- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
AT&T’s stock price hit a 29-year low on Friday and continued to sink today as investors fled telecom stocks on reports that cleanups of lead-covered telephone cables could cost the industry tens of billions of dollars.
Oh noes! Whatever are we gonna do? Fuck corporations of all kinds. Fuck their wealthy backers too.
I believe that stock prices have at best a tiny relationship to the corporation’s health, except in extreme cases.
It’s mostly a picture of wealthy and powerful elites manipulating equity prices for their own gain. Completely rigged by people whose only concern is control.
But hey, we should be happy. Use Your Illusion. If we are intentional, free, and authentic they cannot touch our souls.
Also, a majority of stocks are never traded, really. It’s just sitting there in ETF or other funds/depots without ever being looked at.
The short term price differences are solely based on valueless trades back and forth.
I think stock values are mostly driven by speculation with a minority on a company’s actual performance and real world worth.
You know companies need to exist so you can have and do nearly everything you rely on in your life right? Unless you want the state to control all means of production, which I would not recommend, there is a lane where corporations do need to exist and you’re absolutely free to invest in their businesses (or not) just like everyone else.
ISPs and telecoms are natural monopolies. The state owning them would probably improve the options many people have access to. Also state owned does not have to mean it is owned by a federal or even state government. It can be owned by smaller units of organization. Furthermore there can be vendoring out of the parts that a private market is more competitive for (such as equipment).
Utilities, in particular, can and often should be owned by municipalities or states. For every example of an inefficiently-run state-owned enterprise, there’s a dozen boring, local, publicly-owned utilities that are run as well or better than private companies.
The clusterfucks tend to be at the national level where there’s no real oversight. A corrupt president might be able to treat a utility as a slush fund or jobs program and get away with it but a mayor or county executive just doesn’t have the juice to be flagrantly corrupt without someone investigating.
Corporations are like governments, we need the services they provide to live a modern life. Both can do things that harm public welfare, and they do. If you find the solution to malevolent government, you’ll find the solution to malevolent capitalism. That solution eludes us and always will because of human nature. We will always compete for acquisition. You’d have to eliminate greed which is impossible.
The problem with a non-capitalistic system is it suffers a much worse fate because there’s a single point of control. In the ideal it could work better, but because of human nature it works a lot worse.
But yeah, corporations do a lot of evil greedy shit so fuck 'em.
You are conflating capitalism with corporations; they are not at all the same thing. The former is an economic system, whereas the latter is the legal creation of a fictional “person” for the express purpose of shielding private individuals from legal consequences.
Mind you, that is not always a bad thing. If someone decides to start a new business using a portion of their savings, it is arguably good to allow them to do so in such a way that if the business fails (and my understanding is that something like 90% of them do, so this is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome) then they lose only their investment and not their entire life savings or worse end up deeply in personal debt because otherwise we as a society would lose out on a lot of beneficial enterprises due to them being too risky. The problem comes in when this legal fiction acts as such a strong shield that it enables and encourages people to act in extremely harmful ways with virtual impunity because only the fictional person that is the corporation gets punished rather than the individuals who made the harmful decisions.