Required Levels Of Minority Content; China Content; And, Now, Carbon Content. The Hypocrisy Of Big Business Social Consciousness

Implications: Each time that first American and then European politicians succumb to pressure from small well organized pressure groups for social 'action,' they pass the costs of such action onto large, usually publicly owned, businesses, and usually also, specifically, exempt small, usually privately owned,  businesses to avoid piling onto the small businesses the costs of mandatory compliance. But, as soon as the lights of the TV cameras and the laptops go dark, the newly regulated large, public, businesses immediately pass the new costs onto their supply bases while carefully taking the credit for compliance all to themselves.

Analysis: Politicians began, early on, in the wave of government mandates creating and enforcing social norms, which began to appear regularly in the 1960s in the US, to finance such mandates with hidden costs assessed against big business. Unless business met arbitrary 'content' rules published by bureaucrats they, the businesses, would be ineligible for government contracts, grants, and tax incentives. Government, having not a clue how to accomplish social justice, left it to private business to figure how to do it and how to pay for doing it.

Big business stumbled at first because the intitule social norming legislation intended to stop racially based prejudice in hiring and advancement came at the same time as the first regulation of the environment. Business could play tricks with the one mandate, Equal Opportunity, because the measurement of compliance with it was vague and not quantified, while the other, Reduction of Emissions, was vague, but also accompanied by strict numerical rules.

At first the social norming was handled by promoting individuals based on no other criterion but inclusion in an arbitrarily drawn list of 'disadvantaged' groups. When the chaos brought on by allowing such group members to create businesses with no regard to need or costs the Fortune 500 entered into a conspiracy of silence in which suppliers were encouraged to create 'fronts' using members of so-called disadvantaged groups. These fronts would then be counted as minority content when filling out government paperwork to satisfy arbitrary government rules for minority content in the supply base. 

This hypocrisy continues to this day, and has even spread to other countries, such as the Republic of South Africa where skin color and membership in favored tribes is all that is required to be entitled to be counted as compliance with Black Empowerment Enterprise (BEE).

The model of fronts has now been spread to encompass such poorly thought out programs as low labor cost country, sometimes generically called just "China," pricing content. General Motors has pioneered this mandate, so that its suppliers can be beaten into submission on price through direct comparison, only on price, with low quality poorly made goods. GM's clueless purchasing manager, Bo Andersson, now requires that suppliers show at least 50% low labor cost country content in their manufactured goods in order even to be considered.

The latest cost to be passed through by large public companies to hapless smaller ones is Carbon Content, whiz means whatever the large company wants it to mean, just as in the story of Alice in Wonderland.

America's business managers have simply given in to the legislature's unreasonable demands for social engineering by passing the costs on to the smallest, least capable, suppliers.

In the end American capitalism is simply subsiding into history as Chinese companies, and, soon, Indian, Brazilian, and Russian companies grow and prosper by simply offering jobs and making profits in those businesses where Americans used to work and make a living.