Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

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September 29, 2009, 7:14 p.m. ET

One Man's Utopia

A first-time novelist imagines an America made wonderful by Warren Buffett, Phil Donahue and Yoko Ono.

By ROB LONG

Here's the bad news: Ralph Nader has written a novel. Here's the good news: There's no sex in it. Wait. That's not strictly true. At the end of its 700 pages, one of the characters hooks up with Yoko Ono.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Ralph Nader has written a novel. Well, he doesn't call it a novel—he calls it "a practical utopia." In it, he spins a fictional vision of what might happen if the country's super-rich got together with assorted influential people and worked to transform American culture and politics into something more to Ralph Nader's liking.

In Mr. Nader's tale, billionaire investor Warren Buffett is so dismayed by the ineffectual and chaotic government reaction to Hurricane Katrina that he hatches a plan to "redirect" American society. He summons a brace of moguls—Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Ross Perot and George Soros, among others—to a secret Maui location, along with such celebrities as Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty. As they confer together, they find that they all—surprise! —agree that Something Must Be Done.

The news media soon dub this cabal, in one of Mr. Nader's typically tin-eared phrases, "the Meliorists." The "something" that they all agree must be done involves, naturally, increasing regulation, raising taxes and punishing heartless multinational corporations. It's easy, apparently, once you've made a billion dollars in international business and finance, to denounce international business and finance.

But the Meliorists realize that before any real reform can take place they must first win over America. They have to wake up the country. And that process fills the first 200 pages—out of a total of 700 (I mentioned that, right?)—of this very long, very odd, very Nader book.

Here, for instance, is an actual passage from "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!": "As promised, Ted Turner and Phil Donahue had put their heads together to brainstorm about a mascot for the group's efforts. Ted's thoughts naturally ran along avian lines, and it wasn't long before they hit on the idea of a parrot. . . . Patriotic Polly hit the airwaves in fifteen-second spots shown on thousands of stations, and it was an immediate smash."

The parrot, see, appears on TV and squawks, "Get up! Don't let America down!" Then there's an email address for viewers to use to join the movement to redirect America. Which the viewers do, and off we go.

 

"Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!"

By Ralph Nader
Seven Stories Press, 733 pages, $27.50

Because that's what it takes, really, to get America to agree with you, according to Ralph Nader: a parrot, a couple of TV spots, some billionaire's cash. Why so easy? The premise of the novel is that ordinary people love Ralph Nader's politics. They all agree with his progressive, left-wing agenda—even though, for some reason, they didn't vote for him, in huge numbers, in two presidential elections. But with a little Hollywood pixie dust and some community-organizing money, the entire grocery list of left-wing causes from 1960 to 2009 can be enacted. The whole story is presented with such sweet earnestness that it almost seems mean to laugh at it. Almost.

In fact, "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" reads less like a novel or "practical utopia" than a dream journal. At the Maui summit, for instance, Phil Donahue rises to address his fellow do-gooders: "Phil pulled a letter from his jacket pocket. 'This is an offer from the head of NBC. He wants to give me a national talk show, and get this—he specifically wants me to deal with injustice, hard solutions to the nation's problems, bold doings among ordinary people, and the plight of millions of Americans who get pushed around or shut out while they do the essential, grimy, everyday work that keeps the rich and famous sitting pretty on top. He says NBC wants a "new Dr. Phil" for the new burgeoning civil society.' "

And that's only page 68! (There are 700 pages total, in case I forgot to mention that.) The spine is barely creased and already there's a sensational parrot, a new TV talk show . . . oh, and a movement to change the national anthem to the more peaceful, labor-friendly "This Land Is Your Land." But even a first-time novelist like Mr. Nader knows that the story would begin to drag if he simply narrated a tale of how the country seamlessly eased into an idyllic state of pure Naderism, in which Ralph Nader's vision is finally realized and everyone sounds like Ralph Nader.

And so he throws a few hurdles in the way of the Meliorists. Following the unionization of Wal-Mart, there's some predictable push-back from corporate fat cats and power brokers. You know the type: the ones who force decent Americans to use energy-hogging lightbulbs and to sing a complicated national anthem. But then there's push-back against the push-back, which is eventually (spoiler alert!) successful, thanks to Yoko Ono's deployment of her ravishing personal beauty to dazzle and distract the guy leading the corporate opposition. His name, by the way, is Lancelot Lobo. It may be a blessing that Mr. Nader populated his book with so many famous people.

By novel's end, American society is thoroughly Naderized. Warren Beatty sits in the governor's mansion in Sacramento; the president has signed on to the Meliorist program; and Americans have embraced a new life that is dimly lit by awful fluorescent curlicue bulbs. But curiously, for a futuristic utopia, it all seems so tired. So old. So Jimmy Carter. This is a novel that should have been written in 1976. Honestly, though, it's feeling more like 1976 every day.

Mr. Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574440954001791002.html

Making utopia practical

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By Erik Curren January 17, 2011

In nearly a half century fighting abuses of power, Ralph Nader has seen the worst in people, from venality in politicians to arrogance in corporate executives. And Nader knows as well as anyone that corporate control of Washington has kept the US from implementing the policy we need to fight climate change and prepare for peak oil.

Now, Nader’s written his first novel, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” which he calls a “practical utopia.”

“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”
By Ralph Nader
Seven Stories Press. 733 pp. $27.50.

For people who care about peak oil and climate change, there’s a method to Nader’s madness. He seems to be offering optimism as an antidote to the poisonous cynicism and indulgence in scenarios of doom that together threaten to sideline the sustainability movement and torpedo any chance for American society to deal with our historic energy and pollution challenges in a positive way.

Long on policy, short on politics

After thirty years of earnest tomes exhorting us to create sustainable economies, starting with The Limits to Growthand Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful in the early seventies, we’ve done just the opposite. Now, our globalized consumer economy is bigger and badder than anyone ever imagined, and climate change and peak oil threaten the very basis of industrial civilization worldwide.

Why haven’t we mended our ways?

It’s certainly not for lack of good policy ideas. But it could be for lack of political strategy. And that’s where Ralph Nader comes in.

In the last couple years alone, we’ve seen many guides to creating a sustainable economy from Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy to David Korten’s Agenda for a New Economy, Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization and even Pat Murphy’s answer to Brown in Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Each volume overflows with sensible proposals to save energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and empower local economies. But now that we have all these good ideas, how can we get them passed into law in a Washington where even the Obama White House gives more love to the Chamber of Commerce than to civil society groups? Especially when big corporations might worry that some of the ideas might threaten their profits?

Nader’s answer is that all Americans need to start behaving like good citizens — starting with the very rich.

The dream team

Nader imagines an America where billionaires can be split off from mere millionaires to reinvigorate American democracy and take economic power from Wall Street and give it back to Main Street. The story starts when Warren Buffett gets an idea:

In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television in early September 2005. . . . On the fourth day, he beheld in disbelief the paralysis of local, state, and federal authorities unable to commence basic operations of rescue and sustenance, not just in New Orleans, but in towns and villages all along the Gulf Coast. . . He knew exactly what he had to do. . .

After helping out in Louisiana, Buffett decides to recruit a committee of fellow billionaires, including Phil Donahue, Warren Beatty, Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono to fix America’s biggest problems. Bringing the power of their influence and personal networks along with wheelbarrows of cash, the billionaires pledge themselves to a $15 billion campaign to fix the environment, reduce the gap between rich and poor, clean up elections and help small businesses.

To accomplish this second American revolution, Nader imagines nothing less than the dream activist campaign: never short on funds, staffed by top talent and run with the efficient urgency of a military invasion.

Critics can’t accuse this campaign of trying to turn the country “socialist,” because its sponsors are America’s most respected business leaders.

The campaign also avoids anything that could be perceived as an attack on national pride, such as proposing to cut the defense budget (a lesson that the peak oil community, with its ample citation of military reports on the threat of armed conflict over oil, seems to have learned well already). Indeed, from its PR spokesperson — a parrot named Patriotic Polly — on down, the “Meliorist” campaign waves the Stars and Stripes and serves up a heaping helping of mom and apple pie.

Talk about success. Not only do the billionaires unionize Wal-Mart and get their whole agenda through Congress, both in the space of less than a year. They also found a new political party that sweeps the mid-term elections.

Most interesting of all, the campaign converts political opponents into supporters. The George W. Bush-esque president ends up taking credit for the billionaires’ legislation and Congressional bulls are relieved that they no longer have to grovel for corporate campaign funding. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Can it happen?

Just before the book came out, Nader made courtesy calls to the dozen or so billionaires who served as inspiration for the characters of the same name in Nader’s book. “I feel that if I am going to do that to people, I want to give them all a heads up,” he told the New Yorker. Nader also wanted to try to recruit the real-life billionaires for an effort to make the novel’s fictional campaign into an actual one.

It may have worked. In June 2010 Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates started a campaign of their own calling on their fellow billionaires to donate more than half of their wealth to charities. As of December 2010, the three had convinced 57 families on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans to sign onto their Giving Pledge campaign.

Much of the money pledged is sure to go to relatively uncontroversial medical charities or community service projects rather than political causes that will make big CEOs sweat. But there’s still time for advocacy groups of all sorts to follow Nader’s example and hit up billionaires, both in the US and beyond.

Though it’s fiction, the book can serve as a handbook for activists to get their issues out to a wider public using fun and spectacle.

For example, Buffett’s group mounts Sun God Festivals to promote clean energy. These high-concept stage shows feature acts such as “Beauty and the Brains,” pairing scientists in lab coats making “offerings”of clean energy gadgets to statuesque young women:

One such demonstration featured  a tall, lithe Goddess training an oversized magnifying glass on the wooden logo of one of the big energy companies until the concentrated power of the sun burned it to a crisp. “Who says solar is too diffuse to be practical?” she asked the audience sweetly. Other shows and exhibits provided equally graphic refutations of one canard after another that had been circulating about solar energy for years: that it was too irrevocably costly, that solar photovoltaic took way too much land surface, that it would be decades, if ever, before solar could make a significant contribution to rising energy demands…

Until they’ve tried more Nader-style outreach tactics, it’s too soon for climate and energy activists to write off either Washington or the American people.

Fewer boring technical explanations. Less apocalyptic fear. More fun and hope. It might just be crazy enough to work. And a few billionaires on board might help, too.

– Erik Curren

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: activism, altruism, Ralph Nader, solar power, Warren Buffett

About Erik Curren

Erik Curren is the publisher of Transition Voice. He co-founded Transition Staunton Augusta in 2009 and serves as managing partner of Curren Media Group. In 2012, Erik was elected to the city council of Staunton, Virginia.

http://transitionvoice.com/2011/01/making-utopia-practical/

Return to Philanthropy?

by Michael Barker

Philanthropy, we are told, is to replace the welfare state: instead of attempting to redistribute wealth via taxation and democratic planning, austerity politicians are in the process of dispatching with what they view as an irritating relic of working class history. In its place we are informed that we should rely upon the charity of the greediest and most exploitative subset of society, our country's leading capitalists. A group of individuals whose psychological temperament is better described as psychopathic rather than altruistic.^[1]

While many corporate executives may well have numerous commendable personal traits, their commitment to pursuing their own class interests -- at the expense of the mass of humanity -- necessarily means that they must master the means to mask their illegitimate power and actively encourage a sense of futility amongst the governed. The creation of non-profit corporations, otherwise known as philanthropic foundations, thereby serves a critical function for powerful elites:letting them distance themselves from their psychopathic for-profit offspring, and allowing capitalists to recast themselves as good Samaritans striving to work for the common good. 

Under the ideological onslaught of the “Big Society”, philanthropy is now a big and highly profitable business in itself. Tens of thousands of individuals are employed in this booming industry whose very growth is inversely related to the cutting of much-needed public services. Yet this philanthropic sector is hardly new, and can trace its institutional history to the old charity organisations of the nineteenth century. 

In fact to this day, the Charity Organization Societies that were initially formed in 1869 continue to be used as a misleading “institutional model to illustrate the alleged advantages of voluntarism over state benefits.”^[2] This is a model of manipulation that was quickly exported to the United States. In time these charity societies found their replacement through the institutionalisation of philanthropy in the form of dedicated foundations, which were quickly used as a weapon of capitalist reform against a militant and increasingly socialist working class.^[3]

For the past several decades the pro-capitalist ideology guiding the foundation-world has been gaining the ears of the rich and powerful in the UK, and its historical lessons are currently being reintegrated into the British ruling classes’ war against life. Groups at the forefront of this educative endeavour are numerous, but perhaps the most significant is the Association of Charitable Foundations, which was set up in 1989 -- with grants given by their members amounting to £1.2 billion in 2005 alone. 

A former senior executive at private equity company 3i plc, John Kingston, is the current chairman of the Association of Charitable Foundations, a position of authority he bolsters through serving as a board member of David Cameron's recently launched Big Society Capital. Kingston is supported at the Association by his vice chair, Sara Llewellin, who is the chief executive of the leading liberal foundation -- ostensibly “committed to funding and encouraging the promotion of social justice” -- the Barrow Cadbury Trust. 

With the Association of Charitable Foundations being of fairly recent origin, an apt forerunner in the UK sis the Charities Aid Foundation. This Foundation was was formed in 1924 as the Charities Department of the National Council of Social Service, in order to encourage efficiency in charitable giving. In 1959, the Charities Department changed its name to become what is now known as the Charities Aid Fund (CAF); while the National Council of Social Service itself is now called the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. 

In late 2010, Dominic Casserley, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, became CAF's chairman, only retiring from his position as the chairman of the major British charity Action on Addiction in 2012. Casserley's predecessor at CAF was the former chief executive at the London-based investment bank SG Warburg & Company, Lord Cairns; while CAF's current chief executive is John Low, an individual who in recent months stepped down from his position as the chairman of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) -- the professional body for the third sector's usually overpaid chief executives. Low also serves alongside the aforementioned Sara Llewellin on the board of trustees of Charity Bank, an organisation which helps financial investors “facilitate real social change.” The type of social change being facilitated equates with activities that enable and empower the ongoing priviatisation of public services, something that ACEVO chief executive Sir Stephen Bubb is certainly familiar with, given his recently revealed key role in the ongoing privatisation of the NHS. 

The close relationship between capitalist enemies of public services and the promoters of voluntary work should come as no surprise. And a key addition to the ruling classes’ armory in their longstanding efforts to undermine the welfare provisions of the state is Dartington Hall Trust's School for Social Entrepreneurs. This “School” was founded in 1997 by Michael Young, a former Director of the pro-capitalist Political and Economic Planning think tank, who is best known as being the man who coined the phrase “social entrepreneur.”^[4] Funding for this project came from HSBC Holdings plc, the National Lottery Charities Board and the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust. 

The School for Social Entrepreneurs' founding chairman was the late James Cornford (1935-2011), who just prior to his death acted as the chair of Dartington Hall Trust. Having been a policy wonk for the ruling class for decades, Cornford previously serving as the first Director (1989-94) of the New Labour think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research -- the very think tank that helped provide the intellectual fodder to allow the Labour Party to dispatch its working-class roots. Another notable trustee of the School for Social Entrepreneurs is Vaughan Lindsay, who became the CEO of Dartington Hall Trust in 2004 after leaving an illustrious career in the corporate world, where he had most recently worked for healthcare privatizer McKinsey & Company. 

Notably the current chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research is James Purnell, who recently served as a board member of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations. Blue Labour operative Purnell presently acts as a senior advisor for the world's leading advisor on business strategy, Boston Consulting Group, and is a trustee of Citizens UK -- a group whose “goal is to increase the power of communities to participate in public life.” Dismantling the welfare state being one way sure fire way in which to force increased public participation in public life.

Given the insidious way in which elite philanthropy works to defang and delimit the processes of beneficial social change, it is vital that progressives begin seriously to tackle the vexing questions surrounding the mostly unmentioned power of philanthropy, most especially that of liberal elites. Thankfully in the past few years this dialogue has gained much needed support from the publication of two books, Joan Roelofs’ Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (2003), and INCITE!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (2007). However, the most important work still needs to be done: together we need to launch a popular debate about the corrosive influence of foundations on progressive social change, and then begin to propose and support alternative (sustainable) solutions to funding progressive groups all over the world. 

Michael Barker is an independent researcher who currently resides in the UK and blogs at http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/.

For more New Left Project coverage of the Big Society project, see Emma Dowling's series here, here and here.

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[1] Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004).

[2] Robert Humphreys, Poor Relief and Charity, 1869-1945: the London Charity Organization Society (Palgrave, 2001).

[3] Sheila Slaughter and Edward Silva, "Looking backwards: how foundations formulated ideology in the Progressive Period," in Robert Arnove, (ed.), Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1980).

[4] Asa Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p.328.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/return_to_philanthropy