Dear Friends,
It seems to me, when someone tells you they are going to steal from you, it is wise to listen. I have opined for years on this site, how corporations are no longer, if they ever were, run for the benefit of the shareholders, employees or customers… they are run for the benefit of the executives and board members. This couldn’t have been proven true any more than by the recent articles making their way across the financial news, that corporate CEOs believe that corporations obligations to society, supersede those to the shareholders. In other words, they are running the businesses owned by others, not for the benefit of the owners, but for their own selfish interests and the political favor they can buy with the shareholder’s money. The very definition of the principle agent dilemma.
These CEOs are in fact openly telling their shareholders that they will be stolen from, to purchase political favor for the executives and board members of that corporation… instead of make money to pay shareholders. What’s worse is that the government is complicit in stealing from investors! Take any given quarter, there will be a multi million dollar fine paid by one of the companies run by one of the CEO’s, who subscribes to the philosophy, that their obligations are to themselves and progressivism, over the shareholders. In 2016 J P Morgan Chase for example, was fined 264 million for bribing foreign officials. Don’t worry though, no executive involved lost his or her bonus… let alone their job or suffered prosecution for breaking the law. The shareholders became the bag holders.
Despite the propaganda to the contrary, most stocks are owned by retirees, pensions, IRAs, 401ks, etc… If you have a 401k, you probably own stocks. Many times through derivatives like those provided by T.Rowe Price, Vanguard, Merrill Lynch, J P Morgan Chase, etc… the very companies are run by CEOs who subscribe to the philosophy, shareholders, customers and employees are the enemy. These companies are in the business of stealing from the customers and shareholders, to enrich executives and buy political favor. So the real victims are retirees, savers, widows and orphans. Even as the media reporting on this open embezzlement, call the shareholders psychopaths, for wanting a return on investment of our hard earned money. How much do those media elite give to charity?
When a middle class person puts money into an ETF she has gone without to save that money. It is not from her surplus she takes it but from her necessity. She didn’t go on vacation, buy a new car, eat out, have the newest phone or have a giant home. She went without so she could be more independent later. Benjamin Franklin would be proud. She goes without so Jamie Dimon can have extra. He will steal the profits that are rightfully hers, lower the value of her investment by dirty dealing, pay out more of her returns in fines for his criminality, and then have the audacity to tell her to her face… her investment means nothing to him, he will do with it as he pleases, she can go straight to Hell as far as Jamie Dimon is concerned. Now that is psychopathic… even as the unbiased media calls her a psychopath.
Jamie Dimon has the right to deplete the tens of millions he gets a year to societal “good.” Spending as much of his enormous wealth… pushing abortion, open boarders, undermining our Constitution, installing a despotic world government, abetting child trafficking to pedophiles, putting people in jail over a soda straw or mistaking the recycling bin’s color, censoring pro constitutional speech, corrupting our governments, undermining the democratic element of our republic, or any of the other societal “goods” he wants to put our money to. Not his own… ours, the money we saved by going without. Jamie Dimon is ratcheting down our standard of living to elevate his. Such a good progressive corporate leader!! If I owned a share of a company run by one of these weasels I would sell it today!
Sincerely,
John Pepin
