Donna Azucar
In 1974 I was a student at Cornell majoring in Economics and Government. My studies had taken a decided focus on development economics and third-world government. It’s not complicated, my mother was a UN diplomat living in Rome and serving as a director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). She was the dominant force in my life, my role model, my muse. I assume I wanted to follow in her footsteps. That first semester senior year I took a course on Latin American Economics and a Government Course on Modern Revolutions. The intersection caused me to write a term paper which I titled Donna Azucar about the origins of the Cuban Revolution. It was a good paper. My Government professor thought it so good that he urged me to apply to graduate school under his sponsorship to pursue that arena in the Academy. I had been in Cuba momentarily after the revolution as my family transited through Havana from Venezuela. I saw the revolutionaries at the airport with their bandoliers and early version of the now ubiquitous Russian AK-47. It all felt very real to me, but I felt I was less academically interested than interested in the economic cause and effect.
When I researched the Cuban Revolution, I had a hard time missing The Sovereign State of ITT, the book by Anthony Sampson. I was studying this issue just as the U.S. was working through the CIA to overthrow Allende in Chile and installing General Pinochet as they had with General Franco in Spain in the 30’s. I was enough a child of the 60’s that despite not being a dope-smoker or “hippie”, I was greatly offended by the darker side of our state as it played its ambitions out through vehicles like the CIA. I never marched or protested physically, but my protest took the form of research and writing that I was doing about revolutions and what brought them about. Cuba was my subject and Azucar (sugar) was the vehicle for social change. As you can see, I was conflicted. I was no academic, but I was not ready for the front lines and return to the mud ditches of my youth in Latin America either. I hated what the CIA stood for, but I was intrigued by what corporate America was capable of. I was the perfect blank slate to become a Republican by today’s standard.
I sought advice from my mother who had a very pragmatic solution to my dilemma. She was no ideologue, she was a pragmatist and always had been since her days at the Rockefeller Foundation. Her feeling was that if corporations were to get better at serving mankind, the way to do that was to work within the system not against it. She felt that corporate America would benefit from “men and women of conscience” serving in their ranks. What is so strange about that advice is that it seemed contrary to the history of revolution with which I was so taken.
I went on to choose business school and an MBA as my next step in life. That led me to a career in banking where I more or less forgot about the third-world for a long period of time while I learned the ins and outs of banking. I even voted for Regan as a believer in the corporate world. Suddenly in 1985, I was asked by our Vice Chairman to take over $4 billion of bad debt to Latin America and try to recover it in any creative way I could. My mother had her doubts about my working to take money out of Latin American when she had spent a lifetime doing the opposite, but we got past that. This was an existential crisis for our eighty-year-old bank so off I went. One of the first deals we did was to use some of our debt to buy the largest life insurance company and largest pension company in Chile. We were suddenly the biggest financial institution in Chile, with almost complete control over the long term capital markets of the country. So, I got a chance to meet Mr. Pinochet (he was in his “brown suit” grandfatherly stage of dictatorship, dropping the uniform and military trappings). He was doing good things for the country by bringing in lots of Chicago-School technocrats. Chile has since done more to broaden its middle class and create a more evolved economy than any other country in Latin America. There’s a lot to unpack in that story since the origins of Pinochet were questionable, but the outcome seemed positive.
This morning I read about the riots in Santiago which are predicated on a perceived lack of economic fairness (specifically Subway fares) and unrest among the youth of Chile who see a bleak future. What a wild forty-five year ride I have witnessed and participated in. From populist revolt to economic stability and conservativism to excessive greed (I know many of those in the Chilean elite and they clearly have gone too far), landing us back at the doorstep of populist revolt. So the world turns. And now it is turning this way all over the place. Hong Kong, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, Bolivia, Spain, France, Iraq, Russia, the Czech Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Kazakhstan. The 26,000 for the Bernie/AOC rally in Queens forces me to add the U.S. to the roster. The world is coming to an inflection point of the wallet.
In 2013 I published a book on the Global Pension Crisis wherein I predicted that the world is quickly approaching a demographic point where we are in a species-defining moment. A species is defined by how it provides for its aged and how it provides opportunity for its young. Evolved species do what it takes to do both. By their very nature, the young are more able and willing to take to the streets sooner than the aged are. I believe this is the beginnings of that trend. Imagine a world bounded by dissatisfied older people who are living longer without the means to do so and younger people feeling devoid of opportunity. The only salvation to avoid global revolution and disruption that will inevitably lead to the age-old solutions of war (ethnic cleansing?) and pestilence (a new form of bio-engineered ethnic cleansing perhaps?), may be to recast the world’s wealth distribution mechanisms.
I hear Republicans and centrist Democrats warning that perceived socialist candidates like Bernie and Elizabeth cannot possibly appeal to the American electorate. Have they just blinded themselves to the growing global phenomenon of the revolution brewing against perceived unfair wealth distribution? This is neither an accident nor some sort of centrally led conspiracy. This is a demographically-led need-based grass-roots movement in multiple places around the world at the same time. There may be some degree of awareness enhancement and even encouragement via social media and internet news sources, but anyone who thinks people take time from their working day to protest just for fun isn’t thinking straight. These protests are the tip of the iceberg of unrest which comes as a natural course with economic disparity.
I have the interesting perspective of having been a student of modern revolutions, a student of pension demographics and a living, breathing globalist who can be honest about the world around me. I have no idea if the U.S. is ready to elect a Bernie or a Warren, but I do know that the drive to do so is greater today than it was in 2016 and it will probably be greater still in 2024 if it goes unfulfilled. What can centrists and conservatives do to combat this? I’ve said it before…you can’t build your walls high enough. I believe there is only one way this plays out, the world has to reverse the trend it has been on since 1980 of doing everything it can to benefit the wealthy and pretending that it will all trickle down to the bottom 99%. Making governance (of public corporations and of government) more inclusive is a must. It either doesn’t happen all by itself or it doesn’t happen enough enough. Get real, think long-term, think humanely, stop thinking about this moment’s self-interest and start thinking about our next generations’ self-interest…all of the next generation, not just yours.