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A Winner’s Take On ‘Winners Take All’

A Winner’s Take On ‘Winners Take All’

Last summer, at a social dinner in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to meet Anand Giridharadas, the former New York Times columnist and author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. As he explained the message of his book, I became intrigued. For years, I have viewed the staggering economic inequality in the U.S. with fear and anxiety. I have watched the widening gap turn into a chasm, serving to illustrate just how broken the U.S. system has become.

Anand seemed curiously eager for me to read the book, but I didn’t fully grasp why until I picked up a copy and read to page 205 – where there is a single mention of my name. He takes a subtle shot, including me in a group of elites who sanctimoniously apply band-aids to problems while ignoring that, in our self-interest, we are the ones who allowed the system to fail in the first place. And that’s the part I hadn’t previously considered.

His book makes a valid case that elites have participated in allowing the U.S. system to break down, while government and its high-powered advisers reinforced the income gap in many Western democracies. And to make things worse, these same elites are advocating “market solutions” to fix social issues around the world while they have utterly failed to fix the inequality in their own backyard. The result, Anand writes, has been the creation of what essayist C.Z. Nnaemeka calls the “unexotic underclass,” people who are neither rich enough to be global elites, nor poor enough to get the elites’ attention.

No argument there. One need only look at the facts.

Since the 1980s, the incomes of the top 0.001 percent of Americans have increased seven-fold, while the incomes of the lowest-earning half of the population have barely budged. Giridharadas points to trends that have contributed to the widening gulf between rich and poor, including cuts to public education, the dismantling of unions, outsourcing labor offshore, the continued belief in trickle-down economics, and much more.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the average person remains 30 percent poorer. And the undeniable truth is that the only people who have done well since 2008 are the ones who caused the crisis in the first place. It’s no wonder people are seething with rage and have taken out their anger by supporting and voting for populist politicians from all parts of the spectrum, in democracies around the world. History has always shown this as the inevitable outcome of severe inequality and disenfranchisement.

Anand certainly does a great job illuminating the apparent hypocrisy of some elite philanthropists. As Giridharadas writes, “This book is an attempt to understand the connection between . . . the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding.” But I have several issues with his book as well. He exhibits a tendency to paint everything black and white in order to make his case. Having met so many philanthropic types over the years, I know there are in fact people who truly care and are passionate about giving away their money and bringing about sustainable change. A quick cast of the net would capture myriad examples of philanthropists who are intent on doing good, quietly backing projects that take innovative entrepreneurial approaches to large-scale social challenges.

Moreover, the benefits of all that philanthropic giving and change of corporate culture are evident and provable. Throwing rhetorical grenades in every direction is far from helpful.

More importantly, Anand doesn’t offer any solutions to the systemic problems that plague America. “Where do we go from here? Somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people that have been leading us,” he tells us. To me that reads as a cop out.

But I don’t entirely fault him for not providing concrete solutions. If history has taught us anything, the systemic change needed when societies go to the mat over inequality doesn’t come without some serious social disorder. And I am being diplomatic here. When a political system is broken as badly as it is today, when big money interests can spend billions on a single election, when truth is no longer relevant and  tribal affiliation causes citizens to vote against their own interests, then how will we fix the underlying causes?

Here is the irony: Anand seems to expect politicians to fix a system that either benefits or enslaves them. He will wait a long time.

As Republican Politicians Cower, Where Is America’s Cato?

As Republican Politicians Cower, Where Is America’s Cato?

While the pipe bombs sent in recent days to vocal critics of the current U.S. administration failed to detonate, the act lodged itself firmly in the American psyche.

Combined with devastating gun violence at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, these violent acts from within have left the US even more divided, rattled and uneasy. And they pose the question of what leaders of a democracy must do.

True leaders – ones with courage and conviction – would have immediately denounced these attacks for what they were: acts of domestic terrorism. They would have called for unity and peace, denounced the divisive political rhetoric that fuels hate, and offered words that might have comforted the heartbroken and called a nation to find its better self.

As America enters the final stretch before the midterm elections, the Republican members of the House and Senate have also largely stayed quiet. They have put party and self-interest before country. They have prioritized re-election and power over institutional norms and civil discourse and abdicated practically every role the constitution envisioned – primarily that of checks and balances.

It is no coincidence that only retiring GOP House Representatives and Senators have spoken out against the vitriol spewing from the executive branch – and even then, only tepidly or fleetingly. Republican opponents who previously distanced themselves from the current President during the 2016 GOP primaries have now lined up behind him, fearing that falling afoul of him will jeopardize their political fortunes.

More alarmingly, the White House is now an open source of disinformation, content to offer the public “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories that once existed only in the far reaches of the internet and the fringes of society. It is not an exaggeration to say that the White House has given sustenance to the darkest elements of American political life.

And while many sitting Republican politicians are undoubtedly aware of the damage this is doing to their democracy, few if any have the courage to speak out against it. It’s unimaginable that out of all the congressmen and senators not one is willing to sacrifice his re-election chances by doing what’s morally right. Not one.

One could ask, where is the Cato in today’s republic?

Cato, the incorruptible Roman senator and Stoic, stood up to Julius Caesar and warned his fellow senators about the leader’s dishonorable motives. His reputation as a fierce defender of truth and justice was so great that centuries later, George Washington, John Adams, and Samuel Adams were each reportedly praised as being “the American Cato.”

Fast-forward to today, however, and an American Cato is nowhere to be found. Having felt the political tailwinds of vulgar speech, demographic agitation, and invented truths, Republicans running for office lack the courage and conviction to save American democracy from within. It remains to be seen how America’s political institutions will recover from this wholesale abdication of leadership.

[Frank Giustra is a Canadian businessman and global philanthropist whose foundation focuses on poverty alleviation and assisting people caught in natural disasters.]

 

We’re Living ‘The Hunger Games’ — And We Need To Change That

We’re Living ‘The Hunger Games’ — And We Need To Change That

Most of us are familiar with The Hunger Games — the story of a fictional future society where an elite has everything and is oblivious to the suffering all around them, beyond an occasionally peek at their ubiquitous screens to see the tragedies unfolding beyond their borders.

I founded Lions Gate Entertainment, which distributed that dystopian film to the world eight years ago. I never thought it would become a reality, but I’m afraid it has.

After spending three days in the Iraqi city of Mosul, where I was doing some desperately needed humanitarian work to help Christians terrorized by ISIS, I returned to my home in Vancouver. By habit, I opened my Instagram account and mindlessly browsed through postings of people I knew, to see what had happened while I was gone.

It was like leaving The Hunger Games’ District 13 and returning to the privileged life of Panem. As I gazed at photo-shopped selfies, hot vacation spots, and cute pets, I realized I just couldn’t connect with them. And I realized that most of the friends on my Instagram account couldn’t connect to the devastation I’d witnessed just hours before.

What I saw in Mosul was the aftermath of the nine-month battle to liberate the city, often called the birthplace of Christianity, from its ISIS captors — who had held the city’s civilians hostage for the preceding three years.

After the biggest urban battle since World War II, eight million tons of rubble is pretty much all that is left of the western part of this ancient city. It was mind-boggling to walk the streets, knowing there are still many undiscovered bodies buried beneath the bombed-out buildings. As many as 40,000 people may have died in the battle for Mosul. (Neither the Iraqi government nor the US coalition will acknowledge any total number of casualties).

Now in the safety of Vancouver, browsing through those Instagram photos, I realized that our society faces a profound challenge.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault the folks who posted those pretty photos; I’ve posted plenty of my own. But we are in an existential crisis, absorbed with life in our comfortable, social-media driven bubbles, a phenomenon that isolates us from the world’s major challenges.

Until three years ago I was equally isolated. Then I visited Lesbos, Greece, and saw refugees landing on the beaches. That personal moment, which I could never have experienced on social media, motivated me to immerse myself in doing something to help the 65 million-plus human beings who are now refugees.

Since I began that work, I have grown increasingly frustrated that our social media addiction is making us like the citizens of The Hunger Games’ Panem — clueless to what is happening in the world around us.

But why?

Partly it is a matter of what media choose to cover — and what we choose to follow — in an era fueled by political scandal and celebrities. When was the last time you turned on any cable news outlet and saw a report about the thousands of civilians killed during the recapture of Mosul? Or a story about the millions of Yemenis now on the brink of starvation because of a US-backed, Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels in their country? How much coverage have you seen of the Russian-backed Assad regime’s brutal campaign against its own citizens that has killed hundreds of thousands and left half the population displaced?

My guess would be that you haven’t seen much.

But our growing isolation from these brutalities can’t be blamed only on the paucity of coverage, because media does provide some reporting of these tragedies. The broader problem is that we are being anesthetized by the technology now shaping our society and its discourse.

We increasingly get most of our information from social media, where we select the kind of information or opinions we want. To make matters worse, we allow the algorithms used by these platforms to reinforce our preferences and make those decisions for us. In this way, we can easily tune out the hard-core reality of what’s happening in the world.

Why should we care about what seems like an unstoppable trend? So what if we choose to exist in our comfortable bubble, paying little heed to the problems of people on the other side of the planet? We’re just civilians. We can’t fix wars, can we?

Perhaps not, but we should still worry about one very dangerous result of our intellectual and social isolation. Tyrants are now taking advantage of this public-interest vacuum to perpetrate astonishing atrocities against civilians, destabilizing whole societies and holding power — as the International Crisis Group outlined in its recent paper, Misery as a Strategy.

A dumbed-down public can be manipulated, fooled, and distracted more easily, allowing those in power to get away with murder, quite literally and on a massive scale. Robespierre said it best: “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

While we live in a world where the rules of conduct are melting away at a dizzying pace, there is a solution to this growing entropy on the international stage. We must change our social media behavior.

Accompanying me in Mosul was my friend, the global philanthropist Amed Khan. One of his ideas is to invite Vice President Mike Pence to come to Mosul and witness the plight of Christians there. We can hope that Pence and other leaders will take Amed up on that invitation.

But I would extend it even further.

We don’t have to give up Instagram or any other platform. But we do need to log off from time to time, to take personal responsibility to engage with the world beyond the screen. When we choose to live within an isolated bubble, allowing barbarism to prevail, everyone will lose eventually.

The Hunger Games teaches us that, too.

Founder of the Radcliffe Foundation, which sponsors his continuing work on refugee issues, Frank Giustra is the former chair of Yorkton Securities and the co-founder of Lionsgate Entertainment. He is also an active executive member of the International Crisis Group and created the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership with former president Bill Clinton. 

IMAGE: Displaced Iraqi civilians who fled Mosul gather at Khazer camp, Iraq December 13, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Awad