When you buy stock, is it your goal to enrich yourself or to enrich the CEO and the BOD?

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

I thought so. So why does the CEO and the BOD feel free to enrich themselves at your expense? Regardless of performance? Why do you allow failed CEO's and BODs to abscond with your money with absolutely no protest whatsoever?

Hello Employee stockholders?!! Are you braindead? Defenseless? Have they injected you with some drug that allows you to see and hear but not act?

Hello mutual fund managers?! Do you think it's just fine for these guys to take off with the assets? Do you have a voice? Why are we paying you to manage our mutual funds?

Hello SEC?! When the whole market goes down the tubes, will you wail, "If only we had known. . .No one could have predicted that people would have become fed up with giving their money away for itsy-bitsy teeny weensy little returns while the insiders looted the store. Who knew?"

[Dora]

1. "The Divine Right of Capital" explained it for me perfectly.

If you don't understand what Phoebe's talking about, I highly recommend this book.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. someday this s!@t will hit the fan

If CEO's want the big bucks, they can earn a salary like the rest of us and buy stock in their company's 401K and hope that the stock price goes up based on EARNINGS or pays out a good dividend based on EARNINGS like the rest of us.

[Selatius]

3. You buy stock to make yourself richer.

However, agency costs come into play. I'm talking mainly about what the Board of Directors and the CEO may do with your money. If they decided to take a percentage of the profits that would've been declared as a dividend and instead offered bonuses to themselves beyond what was expected, you can try to remove them, but then there's that other industry term you run across: Entrenched management.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

4. Particularly egregious is when there really aren't profits

and they just run a company into the ground, but still pay themselves these grandiose, bloated, obscene compensations - a la K Mart and Enron. There are a lot of little mini Enrons out there in my opinion.

Another case in point - the "celebrity" CEO - like Jack Welch. I despise Jack Welch and think he is really no different than Bernard Ebbers. Why does Jack Welch think that GE should pay for his toilet paper in retirement? According to Jim Hightower in the Austin Chronicle this is Welch's "retirement package"!!!

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A109012

A Wealth of Retirement Benefits
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But GE adds to the golden luster by paying its retired CEO a monthly stipend to help make ends meet: $1.4 million a month, to be precise. Not that he really needs the cash, since GE also pays for all of his little necessaries, such as a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, free din-din at the four-star Jean Georges Restaurant, primo box seats at Yankee games and the Metropolitan Opera, limousines, and helicopters to get around town, use of GE's 737 Boeing jet to scoot around the world, membership dues in 11 exclusive country clubs, and so many other perks of the corporate royalty.

But then it gets weird. General Electric also reimburses this multimillionaire for his mundane purchases, such as buying a bottle of wine, purchasing a CD, picking up a newspaper ... and, yes, bringing home a four-pack of toilet paper.

All this for a guy who prided himself on being a lean-and-mean, penny-pinching CEO. He slashed jobs, cut wages, moved factories abroad to exploit sweatshop labor, and depleted the nest eggs of thousands of GE's rank-and-file retirees -- even while negotiating a lush retirement for himself

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

5. One last kick sorry - this is a pet issue of mine as you've probably guessed.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

6. I don't know how any so-called "conservative" could justify $1/2Bn and $1Bn bonuses to the Exxon and

United Healthcare CEOs, respectively. I don't care HOW well the company is doing, and even if it is entirely the result of their wonderful stewardship (cough cough), such a huge amount couldn't HELP but have a significant impact on the company if it were used for research and development, advertising, paying off debt, infrastructure etc.

It's simply a matter of America's CEO royalty being rewarded out of proportion to anything, by committees they are in bed with, and it stinks.

Republicans like to talk a good game about self sufficiency and the evil of welfare, but even outrageously rich guys like Welch are happy to grab at the goodies, even though he could easily pay for his own, and probably all of DU's, toilet paper for the rest of his life.

I'm glad to hear an elected Democrat like Webb use a term like "robber barons" on TV. We need to hear more like this.