"Thus, when the banks did well, their employees were paid well," Cuomo's report said. "When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well."
But it's not just Wall Street investment companies that are helping ensure the success of "say on pay."
Few CEOs in any industry are sharing shareholders' pain. As The Baltimore Sun's Jamie Smith Hopkins reported Sunday, only three of 20 top-earning CEOs in metro Baltimore saw their compensation fall last year even though most of the companies saw their share prices plunge.
In a year when he came close to pushing the company into bankruptcy, Constellation Energy boss Mayo A. Shattuck III took home $5 million - even if you don't count a $10 million increase in the value of his pension plan.
No executive should be paid based only on one year's performance or other short-term results. Risk-taking to goose short-term profits and short-term pay helped cause last year's disaster. The long-range health of the enterprise should be the main goal.
But you would think that, as they're laying off millions of employees and presiding over the erosion of trillions in wealth, CEOs would sacrifice more.
"After everything we've gone through, you're already seeing a return to high levels of bonuses," says Dawn Wolfe, associate director for social research at Boston Common Asset Management, an investment firm that tries to combine social goals with private gain. "When you see the high level of bonuses despite the fact that share prices and performance continue to be depressed - to me this is something [executives] are bringing on themselves."
Executives are lucky "say on pay" is the most serious threat to the corporate American status quo so far. They're lucky that "card check" legislation, which would let unions obtain representation without a secret ballot, seems to be dead. They'll be fortunate to escape direct federal control over pay schemes. Or confiscatory taxes.
Wall Street bankers ought to be thanking taxpayers every single day for saving their bacon last fall without nationalizing their companies and tossing their sorry carcasses out the door.
Given everything that has happened, letting shareholders into the boardroom to discourage pay deals that might set the stage for another meltdown seems a modest, conservative thing to do.
