I blame Jack Welch more than Reagan for bringing this culture to GE and later spreading it into every single fucking MBA program through his books. Jack Welch was a snake who transformed corporations into these absolute greedy monsters, before him there was at least a sense of social responsibility to workers, and society benefits in general, then shareholders. He completely inverted the relationships to be shareholder-first, propagandising his philosophy to business schools afterwards.
Fuck Jack Welch (and Reagan).
Re:The Death of Unity
by sydbarrett74 on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @01:47PM
(#37499447)
'Profits above all else' came primarily from three sources:
1) The 'Chicago School' emerging from the University of Chicago economics department, most active from the 1950's to the 1970's, and of which Milton Friedman was the exemplar;
2) The 'Powell Memo' that corporate lobbyist and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971; and
3) The efforts of Robert Bork, who was a militant critic of antitrust regulation and believed that mergers and acquisitions were good because they always lowered prices for consumers, and led to the creation of greater shareholder wealth.
The fiction that a corporation's fiduciary duty to its shareholders means "profits above all else" didn't become a thing until the 1980s, when Reagan's "greed is good" became the driving mantra of capitalism.
A "B" corporation, for example, is just a C corporation that has voluntarily agreed to a set of governance rules.