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By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report
Noam Chomsky once said “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”
Today, this profound quote from an important figure is ensconced in irony, not only in light of Chomsky’s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein, but also regarding the entire ruling class structure’s facilitation of the pedophile’s rise to the top. Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, talks about this privilege and the elite delusions that capitalism and capitalists can save the planet from the very problems that they create.
Giridharadas joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report and shares how the world today, one of vast inequality and stark class divide, is perpetuated by the self-serving and egotistic mentality of oligarchs who see themselves as humanity’s figureheads.
Many of the elite class, especially those in Silicon Valley, believe they are shaping the world for the better. They believe, according to Giridharadas, “the way to solve gender inequality is through Silicon Valley tech companies. The way to solve the environment is through Tesla. The way to solve poverty in Africa is MasterCard and Goldman Sachs figuring out credit cards for rural people in Kenya.”
Their belief that they are the agents of change, efficiency and good in the world leads them to gut government programs and proceed to point “to the failures of government, failures they helped engineer, as evidence for why government cannot be entrusted with the solution of public problems, thus leaving only them, the private sector, to step in,” Giridharadas explains.
As for the Jeffrey Epstein-aligned elite, they are different because they can still function as good capitalists but have no reservations about the morality of their work. After Epstein’s conviction in 2008, Giridharadas spells out that Epstein surrounded himself with these people, those who do their business and have no trouble looking away.
“[Epstein] picked a group of people who are expert, if at nothing else, in putting fingers in their ears when people begin to scream.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Victor Castellanos
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women, who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack the empathy to see the suffering and abuse of others whether that was sexual abuse of children, the financial meltdowns they orchestrated, the military fiascos they backed, the addictions and overdoses they enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked and the technologies they failed to protect people against.
“People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good,” he writes. “They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.”
The Epstein emails, in my view, he writes, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.
This class includes Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Scientists. Royals. Superlawyers. From former Treasury Secretary and former president of Harvard Lawrence Summers to Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, Alan Durshowitz, Woody Allen, Deepak Chopra, Peter Thiel and even Noam Chomsky.
“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he writes, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”
“These people are ,” Giridharadas writes, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”
It is the class of new mandarins Giridharadas examines in his book Winners Take All, a class that has sold us out, degraded our democracy and allowed corporate and oligarchic predators to immiserate our lives. While mouthing a cloying morality, positing themselves as champions of the poor, they assiduously defend a status quo that serves their interests, not ours, a system of ruthless and often cruel economic exploitation unlike anything seen since the age of the robber barons. Joining me to discuss his book is Anand Giridharadas.
The book is great, and we don’t find out till the end that it’s not just very fine reporting into the machinery of our, at this point, global ruling elite, but you spend time within it yourself, which I find kind of fascinating.
One of the things in the book you write about is the heavy recruitment that these large firms like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs use, essentially convincing recruits that they are going to make a better world. And I wonder whether you were susceptible to that. You worked for a year for McKinsey.
Anand Giridharadas
I wasn’t, that was not… my story was a little bit more unique and frankly mercenary. I wanted to be a journalist and wanted to be a journalist for the New York Times since I was like 14 or 15 years old and started writing for my school newspaper and told everybody who would listen that that was my single goal in life.
And I got some internships with the Times actually in high school and then got in college. And I had a mentor there, Jill Abramson, who later became the editor of the paper, but was a junior editor in Washington at that point. And she gave me some career advice, and she said, don’t spend your 20s hanging around the building in New York and Washington trying to get these internships.
A thousand young, aspiring journalists vying for each freelance piece, each internship. She said, go far out into the world and try to learn about something that other people don’t know. And so I kind of thought about going international somewhere and I applied for all these journalism jobs and it’s obviously pretty tough to get a foreign correspondent job out of college.
And so then I had the idea of like, let me just go take some job somewhere I actually wanna be, somewhere I wanna go, right? And my family had come to this country from India and I had a lot of, I had a complex relationship to India. I didn’t like it, I was fascinated by it. The first thing I learned about it was that my parents had chosen to get out of it.
So I thought, okay, I’m gonna make myself a writer by going to India. And I tried to get these journalism jobs in India, that didn’t work. So I was like, okay, I’m just gonna get a job. And I figured out that you could get a job at one of these consulting firms, which would take someone who studied what I did, which was the history of political thought, and would send you far afield in the world to be a business consultant.
So I took this job. It wasn’t particularly lucrative. I was making $14,000 a year, working at a local Indian salary, living in a little room in someone’s apartment. But it got me to India. And within a few months, I realized it was a huge mistake and started applying again for journalism jobs and got one a year later and joined the New York Times, which was my dream, and started doing journalism.
But that one year, along with some later experiences I had, and I’ve been a full-time writer, I should say, ever since 2005 when I was 23 years old. But that experience, that one year at McKinsey in India, was an eye-opening glimpse into, I think, certain mentalities in the business world that are important to understand if you wanna understand the world we live in.
And often, and I say this about myself now, we are often critical of these systems and often those of us who are most critical of them don’t actually have much human understanding of what’s going on in them, right? And it’s very important to understand what you’re up against.
It’s very important, I hear people say all the time, you know, things about how the media work. There are people who might have theories about how you and I do our jobs and I often hear them and think sometimes it’s just so off base that I think you’re not necessarily a very effective critic of how these systems work if you don’t understand them.
And what I saw that year was a business world, I mean I was operating in India, but a kind of, in many ways, new kind of business elite that had emerged over the last generation in which businesses were being kind of rationalized and rationalized and rationalized. Any fat was being cut, everything was being optimized.
But what that actually often meant was an indifference to or disregard for human beings, people becoming collateral damage to the hegemony of the spreadsheet. And it was enough to drive me away within a few months, left just after a year. But it stayed in my mind. And when I wrote Winners Take All a long time later, it was probably still in there.
Chris Hedges
Well, you interview a lot of the people who are inside the system, many of whom have conflicted feelings about being within the system. But I also began as a freelancer. I just went to El Salvador and began as a freelance reporter. Jill Abramson is right. I didn’t hang, I didn’t even get an internship like you at the New York Times.
But I found it fascinating the efforts to which these very mercenary corporations, you know, play on the idealism of those they are attempting to recruit. I didn’t know that until I read your book. Just explain how that works because once they get inside the system, at least from many of the interviews you carried out, they realize they’ve been had.
Anand Giridharadas
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think there was a time, maybe not that long ago in history, when a company, Goldman Sachs or Coca-Cola or what have you, didn’t have to engage in the charade of my subtitle, right? In which they could just say, we’re Coca-Cola, big famous brand, make a lot of money, you’ll have a great career here, you’ll have mobility, you’ll get promoted.
Or Goldman Sachs could say, we’ll send you to Hong Kong, we’ll send you to London, you’ll have this, you make a ton of money, you’ll live in Tribeca, you will date models, like whatever the pitch is, right? But as rising inequality over the last generation, as you’ve so brilliantly chronicled, as that has become not just an economic fact, but a felt fact, a fact that people know in their bones, that as, you know, is not just a feeling people have on the left, but is actually animating quite a bit of rage on the right as well, where you have in different forms an anti-corporate revolt that’s bipartisan.
I think these companies have realized that for many purposes, for hiring, for dealing with Washington, for having consumers want to buy what they are selling, for all the ways in which they interface with the public, they have to deal with this issue of the public potentially hating them for the world that those corporations have wrought. And so these corporations, as I tell in Winners Take All, have evolved and articulated and disseminated a story that serves them now in this environment.
And that story cannot just be we’re a good company, they’ll give you a great career. It is: you are changing the world by joining this company. By joining Coca-Cola, by joining Goldman Sachs, by joining Facebook, Meta, you are changing the world. You are making the world a better place. You are liberating people. You’re gonna transform education. You’re gonna transform these societal things.
Almost to the point of saying not only are you not a bad person — like in case that you’re the idealistic college student at the peak of your idealism who’s like I don’t want to go work for Meta — not only are you not doing anything wrong by coming to us, think about this, what these companies really say is you are, in a sense, hurting people if you go choose to work in some other line of work where you wouldn’t be able to have this impact.
What, are you gonna go work for some nonprofit? You’re helping 10 people get a better education? In the telling of this story, you work at Meta, you could change education for a billion people if you had the right stuff. And then you could find versions of this pitch for consumers, right? If you buy this cookie, we’ll donate $1 to every one of these, or you can find this for… what they come and tell senators and congressmen in Washington, that we’re not just a company bringing jobs to your district, that doesn’t cut it anymore, right?
We have these civilizational missions. And what I tried to do in Winners Take All was deconstruct this as I think a new ruling class ideology for this age that was a wrinkle on, it was an innovation on the earlier story. It was no longer enough to just offer people money, you had to offer them this idea that change, which in theory would be a thing visited against powerful elites of this kind, that change was now in this story something that could only be achieved using the skills, resources, systems of this very elite.
Chris Hedges
Well, you also point out in the book that they sell this idea that you are going to learn skill sets at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or anywhere else that will make you more effective as a citizen even if you don’t stay with the company. The idea that we’re training you with esoteric skills that you can use anywhere.
Anand Giridharadas
Yeah, and this is a very important part of the story because I think with the rise, that’s the story I tell in the book is, with the rise both of management consulting and high finance, right? So think about a McKinsey and a Goldman Sachs. Different, but what they both have in common is, think about, just to simplify this for people, think about, that show “The Office,” right, that everybody knows?
In a certain way, that’s how a lot of companies were running, coming out of World War II in the post-war years. Meaning, in a pre-internet, pre-McKinsey, pre-high finance, saturating everything age, you had your company, you had your boss, right? How did companies like that find customers to sell to? Well, like the guy who runs a place like that knows some people, went to high school with some people, makes some calls, you sell to some customers.
I’m oversimplifying, but how do you hire people? Well, there’s some people in your town, you put out an ad, those people come to your thing, you hire them, right? It’s not particularly rationalized or optimized. It’s sort of like you go with what you got, right? And by the way, a lot of us, that’s how we were eating before we could look up every restaurant review in the internet age.
What the consulting firms and the high finance firms and in a way, shareholder activism, various things over the last generation did, was arrive in businesses, keep that picture of the office kind of company, paper company in your head, arrive in businesses like that and start lifting up the hood and being like, why are you only selling to eight customers that you happen to go to high school with? You should have a customer base that is rationalized to be the most optimal possible customer base for you, not just people you happen to know or people whose numbers you happen to have.
Why are you hiring people from this town only? Because these people are actually quite expensive. What if you hired these people? What if you ran ads elsewhere, right? I’m simplifying the story, but what a lot of these outsiders, right, the consultants who came in or the bankers who came in and bought a company, turned it around, what a lot of them were doing was saying, this cozy, clubby, like informal thing but actually everything, every element of everything needs to be rationalized.
And so they brought these frameworks and skills and tools. And not all of it is terrible. I mean, some of it is like, if you’re purchasing tires for a car, like there’s a kind of helter-skelter way to do it, which is calling guys you know, and then there’s a process you could imagine where you’d find like the safest, best, cheapest tire in a more concerted way. So a lot of this kind of concertedness came into business.
But what I describe in the book is that the frameworks that they were bringing into these companies, right? How do you purchase more effectively? How do you do this more effectively? How do you reduce your wage bill and not pay for the use of people’s time that you don’t need? What it actually amounted to in human practice was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing every bit of fat is one way to think about it. But often what the fat was was people, community stability, right?
Yeah, you can hire like people from 25 countries to do the work of a paper mill and they could all be virtual and whatever. But if you have 25 people from the same town, there’s a certain connection in that town that you might be [inaudible]. You might then have a loyalty to the local high school, you might then sponsor the local high school football team because of that connection, right?
When everything got rationalized and everything got squeezed and everything got optimized and every supply chain, every… it was all like algorithmically remade, you ended up with an economy that feels like what we live in now, which is a lot of efficiency, but not a lot of humanity. And companies that are very big and employ lots of people, but are kind of loyal to nowhere.
So when you think about where we ended up, which is the biggest companies in the world based in this country, companies that have changed how everything functions how work functions how the economy functions but companies that whose success doesn’t seem to have implications for everyday people’s success I think that the rise of those frameworks are a big part of the story.
And then what I tell in the book is that those frameworks have now been imported into the world of do-gooding into the world of philanthropy, even into the world of government and public health. These other worlds saying these same frameworks that helped business kind of squeeze human beings and remove them from the equation of how a society should be run should now be used to fight AIDS and reform education and figure out how to battle poverty.
And that is, again, as if it wasn’t enough for some of these frameworks to dehumanize people through corporations, they’re now dehumanizing people in many cases through this kind of separate phase of do-gooding.
Chris Hedges
I want to seize on that word efficiency because efficiency in the eyes of people who are attempting to accumulate more wealth. It’s actually not efficiency. It’s about creating a system whereby workers are immiserated and disempowered. You see that within academia with the decline of 10-year jobs.
Everybody is an adjunct who’s earning, what, $5,000 a course and can’t get health insurance and probably driving an Uber on top of it. What they define as efficiency is really a mechanism to increase profits for the elite that you write about at the expense of everyone else.
Anand Giridharadas
It is and that’s right and I would say, and I think about this a lot, I want someone to write about this in a way. I feel it’s a really powerful thing that someone could do. You know we talk about these big plutocrats and Elon Musk and all those people.
I think something more universal and fundamental has happened that we haven’t really been able to name which is that I just feel this walking down the street living my life that in almost every kind of crevice of human experience now, it feels to me like a corporate mentality of that kind of what they would call efficiency, what I would say is a kind of squeezing or draining of a certain level of humanity between people. It has happened everywhere.
So I’ll give you just little examples, right? Where people don’t, I don’t think people think about this as part of what we’re talking about. You wanna get your hair cut now, right? Like you used to, like you live in a place, like you go to that same barber every so often, you’d have a relationship, you’d go in, pop in, you ask for an appointment, maybe you come back later, you call.
In a lot of places in America, you can’t do that anymore. Even, this is not a big business we’re talking about, it’s small business. But there’s this company called Vagaro, and there’s others, that is like an appointment broker for that company. And it’s very helpful to these barbers, I’m sure.
It allows them to organize their day and not spend all the time on the phone, feeling calls. But what it has done, and I’ve seen this in my neighborhood, I talk about this with my friends, it has created a world in which none of us can have that personal thing with the barber anymore.
There’s just this company in between that decides your appointments. And sometimes you have a crisis and you need to get your hair cut, you have to go to an event, you can’t do that anymore. Unless you’re some very high end person that spends thousands of dollars on a like a glam squad. Because you can’t call your barber, the barber can’t call you.
The same thing’s happening in restaurants. There’s Resy, which is owned by American Express. Your neighborhood restaurant, you can’t just go to your neighborhood restaurant. New York City, people talk about it all the time. It’s impossible to get into restaurants now. Because there’s a finance company that is the broker of reservations.
I’ve talked to people who own restaurants who say, my mother calls me and asks for a table at this restaurant, I can’t give my mother a table. Because I don’t own the tables in my restaurant, Resy has control of all the tables. And I’m giving you little, little examples that are not necessarily big plutocracy. I think at every single level of our public life, our shared life, there has been the insertion of these tools that claim to be about efficiency and sometimes deliver some efficiency for some people.
Again, I’m sure that barbers prefer to not be on the phone all day answering, you know, appointment queries. But what it amounts to, in my experience, is a society in which people are increasingly separated from each other in every way and the human connection with the people in our neighborhood with the people doing work that we are benefiting from or we’re doing work for them. There’s this force cutting into our [inaudible] and that force is corporations.
Chris Hedges
Well, it’s the commodification of human life, just as we have commodified the natural world. I want to talk about these elite networking forums. You spent time, was it the Aspen Institute, the Clinton Global Initiative Forum, these, you write, self-appointed leaders of social change.
And you make, I think there’s a little moment in the book where you talk about [Andrew] Carnegie on the one hand crushing unions — and wasn’t it Carnegie who shot all the workers in Ludlow — and building libraries on the other, was kind of the perfect analogy. They don’t touch the system.
And it was a question I had when I read the book. I thought you were a little kind to them in the sense that, at least from my reading of the book, you seem to believe that some of them at least saw themselves as do-gooders, and perhaps some of them do. But on the other hand, they’re also, once again, as they have with the accumulation of wealth or power, using philanthropy to build monuments to themselves, which is what Carnegie did, of course.
But let’s talk about that world. And it’s a world that certainly Trump supporters have quite rightly been repulsed by and responded to. So you have this kind of virtue signaling and moral posturing by the very people who are making sure you go bankrupt because you can’t pay your medical bills.
Anand Giridharadas
Yeah, you know, the book originated in a moment in one of those forums, the Aspen Institute. In 2011, while I was still at the New York Times, and I was a columnist at that point, and I was just about to publish, or had just published my first book, which was about India, where I’d been a foreign correspondent, and I get this kind of out of the blue thing, saying, you know, you’ve been nominated to be a fellow of the Aspen Institute.
And interestingly, I was actually nominated by a guy who was a fellow, but he was a Chinese business executive who had liked the column I’d written in the New York Times, actually about how the American elite didn’t quite understand the way they were running the country was actually making other systems like the Chinese appealing to other countries around the world because of how America was being run into the ground.
You know, my beginning with it was actually this guy saying, maybe you all need to listen to somebody who’s a little bit different from your consensus. And this fellowship was like you go to Aspen in Colorado in the beautiful mountain town, you know, where parkas are like $8,000 in the local store. And you’d go there for a few days and you’d actually read these ancient texts and Plato and Aristotle, you discuss the good society.
And I think they probably wanted some variety when they were choosing me. So I give them credit for that. And I very much was that variety, right? I sat in a room with 20 people, we read these books and talked about what is a good society. It was interesting to me because I hadn’t, when am I otherwise gonna sit with like 20 mostly business people and actually in private, off the record, like understand what they actually think, how they actually understand the world?
It was very illuminating. Several years later, four years later into it, there was an annual reunion of these fellows from all the different classes. And they asked me to give a talk at this reunion. And a lot of people from the thing gave a talk at one thing or another. It was pretty common. And they asked me to give a talk actually about a book I’d written about a hate crime after 9/11. So I said yeah, and then I decided to not inform them that I would be giving a different talk.
And I wrote a different talk. And I wrote a talk about what I call the Aspen Consensus, which is that you should do good, that powerful and privileged and fortunate people should be told to do good, but never to do more good, but never to do less harm. That they should be told to change the world, but never to change the system. That they should be told to give back, but not to stop taking so much.
And I basically said look, this fellowship is about trying to make the world a better place. Well what would actually make the world a better place is reigning in the power of the kinds of people in this room. I got a weird combination of a standing ovation and very icy stares. Let’s say the standing ovation was not from everybody. Some people, even people in that world, were moved by it, maybe even altered by it a little bit.
A lot of people thought it was a very asshole thing to do. Some people thought both at the same time and told me that. But what I was trying to get at is, I think at the heart of what you’re raising, which is this group of modern corporate elite in this country is really built today in a way that I think is different from a generation ago on this fantasy of doing well by doing good.
In the book I call it win-win-ism. This idea is win-win-ism. And it’s really different from prior flavors of capitalism, which in a way we’re more self-confident in saying the purpose of business is just business, just do business, the rest takes care of itself. This is not quite that. This is saying business and the tools of business and in some cases the spoils of business are the most powerful possible tool to deal with the biggest societal problems we have.
So it’s not just that let things trickle down. It’s like the way to solve gender inequality is through Silicon Valley tech companies. The way to solve the environment is through Tesla. The way to solve poverty in Africa is MasterCard and Goldman Sachs figuring out credit cards for rural people in Kenya. It was a really, in a way, new ideology about the capacity of business not just to deliver goods and services efficiently, which was always the old pitch, and create abundance, but to actually do the work traditionally that even business people thought of as government’s work or the civil society’s work.
This was a kind of almost, I would say, cancerous idea that business and capitalism had to endlessly multiply so that it was almost the only organ left in society. That social change would now be delivered by these same people, mentalities, frameworks, and resources. That education would now be another of their provinces. That gender equality would be kind of fought through their organs and mechanisms.
And it’s a very seductive idea because at the very moment that big business had been kind of elbowing its way into social change, it had been starving and defanging government, as you know so well.
Chris Hedges
Well, you point out in the book that they’re utterly dismissive of any other way to affect social change, including, of course, government. And therefore, they dismantle and destroy systems that are essentially, that they see in competition or perhaps in their view are inefficient.
Anand Giridharadas
But what’s interesting is it’s, historically it was a kind of phased process, right? So you go back to the 1981 Reagan budget, tax cuts, spending cuts. And you know, there were more after that. What you’d first do, what this group of people first did, a lot of people kind of date the phenomenon I’m talking about to roughly around then.
What you first do is you gut government, right? So you cut taxes, now there’s just less money for them to spend. They say, we gotta cut spending, because we don’t have enough money in the coffers, even though you’re the one who just did that. So now there’s less money to spend, programs get cut.
And which programs get cut? The ones for the people most despised, most disregarded, most uncared for. So now those programs are cut. So then what happens? Well, the consequences start to take shape, right? You cut food aid programs, shock of all shocks, some people become more hungry.
You cut education and some people become less educated and struggle from that. You cut mental health facilities and more people are struggling with that on the street. And then, what a lot of members of this class in ensuing years had the gall to do was sort of metaphorically walk around their society and be like, oh my gosh, what a shame.
So many mentally ill people on the street. Oh my gosh, what a shame. American educational attainment, so low compared to Finland. Oh my gosh, what a shame. People going hungry in this country and look, government has failed us. And no one would call them out on the fact that their companies — they’re often sometimes the same exact people — have of course pushed for the government to pull back in ways that cause that misery. No.
So now they are pointing to the failures of government, failures they helped engineer, as evidence for why government cannot be entrusted with the solution of public problems, thus leaving only them, the private sector, to step in. The phrase that is used in this world is fill the gap. Fill the gap. Fill the gap that they just got done carving.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask you, you talk about it, there’s this absurd reductionism that they use. This is from your book, Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school and a popular TED speaker, I once debated him at the 92nd Street Y, was a left-wing student at Yale in 1980s. He’s since turned against the kind of power-busting, world-changing he believed in then.
He articulated the new belief well in an interview with a radio host, Krista Tippett. And this is him. People our age grew up expecting that the point of civic engagement is to be active so we can make the government fix civil rights or something. We’ve got to make government do something. And young people have grown up never seeing the government do anything except turn the lights off now and then.
And so their activism is not going to be to get the government to do things, it’s going to be to invent some app, some way of solving problems separately, and that’s going to work. You call these people thought leaders. It’s like Thomas Friedman saying we should all be entrepreneurs in our garage after mass layoffs. But talk about that.
Anand Giridharadas
Can I just say, to bring readers up to speed, we all know Jonathan Haidt, he may have said that then, and that may have been what was convenient for him to say then. Jonathan Haidt has since gone on in the endless reinventions of this thought leader class to become a big entrepreneur of the idea that phones are dangerous for young people, and he’s made a persuasive case that they’re doing a lot of damage to young people.
So now it seems Jonathan Haidt does not think that apps are gonna solve things for young people. Now what Jonathan Haidt is doing, if you followed his work, is calling for governments to deal with phone access for young people. So it’s quite interesting that the guy who said governments are not gonna do anything and it’s all gonna be apps is now saying apps are dangerous and only government can step in.
Chris Hedges
Well, because as you point out, you make the distinction between intellectuals and thought leaders, thought leaders, whatever the hell that is, people who deal in cliches and slogans. But here you have him, as you point out, equating the civil rights movement with inventing an app.
Anand Giridharadas
It’s incredible. You know, look, I don’t fault people for saying and doing what they need to do to feed their families, but look, there’s gotta be a limit. And I remember, that kind of TED conference world is another of these other universes, there’s many of them. And I gave not one but two talks at TED. My talks were not in keeping with what you normally heard at TED, but I was invited to give them and I gave them.
I’m a big believer in going to the lion’s den as you might gather. I think it’s important that people hear things that they may not want to hear. But a big part of the consensus in that kind of world, which does in many ways feel quite remote from us now, I think it has receded in some ways and has been punctured, was this belief that public endeavor is just kind of wasteful and sclerotic and useless.
There’s this sort of vision out there of public endeavor as the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. Like the DMV is all government is and a big part of what I try to do in Winners Take All is remind people of how extraordinary public problem solving is. And the way public problem solving works, when the government solves some big social problem, it goes into a bucket of things we are never grateful for ever again, we never think about again.
When is the last time in the United States of America, except for some occasional story in the news, when is the last time you thought about the safety of food when you go out to eat, right? My family’s from India. Even if you’re a pretty prosperous person in India, thinking about the safety of food is a daily, you have to do this all the time.
Not washing your vegetables properly in India, it’s a matter of life and death, right? Knowing which restaurants you can eat at, which you can’t, which use filtered water, which do boil-in filtered water, which use Himalaya bottled water, even just for cooking. You have to know these things to survive. It’s just a huge amount of mental energy just to be safe living in India. I lived in India for six years. These calculations are a big part of life.
We used to be like that too, in a sense, right? Every place used to be like that at a certain point in history. At a certain point, we invented food safety. We got an FDA, every single piece of meat started being inspected by the federal government, so on and so forth. Restaurants, you got the Department of Health going up to restaurants, checking all these things.
You don’t look at the ratings online, because you just trust, and it’s true, you are right to trust that there’s some giant regime that you don’t even understand that is taking this thing that used to be one of the greatest challenges of human existence, which is dying because of something in food, right?
It brought down like a huge fraction of us who ever lived. This giant thing that is still in many parts of the world, something you have to think about all the time to survive. We have eliminated that in the United States and many other prosperous countries. We’ve eliminated that. I’m giving you one example of one thing that government does that you don’t think about very often. That is a game changer. Now do what I just did for Social Security. What was it like to be old before Social Security?
Chris Hedges
Well, we know from the 1930s the level of malnutrition and starvation among especially the elderly was very, very high.
Anand Giridharadas
What was it like to be without electricity? If you can read Bob Caro’s chapter in the LVJ series about what was it like to not have electricity when it was available, but it was not necessarily profitable or to bring to certain parts of this country. Those women spent, as he tells it so beautifully in that book, like their whole day washing clothes, going to get water, moving the water, thinking about…right?
As soon as government solves a problem, it gets no credit anymore. And so you got these Silicon Valley guys who have invented some app for getting a latte a little bit faster. And they feel so triumphant about their capacities as problem solvers. And you got your Social Security Administration over here that’s doing Nobel Peace Prize level work every year. And it gets no credit.
And this basic problem is at the heart of so much we’re talking about. We don’t even realize what government does. We don’t realize, business people don’t realize, the amount of their commerce that is enabled by the kind of court system that you and I pay to maintain, right?
And so this ignorance about and disregard for public endeavor, for what government does, for the solution of common problems through common institutions, this ignorance is a big part of the story of what went wrong. And I think we have to help revive in people the ideas and the stories of what government actually does.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask you about Market World. You write, Market World 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 world of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, one of whom we just quoted, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, even its own territory, including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action.
Market World is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind. These elites 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 but you make this point in the book, what they do when they retreat to the these conferences or the Aspen Institute or the Clinton Global Initiative is they only, you document this in the book, they only bring in speakers who essentially regurgitate what they already believe.
They’ll pay Thomas Friedman $40,000 a lecture, I think that’s what he gets, but because they know that he’s going to come in and essentially buttress their own ideology, not as you did, challenge it. So it becomes this bizarre kind of hermetic world. I mean, something like the Forbidden City or Versailles.
Anand Giridharadas
I think that’s a good way to put it. It goes back to this earlier kind of question I think you were gesturing at, which has to do with the morality of people in this world. Look, I think there are some, in all social worlds, including certainly the business elite, there are some real sickos. That’s true. But I think most people are not real sickos, even in these worlds.
I think what is actually sadder is that most people are kind of not imaginative enough to think outside the kind of common sense of their world and domain. When I spent time in these worlds, these conferences, I interviewed people extensively who were in these worlds. It took very rare figures and my book actually focuses and profiles the rare figures who are sort of seeing outside of their own world, right?
Because those are the people I always write about, people who are just steeped in something are not interesting but people who are steeped in it, get it, believe in it, but also are having a crisis of faith. They’re the people I’m always drawn to write about. But most people in these worlds, I found, they weren’t sitting there at the Clinton Global Initiative thinking they’re screwing over the world. Like they’re really not. They’re sitting there thinking that the corporate partnerships they can put together.
You know, I think there was a Starbucks and Goldman Sachs partnership to reduce the racial wealth gap. I may be getting that wrong, but I think there was something like that that was being brokered, that these things hold unprecedented power to make the world better. And I think what is actually so scary to me, sometimes to the point of funny, I don’t think a lot of these people are saying this as a kind of lie. I think they deeply believe it’s true.
This, in a way, makes them more dangerous and I’ll give you the example that I often think about which is New York money versus Silicon Valley money, right? New York again, oversimplifying, New York money is largely financial money. I find it much easier to deal with the New York kind of money and I’ll tell you why, because no one is deluded about who they are or what they’re trying to do, right?
You meet any finance person, I mean some of these banks talk to these… but generally people who work in finance are clear about why they work in finance and it’s to make money. What started to happen in Silicon Valley is the rise of these people who, I think, genuinely believed — and you see this in an Elon Musk, I think you see this in a Zuckerberg — genuinely believed and thought of themselves as these kind of world historical figures, these liberators who are gonna transform how human society works.
And I actually think it’s much easier to tax and regulate some rich people who maybe need to be redistributed from a little bit. But I don’t think our society has figured out what to do about the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world who have these kinds of civilizational visions for us and think of themselves as doing capitalism almost for the purpose of redoing humanity.
Chris Hedges
I want to close by asking you about [Jeffrey] Epstein. I mean, like you, was fascinated with the emails and I thought your column, which I quoted from, in the New York Times was really smart because it did just rip back the veil on these people like Lawrence Summers and others and just showed how shabby both not just their moral life, but even their intellectual life was.
And so, it was a kind of one of those moments where we had a window into the inner workings of the elite that you write about.
Anand Giridharadas
It was and there’s this old line from Maya Angelou: when people show you who they are, believe them. When people who normally have private servers protecting their emails, when you get a glimpse of those emails, believe them because you’re not going to get those kinds of glimpses very often. It’s worth understanding that this is a group of people, we live in an age of oversharing, but this is a group of people who under share, right?
This is a group of people who are very private. You don’t normally know how they operate. What we most don’t know, what we have least access to in a way, is their mentalities, right? How they really think. How they think about us. These are the things that are not filed in IRS forms, that are not filed in lobbying disclosures. And when the Epstein emails came out, released by the House Oversight Committee, I started just reading out of curiosity.
And then with the kind of Winners Take All lens, and for all the reasons that we’ve talked about today, I started thinking, gosh, I think I see this in a way that’s a little bit different, because I guess I was frustrated that week that they came out everybody seemed to be, all the journalists seemed to be looking for the same story, which is like, did Donald Trump rape children and was it caught on video, right?
Now, I think that’s as important a possibility to uncover as anybody else, right? And if that’s the case, you know, there could be no more important story, arguably. That said, there were thousands and thousands of emails providing this glimpse into a giant group of elites and everybody was like is Trump child rapist and name-searching Trump.
And as I was reading them I was like I think this other story is really important. By the way, the other story is about wealth and power and how they operate, so many of the survivors who have spoken out have said don’t let this just be a story of a small number of people trafficking. Make sure you realize this is a story about wealth and power, right?
So like the women at the heart of this have understood what they lived through to be a story about wealth and power that took on the flavor of these cruelties, these specific cruelties, but they understood it to operate in a context that made it possible. So I was reading the emails and I was like, you know what, I’m gonna read all these emails because I think there’s something here. So I spent five or six days reading all of the emails. I don’t recommend it.
And I started making notes in many ways informed by my work in Winners Take All about like what am I seeing here, about the way these people are interacting, about the way they’re operating about… I often think about it as kind of like dance moves. What are the dance moves that we’re seeing in this cohort of people? And the more time I spent with it, it seemed to me that we were seeing a portrait of how a power elite operates, how it thinks of us, how it defends its power.
And three things I would say stood out. Number one, this is a group of people, almost every email, and so many of the emails start with, where are you, I’m in Tokyo, where are you, where are you, when are you gonna be in New York. I’m passing through this kind of what I call the whereabouts inquiry, this kind of echo location, human echo location. And what I think that’s about is this is a group of people who are actually in the air and not tethered to place. And most of us are tethered to place.
Most of us live in a certain community where we have quite a bit of a stake in how that community is. But this group of people is not like us in that way. This power elite is fundamentally global and fundamentally loyal to itself. Second, this is a power elite that kind of, the grease in the wheels of its connection was information barter, and inside information, intel, edge, as it’s called in finance.
But these people are constantly trying to give each other and take from each other proprietary knowledge about who’s the new FBI director gonna be, or what’s that company gonna do, or what are you hearing about the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund? That kind of information barter.
And third, this is a group of people, and this goes to the heart of so much of your work over the years, this is a group of people who are on the same team, whether Republican or Democrat, this or that, who out there are certainly on opposite sides of important policy questions. I’m not saying that they’re all on the same team. They’ve been on different sides of profound questions.
When I say they’re on the same team, what I mean is they are, they’re like the cast of the play, right? And in the play, you watch the play and the people are yelling at each other in the play and they’re certainly like characters that are in conflict in the play.
But what’s important for this group of people is that they be the cast and that other people not be the cast. And when this group of people fails us, when a Larry Summers fails us in pushing for the financial deregulation under Bill Clinton, that then came to fruition in the financial crisis under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, a Larry Summers is not punished.
Well, he is punished for that by getting a better job and by becoming a chief advisor in the Obama era who will now help to oversee how a crisis he helped foment will be addressed. When, as you know so well, the people who have sold fraudulent wars like the war in Iraq, when they do that and then later their fraud becomes kind of well known and the consensus becomes even Donald Trump is being like that, that we shouldn’t have done that.
They are punished for it by getting better professorships, better roles on television. When people fail to protect us from technology, when they fail to protect us from environmental ruin, when they fail, they fail, they fail. This cast of characters, the group of people, this power elite around Epstein, this Epstein class, I think you could say, they survive no matter what happens to the country.
They get promoted no matter how badly they fail us. And so where it fundamentally landed me at the end of all that reading was I started, I think, in the same place as a lot of people, which was how could these eminent people, these bold-faced names, these people from these prestigious institutions, how could they consort with someone like him?
There was an inherent hierarchy in the kind of questioning a lot of us were doing. How could a Gates Foundation person or how could a Harvard person consort with him? And the more you read the emails, the more it seemed to me: of course they could. When he needed new friends after his plea deal and conviction, when he needed new friends to rehabilitate him in society, make his name, scrub his name, he picked a power elite whose superpower was looking away.
He, Jeffrey Epstein and his sex crimes, were not the first thing these people had ever looked away from. This was not their first rodeo of looking away. They had looked away at American pain, what you called immiseration, for a generation. They had looked away from it in the form of economic inequality. They’d looked away from it in the form of environmental disaster.
They had looked away from it in the form of financial crisis. They had looked away from it in the form of needless deaths and bogus wars. Looked away, looked away, looked away. And so it became my own question that I began with. How could they consort with him became nonsensical the more I read. How could he have chosen anyone else but that power elite? He chose perfectly. Jeffrey Epstein knew exactly what he was doing. He picked a group of people who are expert, if at nothing else, in putting fingers in their ears when people begin to scream.
Chris Hedges
Great, thanks. And on that, your book is wonderful, beautifully written, Winners Take All. And I want to thank Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.