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by throw0101a
1 hour ago
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> It has been more than a century since the American legal system told publicly-owned companies "Don't Be Good" The American legal system did no such thing in the Dodge ruling: as stated in the Wikipedia article itself, the 'pay shareholders' idea was in the obiter dictum (non-binding remark) portion. And as recently as Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said: > While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. * http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,.... |
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The difference between that decision and "Don't be Good" is that if you have zero greedy shareholders, or are ready for a protracted and uncertain legal battle against them, then you might get away with being good. Otherwise - make sure any seeming good you do is some combination of de minimis and trivial to defend as a tactic to maximize shareholder profits.
(Hobby Lobby is a decision about about closely-held and privately-held corporations, when they are claiming strong religious reasons for policies which a majority of the Supreme Count Justices have very obvious ideological reasons to favor. And also have both the motive and resources to spends years fighting through the Federal Court System. The relevance to 99.99% of the decisions made by corporations is very close to nill.)