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capitalism
Big Oil's Post-Trump About Face Proves Corporations Won't Regulate Themselves
The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions.
Mar 28, 2026
President Donald Trump has long called global warming a hoax, but his sweeping anti-climate agenda has stunned even many of his supporters. Since returning to the White House, he’s withdrawn the US from the Paris Treaty, rolled back critical greenhouse gas regulations, and opened up millions of acres of previously protected public land for oil and gas drilling.
In response, big oil and gas companies have abandoned, without the slightest resistance, the showy public commitments they had previously made to climate transition. For example, BP has slashed green energy expenditures by 70%, Equinor has cut back its renewable capacity targets by almost 40%, and Chevron has reduced its carbon-reduction capital expenditures to about 5% of its total capital expenditures. None of the world’s 12 largest oil and gas companies plan to decrease fossil fuel production, and all of them project that fossil fuels will continue to overwhelm other sources of energy for the foreseeable future, according to a recent evaluation.
Far from a change of heart, this is simply Big Oil returning to form. The petroleum industry has never been serious about curbing emissions, 90% of which globally come from fossil fuels. Indeed, after decades of investment, renewables still account for a minuscule amount—about 0.13%—of total energy produced by the world’s largest 250 oil and gas companies, according to a recent research paper. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” said the paper’s lead researcher. “Their interest ends with their profits.”
Some oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, continue to promise to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. This appears to align them with the consensus of climate science that this is necessary globally to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels. However, Exxon is typical in designating a narrow target of greenhouse gases to eliminate: only those from its own operations, mainly pumping and refining oil and gas, and from buying electricity generated by fossil fuels. This conveniently ignores greenhouse gases from the consumption of its gasoline and other petroleum products, as well as those of its suppliers—which exceed by four times the total covered by Exxon’s commitment.
We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord.
Exxon wants us to believe that running its pump jacks and refineries on solar and wind power puts it on the side of the climate transition. It’s cynical buffoonery. But it’s also a sign that America’s leaders and electorate have been willfully blind. We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord. As Shakespeare might have said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in Big Oil but in ourselves.”
The past is prologue. Ever since the advent of industrial capitalism in America in the early 1800s, corporations have consistently served one master, shareholders, delivering them profits by open competition in free markets. From the start, elites have insisted that corporations must regard financial and social objectives as mutually exclusive, even as a single-minded quest for profitability has pushed the system to its breaking point.
We saw the injustice of this belief in the late 19th century, when “robber barons”—who had clawed their way to the top of an unregulated, chaotic economy—justified poverty wages and harsh working conditions by co-opting Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution, popularized as “survival of the fittest.” Railroad magnate Charles Elliott Perkins—who embodied Social Darwinism by rising from office boy to president of one of the nation’s largest railroads—declared his creed: “That a man is entitled to a living wage is absurd… [If] you take from the strong to give to the weak, you encourage weakness; therefore, let men reap what they and their progenitors sow.”
Early capitalism was marred by periodic, destructive economic downturns. But over time, government acquired fiscal and monetary tools to smooth the boom-and-bust cycles and soften the hard edges of fierce profit seeking through welfare programs, especially during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920) and the New Deal (1933-1938).
However, the bedrock of the corporate mission stayed solid even as the government built new structures on top of it. During the New Deal, for example, leading industrialists joined the American Liberty League to oppose innovations like Social Security. A League leader, echoing his counterpart six decades earlier, proclaimed, “You can’t recover prosperity by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and unlucky.”
The permanent establishment of a taxpayer-funded social safety net in the postwar period only reaffirmed corporations’ unwavering fealty to shareholder value. The president of the mighty Dow Chemical Company, Leland Doan, wrote in 1957: “Any activity labeled ‘social responsibility’ must be judged in terms of whether it is somehow beneficial to the immediate or long-range welfare of the business... I hope we never kid ourselves that we are operating for the public interest per se.”
The corporate community resisted even when the tide of public opinion turned against the malign Jim Crow segregation system in the 1950s and ’60s. When US Steel was accused of workplace discrimination in 1963, prominent academic Andrew Hacker struck back forcefully: “If corporations ought to be doing things they are not now doing—such as hiring Negroes on an equal basis with whites—then it is up to government to tell them so. The only responsibility of corporations is to make profits, thus contributing to a prosperous economic system.”
Predictably, that same decade, the corporate establishment dismissed the emergence of the environmental movement. In 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the nation by exposing the harm to human and animal life posed by the unrestricted use of pesticides, a chemical industry spokesman responded, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, famously summed up the unchanging corporate consensus in words still widely quoted today: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
For the most part, investors have held their noses and counted their gains. But starting almost a century ago, in 1928, when the invention of mutual funds opened up the stock market to the middle class, “ethical” funds, as they came to be known, entered the arena. They were marketed to individuals and families who wanted their portfolios to reflect their values, and to asset managers who wanted their clients to consider them good citizens.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government.
For a long time, these socially responsible funds were a negligible part of the industry because they typically underperformed the market. These funds used a strategy called negative screening—excluding certain “sin” industries, such as cigarettes, liquor, and weapons. Unfortunately, negative screening typically yields lower returns (sin often pays in the stock market!) and greater price volatility, due to limited diversification. In addition, there is no reason to believe that negative screening has any discernible effect on stock prices, so it has no power to compel corporations to reform.
The answer to this quandary finally came in the early 2000s, in the form of a new stock-picking tool called Environmental, Social, and Governance, or “ESG” for short. The seductive promise of ESG is “doing well by doing good”—or getting rich by investing in companies that make the world better. On the back of this dream, capital invested in accordance with ESG principles has grown monumentally, to as much as $30 trillion, about one-quarter of the global total of assets under management.
ESG claims that adroitly managing environmental and social risks will improve profitability and, therefore, stock prices. But ESG only counts risks that are financially material, ignoring all social or environmental harm for which a company faces no financial penalty. As you might expect, this often bears perverse results. For example, cigarette companies kill their customers—you can’t get more anti-social than that!—but smoking is legal, and Big Tobacco rarely faces liability for cancer from smoking. That is why tobacco companies are sometimes awarded good ESG scores and even appear in some ESG stock funds. Likewise, fossil fuel companies, which have historically made high returns and avoided significant regulatory penalties, appear in 80% of ESG funds.Whether it be alcoholism, gambling addiction, gun deaths, climate change, or other iniquities, the damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it—or the negative externalities, as they’re called in economics—entirely escapes ESG’s radar.
Worse, the key assumption of ESG—that adept social risk management translates into higher profitability—is fundamentally unprovable. Many studies have attempted to show a strong positive correlation between specific ESG policies, like emissions reductions or heightened employee benefits, and financial metrics, like cost of debt or return on assets. But, as I explain in my forthcoming book on socially responsible investment, very few succeed. In the end, the research only allows you to draw one conclusion with confidence: that it is simply not possible to precisely define ESG practices at a granular level, measure their direct effect on financial performance, and compare these results validly across different companies.
But that does not stop ESG rating agencies from trying. ESG ratings have grown into a big business, since fund managers pay dearly for them to guide their stock selection. The rating agency reports are typically long, detailed, and quantitative—but completely unreliable. These reports may look sober and professional, like credit rating reports from companies such as S&P Global or Moody’s. But credit rating agencies are analyzing real financial values to assess a tangible corporate quality: its ability to repay its debts. The numbers are verifiable and have a proven relevance to the projected outcome. That is why credit ratings have a 90% correlation; S&P and Moody’s seldom disagree substantially on a company’s rating.
ESG ratings, by contrast, are all over the map, with a correlation of only 40%. Analysts point to three key factors: the rating agencies choose different terms to measure; they measure them with incompatible methods; and they use contradictory methodologies to combine these idiosyncratic measurements into final ratings. These discrepancies build on each other to produce wildly variant final scores. A company denigrated as a dog in ESG terms by one rating agency may be lauded as a star by another.
If ESG is just an illusion, and negative screening a disappointment, how should investors direct their capital to make corporations more socially responsible? The answer is, they shouldn’t bother.
In the game of capitalism, the role of corporations is to make as much money as they can, while playing by the rules. The role of the state, as we learned in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, is to revise the rules periodically to ensure fair play and a socially positive outcome—without hobbling the players. We do want fierce competition, but we don’t want to destroy the playing field in the process.
Today, corporate profits are at their highest proportion of GDP in 50 years, while wages are at their lowest. Overall, income inequality has never been greater, not even in the Gilded Age, the period immediately preceding the Progressive Era, when many toiled in Dickensian poverty while a few, like the Vanderbilt dynasty, flaunted their extravagant and lavish lifestyles. Now, like then, the people, with justification, are losing faith in the system.
Like our Progressive forebears, we will have to revamp capitalism in order to rescue it. Key objectives must include rebuilding organized labor, since what benefits unions benefits the middle class. We’ll also need to break up de facto corporate cartels that stifle competition, squeeze wages, and lower productivity. To counter the existential threat of climate change, we need a cap-and-trade system that makes industry a partner in carbon reduction, not an opponent, and can serve as a model for other public-private partnerships.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government. The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change and acknowledge that they are amoral profit machines, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions. The path to greater corporate social responsibility leads through the voting booth and the statehouse, not through Wall Street and the C-suite.
This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader.
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Working People Must Recognize the Basis of Class Struggle
Polls suggest that working people are becoming more aware that our economic model is failing them. Regrettably, this increasing discontent stops at addressing the symptoms rather than the cause cemented into our economic model.
Mar 01, 2026
Currently working people are inveterately distracted with attacks on the Constitution by MAGA gangsters, thugs, and reprobates.
Another distraction is the heinous protection of the international cabal of rich men guilty of exploiting young girls in the Epstein criminal network.
A third distraction is indoctrinating working people into supporting a glutted military budget while cutting programs for working people.
Distractions
General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned working people in 1961 of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model.
It results in violations of international laws to protect corporate profits in foreign countries like Venezuela; that includes the murder of innocent civilians in cruising boats.
However, a not so obvious din of these distractions is designed to numb Americans from zeroing in on the foundation of their chronic economic adversity and anxiety.
That foundation is the wage and salary construct of our economic model.
Economic Model Decline
The symptoms of the decline of our economic model are well documented.
The Ludwig Institute of Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported a functional unemployment rate in November 2025 of 24.8%. LISEP reported a real inflation rate of 9.4%.
Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, (ALICE) reported that 42% of households in the US were below the ALICE threshold of poverty.
The underemployment rate reported by the Burning Glass Institute in February 2024 was 52% for college graduates.
These are chronic symptoms of an economic model that cannot provide an equitable and moral distribution of employment opportunities. If you harbor the belief that anyone here can become rich or wealthy, think again.
Progressives recognize that the Republican Party has devolved into a fascist cult. The evidence is Project 2025 and screams daily that our government is being replaced by rich con artists inside the Trump administration swamp.
However, polls do suggest that working people are becoming more aware that our economic model is failing them.
Regrettably, this increasing discontent stops at addressing the symptoms rather than the cause cemented into our economic model.
Many progressive politicians, scholars, academics, and journalists go to the water's edge of the cause, but cravenly avoid a discussion of the that cause.
Upton Sinclair’s assertion in 1935 is applicable:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. (“I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked”)
Root Cause
The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model. To understand how that model is inherently exploitative and inequitable, the basics must be understood.
The following is a simplified example on that process.
The primary purpose of our economy is to return a private profit to the business owner.
The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing.
There are two types of investment that the business owner must spend.
First is expenditures on space, plant, machinery, tools, hardware, software, technological advances, and raw materials. This includes legal registrations, licenses, permits, and financial services. Often, the business owner inherits the business so this expenditure may be minimized.
Next, the business owner must purchase the physical or mental efforts of the employees. It is realized in the form of wages and salaries.
The employees create the products or services that the business owner sells in the market. In spite of the delusions of many business owners, no business owner creates those products or services alone. It is a social process.
If the business owner paid the employees the salary and wages equal to the value of the products or services created by them, there would be no profit.
Hence, there would be no reason to continue the business. Moreover, the business owner must compete with other business owners to sell as much as possible and minimize costs. Parenthetically, layoffs and recessions crushing working people are the usual remedy for the business owner.
Specific Example
The business owner must sell the products or services created by the employees at a price above the amount spent on wages and salaries.
In this example, a male employee works a typical nine to five workday.
In that workday, the employee works for wages or a salary that will allow him to maintain himself or his family.
However, inside that workday is the key to the exploitation and moral flaw in this economic process. It appears that the employee is being paid for working a full day, but that is not the case.
The business owner must calculate the amount paid to the employee based on how much is required for a private profit.
The employee is working some hours to provide a profit for the owner and some hours to maintain himself or his family.
In this example, in one workday the business owner pays $50 an hour for all the initial expenditures listed above to create one product.
The employee must be paid to create the product or service. By an arbitrary calculation of the business owner, it is $10 an hour.
The business owner must sell the product or service in the market by charging an amount above what has been spent already to produce it. It was created for $50 plus $10 which equals $60.
However, the business owner must sell the product or service for $70 each to obtain a profit of $10. The “new” value of the product or service is $70, yet it cost $60 to create.
If the employee created a product or service that is worth $70, it is inescapable that the employee is not being compensated for the value that he created. This is basic exploitation of unpaid labor and, in most spiritual belief systems, immoral.
Perceptive Voices
Pope John XXIII wrote on this subject:
We therefore consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner. (Mater et Magistra May 15, 1961)
Martin Luther King commented on this moral flaw:
We are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism... There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children (1966)
Malcolm X, American Muslim leader, spoke at one of his speeches at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1964:
You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.
Consequences
The inherent exploitation of our economic model begins at the wage and salary level. From there we organize, produce, transport and distribute goods and services. Private profit for the business owner supersedes all other values.
In the US we have seen the values of community, family, and social sentiment diminished. Those values are overwhelmed by a tsunami of advertising urging working people into a conspicuous consumption of material items whether needed or not.
Simultaneously is the harsh economic reality for working people. The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing. Those opportunities are quality and affordable healthcare, smart and accessible education, safe and comfortable housing, healthy nutrition, and a clean environment.
This dilemma can be addressed by providing the material opportunities above with policies formed by the best of spiritual and secular values.
That can only be realized by a transition to an economic model based on realistic democratic principles and collective profits.
Otherwise, the present economic immiseration and despair will continue to transform working people into a morass of fear and hatred seeking scapegoats to blame. They will become an alienated, vapid mass of untethered individuals at the mercy of the soulless and parasitic oligarchs who live off the products and services of their labor.
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Honoring Michael Parenti, Who Kept the Torch of the US Left Lit and Sharply Afire
Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful.
Feb 28, 2026
Michael Parenti, who died on January 24 at the age of 92, blazed a long, brave, and often lonely trail through American political thought and radical politics. The author of more than 25 books, including such many-editioned classics as Democracy for the Few and Inventing Reality, Parenti leaves behind a rich and vital legacy of intellectual and moral clarity.
Arguably one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the US left this past half-century, Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful. Where many liberal writers bemoaned corporations and the rich, Parenti educated generations (including this writer) about capitalism’s fundamental contradictions and intrinsic forces of inequality, harm, and destruction.
Parenti grew up in a working-class family in East Harlem in New York City, and worked for a few years after high school before obtaining his BA from City College of New York. From there, he gained a teaching fellowship at Brown University, where he earned his MA, then earned his PhD at Yale University. Parenti taught at a slew of different colleges and universities across the United States, eventually becoming an itinerant lecturer and writer after he was widely blackballed from academia for his ideology and activism.
In 1970, Dr. Parenti’s career as a professor was derailed when he was clubbed by police while protesting the shootings of students at Kent State, leading to his ouster from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He soon resettled at the University of Vermont, which then booted him when he was convicted for the protest altercation. Parenti became part of the Green Mountain State’s upwelling of political ferment. He ran for Congress in 1974 on the Liberty Union ticket, netting third place with 7% of the vote, while his then-friend Bernie Sanders garnered 4% in his run for the US Senate.
At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.
While growing up in this fertile milieu of 1970s Vermont, I met Parenti through our interconnected communities and chatted with him many times over the years. Alongside his brilliance and courage, Parenti was warm, amiable, engaging, and funny. He had a visceral humanity and compassion to him that embedded both his interactions and his writing.
“What the military-industrialists fail to see is that the pyramid of power and profit they build rests on a crumbling base,” he wrote in a 1981 essay in The Progressive, one of several pieces he contributed to this magazine between 1975-1992. “Ultimately, no political-economic order can remain secure by victimizing its own people. Sooner or later, this truth returns to haunt the mighty.”
One trademark Parenti talent was his ability to pierce through clotted, contorted mainstream narratives with sharp original insights. A favorite of mine comes from a speech he gave before a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado in 1986:
The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money... Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor. There’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and to be taken. There’s been billions, for 400 years, the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor... These countries are not underdeveloped, they are over-exploited.
The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, as often happened at a Parenti speech.
Many of Parenti’s works, while maligned or dismissed by mainstream critics, have proven to be startlingly prescient. Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, provides a trenchant original analysis of the multi-layered relationships between economic and political power. A few short quotes from the book bear chillingly close resemblance to the intertwinement of money and politics today:
The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.
In his 1986 book, Inventing Reality, Parenti delivers a searing and wise indictment of corporate mass media that goes beyond standard critiques. While liberal critics of corporate media may decry big business control of journalism, Parenti’s examination dug deeper into core fundamentals of capitalism: “As with any business, the mass media’s first obligation is to make money for their owners,” he wrote, and these wealthy owners “determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.”
As a young, budding journalist when Inventing Reality was first published, I learned a great deal, not only about who owns and controls the media, but also about the many hidden biases embedded in US journalism stemming largely from that economic power. As Parenti often pointed out, mainstream media discourse typically spans a narrow political continuum from liberal to conservative, rarely including any radical or progressive perspectives, particularly ones like Parenti’s which confront capitalism directly.
Ironically, following Michael’s passing, the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary piece that illustrated many of these biases, highlighting mainstream criticisms of Parenti’s “uncompromising” stances and terming his speaking style as “feisty and animated.” Displaying some of the biases Parenti long critiqued, Times staffer Trip Gabriel wrote, “Parenti seemed to view every American domestic challenge as the fault of capitalism and every US foreign venture as an act of militarized imperialism.” As if such an assessment is somehow objectively inaccurate.
Parenti’s passing is especially notable and poignant due to the dearth of radical political thought and leadership in the United States today. While he was often outcast and blackballed throughout much of academia, he was of a now-gone generation on the left that, at least to some extent, retained its radicalism and Marxist analysis. In this respect, Parenti and his ideas came from the Old Left of the 1930s to the 1960s, rather than the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which often diverged from Marxism and communism.
In today’s chaotic and confusing political landscape, we have left-progressive figures of varying prominence and radicalism, but very few who, like Parenti, directly confront capitalism and its structural, systematic destruction, rather than simply chronicling the many anecdotes of its impacts.
Parenti’s legacies are many and important. Through his books and countless lectures, he inspired generations of progressive-left activists and thinkers. He kept the American left’s torch, so often flickering and adrift, lit and sharply afire.
But there’s another reason I think it’s time for many to discover or revisit Michael Parenti’s prolific oeuvre. At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.
Parenti’s old one-time friend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for political revolution when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020. We hear less of that call to action today, when so much of our political energy and time are consumed by our desperate defenses against President Donald Trump’s hideous autocracy.
Amid the daily chaos and maelstroms over Trump’s unrelenting assaults on immigrants, human, and civil rights, our environment, and this nation’s withering democracy, the “Overton window” of the politically possible has been squelched nearly shut. These days, even many progressives have been at least temporarily reduced to anti-Trumpers and, to some degree, to the dreary-grim “Blue no matter who” camp. We could really use the bold radicalism of Michael Parenti now, with his piercing ferocity and that iconic moral and intellectual clarity.
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