the very planet we live on.
Right now, the ONLY fiduciary responsibility of ANY corporate officer in a publicly traded company is to generate profits for shareholders. The only exception to this is the so-called 'b' corporation.
This means the first thing the CEO will do when s/he goes into that corner office is bust the union and hire consultants to ensure that it will be very, very difficult for workers to organize. She will cut benefits, drive wages down, gobble up any pension fund if she can get away with it. The floor will become less safe, and managers may well be quietly coached to turn a blind eye to wage theft.
As to the consumers, if their product hurts or kills people, or gives them cancer, the first thing the CEO will do is summon the legion of sociopathic MBAs and ask them whether it is better for shareholder profits to just pay out the claims or recall and fix the product. The former is nearly always cheaper so we have, by way of example: the Johnson & Johnson talc which causes ovarian cancer but they left it on the shelves anyway. They KNEW. And big oil? They KNEW back in 1971 that carbon emissions were causing a greenhouse effect but they stalled and stalled, even creating pseudo scientific 'studies' to refute or at least cast doubt on actual science. Don't forget the Ford Pinto, which would burst into flame if it got rear ended because of a design flaw in the gas tank - sometimes. So Ford kept selling them until they got caught. Now we have Tesla lying about its self driving cars. Same thing. Stall, stall, stall. Keep them shareholder profits rolling in!
And the environment? Well, that is a multi-faceted approach:
1. AM talk radio and Fox news are paid well to cast doubt on any claims about corporate malfeasance. They specialize in driving wedges between us so people don't notice corporations and billionaires are screwing us all.
2. They buy politicians through dark-money superPacs. These politicians make sure the 'right' people get elevated to federal courts.
3. They fund think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Foundation and ALEC that work to attack any regulatory oversight 24/7/365.
4. The goal, in case they are caught doing damage to the environment, is to pass on any cleanup costs to taxpayers while they still get to pocket the profits.
Sound monstrous? It is. Wall Street values profits over human life and the very habitability of the planet.
The solution? We need to get rid of the doctrine of shareholder primacy that stemmed from the 1919 MI Supreme Court ruling against Henry Ford in favor of the Dodge brothers, who sued Ford on the basis that raising the pay of his factory workers to the point where they could afford to buy the cars they built deprived them of 'profits to which they were entitled as shareholders.' And they won. This is how Wall Street has rolled for over a century now, and this republic is tottering on the edge of being a dictatorship. The middle class has been hunted nearly to extinction. The 2017 tax cut screwed everybody but corporations and billionaires. This whole planet groans under the tyrrany of our neoliberal shareholder primacy system of capitalism.
This needs to be overturned in favor of a stakeholder approach to corporate governance whereby the interests of workers, consumers and the environment would be held equal to the interests of shareholders. And then increase taxes and fund regulatory agencies so the new rule has teeth.
Why is this urgent?
- Six species an hour are going extinct. Six. Per. Hour.
- Eleven people die of starvation every minute. That is 9 million per year. Nine. Million. Per. Year.
We need to grow up. Consumerism is killing us. We need to begin thinking of ourselves as a species and planning forward around the needs of all life on this earth.
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