In August, more than 180 CEOs of leading U.S. I am optimistic that this is possible as we enter a new decade. That means meaningful changes like rebuilding our education system and providing skills training, affordable health care policies, substantial infrastructure investment, and sensible immigration reform and climate policies.
I don’t disagree with the argument used by Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase - an extremely capable businessman, but also a corporatist’s corporatist - that there is need for a stimulus, and sooner rather than later, but there was something disconcerting about the language he used in a recent discussion on this topic:Ĭapitalism must be modified to do a better job of creating a healthier society, one that is more inclusive and creates more opportunity for more people. Much of stakeholder capitalism’s appeal lies elsewhere, whether it is from the social approval that it can generate for a manager who uses his or her role in such a positive way, or in its ability to hand executives power, which they can wield, as noted above, with relatively little accountability now that their responsibility to shareholders has been so diluted.
THE GREAT RESET AGENDA 21 FREE
To him, it is “a concept so vague that Facebook, IBM, Lockheed Martin et cetera are free to interpret it quite as they wish.”Īpprovingly, he cites Steve Dunning, writing for Forbes: “Firms can go on privately shoveling money to their shareholders and executives, while maintaining a public front of exquisite social sensitivity and exemplary altruism.”īut while removing one possible obstacle to shoveling money to executives (shareholders are a different matter) is a part of stakeholder capitalism’s appeal to managements (bonuses are easier to justify when targets are to grow, say, diversity rather than the share price), it is only one part of its attraction. Sixsmith takes, in my view, too relaxed a view of what stakeholder capitalism is him. The power it gives to managers is increasingly being used to support an agenda influenced by a cabal of activists, NGOs, representatives of the “international community,” and politicians too arrogant to go through the usual legislative process. It’s not difficult to grasp why so many corporate bosses are enthused by stakeholder capitalism.īut stakeholder capitalism is a betrayal of democracy as well as of shareholders. They are then accountable to, well, it’s not quite clear whom. That would reduce a company’s shareholders to just another category of “stakeholder,” effectively transferring the power that capital should confer away from its owners and into the hands of those who administer it. A key feature of the Great Reset is the idea that stakeholder capitalism should, one way or another, be adopted. It’s something that Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s founder and executive chairman, has been advocating for a long time. Stakeholder capitalism rests on the notion that a company’s management owes a duty to more than its shareholders. Looked at realistically, they are part of a managerial class grubbing for the power that flows from other people’s money. Looked at optimistically, the BRT and its C-suite cheerleaders are useful idiots. allegedly a bastion of both free enterprise and democracy - is depressing.
This might be expected in Europe, but that it has been taken up by the Business Roundtable and many leading firms in the U.S. Recently, one expression of corporatism, “stakeholder capitalism,” has won strong support on both sides of the Atlantic. Hydra-headed ideology with origins in the premodern, and a very mixed past - sometimes benignly (it influenced the formation of West Germany’s social market economy) and sometimes not (it was an important element in pre-war fascist theory.) The different forms corporatism has taken make it tricky to define with precision, but they share a common core: the conviction that society should be organized by and for its principal interest groups - let’s call them “stakeholders” - intermediated by, and ultimately subordinate to, the state.