SiliconBeat

We were getting two new tires installed a couple of weeks ago to correct the damage caused by a boneheaded maneuver on our part. The guy helping us behind the service desk was having trouble with a newly installed software program and we knew just how he felt. We’ve been migrating to a new platform ourselves here at the Mercury News.

As we commiserated about our software woes and let off some steam about the respective management “theys” that bedevil us with such “improvements”, the guy behind the counter said that a big part of the problem was that “these CEOs get paid too damn much money.”

Honest, he said that. And he didn’t know us from Adam, or where we work, or what we write about.

I thought about this encounter when I read a report today from Financial Week, which bills itself as “The Home Page of Corporate Finance”, regarding the latest efforts by activist investors hoping to “catch some of the anti-executive-suite tailwinds that helped Democrats last Tuesday and push a new weapon in their battle against corporate pay practices: a ban on selling stock options until two years after retirement for the top executives of public companies.”

Now that would be game-changing, and while we doubt that such a radical requirement would ever make it into SEC regulations, the gravity of our current economic situation tends to make us pause longer than we might have just three months ago about the possibilities.

And the movement is widening beyond what now seems relatively harmless measures like “say on pay.” Activist investors are “also cranking up efforts beyond mere say on pay to curtail tax gross-ups for executives and what are called ‘golden coffin’ payouts to the estates of executives who die while at a company.”