Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam
Sept 4, 2021 0:14:37 GMT -5
Post by maybetoday on Sept 4, 2021 0:14:37 GMT -5
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam
September 3, 2021
By Janet Levy
In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, proclaimed that the investment firm wouldn’t take corporations public unless they had at least one “diverse” member on their board. The ostensible logic: a diverse leadership performs better by avoiding groupthink. But the proclamation came too late. Six months before, the last S&P 500 company with an all-male board had inducted a woman. Goldman was actually virtue-signaling to divert attention from its role in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, described in 2016 as the “largest kleptocracy case to date.” Goldman had paid $1 billion in bribes to win work raising money for 1MBD, a slush fund linked to then-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak and corrupt officials. Fined $5 billion for its machinations, Goldman was embracing “woke” to burnish its credentials.
It’s not just Goldman. Corporate America has learned to invoke buzzwords like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘social justice’ to boost its profile, cachet, and profits. In Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy lays bare this duplicitous con. He writes in the introduction, “Here’s how it works: pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” Worryingly, this deception is subverting democracy.
Like most American capitalists, Ramaswamy believes that the job of business is to provide products, maximize profit, and deliver value to shareholders. It’s not the realm of business to impose one particular vision of “social responsibility” on society. Corporate law limits boards’ focus to the financial interests of shareholders. This protects democracy from corporate overreach, for with financial power, businesses can easily crowd out dissent, whether from employees or from ordinary Americans.
On the other hand, corporations are granted the privilege of limited liability -- protection from being pursued for business failure -- so that they can innovate without fear. The business judgment rule (BJR) also protects CEOs and boards from being sued for bad decisions. But when corporations engage in social activism, they use the power of that immunity against democracy. They are able to work from behind shields denied to genuine activists, who may have a different social vision. They are also able to go unquestioned for funding fashionable but unprofitable causes in conflict with the interests of shareholders, who may not subscribe to those causes. In both ways, as Ramaswamy writes, this concentrates “the power to determine American values in the hands of a small group of capitalists rather than the hands of the American citizenry at large, which is where the dialogue about social values belongs.”
Continued at link
September 3, 2021
By Janet Levy
In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, proclaimed that the investment firm wouldn’t take corporations public unless they had at least one “diverse” member on their board. The ostensible logic: a diverse leadership performs better by avoiding groupthink. But the proclamation came too late. Six months before, the last S&P 500 company with an all-male board had inducted a woman. Goldman was actually virtue-signaling to divert attention from its role in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, described in 2016 as the “largest kleptocracy case to date.” Goldman had paid $1 billion in bribes to win work raising money for 1MBD, a slush fund linked to then-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak and corrupt officials. Fined $5 billion for its machinations, Goldman was embracing “woke” to burnish its credentials.
It’s not just Goldman. Corporate America has learned to invoke buzzwords like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘social justice’ to boost its profile, cachet, and profits. In Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy lays bare this duplicitous con. He writes in the introduction, “Here’s how it works: pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” Worryingly, this deception is subverting democracy.
Like most American capitalists, Ramaswamy believes that the job of business is to provide products, maximize profit, and deliver value to shareholders. It’s not the realm of business to impose one particular vision of “social responsibility” on society. Corporate law limits boards’ focus to the financial interests of shareholders. This protects democracy from corporate overreach, for with financial power, businesses can easily crowd out dissent, whether from employees or from ordinary Americans.
On the other hand, corporations are granted the privilege of limited liability -- protection from being pursued for business failure -- so that they can innovate without fear. The business judgment rule (BJR) also protects CEOs and boards from being sued for bad decisions. But when corporations engage in social activism, they use the power of that immunity against democracy. They are able to work from behind shields denied to genuine activists, who may have a different social vision. They are also able to go unquestioned for funding fashionable but unprofitable causes in conflict with the interests of shareholders, who may not subscribe to those causes. In both ways, as Ramaswamy writes, this concentrates “the power to determine American values in the hands of a small group of capitalists rather than the hands of the American citizenry at large, which is where the dialogue about social values belongs.”
Continued at link