Wow, rolling blackout. o.o We had a rolling blackout today. I can't afford a battery backup for this back computer here. x.x It just like, went dead. Thank goodness for journaling filesystems. But yeah, rolling blackouts.
Last time we had city blocks going out one after another, in California here, Enron walked off scot free with the state's budget. S'truth! Enron was running all the power stations, and used rolling blackouts as scare tactics.
They haven't even payed for it yet. You want justice, maybe 0.01% of the money has been recovered. Mostly they just send the lackeys to jail. The top stockholders who engineered the scam, then sold out, can't be held to any justice. Why? Well that leads to why I don't like the stock market.
Because a claim against a corporation can never pass on to the persons owning that corporation. This is intended so that when a small business entrepeneur tries something, and fails spectacularly, their creditors cannot take their personal property to compensate. The theory is without such protection for corporation owners, they would be losing their homes, the shirt off their back. Real sob story, let me tell you.
How many times have you heard the words "small business" come out of a politician's mouth, and then found that no, they were really talking about "large, huge, multinational conglomerate business?" If you haven't, then you should be. Small business is what they call a euphamism and the heavyweight corporate bastards just put on big puppy dog eyes and say they only have the interests of small, family, loving, happy, charitable, honest business in mind, and you go and vote for their politicians spouting that crapola. (Maybe you don't, but I'm 51% likely to be correct so I place my bets that you voted for "business" Bush.)
So anyway, this blog entry is not to dismiss the myth of small business. I'll save that for another time. What I want to talk about is what a horrible thing the concept of Corporation is, and why it's going to destroy the world using the stock market again and again.
A corporation is a legal entity independant of its owners. In such cases those owners are called "investors." The stock markets exist to allow investors to trade in how much stock, or ownership, they have over each company. Forget small business owners, they get crushed by the stock market. They almost never go public. It's the big successes, the money makers, the prime investments that go public. Why would they do this, and become a corporation, and be vulnerable to the buying and selling of their ownership stock?
The reason is that stockholders cannot be, and are not held liable for the actions of the corporation. This law to protect "small business" is nothing less than legal amnesty to wealthy people. They can't be sent to jail. They can't be held before a tribunal for investing in genocidal companies. All they can do is lose their investment. And do they?
Well, here's how it usually works for the "fortune 500" types. The biggest investors are allowed onto a board of directors. That board of wealthy investors then hires someone to run the company for them: the CEO. If they choose their CEO wisely, as well as other top management positions, then the following will happen. That CEO will engage in criminal proceedings, make a hideous amount of money for the stockholders, and then be held liable for the actions of the corporation. End result, Kenneth Lay goes to jail, everyone's happy, right?
...wrong. The theory is that after such a scandal the stock in the company will fall, and the stockholders will lose their investment, because they foolishly invested in criminals. But that never works out. There's always some kind of insider trading going on. In the case of Mr. Lay, and Enron, the top stockholders all sold all of their stock, right after the scandal was discovered, but before the rest of the investment market could believe its eyes. They got off scot free with most of the money, and nobody thinks to press charges against them. Because again, when people think of stockholders they think of the poor workers for Enron, who lost their retirement savings. But did Kenneth Lay get those retirement pensions? Does he have them hidden under a mattress in De Moines?
No. Other stockholders took those pensions, by selling stock when Enron was just starting to falter. The dutiful lackeys running the company lied and cheated, and made things out as if there was nothing wrong. And when it all came crashing down, the stockholders were off enjoying their wealth while everyone else's pensions died a gorey, scandalous death.
Who were these villains? These awful, amoral examples of humanity that make soap scum look good? If you would please tell me, I will post their names here:
See, I can't find the names of the top stockholders of any of these big companies. Does anyone know of a directory where they can be found? Something that doesn't cost money? It's just the top 10 here, not a hard statistic to collect, and one vitally important to the US economy. I know George W. Bush had lots of stock in Enron, as did Tom deLay. Names sound familiar to you? Where's the numbers here? What is going on?
These stockholders are currently in possession of the California state budget for 2001. They cannot be held to criminal charges, but I sure as heck can make a statement against them. My college raised tuition again this year, to $26 a unit. A unit! That means the "community college" system, built to be the cheapest colleges in the state, are barely scraping by, while charging their students $1400 a year counting textbooks. The public transportation budgets have been slashed. The farm subsidies, and corporate subsidies, have not been slashed. The sales tax has not been increased, and the real estate tax isn't increasing, even as the real estate market continues to boom.
Criminals are destroying our society, taking our communities, and cutting off our essensial programs, while other criminal stockholders hold possession of the money. It's extortion. They steal from us, and then say there is not enough money so you must give up what you hold dear. How is this possible? Why are people not rioting in the streets? Are they like me, alone and unknown in a faceless corporate community of commuters and television zombies? How can we empower ourselves to stop this unctuous rape of the middle class?
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