Comment FSA (Score 1) 690
this is not a workable blend of capitalism and socialism. if you are going to be communist be communist, but this "everyone sits on their ass with their hand out" shit cannot work anywhere.
Officers of the company (i.e. insiders) would naturally want to exercise their options at the highest price possible. Increasing dividends makes the stock appear more attractive to institutional investors.
When institutions buy, that increases the pressure for the price to go up (retail investors don't move a market cap like this, only the big boys do). When the price per share goes up then that's more money that the officers can collect when they exercise their free options; in this case it looks like all the strikes were no higher than around $100. Or they simply sell some of their common position into the open market. The higher the stock price, the higher the profit. Tax strategies play a huge part too.
Any decent financial site will list insider transactions and their values, here's IBM's:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?...
Just to clarify, it's not just the nutty Hollywood liberal types like Jenny McCarthy spewing this nonsense. Conservative Christian churches have been railing against vaccination too. This has directly lead to outbreaks of measles:
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.