This is a long article but well worth your time. It seems that EBay billionaire Pierrer Omidyar is underwriting a major new media venture. While he is widely hailed as a “civic-minded billionaire,” authors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine see him as a standard-bearer for what is called neoliberalism, in which free markets rule our lives.
Since this will shortly go behind a paywall, read it now. Here’s a start.
Ames and Levine write:
“We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.” – Pierre Omidyar
“Like eBay, Omidyar Network harnesses the power of markets to enable people to tap their true potential.” – Omidyar Network, “Frequently Asked Questions”
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The world knows very little about the political motivations of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire who is founding (and funding) a quarter-billion-dollar journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. What we do know is this: Pierre Omidyar is a very special kind of technology billionaire.
We know this because America’s sharpest journalism critics have told us.
In a piece headlined “The Extraordinary Promise of the New Greenwald-Omidyar Venture”, The Columbia Journalism Review gushed over the announcement of Omidyar’s project. And just in case their point wasn’t clear, they added the amazing subhead, “Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world.”
Ah yes, the fabled “civic-minded billionaire”—you’ll find him two doors down from the tooth fairy.
But seriously folks, CJR really, really wants you to know that Omidyar is a breed apart: nothing like the Randian Silicon Valley libertarian we’ve become used to seeing.
“…billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don’t want annoyed and business interests they don’t want looked at.
“By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he’s the billionaire exception….It’s like Izzy Stone running into a civic-minded plastics billionaire determined to take I.F. Stone’s Weekly large back in the day.”
Later, the CJR “UPDATED” the piece with this missing bit of “oops”:
(UPDATE: I should disclose that the Omidyar Network helps fund CJR, something I didn’t know until shortly after I published this post.)
No biggie. Honest mistake. And anyway, plenty of others rushed to agree with CJR’s assessment. Media critic Jack Shafer at Reuters described Omidyar’s politics and ideology as “close to being a clean slate,” repeatedly praising the journalism venture’s and Omidyar’s “idealism.” The “NewCo” venture with Greenwald “harkens back to the techno-idealism of the 1980s and 1990s, when the first impulse of computer scientists, programmers, and other techies was to change the world, not make more money,” Shafer wrote, ending his piece:
“As welcome as Omidyar’s money is, his commitment to the investigative form and an open society is what I’m grateful for this afternoon. You can never uphold the correct verdict too often.”
What all of these orgasmic accounts of Omidyar’s “idealism” have in common is a total absence of skepticism. America’s smartest media minds simply assume that Omidyar is an “exceptional” billionaire, a “civic-minded billionaire” driven by “idealism” rather than by profits. The evidence for this view is Pierre Omidyar’s massive nonprofit venture, Omidyar Network, which has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to causes all across the world.
And yet what no one seems able to specify is exactly what ideology Omidyar Network promotes. What does Omidyar’s “idealism” mean in practice, and is it really so different from the non-idealism of other, presumably bad, billionaires? It’s almost as if journalists can’t answer those questions because they haven’t bothered asking them.
So let’s go ahead and do that now.
Since its founding in 2004, Omidyar Network has committed nearly $300 million to a range of nonprofit and for-profit “charity” outfits. An examination of the ideas behind the Omidyar Network and of the investments it has made suggests that its founder is anything but a “different” sort of billionaire. Instead, what emerges is almost a caricature of neoliberal ideology, complete with the trail of destruction that ensues when that ideology is put into practice. The generous support of the Omidyar Network goes toward “fighting poverty” through micro-lending, reducing third-world illiteracy rates by privatizing education and protecting human rights by expanding property titles (“private property rights”) into slums and villages across the developing world.
In short, Omidyar Network’s philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of “markets” to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives—one micro-individual at a time.
All the neoliberal guru cant about solving the world’s poverty problems by unlocking the hidden “micro-entrepreneurial” spirit of every starving Third Worlder is put into practice by Omidyar Network’s investments. Charity without profit motive is considered suspect at best, subject to the laws of unintended consequences; good can only come from markets unleashed, and that translates into an ideology inherently hostile to government, democracy, public politics, redistribution of land and wealth, and anything smacking of social welfare or social justice.
I bet if you asked neoliberal billionaires to establish (interest free?) micro-lending programs in the US, so we can have more mom and pop establishments on Main Street again, they’d give a lot of reasons why banks should be used for that instead.
It’s like those commercials for supporting a poor foster child in a foreign country. That’s a lot more appealing then helping poor kids here, because when it only costs about 12¢ a day to eat, giving micro-moola sounds good.
“Ah yes, the fabled “civic-minded billionaire”—you’ll find him two doors down from the tooth fairy.”
What a great line!
And it IS serious, folks, when journalists and other pundits abandon all critical thinking and present neoliberals as if they are capitalists turned altruists and would never think to continue to do everything within their power to manipulate “free” markets to their personal advantage. They all have skin in the game, regardless of which game and the fact that they have more money than God.
No one promotes privatization for the public good. I’ve read enough Tea Party garbage to know that those folks readily admit that they don’t even believe in the public good. Some neoliberals from the major parties might conceal that belief, but privatization is inherently beneficial only to privatizers. Ask virtually everyone in my city who benefitted from privatized public parking –certainly not the people who have to pay sky high prices at parking meters for the next 75 years –and 90 years in garages, since that’s how long those privatization contracts last.
I am really shocked that Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill will be working for this billionaire. Greenwald and Scahill are good progressive journalists but it would appear that they are clueless about the evils of privatizing education. These are two smart men, being clueless about the privatizing of education is not much of an excuse. Is there a billionaire out there who actively supports the REAL public schools, public school teachers and their unions and is ready to throw his millions or billions at the neighborhood district schools? George Soros? If they and their corporations would just be paying the top marginal tax rates of the 1950s (91%), that would go a long way to ending the fiscal crisis that we do have.
Yes, I’m shocked too. Greenwald has been on the front lines calling out the evils of neoliberalism for over a decade now. I think he has it in his mind that he is going to be able to be more “independent”, but I don’t see how you get much more independent than the Guardian. Certainly not by being beholden to a neoliberal billionaire. Quite disturbing.
Greenwald seldom talks about social issues. When he started blogging his world view was apparently identical with Fox News. For example much less than a decade ago he wrote this:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.fi/2005/11/reality-of-latin-american-reaction-to.html
My impression is that he is a cynical careerist, not a reactionary and definately not a progressive either, in a sense that he would actually care about the issues. Focusing on civil liberties (as if they are something that exists in a vacuum ) has made him loads of money. And his attitude seems to be careerist: making book deals with Hollywood and now this billionaire venture.
Oh, Diane, now you’ve really stepped in it! It is extremely controversial to ask about the methods or motives of billionaires. I have no idea why, but it is. Fair warning: you’ll be accused of being ungrateful!
You may ask about the motives and self-interest of teachers and you may ask about the motives and self-interest of unions but you may NOT ask about the motives and self-interest of the billionaires who are backing public school privatization.
‘It’s almost as if journalists can’t answer those questions because they haven’t bothered asking them.’
It is also hilarious that this is being promoted as a foray into tough, investigative journalism but none of them bothered to look at how this guy promotes a specific ideology with his other “donations”.
By the way, I AM ungrateful. I never asked Bill Gates or the Walton Family or the Dell Family to run my public school. I never voted for any of them and I have no rational reason to believe they’re working on my behalf.
The free market economic system is the one that has been the most successful in ending the poverty that has characterized the human condition for most of our history on earth, so I think Omidyar’s faith in it is well placed.
There has never been a “free market economic system” ever unless one goes back far enough before money was used, back to straight barter.
Money has taken many forms. The earliest thing we might call money were commodities that everyone valued (eliminating the double coincidence of wants that barter requires). Cattle, for example, in many areas have been identified as commodity money (very useful as money can literally create more money, less useful that the money dies, and very difficult to make change. Fiat money seems more practical) .
Would you count commodity money as barter or money in your criteria?
“We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.” – Pierre Omidyar
Funny, I thought the point of business was to make money.
The point of a business is to make money by appealing to potential customers. Businesses end up making socially useful decisions because of market forces. The invisible hand thing.
Ah yes, the Invisible Hand and and those glorious Free Markets, as in the Federal Reserve buying $85 billion in mortgage-backed securities every month, and providing zero percent interest rates to the big banks, which then lend the money back to the federal government.
I am not sure what the Fed’s quantitative easing program has to do with it, but I am willing to learn if you could elaborate a bit.
“Businesses end up making socially useful decisions because of market forces.” Sure, if you ignore the exploding Ford Pintos, all the other unsafe at any speed cars, the killer tobacco, the asbestos related diseases, all the toxic waste dumps that corporations gifted to us over the many decades. Was slavery a socially useful decision?
Are you self sufficient or do you depend on participants in a decentralized market to feed you every day, provide clothing for you, build shelter for you? To use Adam Smith’s words, do you depend on decentralized markets to provide you with all the necessities and conveniences of your life?
When I teach an online class on economic development I have my students watch this TED talk, among others. It seems relevant to this discussion.
“The point of a business is to make money by appealing to potential customers.”
As I said, the point is to make money.
Some may find profit in making “good” decisions, while others may succeed by being monopolists (and using some dubious means to set up said monopolies), some use the power of persuasion (expensive and not necessarily “good for society” advertising) to make money, some companies cloak themselves in “good”, but are really part of the problem (look into the “pink washing” concept here: http://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/?page_id=13), then there is the whole Enron way to make money, not too much socially useful in all that, is there?
Guess I am just not buying the whole invisible hand thing, Milton.
But thanks.
Ang,
Do you depend on the decentralized market to provide you with food and shelter, the conveniences and necessities of life or are you self sufficient?
I was referring to the transparent hypocrisy of Invisible Hand rationales, when in fact markets are manipulated and controlled in the interests of those with the most capital and power.
If by referring to the Invisible Hand you meant shadowy but powerful forces hiding behind cliches supplied to an increasingly powerless public, I might agree, but I’m reasonably certain that’s not what you meant.
Don’t you have to address the facts raised in the piece rather than just relying on invisible hand theory?
What about this:
“Sidr victims who lost almost everything in the cyclone, experienced pressure and harassment from nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for repayment of microcredit instalments. Such intense pressure led some of the Sidraffected borrowers to sell out the relief materials they received from different sources. Such pressure for loan recovery came from large organisations such as BRAC, ASA and even the Nobel Prize winning organisation Grameen Bank.
“Even the most severely affected people are expected to pay back in a weekly basis, with the prevailing interest rate. No system of ‘break’ or ‘holiday’ period is available in the banks’ current charter. No exceptions are made during a time of natural calamity. The harsh rules practised by the microcredit lender organisations led the disaster affected people even selling their relief assistance. Some even had to sell their leftover belongings to pay back their weekly instalments.”
The rate on the loans was 40%. 40%! “market forces” seem to be screwing these women. Yet this was promoted by every media outlet from the NYTimes to the Economist. Did any of them go there and look at what happened when the theory became a reality?
Good thinking, Ang, because, most likely, Friedman knew better, too. I heard an economist explain on Moyers that economics professors in business schools teach economics very differently from professors who teach in economics departments.
While the profs in economics departments extol the virtues of “free” markets and “the invisible hand,” the business school profs teach how to manipulate markets, so that very little, if anything, is left to chance. You can guess which economics courses peons meeting general education requirements take and which courses future entrepreneurs and corporatists take.
It seems we have completely forgotten something we used to know, which is “look a gift horse in the mouth” 🙂
At this point, shouldn’t we look with a critical eye at ALL of these “miracles”?
Micro-loans were promoted so heavily by media. It was…a miracle!
Did no one ever go back and look at what happened to the people who defaulted on the loans? Wouldn’t that be the logical next step? “Micro loans sound great, but what happens when they can’t make the payment on the note? What’s the collateral?”
I mean, for goodness sakes. This isn’t difficult.
Fads, quick fixes and miracles.
There’s just no appreciation of RISK. Wealthy adults can handle a LOT of risk, because they’re insulated from the downside of their ventures! That’s not true of public school kids in Philadelphia. No one considered that? They’re exactly the same as Bill Gates?
It’s happening again with “blended learning”. They’re all pushing it, recklessly and thoughtlessly. It’s a miracle! Duncan may as well be on the paid sales force.
How many times are we going fall for this? What happened to due diligence and prudence regarding children? Isn’t that the role of adults?
What happens to small children when they spend 6 hours in front a screen (and that’s not even counting the time they spend out of school in front of screens)?
What happens to state lawmakers when they’re presented with an opportunity to employ a cheap quick fix to save money on staffing public ed? They grab it, right? We already know this. We already know that the biggest expense in public schools is staff. How do they save money? They cut staff. Will they use “blended learning” to replace teachers? Sure they will! What’s cheaper? A science program or a science teacher?
Wouldn’t one ask these things BEFORE one rejiggers schools to accommodate “blended learning”?
“Duncan may as well be on the paid sales force.”
Oh, he is. Just a little bit indirectly.
I read his tweets. You should too. I’m not sure he writes them, but someone over there is pushing “blending learning”. It’s interesting politically because they’ve all but dropped “virtual schools” due to the incredible rip-off industry that has grown up around that experiment.
Blended learning is the new virtual schools. Blended learning may have merit, but it’ll be discredited if they pursue it with the same reckless abandon they forced “virtual schools” down our throats. Virtual schools are completely discredited where I live, and I live in the middle of nowhere. Someone should alert Tom Friedman!
Chiara Duggan & Dienne: “blended learning” fits in nicely with other catchy phrases like “the bigotry of low expectations” and “poverty is not destiny.” [Ok, I left out “masking tape is a elementary school teacher’s best friend” but that takes us down a different road.]
As a pr ploy aimed squarely at the general public it suggests a kind of innovative multi-tasking that eschews the [allegedly] old teacher-dominated, boring, one-little-atomized-step-at-a-time learning regimen. Not for nothing are we in the cagebusting achivement-gap crushing twenty first century.
After all, wouldn’t it be more efficient and interesting and productive to “blend” and “mix” and “stir in” a whole bunch of educational ingredients to make tastier and healthier “learning” nutrients?
Evidently you two didn’t get the memo. No time to waste on frivolities like smaller class sizes and touchy-feely approaches like encouraging a lifelong love and enjoyment of learning. Critical thinking is sooooo over rated.
No, it is best to force-feed the little [and not so little] tykes the edufood with the greatest potential of giving our “most precious assets” a chance to learn docility and low-level skills. Standardized test anyone?
“Blended learning.” A winner.
Said recommended school diets not to be served, of course, in the schools the charterites/privatizers send their own children to like Harpeth Hall and Lakeside School and U of Chicago Lab Schools and Sidwell Friends and the like.
Wonder why???
😎
The historical record on the efficacy of free markets vs. socialism in advancing material prosperity is overwhelmingly in favor of free markets. Socialism when actually implemented has been a massive disaster.
This is blatantly false. The scandinavian countries, which are democratic socialist, have a high standard of living, including Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland.
“Oh, he is. Just a little bit indirectly.”
You know what I expect out of government actors? To act as a CHECK on market forces applied to public entities like public schools. Market forces have plenty of resources to promote themselves. They don’t need deregulatory cheerleaders in government. Duncan is supposed to be the adult in the room. Does he have any idea if “blended learning” benefits 6 year olds? I know they’ll be able to make money on it. That isn’t the question. If they can’t make money on it they’ll get out of it.
His role is to look after the PUBLIC INTEREST. The private interest will take care of itself. It always does. Who represents the public interest at this table? Why is he filling an advocates’ role that’s already filled?
I agree completely. But unfortunately, we’re living in times when the government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biggest corporations (who are not, in fact, in competition with each other, but rather using the government to keep out any further competition).
WOW. This from the link: “In 2012, it emerged that while the SKS IPO was making millions for its wealthy investors, hundreds of heavily indebted residents of India’s Andhra Pradesh state were driven to despair and suicide by the company’s cruel and aggressive debt-collection practices. The rash of suicides soared right at the peak of a large micro-lending bubble in Andhra Pradesh, in which many of the poor were taking out multiple micro-loans to cover previous loans that they could no longer pay. It was subprime lending fraud taken to the poorest regions of the world, stripping them of what little they had to live on. It got to the point where the Chief Minister of Andrah Pradesh publicly appealed to the state’s youth and young women not to commit suicide, telling them, ‘Your lives are valuable.'”
Don’t know how much more I can take. Pearson has expanded its tentacles into the sub-Sahara: “Overseas, the Omidyar Network is embarking on a school privatization program that will make DonorsChoose look like Mother Theresa’s handiwork. Omidyar provided seed capital for a new Africa-based for-profit private school enterprise for the poor called Bridge International. In 2009, ON gave Bridge a total of $1.8 million; Matt Bannick, the top figure (managing partner) in the Omidyar Network, sits on Bridge International’s board of directors.
Bridge International’s first schools are being built in Kenya, and are slated to expand across the sub-Sahara, hoping to rope millions of poor African kids into its schools. Bridge’s strategic partner is the for-profit education giant, Pearson. Diane Ravitch, former US Assistant Secretary of Education and critic of school “reform” efforts, has warned about Pearson’s near-monopolistic power influencing the privatization of American education (see Ravitch’s article”The Pearsonization of the American Mind.”)”
KrazyTA
November 21, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Chiara Duggan & Dienne: “blended learning” fits in nicely with other catchy phrases like “the bigotry of low expectations” and “poverty is not destiny.” [Ok, I left out “masking tape is a elementary school teacher’s best friend” but that takes us down a different road.]
Right, but they’re not naive. They must be listening to Jeb Bush pushing “cyberschools”. There have been local media exposes on this. A single local reporter in Maine won an award for exposing the Bush lobbying in that state. I mean come on, this is ordinary due diligence with public money and policy. It’s not extraordinary. Why are they selling this so hard? What’s the rush? They know perfectly well states are gutting public ed funding. There’s no connection there? Shouldn’t we at least ASK?
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172551/e-mails-show-jeb-bush-foundation-lobbied-businesses-including-one-tied-bush#
Thanks for posting this, Diane – I just finished reading the whole article. It’s quite possibly the most important article anyone could read right now (along with your book and THE SHOCK DOCTRINE). Such a shame it will be behind a paywall soon.
Oh lord, here we go again. Markets=Bad. Government=Good. And so many on this blog wonder why there is hostility among people to public school thinking. Blind hatred of entrepreureship, of capitalism, of market solutions vitiates all otherwise sensible critique of privatization. There is nothing wrong with “Randism.” As long as people prefer the state doing things, there will be slavery of the individual arising from slavery of the mind. The road to serfdom indeed is broad and filled with people defending government run schools. It reminds me of the image in Milton’s Paradise Lost of Satan building the bridge from Hell to the world. Once it’s built, and by the bridge I mean the philosophy of utopian statism, it is the path to hell (metaphorically speaking). So sad to find the second rate minds of our time so completely and so easily deceived. Again, I speak metaphorically, not fundamentalistically, you are endorsing the road to “hell.”
Apparently you didn’t read the article. It doesn’t say market=bad, government=good; it says government=market. Government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big corporations who now control everything.
I’ll blame your reading comprehension on whatever private school you attended.
I was explicitly responding to Diane’s post. But you are right that I had not read the article when I posted. Now you have caught me by the toe, and I must go actually do the home work.
The “free market” zealots forget that markets are created by governments, as shown by Alex Marshall in “The Surprising Design of Market Economies.” The idea of a “free” market is essentially a myth, just like the Tooth Fairy.
Exactly. Try explaining that to Harlan above you.
Yeah, try explaining that to me. “essentially a myth” eh? Go ahead, explain. “essentially” what is Mr. Marshall’s argument?
I love it, the myth of the market. A claim isn’t a proof, dearie.
In all of the comments, everyone seems to think that Greenwald, Scahill and Poitras can be bought and sold by a billionaire… Based on what I’ve seen from these three journalists, I don’t think so…. I don’t believe in the tooth fairy, but I DO think it’s possible that Omidyar is a libertarian who believes information needs to be free and open like networks and (unfortunately, in HIS mind) markets and he is therefore willing to underwrite gutsy muckrakers one of whom (Greenwald) is reluctant to enter our country because our government might arrest him… I’m HOPING that Omidyar is the champion of the first amendment he purports to be and, if he is, I am grateful for his willingness to underwrite journalists who don’t accept everything they are told…
Billionaires are interested in privatization for one reason only: they can no longer make their money on fossil fuels. . . . extracting it, processing it, selling it, or even using it to fuel their now outsourced industries. BRICS is now competing for that same fuel.
ANd therefore the American billionaires must turn inward and whittle down public trusts to get their capital.
Simple as that . . . . . .
A disappointment! I do so want to believe in true philanthropy – a wealthy Mother Teresa able to finance a way to eliminate poverty, hunger, and disease throughout the world.
Only way is capitalism rather than statism.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.