BITC “Capitalism must be a force for good”

“Capitalism must be a force for good” BITC CEO Stephen Howard declared a few years ago in the Telegraph..

“Seldom has business needed such strong, effective and responsible leadership and a duty to show it can be a positive force for good through wealth generation and responsible action. “

“Business leaders must look beyond bottom-line profit at wider impacts on the workplace, environment and communities.”

Fine words. Let me show you who they came from.

In 2007, our ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine described a centre for social enterprise development, which appealed to forward thinking businesses for support. It was shared with USAID, The British Council and Erste Bank.

It argued for an approach where profit is deployed for social benefit . Saying this about bottom-line profit.

‘An inherent assumption about capitalism is that profit is defined only in terms of monetary gain. This assumption is virtually unquestioned in most of the world. However, it is not a valid assumption. Business enterprise, capitalism, must be measured in terms of monetary profit. That rule is not arguable. A business enterprise must make monetary profit, or it will merely cease to exist. That is an absolute requirement. But it does not follow that this must necessarily be the final bottom line and the sole aim of the enterprise. How this profit is used is another question. It is commonly assumed that profit will enrich enterprise owners and investors, which in turn gives them incentive to participate financially in the enterprise to start with.

That, however, is not the only possible outcome for use of profits. Profits can be directly applied to help resolve a broad range of social problems: poverty relief, improving childcare, seeding scientific research for nationwide economic advancement, improving communications infrastructure and accessibility, for examples — the target objectives of this particular project plan. The same financial discipline required of any conventional for-profit business can be applied to projects with the primary aim of improving socioeconomic conditions. Profitability provides money needed to be self-sustaining for the purpose of achieving social and economic objectives such as benefit of a nation’s poorest, neediest people. In which case, the enterprise is a social enterprise.’

The primary focus of childcare reform reflected our founder’s exposure of ‘Death Camps, For Children’ which pointed to who he saw as the root cause:

“Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..”

Three years later in 2010, USAID , The British Council and Erste Bank set up their own social enterprise development initiative in Ukraine. The British Council were soliciting for partners, so we applied. There was no response.

Partners in this initiative included two of the oligarchs described in ‘Death Camps, for Children’ and BITC. Childcare reform wasn’t on the menu.

They didn’t succeed in preventing the social unrest which would lead to conflict with Russia and in 2014 when flight MH17 was downed by a missile over Ukraine. The bodies of passengers landed in the grounds of the Torez orphanage where many children had been buried in rough trenches.

“I want to know why that boy died,” said one of the orphans, 14-year-old Ruslan. He and the other children read the news on line to find out the true reason behind the deaths of the Malaysian Boeing’s passengers and crew. Why did almost 300 children and adults fall six miles through space, their clothes ripped away by the blast and the rush of air, until they landed on roofs, in yards, on streets and in fields?

I’d like to know too. Perhaps BITC can provide an answer?