Business

03/01/2023

Salesforce's Mark Benioff Morphs from Social Justice Warrior to Gordon Gekko

In my book The Profit Motive, I talked about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff:

A 2017 Slate essay claimed that “Fortune 500 companies today are socially liberal, especially on areas surrounding diversity, gay rights, and immigration; they are unabashedly in favor of free trade and globalization, express concern about climate change, and embrace renewable energy.” Robert Miller similarly concludes “that, at the current time, a sizeable majority of individuals in the socio-economic class from which public company directors, partners at elite law firms, senior officers at institutional investors and proxy advisory firms, politicians, and academics are drawn overwhelming favors one particular political agenda—i.e., the largely progressive political agenda that emphasizes issues such as climate change, environmental concerns, racial and gender diversity, systematic racism, and so on.” Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, to cite but a single prominent example, energetically promotes social responsibility and woke activism. ...

Even true social justice warrior CEOs like Marc Benioff abandon their stakeholder capitalism commitments when push comes to shove. ... To cite but a single high profile example, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 29, 2020, while the pandemic was still raging, that one day after “Salesforce.com Inc. posted record quarterly sales, the business-software company notified its 54,000-person workforce that 1,000 would lose their jobs later this year.”  As John Stoll opined in the Journal, Salesforce CEO and Business Roundtable 2019 statement signatory Marc “Benioff called the company’s strong earnings a victory for stakeholder capitalism.” Benioff claimed to have done “a great job” for both shareholders and stakeholders. One might reasonable ask, however, as Stoll did, “how does the billionaire founder justify this claim when shortly after that interview Salesforce notified staff of plans for around 1,000 layoffs? This despite Mr. Benioff’s no-layoff pledge in March on Twitter and the challenge to other CEOs to follow his lead.”  One might add to that inquiry a question about how Benioff would justify telling Salesforce employees that in a few months down the road 2% of them would be fired, leaving them to twist slowly in the wind for months while worrying whether they would be among those who get fired.

Benioff's morph from social justice warrior to shareholder capitalist continues according to today's WSJ:

Through the sky’s-the-limit boom years, Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce Inc., told employees they were bound together like family. In today’s leaner times, he is laying off thousands of them.

Why? Because, as Benioff now acknowledges, "ultimately, the success of the business has to be paramount.” 

“Layoffs are always hard,” Mr. Benioff said, but the Salesforce culture of family bonds only goes as far as business allows. “You can continue to keep a company going with excess employees, but it’s not healthy for the company,” he said.

Salesforce has struggled recently and its executives admitted--until they got scared off by their employees--that the firm's embrace of corporate social responsibility was part of the problem:

Salesforce executives ... said “wellness culture overpowered high performance culture during the pandemic” to explain the company’s recent headwinds. After employees complained on Slack—“Most disturbing and tone deaf is this sad excuse,” one post said—the line was changed.

It seems like Benioff is not alone:

Silicon Valley companies for years sold workers on the idea that they operate as communities with shared values and where people come first. Highflying firms could easily afford such amenities as on-site dry cleaners, workout classes and free food. 

Management is now cracking down.

As I predicted.

Posted at 11:22 AM in Business, Corporate Social Responsibility | | Comments (0)

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01/12/2023

Can Corporate Governance Solve Social Ills?

No one can deny that we live in an era with many social issues and ills, not least of which is wealth inequality and the adverse social and economic problems that flow from it. But can those of us who toil in the corporate law and governance do much to solve those problems.

But first we have to identify the problem.

Is the Problem that Corporations are Fundamentally Undemocratic?

Some commentators contend that corporations and corporate wealth benefit a narrow slice at the top of society and that the benefits of the corporate form need to be more widely available?

But share ownership is already broadly distributed: Since 2009, an average of 55% of Americans annually reported owning stock. Although only about 15% directly hold stocks, mutual funds and ETFs have democratized investing. As a result, today, American families hold an average of $40,000 worth of stocks. His hypothetical financial intermediaries already exist in the form of ESOPs and 401(k)s.

Moreover, access to the corporate form is widely and easily available to impecunious entrepreneurs. In most states today, it is possible to form a corporation with no requirement for a minimum amount of capital, using low cost forms widely available from online vendors, and with payment of a modest franchise tax. The problem thus is not that we need to “extend to all people the competitive market opportunity to acquire an interest in corporate capital acquisition with the future earnings of that capital in amounts that are not limited in proportion to their (meager or negative) existing wealth.”

The inequality of which Professor Ashford writes exists not because of the corporate form and what he repeatedly refers to as its legislated advantages. In preparing its annual billionaires list, Forbes gives each member of the list a self-made score from 1 to 10, with scores of 6 and higher going to those who built their business on their own without inherited wealth.

Well over half (238) of the top 400 billionaires scored 8 or higher. The top three Americans on the most recent list—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—all scored 8. I would argue that part of what enabled these folks to start from more or less nothing and achieve great wealth was the ready availability of the corporate form.

Is the Problem that the Corporate Form is Unfit for Purpose?

Instructively, the corporate form historically has been embraced—albeit sometimes grudgingly—by populists.

During the early 1800s Massachusetts corporations did not get the benefit of limited liability but Maine and New Hampshire corporations did. In Massachusetts a public debate over limited liability broke out during the 1820s, in which “Jacksonian liberals” contended that capital was fleeing Massachusetts for those neighboring states.

Moving forward, populists of the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s tended to focus on abuses of the corporate form rather than the corporate form itself. To be sure, some populists were simply doubtful of the corporation’s fitness for purpose, disputing its utility as a way of organizing production.  In time, however, most populists came to recognize that the problem was not the corporate form as such because they recognized that even locally owned and operated business could advantageously use the corporate form.

What is the Problem of the Corporation?

If there is problem with “the corporation” today, it is not with that there is some intrinsic flaw with the form itself. It is not with the legal rules that require boards and officers to maximize shareholder value.

Instead, the populists correctly identified that problem: Size.

Size and the resulting potential for concentrated economic power are the chief recurring themes in the populist critique of the corporation. Late nineteenth century populists thought that the growing power of corporations was a significant threat to their economic and even political liberty.  The Southern Agrarians likewise believed, as Lyle Lanier observed, that “the corporate form of our economic system makes possible a scale of exploitation unheard of in history.” They argued that workers toiled under dehumanizing conditions. The Southern Agrarians further believed that the concentration of economic power in large corporations had created “a plutocratic corporate capitalist class” that effectively ruled the country and thus stood ready to fully exploit their power over farmers and workers.

Size is not something corporate governance can do much, if anything about. Neither shareholder nor stakeholder capitalism addresses size and power issues in any meaningful or useful sense; nor, it seems to me, does inclusive capitalism.

Posted at 01:04 PM in Business, Corporate Social Responsibility | | Comments (0)

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12/13/2022

As Tesla's stock price slides, would Musk or Tesla's board have liability for his Twitter distraction?

A Twitter series:

Posted at 12:09 PM in Business, Corporate Law, Web/Tech | | Comments (0)

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09/10/2022

If nation-states are going to make war on corporations, why wouldn't corporations make war on each other and even nation-states?

Tom Lin has an article at CLS Blue Sky Blog on wars on business:

For example, the United States banned Huawei, one of China’s largest and most prominent technology companies, from doing business in the country due to national security concerns.  Foreign drones affiliated with Iran attacked oil installations of state-owned Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s most valuable companies. China’s military hacked into data corporate giant, Equifax, to gather private, sensitive information about American officials and intelligence officers for bribery and blackmail. North Korea initiated an unprecedented attack on Sony in response to a movie’s unflattering portrayal of the nation’s president. Hackers affiliated with Russia targeted large American corporations and large swaths of the federal government.  Regardless of form, motivation, or severity, these attacks and aggressions raise critical, interlocking questions about law, commerce, society, and warfare.

Go read the whole thing. As always, Tom's hit an interesting problem and offered some very useful insights.

Being something of a science fiction nerd going back to my youth in the 60s, what came to my mind was Mack Reynolds' Joe Mauser series. In a future caste society, the military castes were one of the few that allowed upward mobility. But there are no wars among nation-states. Instead, corporations wage war on one another on reservations set aside for that purpose. It provides dispute resolution and entertainment for the masses who follow the military who fight the wars the way we follow the athletes that play pro sports today.

The short story that started the series is here. I think it would be fun to do a law review article on how the legal system in such a culture would work, blending dispute resolution and the laws of war.

Posted at 04:10 PM in Business | | Comments (0)

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11/01/2021

Dan Loeb wants Shell to split its brown and green assets

Dan Loeb has been my favorite hedge fund manager ever since his campaign against Warnaco, during which he famously compared Warnaco's CEO to Burt Reynolds’ character, the pornographic producer, in the film "Boogie Nights.”

Loeb is now making a run at Shell, arguing for breaking Shell up into "multiple standalone companies:

For example, a standalone legacy  energy  business  (upstream,  refining  and  chemicals)  could  slow  capex beyond what it has already promised, sell assets, and prioritize return of cash to shareholders (which can be reallocated by the market into low-carbon areas of the economy).  A standalone LNG/Renewables/Marketing business could combine modest cash returns with aggressive investment in renewables and other carbon reduction technologies (and this business would benefit from a much lower cost of capital).  Pursuing a bold strategy like  this  would  likely  lead  to  an  acceleration  of  CO2  reduction  as  well  as  significantly increased returns for shareholders, a win for all stakeholders.

Ann Lipton has a post discussing the issues raised. She points out that:

Shell argues – and apparently some of its large investors agree – that you can’t split them up that easily.  Part of the claim has to do with how the different sides of the business are integrated, and part of it has to do with cash flows, namely, that the brown assets are funding the green ones.  As Matt Levine points out, though, investors themselves could do that if they wanted to – they could take the cash they make from the brown assets and plough it back into green investments ....

This strikes me as plausible. It's basically the same argument that was made to show why conglomerate mergers are value destroying; namely, that diversification at the investor level will almost always be superior to intra-company diversification. 

The even more interesting and provocative part of Ann's post, however, is her argument that Loeb is purporting "to appeal to ESG strategists and possibly take a leaf out of Engine No. 1’s playbook." As she explains, however, "that’s actually not the strategy at all.  Loeb is in no way trying to make energy 'greener.'"

All of this relates to the question of whether traditional shareholder activists like Loeb are going to advance or oppose the ESG movement. Count me as dubious.

Posted at 01:13 PM in Business, Shareholder Activism | | Comments (0)

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10/17/2021

My third video on business valuation is now up on YouTube

This one focuses on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Beta, and using them to calculate discount rates.

Posted at 03:37 PM in Business, Dept of Self-Promotion, Videos | | Comments (1)

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09/26/2021

The Economist’s Latest Jab at Peter Thiel Goes Awry in Middle-Earth Lore

The folks who write and edit The Economist have a rather odd mix of attitudes towards the military. On the one hand, they have long felt free to urge that American troops be sent to far off places to wage war. On the other hand, like so many left-liberals, there is often a note of snobbish disdain towards the men and women who serve and those who equip them.

One detects the latter in The Economist’s latest jab at one of its favorite bête noire’s; Peter Thiel. The article documents Thiel’s increasing interest in getting rich while using technology to support national security.

The Economist complains:

All this takes tech investing beyond Silicon Valley into new realms, some of them menacing to many observers. That will not worry Mr Thiel. Palantir is named after a “seeing stone” most often used by Sauron, ruler of J.R.R. Tolkien’s evil empire of Mordor in “The Lord of the Rings”. Evidently Mr Thiel, ever the contrarian, does not view Mordor as harshly as most Tolkien fans do. As he once told a friend: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.”

In the first place, I’d rather see Silicon Valley following Thiel’s efforts to defend America rather that aping the progressive weenies at Google who go into hysterics at the mere thought that Google might contract to provide support to the military that defends them.

In the second place, as a 50+ year fan and student of JRR Tolkien’s work, I take some offense at The Economist’s inept use of Middle-Earth lore. For one thing, they mention that in addition to investing in Palantir they mention that Thiel has also invested in a company called Anduril, which makes military drones. For some reason they fail to note that Andúril, also called the Flame of the West, was the sword which was reforged from the shards of Narsil in Rivendell. Aragorn bore Anduril throughout the War of the Ring. He used it to prove to the dead that he was Isilduir’s heir. He used it to defend Minas Tirith at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. He used it when the Army of the West marched against Mordor. I suppose those facts didn’t fit the Economist’s narrative that Thiel is somehow on Mordor’s side.

As for the Palantir, it is true that Sauron had one. But they had been made by the Elves of Valinor in the First Age. By the time of the War of the Rings, there were only three known to exist. One was held by Sauron. One was held by Saruman and was recovered by Pippen after the fall of Isengard. One was held by Denethor the Steward of Gondor. 

Critically, Aragorn takes up the Palantir recovered by Pippen. He masters it and uses it to show himself to Sauron. He deceives Sauron into believing that Aragorn has the One Ring and that Aragorn will use it in attacking Mordor at the Black Gate. This deception causes Sauron to concentrate all his forces at the Gate, which (after some adventures with the Orcs) allows Frodo and Sam a clear path to Mount Doom.

You could thus say that the Palantir saved the day. But that too would be inconsistent with The Economist’s desire to portray (however ineptly) Thiel as evil.

Posted at 01:30 PM in Business | | Comments (0)

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09/22/2021

My post on the SEC steeping out of its wheelhouse by investigating Activision's employment practices got noticed

Posted at 04:42 PM in Business, Dept of Self-Promotion, Securities Regulation | | Comments (0)

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Why boards fail and what to do about it

Posted at 04:35 PM in Business | | Comments (0)

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09/08/2021

Valuation of a Business in Legal Settings II: Discounted Dividend Methods

Posted at 02:56 PM in Business, Dept of Self-Promotion, Mergers and Takeovers | | Comments (0)

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08/01/2021

Buffett expert Larry Cunningham on Buffett

Posted at 03:28 PM in Business | | Comments (0)

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05/22/2021

Am I the Only One Who Thinks There is a Conflict Between Green Finance and Cryptocurrrency

Two articles in today's WSJ caught my attention. First, Green Finance Goes Mainstream, Lining Up Trillions Behind Global Energy Transition:

Some of the world’s biggest companies and deepest-pocketed investors are lining up trillions of dollars to finance a shift away from fossil fuels.

Assets in investment funds focused partly on the environment reached almost $2 trillion globally in the first quarter, more than tripling in three years. Investors are putting $3 billion a day into these funds. More than $5 billion worth of bonds and loans designed to fund green initiatives are now issued every day. The two biggest U.S. banks pledged $4 trillion in climate-oriented financing over the next decade. ...

But then there was Bitcoin Miners Are Giving New Life to Old Fossil-Fuel Power Plants:

Across America, older fossil-fuel power plants are shutting down in favor of renewable energy. But some are getting a new lease on life—to mine bitcoin. In upstate New York, an idled coal plant has been restarted, fueled by natural gas, to mine cryptocurrency. A once-struggling Montana coal plant is now scaling up to do the same. ...

The drive for power has its roots in bitcoin’s intractable mathematics: To operate securely, the cryptocurrency’s network relies on computers solving puzzles; in return the solvers get fresh bitcoin. The higher the bitcoin price, the more of these miners compete to solve the puzzles—a process that chews up electricity. The more competition, the harder the puzzles get and the more electricity is used.

A University of Cambridge index pegs the annual power consumption of bitcoin mining at around 130 terawatt-hours, more than three times higher than at the beginning of 2019. That would be more than the power consumption of Argentina.

The coal-fired Hardin Generating Station in Montana had been struggling for years. Late last year, a Nasdaq-listed miner called Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. MARA -4.57% partnered with Hardin’s owner to transform the power plant into a hub for mining bitcoin.

Here's what really hit me in this article:

The project is in the process of scaling up, with more than 100 megawatts of power capacity planned. Marathon Digital, whose investors include BlackRock Inc. and the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies LLC, said that by tapping the Montana coal plant, its break-even costs to produce a bitcoin will fall to $4,600, 38% less than previously. ...

BlackRock and Renaissance declined to comment.

This is the same BlackRock that claims fighting climate change is central to its business model.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Business | | Comments (0)

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05/20/2021

AT&T Spin Off of Warner is the Latest Turn in the Sad Saga of Paramount Communications v. Time Inc.

In 1989, Time Inc. and Warner Communications, Inc., announced plans to merge. Before the deal could close, however, Paramount Communications, Inc., intervened with a cash tender offer for Time valued at $200 per share. Time responded by recasting the Warner deal as a tender offer and implemented various other efforts to ensure that Paramount would be unable to close its offer before Time could complete its offer for Warner. Since Paramount would be unable to raise funds to buy the combined Time-Warner entity, the restructured deal would put an end to Paramount's intervention.

When Paramount and Time shareholders challenged the restructured deal, Time's management justified its decision on grounds that pursuing the deal with Warner would in the long run produce higher returns to shareholders. As famed Delaware Chancellor William T Allen wrote:

In the longer term, Time's advisors have predicted trading ranges of $159-$247 for 1991, $230-$332 for 1992 and $208-$402 for 1993. ... The latter being a range that a Texan might feel at home on.

Paramount Commun. Inc. v. Time Inc., 1989 WL 79880, at *13 (Del. Ch. July 14, 1989), aff'd, 565 A.2d 281 (Del. 1989).

In a decision I still teach in my Mergers and Acquisitions class, the Delaware Supreme Court held that Time's management had not violated their fiduciary duties to Time's shareholders. Time was thus able to complete its merger with Warner.

Thus began a long and winding road, which the WSJ illustrated as follows:

Screen Shot 2021-05-20 at 1.00.53 PM

All of which prompted me to post this tweet:

In response to which, a friend reminded me of a 2003 WSJ article observing that:

By now, even schoolchildren know of Time Warner's folly in merging with America Online. However, the story of shareholder value destroyed through acquisition starts much earlier, back in 1989 when shares in Henry Luce's empire, Time Inc., traded for around $100. That spring, Time tried to combine with Warner Communications in what M&A practitioners call a "merger of equals" -- neither party paying a premium for the other's shares. ...

The executives of Time Inc. got to keep their jobs but the shareholders didn't fare so well, particularly with the double whammy of the AOL combination. If you were a shareholder of Time back in 1989 and held your shares through various splits over the years, they would now be worth $113.76 each, about where they were trading more than 14 years ago and far below the Paramount offer. Meanwhile, if you'd just bought the stocks in the S&P 500 index, you would have almost tripled your money.

Meanwhile, I calculated that if you had taken the Paramount deal in 1989 and invested the $200 per share in the S&P 500, you'd have $5,182.69 today. I'd still love to know what those who held their Time shares all these years would have today. I'm betting it's a lot less than $5,000. 

You might think that I'd be critical of the Delaware Supreme Court decision that made all of this loss of value possible. And I am, but not for the reasons you might think. I think the Court reached the right result via hopelessly muddled thinking.

If you're interested, I refer you to my article Unocal at 20: Director Primacy in Corporate Takeovers. Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 769-862, 2006, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=946016 or my book Mergers and Acquisitions.

In the latter, I explain that:

Time’s defensive actions depended almost wholly on the combined entity’s great size. While the extent of the combined entity perhaps made it unlikely that a subsequent bidder would emerge to unwind the transaction, the possibility existed. The market for corporate control thus could exert some constraining influence on Time’s board, which reduced the likelihood that the board was acting for improper motives, especially in comparison to the defensive restructurings just described.

In addition, it’s critical to the outcome here that Time’s business strategy was motivated by a desire to advance legitimate corporate interests; it had not been cobbled together simply to justify takeover defenses. As a result, Paramount was essentially asking the court to enjoin Time’s board from continuing to operate the corporation’s business and affairs during the pendency of the takeover bid. The Delaware courts were properly reluctant to do so, as a hostile bidder has no right to expect the incumbent board of directors to stop an ongoing business strategy in mid-stream.

In sum, Time presented a highly unusual set of facts, which rebutted the inference that the board acted from improper motives and rendered the result—if not the reasoning—in that particular case relatively unobjectionable.

Posted at 01:33 PM in Business, Corporate Law, Mergers and Takeovers | | Comments (0)

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04/26/2021

Does Religiosity Affect Corporate Governance?

An interesting new paper finds:

Religious directors or directors with a higher sense of purpose hold a longer-term perspective on CEO performance evaluation: Compared with their non-religious counterparts, religious monitoring-intensive directors are significantly less likely to change their company’s CEO based on the company’s performance over a period of one year. However, for the more extended period of 2 years, this difference in likelihood of CEO turnover significantly switches direction, consistent with the “higher purpose, incentives, and economic performance” theory by Thakor and Quinn (2020), suggesting that believers in higher purpose will tend to hold a longer-term perspective.

Religious directors or directors with a higher sense of purpose also improve the typical benefits of intense board oversight, especially when they have more power and influence on the board: We also find that religious monitoring-intensive directors further reduce earnings management, on average, all else being equal. Similar evidence that they tend to reduce excess total CEO compensation further, though ordinarily not as strong, becomes highly significant when the lead independent director or a majority of the principal monitoring committee chairs are also religious, consistent with Wabara (2021).

Independent directors’ religiosity or sense of higher purpose seems to matter more than that of CEOs for firms’ earnings quality: We also find that the monitoring-intensive directors’ religiosity is more economically significant than the CEOs’ for the quality of the earnings information in firms’ financial reports.

Posted at 01:31 PM in Business, Corporate Law, Religion | | Comments (0)

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Why did CEOs wake?

In April 2021, Yale Management School Dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld convened 90 CEOs of prominent US corporations to create a common front against newly enacted voting legislation in Georgia and proposed similar legislation in Texas and elsewhere. Dean Sonnenfeld characterized the gathering as the start of a new “spiritual awakening,” akin to the historic Great Awakenings, although critics might suggest this awakening embraces progressive politics rather than the Gospel as holy writ.

As Dean Sonnenfeld pointed out, this is not the first time CEOs of large corporations have intervened in political controversies in recent years. There was the North Carolina “bathroom bill” brawl in 2016, opposition to various Trump actions on immigration and climate change, the Parkland shooting in 2018, and so on. Although some of the participating CEOs protest that their actions were nonpartisan, critics have pointed out that in every case the CEOs came down on the progressive side of the dispute.

To be sure, business and politics have been intertwined in the USA since the Founding. Two hundred years ago the mere act of forming a corporation required the legislature to pass a statute creating that corporation’s charter, which generated much corruption. In the subsequent decades, businesses routinely lobbied government for special favors. Today, annual business lobbying expenditures approaches $3 billion.

So what makes CEO activism different? Traditional business engagement with government was typically directed at the company’s bottom line. It sought a contract to provide the government with goods or services, to obtain tax breaks, or to derail costly regulation.

In contrast, woke CEO activism typically is unrelated to the company’s bottom line. Indeed, it often negatively impacts the bottom line. As The Economist recently reported, when Walmart banned sales of certain types of ammunition in response to a mass shooting, “footfall in Walmart stores in Republican districts fell more sharply as a result than it rose in Democratic ones.”

So why are CEOs plunging into social activism? Some claim that CEOs are responding to perceived consumer and labor demand. In particular, millennials apparently prefer to work for and purchase from companies that are perceived as socially and environmentally responsible. Accordingly, there is an increasingly widely held view in the business community that to attract Millennial and Generation Z workers and customers, companies must project an image as social justice activists. Nike’s embrace of Colin Kaepernick is but the most obvious example of this phenomenon.

Alternatively, some argue that the CEOs may be trying to head off regulation by progressive politicians. As Wall Street Journal columnist David Benoit observed, “Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has argued that the primacy of shareholder returns has worsened economic inequality, enriching wealthy investors at the expense of workers.” With the mainstream of the Democratic Party seemingly moving in Warren’s direction on business and finance issues, CEOs may hope that a voluntary embrace of corporate social responsibility platitudes would help them fend off more intrusive regulation.

Both of those factors likely explain at least part of what’s going on, but there is another explanation that suggests a much more profound—and potentially permanent—change taking place.

What we’re seeing is the culmination of what Christopher Lasch called The Revolt of the Elites. In his 1995 classic, Lasch identified an emergent split between what he called the New Elites and the rest of society. The changes Lasch spotted became trends that accelerated in subsequent years. In particular, Lasch explained that “the new elites . . . regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.”  They dismissed the masses’ values as “mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women.”  This tension was perhaps nowhere more pronounced than with respect to religion. When Lasch wrote over two decades ago, he opined that “[a] skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes. . . .  The elites’ attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility.”

If anything, today’s elites have become even more hostile to religious values. As Samuel Gregg observes, the Davos Man’s moral creed is “a mélange of social liberalism, environmentalism, and a new order of a borderless world. . . . [R]eligion is considered the refuge of fanatics and anyone stupid enough to be skeptical of gender ideology and techno-utopianism.”

A quarter-century later, Lasch’s new elites have risen to the top of corporate hierarchies. They brought their values into the C-suite. CEOs increasingly reflect the values of the Blue state coastal bubbles in which they are embedded, especially on environmental and social issues. No Fortune 100 CEOs contributed to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, but eleven gave to Hillary Clinton. More generally, “liberal groups accounted for eight of the top ten ideological causes of the ultra-rich, and seven of the ten congressional candidates most dependent on money from such people were Democrats.” Even one of the progressive movement’s favorite whipping boys—David Koch—publicly self-identifies as “a social liberal.”

As a result, as a Slate essay observed, “Fortune 500 companies today are socially liberal, especially on areas surrounding diversity, gay rights, and immigration; they are unabashedly in favor of free trade and globalization, express concern about climate change, and embrace renewable energy.” In doing so, they are simply reflecting the changing values of their CEOs.

All of which suggests that the elites who control America’s largest corporations are likely to remain some the primary culprits in the assault on America’s national and cultural identity.

Posted at 01:24 PM in Business, Corporate Social Responsibility, Politics | | Comments (0)

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