Corporate CEOs Need To Be Held To New Standards
This is funny, but what’s truly at fault here is that corporate governance is necessarily about maximizing profit; these people aren’t at liberty to act otherwise. More correctly, if a CEO of a publicly traded company were to act otherwise, he would be immediately removed.
Thus the imperative to regulate corporations, and demand that they act in accord with environmental responsibility. All CEOs have to sign off on the accuracy of their financial statements, under pain of criminal prosecution. We need to look forward to a day when they also need to attest to their company’s actions vis-a-vis sustainability.
Needless to say, all of this is just an ‘opeless fancy until and unless we can separate corporate power from our law-making apparatus, starting with the overturning of the horrendous Supreme Court decision “Citizens United.”
Craig,
Why is it whenever you raise an interesting and reasonable relevant issue, you feel the need to juxtaposition a politically motivated extraneous subject to confuse any ensuing discussion ?
You are quite correct when you state good corporate governance requires the accurate and factual reporting of all relevant financial and commercial information and decisions.
The problem with “sustainability” reporting is the category can be very subjective and a matter of opinion.
Many corporation do include “sustainable”and even environmental information, but usually with disclaimers about the reliability of such statements. All commercial and industrial ‘forecasts’ are subject to interpretation and are often proved inaccurate. Such is the nature of free enterprise and capital risk.
How to construct an accurate and empirical formulae to assess “sustainability” impartially, doesn’t seem possible without straying into politically motivated conjecture and speculation, neither of which is desirable in investment reporting. So far no one has advanced a practical proposal of how to overcome this problem, do you have a suggestion?
There is nothing to stop an advocate like yourself, using a private third party independent web-based analytical service to monitor corporate “sustainability”. The problem with such sites is they are never impartial or accurate. Even the best eventually become distorted by ideological agenda.
As for Citizens United. No one cares. Well, maybe not no one, the usual coterie of leftist cranks backed by deliberately “skewed” polls rants on endlessly. But in the end, Joe Public knows it’s really just a bunch of hypocrites bleating, “Whaaah, we lost, it’s not our fault, we woz robbed” !