There's an important diary up on the rec list right now. I won't point to it, so as not to write a call-out, but it's by someone whose nick refers to the non-existence of eating utensils, and everyone should read it. Sadly, it's based on a terrible misapprehension, and I'm hoping to address that here.
He or she who avers the non-existence of cutlery (henceforth, TinS, as in "cookie tins") write:
The truth is that any CEO who behaved morally in the ways Obama is asking would be in violation of the corporate charter, which demands maximum profit to the shareholder.
Despite the popularity of that juxtaposition, hose two clauses are complete unrelated to one another, and it is vitally important to understand why and how.
As juxtaposed, the diarist seems to assert causality -- that is, TinS seems to assert that "because a corporation's CEO's sole purpose is to maximize profit, he or she must put social welfare behind any money making goal." That misrepresentation serves the purposes of both the corporatist right (which wishes to undermine any attempts at improving the lot of workers or the communities from which they're drawn) and, also, the anti-corporatist left (which wishes to paint the notion of a corporate entity as irredeemably corrupt.)
But it's still a misrepresentation. Yes, a corporation exists to return the maximal profits to its shareholders -- but it does not follow that the corporation should always return the maximal short-term profits. In fact, the role of a corporate director, such as a CEO, is to set strategy which balances the need for short-term return against longer-term return.
For instance, when Henry Ford payed his workers "a dollar a day", he cut his short-term profit -- but, in the same breath created a vast class of customers who could make his enterprise truly profitable.
When companies in Silicon Valley took the radical step of providing generous options packages to their engineers, they cut their short term profits, but provided a means to retain the best and brightest engineers and creative personnel through their "golden handcuffs".
When Google recently cut off China, it simultaneously cut off short term profits, but added pressure to the forces which will eventually make China a better market for the company's products and services.
When corporations provide benefits, when they invest in their communities, and when they raise wages or improve working conditions, they provide for longer-term profit and the cost of short term return. A director is payed to figure out how best to balance those two corporate goals, and when anyone pretends otherwise to you, they're not telling you the truth.
What President Obama did today was start the process of changing the narrative -- remind corporate officers that gutting a company, and then leaving the drained husk behind to shrivel, is not the only, the best, or even an acceptable strategy.