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You have to make a distinction between a person and a corporation. Now I feel I should say, I'm not in favor of the "Citizens United" ruling before I start down this path.

The mandated motivation for a corporation is to maximize share value for it's shareholders. That's it, as creepy as it is. CEO's (well "good" sociopathic ones) compartmentalize everyone's jobs so they only do the little bit of bad that they are comfortable with and can distance themselves from the corporate wrongdoings, as a whole.

A singular person, or even a small group of people, have entirely different dynamics and motivations and would, normally, never make these type of decisions themselves. Singularly, they wouldn't be able to run successful multinational, billion dollar corporations either.

It's somewhat unfair to look at a single person who works at one of these companies and say that they are the downfall of society anymore than you could point to a singular person in Roman history and say, "There. That guy. He caused the downfall."



> The mandated motivation for a corporation is to maximize share value for it's shareholders.

That's actually not the case. It became dogma in the 1980s but there is no legal mandate for this.




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