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Pope Francis gives his blessing to Council for Inclusive Capitalism

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Premium Member
Financial Times

Pope Francis is giving his blessing to a coalition of large investors, companies, unions and foundations that are pledging to make capitalism less socially and environmentally damaging.

The Vatican will on Tuesday lend its name to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, whose members must commit to measurable action to create a more equitable and trusted economic system, including adherence to the UN’s sustainable development goals.

The alliance marks an embrace of big business and finance by a head of the Roman Catholic Church who has warned of the idolatry of making profit one’s only purpose and called unfettered free markets the “dung of the devil”.

In a statement, Pope Francis said that a fair, trustworthy economic system that could address humanity’s biggest challenges was “urgently needed”. The group’s leaders had taken up the challenge of making capitalism “a more inclusive instrument for integral human wellbeing”, he said.

The council’s founding members, who will hold annual meetings with the Pope, include the managers of $10.5tn of assets, companies with a combined market capitalisation of more than $2tn and groups representing more than 200m workers around the world.

They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría and Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate finance.

“Neither the Vatican nor the CEOs that I know need another meeting. We need action and we need to reform capital markets,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the council’s founder, told the Financial Times. The Pope’s support was significant, she said, because “it’s a positive embrace of doing the right thing for capitalism, but it’s also a challenge”.

She said she had been confident that she could enlist leaders in business and finance to advance a more inclusive form of capitalism, but approached the Vatican because “we needed moral guidance”.

Pope Francis is backing a new movement to redefine capitalism as a force for good

Capitalism has been condemned for many of the world’s evils, from massive income inequality to climate change. But self-interest wasn’t the core idea of the economic system first codified by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Avarice became coupled with capitalism in the 1980s, fueled largely by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s theory that the singular goal of businesses is to maximize profits for shareholders. In short, it was the argument that “greed is good.”

Now a new global alliance, with Pope Francis as its moral leader, is pushing to rescue the heart of capitalism and reorient it as a force for social good...

Forester adds that though the leader of the Catholic Church serves as it main advisor, the coalition is firmly non-sectarian. “This is of course informed by the [Christian] gospel, but it speaks about what Aristotle was speaking about 300 years before Christ about humanity’s need to be responsible for each other,” says Forester, also known socially as “Lady Lynn,” by virtue of her marriage to a British knight. Her net worth was more than $600 million in 2016, according to Business Insider.
 
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Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
"They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations...".

Communists, every damn one of them!
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
A correction of Friedman's catastrophic blunder has been long overdue. However, the damage is at this point too profound for a quick solution. It will take decades to put an end to Friedman's madness and get us on track with some kind of sane and sustainable, socially responsible capitalism.

By the way, I seem to recall that Friedman first offered up his notion that the sole responsibility of executives was to "maximize shareholder value" in a 1970 essay in the New York Times. When the article in the OP refers to the advent of shareholder capitalism as the 1980s, it's off by a decade. However, the article might be referring to Jack Welsh's speech in 1981 that is often given credit for popularizing Friedman's idea.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
It's striking that the Council for Inclusive Capitalism has reached out to Francis for moral guidance. I suspect no other recent pope would have seen them do so. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but it seems to me at times that the only major reservoir of 'Catholic Moral Authority" left after the sex scandals is located directly below the pontiff's crown, and no longer extends to the clergy as a whole.
 

Treks

Well-Known Member
I wonder what relation this has, if any, to the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset". They both have reference to the UN's SDGs.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Premium Member
It's striking that the Council for Inclusive Capitalism has reached out to Francis for moral guidance. I suspect no other recent pope would have seen them do so. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but it seems to me at times that the only major reservoir of 'Catholic Moral Authority" left after the sex scandals is located directly below the pontiff's crown, and no longer extends to the clergy as a whole.

I found it striking as well!

I think you're essentially right about the lustre and prestige of papal moral authority being the one major clerical office left that has retained its credibility in that regard (as has remained, surprisingly, constant down the millennia despite episodes like the Avignon Papacy, the Borgias and the Pornocracy!).

That a cross-section of the world's top engines of global capitalism in 2020 are turning to that papal office for moral edification and direction, is testament to the staying power of the oldest, most continuous institution in the Western world - the Papacy.

Of course, we cannot discount the remarkable personality of Pope Francis himself as a man and what he has brought to the office - yet one can note that His predecessor John Paul II played an instrumental role in the collapse of Soviet Communism behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, so this kind of influence seems to be perennial.
 
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Treks

Well-Known Member
I found it striking as well!

I think you're essentially right about the lustre and prestige of papal moral authority being the one major clerical office left that has retained it's credibility on that regard (as has it has remained, surprisingly, constant down the millennia despite episodes like the Avignon Papacy, the Borgias and the Pornocracy!).

That a cross-section of the world's top engines of global capitalism in 2020 are turning to that papal office for moral edification and direction, is testament to the staying power of the oldest, most continuous institution in the Western world - the Papacy.

Of course, we cannot discount the remarkable personality of Pope Francis himself as a man and what he has brought to the office - yet one can note that His precessor John Paul II played an instrumental role in the collapse of Soviet Communism behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, so this kind of influence seems to be perennial.

Are you sure they're not just sniffing around the Vatican's wallet? :D
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, my uncle was CEO of a large American corporation. Shareholder value was only one of five or six things he tried to strike a balance between and achieve. Among the others were the corporation's employees and customers, and the communities the corporation had a presence in. He even took into account the interests of the corporation's suppliers when formulating his strategies. Call him "old school", but his attitude was not original to him -- it was more or less the standard for CEOs at the time (at least as an ideal). Or so I've been told.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Premium Member
Are you sure they're not just sniffing around the Vatican's wallet? :D

Well, I doubt they're much lacking in that regard themselves Treks! ;) (Btw it's great to see you posting again!!!)

And to be honest, the Vatican's finances are still in such an abysmal, Byzantine state of antiquated disrepair, I'm not sure I'd want to be indebted to that particular wallet if I were the likes of Ms. Rockefeller! :)

Just today:

Pope Francis takes on 'the most secret bank in the world'


When Pope Francis’ advisers report back on the battle to overhaul the Vatican’s sprawling finances, they regularly bring poor tidings. As they huddle with the Pontiff, the aides voice their frustration at the resistance of the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Catholic Church and which Francis has called “the last court that remains in Europe,” saying it’s filled with careerists and gossips.

The bureaucrats are pushing back against Francis’ drive for transparency and accountability, refusing to give up the privileges that control of money grants them, according to officials who asked not to be named as these discussions are confidential.

The Roman Catholic leader hears them out, then urges them to forge ahead. “I don’t understand any of this stuff. Talk to each other, and don’t lose your sense of humour,” he says. “But we have to keep going. I won’t stop.”
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
I found it striking as well!

I think you're essentially right about the lustre and prestige of papal moral authority being the one major clerical office left that has retained its credibility in that regard (as has remained, surprisingly, constant down the millennia despite episodes like the Avignon Papacy, the Borgias and the Pornocracy!).

That a cross-section of the world's top engines of global capitalism in 2020 are turning to that papal office for moral edification and direction, is testament to the staying power of the oldest, most continuous institution in the Western world - the Papacy.

Of course, we cannot discount the remarkable personality of Pope Francis himself as a man and what he has brought to the office - yet one can note that His precessor John Paul II played an instrumental role in the collapse of Soviet Communism behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, so this kind of influence seems to be perennial.

Granted that Popes wield considerable moral influence due to their office, but it should not escape our attention that perhaps the most socially, economically, and environmentally responsible pope of the past few centuries (at least!) is the current occupant of the sacred pointy hat. Surely, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism is likely to have been attracted to the personage of the Pope as well as the office of the papacy -- and my hunch is even more to the personage than the office.

You're allowed to disagree, though. Our two nations are free societies, and hence it's your absolute right to be wrong by disagreeing with me.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Premium Member
Granted that Popes wield considerable moral influence due to their office, but it should not escape our attention that perhaps the most socially, economically, and environmentally responsible pope of the past few centuries (at least!) is the current occupant of the sacred pointy hat. Surely, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism is likely to have been attracted to the personage of the Pope as well as the office of the papacy -- and my hunch is even more to the personage than the office.

Yes indeed!

As I noted myself in passing, we cannot discount the personal magnetism of Francis the individual as the draw here - he has, for one, an uncommonly visionary understanding of the immense office he has been elected to hold and has made it, moreover, exquisitely attuned to the hopes, fears, challenges and dreams of the 2010s - 2020s; whether through his excoriation of environmental degradation, trickle-down economics, the religious right in the United States, national-populism, the refugee crisis in Europe or indeed hypocrisy within the clerical hierarchy of the church itself.

But - and this is where I would add my qualifier - I doubt that a person such as he would have been able to shine in this way as an arbiter of moral guidance, if he were not occupying the most powerful religious office at the head of the largest of organised religious sects (1.3 billion people).

Thia has given him a platform and the "clout" so to speak (in addition to his direct supremacy over the global church body as its Supreme Pontiff) - and minding that the Vatican City is a sovereign state with its own diplomatic relations and observer status at the UN - to act in the way he has, with such real world impact.
 
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Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría and Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate finance.

“Neither the Vatican nor the CEOs that I know need another meeting. We need action and we need to reform capital markets,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the council’s founder, told the Financial Times. The Pope’s support was significant, she said, because “it’s a positive embrace of doing the right thing for capitalism, but it’s also a challenge”.

Pope Luciani didn't have all these connections...just saying...;)

But let us keep fingers crossed...about Francis I
 
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