I was, for a moment, heartened this week when I received an email from a large café chain notifying the public it was adding two uncaffeinated dessert drinks to its menu but, when I visited a store, I was reminded its arguably healthiest caffeine-free and non-sugary tea could now only be ordered with caffeine and sugar added.

I’m not sure whether you’ve had the same experience, reader (you may not be so gullible), but I noted not long ago that, after signing up for one of this chain’s game-based promotions that, whenever I listened to Spotify afterward, I was suddenly inundated with gambling commercials. Embarrassing. What about, I wondered, rather than emailing about the value of a new caffeine-free sweet drink, restoring the healthier option instead? Or, in addition to publishing slogans, as this chain does, supportive of Native American communities reduced to proffering or falling into addictive behaviors, especially given the epidemic of so-called deaths of despair in the U.S. today, taking a more meaningful stand against the plagues of addictions of all kinds?

The question is not whether such organizations do good things. They do, certainly. The question is whether the value they add to the world outweighs the harms they impose. And, being corporations, it is arguably probable it does not. I realize that, as a person concerned about plastic pollution and who picks up containers bearing such organizations’ logos on my trail runs & hikes often, I am biased. But I believe the question matters and is another one of many reasons a restored journalism sector could be useful.

I do not claim to know for sure that any of these corporations’ profit margins would make very much of a dent in reversing the harms their plastic pollution have imposed on the world, but what if, even only as an act of good will, each committed 100% of profits to the remediation of plastic pollution (and, for that matter, the diabetes epidemic) until the problem is under control? (Below is an image of a nest I found on the ground interwoven with a large amount of plastic.)

What if arms manufacturers did the same and committed 100% of profits to peacemaking initiatives at least for a period? The U.S. is arguably just as addicted to war as individual people can become to chemicals like caffeine and, yet, barely anyone seems to see this as a problem worth discussion because of the economics involved.

As a person who felt personally motivated to serve after 9/11, I was saddened to see the way our country pulled away from Afghanistan so abruptly and totally, partly because of concerns over the well-being of those still there and partly because this seemed almost like an invitation to other nation states to push American limits.

In a recent interview, JFK, Jr. put forward the theory that CNN had him on for reasons other than to court him as a partner in suppressing critiques of the merger of the stock market and journalism sectors and hobble his campaign’s ability to credibly critique corporate media business models. And I hope this is true. But it was still helpful to me to hear this candidate discuss the relationship between behemoth investment firm BlackRock and news corporations like CNN and validating to hear about BlackRock’s practical arsonist-firefighter role in both privately causing and publicly appearing to address a plethora of public harms as, if I understand correctly, this is the same organization that, in purchasing actress Reese Witherspoon’s media company after its cooptation of the women’s movement in corporate journalism via the production of The Morning Show program, arguably levied the harshest blow inflicted yet on the real-life women’s movement in corporate journalism. (I felt practically nauseous it had never occurred to me to remove any BlackRock colleagues from my LinkedIn network before speaking out about CNN there, not knowing the two entities were even connected.)

In any case, I found it intriguing to hear Mr. Kennedy imply that a key to helping ameliorate the political and economic divisions plaguing the country may begin with addressing the rule Citizens United v. FEC struck down in 2008 and, while I agree, I wonder whether such a move would be as critical if the root problem were addressed. Wouldn’t the ability to have free markets in the U.S. almost automatically be restored should the journalism sector be restored by disentangling it from stock market forces? I think the rip cord that could help undo both political parties’ harms not only to Americans but to all of mankind will be disentangling their respective news networks from stock market forces.

It is not that Mr. Kennedy’s idea is a bad, in my view at least; it is just that I feel it may be incomplete in that I believe it may be far more important to focus on increasing the free exchange of ideas than decreasing the free exchange of money in stopping polarization not between political parties but between economic classes (divided for too long into groups who are either addicted or not to a stock market economy that sometimes today feels like little more than a hoax) in the simplest, most effective, and most elegant way possible.