John Campbell: “as has been mentioned in the debate tonight, we had a substantive hearing on this subject, and there were six witnesses…”

“as has been mentioned in the debate tonight, we had a substantive hearing on this subject, and there were six witnesses at that hearing. The witnesses were split as to the substance of the bill that is before us. Four of them liked the bill, supported it, and two of them opposed the bill. However, there was one thing on which there was unanimity with the witnesses. All six witnesses agree that a better solution, a better proposal, would be to allow to have shareholders, or to require companies to require a majority vote before seating a shareholder on the board. All six witnesses preferred that to this very prescriptive executive compensation proposal. Because, as we discussed earlier, that would actually give shareholders more rights, through the board, to express their displeasure with a company for excessive executive compensation or simply executive operations that they don't like: for a poor performance, for a bad union contract, for whatever they wanted to express their displeasure more effectively by voting against people who were proposed to be on the board. Because if a majority vote is required to put anyone on the board, it's going to take a lot more votes to get people on there than would have happened under the current system.”