Wednesday 17 April 2019
With friends like these...corporate cred appropriaton reaching new heights/lows
You can't have it both ways, goes the folk wisdom. Still, many want to and try to. "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World", a 2018 book by Wall Street traitor/refugee Anand Giridharadas exposes the post-2008 crash make-over attempts of corporate philanthropy to equate making profits and doing good. As an insider-outsider who left the Wall Street world Giridharadas makes clear beyond fudging the political stretch to bursting of Pinnochio-like philanthropic "giving" with one hand (to take with the other through sales to the well-intended but gullible). Only abandonment of the consumerism that fills the other half of do-gooding corporations' "half-full/half-empty" marketed cup would have any real impact, even if we/they have increasingly limited Common Era time for delaying the inevitable. Problem: consumerism sustains most "developed" economies.
Our environmental options as societies dependent in large part on reeource extraction are often cast as half-empty or half-full. Green economic transformation involves severe job disruption.These options are always by definition both of course, but with the corporate world chasing street cred as young people, in particular, take seriously our planet's marginally mobile date with environmental Armageddon, forget the half full bit.This cup is empty. And see the following, recognizable by most, companies, now touting their own environmental commitments for what they are: shameless appropriators of the hard work done by alarm-sounding activists for many years
We must be under no illusion about the following:only serious and radical government action has the scale to pause our climate change descent to a fiery catastrophe. Airy words about the complementarity of the economy and the environment are not enough. Not all social enterprise is born equal, even if much of it has little practical effect in the overall scale of things. The idealistic entrepreneurs of TorontotheBetter enterprises, who want to do something good in the way they do business, can play a positive role by, in effect, counterbalancing some of the damages wrought by mainstream economic actors. But that net effect will only be positive if, as TorontotheBetter demands, they simultaneously support necessary taxation and related public intervention to transform society's economic norms for humans as well as products, from consume and discard to conserve, nurture, and transform. Social enterprise can be part of a better world as long as it does not oppose or distract us from the key public intervention that make their stated goals achievable. The phrase social enterprise is so broad we need some mechanism to identify those entities genuinely ocmmitted to a better world from those seeking only to profit from it. TorontotheBetter has a set of criteria that has in general worked by combining criteria for acceptance but adequate disclosire and enterprise transparency are always a challenge.
And then there is the increasing problem of the virtual invisibility of much of today's economic activity. In this environment increasing numbers of transactions occur outside public scrutiny and accountability through blockchain technology, while social media have grown up beyond the reach of traditional public regulation. The accountable public realm is now dwarfed by such virtual entities and their activities. Assuing we have acceptably sophisticated criteria how can we effectively apply them to isolate hard to reach virtual enterprises? More to come on this matter, including th rise of platform cooperatives as models for an alternative economy with scale and probity. Once solidly established they offer a set of concrete standards against which fake and compromised initiatatives will be found practicallyu wanting.As always, for progressive change development of the better must be accompanied by exposure of the worse..
# posted by Taodhg @ 11:51 am 
