Council for Inclusive Capitalism launches partnership with Vatican

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Motherwit

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Pope Francis quietly saving the world…

The Council for Inclusive Capitalism launched a partnership with the Vatican on Tuesday, saying that it would be “under the moral guidance” of Pope Francis.

The council consists of global companies and organizations which share a mission to “harness the private sector to create a more inclusive, sustainable and trusted economic system,” according to its website.

Members include the Ford Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Mastercard, Bank of America, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Merck.

According to a press release from the council, the partnership with the Vatican “signifies the urgency of joining moral and market imperatives to reform capitalism into a powerful force for the good of humanity.”

Pope Francis met with members of the organization at the Vatican last year. With the new partnership, the 27 leading members, called “guardians,” will continue to meet annually with Pope Francis and Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

Francis encouraged the council last year to renew existing economic models to be fair, trustworthy, and capable of extending opportunities to all.

“An inclusive capitalism that leaves no one behind, that discards none of our brothers or sisters, is a noble aspiration,” Pope Francis said Nov. 11, 2019.

Members of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism make public commitments to “advance inclusive capitalism” in their own companies and outside them, through grants promoting various issues, including environmental sustainability and gender equality.

The Vatican partnership puts the group “under the moral guidance” of Pope Francis and Cardinal Turkson, a press release states.

 
The best way to make capitalism or markets inclusive is to strip away corporate privilege. Make the markets truly free and you will see improvement in the lives of workers and the economy in general.

Let the free market eat the rich.
 
StudentMI said:
Let the free market eat the rich.
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With respect, I would gently urge us all to try to keep our thoughts more in terms of: “Let the free market enrich the poor.”

I think we wander into a spiritually dangerous place, for ourselves, when we start framing things, even to ourselves, as wanting to tear any group of people down.

I have never hated the rich or wanted the rich to have less. It’s actually kind of awesome to watch what rich people do, sometimes. They create some spectacularly beautiful, scientifically clever stuff. I don’t want to see less good stuff from rich people. I just want the poor to have more.

This may be basically what you already mean, and it just happened to be different from the way you verbally framed it. I’m just putting this out there because it seems to me like even our subconscious, accidental framing of things, can sometimes end up affecting our conscious beliefs or dispositions towards things.

I don’t want anything bad to happen to rich people. I want everyone to become rich people.

It may be that, for descriptive finite-resource reasons, when the currently-poor have more, the currently-rich will have less. But I still think we should put our focus on the half of the equation that lifts up the poor. Not the half that “eats” into what the rich have. Let’s not hate the rich. And I’m saying this while poor.
 
MNathaniel said:
I don’t want anything bad to happen to rich people. I want everyone to become rich people.
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I don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone. But as for state enforced privilege and subsidy, I want it to end. Making the market free is often seen solely as ending regulation. It’s also a matter of ending privilege.

Rich people will do just fine without corporate welfare.

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I dunno, friend.

I think slogans like “Eat The Rich” inherently put the emphasis in a dangerous place.

I don’t think we need to choose that particular language in arguing for economic/political changes that uplift the poor. In fact, I think that language can be counter-productive.
 
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Perhaps. It’s also a boon to nonviolent change through peaceful, consensual exchanges between individuals. I think that needs to be stressed.
 
My lord, yes.

Didn’t Elon Musk get another $900 million dollar subsidy?

He’s the poster child for a guy who got rich (and then obscenely rich) off government subsidies to private corporations.

But we get worked up about poor African American women on food stamps . . .
 
StudentMI said:
Make the markets truly free and you will see improvement in the lives of workers and the economy in general.

Let the free market eat the rich.
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The opposite will happen in an unregulated free market. There are plenty of examples.

We are lucky enough today to live during a time when there actually exists some very unregulated markets in tech. This era is going to come to an end soon. Facebook and Google (Alphabet) have gone unchecked for long enough to completely gobble up every competitor to the point that they have no competition and unrivaled power. At this point, not even a government subsidy (loan) could help a smaller company compete with them. So, government regulation in the form of antitrust laws are the only thing left to stop them. Most of the states are currently taking action.
 
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1Lord1Faith said:
The opposite will happen in an unregulated free market. There are plenty of examples.
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There are just as many examples of corporations colluding with states to prevent true competition. This is not a free market and should not be regarded as much.
 
StudentMI said:
There are just as many examples of corporations colluding with states to prevent true competition. This is not a free market and should not be regarded as much.
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Both the strong dominating the weak in an unrestrained market and the strong colluding with a subservient state to dominate the weak are both evils–and in fact, the latter is a fruit of the former. We don’t have to choose one or the other. See Quadragesimo Anno 107 to 110.
 
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An inclusive economy is a good thing:

Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno
Therefore, the riches that economic-social developments constantly increase ought to be so distributed among individual persons and classes that the common advantage of all, which Leo XIII had praised, will be safeguarded; in other words, that the common good of all society will be kept inviolate. By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits.
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There’s also nothing wrong with collaboration with people of other religions when it comes advancing just causes in the social order (cf. Dec. 20, 1949 Instruction of the Holy Office).

All that being said, these corporations have not been known for actually being ordered to social justice (whether related to abortion, usury, etc.). I hope the Pope and Cardinal can have a good effect on them rather than being used to cloak less-than-noble activity in their moral authority.
 
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One extreme is just as bad as the other.

Corporations need an umpire, so to speak; they need rules and penalties as well.

Obviously, too much of that is bad, but you seem to think that getting rid of the bad things will make everything ok. No, what happens is that you get a different set of problems.

What is needed is balance.
 
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