Real ownership in the "ownership society"

I suppose this isn't exactly relevant to the blog, but I thought about this while engaged in an exchange of emails with a grad student about cultural/heritage tourism issues.

Do you remember?, probably from the 1970s to about 2003, op-ed pieces from "conservative" writers about how "labor issues" were more complicated and that workers interests were far more aligned with corporations than they realized, because after all, through workers pension plans, "they owned the corporations."

Well, with so many pension plans (steel companies, airlines, etc.) being dumped onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government agency, I guess that's no longer the case. Ask the people of Portland General Electric, which was bought by Enron, and their pension plan converted to Enron stock. Etc.

Unless you're a stockholder that can move the market (like the division of Legg Mason forcing the sale of Knight-Ridder Newspapers so that the investment bankers involved can get a multimillion dollar bonus), your position as an "owner" isn't really assured.

Anyway, this thought came out of "just because you live in a historically designated or eligible building, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're committed to historic preservation."

Index Keywords: empowerment, civic-engagement, historic-preservation