savvy
It would bother you if the board and the execs gave themselves lots of shares, and/or if the execs got big boosts in pay or bonuses, when the company was doing poorly and they were saying they have to cut your pay or dump you even when you'd been more productive. Even if they gave each employee 1 share and the execs 10 shares, it would be a scam.
If the CEO were doing great things there'd be no legitimate excuse to complain. If financial success floated all boats, as it were, there'd be no legitimate excuse to complain. But if we see an exec making stupid decisions, and still reaping out-sized rewards, something stinks.
Movie stars are highly compensated because they draw people through the box office and into the theaters (or pay-per-view or in front of the brain-draining box to be subjected to the advertising). Ditto "sports stars". They provide something many people want and are willing to voluntarily pay to get, and those particular individuals provide more of it to more people, wlling to pay more altogether than others in their fields (at any particular time 30%-50% of professional actors are unemployed, and one heck of a lot of sports wannabes ditto).
Now, I may not be a fan of team X, just as I'm not a fan of IBM or MSFT or the new HP, but I can see that they do have deluded fans willing to pay for their trash. To the extent that they're honest, and we have an open opportunity to criticize them, that's fine; to the extent that they're not honest, or that they try to squelch criticism, that's all the more reason to condemn them.
And I can see altogether too many people eager to lose their privacy to Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Grouply, Friendster, MySpace, GE, Lockheed Martin, Siemens. That's a different matter; they're being dishonest and coy about their flagrant abuses, their massive and extreme privacy violation schemes. And then there's Oracle/Sun who are honest about their evil intentions, and yet very determined and industrious about abusing people.
