San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How world’s richest make billions pile up
Peter S. Goodman’s “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World” is a meticulously researched, clearly reported and truly infuriating history of the way the top 1% of the world has systematically arranged the way societies operate in order to become even richer, all to the detriment of the rest of us.
Davos Man — a term coined in 2004 by political scientist Samuel Huntington — refers to those who attend the yearly World Economic Forum in Davos, a small town in the Swiss Alps. However, as Goodman writes, the term is now used to describe those who “occupy the stratosphere of the globetrotting class, the billionaires — predominantly white and male — who wield unsurpassed influence over the political realm while promoting a notion that has captured decisive force across major economies: when the rules are organized around greater prosperity for those who already enjoy most of it, everyone’s a winner.”
This formula, Goodman clearly demonstrates, is flawed. The first thing he accomplishes in his book is to dissect and then obliterate said formula by showing that when you give more to those who seemingly have it all, they do the opposite of spreading the wealth around: They buy more stocks, squirrel away more money, evade more taxes, and purchase more expensive private jets and yachts.
And, he shows, they do it all while convincing others they are heroes who will save the world. And he targets the individuals — the Davos Men — who are in charge, not just the corporations they head. One example he cites is San Francisco’s Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, the enterprise software company. While Benioff, Goodman argues, is concerned with homelessness, he takes advantage of tax policies to prevent his earnings from ending up in government social programs. Goodman writes: “The same year that Benioff backed the special levy to address homelessness in his hometown, his company recorded revenues exceeding $13 billion while paying the modest sum of zero in federal taxes. Salesforce deployed fourteen tax subsidiaries scattered from Singapore to Switzerland, moving its money and assets around in a masterful display of accounting hocus-pocus that made its taxable income vanish.”
Benioff is just one of Goodman’s Davos Men. He also looks at the careers, fortunes, and political and financial machinations of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. In each case, Goodman maps out every company, the fellow billionaires and the politicians who, he says, helped each of these men become billionaires at the expense of others.
Citing laws, speeches, books, reports and interviews with a range of subjects, from unemployed workers to taxi drivers, Goodman shows how Davos Men work: how what they do affects everyone else, even as politicians side with them and convince those struggling to survive that globalization and immigration are to blame for their problems.
“Davos Man” takes readers through the events that have led to the current state of affairs, not just in the United States, but also in Italy, France, China, and even Sweden, which Goodman calls a “supposed paragon of enlightened social democracy.” The book serves as a call to arms and an invitation to fight back against the continued unabashed pillaging of all economies by those who least need it.