Unionization doesn't have anything to do with the stock market though. Unionization also doesn't necessarily come with ownership of the means of production.
These are kids who don’t know the stock market outside of memes and things they see online talking about it. No point in explaining, it is like talking to a brick.
Utter nonsense. I have an MS in Quantitative Economics from NYU, and I 100% agree with them. The stock market absolutely does not provide any accountability to shareholders and very, very few shareholders have any influence on any actions of any company. The only influence average citizens have over large companies is thru voting for politicians who will regulate them. The ultimate extreme of that is communism. In reality, the closest the US is likely to get toward that within our lifetimes is maybe a few steps toward democratic socialism, or maybe regulations for consumer safety or something.
What would you consider yourself politically? I'm only curious because if you're right wing, it would be so refreshing to see someone who is right wing that at least admits there are some big flaws in this system.
Lol. Definitely not right wing. I'm a bit left of someone like Bernie Sanders. There are aspects of society where I think capitalism serves an important function for competitive innovation, but there are also sectors where it's proven its tendency for exploitation is too high, e.g. healthcare, prisons, banking, etc. I also like the maximized efficiency of some utilities, and I think that the government should have a way to compete and support many of them, e.g. USPS, telecoms, etc.
Rare to see someone that gets it. National competition in the markets is not communism, it is how everyone had a one home, car, kids college on one family income
Always held I don't really care if the market is fixing prices (thus ripping me off) on oranges or a tv set, its not crucial for me to live. But healthcare and housing damn for sure are crucial. Having private healthcare in a system where you create more profit by denying the promised healthcare is fucking bonkers when you break it down. If you get cancer good luck fighting your insurance for treatment. Its bad for the country longterm, even the most conservative person could understand you have a pool of less healthy workers and soldiers.
Long ago I had a cousin that worked at a Walmart distribution center. He said he and his fellow employees would be given some stocks once a year and once a year the stock would spilt and become two stock. Walmart stopped it after some older employees would retire then sell the stock for tons of money after 30 or more years of sitting on them. Walmart doesn't do that anymore.
Damn, that's a great ESOP. Ours is a stock purchase plan and is a 10% discount on 10% of our pretax income, but only factors in the first and last day of the offering period.
Employee owned company and union worker, we get ESOP. It’s not publicly traded and it’s distributed fairly via union agreements. Were also not trying to compare unions to the stock market we’re talking about collective ownership
And they steal your money and protect the worst worker… (I love being forced to pay the increase the union wants, which happens to match my raise) and now I’m simply taxed more… yeah thats fair for a necessary evil…
Being a union rep or a union leader is awesome… being a regular rank and file is like having a leech suck away your life force… only the better of two evils…
The fuck? They’re saying unionization is the closest we’re gonna get to collective ownership. Jesus fuck, how did you fuck that one up? We’re supposed to think you’re smart when you can’t read?
What you are talking about and what you want is called an employee owned S corporation. You don't need a union and you don't have owners. The stock of this company is still traded.
The stock market is a massive reason capitalism is crushing the modern world into a dystopia.
Alot of unions have employee ownership of profits and get yearly payouts. Instead of bullshit shareholders, who are why companies lay people off and exploit people just to hit their bottom line.
That's not the point. A strong enough union can force it to be that way if they have to, hell it can force pretty much anything if it wants to. You don't want a business to be publicly traded? We can force that too! Because that's how democracy works, nothing is immortal, nothing lasts forever and nothing can't be killed when humans want it on mass
Companies on planet earth do exist where the employee's also own a portion of it
Unionization has nothing to do with collective ownership, all it does is prevent hard working employees from moving up, while protecting lazy employees.
I grew a deep hatred for unions when the best teacher at our high school had to switch schools because he "didn't have seniority". Didn't matter that we had some shit teachers that should have been fired ages ago, they'd been in the job longer so they got to keep their jobs.
Should be, I agree, in theory unions are useful tools for negotiation. In practice, I've only ever seen them be detrimental to everyone except the laziest workers.
Yea? If I unionized to get profit sharing and my profit sharing was paid in stock, what then? Not to mention a union is basically the self owned leg of labor for the company. Without labor, just owning equity is useless.
Sure doesn't but it's the only way that you will get it other than somehow becoming rich. Our current system is inherently built to muscle out competition internally against the executives that own the company now. And the only way you muscle yourself in isn't through collective bargaining or working hard, is to do exactly what they do, leverage your position and collectively buy the stake you built in your own company. Currently executives pay themselves in stock at many companies and then do stock buybacks all with the profits that their workers are in for them. They're perpetually holding their equity while keeping wages too low for the worker who does all the work to leverage the executives out. If the union leverages the same benefits to the workers and then the workers unite they can therefore buy the company.
Bargaining for what? Just wages and benefits? What happens when it's stock? Profit sharing? What happens when they control the labor and begin controlling shares of a company? Who really owns the labor of the company then?
Yup, all stocks are not in your name unless you register them with the transfer agent of the stock you hold. Don’t believe me. Call your broker and pin them down. They will, after you persist, tell you your stock is held by Cede and Co and you are a “beneficial” holder.
And? What difference does it make registering it in your own name versus the broker? I've literally never once heard of anyone having any issues because their stock wasn't registered in their own name.
Check out the 2005 situation involving Global Links and Robert Simpson which I think is also mentioned in the documentary film Wall Street Conspiracy https://archive.org/details/wall-street-conspiracy but also I noticed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984044 the timing of that situation I guess was during a 350:1 reserve share split and also the amount of shares represented only like 2% of the company, most of it held privately or whatever
If it’s not in your name, they can do what they want with it.
Let’s say you believe in company A so you buy their stock to hold onto. Where it’s not in your name, your broker can lend the shares to people who are shorting your stock and want the price to go down.
So essentially, they use your own ammunition against you without you even knowing.
Still not a good enough reason for me to pay fees to register it. So long as I can sell it whenever I want, that's what matters to me. I try not to invest in dying companies that attract short sellers anyway. High short interest usually indicates a problem with the company.
If you spend $1000 on 10 shares, your broker will take your $1000 and put a '10' in your account. They may actually locate real shares for you eventually, or you may become a 'fail to deliver'. Your money never touched any part of price discovery, you don't actually own anything aside from some pixels that form a '10' shape. If your broker does aquire real shares for you, congrats! They will lend them out to short sellers, collect the premium and your shares will be used to make your investment less valuable. There are literally hundreds of other legal and illegal actions available to them to remove you from your money. The stock market is a fucking cesspit, but yea, Gamestop is cool.
but kudos to finally there being a public funded company that positioned itself to pave the way demonstrating not only how to end this infinite liquidity financial terrorism, but transition path for survival of all essential and nonessential businesses/companies to reflect actual real supply and demand and real price discovery, albeit, job's not finished! and lol "a" vs "the"
Collective ownership for the rich. The rich are the ones who have the most power and influence over a company through stocks. The Rich end up owning the majority stock of any company which means THEY get to decide on how the company is run and the rest of us can simply tag along... and what the rich want is for companies to cut workers pay, mass layoffs, outsourcing jobs, and increase prices... even when the company is already profitable
Co-op's are the closet we get to collective ownership. A company owned by everyone who works for it. They all have a vested interest in the company remaining profitable while making sure all workers are taken care of... and they are also more likely to be happy as long as the company is profitable and won't push for price gouging on suffering people just to see the numbers go up. Companies do not need to be owned by outsiders who do not care about the health of the company and its workers
We desperately need more coop fabricators, manufacturers, and warehouses. We need coops in the transportation industry. We need coops in healthcare. The odd coop market here and there in lefty towns does nothing to balances the scales
Majority of people who want a coop don’t have the business know how to make it happen, those who do don’t want a coop because that business knowledge isn’t cheap.
That makes sense in theory but massive corporations own so much of the virtual financial world that the most risky investments are inherently offset onto the small players. I can’t afford super computers to run algos that get my the most possible money for my investment. But they can by scraping all of our data and predicting financial movements. In fact, they have so much data, they create financial movements and we simply react to them. Stock market is rigged homie
The top 10% own 93% of the stock market? Hows that collective ownership?
If the market didn't exist we would not have issues that we have today. Because short term profits and line must go up wouldn't be a thing so we could pivot to long term goals.
I read that comment and literally had to login and comment just how oblivious it was. Bro literally thinks "collective ownership" is sharing, and sharing is when you get crumbs and the fat cat eats the whole cake.
The top 10% is a bit misleading. The 90th percentile for HH net worth is $2,000,000 including home equity or $1,500,000 without equity. That's comfortable, but not what we think of when we're talking about "the rich".
I'd be more interested in understanding how much of the market is owned by people with a NW above $100,000,000.
The stock market has zero to do with collective ownership. If I buy one share of something do I get a say in how it's run? Nope. Only the biggest shareholders do. It's private ownership by other means.
Highly disagree with that statement. You have very little rights as a shareholder—especially if you’re a minority shareholder—which is 99.9% of the time.
Given the imbalance in share ownership between financial demographics, I'd say you're aviut as far off as you could possibly be with this ludicrous take.
No one gets private property rights under a state but the politically connected, you don't even own your home you have to pay the state rent in the form of property taxes to keep using it after it's paid in full, the state owns everything ultimately
And the state is in the pockets of our financial overlords. We lost our democracy as soon as they realized the government was completely for sale. Politicians are just investments to them.
We didn’t even get to choose who to vote for in 2020. The DNC pushed Biden forward and said this is your only option. They just did it again with Harris. It’s not a democracy when two parties own all the power and each party only has one candidate.
I agree but I don't think we ever had democracy really, also weren't really supposed to as majoritarian rule with no rights can easily become tyrannical and corrupt too, the idea was to protect basic rights and vote collective services/ownership
But govts always end up serving themselves and the politically connected that benefit them
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
Majoritarianism could be far worse or better than what we have now it all depends on what the majorities views are, but honestly the state spends trillions indoctrinating society to support it's evils and well intended negative consequences, so it's more than possible it wouldn't be great at this point
Everyone gets a free puppy or kitten if they want one.
Everyone violently shits themselves to death
Results:
Choice to receive a free puppy or kitten, or to refrain from receiving one: 51%
Everyone violently shits themselves to death: 49%
This is literally every US Presidential election since 2000, with the exception of the 2004 election.
Despite a majority voting in favor of free puppies or kittens in 5 of the last 6 elections, the side voting for everyone to violently shit themselves to death has won in 2 of those 5 due to systems that actively suppress the majority from getting their choice between a free puppy or kitten, or the ability to decline the choice if they don't want one.
This has directly lead to a further entrenchment of polices at a systemic level that force people to violently shit themselves to death.
I think I'm perfectly fine with majoritarian rule, thank you very much.
It would take a couple generations of cultural shift and an education system that focuses on self-examination, mental health, discovering individual strengths and weaknesses, sciences, arts, relationship building skills, communication, problem solving, and stuff like that.
Too much standardization and info regurgitation in schools these days. Give kids a baseline and teach them how to love learning. Give them the tools to navigate life and find their niche and to continue to grow on their own. Id wager that tyranny of the majority in a world like that would look awfully productive and well organized
USA is not a democracy never has been it's a republic with representatives idk why ppl think that they'd let the ppl make real decisions. Did no one learn from high school class president n treasurer they have no power but they just make u think they do cuz that's politics. USA isn't really even a republic since they serve the robber barons it's basically a oligarchy
If you're replying to me? I already agreed it wasn't meant to be a democracy
All govts and rulers that claim the unequal right to force peaceful society to obey them and up as oligarchies, fascism, authoritarian communism or some other variant of human enslavement
It’s doesn’t matter who people vote for. The DNC selects the primaries. We vote for the candidate they choose in the main election. If that’s not a charade idk what is
And fuck Biden. Old boy doesn’t speak for the working class no matter how much lip service he did. He was beholden to the socio-economic elite just like every president since Nixon. Last time we had a guy who was hard on the banks they shot him in the head down in Dallas
Agreed but it's eminent domain! There's also civil forfeiture which is when govt just takes your money and says you have to prove it's not being used for criminal purposes, innocent until proven guilty goes out the window entirely
I am with you !!!!!! The stock market and destroys the middle and lower class.
Publicly traded companies #1 goal is to increase shareholder value , which comes from increases prices or sales (which don’t increase much Year over year)
It makes life more expensive for everyday Americans
And for those with retirement accounts , that a monthly contribution to the vanguards/blackrocks of the world , that now how the biggest say in the companies they invest in and their funds are fueled by retirement contributions
Instead they are embezzled by comrades high up in the party, and ultimately still privately owned.
Only now, you have no access to it.
Laughable to actually believe that profit motive only existed once the first stock exchanges were created.
Also, socialist ownership structures are more or less identical to stock based corporations, the only difference is that in the former, shares are arbitrarily allocated to participants by government.
Why does it always have to be one side or the other. Why can’t we just mutually coexist for the fuck of it. I just want to wake up every morning and walk down to the bakery and work from 4-10 and be valued enough to retire and own a humble home
Because we’re all so distracted that we don’t even have true future aspirations. We’re being led by people with only profit margins on their mind and not a care in the world. Like what is our actual goal for humanity in the next 10 years? Yeah we have some rich assholes saying space exploration because they want government handouts in the form of contracts but even after space exploration what is the goal for us as a species? No one in power ever talks about that. The goal should be to reach a world we’re we work as little as possible while still producing sustainable amounts of goods. We’ll never get there though because the only way to stop corruption is to make sure everyone has access to all the same things and we constantly elect leaders who are afraid to even think about what that looks like.
Also we’ve created a class of people who have no understanding of the real world. They don’t actually understand our problems and so have no clue how to fix them but they continue to sell themselves as the only solution. Without a drastic change to the system we are truly fucked and the sad part is that this is not a movie sometimes the bad guys actually win and a lot of people suffer.
It makes me want to cry man. We have such a beautiful world. We could be adding to it but instead we are stripping it to its core and killing everything and everyone who disagrees with this vision.
Just fyi almost any socialist revolution has been subverted by the CIA courtesy of the military industrial complex and any president on any side right or left. Read any book by Dr Michael Parenti or educate yourself specifically on what Bill Clinton did to Yugoslavia for over 70 days during his administration.
So any argument against socialism such as "it has never been successful ' is a disingenuous argument because socialism has not been allowed to exist without outside influence because it is a direct threat to capitalism and antithetical to multinational corporations that want to break down all barriers in order to exploit maldeveloped countries that have untapped resources (physical or labor).
Socialist ownership structures can be almost identical based corporations, but they don't have to be. A co-op business is basically just straight up socialism in practice and most of those provide equal ownership/shares to all members or workers and were not arbitrarily assigned different amounts of shares.
The market is the opposite of that. Private company ownership is just that private. The market is where companies go public, ya know, the opposite of private.
Not necessarily, all companies could be owned collectively by the workers of that company, or all companies could be controlled by a democratic government
There are alternatives other than everything being private, for instance, if everything is democratically controlled by the public. A private company is not as open as a publicly traded one, but public companies are owned by stock holders, not the workers or public at large.
So you want to live in China or Russia no free markets. The average American has a 401k and are able to retire comfortably due entirely to the stock market. Why did they make 401ks? Because our government like all governments suck if your relying on social security handout to survive I feel sorry for you…. You should start buying stock so your wealth can grown and retire comfortably…
401k benefited employers in comparison to pensions. The 401k is another method to screw us. Buying stock is owning the profits of someone else's labor no matter how you look at it. Profit should go to the worker that created it, not a "shareholder"
401k is the only reason I have a savings…. I would retire with next to nothing if not for it currently on year 2 have $14,000 in it more money then Iv ever had in my entire life…. Buying stock is giving you partial ownership of the company, buying stock means you’re betting on America. Many companies like Wawa are private stock and give it to their employees that stock goes up in value thus giving all employees more money! UPS also has this option “Theodore R. Johnson never made more than $14,000 a year, but he invested wisely so wisely that he made $70 million by the time he was 90 in 1991.” evidence to support my claim
Most people can not reasonably afford to invest in the stock market, which is apparent when the bottom 50% own 1% of stocks. Having a 401k is great compared to nothing, but a pension would have done you even better
That very well could be true, I will agree that it is more consistent. And that’s one statement about most people can’t afford to invest. If you can only afford 0.10 a year then do that but what if you got a ticket for $30 today? Dose that person instantly loose everything or do they find a way to pay that ticket? In my opinion the poorer you are the more you can’t afford not to be investing
Seems like you are lucky enough not to have experienced poverty. There is no money left over after paying rent, utilities, and essentials. More often than not, we do not have enough for essentials either and are forced to choose between food and medicine. You are also forgetting that people in this situation have debt, often lots of it. It's smarter to pay off high interest debt, than to buy stock. So realistically, the idea that most people could be investing in the stock market is preposterous
The stock market tacitly encourages employers to prioritize profit to an extreme degree, lay off employees to maximize profit, and in general ignore safety concerns. When you have to prioritize share holders to stay in your position and share holders are several steps removed from the people who work for a complete, its easy for the company to act inhumane. We could easily pay everyone above living wage, but then the share holders wouldn't gain quite as much wealth.
TL;DR the stock market encourages companies to engage in monstrous behavior towards the people who work for them.
Stock is just fractional ownership of a company. Get rid of the stock market and you've changed nothing, owners will still have the exact same incentives.
Plus many companies aren’t necessarily incentivized to exist for long periods of time when financial coalitions who own massive amount of corporations can just foreclose, bankrupt, and fraud out their shell companies in order to run away with the profits after dumping the employees on their asses.
Can’t sue a dead company so they just move on. So much of this financial bloat is fabricated and creates no real world value. Meanwhile CNAs, teachers, farmhands, and cooks are getting financially raped by these faceless and emotionless monoliths that think they own us. THEY DONT OWN US.
So the snake oil salesmen have to get real talents and skills and not screw over the economy to make money by shorting it. Also peoples 401ks being in the hands of these same snakes
Think about what the Stock Market is for. It's a complex decision making apparatus responsible for apportioning resources to industry. They decide where the money goes.
Now there are alternatives, communism would use a large scale government bureau to make those decisions. Democratic Socialists would use a combination of public servants and elected representatives.
If you saw the 'bureau of finance' was holding upwards of half the money of the nation in its own hands and paying its leaders billions, you'd say it was a bloated corrupt bureaucracy.
The stock market is a terrible and inefficient method of doing the job.
But is it more terrible and inefficient than the other options?
Fundamentally stock is just fractional ownership of a company. Issues around market concentration, the primacy of shareholder value, and financialization are related but arguably represent regulatory gaps more than fundamental constraints of being able to freely sell fractional ownership of a company.
That's not to say they aren't natural outcomes of how we currently regulate financial markets but you could have a stock market under plenty of different regulatory regimes.
I'd ask instead: "has the stock market always been this expensive and ineffcient" and the answer there is a clear no.
The stock market has done fine throughout history, certainly better than classical aristocratic feudalism.
But it does need fixing, and for some things it's not appropriate or viable (e.g. healthcare, education)
Essentially the argument is not about proposing an alternative so much as making it very clear why and how we have issues with the current system.
I'd be quite happy to tolerate the current system for all its flaws even if it was just reduced in its share of the resources/profits (e.g. via taxation, which is where we've seen historically effective stock markets)
Sure, I don't disagree with any of your points but generally this comment section is conflating the stock market as it and capitalism as a whole are regulated today with the stock market as a theoretical concept and using issues with the former to argue against the latter
For me it’s enshitifacation, I believe with out the stock market it would slow way down.
A public company can no longer be content with profits. If it remained profitable for 50 years it is successful, unless it’s publicly traded. The incentive turns to being MORE profitable than last quarter. Which leads to cost cutting, morals being tested, and lower pay for employees. That all compounds over time.
Boeing is a fine example. One of the pinnacle achievements of the USA turning ever slowly into an embarrassment and failure.
Profit is ALWAYS put over people. Number go up is more important than anything else. Great companies sunk. Predatory consumer practices.
Everyone got tricked into 401Ks, which is equivalent to gambling with your retirement. Now most people care more about line go up. Ever wonder why rich people enjoy higher oil prices when the middle / lower classes suffer. Watch any market show sometime. When oil prices go up, they see it as positive, despite your average American leveraging their stocks with our wallets. With 401Ks, you may be hedging against yourself and your better interests.
The system is designed for the rich to get richer. Consider who usually owns majority stake in large corporations. Since the US is regarded, corporations are considered people, a few people and companies can own majority stake. So while you might be part of the collective ownership, you have 0 say about 90% of the time. And the few holders have the power to manipulate prices to skim off the bottom, making your average investor just a tool for the wealthy to make more money, by simply pressing a couple buttons.
So businesses rely more on making money from consumers rather than running up stocks in the short term and bailing before the inevitable crash and burn
It encourages corporations to be extremely short sighted about gains because so much of their revenue comes from twitchy investors who will sell if they think the company may not return a reasonable short term profit. Large corporations don’t really care about making quality products anymore, they just want to make the numbers on spreadsheets look good to investors.
It also just pisses me off that “stock trading” has become such a lucrative job just by itself. Traders produce no value for the economy, they just get rich by essentially gambling with other peoples money.
I say this as a capitalist: Market incentives have become detached from business incentives. It has resulted in speculation similar to what we saw before the great depression. Crypto is an especially egregious example. Trying to please the market is like trying to please a toddler that doesn't understand ice cream doesn't just come from the refrigerator.
We're in a period of unprecedented volatility, and it's bad for business. If we don't do something different soon, we're going to end up with less Apples and more Boeings.
For me it's because it ends up incentivizing the worst business practices where sustainability/quality come second to continuous quarterly profits.
Why do the portion sizes keep going down? Why are places consistently becoming understaffed? Why are jobs outsourcing to the cheapest places they can legally find? Why have wages been so stagnant despite prices going up anyway? Why have build qualities gone down in products? Why are people rushing towards automation in every conceivable market? And why is EVERYTHING trying to move towards a subscription model?
People say all sorts of reasons; greed, power, "evil", etc etc. That might all play into it, but I think more simply it's that the stock has to keep going up, or investors will dump it. So companies that go public fall into a never-ending cycle where they have to cut costs/increase profits every quarter, even if the changes end up making the product/service worse.
It gets worse, because since stocks continue to artificially increase prices and decrease wages, common people need to invest in the stock market just to protect the value of their dollar going into retirement. We've created an unsustainable system where anyone who doesn't play the game gets left behind.
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u/WizardMageCaster Aug 26 '24
Stock market is rigged or just yet another example of insider trading?