1. Corporations exist to benefit their shareholders over some term (short, long, whatever) as the shareholders ask for, through their elected board of directors. I tend to be sympathetic to what you're saying about taking the long view (esp. for a company like 3M) but the many vs. few doesn't make sense in a corporate context. It's the now vs. the later.

2. "Buy bonds"?? A corporate CFO would be pilloried for buying bonds. The shareholders are emphatically not interested in the CFO playing amateur bond-picker in order to generate a bunch of double-taxable income.