Corporate behavior is determined by the upper management including the CEO, they make the rules, policies and enforce them and should be responsible and held accountable for them
You aren't getting it. The parameters the management is allowed ot behave in are very narrow - they have to follow the needs of the corporation, not the good of society, not the management's personal ethics, just the profit of shareholders - and that's by law. The management has quite limited mobility about these things.
'Competitive pressures' force their choices whatever they 'want' to do.
Say one wants to spend a lot more on safety - can they afford to if their competition doesn't? Say one wants to pay workers a lot more - can they afford to if their competition doesn't? Say there's a way to do business that's bad for society but profitable for the corporation, and the management doesn't want to; some competition will do it, and gain competitive advantage, forcing them to do it too.
Responsible? Held accountable? By law their only accountability, other than the law which they can lobby to change almost how they want it, is to profit.
Please name me three times the shareholders of a company have every 'held management accountable' for anything other than profit at any Fortune 1000 corporation in the last 50 years. I can tell you one time there was an attempt; the Rockefeller family tried to organize a shareholder measure to vote to tell their management to act better for society. They lost. You're speaking a fantasy.
All that movie does is try to put the blame on an abstraction called the corporation for the misdeeds of the people running them, no different than someone blaming America's system of government for Bush's, Cheney's, and Rumsfield's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You aren't getting it.
The management is required by law to pursue profit period. If they don't, they are gone. If the shareholders don't, competition rewards the competitors over them.
The only way this works differently is when government, democracy, makes rules for all of them to follow. "No, you can't gain competitive advantage by having a ridiculously unsafe work environment and getting rid of workers who are hurt, and this applies to you and your competitors". That works - and it's increasingly rare as corporations select the government and tell it what to pass into law.
A CEO can strongly want to do something, and have his options limited by the requirement for profit and competition.
This is also why it's often up to government to push 'good for society' things like basic research that no one company will make a big investment in if they won't profit quickly, and their competition will profit from it but not have to pay for it. In that case it doesn't get done, quite possibly, by a company, only the government, whether directly or by funding it or by tax incentives.
Rules of the game never determine what happens, people do by following them
I give up. That's exactly wrong, and I'm wasting my breath trying to inform you, no offense.
, making them or breaking them,(signing off on fraudulent loans because the rules of the game at the time demand it doesn't mean you are somehow blameless)and if a leader makes a stand and gets fired for questioning them,
No one is saying there aren't some limits, about things like *fraud*. of course there are. Enron and MCI should never have got as bad as they did, but they 'got caught'.
That sort of criminal behavior isn't what I'm talking about.
The best Generals are the ones who least likely want to go to war because they understand the horrors of it and will give you an honest assessment like Eric Shinseki who was sacked by Rumsfield because of it
Missed the point again. It was an analogy about generals not being pacifists - their scope of action is quite limited. They can decide some things about HOW to fight a battle, but they can't be a pacifist, or they're removed (that's an extreme example). The issue of some political battle with Rumsfeld has nothing to do with the point.
CEOs can say, "here's a way to be more profitable", but they can't say "let's give up 25% of our profits to do things in a way for the good of society", almost ever.
CEO power gives them a tiny bit of latitude; if they can 'benefit the profit' by doing something that 'looks good', they can do that. The other day a company ran a tv ad saying not a word about the product but only about their giving to a charity. There's a little room for that, but society cannot meet its needs for charitable activity by corporate giving programs they have the budget for taken from their profits.
Every corporation, at least nearly, has some sort of program for 'charity' (in part because they could be attacked by competitors who do if they didn't). It's small.
People think 'management can do what they like'; they can't do much against the profit of the corporation as a practical matter.
Only the law can push what's good for society, and that's why it breaks when corporations corrupt democracy.
Society says, "too big to fail finance companies gambling too much putting the economy at risk is bad for society, so you have to have more reserves, less leverage." The finance companies say, "more leverage means more profit, and so they'll push a change in the law for 'credit default swaps' not to be regulated which will replace insurance which is regulated, and exploit them, and make massive profits they get to keep even after it causes a huge crash."
There's this nice company who said "oh, that's not right, we won't do it". I'm sorry, did I say company? Former company. Competition put them out of business.
Solution? Government saying "hold on there, you can't do that". Corporations corrupting democracy - both parties - prevented that.
They're powerful enough they don't just influence laws; they right them, and in the case 'of 'government sachs', they run the government itself quite a bit.
Remember the story of a Bush aide who overheard him on the phone during the 2008 crash to Hank Paulson, saying Paulson had to let him know what he's doing?
This while Paul who had left Goldman Sachs to run Treasury was letting a competitor go out of business, while arranging for bailing out AIG - while not informing people that oh by the way, AIG had large debts to Goldman Sachs that this money would be used to pay Goldman Sachs, so he was REALLY bailing out his own company but hiding that? I digress, just pointing out the problem of corrupted democracy. And of course Goldman Sachs was Obama's biggest private donor.
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