Holding corporate money to a higher standard of truthfulness can now becomes profitable with the supreme court’s removal of all controls on corporate speech ..
Friends,
I’ve been sort of waiting for this.
“Fiduciary duty > noun: the legal duty of a fiduciary to act in the best interests of the beneficiary”
It occurred to me some time ago that it would be possible to completely reverse a supreme court decision on campaign finance like what we just got today.
You just need to force “fiduciary duty” to be reinterpreted from having its *habitual meaning* to its *natural language meaning*. Fiduciary duty actually requires acting in the best interests of stockholders and the public *without qualification*.
How it has been treated is meaning that trustees are only obligated to maximize their own short term financial gains in which shareholders would get some share, as if money were the only interest stockholders and the public could have. The world has changed radically in the time since that usage developed.
Now that business is directly causing major threats to the survival our the ecology and economy by broadly shirking responsibility for their environmental impacts and disrespecting their own natural limits and sustainability, the tables are completely turned. Businesses make the physical decisions for how our life support system evolves and adapts to its environment, and so physically steer our path toward or away from sustainability.
The actual meaning of the word “fiduciary” then implies acting in the whole interest of stockholders and the public. That would mean that their public speech would need to meet unusually high standards of balance, clarity, truthfulness and realistic assessment of the possibilities.
How would that sound? ….just fabulous, just simply fabulous!
It seems it could be the law today simply by someone using it, as it already is the law today. ;-)