From: Bill Humphries (bill@whump.com)
Date: Mon Oct 23 2000 - 19:51:17 PDT
At 6:58 PM -0700 10/23/00, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>Good grief. This is one of the stupidest articles I've ever seen on
>democracy and corporations and free trade.
We weren't reading the same article. Beatty was discussing what may happen corporate accountablity as ownership of shares becomes more 'democratic':
>The promise of the twenty-first century is to move from ownership -- already
>nearly 50 percent of us own stock -- to control. More and more the system is
>truly becoming "ours." The democratization of investment is fast bringing us
>to the point where we can begin to take responsibility for capitalism, which
>for the past two hundred years has been happening to humankind like fate.
>Countervailing power, that is to say, may arise not through political
>intervention from outside the economic system, as it did in the New Deal,
>for example, but from within the economic system itself, through the
>democratization of ownership.
Please, this isn't Seattle, I'm not from Eugene, nor do I wear black.
I thought Beatty's article is overly optimistic since much of the stock we hold is held in institutional funds whose managers are measured on their ROI, and not their performance against a metric of social justice. However, if 'social screened funds' such as my Domini become more popular, then maybe we will be doing more voting with my investment choices.
Globalization is a related, but different subject. My main concern isn't trade. Trade's great. And I'd be happy to see more of it as long as all the workers concerned have the right to organize.
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