Investment Advice for Young Revolutionaries
Late last week Kamala Harris announced that 12 companies and organizations will invest in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Microsoft will establish community centers and expand internet access in nations where well over half the people live in extreme poverty.
Mastercard will give electronic banking services to people who make the equivalent of $1,500 a year.
Chobani will take its incubator to local entrepreneurs in Guatemala and, presumably, also give them yogurt.
Nespresso is making a minimum regional investment of $150 million in a region whose coffee crops are already ravaged by rising temperatures.
All of this is part of the Biden administration's attempt to deal with the migrant surge - a migrant surge we helped create with the paternalistic catastrophe that is our foreign policy.
We’re not doing this solely because we lack the political ability and moral inclination to address the consequences of the past five decades. We’re doing this because business is more powerful than policy or presidents.
So now we sell the desperate to the corporate.
The corporate grind them into the dust and call it largesse.
But it’s just a line item.
It’s an ad campaign.
Capitalism replaces morality with performative charity. It gives a superficial polish to the very problems it creates.
But what’s the alternative, right? We’re told if we don’t glad-hand every silk suit that walks in, we can’t help the poor at all.
What if that’s not true?
Settling for less than real change gets us nothing but a photo op and perpetually deepening despair.
And the cycle will continue until we decide to take the power away from the few, and return it to the many.