[brownsfan]

“Do the shareholders care enough to do something about it? They DO have a vote in such matters, ya know...”

Oh yeah, I know, it’s the same kind of vote that we have with our elected officials. That’s working out well, isn’t it?

[ctdonath2]

Yeah it is. The "shareholders" are speaking up, and the "board" is backing off their unwanted big-spending plan. Takes effort, takes time, but it does work if enough shareholders care enough.

We COULD institute a benevolent dictatorship, but save for a few notable exceptions those don't work out very well. Ditto having government interfere in corporate matters.

Rhetoric aside, let's crunch some numbers:

Average S&P 500 CEO pay is $7.8M, $28M if paper assets are included; that's $14,000M income (cash & paper) for all those CEOs.
Total value of S&P 500 shares is $8,862,748,000,000. Let's assume a 10% return in "normal" years; that's $886,274M in dividends & value, spread across some 100,000M shares at a recent pre-crash high of $90/share. Knowing how many people invest in S&P 500 companies is, er, hard - so let's for sake of argument (and addressing the claim that "everyone is affected") find that every US citizen's fair cut is 328 shares of S&P 500 stocks, or $29,523.
So what?
That means that (and I don't know what the next words & numbers are as I write this, so I'll be just as surprised as you), assuming even distributions of stocks, that means everyone enjoys $3,000 in no-effort moderate-to-low-risk income - and pays those evil CEOs $46 to get it.
Wow. Shocks me too.
Evenly spread all S&P 500 stocks across all citizens, and everyone pays the CEOs $46 to make $3,000.
That's paying each CEO $0.016 for every dollar made on stocks.
No wonder the stockholders aren't complaining.