America has a financial system built around the creation of value. The preservation of value. The protection of value. Our entire financial system seeks out potential value, analyzes and determines value, protects and litigates value, but we neglected to decide as a collective how we define value.
Instead, white Anglo men, America’s ancestor-founders, defined value as the dollar. But the dollar won’t defend and protect our environment. I want my children and grandchildren to breathe clean air. I want the ocean in its safest natural state, not filled with plastic, not too warm to sustain wildlife.
Don’t we want rivers and lakes, towns, forests and meadows? Don’t we want safe work conditions, and pay that supports all families’ healthy needs? Anglo-european males, in their aggressive ideological, technological, industrial, and military pursuit of the dollar, have made this dream less likely for everyone’s grandchildren. In their colonizing, and in the viral spread of this one value at all costs, they have infected our world.
Embedded in the patriarchy, the virus has spread to Asia, the Middle East, and all over the world where “progress” is measured in buildings, material goods, wealth and wealth indicators, while our humanity is being precariously threatened right alongside our natural environment.
We warehouse Black and Brown bodies in prisons to protect the dollar for lighter-skinned people. We murder people around the world with our military to create dollar value for shareholders.
If we continue to create ‘shares’ of ownership in companies, and hire ‘fiduciaries’ with a duty to protect shareholder value, we need to solicit feedback from present and future shareholders. From present and future stakeholders.
Who are we and what do we value? Pursuit of the dollar at all costs, protection of the dollar at all costs, has come at the cost of what we truly value.
It’s time to redefine shareholder value.
We Hold These Shares 