Corporate (executive) greed is getting beyond disgusting

[taught_me_patience]

WaMu Moves to Insulate Bonuses from Loan Crisis
Mortgage-related losses are excluded from consideration in plan covering top executives, including the CFO.
Stephen Taub
CFO.com | US
March 6, 2008
Washington Mutual’s board of directors have found a way to keep bonuses heftier in a year of extraordinary mortgage-related losses: moving the goalposts by excluding consideration of the losses in the bonus calculation.


http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10807751/c_10807964?f=home_todayinfinance


Something must be done to stop this insanity!

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. How can they keep getting away with it?

Why haven't the stockholders mutinied and fired the Board of Directors and the CEOs?

[Coyote_Bandit]

4. Two main reasons

(1) The legal requirements that must be met to bring a shareholder derivative suit have been tightened and
(2) Institutional investors typically represent a significant share of stock holders and their own managers have little incentive to (a) contest such compensation packages or (b) incur legal expenses required to contest the compensation packages.

[Warpy]

7. Stockholders generally get one proxy vote a year

and which is made as confusing as possible by a thick book mailed with it, 99% of which is obfuscation. I've taken to voting against boards of directors whenever I can. It's the only chance I have. Unfortunately, I am not a majority stockholder and most other minority stockholders just trash their proxies or rubberstamp them to save reading time.

Stockholders are never consulted about executive compensation packages, the board of directors control that. Since most boards are incestuous, to say the least, we have CEOs on one board deciding pay packages for another CEO in a "you scratch my back" sort of deal. Consulting stockholders about this would result in rebellion, nothing the cozy boards want.

Since stockholders have so little power over this, Congress needs to step in with either reinstating the progressive income tax with confiscatory rates over $10 million/year (nobody's worth that!) or putting a ceiling on executive compensation by tying it to hourly employee wages.

[Bettie]

2. Wow

The greed is just staggering.

[LSK]

3. turn on CSPAN

Theres a hearing on this topic.

[VotesForWomen]

5. the few at the top accumulate the wealth created by the masses at the bottom. it is a large part of

the economic problem this country is in.

[tom_paine]

6. Of course it is. As America returns to a pre-1776 condition, our aristocratic elites find

that all the restraints are dropping away. Excited by the prospect of tasting a life they have always dreamed of in their secret hearts (yes, I know that this is a generalization and given there are exception to every generalization) which is the life of the 18th Century French Aristocrat over the Filthy Powerless Peasants, they just can't stop themselves. Even if they could on an individual level they cannot stop the mad slobbering dash by their Elite Class, collectively, which is driven by a certain mania.

The mania of successful serial thieves who have gotten away with it again and again in broad daylight, and who are secure in the knowledge that the "Sheriff's Department" has now all been replaced with thieves like them.

On a human level, that must be a most powerful excitement and temptation, I don't care how moral a person is. To live without restraint, rule or consequence for criminality? Wow. Not many could resist THAT! And we approach such a total condition moreso every day. For the aristocrats, not us peasants, for whom the lash and Power of the State will fall upon us with increasing inverse proportionality to the lawlessness of the aristocracy.

They wouldn't want us to get any ideas, after all.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

8. Ultra-rich CEO sez: "Why would we make decisions that hurt US?"

Oh, yeah,...those CEO guys are hurting so bad with their tens of millions or more!

Makes me want to pull my hair out just listening to these poor, misunderstood punks! EEK! :grr: