mirrorofliterature:

quasi-normalcy:

calcinator:

cobragardens:

depsidase:

Ok but you need to understand that if your business has shareholders, this is literally illegal.

In the U.S. it is federal law that a business must do everything within its power–including environmental damage and worker exploitation–to maximize investor profits every year, or those shareholders are entitled to sue the business and it will be dismantled to pay what they are legally owed.

Shareholders have too many rights.

The system needs to be overhauled massively, but shareholders should be able to sue for less and should be able to be sued (and prosecuted) for more.

You want to invest? Fine. That’s what you’re doing, and that’s all you’re doing. If you don’t like the business’s plans or how they handle their money, you sell your stock and go someplace else. You take the dividend payout you’re given, and you’re the last person in line when handing out money.

Your investment doesn’t work out? That’s what gambling is. Better luck next time.

We also need a law that says that if a company is convicted of a crime, it’s board of directors and CEO are automatically guilty of committing that crime via conspiracy, and subject to the “for humans” laws rather than the “for companies.”

That means if Wal-Mart steals millions in worker wages, the CEOs and Board are prosecuted as if they’d robbed a bank of that same amount. If Hobby-Lobby smuggles artifacts, the people at the top are prosecuted as smugglers and thieves. If a company dumps toxic waste into a river against regulations, well, if any individual human did it, we’d call them a terrorist.

And we need a law that makes it so that companies that settle with the government cannot admit “no wrongdoing”.

This is also why enshittification begins almost immediately when a startup goes public.

This is not true. Companies may say its true, shareholders may say its true, but under US law, companies are not legally required to maximise shareholder profits.

This is misinformation! If you buy into it, it only strengthens the myth that companies must prioritise investor profits above all else.

You can blame Milton Friedman, the inventor of neoliberalism, for this legal mythmaking.

Let’s look at a US Supreme Court Judgement: ’modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else’.

There are also laws in over forty states explicitly allowing companies to consider non-shareholder interests!

Anyway. Shareholder primacy is an economic perspective, not law!