution, more than one year was added to the life of an average Chinese person. In 1949, the country’s population was 80 percent illiterate, which in less than three decades was reduced to 16.4 percent in urban areas and 34.7 percent in rural areas; the enrolment of school-age children increased from 20 to 90 percent; and the number of hospitals tripled. The decentralisation of the health and education systems from elite urban centres to poor rural areas was key. This process included establishing middle schools for workers and peasants and dispatching millions of barefoot doctors to the countryside. Significant advances were made in women’s participation in society, from abolishing patriarchal marriage customs to increasing access to education, health care, and childcare. From 1952 to 1977, the average annual industrial output growth rate was 11.3 percent. In terms of productive capacity and technological development, China went from not being able to manufacture a car domestically in 1949 to launching its first satellite into outer space in 1970. The Dongfanghong satellite (meaning ‘The East is Red’) played the eponymous revolutionary song on loop while in orbit for twenty-eight days. The industrial, economic, and social gains in the transition to socialism under Mao formed the foundation of the post-1978 period.
By the 1970s, it became clear that China’s economy required an infusion of technology and capital, and that it needed to break its isolation from the world market. As China’s leader Deng Xiaoping later wrote, ‘Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism’. The government introduced a range of economic reforms, including opening the economy to the world market, but – because China remained a socialist country – the public sector remained dominant and free of foreign control.
good stuff over at Tricontinental -== https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/
Interesting to listen to Amy George Soros Goodman with Peter Goodman, no direct relationship to Amy, discussing Davos.
PETER GOODMAN: Yeah, that’s right. And, you know, look, it’s great that CEOs are talking about doing good. And some of them are doing good. And that’s terrific. But this idea that Benioff champions, along with Larry Fink, another guy I profile in my book — he’s the world’s largest asset manager. He now controls $10 trillion in investments worldwide. That’s pension funds. That’s university endowments. Both of these guys champion this idea that Milton Friedmanism is over, this idea that we just maximize shareholder value, and then the wealth trickles down throughout the economy, and everything is rosy. It’s been replaced, they tell us, by this thing that they called stakeholder capitalism. We’re catering to stakeholders now, to labor, to local communities, to society in general, to the environment. Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s always unilateral. There’s no labor unions in stakeholder capitalism. Government does not really exist in stakeholder capitalism. It’s not a talking point. It’s all about us depending upon the goodness, the innate goodness, of people like Benioff and Fink and the other CEOs to run their companies so that everybody wins. And central to that is this idea, that is pervasive at Davos, that all solutions to problems can be found if people just earnestly debate them and find win-win solutions. They love win-win solutions, because then that obviates sacrifice. It’s all an elaborate prophylactic against the actual exercise of democracy toward the redistribution of wealth so that we can tax wealthy people and finance the things that we actually want, like expanded healthcare and affordable housing.
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/21/world_economic_forum_davos_man
Gotta get others on these faux news sites, you as well, Alison.