OPINION:
The World Economic Forum in a recent post on its website cheered the success of its partners in moving businesses the world over away from a shareholder model and toward a stakeholder system — meaning, away from a capitalist market and toward socialism.
Then the WEF’s post, originally from The Business Times, called for more crackdowns on businesses that buck the socialism.
America, beware. This is bad news for an America that has a Joe Biden at the presidential helm. Where are the White House controls to keep the globalists in check?
Right. Nowhere to be found. Off to the nearest ice cream parlor to buy a cone.
“The principle of stakeholder capitalism calls for business leaders to have a clear purpose beyond generating profits,” Janet Shum wrote in a piece for The Business Times, posted on the WEF’s forum, that was aptly titled, “At the turning point of stakeholder capitalism.”
The eerie opener for this Shum piece?
“As investor interest grows,” Shum wrote, “the shared value creation potential of stakeholder capitalism is proving to be more than conceptual.”
It’s becoming a thing of reality, in other words.
And this is no small feat, given the long-standing free market system of America that brought the country to such heights of economic success.
The standard business practice of corporate America is to make a product or provide a service that is desired enough by consumers that they’ll gladly pay. The better the product or service, or at least the better perceived the product or service, the more and more frequently consumers will pay. Business owners and corporate entities gauge success by the pure and simple bottom line of finances: If they take in more than they spend, then the business is deemed a success.
To socialists, the idea of money as a standard of success seems cold, cold-hearted, uncaring for the little guy.
But it’s actually quite honest — and it keeps the businesses honest.
If the product or service sucks, people will not buy, corporate board members will not earn off stock dividends, shareholders will be unhappy, business owners will not expand their businesses, the doors will eventually close. Accountability is inherent in a capitalistic system; it’s tough to fake success when people aren’t buying. Expectedly enough, it’s this accountability factor that’s detestable to the socialist mindset. It’s almost as detestable as the freedom that capitalism provides, in that anyone and everyone can try their hand at producing and selling a product or service — and those who succeed aren’t always and necessarily tied to families of wealth, or highly educated at Ivy League schools, or even trained in the ways of savvy businessmen and strategic corporate executives.
Even a deplorable can become a millionaire in a free market system.
Even a high school dropout can become self-sufficient and move from poverty to financial freedom in a capitalist country.
And there you have it — the base reasons globalists, socialists, communists, Democrats, elitists, collectivists and the like hate free markets, hate pure capitalism, hate honest profit-loss based economies: they can’t control them. Or, more to point, they can’t control the people within these systems.
The WEF has been pushing a replacement of shareholder capitalism for some time.
“Shareholder capitalism, which focuses exclusively on maximizing profits for shareholders, is, in our view, unsustainable,” Shum wrote.
Well, it’s not. Not really. It’s actually the way nations have built wealth and moved their citizens out of poverty. It’s only unsustainable because the WEF and their partners in global governance want to make it unsustainable, and they want to make it unsustainable in order to commandeer and capture and enslave the world’s citizens. Economically speaking, of course.
Shareholder capitalism — the model the WEF wants the world to move to — is based on a whole host of different standards that deem a business a success versus failure. For instance: Does the business give proper regard for Black Lives Matter movements? Check. Or: Does the business provide adequate means of offsetting carbon consumption? Check, check. Or even: Does the business take profits and redistribute them to foundations that provide education and other services for illegals? Check, check, check.
Shareholder capitalism — which is not capitalism at all — places equity, diversity, inclusion, tolerance above profits, above even losses, and rewards businesses based on those ever-changing, social justice, social causes. Shareholder capitalism puts someone other than business owners and corporate board members in charge of running the business, of deciding how to make profits, of deciding how to invest and re-invest capital. Who?
Who knows.
Whomever rises to the social justice warrior top at the time.
The pandemic, as the WEF previously reported, provided an excellent opportunity — a “Great Reset” opportunity — for globalists to move the shareholder ball a little farther down the economic playing field because of all the interruptions and disruptions of proper business dealings. But now, WEF says, it’s time to move the ball more.
“The paradigm shift to stakeholder capitalism is a systemic change that requires a holistic approach with collective effort from players across the ecosystem,” Shum wrote.
“The principle of stakeholder capitalism calls for business leaders to have a clear purpose beyond generating profits,” Shum wrote.
“In America, over 180 chief executives have signed the Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, issued by the Business Roundtable, to pledge their commitment to building long-term value for all their stakeholders,” Shum wrote.
So you think these woke businesses springing across America have sprung suddenly, and from seemingly nowhere?
Think again.
It’s a signed, pledged, strategic commitment.
And now the WEF and its partners want more.
Now the WEF and its partners want to ratchet pressures on these businesses to comply, or continue to comply, even more.
“A pledge is an empty promise if there is no concrete action plan to achieve it,” Shum wrote. “The purpose has to be fully integrated into the company’s strategy, operations and culture.”
Business executives, start your engines. It’s time to reshape the corporate culture, one business plan at a time, one Human Resources’ manual at a time, one earnings report at a time.
But here’s the part that’s really aimed at reshaping America’s entire free market system: the enforcement arm.
“To check whether companies are walking the talk and making progress,” Shum said, “we need new tools to assess overall corporate performance. Emerging frameworks such as impact-weighted accounts that reflect a company’s overall net internal and external financial, social and environmental impact, may prove key.”
Make way for the era of businesses that fail to be the world’s biggest businesses — with taxpayers, no doubt, tossing in the money to keep them afloat.
If social justice is the standard of success and profits and losses mean little, then it’s only a matter of time before free markets are utterly destroyed. Only those businesses specially chosen by the globalists will be allowed to operate.
Only those business owners who play the globalist game and bow to WEF’s standards of equity and inclusion who will be allowed to make money.
It’s not likely in this type of system that conservative voters, patriotic Americans, or, God forbid, Donald Trump supporters, will survive, never mind thrive.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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