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there is a reason you are not allowed to withdraw your 401k dollars and that the government gives you a tax advantage to invest via 401k instead of your own trading account. It increases the amount of money in mutual funds and thus gives a greater liquidity to the market.

Seriously, you don't know much about 401ks or mutual funds. In a 401k investors are not restricted to just investing in mutual funds. Perhaps you don't recall it but many Enron workers lost money because they had their 401ks invested in Enron stocks. But even if people have money in mutual funds, the funds are not of a single mind. There are aggressive growth, growth, income, and value funds. Aggressive growth funds invest in businesses that growing fast whereas income funds invest in corporations that pay dividends for income. Funds may invest in stocks, bonds, or both. Then there are also SRI, Socially Responsible Investing, funds. These funds use various screens to decide what to invest in. Some screen for companies that they feel treat their employees and or the locations they are located in well. Some focus on the environment, and others will not invest is so called sin industries. Such as military contractors or weapons makers, alcohol businesses, or tobacco companies.

All that 401k money (and the proxy votes) are controlled by an elite class of money managers who then wield enormous leverage over corporate boards.

Every one who owns stocks can decide for themselves who will vote as their their proxy, or can vote for themselves. There is such a thing as activist shareholders. Apartheid in South Africa very well may of ended in part because of shareholder activism, shareholders in the US as well as around the world pressured their companies to not invest in or pull out from South Africa in efforts to end apartheid. Now activist shareholders are pressuring their corporations to oppose Israel's construction of the Apartheid, er Separation, Wall. Chief among them are funds and groups that invest on a religious basis.

The owners of companies are changing so rapidly that it is nearly impossible to tell who actually owns what.

After more than 10 years Steve Jobsis still a member of Walt Disney's board. Ted Turner spent years on Time Warner's board. And as of 2001 and 2002 the Packard and Hewlett families still had seats on the HP board.

Falcon

Essentially impossible? Well, you could start by investing in SRI funds from brokers that care about that sort of thing. Like this: http://www.socialfunds.com/

Yet, are there things that are more important than money?

Fortunately, many of my peers in the United States of America feel that some things are more important than money. Consider the case of Stanford University. It is probably the most commercial of the elite universities and has strong ties to industry. Yet, Stanford University recently divested its investments in Chinese companies like PetroChina, which is commited to indifference to the Sudanese victims of human-rights abuses.

What surprises me about the lead article in this discussion is that Boston Common Asset Management, which (to my knowledge) is not an official advocate of socially responsible investing, has done such a clearly socially responsible act. Does anyone know of any funds managed by Boston Common Asset Management? I want to invest a significant amount of my 401K monies into those funds.

Like Stanford's Board of Trustees, I too am committed to the cause of human rights. I invest exclusively in socially responsible mutual funds.

By the way, there is a significant and measurable difference between Western society and non-Western society. In the West, you will often see incidents of this kind, where shareholders actually demand that companies support human rights. Cisco will change. Reebok has already changed and is now an official supporter of Amnesty International. Can anyone find examples of such shareholder activism in, say, the Chinese province of Taiwan?

Corporate "personhood" is all based on the 1886 tax case of California's Santa Clara county and Southern Pacific Railroad. The court ruled on specific tax liabilities of the corporation, but the court clerk included, in the headnotes, the otherwise unsupported assertion that "[...] corporations are persons within the intent [...] of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution [...]". The clerk seems to have been employed by the railroad, which owned the local newspapers which promoted the faked decision. These headnotes aren't precedents, but they are the entire precedential basis for later corporate "rights". Then, in 1978, (now-Chief) Justice Rehnquist wrote the dissenting opinion in the 5-4 Supreme Court case that gave corporations the right to give unlimited money to "political causes". Rehnquist thought the 1886 "decision" was wrong. It came up in the "Nike v. Kasky" case before the Court, and it ought to come up again and again until the scam is dispelled.

Corporate "personhood" turns out to be extremely fragile. We can promote these cases in the media to equalize the corporate lawyer consciousness of them with public awareness. These decisions go wrong in the dark, and the light of day makes it much harder for them to work against us. To date, most of that "light" has been corporate media editorials in favor, of course, of corporate personhood. So this latest chapter has begun, with some surprising allies and unsurprising enemies. It's also worthwhile to note that a reelected Bush will almost certainly send at least one or two new justices to the Court, and maybe as many as four - including, ironically, a replacement for Rehnquist much less likely to exhibit the traditional "Conservative" philosophy of headlines merely summarizing stories, rather than extrajudicial end-runs around justice.

Employers in the west never volunteered minimum wage, child labour laws, working hour restrictions, etc, etc, etc. It had to be fought for, and these people don't have a voice in the marketplaces where their goods are being sold.

Wrong. Before unions existed, some employers tried to improve the conditions of their workers. They were called "Social Entrepeneurs". Today, the responsibility of (especially big) businesses is coming back into the limelight (more in Europe than the US though) and we see Sustainability Reporting and social funds.

Your claim that a group of people is universally evil is classic fundamentalism. Those claims are a great rallying call for extremists, but if you really want to change things, it's better to be reasonable. That involves being a critical consumer and buying from companies that do well and boycotting those who don't act responsibly. It also means that as a voter, you try to support politicians who care about these things and support mandatory reporting guidelines on these subjects (it improves market transparancy, so right-wingers should support it too ;) ). As an employee, stand up for your rights and become a member of a (non-extremist) union. Finally, as an invester, look at social funds and responsible companies.

The most important thing to remember is that you don't have to be an antiglobalist or such. You can do your part based on your own agenda.

According to "Executive Excess 2000," CEO pay jumped 535 percent in the 1990s, dwarfing the 297% rise in the S&P 500, 116 percent rise in corporate profits and 32 percent increase in average worker pay. If average pay for production workers had grown at the same rate, instead of barely outpacing inflation, their 1999 annual earnings would have been $114,035 instead of $23,753, and minimum wage would now be $24.13 an hour, instead of $5.15.