The old capitol

The state’s job isn’t to moralize the market. It’s to govern and regulate it.

Anything less is wishful thinking dressed up as civic virtue.

/10

Obama's framing isn’t just soft, it’s a symptom.

It treats corporate retreat as a moral failure, not a structural inevitability.

Until we fix THAT, we’ll keep mistaking market PR for principle.

9/

The fix isn’t better corporate virtue.

The fix is stronger public institutions. Build laws that make it impossible to betray the public good without consequence. Stop begging corporations to be moral and make government capable again.

8/

Obama’s right that people have a capacity to stand up. But companies aren’t people—despite what SCOTUS would have you believe.

They’re machines built to convert capital into more capital. (^ this also goes to why Citizens United was wrongly decided)

They don’t “stand up.” They pivot.

7/

A democracy that relies on CEOs for courage has already surrendered the plot.

Public purpose belongs in public hands—law, regulation, enforcement—not corporate press releases about “values.”

6/

The deeper issue isn’t that these places folded. It’s that they were ever in a position to matter this much in the first place.

We’ve outsourced moral authority to entities whose only mandate is quarterly profit.

5/

When companies roll back DEI policies or cozy up to a hostile administration, that’s not “cowardice.”

That’s the market doing what the market does: chasing favor, contracts, and survival.

4/

This is the same neoliberal reflex that got us here: pretending private actors can fill the void left by a hollowed-out public sector.

Government retreats, corporations step in, and suddenly we act shocked when they act in their own interest.

3/

Corporations aren’t moral actors. Their job isn’t justice, it’s profit. Their constituencies are shareholders and their respective communities, not the public.

Expecting them to “take a stand” on principle is like expecting a shark to go vegan.

2/