Companies don't make decisions with their money and their shareholders' money based on some gauzy notion of corporate citizenship.   They are geared to thrive and succeed and improve their position.

I question the distinction between their money and their shareholders' money Legally it's all the shareholders, practically it's all the companies'.Nor do  I thnk there is even a gauzy notion of corporate citizenship .In the course of a  couple of hundred board meetings not only did the subject never come up, you'd have been considered distinctly odd  if you raised it.   

Sign up and do your partiotic duty, protect America Corporations?

Although you'll never get rich, You'll have money in your pockets joining Blackwater.

What are we fightin for, dont ask me I dont give a damn"

Now American companies overseas can get back to business.

Plenty of workers working cheaply, Plenty of buyers for cheap goods

Qaulity? ........Hahahahahaha 

Quality of life? .......Hahahahahahaha

Doing exactly what the shareholders would expect, And arguably a good thing,per se, because it lowers costs, potentially prices , thus making goods available at cheaper prices.That's the appropriate role for a company. 

The role of the government is to manage the econmy so that increased demand results in these efficiently operating companies re hireing the idle workers. If ,as I  continually harp, marginal tax rates were more progressive, much more,  that tax revenue could be employed addressing our infrastructure needs thus providing that demand.

The problem is not that companies are doing what they are supposed to, it's that the government is not doing what it's supposed to.

I yield to no one in my knowledge of and criticism of the illegalities and outright cruelties of which companies are capable. But I don't criticize them from doing what they are supposed to do.

Looks like it's so; crikey.  Not gonna go down with the ship.  Hmmm.  When I googled, one of the hits was at a site that showed this pic with the news, caption says:

"Row Goolsbee, you bastard! Or, the Obama Admin. will take us down with it!

Set a course for the Ivy-league coast. That's where the other survivors went. We'll catch a train to Chicago from there."

I basically agree with you. It is an improvement and that is improvement and important. All progressives worthy of the name should be in favor of 30 million some-odd uninsured people having insurance. Whether that actually is achieved is something we'll have to see about.

However, I wonder whether a better bill couldn't have been gotten. I have no proof of this, really, but here's what I'm thinking...

Obama came in with this overriding notion of bipartisanship. He saw what many had remarked upon, which was that our politics was stuck in the mud because "half" the people said X and the other half insisted on Y. Neither side could move forward because of the other side. Both sides were trying to walk forward with only one leg.

REGULAR people who are Ds and Rs want basically the same things. If he could get beyond the ideological divide, he could bring people together.

So he's tried to overcome this gridlock and ideological divide to almost no avail, as far as I can see. He assumed good will from Rs when there was none.

But what he needed to do, quickly and decisively and early on, was reset the terms of the debates, not with a bipartisan consensus, a little from this side, a little from that side, but with bold strokes that reset the debate, and then galvanize the public around those bold strokes. So...

Medicare For All...

It's been dismissed as too radical and too left, but it has many important advantages:

• Everyone knows what Medicare is.

• Everyone likes Medicare and probably knows someone on it.

• Medicare For All could have been positioned and been, in fact, a way to truly reform the existing Medicare system through cost controls and by adding millions of healthy people to its rolls. The Ryan attack would have been utterly pre-empted.

• It would not have required anyone to buy anything (do anything) directly.

So, in one fell stroke, he would have covered everyone, sick and poor, healthy and wealthy. He would have solved the one serious deficit problem we have. And he would have had a proposal with some built in political teflon inasmuch as attacking Medicare is like attacking America.

One of the things I've sensed in various conversations with people who disagree with me is that even folks who didn't vote for Obama were hoping for serious change. Even if they thought this proposal was too far left, they'd have to agree that it WAS some serious change.

And again, it would have been hard to attack, because even conservatives are on Medicare, and so are their parents and their grandparents. They aren't about to call those people socialists.

Instead, he chose a compromise. I don't fault him for it. The logic was there: If I go halfway, others will meet me halfway. Especially if I take up an idea that's at least 75% Republican in origin. But a compromise, which almost always has a lot of hard-to-understand moving parts, is easily attacked. No one knows what it is, so it's easy to become fearful of it. And if I move five steps toward them, they think there might be another two steps in it for them if they really press.

Medicare For All could have been a five-page bill...

Plus it would have totally reset the terms of the debate. He could even have pitched as a way to save Medicare rather than as a revamping of the American health care system.

By the time the opposition had woken up and figured out how to demagogue it, the bill could have been a done deal.