Author: CRT Admin

Recently, I sent you some thoughts on wokeness using the critical thinking constructs of post-modern discourse.  In thinking that way, I was not induced to think much of what more and more are calling a post-modern form of Puritan sectarianism seeking salvation, while living in a world of sin.

I saw that in a recent column, George Will now speaks of the woke among us as having become a “suffocating, controlling, minority.”

He continues: “The fires of wokeness will soon be starved of fuel by the sterile monotony of wokeness’s achievement: enforced orthodoxy. …  the woke will have the consolation of vanity. wokeness has many flavors, but one purpose – self-flattery.”

Will infers that the vision of the woke is a twist on the conviction of the 19^th century Unitarian thinker, Theodore Parker, and later adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. which, in reformation, now holds that, “The arc of the moral universe is long and bends towards me.”

In his disdain of the woke, Will reminded me of Lenin’s objection to his more left-wing colleagues when he entitled a book, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

In its principles for moral government, the Caux Round Table asserts, as a fundamental ideal, that public office is a public trust.  Public officials serve as trustees, not as imperators or dictators who rule by fiat and oppression of those who disagree with them.

Christine Wilson is resigning as a commissioner of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  Her decision to so resign was prompted by her moral conscience, which would not let her rest content and silent when a public trust was being abused.  She wrote a justification for her decision, which was published by the Wall Street Journal on Feb 15^th and is reproduced below.

The essence of abuse of trust as reported by Commissioner Wilson is her statement that the chairman of the FTC adopts arbitrary and willful standards for regulating companies – “I know it when I see it.”

This is fundamental lawlessness and abuse of power.  King Richard II of England was dethroned in 1399 on a number of grounds, but one was that he similarly imposed his pleasure on the kingdom:

The king did not wish to preserve or protect the just laws and customs of this kingdom but to do what struck fancy according to his arbitrary will.  When frequently the justices and others of the council explained and declared the laws of the realm to him and when according to those laws, he was to grant justice to those seeking it, he said expressly with a hard and a bold countenance that the laws were in his mouth and sometimes he said that they were in his heart and that he alone could change and establish the laws of the realm.  Following that opinion, he did not grant justice to many of his liegemen but through threats and terrors he compelled many to cease asking for common justice.

Commissioner Wilson wrote:

Much ink has been spilled about Lina Khan’s attempts to remake federal antitrust law as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.  Less has been said about her disregard for the rule of law and due process and the way senior FTC officials enable her.  I have failed repeatedly to persuade Ms. Khan and her enablers to do the right thing and I refuse to give their endeavor any further hint of legitimacy by remaining.  Accordingly, I will soon resign as an FTC commissioner.

Since Ms. Khan’s confirmation in 2021, my staff and I have spent countless hours seeking to uncover her abuses of government power.  That task has become increasingly difficult, as she has consolidated power within the Office of the Chairman, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent and undermining the commission structure that Congress wrote into law.  I have sought to provide transparency and facilitate accountability through speeches and statements, but I face constraints on the information I can disclose—many legitimate, but some manufactured by Ms. Khan and the Democratic majority to avoid embarrassment.

Consider the FTC’s challenge to Meta’s acquisition of Within, a virtual-reality gaming company. Before joining the FTC, Ms. Khan argued that Meta should be blocked from making any future acquisitions and wrote a report on the same issues as a congressional staffer.  She would now sit as a purportedly impartial judge and decide whether Meta can acquire Within.  Spurning due-process considerations and federal ethics obligations, my Democratic colleagues on the commission affirmed Ms. Khan’s decision not to recuse herself.

I dissented on due-process grounds, which require those sitting in a judicial capacity to avoid even the appearance of unfairness.  The law is clear.  In one case, a federal appeals court ruled that an FTC chairman who investigated the same company, conduct, lines of business and facts as a committee staffer on Capitol Hill couldn’t then sit as a judge at the FTC and rule on those issues.  In two other decisions, appellate courts held that an FTC chairman couldn’t adjudicate a case after making statements suggesting he prejudged its outcome.  The statements at issue were far milder than Ms. Khan’s definitive pronouncement that all Meta acquisitions should be blocked.  These cases, with their uncannily similar facts, confirm that Ms. Khan’s participation would deny the merging parties their due-process rights.

I also disagreed with my colleagues on federal ethics grounds.  To facilitate transparency and accountability, I detailed my concerns in my dissent—but Ms. Khan’s allies ensured the public wouldn’t learn of them.  Despite previous disclosures of analogous information, Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya imposed heavy redactions on my dissent. Commission opinions commonly use redactions to prevent disclosure of confidential business information, but my opinion contained no such information.  The redactions served no purpose but to protect Ms. Khan from embarrassment.

I am not alone in harboring concerns about the honesty and integrity of Ms. Khan and her senior FTC leadership.  Hundreds of FTC employees respond annually to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.  In 2020, the last year under Trump appointees, 87% of surveyed FTC employees agreed that senior agency officials maintain high standards of honesty and integrity. Today, that share stands at 49%.

Many FTC staffers agree with Ms. Khan on antitrust policy, so these survey results don’t necessarily reflect disagreement with her ends.  Instead, the data convey the staffers’ discomfort with her means, which involve dishonesty and subterfuge to pursue her agenda.  I disagree with Ms. Khan’s policy goals but understand that elections have consequences.  My fundamental concern with her leadership of the commission pertains to her willful disregard of congressionally imposed limits on agency jurisdiction, her defiance of legal precedent and her abuse of power to achieve desired outcomes.

Three additional examples are illustrative.  In November 2022, the commission issued an antitrust enforcement policy statement asserting that the FTC could ignore decades of court rulings and condemn essentially any business conduct that three unelected commissioners find distasteful.  If conduct can be labeled with a nefarious adjective—“coercive,” “exploitative,” “abusive,” “restrictive”—it may violate the FTC Act of 1914.  But the new policy contains no descriptions or definitions of these terms, many of which also lack context in the law.  The commission also candidly explained that its analysis under the new policy may depart from prior antitrust precedent and identified previously lawful conduct as now suspect.  In other words, the new policy adopts an “I know it when I see it” approach.  But due process demands that the lines between lawful and unlawful conduct be clearly drawn, to guide businesses before they face a lawsuit.

In January 2023, the commission launched a rulemaking that would ban nearly all noncompete clauses in employee contracts, affecting roughly one-fifth of employment contracts in the U.S. This proposed rule defies the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), which held that an agency can’t claim “to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion in its regulatory authority.”

Under President Biden, FTC leadership has abused the merger review process to impose a tax on all mergers, not only those that hinder competition.  Progressives tried but failed to enact a legislative moratorium on mergers in early 2020 and to pass other restrictions since.  Ms. Khan now does so by fiat.  Abuse of regulatory authority now substitutes for unfulfilled legislative desires.

We all know the simple rule: If you see something, say something.  As an antitrust lawyer, I counseled clients to avoid trouble by knowing when to object and how to exit.  When my clients attended trade association gatherings, I advised them to leave quickly if discussions with competitors took a wrong turn and raised alarm bells about price fixing or other illegal activity. Make a noisy exit—say, spill a pitcher of water—so that attendees remember that you objected and that you left.  Although serving as an FTC commissioner has been the highest honor of my professional career, I must follow my own advice and resign in the face of continuing lawlessness.  Consider this my noisy exit.

I thank her for giving us all some moral clarity on public justice.

As we start a new year with the legislature pondering how best to spend $17.6 billion in unallocated public monies, we might also think of what investments in social and human capitals come without great financial cost.

Along with my role at the Caux Round Table, I’m also the chair of the Minnesota Character Council (MCC).  The members of the MCC have drafted this statement on Minnesota’s hope – our children.  Investing in the emotional health and character development of children doesn’t cost much money, but it does cost us in taking time and making sure we care.

We ask that you consider sharing this statement with your networks and colleagues.

Please also let me know if you would like to help us get the message of care out and letting our kids know that they matter in all kinds of important ways.

We have been thinking a bit more, perhaps belatedly, but better late than never, it has been said, about systems and individuals.  One might argue that a casualty of modernity has been charisma – the compelling dynamic of individuals to lead, bring communities to excellence, to heal and to inspire.  We live under the ministrations of great organizations – bureaucracies, hierarchies, peer pressure – encased in our roles, confined by rational/legal criteria of justice, subordinated to celebrity and the alure of going along to be paid for conformity with money, status or power.

Many seem to have given up on the possibility of individual greatness.  Academically, I have been trained in systems theory – the social system; the political system; the economic system; the self-system; etc.

Who can act?  Who is willing to act?

We speak of moral capitalism, but where are the moral capitalists?

Here in Minnesota, we have started an annual recognition award for individuals.  We call it the Dayton Award, in honor of the Dayton family here which, for four generations, has given to society individuals who are willing to act for the common good.

Our colleagues in Mexico, for many years now, give annual awards (a distintivo) to companies which have achieved under their leaderships.

The Caux Round Table will present Dayton Awards for 2022 to Mary Anne Kowalski, owner of Kowalski’s Markets, Kris Kowalski Christiansen, CEO of Kowalski’s Markets and Kyle Smith, CEO of Reell Precision Manufacturing.

Our board of directors has established the criteria for selection of an award recipient as:

-CEO of a Minnesota company or similar operational organization.
-Revenue and profits if relevant to mission.
-Community impact if relevant to mission.
-Demonstrated innovation/response to market opportunities.
-Quality of company culture.
-Care of employees.
-Customer satisfaction.
-Environmental stewardship.
-Personal community commitment.
-Company community commitment.
-Vision and prudence: level 5 leadership traits (Jim Collin’s book, Good to Great)

We seek to recognize leadership, not position.  In fact, small and family-owned companies contribute more to the quality of our lives than do large corporations.  Small businesses constitute 99% of all American companies and employ 47% of working Americans.  We have also found that small and family-owned companies are more in touch with their stakeholders than are large corporations, which tend, on the whole, to favor shareholders.  The companies that made Minnesota prosperous with a high quality of life, honest and dedicated public officials and dynamic civil society nonprofits started as family-owned or small companies.

It is the intangible of leadership that counts most for moral success.

There are essential abilities required to lead – integrity, courage, compassion, respect and responsibility:

Integrity is being honest and having strong moral principles.  Having integrity means you are true to yourself and would do nothing that demeans or dishonors you.  Integrity makes you believable, as you know and act on your values.

Courage is strength in the face of adversity and upholding what is right, regardless of what others may think or do.  Courage enables you to take a stand, honor commitments and guide the way.  Courage is a necessary element of responsibility.

Compassion is having concern for another.  It is feeling for and not feeling with the other.  Compassion is concern of others in a more global sense.

Respect is a feeling of deep admiration for someone.  Leaders ought to be respected and they ought to respect those with whom they work.  Demonstrating this perspective is essential to motivate and inspire others.

Responsibility is acting on commitment, will, determination and obligation.  Responsibility implies the satisfactory performance of duties, the adequate discharge of obligations and the trustworthy care for or disposition of possessions.  It is being willing and able to act in a life-enhancing manner.  Responsibility is expected of self, as well as from others.

The nomination of Kyle Smith reported that:

I have never met an individual with more integrity than Kyle Smith.  He holds himself to such a high standard of integrity, beyond what most of us even think about.  He is intentional about everything he does, in business and his personal life.  He is honest and extremely trustworthy.  He knows what he believes and why he believes it and his values are his compass.  He is a humble, servant leader.  Kyle faces into hard decisions.  Many courageous decisions have been made.  In 2009, Reell’s revenue was cut in half.  Kyle became CEO and led the way to greater profitability.  The share price has since grown over 700%.  When he joined the company, the bankers were calling us every day and now we are healthy and debt-free!  Kyle knows the names of every coworker.  His door is always open for anyone to talk about life or work.

The nomination of Mary and Kris Kowalski Christiansen, owners of a family business, reported that:

Mary and Kris became excellent teachers of civic responsibility and the qualities needed to create wealth. They understand wealth as excellence, of which profits are the by-product.  They established a vision, expressed in their mission statement which was developed by “store citizens” and printed on their grocery bags – “Kowalski’s is a Civic Business.”  This is a statement of Kowalski’s continuing commitment to the principles of moral capitalism and citizenship, defined in the company’s educational opportunities for all employees, in the care shown to all stakeholders and in the inclusiveness of the Kowalski mindset regarding their reciprocal duty with the larger community.       

In 1991, Charles Denny, then the CEO of ADC Telecommunications, chaired a presentation by Ryuzaburo Kaku, then Chairman of Canon Inc.  Mr. Kaku spoke of the Japanese business ethic of kyosei or symbiosis, whereby each company thrives due to reciprocal engagement with its stakeholders.  Inspired by Mr. Kaku’s approach, which they found very similar to their own value-based understanding of successful business enterprise, several Minnesotans, including Chuck Denny and Tony Anderson, then CEO of H.B. Fuller, decided to present a set of ethical principles to the Caux Round Table, which met in Caux, Switzerland.  Those principles had been worked out by a group here in Minnesota, including Bob MacGregor and Professor Kenneth Goodpaster of the University of St. Thomas.

The ceremony will be held in April.

After commenting on free speech as a public good in the U.S., I was taken by Jordan Peterson’s defense of the value of free speech for Canadians.

I attach his commentary in the National Post here.

With recent comments on the virtue signaling of wealthy participants in the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, I thought of going back to a commentary of mine from April two years ago.  I was reacting to “wokeness” as a long-hoped for awakening of moral sentiments that would “transform” capitalism into goodness and well-being for all.

Then, I was not convinced that “wokeness” would do any good at all.  I wrote:

For the Caux Round Table, the germane question has thus become: should wokeness be integrated into moral capitalism?

I have been thinking about this for some months now.  I wrote a first draft of this commentary on Christmas Day, 2020.  My considered answer is that, no, wokeness cannot be aligned with moral capitalism.

One of the carols I was listening to that day asserts: “God today has poor folk raised and cast adown the proud.”

Wokeness is a prideful, moralizing narrative about good and evil.  Like many narratives, first and foremost it serves the interests of the narrator.  In a sense, it hews to that peculiar American Calvinist tradition of the Jeremiad – prophetic voices predicting doom for sinners and salvations for true believers.  As in the Old Testament, revered by early Calvinists, prophets are tellers of narratives.  They spin a story of walking in God’s ways and never straying from his purposes, with woe to befall all those who fall short of his righteous demands.

Back in 2021, my conclusion, drawing on the political philosophy of the influential Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was:

For long term stability, any governing class needs its ideology, its narrative, to be accepted by the governed.  And so, for the future of the U.S., we must determine whether the woke narrative is credible or whether it is just another Rousseauist general will, a tale told by some narrator.  Whether it proceeds from the moral sense or from somewhere else in the human repertoire of social intermediations?

Last November, a senior executive at a successful American corporation, Jennifer Sey, published a book on her experience with “wokeness” and her resulting disdain for moralizing and canceling others.

In an excerpt from her book, published in the New York Post, she wrote:

“Woke capitalism” is corporate America’s attempt to profit off Millennial and Gen Z activism, often passive keyboard activism.  It exploits social-justice politics and transforms it into social-justice consumerism — and ultimately, investor profit.  Companies purporting to care about “progressive values” are really doing nothing more than striking a superficial pose meant to signal virtue while distracting from any company’s true motive: financial gain for shareholders.

You can read the full excerpt here.

I think we can be more seriously and prudentially just than mere “wokeness” can ever provide.  Moral capitalism can only make sense if it is grounded in the fullness of reality.  Self-serving personal narratives just don’t cut it when it comes to achieving social justice.