Rick Claypool
Like lots of Americans, I don’t really think of myself as an investor, but I am.
I’m an investor because I have a 401(k)-type retirement account. Which means that some significant part of my financial future depends, for better or for worse, on corporate profits, stock performance, and other creatures of the market.
Because I’m an investor, it’s the job of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look out for my interests, whether or not I am aware of it. About 50 percent of U.S. households are investors of some kind or another. Some are the day-trading aficionados who follow the market as tenaciously as my father-in-law tracks his fantasy football team. Some are like me – we’re investors because that’s the kind of retirement account we were offered for our jobs.
Either way, the SEC is the agency that’s supposed to prevent corporate malefactors from abusing the money we shareholders invest in them. By law, that basically means that these corporations are required to spend shareholder money in ways that will increase profits – profits that are supposed to, among other things, boost my retirement account, since that’s where the money came from. The good folks from Occupy the SEC have a good primer on what it does, from an activist perspective.
Then, about two years ago, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission happened – and a brave new world of ways to spend investor money to influence elections was opened up.
