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A true winner would have reduced the shares in advance. This week, with moral authority coming from the abs where sushi can be cut, Cristiano Ronaldo pulled two fat-filled bottles of Coca-Cola from a press conference desk and greeted water However.
The most followed human censorship on Instagram would sting any company. Equally, the next $ 4 billion would affect market value. But few are as self-doubting as Coca-Cola. Its “Business and Environmental, Social and Governance Report 2020” (yes, two “and”) is one 82 pages sorry for your main product, if not the trade itself.
At this point, it is natural to contrast the piety of the modern corporation with its Rococo tax schemes. (Indeed, Coca-Cola has had tax problems with the feds.) But I no longer see the former incompatible with the latter. It is better understood as a consequence. The rise of “RSC“I”ESG”- as the acronym is not estimated – reflects the gradual decline in the effective corporate tax rate.
The foundation of suite C is transparent: what we deny the common bag, we repair, or at least muddy, in other ways. It is not just guilt that makes a multinational speak the slang of the cultural left. It is not just naivety that induces a bank to hire phalanxes of sustainability advisors. It is calculation. A cunning fox throws dogs out of the scent.
If I am right, it follows that higher and better applied taxes mean the end of the corporation being saved. In essence, companies will buy the right to relocate without obligation. We can go back to a time when the production of things that people want and the sharing of profits with the government was a social good. In this sense, a tougher fiscal regime is a reinforcement of capitalism. Few things praise the recent G7 agreement on the subject more. Few things make the opposition of the supposed conservatives weirder.
1984, the least Orwell ever prescribed, misread the trajectory of the left. The force that arrived was not the state, which even in Russia reached its peak at the time of publication. It was the Gramscian march through the institutions. And the result would not be totalitarian, just cloying and spicy.
A harmless manifestation of this is group work therapy. Call me British, but my employer expectations are that they send the monthly bank transfer and meet the legal minimum on paid and similar holidays. If they help me in a difficult time, they can expect mutual loyalty. What I don’t want is to enter into pastoral communion with them or remake the world together.
The truly messianic enterprise is far more terrifying. Coca-Cola wants its U.S. workforce to “align” with ethnic census data, such as a Singapore housing block. Microsoft’s CSR mission seeks immigration reform, a better humanitarian response to the crisis and “alternatives to imprisonment.” It resembles the program of a political party (one, to be clear, would vote) and sometimes the declaration of rights of a nation state. Even if one can live with the fiscal starvation of the government, who believes that this range of Napoleonic activities is good per business? Who do you think is, in the old sense, sustainable?
Christopher Hitchens had an answer when the well-meaning but absurd stopped believers who do not proselytize or act according to the most writerly chunks. “All you’re saying is that these people are so nice that they’re hardly religious.”
This is CSR everywhere. The bottom line is that a company is good precisely insofar as it does not act as a company. Job creation, innovation, consumer choice: they become data. In its own report that we like, Nike assures older adults who buy their silly shoes that at least 1.5% of gross revenue has a “community impact”. The implication is that employment does not affect any community.
As an intellectual concession, this is huge, and companies have come up with it as protection against the prosecutor. The state injury is transmitted well enough. Bad service to capitalism itself is insidiously built over time. Immediate cash savings are not worth polluting the long-term atmosphere in which the business is to operate. The obvious way out of this trap seems expensive. In fact, it’s a bargain. Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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