Citizens Lose Power as Corporations Buyback Stock
Corporations are “spending record sums repurchasing their own stock” so says the Wall Street Journal.
What happens when buyback happens? I suspect many things happen when this happens; one important thing that happens is that corporate management gains greater power.
Great power in America resides in America’s large institutions. “Power is not an attribute of individuals, but of social organizations.” Power is the potential to control. You have power over me when you have the potential to thwart my self-determination and to cause me to be determined by you.
In society most power lies within the roles an individual has rather than in the individual as a single entity. Few corporations are owned primarily by single families. The power residing in big corporations is exercised by management. The less the stock holding by the public the more power is in the hands of managers. With buybacks the power of management is enhanced.
A democratic form of government is one wherein the citizens have some voice in some policy decisions; the greater the voice of the citizens the better the democracy. As management power increases democracy is weakened.
In America we have policy makers, decision makers, and citizens. The decision makers are our elected representatives and are, thus, under some control by the voting citizen. The policy makers are the leaders of American institutions; less than ten thousand individuals, according to those who study such matters. Policy makers exercise significant control of decision makers by controlling the financing of elections.
Policy makers customize and maintain the dominant ideology in order to control the political behavior of the citizens. This dominant ideology exercises the political control of the citizens in the same fashion as the consuming citizen is controlled by the same dominant ideology.
“Thomas R. Dye, Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, has published a series of books examining who and what institutions actually control and run America. To understand who is making the decisions that affect our lives, we also have to understand how societies structure themselves in general. Why the few always tend to share more power than the many and what this means in terms of both a society's evolution and our daily lives. They examined the other 11 institutions that exert just as powerful a shaping influence, although somewhat more subtle: The Industrial, Corporations, Utilities and Communications, Banking, Insurance Investment, Mass Media, Law, Education Foundation, Civic and Cultural Organizations, Government, and the Military.”
http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/12-dye.html
