"Jack Goff" wrote in message
m...
"Harry Krause" wrote in message
news:1103770958.4f42aaf2bb531d7c58c7431201b27f94@t eranews...
Jack Goff wrote:
"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
I wouldn't characterize the party as a mindless idiot, but I'm
flabbergasted
that anybody seriously believes Clinton's sex life was a factor in
whether
Al
Qaida attacked us on 9-11.
But Harry is blaming Bush for the 9/11 attacks. I'm flabbergasted that
you
would believe that. Bush had nothing to do with it, but I don't see
your
indignation over Harry's remarks.
Typical two-faced liberal you are, Chuck.
Jack
I know you righties want to give your boy Dubya a pass, but the fact
remains that Bush was captain of the ship on 9-11, and therefore 9-11
happened on his watch and was his responsibility. Perhaps if he had
taken a shorter vacation that summer or had the IQ to pay more attention
to the warnings, he might have done something -anything- to mitigate
what happened in 9-11.
OK, let's run with that. It is a fact that those two planes were flown
into
the twin towers while Bush was in office.
By the same logic, the downturn in the economy happened on Clinton's
watch.
He was asleep at the wheel, and allowed the stock market to get wildly
overvalued. The crash was inevitable and happened on his watch, but
Clinton
did nothing. Bitter pill to swallow, eh?
Actually, Clinton directly caused it..........by limiting CEO salary
deductibility
http://www.chilit.org/Barnh6.htm
A poriton of the article
" Fortune magazine, in its survey of 1992 executive pay reported, "The
explosion of stock option grants - the main CEO pay trend of the 1980s - may
finally be slowing. Salary and bonuses grew faster than stock awards" in
1992. Your chart indicates the decline of stock option awards continued for
another year. Options declined absolutely and as a percentage of total CEO
compensation from 1992 to 1993. That was when the Clinton CEO pay cap was
enacted.
Let me pause for some definitions. Employee stock options grant to the
holder of the option the right to buy shares of the company at a specified
price during a specified period. If you hold an option to buy shares at $10
and the stock doubles to $20, you can exercise your option by paying the
company $10 and then claim a 100 percent profit, not counting taxes and
transaction costs. You never have to own the stock for more than a moment.
But President Clinton's reform of CEO pay specifically excluded stock option
awards. Options were billed as a way to align the interests of executives
with the interests of ordinary stockholders.
As Roger Lowenstein points out in his new book, Origins of the Crash,
options fail as an incentive for corporate performance because they carry no
risk. If a company's operations decline and its stock price drops, or if
the stock price falls for any reason, the options expire worthless and the
CEO simply collects a fresh batch of options at the reduced price. As we
learned in the 1990s, short-term stock price movements frequently bear no
relation to the intrinsic value of a company or its operating performance.
Rolling over a series of option grants, which are free to the executive,
virtually guaranteed millions of dollars with no effort at all, especially
in a bull market. It was much simpler to appear on CNBC and tout your stock
than actually manage the company efficiently to generate legitimate profits.
Indeed, generating profits was a waste of time. Companies with strong
balance sheets and steady profits lagged the market in the late 1990s, a
condition that persists today."
Nonetheless, the House Ways and Means Committee said in 1993, "Stock
options.generally are to be treated as meeting the exception for
performance-based compensation.because the amount of the compensation paid
to the executive is based on an increase in the corporation's stock price."
More than one hundred years ago, the acerbic newspaper columnist Ambrose
Bierce, a veteran of the Civil War, began publishing cryptic definitions of
words. These were later compiled into a book, The Devil's Dictionary.
Bierce defined a corporation as "an ingenious device for obtaining
individual profit without individual responsibility."
I suspect Bierce had never heard of stock options. But when President
Clinton's compensation deduction cap took effect 10 years ago, individual
CEOs and their consultants quickly recognized the windfall that had befallen
them. Obviously, it would be poor business practice to collect more than $1
million in cash salary and bonus, thereby losing the tax deduction on the
excess business expense. Stock options, on the other hand, were not only
excluded from the new law. They were not even counted as a business
expense, no matter what amount was awarded. They were a "device for
obtaining individual profit," as Bierce put it, that was free of
responsibility and financially free to the corporation, even though employee
options dilute the ownership stake of other shareholders.
Stock options as the solution to outrageous executive pay had been
validated in 1990 by professors Michael Jensen of Harvard University and
Kevin Murphy of the University of Rochester. Their article in the Harvard
Business Review was titled "CEO Incentives - It's Not How Much You Pay, But
How." They advocated greater stock ownership by CEOs. But the professors
made a fatal error by failing to distinguish fully between stock options and
the outright stock ownership, in which stockholders face the risk of loss.
They also equated company performance with the market value of its shares, a
remarkably naïve assumption in the short-term world of option grants.
Jensen has acknowledged his mistake. In 2001, he published an article
titled "How Stock Options Reward Managers for Destroying Value." Today, he
says options are like heroin in the executive suite. They induce CEOs to
lie, cheat and steal to keep inflating their share prices. Kenneth Lay, the
former chairman of Enron Corp., cashed in $145 million on stock options from
2000 to 2001, just before the company collapsed. Recently Jensen told a
Chicago audience that the best solution to corporate governance scandals was
lower stock prices. Academics and others are now calling for the repeal of
the cap on executive compensation as an urgently needed reform."
Bush was asleep at the wheel before, on, and after 9-11. He still is
clueless about fighting terrorism. He thinks the military is the answer.
It is part of the answer. No more attacks here in the US in over three
years is a pretty good record. I suppose we could have pacified them with
free ketchup...
Right, Hanoi Harry?
Jack