FROM: Getting to Real Solutions – A Dialogue with Bonnie Faulkner
Catherine Austin Fitts: So let me tell you another one of my bugaboos: B corporations.
Bonnie Faulkner: Okay what’s a B corporation?
Catherine Austin Fitts: Oversimplified, a B corporation is a corporate structure where you commit to additional standards of environmentally and ethically correct. Okay, you commit to a whole bunch of increased criteria and legal liability that means you’re going to be a highly ethical organization in a variety of ways. And the reality is this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard in my life. Because what it says is this is a solution to the fact that we have a group of people who’ve just stolen $40 trillion. To me, if you said to me, “Let’s bring transparency to that and figure out how we get our $40 trillion back.” I’d say, “You know something? Now we’re going at real problems and real solutions.”
If you say to me, “You know something? These evil people have just stolen $40 trillion. And so our solution is we’re going to take the people who just lost $40 trillion and we’re going to add more legal liabilities and more requirements for them to be harder working and even more ethical than they are.”
And my attitude is let’s say we create a B corporation and we load up far more requirements and legal liabilities and everything else to that organization. Well you know something? That board of directors is still going to do whatever the guys who can kill with impunity tell them to do because they don’t want to get killed; they don’t want their kids to be killed. So it doesn’t matter.
What it just does is it makes their life that much harder, and that much more expensive. It’s completely nuts. If you look at the people who’ve been promoting the B corporations, from everything I can tell, the people who just stole $40 trillion are financing them.
Bonnie Faulkner: So do we have these B corporations?
Catherine Austin Fitts: I’m not saying that the people promoting them are not goodhearted people because we have a whole world of goodhearted people being financed by the people who control $40 trillion to come up what “solutions.”
One of my theories is you have all these people who feel terrible about what’s going on and this is a way to give them a socially satisfying experience, or to come up with solutions which are pure fashion and don’t mess with the real power lines. It’s a way that they can process their grief. They feel like they’re doing something positive.
It’s interesting, when we had our little debate in Petaluma I said, “Look, we have people who are running around killing with impunity who are acting above the law. They’re a breakaway civilization. That’s our problem.” And they said, “Yes, but we can’t solve that. So we want to do something positive.” I said, “Well great, but making the financial system more complex and cumbersome I realize it makes you feel good but it creates a regulatory burden for the rest of us, and we have enough problems dealing with these psychos over here without you loading on more.” They just looked at me like, “Well I know but we’d much rather pretend; we don’t want to think about that.”
The goodhearted people can get cycled into dead end solutions that are very, very dangerous.
Related Reading:
B-Corps and the Mythos of Spring
Delaware Overcomes its Qualms and Advances B Corps Law
