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Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation, was on 60 Minutes last night. Walker is a tremendous story in that he’s an African-American gay male who rose up from a two-room shack in east Texas to be a king of the New York City virtue-bombing philanthropy scene, including a salary of $1M/year and a past on Wall Street as a crack bond sales guy. Most people from where Darren is from, who look like Darren does, can’t get that far. But he did, and thus he’s a great topper for the Ford Foundation, a major player in American grant-giving. (Global, actually.)
The 60 Minutes piece points to this article he wrote in June 2020 (pandemic, pandemic!) for New York Times about giving up privilege. The article makes a lot of great points and uses flowery language, but very little of it is possible to achieve, especially in a short-to-intermediate term time window. To wit, Walker writes this:
In 1982, a Securities and Exchange Commission rule allowed corporations to repurchase their stock. This created an environment in which companies accelerated their use of stock options and equity as forms of executive compensation, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. This has encouraged companies to increase share prices, at the expense of wages and benefits for workers, and created perverse incentives for companies to authorize buybacks. In 2018…
