I wish I was joking.

question that gets to the root cause of the problem.

The question is why do corporations ALWAYS have to be forced to do the right thing?

What is the fulcrum? The root cause?

The legal doctrine of shareholder primacy established back in 1919 by the Michigan Supreme Court in its decision in favor of the Dodge brothers against Henry Ford.

The root cause of this particular corporate malfeasance, and to my mind ALL corporate malfeasance is that shareholder profits are held above worker interests, consumer interests and the earth itself.

The lever that would move this corporate world is changing shareholder primacy to a stakeholder approach. If corporate officers had their fiduciary responsibility EXPANDED so they had to look at worker safety, worker welfare, consumer welfare (including truth in news reporting for publicly traded media outlets), and the environment as being of equal value to shareholder profits, and if this new approach to corporate governance was ENFORCED by federal agencies, then a whole bunch of seemingly intractable problems would become much easier to solve.

I do not know how close you are, or how much influence you have on public policy, but this one thing would pull the teeth of the Wall Street fund managers, corporate lobbies and billionaires. Couple that with reforming the tax code with an eye toward billionaires and corporations paying their fair share of taxes, then we'd be off to the races in reversing decades of 24/7/365 efforts by the ultra-wealthy to take over the republic.

Warm regards!

I blame the business media that hypes "expectations" for profits and losses. You might note how CNBC set itself up as the "business network" for NBC, with the splashy graphics, layers of scrolling chyrons, and a "sports commentary-like" format of programming. CNN had made an attempt at similar with their CNNfn (all that went bye bye), Faux has their "business" outlet as does Bloomberg. Then you have the WSJ, Fortune, Barrons, Financial Times, etc.

The corporations are subject to their own "pundits" who can "make or break" them, causing them to adopt the mantra of "sink or swim" (by any means necessary). So often they end up engaging into all kinds of shady practices to keep the "positive media" going, which helps their businesses.

The "expectation" for what the "acceptable" level of profits should be, has soared over the past century, and IMHO, that has made the problem intractable.

NBC is owned by Comcast. ABC is owned by Disney. CBS is owned by Paramount Global. Fox is also publicly traded.

Therefore, if these corporations were forced to adopt a stakeholder approach to corporate governance, and Congress put into the legislation the clause that officers in publicly traded news outlets would have to hold truth in news reporting equal to shareholder profits as part of this stakeholder approach, their senior producers would have to instruct their pundits accordingly. Essentially this would become a 21st century Fairness Doctrine, which you'll recall Ronald Reagan killed the old Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

This has been the problem all along - our people are so ill informed because the fiduciary responsibility of the senior people at these networks is NEVER truth in news reporting, but instead ALWAYS to generate higher shareholder profits. Which is why we have a 34-time convicted felon running against Harris and it is being presented to us as a horserace. Horseraces are good for profits, but really lousy for informing voters of anything substantial.

Wall Street has in fact become the tail wagging the proverbial dog. And, what is good for Wall Street is not always good for Main Street.

If you go back to the 1971 'Attack on American Free Enterprise' (known as the Powell Manifesto), you will see that Lewis Powell, Nixon's Supreme Court pick, laid out the whole plan for the corporate takeover of this republic in this essay penned for the US Chamber of Commerce. This has nearly come to pass, and now Charlie Koch's Heritage Foundation is trying to drive the final nail in the republic's coffin with its 2025 Project.

Wall Street did this, and the Newtster, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others accelerated the progress of the slow coup beginning with the lock-step 'do nothing' House in 1995, and continuing on to what we have now, which is MAGA. Shills they are - Tea Party people coopted, bought by Charlie Koch. Why? Because even at age 88, he wants 'just a little more.'

was that there was a period when they sort of went "dormant" and ceded "policy" stuff to the "industry" people like the Kochs, Mercers, and DeVos, as well as the neocons for the MIC to implement PNAC (including DeVos sibling Erik Prince, along with Halliburton), and of course as a very vocal group, the NRA.

But once 45 got involved, he became an uncontrollable wildcard. He was initially able to do this when the tax cuts for the wealthy was shoved through (per these infamous remarks a dozen years ago) -