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The media may want to bury the news that 296 advertisers don’t want their commercials shown on the Glenn Beck show, and the NewCorp management may pretend it’s no big deal, but as we are told over and over, “maximizing shareholder value” is the most important thing in the world.

So what should a concerned investor in a company do when the corporate managers keep employing someone who has gone from an asset to a liability? What actions should they demand management take? And if management doesn’t act, how should they respond?

Below I ask these questions to the largest institutional investor of NewsCorp, probably the only people on the planet with enough clout to demand real answers.

A man is arrested with guns on his way to shoot up the Tides Foundation. In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Byron Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”
Williams talked to a reporter who confirms that Glenn Beck was his inspiration.

Beck won’t ever be accountable for incitement of violence. Is there anything we can do?

The White House, the FDA and the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board are teaming up with a group of celebrity chefs to promote the eating of Gulf Seafood.

It isn’t “sexy news” to discuss a higher percentage of cancers for small children who eat Gulf seafood more than once a month. But pointing out to the media that the FDA has flawed testing protocols and have ignored safety concerns is news. NOAA using only 12 shrimp to prove the safety of 5,000 miles of the Gulf should be news to the media.

This Monday the media will be shoveling shrimp into their mouths and they might be concerned for their own health if they aren’t concerned for others.

It’s not my job to care about the little kids and pregnant women eating Gulf seafood. Nine years from now when questions are being asked the folks at the FDA can say, “Nobody could have anticipated…”

Where have I heard that line before?

5,000 Americans die each year from food related illnesses, 325,000 are hospitalized. But they aren’t related to the President and don’t have the money to ensure their food is safe. The sad reality is that in our celebrity-driven media culture not all lives have equal power when it comes to media awareness and political change.

There is a food safety bill languishing in the Senate because the people who have died just didn’t have the right connections, a good narrative and someone who has the power to follow through.

If there is no newsy disaster regulations won’t change.
When it comes to food safety an uptick in long term cancer rates is a snoozer. But if the children of rich white people who ate seafood from the Gulf start vomiting blood and bleeding from their rectum next Thursday then people who matter will make phone calls to people who can make changes. And things will change. Unless this happens the FDA can get away with not testing seafood from the Gulf for the chemicals in Corexit.

What can be done as a rich human person vs a rich corporate person when they realize the corporate fiduciary goals aren’t compatible with moral human goals?

It’s very hard to convince the people running corporations to put moral responsibility for people over their fiduciary responsibility for the company. If they fail their fiduciary responsibility they can be fined, fired or go to jail. A moral responsibility can be spun. “I give to charities. I give to churches. I pay taxes.” But many rich powerful people are going beyond immediate fiduciary responsibility to a company. They are also funding right wing think tanks. lobbyists and other groups who actively work to create the current situations that many people are in, as well as hurt groups that are working to help people.

I question one concerned Venture capitalist about how his actions, outside of his corporate fiduciary actions, supported or fought against the current human suffering in our economy.

People talk about how Shirley Sherrod should sue Andrew Breitbart. If she does, will he be tried as a journalist? If he is not a journalist what laws apply? In order to keep him from becoming a free speech martyr and getting defended by the ACLU and the NY Times media lawyers, maybe there are other laws and contracts that he has violated–including his own terms and conditions for posting on biggovernment.com

“BP has either been blocking blood panels or they have been taking blood panels and not letting really anyone see what the blood panel works look like.”

— Riki Ott the marine biologist and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Virtually Speaking July 8, 2010/

A fisherman’s wife sees behind the scene’s PR tricks of BP. CNN could have revealed these same tricks to viewers, but fish don’t discover water. They are oblivious to the standard deception that an “uneducated housewife” reveals. The media need stories like this because they don’t see their job as pressing the corporations. However they will reporting on other people pressing the corporations.

Oil clean up workers and volunteers are going to have the same respiratory health problems as the workers on the Exxon Valdez and 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

OSHA is waiting for the EPA to tell them the air is so bad workers need gear. Until that happens BP will not provide the gear to workers.

The EPA should start providing real-time air quality monitoring at the worker level ASAP.

I describe what steps I’ve been taking to make this happen since I started my group, BP, We Demand Respirators for ALL Clean Up Workers.