Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both disciplined, dogged millionaires who describe their more popular wives as their better halves, hold degrees from Harvard Law School, and have a preference for data-driven arguments rather than emotional ones. Both men struggle to connect with the grassroots of their parties, coming across as cold and robotic.
That's a taste of Chrystia Freeland's analytical prowess from her 2012 book, "Plutocrats; the rise of the new global super-rich and the fall of everyone else." I'd never read it, but Santa was kind enough to drop off a copy yesterday.
Written a couple of years before being recruited by Team Trudeau's Liberals, the book gives some insights into the life of our now Deputy Prime Minister. Chrystia was a busy gal back in her journo days. There's a couple of thousand billionaires loose on planet earth, and she name-drops most of them here. They're mostly hard-working folks who built their own fortunes. They just happened to have the right skill-sets to surf the revolutionary wave of algorithms, AI, and automated trading that define the modern era.
It's a slow day when Chrystia isn't having breakfast with a billionaire CEO or lunch with a Silicon Valley billionaire or dinner with a billionaire Russian oligarch or moderating an expert panel of billionaires at Davos.
She loves billionaires and they love her back. In her acknowledgements she informs the reader that "many members of the global super-elite have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends." There follows a list of a dozen of her billionaire friends, starting with George Soros.
Maybe that explains why her book doesn't have much of a critical perspective. Billionaires are just nice folks who are really smart and well-educated and happen to have a lot of money. Nothing to see here, folks.
Having followed Chrystia's political career for a few years, she strikes me as a lightweight, in over her head. That was especially obvious in the Global Affairs portfolio. That's not a surprise when you consider her superficial comparison of Barry and Mittens above.
Romney was a seasoned slash-and-burn hedgie with at least hundreds of millions worth of assets. Obama was a college professor who barely squeaked into millionaire territory on the strength of a book deal. Painting both as "dogged millionaires" is silly and dishonest. So is the claim that both were cold and robotic. Romney, maybe. Obama, not so much.
Nowhere does she suggest that billionaires are a threat to democracy. In the USA, it's fair to say that the billionaire class has more or less bought the political system, lock, stock, and barrel. In Canada we're running a little behind, but it'll take a concerted effort to avoid ending up in the same dismal place.
Don't expect Chrystia Freeland to be part of that effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment