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To: Brilliant
“I’m not in favor of regulating CEO pay, but I am in favor or requiring stockholders to approve top management pay.”

In most corporations the majority of voting stock resides in the hands of the Boards and the CEO. Thus, they can vote for anything they want.

I firmly believe that there should be NO regulation or oversight of non-Government corporations by the Government.

Saying that, I do believe there is a dearth of morality within the upper echelons of most corporate structures as the people there are mostly elitists that look down on everybody else, including all their employees, and believe they can raid the company coffers with impunity.

Couple this with the “quick-buck” mentality of the entire country and this allows for the people at the top to just say that it is all for the stockholders (the majority of stock owned by a few at the top).

While the stockholders have a right to see a good increase in their share prices we must also realize that employees are the ones getting the job done and want to have a decent life too. They are our neighbors and friends.

No. This is NOT a Socialist or Communist rant. I am just saying that some morality injected into the entire system would go a long way toward bettering our system, but the extraction of morality, starting in our public schools and extending throughout the education system, is doing great damage to the US and leads to Socialism or Communism. Teaching morality at home does help but should be reinforced in our educational system.

My two cents.

50 posted on 06/10/2008 6:23:07 AM PDT by OldMissileer (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, PK. Winners of the Cold War)
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To: OldMissileer

“In most corporations the majority of voting stock resides in the hands of the Boards and the CEO. Thus, they can vote for anything they want.”

I would not say that they typically own a majority, at least not in public corporations, though they do generally own a lot, and that often is enough to get things done that most stockholders would not support. They should be disqualified from voting their stock when they are voting on their own salary. That is a clear conflict of interest, which is the thing that is causing all this to begin with.

“I firmly believe that there should be NO regulation or oversight of non-Government corporations by the Government.”

I agree with the no regulation idea, in general. However, when it comes to corporate governance, you’ve got to remember that the statutes already regulate this, and always have regulated this. Corporations are a creature of statute. There would not even be such a thing as a corporation but for the fact that government passed laws permitting their creation. There are already laws on the books specifying how a corporation is to be governed. When it comes to public corporations, they are even more intrusive, the idea being that when you buy stock on a stock exchange, you ought to be able to count on certain things without having to order and read copies of their organizational documents. There is a certain standardization in how public companies are governed. Unfortunately, it does not generally extend to how management’s salary is determined. There is currently a shareholder movement growing across the nation that requires corporate structures to have shareholder approval of executive compensation, and for good reason.

Let’s face it, you can’t very easily justify the salaries that some of these guys get paid based on their performance. We’ve got companies on the verge of bankruptcy where the management is getting paid a bundle. Companies that haven’t made a profit in years, and yet the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions of dollars for driving the company into the ground.

The only way to explain that situation is that the shareholders don’t have enough control. Sprint is a good example. If the shareholders truly had control, they’d boot everyone in management out in a second. They certainly would not be paying them what they are getting paid. These financial institutions that are in trouble are another example.


57 posted on 06/10/2008 6:43:01 AM PDT by Brilliant
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To: OldMissileer
I agree with McLiberal. When they find the criminal who put a gun to the Board of Directors head and forced them to pay $9 kajillion to some jackass to run the company into the ground...

He/she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

298 posted on 06/11/2008 7:54:39 PM PDT by Eric Blair 2084 (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shouldn't be a federal agency...it should be a convenience store.)
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