winners take all the elite charade of changing the world

This kind of arrangement is an embodiment of what Anand Giridharadas, in his new book Winners Take All, calls a “MarketWorld” approach. The exponential increase in corporate welfare (at a time that social welfare programs are continuously under attack) bespeaks a larger shift in society toward private approaches to the public good, and of “the business world’s growing influence over social change.” Rather than funding higher education to a greater degree, our state government thought it better to funnel public money to a large corporation that could partner with the university to develop the new technologies it can then put to use back in its factory to create jobs. It is, as the Guardian stated bluntly, “the latest giveaway in a series of corporate welfare cheques cut for highly profitable tech companies and the largest to a foreign firm ever in the US.” Meanwhile, Foxconn itself is currently slated to receive $4.1 billion in public subsidies from the state of Wisconsin and other local municipalities in exchange for building a factory in the southeastern portion of the state. “To receive the full $100 million from Foxconn,” reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “UW must raise another $100 million in private gifts over the next two years as part of a broader, $3.2 billion fundraising campaign dubbed All Ways Forward.”

There are a few conditions-perhaps catches-to their generosity. Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn announced last week that it would be donating $100 million to the University of Wisconsin. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, Knopf, 304 pages, Hardcover, August 2018, ISBN 9780451493248

Winners take all the elite charade of changing the world