Maybe our quality of life, livelihood, and retirements should not be bound to the success of for-profit corporations?
This is the greatest grift of all time. Binding the average citizen’s, and governmental, wealth to the success of private corporations means that the economic success of those corporations, and the oligarchs who own them, become equal to “national security”; thus they are violently protected by the state, even when their actions and success are the antithesis of democracy.
I agree, but unfortunately it’s a reality of a capitalist society that large private companies have a lot of the wealth, and so people set themselves up for retirement by owning a very tiny part of those companies.
Our retirement plans didn’t used to be tied to the stock market. So clearly there’s a way to have retirement plans that don’t tie the entire middle class to the success of every large corporation.
Well, there’s the Defined Benefit pension, however typically these pension funds then become institutional investors who seek to own shares in… you guessed it - stocks.
At least those institutional investors are at least somewhat responsive to public pressure campaigns, as the state/local comptrollers are a politically appointed position.
When you give your money to a 401k, the fund manager gets all the voting rights on the corporate board and is generally only accountable to “A reasonable rate of return”
Maybe our quality of life, livelihood, and retirements should not be bound to the success of for-profit corporations?
This is the greatest grift of all time. Binding the average citizen’s, and governmental, wealth to the success of private corporations means that the economic success of those corporations, and the oligarchs who own them, become equal to “national security”; thus they are violently protected by the state, even when their actions and success are the antithesis of democracy.
I agree, but unfortunately it’s a reality of a capitalist society that large private companies have a lot of the wealth, and so people set themselves up for retirement by owning a very tiny part of those companies.
Our retirement plans didn’t used to be tied to the stock market. So clearly there’s a way to have retirement plans that don’t tie the entire middle class to the success of every large corporation.
Well, there’s the Defined Benefit pension, however typically these pension funds then become institutional investors who seek to own shares in… you guessed it - stocks.
At least those institutional investors are at least somewhat responsive to public pressure campaigns, as the state/local comptrollers are a politically appointed position.
When you give your money to a 401k, the fund manager gets all the voting rights on the corporate board and is generally only accountable to “A reasonable rate of return”