Bob Monks is a Boston grandee, a former Department of Labor official, Wall Street lawyer and big-time fund manager, who has, over the last 15 years, developed a second (or fourth) career as one of America’s foremost corporate governance activists. Since the LENS fund, which he founded in 1992 to put a bit of oomph into institutional investment also operates a joint venture with Hermes in the UK, his influence has become transatlantic – and he has many supporters (and opponents) an the UK as well.

This paper is written by an angry old man in a hurry.

Monks believes that US democracy has been superceded by “corpocracy” – that the US is run like a giant corporation and that flesh-and-blood politics have been squeezed out by a philosophy epitomised by the Business Roundtable. As part of that, he argued, the press and television have been co-opted as well; in a faustian compact, they depend on political ad revenues and politicians depend on them for exposure. The result is that the little guy – the guy who actually believed in capitalism – gets stuffed.