Very difficult to run these days. Since 2018, federal courts have ground away many of the legal routes needed to run a successful class action suit against a national or multinational corporation.
Regardless of whether or not one personally enjoys the work one is doing, if one really is contributing to society, one should get fairly compensated for it.
Additional requirements not common in the private sector, such as rigorous drug testing, ethics codes, requirements on gift reporting, increased surveillance, etc., should come with additional benefits to compensate. Instead, government workers submit to these requirements and a substantial pay cut.
That's mostly because conservatives 1) desire tax cuts at any cost and 2) want to demolish the entire administrative state. The stability and consistency that comes with a well-funded civil servant class are an obstruction to their stated goals.
In most cases this isn't accurate. The author (or, more commonly, their agent) submits the book to several publishers, who either accept or reject or refer for edits. Unless you're in the top percentile of published authors, there's very little room for negotiation. It's pretty rare for an author to have more than one "accept" on a work simultaneously, many publishers frown on multiple submission precisely because it can lead to a bidding war.
In practice, almost no author gets to choose how the fruits of their labor are distributed. Their rights are gobbled up immediately by one of the big publishers, who then dispose of their captive intellectual property as they see fit.
I'm afraid you're the one that's confused. Profit is defined economically as revenue minus expenses, and so the grandfather post's first sentence is correct.
What grandfather is suggesting is something like an ESOP, co-op, or etc. There are a long history of these kinds of organizations, and they thrive in free-market economies--unfortunately, nobody really lives in one of those anymore.
It is telling that you say public employee unions "extract value" by demanding the pensions/job protections that should by rights belong to everyone (and often did, in the past). Conversely, private corporations "extract value" from the labor marker by struggling to provide any job security, any retirement, or even anything resembling a living wage.
Just which sector is failing to be profitable, here?
They do actually have relationships with these institutions, and are in some cases likely stuck between friendly relations with their funding source xor showing solidarity with their readers, authors, and editors. https://placesjournal.org/academic-partners/
I get that you'd rather never hear about the war again--probably doesn't affect you materially, after all--but this isn't an "awkward injection of political opinions into [an] unrelated space." They're embedded in it. The extra effort of closing a dialog box doesn't seem like too much of a cost for you to bear in exchange for reading their article.