The Events That Got Us Here

All are old white dudes consolidating power. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Photo by Caroline Minor Christensen on Unsplash

Last week in the notes of my essay The Rubicon is in the Riverview, Tim MacDonald commented that there was an event that led us to where we are today after I said in my essay, that no one event got us here. So I thought I would spend today detailing some of the events that led us to the world we have today. I’ll focus mostly on climate, though land use, biodiversity loss, water use, biochemical flows, and other planetary boundaries we have breached are all important as well. But such an essay would be overly long. Maybe I’ll explore those at another time. I’ll start with Tim’s suggestion, the one on this list I'll bet hardly anyone has heard of.

Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act (1972)

On August 29, 1972, in Phoenix, Arizona. The National Commission on Uniform State Laws promulgated the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act. This Model Law recommended the codification of the conclusions of the Cary & Bright Report to the Ford Foundation on The Law and the Lore of Endowment Funds, that the Legal List is too constraining and the Prudent Person is the right standard of prudence and loyalty for Pensions & Endowments. The term "Legal List" in the context of endowment funds refers to the now-outdated legal doctrine that dictated specific, limited investment options for trustees managing institutional endowments. The phrase "The Law and the Lore of Endowment Funds" refers to a 1969 report by William L. Cary and Craig B. Bright, which challenged this traditional approach and advocated for more modern, flexible investment practices

The Prudent Person soon became, in fiduciary practice, the Prudent Investor, where “Investor” came to mean “participant in the securities trading markets “. That resulted in the framing of fiduciary accountability as a purely pecuniary (money focused) endeavor. This framing of fiduciary duty as exclusively about increasing returns has led us to the “growth above all else” mindset that we find ourselves in today, and what this blog is often pointing at.

Milton Friedman’s Essay (1970)

In 1970, Economist Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times that has shaped the idea of corporate purpose and helped set us on the road we are on now. The Friedman Essay famously stated that “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase its Profits.”

It is an oversimplification to paint Friedman as a mustache twirling villain, (He had no mustache) who said corporations must make profits at all costs even if that means grinding the bones of the proletariat to do so. He simply meant that he didn’t think companies should be given the duty of improving society. That wasn’t their job. Their job was to make profits, and Friedman himself admitted that a corporation could loose its license to operate if it was seen as harmful to society.

But that nuance got lost over the years. Friedman’s words became a cornerstone of Neoclassical Economics that routinely ignored the energy needed and the waste produced by our economic activities - if the profits were high enough.

The Powell Memo (1971)

On August 23rd, 1971, about two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court, Lewis Powell, Jr. wrote a memo to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr. at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” and served as the blueprint for business and conservative forces to “fight back” against the liberal society that started with FDR’s New Deal and culminated in the Great Society reforms of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

Powell wrote that the purpose of the memo was to “identify the problem and suggest possible avenues of action for further consideration.”

The problem as Powell saw it, was that business in the United States was on the back foot and that liberal forces were ascendant in culture, thought, regulation and business in America and needed to be reversed.

I wrote more about it, here.

The Powell memo served as the scaffolding for conservative thought in the United States over the past 50 years. Endowed chairs at universities to turbocharge the adoption of neoclassical economics, the explosion of think tanks to promote pro-market, and pro-growth economics, the seeds of conservative media creation; it’s all in there. The Powell memo can easily be seen as the grandfather to Project 2025.

Exxon’s Cover up (1970s - Present Day)

Exxon scientists began to report on climate change in the late 1970s. They created reports detailing the impacts of fossil fuels on climate change which were quite accurate. This internal reporting continued on into the 21st century at the company.

At the same time the company was spending millions on climate disinformation in order to protect their bottom line. Vice detailed Exxon’s disinformation campaign in this 2017 article. My favorite fact from that piece was the note that Exxon placed advertorials placed every Thursday in The New York Times between 1972 and 2001. Many of these advertisements focused on climate change (though not all did). The cost of this PR was equivalent of $30,000 per ad. Some quick math tells us that is just over $1.5 million per year. Over nearly thirty years that is about $45 million spent in just one publication to lie to people about climate change. The authors of the Vice piece have a more conservative estimate. Not all the ads were spent on climate. They estimate that Exxon spent somewhere close to $15 million promoting disinformation on the accuracy of climate change science during that nearly thirty year period - just on Thursdays at the New York Times.

John Sununu (1992)

There was a great essay in the New York Times Magazine in 2018 titled, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” by Nathaniel Rich. The article was later expanded into a book: Losing Earth: A Recent History. I remember the article painting John Sununu, George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff from 1988- 1992 as a villain in the climate change story. George W. Bush wanted to act on climate change near the end of his first (and only term), but Sununu convinced Bush that the administration should not engage in efforts to combat climate change. Here is Sununu in an interview in 2015 saying that there have been no change in temperatures in the past two decades.

Yes, Bush could have overridden Sununu and demand that action be taken, but he didn’t. He trusted the counsel of this Chief of Staff, and the leadership ball was dropped again.

Citizen’s United (2010)

The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and opened the door for virtually unlimited spending in political campaigns. The ruling enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.

The decision equated political donations to speech, arguing that limiting donations would limit the first amendment rights of citizens. The Citizens United decision further paved the way for policy capture by a smaller and smaller group of the elite wealthy class, who could in effect buy elections and make sure that their interests - which included economic growth, which increases their wealth - are served over those of most citizens in the United States.

What’s the point?

The point of this essay was to show the consequences of a few actions, by a few people a long time ago, that have had a disproportionate deleterious effect on our lives, and perhaps the survival of humanity. These aren’t the only actions that have got us here, of course. There are many more, but they are some of the biggest. Feel free to share some you think I missed.

Next, I think I’ll take a crack at predicting the future. I’ll try to imagine what events in our near future will impact our distant future - if there is to be a distant future.