Relentless Positive Action: The Stryker Siblings and Victor Fung

Zero Sum Empire

The Mueller testimony gets us talking about the decline in Americans’ ability to experience a common reality with other people, which we take as a harbinger civilizational collapse. Billionaires in the News is about risk assessment and the climate crisis. Recent moves by Chubb and Moody’s indicate that global warming-related risk is figuring into financial industry decision making more than it used to. We also take this to be a harbinger of civilizational collapse. Chad introduces us to the Stryker siblings. They made their money from their grandfather’s medical device company. Their father, Lee Stryker, crashed his plane and died in 1976, and just four years later the film Airplane came out which features a main character named Striker trying to save a plane from crashing. Coincidence? Almost certainly. The Stryker siblings aren’t too bad as far as billionaires go. They give lots of their money to pretty good causes that address educational opportunity, conservation, human rights. They’re also big donors to the Democratic party, and their donations reflect a fairly centrist politics. On the political spectrum of the billionaire class, they’re basically Maoists. The issue we take up in relation to their activities is public-philanthropic partnerships (PPPs). PPPs are a post-2007 crash phenomenon where cities beg the super-rich for money to keep the streetlights on. Not good! Joe introduces us to Victor Fung. Fung is a “global logistics” guy, which apparently means that he connects large consumer good corporations to sweatshop labor. If you’re a big corporation like Apple or Nike, it’s great to keep someone between you and your sweatshops. That way, when a factory burns down and kills a bunch of people you can say “Hey, we just hired this global logistics firm. They assured us everything was cool. We had no idea what the conditions in the factory were.” Joe talks about Taylorism and his techniques of Scientific Management a little bit. We get mad at the naked cruelty of capitalism.