This Is Where It Should Have Ended...

[PatrickforB]

20. Well, yeah. There have been literally dozens of times when Trump's political aspirations should have

been destroyed at his own hand (or by his own tongue), but Wall Street and billionaires keep propping him up. Better for shareholder PROFITS, you see, to have the appearance of a horserace.

We must ALWAYS remember these media streaming stations like Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, the NYT, WaPo and so on are all publicly traded. That is why the media is so biased. Their executives have only ONE fiduciary responsibility and that is to generate PROFITS for shareholders.

That's it. If you want to know more, reference the late Lynn Stout's book The Myth of Shareholder Value. Stout was a distinguished professor of corporate law at Cornell. Her book will give you a complete picture of this legal doctrine of shareholder primacy, established through a MI Supreme Court ruling in 1919 against Henry Ford in favor of the Dodge brothers. When Ford raised the wages for his factory workers so they could afford to buy the cars they built, the Dodge brothers, who held shares in Ford Motor Company sued on the basis that paying his workers 'excessively high' wages deprived them of PROFITS to which they were ENTITLED as shareholders. They won, and this laid the groundwork for our current sociopathic corporate culture.

There is nothing at all about truth in news reporting.

This is the fulcrum, you know. If there were an amendment attached to one of the omnibus bills requiring a change to a stakeholder approach in corporate governance in which the interests of workers, consumers (including truth in news reporting), and the environment were held equal to shareholder profits, and then we had the SEC and other government agencies ENFORCE it with real teeth, we would solve a whole bunch of seemingly intractable problems.

Consider big oil. What if Noble Energy was required to consider the environment equally to shareholder profits? They would have to shift operations away from oil per se and become an energy, rather than an oil company.

And Comcast? What if they were requred to report the actual truth in news (they own NBC, you know)? What if Fox was? ABC (owned by Disney)? See what I mean?

This is why we are so very ignorant as a people. Wall Street wants us that way, because ignorance is better for higher short-term quarterly PROFITS. This is also why we have the right wing war on 'wokeness'. They WANT us to remain asleep. Too bad they overextended so badly with Trump, Project 2025 and Dobbs. We're lucky there. If they would have remained silent and secret about their actual agenda, our republic would probably end in November. Only billionaire hubris has allowed us to push back with real power.

But this huge evil upon us is utterly banal - it stems from the greed of a few people who wish to put the rest of us in an economic stranglehold.