Partial Readings: Rich People Behaving Badly

Partial Readings: Rich People Behaving Badly

Partial Readings: Rich People Behaving Badly

Director Ridley Scott’s popular new sci-fi flick Prometheus has been panned for its muddled plot. To some, the film’s treatment of labor and corporate exploitation may prove more interesting than its befuddling script, or its (admittedly memorable) gore. Prometheus concerns the plight of a group of human explorers on a space mission bankrolled by an arrogant CEO, who is a pitch-perfect caricature of the contemporary libertarian capitalist: death-fearing, pompous, and a self-proclaimed expert. He even has his own TED talk. (Fans of the Alien films, to which Prometheus is a sort of prequel, will recall that this isn’t the first instance in the series of a nefarious corporation playing with people’s lives. In Alien [1986], the corporate villain is played by a far less outwardly confident, more weaselly Paul Reiser.) As Ben Walters writes in the Guardian, the film shows us “super-rich, super-selfish humans try[ing] to manipulate the situation for their own gain even as the fate of mankind is in jeopardy.”

Super-rich, super-selfish humans are running amok in more than just movies these days; even institutions of higher education, as we’ll argue in a future special section in Dissent, are subject to the whims of know-it-all plutocrats. Just last week, Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia described the coup to fire the president of his university, masterminded by a group of trustees:

On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, “radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier.

According to Vaidhyanathan, Sullivan seems to have been dismissed because her leadership didn’t adhere to the vision of certain business school alumni.

The first year of Sullivan’s tenure involved hiring her own staff, provost, and administrative vice president. In her second year she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitors’ top priority—at least at the time she was hired. Sullivan was rare among university presidents in that she managed to get every segment of the diverse community and varied stakeholders to buy in to her vision and plan. Everyone bought in, that is, except for a handful of very, very rich people, some of whom happen to be political appointees to the Board of Visitors.

Peter Kiernan, the now-humiliated trustee in question, embodies an increasingly common archetype: the wealthy individual who, because wealthy, is deemed an expert at everything. “That’s why,” Vaidhyanthan writes, “we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria.” Kiernan, whose money comes from investment banking, recently published a book on preventing American decline with the actual title, Becoming China’s Bitch.

Joseph Stiglitz reflected on how we arrived at this point in a Salon piece excerpted from his new book, The Price of Inequality. Stiglitz examines how the 1 percent has managed to convince many 99 percenters that its interests are the same as theirs, despite much evidence to the contrary. “What is different today,” he writes, “is that the 1 percent now has more knowledge about how to shape preferences and beliefs in ways that enable the wealthy to better advance their cause, and more tools and more resources to do so.”

In the battle over public policy, whatever the realpolitik of special interests, public discourse focuses on efficiency and fairness. In my years in government, I never heard an industry supplicant looking for a subsidy ask for it simply because it would enrich his coffers. Instead, the supplicants expressed their requests in the language of fairness—and the benefits that would be conferred on others (more jobs, high tax payments).

Contemporary Olympic ceremonies get at this point in another way: touted as a celebration of our common humanity and a source of pride for the host nation, the games have become an elite spectator event, funded by the commoners. The Nation‘s David Zirin has been following the drama unfolding around the 2012 London Olympic Games, where the commoners are fighting back:

Londoners are annoyed at the inconvenience brought by the Olympics, incensed by the security crackdown…and outraged that there are no tickets available. This is hardly a petty complaint. Corporate partners have gobbled up the seats, leaving the overwhelming majority of the city with their nose pressed up against the glass. In London, where the pubs dot every block and open onto the streets after work in a daily party open to all comers, this comprises a cardinal sin. As Neill, one of many bartenders I encountered, said to me, “It’s like a big to-do that no one invited us to attend!”

In order to prevent the PR disaster of mass discontent, Prime Minister David Cameron threw a bone to unions threatening a strike:

Faced with the pressures of austerity and recession, Cameron and company are cooling their jets until the Olympics are over and then they will try to do their level best to disembowel the unions and further cut taxes for the wealthy….They need to make sure the unions don’t take strike action or join the demonstrations planned for July 28, the first Saturday of the games. This is why they agreed to sizable bonuses for London’s subway workers. Anything to make sure that the Olympics show London, and more critically David Cameron, in the best possible light.

There is, contrary to what its boosters say, scant economic evidence that hosting the Olympics is a good long-term investment for any country. Olympic debt contributed the Greek crisis (the Olympic Stadium in Athens, in a bitter symbol, now houses some of the city’s homeless). Remarkably, both the Athens and London games are estimated to have cost ten times more than was originally budgeted—a particularly galling fact for Londoners who both lack access to the games and are suffering under the austerity policies of Cameron’s government.

(This isn’t the only tale of wealthy elites ruining physical activity. The New York Times just reported on Ian Thorson’s death by dehydration, after he was kicked out of a yoga retreat in the Arizona desert led by Michael Roach, who “had previously run a diamond business worth tens of millions of dollars and was now promoting Buddhist principles as a path to financial prosperity, raising eyebrows from more traditional Buddhists.”)

With so much super-rich overreach, it’s nice to hear stories of reverse infiltration. David Graeber, author of Debt and unofficial Occupy Wall Street intellectual, was recently invited to the Fed to discuss debt relief. In what is (perhaps) a more symbolic event, customers at a bank in a former East German city voted in a contest to put Karl Marx on the bank’s credit cards. As Reuters reports, “More than a third of customers at Sparkasse bank in Chemnitz opted for the picture of a bronze bust of the bearded 19th century German-born philosopher, bank spokesman Roger Wirtz said. Marx’s stern face is depicted gazing towards the logo of Mastercard.”

NPR is hosting a tagline contest over Twitter. A recent favorite: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. For everything else, there’s #marxcard.”