End of an error: The editor of Business Ethics magazine celebrates its
15th anniversary by admitting that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is
a smokescreen for the excesses of the 'financial elite'.
As the 'Watergate of Wall Street unfolds', Marjorie Kelly - with all
the zeal of the converted - tells the MBA class that power structures need to
be made democratic. 'We’ve been like homeowners chopping down nuisance trees
which continually spring back, because we have failed to eradicate the roots.'
[Business
Ethics].
Peter Carlson says: 'Duh!'
'The idea that corporations will shaft workers, shareholders and Mother
Nature in pursuit of the almighty dollar should be obvious to anyone who has
ever glanced at an American history textbook. And the fact that corporate executives
might utter pious platitudes about ethics while stealing like gangsters would
surprise no one familiar with the tale of Richard Whitney, the president of
the New York Stock Exchange, who delivered a famous speech titled "Business
Honesty" shortly before he was sent to Sing Sing for theft in 1938.
'But it's not nice to gloat over the naivete of disillusioned idealists.
The folks at Business Ethics are not all that different from the rest of us.
In the last several decades, politicians, think tanks and the media have convinced
the American public that corporations are warm, fuzzy creatures, that CEOs are
American heroes and that government regulation of business is meddlesome and
unnecessary. Now we know -- or ought to know -- that it was a lot of baloney.'
[Washington
Post].
Net gains: Scott Rosenberg on why the internet matters even after the
pop of the tech stock bubble: 'Hundreds of millions of people around the
world continue to bend it to their own ends, in chaotic, unstable and unpredictable
ways. As a generator of instant wealth, the Net may now be a big bust; as a
generator of instant ideas, it keeps thrumming along.' [Salon].
