Clean(er) Capitalism
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Ralph welcomes Toby Heaps, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Canadian magazine “Corporate Knights,” which ranks the world’s 100 most sustainable corporations. And we welcome back Dr. Bandy Lee, psychiatrist and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” to discuss Donald Trump’s continuing hold on 30% of the American population. Toby Heaps is the CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights, and Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Knights magazine. He spearheaded the first global ranking of the world’s 100 most sustainable corporations in 2005, and in 2007 coined the term “clean capitalism.” Toby has been published in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Globe and Mail, and is a regular guest speaker on CBC. You see these stories happening all over the world, whether it’s from the oil companies or the electric power companies, fossil power companies, or food companies, or real estate companies. And the ones who are going all in, investing big in the green economy and the more sustainable economy are, more often than not, the ones who are hitting the biggest numbers financially. Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights We don’t want to just be doing a beauty contest or be subject to the latest headline. We’re trying to do something that’s reasonably rooted in evidence, and it can be defensible, and it can be considered fair. And we recognize that none of the big companies that we rank are perfect— they all have major issues, which is kind of the nature of the human condition. Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights Dr. Bandy Lee is a medical doctor, a forensic psychiatrist, and a world expert on violence who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before transferring recently to Columbia and Harvard. She is currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition, an educational organization that assembles mental health experts to collaborate with other disciplines for the betterment of public mental health and public safety. She is the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. Essentially, [Trump] did not have the capacity to have ideologies or policies. He can’t think at that level. What he can do is to manipulate psychologically those who are vulnerably predisposed and those who have formed emotional bonds with him. Dr. Bandy Lee These are the kinds of effects that we expect from having a person with severe mental symptoms holding an influential position and having lots of public exposure. We do have a propagation of symptoms. I’ve been calling this the “Trump Contagion” but what it really is is shared psychosis, which is a psychosocial phenomenon that’s been researched and described since around the mid-19th century. Dr. Bandy Lee [Trump voters] are still with him. But they would never support a friend or a neighbor who lied all the time, who had power over them, who described things that weren’t real about what was going on around them or what he did in the past, or who cheated his workers. Ralph Nader In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis 1. The United Autoworkers Union is on strike against the big three automakers. Just before the strike began, the Lever reported that General Motors claimed the union’s demands “would threaten our ability to do what’s right for the long-term benefit of the team.” Yet, for all their crying poverty, the Big Three “have reported $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of 2023,” and “have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks.” The union’s strategy is also worth touching on, as it is novel for this industry. Instead of all workers going on strike at once, the union plans on “targeting a trio of strategic factories while keeping 90 percent of its members working under expired contracts,” per Axios. However, this story notes the ways industry plans to strike back, n
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