No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

it’s worth remembering that Gates was not always seen as a world savior. Indeed, in the 1990s, Gates was widely regarded as a corporate villain, known for exploitative employment practices and for building what looked like a predatory software monopoly. Then, with Flash-like speed, he reinvented himself as a global superhero, one who could single-handedly fix the most intractable of social crises. Never mind whether Gates has any specific expertise in the areas in question, or that many of the Gates Foundation’s silver-bullet fixes have backfired badly. Gates and his fellow world-saving billionaires are part of what has come to be known as “the Davos class,” named for the annual World Economic Summit held at the top of a mountain in Davos, Switzerland. This is the hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. At Davos’s 2017 summit, for example, Shakira spoke about her charitable work on education in Colombia, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver discussed his plan to fight diabetes and obesity. Gates featured prominently, as always, announcing with other partners a new $460-million fund to fight the spread of infectious disease. The power of the Davos class exploded in the 1990s, with US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair as charter members. Once out of office, both Blair and Clinton continued their involvement. The C...