Hartmann also has a large focus on stock buy-backs, and how they harm the economy, capture money

[Akamai]

for corporations and the top 1%, etc.

Thom Hartmann often focuses on the financial health of United States and of average workers. One of his major concerns is the destructive impact of CEO compensation which now allows CEOs and other high-ranking corporate executives to be compensated in stocks. This means that by manipulating the price of stock through stock buybacks, at their companies, CEOs can be extremely well compensated even though it does not help the company, does not help money circulate in the country, and indeed, it actually hurts the well-being of everyone but those CEOs and high corporate officials.

For an excellent insight on this matter, see the following article in the Harvard Business Review

Profits without Prosperity by William Lazonick from the September 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review

HTTPS://HBR.ORG/2014/09/PROFITS-WITHOUT-PROSPERITY

“Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity.

“The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees.

“The buyback wave has gotten so big, in fact, that even shareholders—the presumed beneficiaries of all this corporate largesse—are getting worried. “It concerns us that, in the wake of the financial crisis, many companies have shied away from investing in the future growth of their companies,” Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote in an open letter to corporate America in March. “Too many companies have cut capital expenditure and even increased debt to boost dividends and increase share buybacks.”

“Why are such massive resources being devoted to stock repurchases? Corporate executives give several reasons, which I will discuss later. But none of them has close to the explanatory power of this simple truth: Stock-based instruments make up the majority of their pay, and in the short term buybacks drive up stock prices. In 2012 the 500 highest-paid executives named in proxy statements of U.S. public companies received, on average, $30.3 million each; 42% of their compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards. By increasing the demand for a company’s shares, open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily, and can enable the company to hit quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets.

“As a result, the very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies’ profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity—with unsurprising results. Even when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, when it was already widely viewed as excessive. Meanwhile, overall U.S. economic performance has faltered.” (Underline Mine)

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This is also practiced by large banks, which now make stock buybacks their road to profit, refusing to lend out money to those who need it. Without money flowing through the whole system, it is like a blood clot shutting down the arteries that this country depends on.
Other terrific articles on this topic are:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/27/bill-clinton-tried-to-limit-ceo-pay-but-elizabeth-warren-thinks-he-made-it-worse/?utm_term=.ca41a121d072

and

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/kill-stock-buyback-to-save-the-american-economy/385259/

[hedda_foil]

1. the worm ouroboros has digested its tail and moved on to devour its belly.

[Akamai]

2. There's a phrase I like: "Money does not sleep -- it is always trying to increase!"

John Kenneth Galbraith said (something like) "The rich are still at their old task of justifying to others their enormous wealth."

[Foamfollower]

3. I don't give a fuck what a Putin apologist and Russian propogandist TRAITOR has to say.

Fuck Thom Hartmann and all traitors that are like him.