As hearings on President Trump’s next pick for Supreme Court Justice proceed, Better Markets has published a detailed 20-page report on candidate Brett Kavanaugh’s history of corporate-biased decisions and writings, see Judge Kavanaugh: good for corporations, bad for your wallet:
“…potential justice, Brett Kavanaugh, has a record on business and financial cases that is hostile to the economic interests of working Americans, particularly if they are ripped off or injured by corporations.
There is little doubt that if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed he will tilt the scales of justice in favor of corporations over consumers, workers, investors and retirees, while gutting the financial regulatory agencies’ ability to protect the public from scammers, predators and crooks.”
Sustainable systems require strong countervailing forces. And the pendumlum toward more and more corporate-friendly policies, in motion for a couple of decades now, and has reached the point of extreme autocratic imbalance at the expense of all stakeholders.
Directly on this point, economist and former policy adviser John Perkins (who advised the World Bank, United Nations, IMF, U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, and leaders of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East) has a new book detailing the inner workings of how domineering corpations and captured governments have steered the world down its presently self-destructive path in The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Perkins recently penned a synoposis article of some of the material here. Here is a highlight:
I was taught that a good CEO earns a decent return for his investors and also makes sure that his company is a good citizen, that it serves a public interest. We were instructed to take care of our employees, giving them health insurance and retirement pensions, to treat our suppliers and customers with deep respect, and to honor the idea that good business is a win-win for all stakeholders. In many cases, CEOs made sure that their companies not only paid their fair share of taxes but also contributed money to local schools, recreational facilities and other such services.
All that changed in 1976 when Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics and stated, among other things, that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs. This was a perceived reality that became the defining goal for businesses. It convinced corporate executives that they had the right – some would say the mandate – to do whatever they thought it would take to maximize profits, including buying public officials through campaign financing, destroying the environment, and devastating the very resources upon which their businesses ultimately depend.
That perceived reality has resulted in a failed global economic system, one that is on the path to consuming itself into extinction – what some economists refer to as Predatory Capitalism.
It is time that we turn this around.
