Good heavens, it’s been an ugly, stupid few weeks for American corporate executives and the companies they lead, hasn’t it? Even uglier and stupider than the usual new depths they’ve reached since the “mostly peaceful” summer of 2020 – which is sort of impressive in a “the devil’s really strong, huh” sort of way.
Let’s start with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who can regularly be relied on to emit something in equal parts self-aggrandizing, farcical and authoritarian. In his most recent notable eructation, he defended “stakeholder capitalism” – or the replacement of corporate-executive fiduciary duty with freedom for CEOs to use investors’ capital to install their own personal policy preferences – on the ground that “[t]he world has told us what they want from us.”
Photo credit: (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
