A Memo To Corporate America: How To Stop Being Cartoon Villains

from the stand-for-something dept

I’ve spent considerable time lately documenting how America’s corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were—groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they’ve spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance for any CEO who might still possess a functioning moral compass.

If you are a person of influence in the corporate world, if you actually care about this country and its future, if you understand that your company’s long-term interests depend on the survival of constitutional governance—here’s what you should do immediately.

The Board Room Speech You Need to Give

Call your senior executive team together. Get all your board members on video conference. Tell them that you are committed to the company’s interests, and that one of the things you believe serves the company’s interests is maintaining basic ethical standards—both inside the company and in the society where the company operates.

Remind them that at the end of the day, we are all members of that society, and it is in all of our interests that we live in a free and fair nation governed by law rather than personal whim. Point out that if your company were to make bribes or pay favors to foreign governments, you would face criminal liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ask them: do any of us think that’s wrong?

Then ask the crucial question: what do we think of the idea of paying bribes to the president of our own country in order to get government licenses or approval for business transactions? Is it really our position that we’re just going to go along with this as “business necessity,” or are we going to lawyer up like responsible corporate citizens and sue the government when it demands tribute?

The Legal and Moral Framework

Here’s what principled corporate leadership looks like in practice:

Refuse Tribute Payments: When administration officials suggest that regulatory approval might go smoother with a “contribution” to Trump-approved causes, document the conversation and file complaints with relevant authorities. Yes, this may slow your approval process. That’s the point—legitimate government doesn’t operate through tribute systems.

Challenge Illegal Conditions: When agencies attach political loyalty tests to routine business transactions, sue immediately. Every settlement payment, every accommodation to illegal demands, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption makes the system worse for everyone while temporarily protecting your immediate interests.

Coordinate Resistance: Work with other companies facing similar pressure to challenge corrupt practices collectively rather than individually. The administration can intimidate isolated companies much more easily than coordinated business resistance backed by serious legal firepower.

Maintain Public Standards: Continue operating according to constitutional principles even when the government doesn’t. Maintain transparent procurement, independent auditing, ethical business practices that demonstrate what legitimate governance should look like.

The Business Case for Constitutional Governance

This isn’t just moral positioning—it’s strategic necessity for any business that wants to operate in sustainable market conditions:

Legal Predictability: Tribute economies destroy the rule of law that makes long-term business planning possible. When regulatory approval depends on political loyalty rather than legal compliance, no business can predict future operating conditions.

Market Integrity: Corruption destroys competitive markets by making political connections more valuable than product quality, innovation, or efficiency. Your company’s success should depend on serving customers, not serving regime officials.

International Reputation: Every American company that accommodates Trump’s tribute demands destroys America’s reputation as a reliable business partner and constitutional democracy. This makes international cooperation more difficult and expensive for everyone.

Talent Retention: Ethical employees don’t want to work for companies that pay bribes to maintain market position. Brain drain toward companies with integrity creates competitive disadvantages for collaborationist firms.

The Historical Examples

The German Industrialists’ Mistake: Business leaders who thought they could use the Nazis while remaining untouched discovered that authoritarian regimes don’t honor implicit deals with collaborators. When their usefulness expired, their collaboration became evidence of their expendability.

The Post-Apartheid Reckoning: South African businesses that accommodated apartheid found themselves facing massive legal liability, international boycotts, and domestic fury when the system collapsed. Their “pragmatic” accommodation became permanent reputational damage.

The Post-Soviet Transformation: Russian oligarchs who built fortunes through corruption under Yeltsin discovered that their wealth made them targets rather than protected them when Putin consolidated power. Corruption doesn’t create security—it creates vulnerability.

The Choice You Face

You can continue the current path—paying tribute, staying silent, accommodating illegal demands, hoping that compliance will protect you when the regime’s appetite for control inevitably expands. This path leads to the complete destruction of competitive markets, constitutional governance, and ultimately your own legitimacy as business leaders.

Or you can choose the harder path of principled resistance: challenging illegal demands through courts, coordinating with other businesses facing similar pressure, maintaining ethical standards despite government pressure, and demonstrating that American business still believes in American values.

The Stakes for You

Every day you delay this choice, you make capitalism’s eventual reckoning more severe. Every tribute payment, every silent accommodation, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption provides ammunition for socialist organizers who argue that business interests inevitably choose authoritarianism over democracy when their privileges are threatened.

You are proving their argument correct. You are validating every Marxist critique of capitalism through your own behavior. You are ensuring that whatever emerges from this constitutional crisis will be far more hostile to market systems than anything you would have faced by choosing resistance over accommodation.

The Leadership Opportunity

The irony is that principled resistance would actually enhance your long-term position rather than threatening it. Business leaders who stood up to authoritarian demands, who defended constitutional principles despite economic costs, who chose democratic integrity over oligarchic access—they would emerge from this crisis with enormous moral authority and political capital.

Instead, you’re choosing the path that maximizes short-term comfort while ensuring long-term destruction. You’re preserving immediate profits while discrediting the market system that makes profit accumulation legitimate.

The Bottom Line

If you actually believe in the free market capitalism you’ve spent decades defending, then defend it. If you actually think constitutional governance serves business interests better than oligarchic tribute systems, then defend constitutional governance. If you actually care about leaving your children a country worth inheriting, then stop acting like the cartoon villains in someone else’s revolution.

The hour is late, but it’s not too late. American business still has the resources, legal standing, and collective power to challenge systematic corruption if you choose to use them. But that window is closing rapidly, and every day of continued accommodation makes the eventual reckoning more severe.

You wanted to be remembered as job creators and wealth builders. Keep accommodating authoritarianism, and you’ll be remembered as the useful idiots who handed socialists the perfect argument for why capitalism cannot coexist with democracy.

Choose wisely. History is watching, and your children will live with the consequences of whatever choice you make.

But not much time. The choice is yours, but you have to make it now.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Filed Under: cartoon villains, corruption, principles