Michael Hiltzik: In shocking reversal, Big Business puts the shareholder value myth in the grave

Among the developments followers of business ethics may have thought they'd never see, the end of the shareholder value myth has to rank very high.

Yet one of America's leading business lobbying groups just buried the myth. "We share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders," reads a statement issued Monday by the Business Roundtable and signed by 181 CEOs.

The statement mentions, in order, customers, employees, suppliers, communities and - dead last - shareholders. The corporate commitment to all these stakeholders may be largely rhetorical at the moment, but it's hard to overstate what a reversal the statement represents from