Elizabeth Warren, a person who is definitely not running for president in 2020, has authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Corporations Shouldn't Be Accountable Only to Shareholders." It is the sort of thesis statement that qualifies as "radical" and "aspirational" in a country in which the wealthiest 10 percent own nearly 85 percent of domestically-owned stock shares, but is, by any objective measure, a reasonable assertion that gets squeezed out of mainstream political discourse by the aforementioned wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, all of whom have a vested interest in convincing you that an economic model that has made them fabulously rich is, in fact, actually good for everyone.

Warren's piece is a companion to the Accountable Capitalism Act, which she introduced in the Senate on Wednesday. As she explains, the American brand of capitalism is premised on the rule that corporate executives are custodians who are responsible solely to investors. This means that the only relevant question in the corporate decision-making process is whether a given course of action is likely to deliver a return on investment. Other considerations—such as, for example, whether an alternative will eliminate jobs, or hasten the destruction of the planet, or do anything else that is unrelated to profits but is very, very relevant to the millions and billions of people whose lives are affected by what corporations do—are, legally speaking, literally irrelevant. Executives who foolishly stray outside the scope of this mandate can face termination, lawsuits, or both.

The results are as grim as you'd intuit: What American corporations do today is give money to stockholders, because that is how executives keep their jobs and earn their incentive-based pay. In the ten-year period between 2007 and 2016, Warren says, large companies have dedicated 93 percent of earnings to shareholders, and since 1985, they have extracted some $7 trillion from the U.S. economy. It is not a coincidence that the most common business headlines over the past few decades are ones that report massive layoffs, or shifts to lower-cost production facilities overseas, or bare-knuckle union-squashing campaigns, or the ruthless elimination of pension plans and other benefits: The people in charge are rewarded for delivering value to rich people. Once they've stripped the car for parts, they have no choice but to start hacking into the chassis and selling it off as scrap.

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