February 10, 2014
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Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, head up the NoVo
Foundation, whose $1 billion endowment was made possible by Peter's
father, famed investor Warren Buffett.Last year, Peter wrote a
scathing opinion piece in the New York Times that called out
traditional philanthropy for treating symptoms while ignoring the
underlying systemic issues. Now that the dust has settled, Peter Buffett
sat down with Gar Alperovitz, longtime advocate for a transition to a
more just, equitable, and sustainable economic system, for a
conversation about hope, change, personal commitment, and community
roots.
GA: I want to make it a dialogue. I’m not a reporter, but I do want to start with the obvious questions, with the
piece you did in the New York Times on the "charitable industrial complex” and the reaction that you received.
PB:
Well, it’s been fantastic. I was utterly surprised that it mattered
that much, what I had to say. And that it mattered that much that
I said it. I got a lot of responses like, “Thank god somebody said this, and thank god you said it!”
So
then I wrote the op-ed thinking, oh, it’ll just be a blog, and when I
finished I thought, well, maybe somebody might be interested in this. So
when the NYT said yes, I was certainly flattered and excited, but still
I had no idea how far it would go. It’s like writing a hit song—you’re
just writing a song; you don’t know that it’s going to resonate the way
it does. In fact, I say to my musician friends, here I’ve been spending
my whole life trying to write a hit song, and it ended up being an op-ed
in the NYT!
GA: I know you also got a lot of criticism.
PB:
This is the interesting part. Within the first three to four days,
maybe even longer, I received an absolute tsunami, beyond a flood, of
support and positive responses—crashed the NoVo website for a couple of
days, came in through my
info@PeterBuffet.com address, hundreds of hundreds of responses, all positive, 100 percent.
And
then the people who actually had their own megaphone, inside the system
that I was talking about, started responding, and that’s when the
negativity began. It came from, essentially, the institutionalized way
of thinking. Immediately what I saw was that the people who got the
feeling of it, the systemic nature or the overarching sense of what I
was trying to put out there as an observation, totally got it. The
people who wanted to reduce it—this sentence is wrong, that sentence is
shows how nuts he is—were the ones who criticized it. Well, isn’t that
the problem? I thought it was interesting seeing the issue once again
show itself in who supported and who criticized the piece.
GA:
That’s really interesting because I thought you were going to answer—but
I’m glad you didn’t—that you were mostly attacked. That’s the part I
saw.
PB: The positive responses are what people didn’t see, because it was email after email personally.
GA:
Even more important, is the recognition in other’s eyes that one has a
voice. A lot of people don’t know that they have a voice.
PB:
We really feel like that at the foundation as one of the key components
for us is to either give people the agency to have a voice, or if they
don’t feel like their voice is valid for some reason, to have other
voices speak for them to show them that it is. One way or another, we
want to create this awareness around your own agency that your voice
matters.
GA: I’ll tell you my story: I wrote a Ph.D. thesis which
turned out to be on the decision to use the atomic bomb. I hadn’t
started there. I started with the development of American economic
imperialism in 1944-'45, and the planning for the post-war era. And I
ran into the fact that people, when the atomic bomb became available,
saw it as way to keep the Russians in the corner and enforce their
position. This was at Cambridge, and Simon and Schuster decided to
publish it.
I was 26—I thought, oh, isn’t that nice? And then all
of a sudden, I had the same experience you had. It was front page on the
New York Times and the Washington Post, but attacked, of course.
PB: Of course. Wow.
GA:
I was like, whoa that’s a different world out there! What’s really
interesting about the inside of the system is that even Harry Truman who
made this decision actually believed that he was doing good. If you see
him as an evil person conspiring, you miss the whole.
PB: I don’t
particularly subscribe to the idea that there are people out there with
their fingers on the triggers, pulleys, levers and buttons, sort of a
conspiracy side of things, as much as a system that is running…
GA: It’s much deeper than a conspiracy.
PB:
Right! The thing I love is that nobody’s that smart, nobody’s that
together. No politician has it all figured out. That’s not to say that
there weren’t bad actors when the engines were starting, for instance
during the Industrial revolution. People have gotten the car going off
in that direction, but at that point, it’s going. That’s the hardest
part about this. We’re inside this system and people absolutely not only
believe it’s real, they need to believe it’s real.
GA: One of the
things I’ve discovered—I’ve been speaking around the country, mainly
because of my new book—most people understand that there is a systemic
problem. It’s not politics and who you elect; the long-term trends are
perfectly clear. It’s not a secret.
PB: You’re saying that most people get that it’s systemic.
GA:
Yes, they get it. Media continues to be all about the Tea Party, and
whether Barack Obama made the right move yesterday, and all that stuff.
But what’s actually being said across the country is that there is a
systemic problem. They voice it in different ways—some people talk about
the big corporations, some about the government. But to say that there
is a systemic problem is to speak to something people basically know.
Lots of people.
PB: Yes, you’re right. Exactly. That was what was
interesting about the response to the op-ed. These were not just
philanthropic people in the NGOs cheering me on. These were people that
just got that I was talking about a systemic deal.
GA: That’s the
challenge. You put that issue in the center. “If you don’t like
capitalism, and you don’t want socialism, then what do you want and how
do we get there?” It is that level of question.
PB: It’s funny, I
was talking to someone at KPFK in Los Angeles, on Pacifica radio. He
wanted me to go toward revolution and communism, essentially. And I
said, look, all those words are charged for various people for various
reasons, so I’ll just use the word “awaken.” How about that? How can I
get to a word that isn’t charged? That’s a problem with “socialism” in
particular.
GA: Although, you’ve seen the poll data. People under
30, who will be the creators of the new era, are slightly positive on
"socialism," probably because Fox news is against it.
PB: Yes, exactly, Fox is probably doing themselves in, and they don’t realize it!
GA:
But all of this is not manifest; we need to crystallize it somehow. The
thing I discovered just going around the country, and particularly this
last round, is that there is also a huge amount going on on the ground.
But people don’t know that! People do not have the information. So they
see the bleak and the dark, and the talking heads. And when you begin
to give them information on what's developing locally all over the
place, the most common reaction I get is “Oh! There’s some hope!” In the
media, people don't get that, what they get is stalemate and deadlocked
power.
PB: Yes, they’re getting what’s fed to them. Maybe the
most important thing to us at the foundation is giving people the
knowledge that other people are there too. Again, that alone gives them
hope.
GA: Knowledge, information and also some perspective on how to move forward.
PB:
It’s about trailblazers. What's critical is finding like-minded people
that maybe have taken one step further than you have, and then you feel
safe to taking that step yourself.
GA: Yes, it makes it seem
possible, that it might be possible. There may be a way forward. But
language is important. Half of our time at the Democracy Collaborative
is spent on the ground, working on how to democratize ownership of
wealth through community building strategies, and the other part is
focused on the systemic question: if you don’t like capitalism and you
don’t like socialism, then what do you want?
My language on this,
I’m from Racine, Wisconsin, and my first test, is to think about my very
good friend who I go back to see occasionally, who I started
kindergarten with. And he’s extremely conservative, very religious and
really smart. And last time I saw him, and I talked to him about this.
If you don’t have a way to speak to people who are ordinary Americans
like the guys I grew up with, you’re not in the game.
Let me ask
you one more question about this, because I can't resist. How much of
this—as a kid from Racine asking a kid from Omaha—how much of the spirit
of this comes from the local Midwestern experience?
PB: In some
sense, all of it. There’s some fundamental geographical DNA that plays a
role in the literal DNA, I think I’m the sixth or seventh generation in
Omaha, my great-great-whatever came in in the 1860s and started a
grocery store in 1869, that was there for 100 years. That was the family
business. My great-great-grandfather, I joke about this, his name was
Earnest and his brother’s name was Frank. And their sister’s name was
Grace! But talk about a work ethic!
My mother lived two blocks
from where she grew up and where I was born. So in other words, I would
go see my grandparents all the time—they were two blocks away. And I had
the same English teacher my mother had in high school, and it just goes
on and on. It was a community. This essentially could happen anywhere,
but it feels very Midwestern.
GA: It’s a small enough city that
you could have that feeling of community. Where I'm from the size of the
town is smaller, about 80,000. I’ll probably romanticize this, but
looking back, let me tell you how it was. The truth of it was, the zoo
didn’t have an elephant and they wanted an elephant. (It's a whole other
question whether that's a good thing.) So they put up a paper-m
âché
elephant with a slot in it, people would drop their pennies in, and
ultimately, step by step, they got an elephant. They could actually
count on the community.
I have this image, and I remember reading
this story, where they’re training young firemen, and they have to learn
to go into the fire and then come out the other end. They are one thing
at the outset, and frightened. And they come out the other end as a
fireman once they’ve actually faced it and done it. What I hear you
doing is embracing Warren Buffett’s son, and coming out the other end,
using it.
PB: Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly right.
GA: Wonderful. Did you have any hesitation about doing this?
PB:
No, and I’ll tell you why. I got it from my parents, and my nature,
too. It takes both. We grew up not having any idea what my dad did.
GA: You really didn’t know?
PB:
We really didn’t know. When my sister was in grade school and she had
to list our father’s occupation, she put security analyst. Everybody
thought he checked alarm systems. He’d read the paper every night in the
same place, going through S&P 500s, Moody’s, huge bulletins, but we
had no idea. Honestly, we rented the same house in Laguna Beach for the
summer for 10 years, over 10 years, and then they finally bought a
house. So we had a second home when I was 13 or 14, and that was a big
deal. And that was a $125,000 house on the beach, it wasn’t a $4 million
house or whatever.
So there were little things that were a little
different, but nothing that was wildly different than anybody in the
neighborhood. We didn’t have any sense of that. When I was in my 20s, in
the '80s, he showed up on some richest person list, it might’ve been
when Forbes started doing it. And my mom and I were on the phone
laughing saying, wow, now everybody is going to start looking at us
differently, even though we’re still the same. But being in Milwaukee
and being a musician, it was actually not a thing because my friends
were painters, house painters, and musicians. We never got a ton of
feedback one way or the other.
But when Jennifer and I moved here
to New York City in 2005, I called my dad and said, this is weird. This
is the first time I felt like the name is doing things to people. My
wife calls it the funhouse mirror. And he hadn’t thought of it, my dad
was like, oh, yeah, this is kind of like you’re a Rockefeller or
something in NY. I mean, none of us think that way, and he hadn’t
either. In the past decade or so, he’s been really way more public. And
so now, of course, he walks down the street and people recognize him
and are excited to see him—and he deserves it. He’s worked his tail off
for years and years and years.
But when I was growing up, it was
never a factor; when it started to become one, I was already fully
formed, essentially, or certainly formed enough, because I’ll never be
fully formed. I was formed enough to be able to recognize that it could
be a tool. How am I going to use this thing? It’s worth using, and it’s
stupid to run away from it. Why live in anything other than a positive
relationship to it? How do I work with this? It’s been spectacular,
trying to figure this out, especially after this op-ed because that
opened up so many things, and I want to be careful.
GA: That’s a whole different public life. It’s not only music.
PB:
Exactly right, and the foundation is of course a big part of this
because it has enough assets to potentially shift things. What do we do
with that? How do we behave? We knew from the minute we got the money
that our behavior is as important as the money. Luckily Jennifer and I
have been together for 22 years, and we have worked through our personal
relationship stuff. However you want to say it, we are learning so
much about being in a relationship to each other that that can only
begin to reflected out into the larger world.
We’re rooted
individually and together, and what I’ve learned, ultimately, is the
whole "be the change" thing is way more complicated than people think.
People think it’s
do the change you want to see in the world.
Being
is so much harder, but you get so much back for doing it. I don’t want
to use the word ‘work’ because it’s not work, it’s this wonderful place
of discovery. It literally grounds you. And I am literally barefoot all
of the time. That’s no joke. I’m convinced that being in nature, eating
from the land you live on, drinking water from the land you live on, all
these things are things that we’ve experienced for millennia, and have
only been separated from at most 150 years, Are essential. Whatever the
next thing is, it has to have that as a component. A deep local
commitment.
GA: I was just thinking this about it the other day
talking with my wife (we’re in our 41st year). I went to William Horlick
High in Racine, WI, and my friends, going to public school, were
blue-collar and farm kids—I could walk from our house easily in five
minutes to a farm to get fresh food. That’s gone now from Racine, it’s
changed. But we had that possibility, to connect to the land, to meet
people of different backgrounds….
PB: Public education is a huge
part of that. My education was public from all the way through
kindergarten through high school, and you’re right, you meet everybody
there.
GA: But it wasn’t a question. It’s just the way it was.
PB: It’s community. Our grandparents didn’t call it organic food, right?
GA: What about the larger ecological piece—climate change? Where does that come in for you?
PB:
Well, to me, it gets into the stopping the bleeding part when there’s a
systemic nature of the wound. Climate change falls into the category of
critical. It’s another piece of the systemic problem. I don’t put it in
a different category than violence against women, economic inequality,
or all the things that create the other layers of injustice, except that
it’s an injustice against the planet, which is probably the deepest. In
NoVo, we aren’t specifically addressing climate issues, but that
doesn’t mean we don’t think it’s important.
GA: To say that it is a systemic problem, rather than a technological problem, changes the debate.
PB:
I have friends who are so passionate about doing all this stuff around
climate change, but it’s like the Affordable Care Act. These things are
big deals, but let's remember the Einstein quote, “The significant
problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that
created them.” All this carbon sequestering, people talking about
burying CO2 under the ocean: you have to be kidding me. Which generation
is going to pay for that?
GA: It’s really interesting, to focus
it that way: it’s not the way the movements are currently engaged. They
are trying for piecemeal legislation and they come up against the fact
that it is really the system that needs changing. We better get an
alternative, and that shifts the conversation.
PB: I think some of
the problem gets back to the question of hope. I think it's beautiful
to see some of the people who are so passionate about this cause, but
then you say, actually that’s not going to work, you need to change the
system.
GA: And they say, well how do I change that?
PB: Exactly, then they say, well, that’ll never happen, so what do I do?
We’re
talking about people who have a lot of influence and you would think
the kind of the imagination to admit, you know what, you’re right, let’s
go! I’m struck by the way ego stops this from happening. You know,
someone has a cause, it’s their cause, they’re going to fight for it: to
say to them, you know what, actually, it doesn’t matter unless you
tackle the big picture. Nobody wants to hear that.
GA: But they
know. And if it’s a system problem, we better figure what’s the
alternative, at least have some ideas about it. We better have some
starting points. I use the term evolutionary reconstruction. Which means
you need to reconstruct institutions, and reform doesn’t get you there.
PB: That’s the thing. I’m so with you on that. Reform is giving energy to the existing problem, ultimately.
GA:
And revolution, typically, doesn’t get you there either. Either you’re
going to find a way, over time, to change the institutional structure
and the patterns in culture that reinforce it, or you are stuck. This
might be possible, it might not be, but what’s interesting is that once
people understand it they begin to have a path.
PB: They have to.
They absolutely do. And that’s the hard part; I think of it as a
lilypad—people need something to jump to, otherwise they’re not going to
jump. I found that in my own career as a musician, I was doing
commercials commercials commercials, and I felt comfortable, safe, and
it took seeing something I could jump to, that was built strong enough,
to make the leap.
We feel that it’s our responsibility to start
building the scaffolding—creating the conditions so that something can
be built. We don’t need to be saying that this is exactly what it should
be. But we obviously have to have enough of an inkling about what we
think it could be, but not be attached to the exact outcome.
I
joke about it, that we’re trying to use money as if money doesn’t
matter. But that’s the trick, you have to use the existing structure so
that the existing structure can go away. And this plays out differently
in certain sectors, you can imagine alternatives easier in some than
others. There are certain things—politics, the economic structure—people
can’t imagine another way.
The idea is that you can start to give
people agency—that’s where the Internet can help—and then knitting
these people together. You can, I’m sure, cite more local examples than I
can, time-dollars and these various things. In fact, there’s a bank in
New England that’s going to start lending local currency, which I think
is so interesting. I think the key is small, local transformation that
then gets knitted together. In a different vein, we’re working with
Ai-Jen Po on domestic worker union rights, and she’s really helped me
see a similar process, knitting together migrant workers, service
workers, domestic workers, Walmart employees— there’s various
constituencies that all are starting to feel that they are not alone.
GA: That’s critical, not feeling alone is politically critical.
PB:
It’s huge! You need to start with extremely small and manageable,
extremely bite size chunks of change that you can turn into a meal.
Honestly, I think the country is too big anyway. I’ve always had this
feeling that bioregions, in particular, would be a way people naturally
have and can organize themselves around. And that the country could go
in this direction, probably over 100 years, 20 years, 400 years? I don’t
know how long it’s going to take.
GA: I’m smiling because I have
argued the same thing for a long time: a continental system is too big
to manage democratically. Is participatory democracy possible with 318
million people? I don’t think so.
PB: No, exactly. And that’s okay.
GA:
It means that there’s a whole radical shift in constitutional
structures that's necessary if you want a democratic system. There are a
few places I see beginning glimmerings of this regional notion. In the
Pacific Northwest, there’s a lot of discussion of regional issues, and
then in New England, there is a growing effort to focus on air quality
and climate change, on energy, and on food as region wide concerns.
PB: Exactly. And again, a bioregion just makes sense. I don’t know if you’re familiar with
Ecotrustand
Salmon Nation. That is visionary.
GA:
Actually, if you go back to the 1930s and the early vision of the TVA
(not what it became in WW2) what it was was a river system. That’s what
they were trying to manage.
But regional scale is an argument that
people have the hardest time with; when I talk about this question, and
I say, no this doesn’t make sense, at some point this country is too
big to manage. That’s very hard for people to get their heads around. At
some point, you’re talking about scaling down the system, or it doesn’t
solve the problem. That’s really tough. “Capitalism” is easy to talk
about compared with actually thinking about regional scale
decision-making of a genuinely serious kind.
PB: Yes, which is
strange to me because history is definitely on our side when you’re
talking about localism. The nation-state is a new idea and it’s an
idea. Wednesday: just an idea. America: just an idea. You have to
remember that.
GA: I spend most of my time these days writing
books. It’s all about ideas. And I often say, I don’t think ideas matter
at all, most of the time.
Except sometimes they do…and then they can matter to people a very great deal.
I
think this is the first time in my adult life—including the '60s—and as
a historian I would say, I think it may be the first time in American
history where we are truly up against systemic limits and the systemic
issues are really on the table. The Great Depression was nothing
compared with the political-economic and ecological limits now
challenging the system. And this makes it a really important time.
PB: And wars can’t take us out of it, which is what happened both with WWI and WWII.
GA:
That’s absolutely critical. The war option is declining as an option to
bail out the system. I agree entirely. And the traditional liberal
solution, for better or worse, is not available largely because of the
collapse of the labor movement, which was the heart of its power base.
PB: And that’s why knitting together the workers in a way that we hope we can help do is valuable.
GA:
And this then points to the evolution towards a different system. That
is really what we are talking about and that’s when ideas matter; it’s
not just projects. I put it like this sometimes: I am really for
projects. But I’m totally against “projectism,” the idea that my project
is better than your project and so on.
PB: Exactly, and this is,
again, part of the problem. We have so successfully individualized
people that they don’t get this necessity for social interaction and
working together and moving together. And I think part of it is the
origin of species: the piece of that story that got amplified was
essentially every man for himself, survival of the fittest. When in
fact, my understanding is that most of that story was the communal
nature of the animal kingdom, which we’re a part of.
But the industrial revolution amplified the piece that mattered to them. I find that whole period so interesting. Have you read
Looking Backward?
I just read this after someone reacting to the op-ed suggested I
should. It’s amazing and it speaks to that time where a book mattered.
What that book launched is pretty extraordinary. And I do think it was
only WWI that stopped, not only the momentum of the book, but the
thinking of the time.
GA: The socialists and all of that early
movement were especially interesting because when it came down to earth
it was community socialism. Municipal socialism, like in Milwaukee. But
it was community-based, it was not just state socialism.
PB: And
these nationalist clubs that started spawning up all over, and it gets
back to projects versus projectism, because it’s people recognizing the
similarities of what they’re doing, even though it might be different
for their particular locale.
GA: We have to have the
chutzpah to imagine and declare that this period of history could be the pre-history of the next great transformation.
PB: And that’s exciting to people. As opposed to scaring people.
GA:
And we need to discuss it openly. Say that it’s a system problem and
it’s capitalism. Working for the next three or four decades laying
groundwork for transformation becomes meaningful if people acknowledge
and embrace the first proposition.
PB: What’s encouraging is that
we are at a point where if you say the problem is capitalism, you don’t
get branded something. All you’re doing is saying—and this is what the
op-ed was about— that from the place that I sit, this is what I’m
seeing. Saying that doesn’t make me something else; it just makes me an
observer of the state we’re in, let’s all work towards something else.
But I’m not going to brand myself some brand from the past that will
serve to demonize me or put me outside the circle in someway. And that’s
the trick, because the system wants us to do that.
GA:
Absolutely. We just held the first meeting for something we’re calling
the “Next System Project” this past Thursday. We had 18 people in the
room, including the president of the American Political Science
Association, who just finished her term, and the president of the
Academy of Management, that’s 19,000 business school professors, along
with others, professors, activists, and so on.
The issue we were
discussing was: if we are facing a systemic problem, how do we put that
on the table and how do we talk about it seriously? Every single person
in that room, hands down, said it was a system problem, not a political
problem. Not a social problem. Isn’t that interesting? We were
surprised at the unanimity and clarity; it was striking just how
enthused everyone was about tackling the question at the level of the
system.
PB: I will say that, to me, that’s probably Obama’s
greatest gift: he’s shown that nothing that stays within our current
system is going to work. He really did that for all of us.
GA: I
think we’ve been in some sense dropping the ball. People understand more
than we have been saying. Particularly when the rhetoric is dropped.
PB:
That gets back to the needing to knit together. And I think that’s
happening. I loved that the most searched words in Merriam-Webster was
capitalism and socialism. These are the kind of things we can measure
now—technology will be extremely valuable in terms of saying that this
is undeniable and here’s why.
GA: We need to make this shift
manifest to people. This is a different time in history, and this is
really the moment. People are beginning to adopt a frame that the next
two to three decades count and that we need to be thinking in terms of
movement-building, project-building and idea-building. I think of it as
the pre-history of the next great shift. National People’s Action is
talking about a 40 year plan; BALLE, who we both work with, is talking
about a generation of work. You know the progressive era—it took this
long, but if you can get rolling, things can really change, and that’s
what we’re talking about. The way I sometimes put it, and it drives some
people crazy, is well, you want to play this game? The chips are a few
decades of your life. That’s what it’s about.
PB: I tell staff
here, we’ll probably be dead when the things we’re working on actually
come to fruition, and that’s okay. We want to see indicators, but don’t
count on being at the party.
GA: I’m going to give you two numbers
that really resonate in my experience. In the talks that I’ve been
giving, the one that really floors people is that 400 people in the US
have more wealth than the bottom 180 million. I used to say that this
was literally medieval, but I don’t anymore because a medieval historian
came up to me and told me it was never that bad in the medieval period.
PB: Oh my god.
GA: It’s a staggering number.
PB: And in a global context, it’s even more staggering.
GA: But it also points towards one of the things any serious alternative systemic design will need to address.
The
other number emerges when I tell people that we don’t have any economic
problems, and they say what are you talking about? And I explain that
the current American economy today produces roughly $200,000 for every
family of four right now. We don’t have an economic problem, we have a
political problem managing the wealthiest economy in the world. If we
were at full-employment, it’d be closer to $250,000. Or—I then
say—$100,000/year with a 20-hour week.
That opens one’s eyes. About equality and inequality, and the distribution of work and work time.
PB:
And the framework around “deserving” and welfare, all those claims that
if people just wanted to work, they could. That stuff drives me crazy.
GA: The technical term for that is "bullshit."
PB:
Another number: how small Occupy was in terms of constituency, 250,000
people at its peak. And think about how nervous just that many made a
whole lot of people.
GA: And that’s just openers.
PB: We’re
talking just 1 or 2 percent of the population, to really get something
going. To build that movement, you need to give people a sense that
there are thousands and thousands of people out there working for the
same things; you need to give them a sense that they’re not alone.
GA: And that there may be a path. There may be a direction. There may be a different system out there if we build it.
Peter Andrew Buffett
is an American musician, composer, author and philanthropist. He is an
Emmy Award-winner and co-chair of the NoVo Foundation.
Gar
Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at
the University of Maryland and the co-founder of the Democracy
Collaborative. His new book, What Then Must We Do? has just been published by Chelsea Green.
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