Harvard University Arthur Brooks Corporate Liberalism and Corporate Crime

Name the first corporation in America.

Harvard University.

Now the most elite, and wealthiest (endowment $36 billion) corporate liberal institution in the country.

Corporate liberal as in a liberal who seeks to expose corporate injustice over there or in the past and ignores the corporate crimes over here and in the present.

I was just up at Harvard Law School last week speaking to a group of students on the question of corporate crime in America.

Afterward, a friend of mine walked me around the campus. It was the corporate liberal tour. At one stop, he pointed out a plaque near one of the law school buildings.

It reads: “In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School. May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory.”

May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory.

But in pursuing the highest ideals of law and justice, shouldn’t we also look at the modern corporate crime wave and ask – what about the crimes of the most powerful institutions here and now?

After my talk at the Harvard Law Forum, I visited the office of the Harvard Law School dean, John Manning, former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge Robert Bork.

I had communicated with Dean Manning earlier in the month, asking that he consider creating a course on the corporate crimes of the here and now at Harvard Law School.

Duke Law School has such a course, Number 306 Corporate Crime, that in part addresses “the debate in the public policy realm over whether, why, how, and when the criminal law should be applied in the corporate and business context.”

I was told Dean Manning was in a meeting, so I left a handwritten note asking if he would consider creating a course in corporate crime at Harvard Law School. I left for him a one page print out of the Duke Law Course Number 306. (No response yet from Dean Manning.)

Earlier, at my talk at the Harvard Law Forum, I made the argument for a manslaughter prosecution against Boeing and responsible Boeing executives for the deaths of 346 in two Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes within five months.

That’s one way of applying the highest ideals of law and justice in the memory of the 346 innocents who lost their lives.

I was greeted upon my return home to an opinion article in the Washington Post by Arthur C. Brooks titled “Want to be happier? Take this lesson from Martin Luther King Jr.”

The lesson — love your enemies.

Brooks is touring the country promoting his new book of the same theme — Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.

Under the Washington Post opinion piece, in the print edition, Brooks is identified only by his twitter handle: @arthurbrooks.

I know Brooks as the President of the corporate funded American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the AEI that pushed for the illegal war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands civilians, the AEI that took tobacco industry money and pushed the industry’s agenda in Washington, the AEI that helped capture the regulatory state on behalf of its corporate funders and weakened laws to protect consumers, workers and the environment.

(When asked why Brooks wasn’t identified as President of AEI in the print edition, an editor at the Washington Post responded — “Arthur is identified as president of AEI on our website, but it was an oversight on our part not to note that with his column in print.” Will the Post run a clarification?  “No, I don’t think the omission rises to the level of a correction or clarification,” he says.)

Brooks is in the middle of a major personal rebranding campaign, moving away from cutthroat DC corporatism to the warm and fuzzy corporate liberalism of Harvard. He’s quitting AEI in July and taking a position at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Maybe while at Harvard, Brooks can commission one of those nice little plaques to honor those hundreds of thousands who died at the hands of the AEI and its corporate funders.

“May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory.”

Copyright © Corporate Crime Reporter
In Print 48 Weeks A Year

Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress