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Write to the candidates: What would you ask Americans to sacrifice?
I appreciate the positive feedback I've gotten on my post about my letter to Senator Obama about donating blood, etc, and I'll appreciate it even more if you'd chime in and send the same message to him through the campaign's debate feedback form. That will make it more likely someone will take notice. (Feel free to spread the word, and/or link to my post).
While you're thinking about it, what would *you* ask America to do, to sacrifice, if you had the the kind of national attention these candidates can get, both as candidates and potentially as President? Write to them about that too.
In addition to the question of giving blood, one big thing I saw missing from both of their discussions of an energy plan was manpower. George Bush has made some somewhat lame mentions of the fact that some Americans are dealing with the gas price problems by driving less and riding bikes and such. Sure we are! And we should do more! Don't we have a national struggle with obesity and diabetes? We can address that and gas shortages and prices at the same time, by using old-fashioned manpower to get around. By hooking up generators to the stationary bikes and other exercise equipment we use at the home and the gym, so they generate electricity instead of using it up. By building bike-powered drive-in theaters and other such alternative energy solutions. Part of dealing with the energy crisis should include encouraging bike-friendly urban design and rules of the road. Hybrid and electric public transit as well as personal cars.
There are a lot of things they aren't talking about. So go call them on it!
(you can contact the McCain campaign here).
While you're thinking about it, what would *you* ask America to do, to sacrifice, if you had the the kind of national attention these candidates can get, both as candidates and potentially as President? Write to them about that too.
In addition to the question of giving blood, one big thing I saw missing from both of their discussions of an energy plan was manpower. George Bush has made some somewhat lame mentions of the fact that some Americans are dealing with the gas price problems by driving less and riding bikes and such. Sure we are! And we should do more! Don't we have a national struggle with obesity and diabetes? We can address that and gas shortages and prices at the same time, by using old-fashioned manpower to get around. By hooking up generators to the stationary bikes and other exercise equipment we use at the home and the gym, so they generate electricity instead of using it up. By building bike-powered drive-in theaters and other such alternative energy solutions. Part of dealing with the energy crisis should include encouraging bike-friendly urban design and rules of the road. Hybrid and electric public transit as well as personal cars.
There are a lot of things they aren't talking about. So go call them on it!
(you can contact the McCain campaign here).
no subject
First, require a shareholder vote on CEO pay packages. Right now, CEO pay is decided in closed-door negotiations with the Board of Directors, and there are some very incestuous cross-memberships between large company boards. This allows mutual back-scratching between members of that club when negotiating pay packages and evaluating performance. Big severance payments for CEOs who are fired for poor performance are not in the shareholders' interest, and they should be able to veto them. I believe that they will, given the opportunity.
Second, company executives should not be allowed to be members of the Board. The Board is supposed to supervise the CEO, and if the CEO is on the Board, they can make it socially very difficult to perform that supervision properly.
Third, I think that the process for shareholder votes (particularly for board elections) needs to be revised. Right now, most shareholder ballots prominently feature the default option to give one's proxy to the Board, essentially going along with whatever they want. A large percentage of ballots are simply returned with that default, thereby giving carte blanche to the Board to do as they please. IMHO, the Board should not be able to take such proxies; shareholders should either research their vote properly, give their proxy to a non-Board member, or withhold their vote.
All that said, I disagree with putting limits on CEO pay, because I don't think that they would work out the way you hope. Every CEO's base salary would become equal to the limit, and then they'd negotiate lots of other perks carefully designed to get around those limits, and write them into book-length contracts written to be ambiguous and opaque. You could have a whole government department devoted to enforcing such a law, and all it would do is spawn more law firms specializing in getting around it. It's the shareholder who have money at stake, and they can and will hold the company accountable, if they're given the tools to do so.