Mr. DeFAZIO. Okay. Well, then I yield myself the balance of my time.
The gentleman refers to the board of directors. He's apparently not particularly conversant with how those elections are set up so that it is extraordinarily difficult to nominate and/or replace anyone on boards of directors the way most corporate governance is set up.
You know, it's amazing to me that somehow those who have a direct interest, Americans who own the stock, they should just sell their stock. Well, maybe their stock's worth half what it was last year because of crumby management, and he says, well, just sell your stock because they lost half your money and let the CEO still get an exorbitant salary. Come on, is that a good decision? No.
The other alternative would be to actually allow the owners, in what I think is a fairly well-accepted form of government in the United States of America, those people to actually vote in a meaningful and binding way, as opposed to an advisory way, to a board [Page: H4306] of directors who are all first cousins, who all serve on each other's boards, and all feather each other's nests and all compensate themselves very well. Come on, we all know how this works.
If you want to just stick up for the current system, then stop this sort of bifurcated argument, oh, the Democrats are really bad because they didn't do this earlier, and it was in another bill that could have been or should have been but we don't want to do it now, and we don't want to do it in a meaningful way. That's where the Republicans are coming down here, and I find it to be a most disingenuous argument.
