Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Meanwhile, as other public servants around the country began to worry about the drug’s propensity for addiction and abuse, Purdue pushed back, according to the Times, “claiming that the drug’s long-acting quality made it less likely to be abused than traditional narcotics.” The U.S. Department of Justice disagreed: “OxyContin was not what Purdue claimed it was,” in the words of John Brownlee, who was then the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Virginia. “Purdue’s assertions that OxyContin was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion were false—and the company knew its claims were false. Purdue’s misrepresentations contributed to a serious national problem in terms of abuse of this prescription drug.” The drug’s fraudulent promotion, he added, had “a devastating effect on many communities throughout Virginia and the United States.” Brownlee brought charges against Purdue, which in 2007 agreed to settle. It acknowledged that it had marketed OxyContin “with the intent to defraud or mislead,” and it agreed to pay $635 million in fines and other outlays.

  It was one of the largest fines ever paid in such a case, but only an inconvenience when compared to how lucrative OxyContin was becoming. In 2015 Forbes declared the Sackler family the “richest newcomer” to its annual list of wealthy families, with a net worth of $14 billion. Noting that the family had edged out “storied families like the Busches, Mellons and Rockefellers,” it asked, “How did the Sacklers build the 16th-largest fortune in the country? The short answer: making the most popular and controversial opioid of the 21st century—OxyContin.”

  Another answer to that question might be: by thwarting the guardians of the public good every time they tried to protect citizens. It was later reported that Brownlee had received an unusual phone call the night before securing Purdue’s guilty plea. A senior Justice Department official, Michael Elston, had called Brownlee on his cell phone and “urged him to slow down,” according to the Washington Post. Brownlee rebuffed his superior. “Eight days later,” the Post said, “his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.” It was part of a larger attempted purge of prosecutors by the administration of George W. Bush. Brownlee kept his job; Elston lost his amid the controversy of the list’s becoming public. And what had occasioned the phone call? According to Elston, his boss, a deputy attorney general named Paul McNulty, had asked him to place the call to Brownlee after receiving a request for more time from a defense lawyer representing a Purdue executive.

  The Sacklers were just one family out of many in America who might have been inspired by Walker’s essay to look at the past. What Walker was drawing their attention to was not just their own conduct, but the playing field on which they had played, the system in which their advantages had formed.

  Despite the easily available knowledge about Oxy and the Sacklers, MarketWorld embraced the family’s do-gooding and kept mum about the harm. The most common single-word descriptor for members of the family became “philanthropist.”

  Generosity is not a substitute for justice, but here, as so often in MarketWorld, it was allowed to stand in. The institutions that benefited from the Sacklers’ largesse have shown little interest in demanding that they atone for any role they might have played in fomenting a national crisis. The generosity tended to be in places where influential people gathered, whereas the injustice tended to happen out of view, in places like McDowell County, whose storytelling apparatus had little chance of competing with a headline about a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The generosity was in the millions; the injustice had helped to build a $14 billion fortune. According to the New Yorker, “two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids” since 1999.

  In his letter, Darren Walker, paraphrasing Dr. King, called for givers like the Sacklers not only to give but also to “bend the demand curve toward justice.” It wouldn’t be easy.

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  The Lincoln was at 49th Street and Third Avenue. Walker was talking about how he tries to reach people—be they philanthropists like the Sacklers, executives like those at KKR, or any of the other wealthy and powerful people among whom he moves.

  The key, he said, adopting a pair of beloved modern phrases, is to “meet people where they are” and “not be judgmental.” Here he made an analogy that was revealing about Walker’s own way of looking at things. When he worked in Harlem, it was hard getting parents to bring kids to medical appointments. There was a temptation to judge and criticize: Here we are trying to help you, and you can’t even get up off your couch. Walker said he knew that was not the right approach. He knew they would have their own logic, their own story. “You don’t knock on the door and say, ‘You’re a loser. You’re a bad…’ You’ve got to meet people where they are.”

  “That’s my view writ large,” he continued. “And so where we’re meeting them”—he was now speaking of the highly privileged—“is where they are, which is they actually believe that they are doing good, they are contributing to our economy. They’re contributing to the tax base. They are contributing to philanthropy through their own personal giving and commitments to boards and whatever. So that’s where they are.”

  The analogy is telling, because it illustrates how an ethic of not judging that had developed to protect the weak could serve just as well to guard the strong. Meeting people where they are means one thing when applied to a mother with mental health issues in Harlem, juggling three jobs, two kids, and their appointments. It is quite another thing for the private equity tycoon to enjoy that same suspension of judgment. Should he, like the subaltern, really be met wherever he is?

  Ensconced in the Lincoln, Walker said that the concentration of wealth and power in our time was causing “a hollowing out of the middle class” and a “huge blowback of populism, of nationalism, of xenophobia.” Around the world, the politics of anger and revenge were on the rise, he said, “because people are truly feeling the pain in a way we have never felt in modern times.” Rich people didn’t want to talk about that, though. They wanted to talk about opportunity. “Okay, I’ll meet you there,” Walker said. “Let’s talk about opportunity.”

  Still, it irritated him to sit in a boardroom or living room and hear yet another elderly white tycoon who inherited much of his money explain why “it’s not about inequality.” He said in the car what he doesn’t say to those tycoons but seemed to fantasize about telling them: “You are allowed to live in a world where you don’t have to deal with reality.” Yet, Walker said again, gearing up for KKR, “I’ll meet you where you are.”

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  Many in MarketWorld have no interest in asking themselves Walker’s questions about how their money was made. But there are others who are inclined to ask those questions, and yet struggle to let themselves truly go there and escape their own web of justifications.

  Kat Cole is the chief operating officer of Focus Brands, the private-equity-owned company behind Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Carvel, and other food purveyors. Unlike many philanthropists whose fortunes were already amassed, Cole is an operating businesswoman who still has a chance to follow both the taking and giving aspects of Walker’s new gospel. At the same time, her life offers a case study in the reasons and rationalizations that the gospel finds itself up against.

  Cole started working at Hooters at seventeen. She joined a business that has long been morally controversial to some for the same reason so many people do: survival. She grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, in a family that was at first middle class. Her parents’ household was the only one in the extended clan with two cars. They worked white-collar jobs. Many of their relatives lived in trailer parks and revolved in and out of work (junkyards, factories, trucking), of jail, and of addictive substances. Cole’s father was an alcoholic. He was gone all the time, she said, and was no longer a reliable husband or father, leaving his wife
miserable and the family unstable.

  When Cole was nine, her mother came to her and said, “That’s it. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we got to go.” As Cole, who prides herself on her pragmatism, remembers it, she didn’t even become upset: “I just thought, ‘What took you so long?’ ” Her mother soon headed a much poorer household, with a $10-a-week food budget for herself and three daughters. Their diet was heavy on Spam, potted meat, Beanee Weenees, and sloppy joes. Cole’s mother continued to work as a secretary, and took on side jobs nights and weekends. Within a few years, she would remarry and the home would gain some stability. But the years of living close to poverty shaped Kat, who would spend her career wondering about her responsibilities to others without a surfeit of luck or good options.

  Cole began selling clothes at the mall when she was fifteen. In her junior year of high school, she took the Hooters job. The following year, she was promoted from hostess to waitress, and in this new role was earning enough to drop the retail job and still save up for college. Though the restaurant promoted its servers’ breasts as a selling point, and boasted of being “delightfully tacky, yet unrefined,” Cole found it empowering. Here she was, as a high school and then a college student, making as much as $400 a shift. (For the record, Cole insists, against all odds and ads, that “the chain has never promoted breasts,” but rather sells “overall sex appeal.”)

  She was a good and versatile waitress. If someone was needed to come off the floor and sling wings, she could do it. If a bartender went missing, she could tend bar. These skills got her noticed by managers, and when Hooters corporate came looking for talent, her name surfaced. At twenty, she switched to management at headquarters. She traveled the world opening up new franchises. Her pay and duties grew swiftly year by year. She became a star.

  In the roles she would later come to occupy, she would serve as something of a role model for aspiring female leaders, asked to mentor young women and to speak to them at conferences. She was a complicated role model, since she was doing it all for Hooters.

  At first, she had seen no contradiction between her own empowerment through Hooters and the fact of what Hooters was. The chain was part of the Jacksonville landscape. “In Florida, that just wasn’t that big of a deal, really,” she said. That location had been around since Cole was very young. In high school, it was where everyone ended up on Saturday nights—the baseball guys, the football guys, the cheerleaders. “It didn’t feel foreign, it didn’t feel shady, it didn’t feel that it was exploiting women, because you’d go in and the girls were having so much fun. And when you’re a high school girl and you see these beautiful women that are having fun, they are very much in control in their roles, they’re almost little celebrities in their own way, that seemed really aspirational, actually.” They also seemed a lot happier than the servers at Applebee’s.

  Moreover, the company put women in leadership positions, and as it grew, often promoted from within, which much of the time meant turning skimpily clad waitresses into managers. “So my immediate view from the inside was, ‘This place is awesome for women,’ ” Cole said. There were moments when men got drunk and hit on Hooters girls. Cole had friends who worked at Applebee’s, though, where the same thing happened, if not as often. “I saw nothing but women’s empowerment all around me,” she said.

  She was enormously grateful for all Hooters had done for her, and defensive on its behalf. When she moved to management and gave out her business cards at a conference, she would watch people look down at that owl logo, and she would see the judgment fill their eyes. She still remembers the woman who said, “How dare you not just work for but be a part of the growth of a company that exploits women!” Cole answered her by telling her something she had come to believe: “We don’t exploit women. We employ them.”

  Cole was laying the foundation for the system of rationalizations that so many businesspeople must construct to quiet their own doubts and the doubts of others. There was tangible good that she could see, and that was enough for her. She did not open herself to questions about her company’s negative contributions to a larger system that was abstract and hard to make sense of.

  Cole eventually became an executive vice president at Hooters. And when she reached those heights, she rationalized that whatever harm people might perceive was offset by good deeds. She worked on a tuition reimbursement program that helped put women through college. She created a résumé-writing program to help people who were leaving the chain to “articulate the experience they had in the best way that would minimize the judgment we knew they would get.”

  Eventually, though, Cole decided that she didn’t want Hooters to be her “only story.” She went back to school, earning an MBA (despite not having a bachelor’s degree) on evenings and weekends. She was recruited by a private equity firm and named president of one of its portfolio companies, Cinnabon. Later, she was promoted to a senior executive role at its parent company, Focus Brands. For the Cinnabon job, new rationalizations were needed. Cole was responsible for putting out into the world many food items that people were probably better off avoiding. She rationalized this by insisting on calling Cinnabon a “bakery.” She said, “It’s literally a bakery, which has been around for centuries.” She seemed to hear herself, and she added a point: “We’re just adding a shitload more sugar. And that is a meaningful change from the bakeries of two hundred years ago.”

  This rather audacious rationalization mingled with other, more plausible-sounding ones such as that if there were going to be bad industries, good people should run them. “If in a free-market society there will be demand, whether it’s for sugary products or alcohol or scantily clad waitresses in a restaurant concept, then it will exist,” she said. “And so if it exists, what matters is the how.” This rationalization was important, because it suggested not only that it was acceptable for someone like Cole to devote her talent to an organization like Hooters or Cinnabon, but also that it might be preferable to using it somewhere nobler. If places like these were going to exist in a free market, and what mattered was how they were run, then not working there would solve nothing; it would in fact increase the likelihood that the wrong leaders, pursuing the wrong how, would end up there in your stead.

  Cole also told herself that she had done her duty by leveling with the public about Cinnabon’s rolls. She said, “We call it what it is. We tell you it’s made full of sugar and fat. It’s marketed as an indulgence, and even when I would do media, I would say you shouldn’t eat this for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Once again, it was important to zoom in and ignore the issue of systems and structures, the larger, more complicated issues of poor dietary habits, nutrition options, and obesity.

  Cole regarded her attempt at transparency about a harmful product as a more authentic form of corporate virtue than the moral offsetting that Carnegie promoted. She said she steered her brands away from giving back to the very problems they may have helped to cause. Doing that wouldn’t be right, in her view: “What is probably disingenuous is to go support the juvenile diabetes foundation.” She suggested that telling customers your product is potentially harmful to them and not intended for regular consumption is a better way to “outweigh,” in one’s moral calculus, the effect of advertising it and selling it to them.

  Cole’s rationalizations were strongly and sincerely held. If Darren Walker wanted to change the moneymaking system itself, to change how business is conducted, he was not only up against powerful corporate interests and their lobbyists. He was also up against the psychologies of thousands of people like Cole, and a way of looking at life that didn’t require cynicism or callousness to commit harm. It was a way of viewing things that inured the viewer to the larger systems around you, that made those systems not your problem.

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  Some months before Walker’s visit to KKR, he was sitting in his office thinking about the award the phila
nthropist Laurie Tisch would be giving him that evening at the Museum of Modern Art. Tisch would also be “doing a little dinner for eighty afterwards at the St. Regis.” And Walker was excited, because, as with the KKR luncheon, he felt that events like this were “opportunities to be disruptive.” “Not to say, ‘Shame on you, rich people,’ ” he said, “but to just ask questions and to interrogate and to talk about things that make people uncomfortable like wealth and race and privilege and justice, and the role that we all play in having more or less justice.”

  Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, one of the temples of MarketWorld, would be interviewing him onstage, and Walker knew exactly what Isaacson would want: Darren Walker’s improbable life story. “I can assure you Walter will prompt that, and he always does, and that’s fine,” Walker said. “That’s the idea. And so part of my approach is to give him what he wants. It’s to give him the story to remind people that we have lived in a country where people like me can realize their dream.” But this was only half of the cocktail Walker wished to deliver: “At the same time, we have to say, ‘All right, so you believe in the story, right?’ ”—he mimicked the coos of the adoring, mostly white crowd—“Yes, we believe in the story. We believe in your story. And then you have to help people paint a picture that stories like mine won’t be nearly as achieved, as realized, in the future. My journey, my story, could never be possible today because of all the things we know. When I got on the mobility escalator, all the things along that journey that helped propel me forward in many ways either aren’t there anymore, or are weaker, or in fact they would push me backwards.” The delicate art of a night like this, he said, was to make the plutocrats “feel good about America” and make them “feel good about themselves,” and, having softened them with those feelings, persuade them that their America has to change.