Friday, January 31, 2020
Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution Is Long Overdue
As
he did in 2016, Bernie is offering something unique to the political landscape:
a transformative vision for a more just and equitable country, and a renewal of
American democracy.
His movement is built upon
four central tenets:
The American political system
is currently broken, unable to respond to the needs of the people and the
planet.
There needs to be a political
realignment along lines of economic self-interest, uniting the working class.
That realignment, combined
with a powerful appeal to common-sense morality (anti-racist, anti-war,
pro-environment, universal inclusion), will build a new progressive majority.
Even so, there must also be a
revival of citizen participation in politics, lest the movement be crushed by
big-money interests.
Sanders is correct on all four
fronts. Until such a program is successfully implemented, America’s endemic
social and political crises will continue unabated.
American politics are locked
in a decades-long stalemate. The Republicans block any major Democratic
initiative and vice versa. This arrangement invariably preserves the status
quo, frustrating anybody who tries to change things democratically.
Sanders’ political
revolution, which unites working people across the racial divide, promises
a release from this stasis, and there’s ample evidence that it will deliver the
kind of electoral victory in the House and Senate required to do just that.
Before I turn to that
evidence, however, let’s make clear what it would mean for American politics if
Sanders were to triumph this November: We could begin to meaningfully deal with
climate change, wealth inequality, the housing and health care crises, and
perhaps wind down our forever wars in the Middle East; under a moderate
Democrat, nothing will get done.
Despite this, establishment
favorites like Sen. Amy
Klobuchar of Minnesota and form South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete
Buttigieg maintain Sanders is a dreamer, his platform would
never make it through Congress, and only their incrementalist goals have a
chance of being realized. What goes unsaid is that the moderate
agenda would do nothing to alter the basic realities of American life in
which the rich get richer while working people continue their slide into debt
peonage.
The moderate Democrats have an
alibi: those evil Republicans won’t let them do more. This, of course, is
total nonsense. It’s their wealthy donors who won’t let them do more. The
Republicans wouldn’t let them do anything.
If, on the other hand, Sanders
can alter the balance of American politics with a new majoritarian coalition,
real, necessary change could happen.
As noted above, Sanders
intends to achieve this by dramatically expanding the electorate — something he
has already done by energizing young voters and deploying his legions of
supporters to the kinds of communities politicians tend to overlook. Sanders
has also proved more popular with the white working-class than Democratic
candidates have in recent election cycles. His appeal to this bloc is the same
as it is to people of color. The difference is that the former has
overwhelmingly voted Republican in recent years. If Sanders could win over even
a portion of these voters, he’d likely break our political stalemate.
One byproduct of a
multi-racial working class coalition is that it would create the conditions to
finally end the American political system’s de facto protection of white
privilege, which the modern Republican Party has been able to preserve and
perpetuate since it began targeting Dixiecrats as part of its racist Southern
strategy.
This is the bedrock of Trump’s
white nativist appeal, allowing him to gain the allegiance of many white voters
without providing any improvement to their material conditions. Sanders can
take a sledgehammer
to that bond by meaningfully bettering the lives of all working
people. This alone could shatter the GOP’s hold on power.
It’s a beautiful paradox that
Sanders’ appeal among the white working class might break the deadlock that has
kept America’s structural racism in place. A Sanders presidency would mean that
anti-racists would control the federal government, which remains the most
powerful instrument available to address this foundational crime of American
society.
A lifetime of following
American politics tells me that little if any progress can be made in this
country without tackling the persistence of structural racism; as long as it
goes unaddressed, it will continue to harm and pervert our collective sense of
justice. The Sanders movement is committed to doing what’s necessary to
overcome this scourge, going beyond the fatuous claims of equal opportunity
promoted by the Democratic establishment. Sanders calls for direct investment
in poor communities of color, universal voting rights and
registration, criminal justice reform and a radical reduction in
incarceration, all while seeking nothing less than the eradication of the
racial wealth gap. It’s an agenda that aims to lift every family into the
middle class. If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a link to his
platform. Suffice to say that if he were successful, it would truly be a
new day in America.
Indeed, ending our political
stalemate would usher in the kind of progressive change polls indicate Americans
would welcome with open arms. These policies include a reduced Pentagon budget,
sane gun laws, a humane immigration policy (with a direct route to
citizenship), the expansion of Social Security and the erasure of student debt,
guaranteed vacation time, a $60,000 minimum salary for teachers, equal pay for
equal work, a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare for all. Perhaps most
important, we could respond to the climate emergency on a scale scientists say
is necessary.
Of course, no discussion of
climate change is complete without mentioning the other plague on America’s
political system—what I call the lobbying industrial complex. Every Democrat on
Capitol Hill claims to respect climate science, but only the true progressives
have been willing to buck the fossil fuel industry. Given their hostility to
the Sanders agenda, it’s reasonable to assume that big-money donors and even
bigger money lobbying would conspire against him. Perhaps you’re wondering:
Would they succeed?
If he were a mere politician,
the answer might be yes. But Sanders is also the lead organizer of a mass
movement, the central aim of which is to mobilize Americans to take back their
government from big-money interests, and one that is designed to prevail. If
you think any House member is going to get away with voting against President
Sanders’ climate policies, to choose one example, you’re simply not paying
attention. Any such official would face pressure from his or her constituents
far surpassing a handful of expensive suits. Indeed, he or she would be
unlikely to survive a primary; call it democracy in action.
Finally, with the Iowa caucus
less than a week away, it’s important we step back and recognize that the
legions of Bernie backers are having the time of their lives. This is a
magnetic movement, with loads of conscientious, intelligent people of all ages,
from all backgrounds. It turns out that redeeming American society is a blast!
And the fun is just beginning.
A Tool for Dismantling Capitalism Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Tannara Yelland / Los Angeles Review
of Books
“Capital City: Gentrification
and the Real Estate State”
A book by Samuel Stein
Over computerized images of a
nondescript early American city and a rushing river, a man with a quiet voice
and a delightful Philadelphia accent describes the process by which the city of
Franklin developed its first water distribution system. The Goodhill Water
Works, the voice explains, was created after a series of yellow fever outbreaks
that the city blamed on contaminated local water. This led town elites to
decide that a new water source was required for the growing municipality.
Despite the fact that the state-of-the-art space doubled as a tourist
attraction while it pumped fresh water straight into town, residents could only
access the water if they had the money to pay for installation and a
subscription. Otherwise, they would have to use the few free fountains placed
around the city. The bulk of the city’s residents — including indentured
servants, a small number of enslaved people, and free workers — had no time,
money, or, in some cases, freedom to take in the beautiful grounds and stunning
architecture. For them, despite this impressive achievement on the road to
their city’s modernization, it was more or less as if nothing had changed at
all.
Franklin, as you may have
guessed, is not a real place. It is the creation of Justin Roczniak, who
publishes a series on YouTube (where he goes by donoteat01) using the video
game “Cities: Skylines” to explore the historical development of cities, and to
discuss how inequality has been built into American cities from their earliest
moments. Starting with an Indigenous settlement along a river, Roczniak
describes the displacements and conflicts that have gone into city-building, as
well as developments such as the carceral system and organized labor. A
self-described socialist, Roczniak uses this historical narrative to examine
“how we view cities and what cities are capable of,” as he told Kotaku last
year.
The series weds the often
wonkish world of urban planning discourse to the pop culture juggernaut that is
gaming, and in doing so claims a space in both fields for leftist analysis. And
both urban planning and gaming are in dire need of some socialism. In recent
years, the public urban planning conversation has been dominated by “urbanism,”
a bland quasi-progressive ideology that typically lacks any coherent class or
power analysis. Now a dominant tendency among city-planners and many municipal
politicians, urbanism treats procedural changes like tweaks to zoning laws as
key to solving the problems of the modern city.
Because urbanism dominates
discussions about cities — about what ails them and how to fix them —
structural analyses have been sorely lacking. The discourse around
gentrification still focuses too much on fancy coffee shops and not enough on
systematic disinvestment in areas inhabited by people of color and the working
class. For urbanists, unaffordable housing can be solved by increasing the
amount and density of housing units through “upzoning,” while a more structural
analysis would focus on rent control or building more public housing.
Much like Roczniak’s YouTube
series, Samuel Stein’s captivating “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real
Estate State” is an effort to shift the discussion away from urbanism and
toward socialism. Stein offers a planner and geographer’s perspective on the
way the city works today, but also shows that planners — even those interested
in dismantling oppressive systems — often uphold the power of capital. “[C]apitalism
makes the best of planning impossible,” he writes. “[A]ny good that planners do
is filtered through a system that dispossesses those who cannot pay.” It is
clear that Stein is interested in recuperating a more expansive set of
possibilities for cities and city-dwellers than exists under capitalism, and
that he sees planning as an avenue toward them. “Capital City” ultimately shows
that socialists belong in the public conversation about cities — a conversation
that has long been controlled by neoliberal politics ranging from austerity on
the right to urbanism on the center-left.
¤
“Capital City” begins with a
brief history of planning as both practice and profession. Stein shows how race
and class often determine the way that space is structured in the United
States. In addition to noting the racist practices of redlining and
segregation, Stein discusses a foundational aspect of American history that has
often been ignored in mainstream discussions of how cities and space are
apportioned: the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples. He shows that
settler colonialism has been — and continues to be — key to the establishment
and expansion of American cities. As Europeans arrived on the land now known as
the United States and dispossessed Indigenous nations, they engaged in a
“spatial form of primitive accumulation,” building their early towns’ street
grids over top of Indigenous settlements and trails.
Click here to
read long excerpts of “Capital City” at Google Books.
After outlining this history,
Stein lays out his book’s central argument: in recent decades, the
financialization of real estate has given rise to what he terms the “real
estate state.” Real estate capital exerts inordinate power over the levers of
government, he argues, taking advantage of deindustrialization to extract value
from cities. “When manufacturing firms exited post-war urban centers,” Stein
writes, “they left behind not just a tremendous amount of property but also a
political vacuum.” Real estate capital was perfectly situated to take advantage
of the glut of now-empty warehouses and abandoned space, and, because it was
necessarily “place-based,” it had always been a presence in local politics.
As politicians sought to fill
the gap left by the disappearance of industry, many aligned with
development-friendly movements and explicitly pushed for gentrification as a
way of “renewing” city cores. Desperate to retain capital investment — a
desperation that remains today, as the grotesque municipal competition for
Amazon’s “HQ2” illustrated — cities have taken to enticing developers and real
estate investors with “geobribes.” One of the most egregious examples that
Stein names is Tax Increment Financing, a “widely used development incentive”
in which a city designates a “blighted” area, issues bonds to pay for
infrastructure upgrades, and then gives the improved area over to a private
developer to build private housing or retail space. The city is responsible for
making the bondholders whole whether the area is profitable or not; meanwhile,
if it is profitable, the developer accrues most of that windfall
(save whatever they pay in taxes), and another neighborhood is dramatically
gentrified. Strategies like these allow real estate developers to reap profits
through a cruel, mutually constitutive process of dis- and hyper-investment
(the latter is more commonly called gentrification).
While much of the United
States is experiencing disinvestment, rarefied areas are experiencing a
flood of capital invested in land and property, resulting in skyrocketing costs
of living. The two processes go hand in hand, Stein explains: disinvestment
causes property values to crater and leads better-heeled (often white) residents
to depart, typically taking needed community services and amenities with them.
These declining property values then create the conditions for a new round of
hyper-investment, which takes advantage of a gap between profit potential and
existing value. In other words, disinvestment causes property values to decline
enough so that developers can come back, years or decades later, and make a
killing, sweeping up now-cheapened real estate and “flipping” it for sale to a
new round of gentrifying buyers.
¤
Despite writing that real
estate capital’s power is a global phenomenon, Stein is overwhelmingly focused
on the United States, and specifically New York City; readers from outside this
epicenter of real estate capital will largely be left to draw their own conclusions
about how Stein’s analysis relates to their own surroundings. But there are
good reasons to focus on New York City too. First, as Stein acknowledges, it is
the city he lives in and knows best. More importantly, the focus on New York
City allows Stein to draw on the city’s history as a site for early and extreme
experiments in financializing the spaces in which we live.
The city was a leader in
public housing and rent control in the first several decades of the 20th
century, owing largely to well-organized tenants’ movements. Yet after the
financial crisis of the 1970s, it led a different way — rapidly reversing those
earlier working-class gains. Stein explains that New York was pulled back “from
the brink of bankruptcy” by a coalition of “banks, real estate interests and
municipal unions, who disciplined the city through a process of privatization
and disinvestment from social services that continues to this day.” Local
politicians, restrained and still smarting from their brush with economic disaster,
were eager to appease capital. In addition to buying up abandoned industrial
spaces, enterprising real estate interests began to eye neighborhoods that had
low property values due to the longstanding racist practice of redlining (by
which black residents were forced into specific neighborhoods that were then
systematically underserviced). They saw in both locations an opportunity to
capitalize on disinvestment. By converting industrial space for residential
purposes, pushing out poor (mostly nonwhite) residents, improving existing
housing stock, and replacing it with more luxurious spaces, landlords and
developers attracted higher-income residents, raised property values, and
remade whole segments of the city “from places into products.”
Today, New York is a
playground for the wealthy where thousands of luxury apartments sit empty,
serving as some business tycoon’s fifth pied-à-terre, as the workers who make
the city run crowd into cramped apartments or, worse yet, don’t have a home at
all. The situation has been exacerbated by city and state governments happy to
sell out working-class residents in favor of private investment.
To illustrate this last point,
Stein looks at the policies of New York’s two most recent mayors: incumbent
Bill de Blasio and billionaire business magnate Michael Bloomberg. Though the
two are often framed as polar political opposites, with Bloomberg prioritizing
corporate interests and de Blasio a progressive, Stein shows that, in many
ways, de Blasio has continued Bloomberg-era real estate policies that have
allowed investors and developers to run roughshod over what was once a livable
city for the 99 percent.
Both Bloomberg and de Blasio
have used zoning as a way to reshape certain areas of the city. Bloomberg’s
practice was to rezone neighborhoods. Stein writes that there was a specific,
racist character to Bloomberg’s pattern of upzoning primarily working-class,
black areas while, in essence, protecting the character and value of primarily
white neighborhoods. By contrast, de Blasio has been a proponent of
inclusionary zoning, and so is widely seen as progressive by urbanist types.
Stein, however, does a superb job of describing exactly why de Blasio’s policy
does not deserve that reputation. Because it requires some (usually small)
number of housing units in a new development to be “affordable,” it relies on
building more unaffordable housing in order to add a small number of
affordable housing units in a given development (and even then, the measure of
an “affordable” apartment is unreachable for many New Yorkers). De Blasio’s
metric for “affordability,” while an improvement over Bloomberg’s, still
effectively prices out 57 percent of New York’s Black and Latinx residents.
¤
Stein ends with a set of
prescriptions for how radical planners might seek to use the tools at their
disposal to “unmake the real estate state.” He is attentive to the difficulties
that this call to action involves: “All consciousness is contradictory,” he
writes almost apologetically, “but the situation for capitalist urban planners
is especially thorny. They are simultaneously far-seeing visionaries and
day-to-day pragmatists.” Ultimately, however, he sees promise for radical
planning within the capitalist state (and this despite his earlier claim that
by helping establish spatial order in capitalist states, “planners — whatever
their intention — are working for the maintenance, defense and expansion of
capitalism”). At the close of his book, Stein suggests that leftist planners
could both make use of existing tools and widen the horizons of what is
possible. In answer to the perennial question “reform or revolution,” it seems
Stein would echo the little girl in the meme who asks, “Why not both?”
In this prescriptive section,
Stein has something to offer almost everyone. Are you merely dipping your toes
in the idea that the capitalist city has problems? Perhaps you’d be interested
in using inclusionary zoning to target wealthy white neighborhoods for
integration or protecting working-class areas with preservation policies.
Skeptical about the prospect of repurposing tools originally designed for the
benefit of the white and the wealthy? You might want to move on to socializing
land and “unmaking the social relations that produce capitalist private
property.” If that gives you pause and makes you ask how, exactly, we are
supposed to accomplish such a goal, it’s time to look at the final section of
this chapter: politics. Here, Stein readily acknowledges that planners cannot
unmake the real estate state on their own — not even close. Mass politics that
both forcefully advocate for specific goals and “make the status quo untenable”
are integral to the process.
It’s clear from his
prescriptions that Stein sees a joint effort between mass political movements
and radical, avowedly anticapitalist planners as a fruitful path. Yet this
prescription, simultaneously the most ambitious and the most realistic for
actually effecting lasting change, feels tacked on given how vanishingly little
space activists and organized grassroots politics are afforded throughout the
book. He might have discussed previous examples of collaborations between
planners and activists — collaborations that sometimes worked well and other
times resulted in disaster. While groups like the Planners Network put
progressive planners to work with community organizations, the midcentury
project of “urban renewal” involved razing “blighted” (usually poor and/or
nonwhite) areas to create new and apparently improved housing or retail,
displacing existing tenants and disrupting their communities. A more
comprehensive exploration of the complex historical relationship between
planning and activism, and the tensions and possibilities in that pairing,
might have grounded the analysis in a way that would give his conclusions more
force.
Nevertheless, “Capital City”
is a fascinating read for anyone interested in cities, capitalism, racism, or
housing. It will undoubtedly be a great resource for socialists who are looking
for common ground with urbanist friends or family (or a friendly method of
radicalization). Stein has produced a book that is concise and digestible,
without sacrificing analytical heft. Socialists are re-entering the popular
conversation about cities from coast to coast, reminding people that winning
another world is not only possible but necessary, and that we can only do it
together. Stein’s work is an important addition to this movement, and,
crucially, a promising tool for introducing more people to these ideas.
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BY CHRIS HEDGES
The Davos Set's Most Dangerous Delusion
Few thinkers are more
deserving of criticism than Milton Friedman. Not only was he the late
20th century’s leading proponent of unfettered capitalism, he served as
one of the intellectual fathers of the neoliberal ideology that has been so
dominant (and destructive) over the past 50 years. It is no exaggeration to say
that the Chicago School economist was one of the most—if not the most—influential
ideologists of the past half-century, shaping economic policy in Washington and
beyond while providing an effective intellectual apologia for capitalists, who
seldom fail to put profit over people.
All of this makes it hard to
defend Friedman in any way, and I have little desire to do so. The neoliberal
prophet’s ideas and theories played an essential role in the right-wing
economic project that took
off during the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980s; today’s
conservative and libertarian ideologues continue to cloak their pro-corporate
agenda (deregulation, tax cuts, and so forth.) in the Friedmanite language of
liberty. All this being said, however, it has been amusing in recent months to
see the dead economist become something of a scapegoat for the very type of
people who once used his work to defend their bad behavior from critics.
This phenomenon was evident
last week at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, where the
world’s political and economic elite come together every year to pretend that
they care more about the world than they care about making money. The theme
of this year’s event was “stakeholder capitalism” and the role of
business in society—or, officially, “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and
Sustainable World.” Five months after the Business Roundtable released
a memo on the “purpose of a corporation,” in which the group of
America’s top CEOs advocated a form of stakeholder capitalism (as opposed to
shareholder capitalism), much of the world’s economic elite are now ostensibly
getting on board with this “new” model of capitalism.
“I feel that everyone is
conscious that the old idea of … maximizing profits, maximizing shareholder
value, the old Milton Friedman concept, is now part of the past,” declared
Maurice Levy, chair of ad agency conglomerate Publicis Groupe, at the
forum. During that discussion, other top capitalists likewise rejected old
Milton’s theory of shareholder primacy. “Capitalism as we have known it is
dead,” pronounced
Marc Benioff, billionaire founder of the Silicon Valley company Salesforce.
“This obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has
led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency,” he continued,
insisting that stakeholder capitalism has finally hit a “tipping point.”
So, 50 years after writing his
article on the social responsibility (or lack thereof) of corporate
America, Milton Friedman has become the whipping boy for wealthy billionaires
and elite Davos regulars hoping to improve their image. It is certainly
entertaining to watch Friedman get some of the ridicule he so richly deserves,
of course, and it’s long overdue that his free-market fundamentalism be tossed
into the dustbin of history. Yet at the same time, it is a stretch to say that
the rise of “shareholder capitalism” over the past 50 years is the fault of
some dead economist, no matter how influential.
The fact is that Friedman’s
work—and that of other right-wing economists, such as F.A. Hayek—was a
great apologia for corporate America, providing a moral defense of its
unscrupulous and greedy behavior. Friedman’s justification of unfettered
capitalism was based on his narrow (and entirely negative) definition of
freedom, which was incredibly useful in the hands of such billionaire
businessmen as the Koch
brothers, who fought all forms of state economic intervention in the name
of freedom. For all his ideological writings, however, much of what Friedman
wrote was simply descriptive. For example, when he said that the role of the
corporation is to make money for its shareholders, he was simply describing
what capitalists have always done. Friedman’s essay on the corporate
executive’s function didn’t really posit anything new; he was merely describing
the logic of capitalism. The corporate executive, Friedman wrote, has
“direct responsibility to his employers,” and his or her responsibility is to
“conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be
to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the
society.”
One of the attendees of this
year’s Davos conference, McKinsey & Company partner Kevin Sneader (who
was in
the news last year for falsely
denying the firm’s role in advising U.S. Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement on its inhumane immigration policies), maintained that
the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith,
“was very clear in saying that the responsibility of the businessperson was to
give to the community and enrich everyone.”
While it’s true that Smith
wasn’t a free-market fundamentalist, as portrayed by libertarian ideologues,
there’s a difference between saying how things ought to be and how
things are, and Smith was not naive about the businessperson’s
motivations. In his own words, the author of “The Wealth of Nations” said that
the “consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which
determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufacturers,
or in some particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade.” The most useful
employment of capital, Smith wrote, is the one that yields the capitalist the
most profit, and this employment is “not always the most useful for society.”
We can find similar accounts
of the capitalist in the writings of Karl Marx, who pointed to what he called
the “coercive laws of competition,” which force capitalists to adopt the same
methods and tactics as their competitors (or cease to be capitalists and go out
of business). Profit is the single motivation for capitalists, and it is naive
to think that they will put the interests of the community, their employees,
their customers or the environment before their short-term profit (at least
without being forced to do so).
The latest public embrace of
“stakeholder capitalism” by America’s corporate elite is more of a PR stunt
than anything else, and the co-opting of “progressive values” by Wall Street
elites and corporate executives is little more than a desperate attempt to
placate the growing anger and opposition to capitalism and the billionaire
class (not just in the United States, but internationally). This cynical
strategy was on full display when the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David
Solomon, issued
a statement from his Davos resort Thursday stating that the Wall
Street firm—the biggest underwriter of initial public offerings in America—will
no longer take public any companies with all-white and all-male boards of
directors. “Starting on July 1st in the U.S. and Europe, we’re not going to
take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with
a focus on women,” he declared.
There is perhaps no better
example than the above of what the great political theorist Nancy Fraser has
termed “progressive neoliberalism”—which she defines as a strategic alliance
between such emancipatory social movements as feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ
rights—with neoliberal forces that use “the charisma of their progressive
allies to spread a veneer of emancipation over their own regressive project of
massive upward redistribution.” The aim of progressive
neoliberalism, Fraser
remarks, is not to “abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it,
‘empowering’ ‘talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise
to the top.”
An inherently class-specific
ideal, this is designed to ensure that the so-called “deserving” individuals
from underrepresented groups can attain “positions and pay on a par with
straight White men of their own class.” This model of meritocratic
neoliberalism is the opposite of radical, as it ultimately helps sustain the
unjust system that keeps the great majority of people from all groups exploited
and powerless.
In the end, individual
capitalists may genuinely care about the environment, global poverty and
inequality, or any of the other noble causes discussed at Davos, but they
operate within an impersonal and amoral system that does not care about their
personal conscience. (Plus, to succeed in this type of environment, the less
empathy one has the better; a recent
study found that as many as one in five business leaders may have
psychopathic tendencies, compared with around 1% to 2% in the general
population).
Milton Friedman was at least
honest about the ruthless and cutthroat nature of capitalism, unlike Davos
elites and a growing number of corporate leaders who promote the contradictory
idea of a kind of compassionate capitalism. In truth, the only way to meet the
enormous challenges and threats we face today is to look critically at the very
system that engendered these problems in the first place. Not surprisingly,
those who benefit most from this system are not prepared to do this.
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BY CHRIS HEDGES
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