[muawiyah]

There are laws regulating stock corporations. A single stockholder with a single share has some rights so he can influence the organization to one degree or the other ~ depending on his intelligence and his access to counsel, or interest in doing so.

Your statement seemed to write off minority stockholders and that's just wrong. If they don't want an active part they don't have to be active.

There are also Partnerships ~ and you have partners with different percentages of the business. These things are corporations. And there are non stock non profit corporations, e.g. your typical church, Boy Scout troop, HMO, hospital, and so on.

The ways individuals influence the behavior of those sorts of corporations can vary.

Not everybody who is part of a corporation is an investor! Not every corporation has investors. Not every investor puts his money in a corporation.

The members of the USSC understood this.

[alexander_busek]

You asked me for specific numbers - implying that numbers could matter - I then gave you specific numbers, and then you said that the numbers don't matter, since even a "single stockholder with a single share has some rights so he can influence the organization to one degree or the other." (A fact that I never denied.)

I guess now that we are merely quibbling about how much influence really matters.

I feel that current corporate law pertaining to how stockholders' meetings are held, what constitutes a "blocking minority interest" (sorry if that's not the right phrase; the German expression is "Sperrminderheit"), what constitutes a majority, who is eligible to take the floor, submit proposals, etc. - combined with the turgid informational style of most Annual Reports - make them a mockery of the democratic process. As a result, a retail investor holding a single share of a total of, say, one hundred thousand shares, has less "voice" than a single citizen voting in a municipal election of a mid-size city with a population of 100,000.

Consequently, I feel that it is wrong to accord stock companies equivalent civil rights as actual human beings possessing a "moral sense," since there is no undistorted, undiluted "will" of the individual stockholders "backing" the company.

The U.S. obviously does not have a direct democracy (and I'm not arguing that it should), but stock companies are much, much less democratic. I therefore feel that it would be improper to accord such "legal constructs" rights on a par with those of full-fledged citizens.

Not everybody who is part of a corporation is an investor! Not every corporation has investors. Not every investor puts his money in a corporation. [...] There are also Partnerships ~ and you have partners with different percentages of the business. These things are corporations. And there are non stock non profit corporations, e.g. your typical church, Boy Scout troop, HMO, hospital, and so on.

Thanks, muawiyah. I know that I said that I was no legal expert or financial whiz, but those facts were known to me. My objections about according "legal entities" rights comparable to those of actual human beings were focussed on the typical large stock companies listed on stock exchanges. At no time did I mention anything but stock companies. I think that it was obvious that I wasn't referring to, e.g., the Boy Scouts.

Regards,