Category: Commentary

I saw that Roger Kimball, critic and respected editor and publisher of the New Criterion, devoted his most recent column in American Greatness to George Washington’s Farewell Address, which I quoted at some length in my last commentary.  Having his intellectual company is nice.

Kimball’s admiration for Washington’s advice can be found here.

The constitutional republic of the United States of America has just formally entered an existential crisis as serious as the breakdown of civil society which brought about its civil war of 1861-1865.

With the criminal indictment of Donald J. Trump by a politician affiliated with the Democrat Party, one faction of the American elite has abandoned government of the people, by the people and for the people.  Such authentic democracy, as once honored by Abraham Lincoln during a brutal civil war, has been replaced with factional criminalizing political rivals to prevent them from winning office.

This process of faction warring against faction, where no prisoners are taken and no mercy shown, is the very evil Madison described in his Federalist Paper No. 10 as the greatest danger which could ever threaten democratic systems.

As Sir John Glubb observed, the normal lifespan of a ruling dynasty or a powerful country, over the course of human history, has been about 250 years (The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival, 1978).

This year, 2023, is the 247^th year of the United States as an independent, constitutional republic.  Has the time come for the evil of factionalism to bring an end to our republic?

In September 1796, the first American president, George Washington, wrote an open letter to the American people as he left the presidency having served two terms in office.  In his letter, he foresaw the very systemic factional dysfunctions now polarizing Americans and warned of the serious danger to the republic to be brought about by any degradation of the civic order into such mean-spirited and self-seeking contestations of interest and power.

Washington wrote that avoiding such factionalism would be “all important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.”

He continued:

Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.  This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.  It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.  The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.  But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later, the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.  Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.  It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.  It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

Washington named the deadly disease which might destroy the republic:

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency.  They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small, but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.  However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

In harmony with Washington’s warning, the Caux Round Table Principles for Government require, as a norm of social justice, that:

Holders of public office are accountable for their conduct while in office.  They are subject to removal for malfeasance, misfeasance or abuse of office.  The burden of proof that no malfeasance, misfeasance or abuse of office has occurred lies with the officeholder.

The rule of law shall be honored and sustained, supported by honest and impartial tribunals and legislative checks and balances.

When the criminal law is invoked (abused?) to single out a political rival for mean reasons of personal fear or ambition, justice collapses and civil strife begins, where “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in an opinion that “a page of history is worth a volume of logic.”

What history can teach us of the dangers now facing the American people?

The collapse of the Roman Republic.

How fitting, I suppose, that the indictment of Donald Trump came in the month of March, when the final years of the Roman Republic began on the Ides of March 44 BC with the assassination of Julius Caesar, like Trump a man of outsized ego and ambition.

In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare well put the consequences of that death for the Roman people.  He has Antony say:

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy …
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

What has gone wrong with the American people?  In a word, the loss of moral rectitude.

In his farewell letter to the American people, Washington would say: “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

There is a precedent for Washington’s admonition in the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Some years ago now, I was reading Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus, who was then on a business trip to Greece.  In a letter of June, 59 BC, Cicero described the politics of Rome, then dominated by the first triumvirate – a junta of Crassus (money), Pompey (soldiers) and Caesar (brains).  Cicero wrote that the Roman elite was petulant.  When Caesar entered the theater, no one clapped.  When a playwright inserted a pun on Pompey’s name into a performance, there were 12 standing ovations from the audience.  Young Claudio was running around spreading inside stories of juries being bribed and other abuses of power.

Then Cicero concluded: “These things, while they make us glad that our judgments are still free, make us the more sad because we see that our virtue is in chains – nos virtutem adligata est.

From that loss of virtue, there was no recovery.  History was a straight line of factionalism and bloodshed down to 27 BC, when the Roman Empire was put in place by Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son.  The strong had done what they could and the weak would henceforth suffer as they must.

The indictment brought on Tuesday April 4, 2023 against Donald Trump by the New York County district attorney states that his alleged crime was to, 34 times, make a false entry in the business records of an enterprise with respect to an invoice from an attorney.

The indictment further alleges that Donald Trump himself personally “made and caused” such entry with the intent to “commit another crime.”  No other crime or criminal statue is mentioned in the indictment.

Nor does the indictment state why the entry for payment of an invoice from an attorney was false.  There is no recitation of why the services being paid for by Trump were not legal in form or substance.

Such an indictment, on its face, seems arbitrary and capricious.  Under the rule of law, any government action or decision which is arbitrary or capricious is usually thought to be, per se, irrational and so illegal.  The Administrative Procedure Act instructs courts to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings and conclusions found to be arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

A U.S. district court in Arizona has ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice’s narrow interpretation of the requirements for a criminal misdemeanor under the Endangered Species Act went beyond unreviewable prosecutorial discretion and its policy was arbitrary and capricious and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (WildEarth Guardians v. U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. District Court Arizona, June 27, 2017).

In this regard of selective prosecution based on arbitrary and capricious prejudice, consider similar conduct by Hillary Clinton.  Several months before Donald Trump made payment of such invoices from an attorney in 2017, Hillary Clinton, then a candidate running against Donald Trump for the office of president of the United States, did seemingly authorize her campaign to pay invoices received from the campaign’s attorneys for their work in procuring a false and defamatory statement (the Steele dossier), which was leaked to the public, accusing Donald Trump of serving as an agent of or as an accomplice conspiring with the Russian government.  This false statement was procured by the Clinton campaign in order to work a fraud on the American people that would influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

There has been no indictment of Hillary Clinton or anyone associated with her campaign for making a false bookkeeping entry to hide the origin of the creation and dissemination of that false and defamatory disinformation designed to manipulate an election outcome.

Our chairman, Brad Anderson, formerly CEO of Best Buy, recently sat down with Marissa Streit, CEO of Prager University, to discuss whether he could start Best Buy today and if so, how he would approach it.

He also discusses his meeting with Steve Jobs and what he learned.

You can watch it above or  here.

It’s a little over 40 minutes in length.

We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics.  They include:

–Technology In, Technology Out

–There’s No Capitalism Without Customers

–Understanding Balance

–Getting Out of The Way of Technology

–A Message from 1929

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 9 playlists, which you can find here.

If you aren’t following us on Twitter or haven’t liked us on Facebook, please do so.  We update both platforms frequently.

It has been one year since Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine.

What should we have learned from this illegal aggression?

From the Caux Round Table perspectives of moral capitalism and moral government, let me suggest 4 major lessons:

1. Napoleon and Clausewitz were correct: the moral is to the physical, as 3 is to 1.  Ukrainian moral strength defeated Russian military capability.  Clausewitz wrote that the moral forces “form the spirit, which permeates the whole being of war.  These forces fasten themselves soonest and with the greatest affinity on to the will, which puts in motion and guides the whole mass of powers, uniting with it as were in one stream because this is a moral force itself.”

2. Max Weber was correct and Karl Marx was wrong.  Values drive human actions, not dialectical materialism.  Weber grounded capitalism as a new form of human thriving in the beliefs making up the Protestant ethic.  Putin’s war is about values, not economic interest.  In his article of 2021 on the history of Ukraine, he, in your face, asserts the moral rights of the Rus people to that territory.  His speeches since the start of the war have reiterated that point.  The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has blessed the war and so turned it for believing Russians into a religious one.

3. The European Enlightenment is comatose and at death’s door.  Enlightenment values were powerful enough in 1939 to mobilize nations against the volksgemeinschaft national socialist regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan.  Now, they are being tested again by Putin, with help from China and other states inclined to forms of national socialism.  The case against Enlightenment values was made in public by Putin and Xi Jinping in their bilateral agreement of February 4, 2022.

States now are looking inwardly for values, not to universals and globalized visions of the common good.  In the U.S., the emerging un-enlightened values are from the left and privilege 1) group identities (including racist ones) over individualism and 2) the right of an elite to indoctrinate the un-woke hoi polloi, who do most of society’s work and raise most of society’s children.

4. Terms for an acceptable peace can be deduced from the Caux Round Table Principles for Government.  If all government is a public trust, then both Russia and Ukraine have trust responsibilities to avoid destruction and killing.  Any dispute over the sovereignty of a territory – in this case, the Donbas and Crimea – can be resolved by giving sovereignty to a neutral party.  The best example in recent history was the creation of a United Nations interim trusteeship administration over Cambodia.  This arrangement allowed both China and Vietnam to back down from their claims to control Cambodia through their client Cambodian factions.  The United Nations still has a trusteeship council, which could be activated to assume interim administration of the territories in dispute so that Ukraine could accept a cease fire and not lose its claim to sovereignty and Russian could similarly accept a cease fire without surrendering its claim to sovereignty over the same territory.  Resolution of the competing claims to sovereignty could be sought without resort to war.

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.