They're still going to plunder
your unions, paychecks, jobs, health, environment and overall well-being. The
only difference is that they now want you to think they feel bad about it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote
of being leery of a loud-talking huckster who visited his home: "The
louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons," Emerson
exclaimed.
Likewise, today's workaday
families should do a mass inventory of their silverware as an integrity check
on a mess of loud-talking corporate honchos. Suddenly, 181 of these
union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging
corporate hucksters are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight
against ... well, against them. Wall Street banksters, Big Oil polluters,
anti-union extremists and a myriad of other profiteers grouped into a
prestigious collective called Business Roundtable, issued a "grito"
in August, trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just themselves but
every "stakeholder" (which is what they call employees, customers,
supplies, et al.).
Nice of them, of course, but
vague proclamations are cheap, and it's worth noting that these new champions
of the common good propose no specifics—no actual sacrifices by them or
benefits for us. Excuse me, but their grandiose promise of corporate
beneficence is what West Texas cowboys would call "bovine excrement."
Yes, we've now been joined in
the trenches of class struggle by the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, Amazon
and nearly 200 other giant corporations. Well, not quite in the trenches, for
you can get your Guccis dirty in there. Still, on the battleground of public
relations, Business Roundtable (the chief lobbing front for America's biggest
corporations) has declared its solidarity with all of us who seek economic
fairness and equal opportunity.
Their opening volley was fired
in August in a grand declaration titled "Statement on the Purpose of a
Corporation." For 50 years, that purpose has been ruthlessly clear:
maximize their investors' profits, no matter who or what they have to run over.
But now, the barons of big business are putting on a softer face, proclaiming
that their "fundamental commitment" is not merely to serve
shareholder greed but also to benefit workers, reduce inequality, protect the
environment and serve the whole community. It's corporate kumbaya, y'all —
solidarity forever!
Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson
& Johnson, was designated to write the Roundtable's new declaration of
concern for the common people. He later expressed a historic sense of pride in
the task: "There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson,"
Gorsky gushed.
Really? This is the same guy
who presided over Johnson & Johnson's profiteering roll in spreading deadly
opioids throughout America. Even as he was posing as Jefferson, an Oklahoma
jury was assessing a $572 million fine on his corporation for foisting the
opioid horror on the common people he now professes to love.
So forgive me for not
believing for a moment that there's one iota of sincerity in this sudden assertion
of egalitarian sentiment by the soulless organizers of today's corporate
plunder. They're still going to plunder your unions, paychecks, jobs, health,
environment and overall well-being. The only difference is that they now want
you to think they feel bad about it.
A few media observers have
been mildly skeptical, saying it's "an open question" whether any of
the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it's not an
open question at all. They won't. They won't support full collective bargaining
power for workers, won't join the public's push to get Medicare for All, won't
stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers,
won't support measures to stop climate change, won't back reforms to get their
corrupt corporate money out of our politics ... won't embrace any of the big
structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political
inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule and made them richer than
royalty.
In fact, their empty proclamation
is nothing but a cynical ploy to soften people's anger at their rampant greed
in hopes of fending off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing.
Corporate elites won't fix inequality for us; they're the ones doing it to us.
