How super rich companies harm us all — and try to cover it up | Anand Giridharadas

Just because a company does incredibly well financially doesn't mean that it does any good for the people. How can we change that? - Huge corporations are often built upon the backs of very cheap labor. So while the stock prices go up, the lives of the workers goes down. - Corporate taxes could offset the harm that these behemoth companies do. But there's a lot of opposition to raising taxes. - Another option would be to classify companies entirely differently than we do now. Anand Giridharadas is the author of The True American and India Calling. He was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016, and has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an Aspen Institute fellow and teaches journalism at New York University. He is the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [https://goo.gl/tHv3eQ] Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2DJIZFI Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Wealthy corporations and people love to ask the question: "What can I do? What should we do? What can we start? What program could we launch?" I would say to the billionaire change agents and corporate social responsibility departments of our country ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you've already done to your country. Before you want to start something of your own, a little private unaccountable venture, do an audit. What do you pay people? Do you pay people enough? Do you use subcontractors to avoid responsibility for those workers? Do you pay benefits? When do your benefits kick in? What do you lobby for in Washington? Do you lobby for things that make everybody have a better life in America or do you lobby against social policies that would cost you something? What's your tax avoidance situation? Do you happen to be this earnest company that wants to change the world? I mean is this company paying its full measure of taxes? Does it use tax havens? Does it do the double Dutch with an Irish sandwich tax maneuver? Does it send money to the Cayman Islands and then back and do all this complex routing? If you're telling me that there are companies that do none of this stuff, that pay people well, that don't dump externalities into the economy, that don't cause social problems – if there are such companies that exist yes, then once you've taken care of all that great. Doing some projects to help people is great. But I haven't found very many such companies. And more often than not when companies do a lot of CSR it's because they understand that they're not on the right side of justice in their day operations so they want to do virtue as a side hustle. And the problem is a lot of these companies tend to create harm in billions and then do good in the millions. And you don't need to be a mathematician to know that we're the losers from that bargain...