Aaron Swartz has the news of how the White House is trying to gut a piece of legislation (passed by the House and the Senate) that would be key to reining in CEO compensation in large corporations: The current financial regulation bill -- in a provision passed by both the House and Senate -- would change that by allowing shareholders with 5% of the stock to come together and propose additional names for the ballot. But the White House is trying to gut this proposal at the last minute, and they've done it in an incredibly sneaky way -- they removed the letter s from the end of the word shareholders.
Now instead of shareholders whose stock adds up to 3% coming together, you have to be a single shareholder with 5% of the stock all by yourself. And for most big companies, there just isn't anyone like that. Take GE, for example -- its biggest shareholder only owns about 3.4% of the company.
So by removing a single letter, they managed to make this provision completely
