Reply #47: Actually, it's board member greed

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Take a look at this page, about 3/4th the way down:

http://www.bea.gov/bea/newsrel/gdpnewsrelease.htm

Of all the income received in the US, shareholder dividends amounted to about 4.7%. That really doesn't seem like a lot to me, overall. And this number has been dropping for awhile now. Compare this with the great INCREASE in CEO pay. Wages payed to employees amount to 67% of the income in the US -- those wages include paying CEOs.

I can only guess, but I would suspect that a lot of money is going to pay board members and CEOs. Many CEOs sit on the boards of each others companies and essentially give each other raises. Back and forth it goes until the company starts having to fire people to pay for it.

It's really a breakdown in corporate democracy. Shareholders should have enough control to put the breaks on such abuses since board members are elected by them. Now that we live in an age of day-trading, the people that actually own the company may only own it for 30 seconds. They have no interest in fixing things, so the abuse goes on.

And what about mutual funds? There's a second layer between you and the company you might own. Owners have even less control.

What's happening is that professional CEO's have been raping public companies and running them into the ground. They don't care because they don't own the company. They want whatever money they can get NOW. Screw the future. They have no financial interest in the future.