On Charles Koch and the scam of right-wing philanthropy
Right-wing “solutions” keep failing to meet the most basic needs of tens of millions of Americans. We know that these failures are neither failures of imagination, nor a design flaw, but the intentional outcome of neoliberal institutional design. When Charles Koch announces a new non-profit, it communicates recognition that the price he's paid for stability is too low; the stability isn't there. American plutocrats have been getting away with paying too little to keep the masses content, and now they're nervous about the consequences. Charles Koch in particular has spent decades funding efforts to shrink the welfare state, and now his network is funding an initiative to address... the wholly predictable social fraying that occurs when communities can no longer cooperate to solve problems together, but each person is treated as an individual with few means of cooperation beyond for-profit economic transactions. In its place is growing populist sentiment, and extremism. If we are fortunate, before American society becomes more precarious, or even collapses under the weight of capitalism's well-known, studied, and understood internal contradictions, some relief to “the masses” - the non-owners who vote but who have no real power in the political system that makes decisions despite their needs, or analyses - might come to fruition. If it does, great for us! Capitalists of the future: take note that the cost of stability is not inexpensive, but it is a necessary expense. If not, and inequality and the exigencies of capital growth continue to create intolerable conditions for those who must live under their physical and psychological burdens, whose bodies and attention are a valuable resource, and the basis of all wealth, then socialism will come sooner rather than later.