Stockholders Retain Wells Fargo’s Board: A Low Bar for Corporate Governance

Corporate governance is supposed to hold management accountable. Slack in the mechanism enables not only a lack of managerial competence or ethics, but also an ineffectual board. Unfortunately, whether by proxies or connections—or just sheer power—a board’s chair and other directors can remain in place in spite of having failed to hold a management accountable. Put another way, it is not necessarily enough that an incompetent or unethical management (and other employees) is removed; replacing the derelict board may be more crucial and yet even more difficult.

The full essay is at "Wells Fargo Stockholders Retain Board"

Why Do Atrocities Occur in the Name of God?

Why have atrocities been associated with religion—even having been committed under religious auspices? Four Crusades were fought, for example, by popes whose God is love—whose god-man extolls love of enemies and turning the other cheek rather than hitting back. In the modern era, Christianity has been tame, but terrorist acts have been committed in the name of God by people who presume that they cannot possibly be wrong in their beliefs. If Feuerbach is correct, the underlying problem inheres in the belief in God's very existence—that belief pointing us to a still deeper problem in the very nature of faith itself, to a vulnerability or susceptibility that has been overlooked or conveniently glossed over for as long as religion has existed on the face of the Earth.

The full essay is at "Monotheism and Atrocities."

On a New Era Dawning in the E.U. State of France

With Emmanuel Macron finishing first on the first-round of voting for the head of state in the E.U. state of France, the media declared a new era in the state politics was already a foregone conclusion. Yet the support of the political elites at both the state and federal level could be read as tempering any such landmark announcement.

The full essay is at "Macron in Europe."