“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.
“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.”
I agree. My post may have rambled a bit but that was part of my point. These people are out of control but if Government steps in any more that they already have throughout the years then we become Socialist really fast.
That is why I stressed morality. I know that the “robber barrons” of old acted like tyrants too but we somehow need to tame this out of control situation. Maybe we should let the free market allow the companies to fall under their own mismanagement and then the free market will let the people who see the right way replace them with their own, better run companies.