Biden Releases a “National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct”
It includes an interagency task force on “content authenticity”
The Biden administration this week released what it is calling “The U.S. Government’s National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct.”
If you are interested, you can read the full 40 page plan yourself. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but there’s a vaguely Leninist tinge to the language of a “National Action Plan.”
Skepticism about such a venture is unlikely to be allayed by the language in the plan itself. “The USG expects businesses to conduct heightened HRDD in conflict-affected contexts in line with the UN Development Program Guide on Heightened HRDD for Business in Conflict-Affected Contexts,” the plan says, using acronyms for U.S. Government and Human Rights Due Diligence. “In addition, the USG expects businesses to account for populations that face disproportionate impacts of business activity in conducting HRDD. … businesses should account for the disproportionate harms business activity can have on marginalized populations, including women and girls in all their diversity; persons with disabilities; members of ethnic, religious, linguistic, or racial minority groups; Indigenous Peoples; LGBTQI+ persons; children; and migrant workers.”
How the government can “expect” anything is unclear. A government can require a business to do something by passing a law. Short of that, it all seems vague, and a bit of buck-passing. The Biden administration hasn’t been able to prevent war from breaking out in the Middle East and in Ukraine; now it wants businesses to up their game in the conflict-affected areas?
The plan includes “an interagency task force to drive outreach to international partners on issues regarding content authenticity.” Now that is amusing. “Content authenticity” is the flip side of what the Trump administration used to call the “fake news” problem. Maybe the Biden State Department can start by taking on Al Jazeera. Good luck.
At least “content authenticity” gets to a genuine issue of responsible business conduct, which is delivering genuine value to customers. Of all the ways the U.S. government improvises a definition of “responsible business conduct”—“workers’ rights,” “environment, climate, and just transitions,” avoiding corruption—that most basic definition seems strangely absent. There’s a nod at “generating economic growth and creating jobs” but nothing about serving customers or shareholders. The word “profit” doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the 40 pages, though responsible businesses seek to provide their owners an economic return on their capital.
The release came from the State Department. It describes the plan as “The Biden-Harris Administration’s release,” and “a whole-of-government commitment,” though the White House hasn’t highlighted the plan.
The plan has gotten almost zero press attention so far. Maybe the business press doesn’t pay attention to news from the State Department, and the State Department press corps doesn’t pay attention to business news. Maybe it seems too technocratic. Whatever the reason, it provides an opening for publications like The Editors, which exist in part to tell you about things that you might otherwise not have known about. It’s our own action plan for “responsible business conduct.”
A Bradley Prize for Samuel Gregg: In our item the other day, “Pope Francis Takes Aim at the Profit Motive,” we quoted Samuel Gregg, the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “There is no intrinsic opposition between seeking profit and the common good properly understood,” he said. “Without profit and therefore growth, humanity is condemned to economic poverty.”
So it was a delight to see a press release cross our desk this morning from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announcing that Gregg is a winner of a $250,000 Bradley Prize for 2024. “Few articulate the importance of free enterprise and ordered liberty better than Sam,” said Rick Graber, president and CEO of The Bradley Foundation. “His scholarship has contributed immensely to the defense of free enterprise, particularly at a time when it is being significantly challenged.”
Americans meet Xi: The Chinese Communist leader, Xi Jinping, is looking for a lifeline from America. Bloomberg News quotes “a person with knowledge of the matter” saying that “Xi said he doesn’t see the need for Washington and Beijing to decouple, and that he wants American businesses to invest in China.” The government-controlled China Daily paraphrased Xi as saying, “China is planning and implementing a series of major measures to comprehensively deepen reform, foster a world-class business environment that is market-oriented, law-based and internationalized, and provide broader development space for international businesses including US companies.”
Bloomberg says those who attended the meeting in Beijing included Blackstone Inc.’s Stephen Schwarzman, Qualcomm Inc.’s Cristiano Amon, Raj Subramaniam, chief executive officer of FedEx Corp.; Evan Greenberg, CEO of the insurer Chubb Ltd., Mark Carney, chairman of Bloomberg Inc., and Harvard professor Graham Allison.
“Law-based” is comical. There are indeed laws in Communist China, but the Communist Party has the latitude to change them or enforce them in ways that advantage the Party over anyone else, so it doesn’t really amount to the rule of law in a meaningful sense.
The war on Jews is a war on capitalism: One of the themes I’ve been pounding away at regularly since October 7 is that the war against the Jews is a war against capitalism.
This point is starting to percolate. Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter professor emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has a new essay up at American Purpose explaining, “The antisemitism that has been on display on American campuses since October 7—and, indeed, before then to anyone who cared to notice—can be understood as the American version of the antisemitism, disguised as anti-imperialism, introduced by the communist bloc after World War II. Communist anti-Zionism, its version of antisemitism, fits all too neatly into the ideology that has taken hold in American universities over the last three decades.”
Mandelbaum blames not only the students, but the grownups. “It is the radical faculty who devote their classes to disseminating antisemitic teachings—and the feckless administrators who enable the demonization of Jews that these faculty members preach and the harassment of Jewish students that that preaching inspires—who are the 21st-century equivalents of the communist propagandists of the Cold War,” he writes.
In another essay, published at ejewishphilanthropy.com, David Bernstein and Phil Siegel write, “Many of the attacks against our people are part of a larger attack against capitalism, free speech, the U.S. and the values of the West.”
The more you look at the critics of Israel the more you see that part of the objection isn’t only the war but the profits. “Wall Street eyes big profits from Israel-Hamas war,” is a headline from the nonprofit Quincy Institute, funded by a list of other charities including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. “The obscene U.S. profiteering from Israeli war and occupation” is a headline in Jacobin, which describes itself as a socialist publication.