before it became one of Webb's major themes.  The right and some of the left have been laughing at and perplexed by Webb's position, but maybe it's occurring to them after seeing all the comments and hearing all the complaints that this is real.  Lose the middle class, lose the election. 

It's just that.  Lip service.  Bush supports the status quo in regards to big business, trade, and the middle class.  If he doesn't, he has never taken concrete steps to prove it.

He doesn't even acknowledge that the middle class is in trouble because of offshoring.  Shame on him.

for some it is the performance of the stock against market expectations.  In other cases it is in cutting costs (eg:  laying off people) even if it does not result in immediate increased profits.

The problem has been how performance has been measured.  And what has happened on Wall Street should serve as a paradigm of what is wrong with the text-based accountability of No CHild Left Behind.  Make the rewards / punishments great enough and what you measure will drive - and hence distort - the system you are purporting to measure.

It also seems to me, non-scientist that I am, that it is also a variant of Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, wherein he posits that you could not simultaneously determine the location and the momentum of a sub-atomic particle.  One can measure to see how someone is performing, but if that measure is used to determine rewards and punishments humans will eventually find a way of gaming the system to avoid the punishments and/or obtain the rewards. 

Peace

The performance of Home Depot since Robert Nardelli came on board in 2000 was great (except for last year!): 12% growth year over year for 5 years. But the return to investors has gone down. Corporate executives like to blame this on rising health care costs for employees, but I believe that CEOs like Nardelli have gotten such sweet contracts that they're scooping up too much profit. Nardelli left HD this year (2007) with a cool $210,000,000. By contract, his $3 million dollar bonus was guaranteed. I know that's not so much in comparison to the billions of dollars of revenue at HD, but he's just one man!

CEO greed knows no bounds. Notice how many public companies are going private now? One reason for that is they want to avoid the encumbrance of reporting under the terms of Sarbanes-Oxley-- great way to scoop up more bling while screwing over workers!

Bush is just grandstanding; no serious person could take him seriously on this.

One worthwhile reform might be for the SEC to lay down some regulations on the incestuous relationship that now occurs between CEOs and Boards of Directors. Part of the reason that CEOs get such sweet contracts is that there are special sweetheart deals going on among friends at the Director level when selecting CEOs. Stockholders should have a bigger voice in the selection of the CEO and Directors than they currently do.

Corporate governance reform legislation is a very unpopular topic in boardrooms and on Wall Street, but it doesn't have to be. One of the main attractions of US companies for international investors is that our reputation for quality in finance, accounting, and corporate governance helps to assure greater safety of investment than in other markets (even though some of that confidence has been shaken lately).