An interview with Michael Moore

His new documentary about the financial crisis is called Capitalism: A Love Story. It comes out October 2nd.

As a free market capitalist, I don't agree with the views he expresses in this interview (and probably the movie), but I'm generally a fan of his works. He's got a good sense of humor.

Note: Despite Poppy Harlow's claim in the interview, in practice shareholders have very little say in hiring and firing boards of directors and CEOs.

When shareholders don't vote, those votes are not discarded. Instead, usually those votes are automatically cast in favor of re-electing directors. Furthermore, many companies have plurality voting rules, which means that even if a director gets less than 50% of shareholder votes, they still win if they get more votes than their nearest competitor. Since they have no competitor, they automatically win re-election under plurality voting rules.

As for CEOs, they usually have one seat on the board of directors. Since the board of directors fires the CEO, the CEO already has one vote cast in his favor. Therefore, it usually takes a supermajority of the other directors to fire a CEO.

Shareholder rights is an area that definitely needs reform, but most congressmen are clueless. They'd rather spend time dictating executive pay.

Update: At least one reader appears not to have understood the paragraph I have now highlighted in red above. Shareholder elections do not work the way most people think they do. The way votes of apathetic, nonvoting shareholders are counted makes the math daunting for those shareholders who actually do care. See the comments for my second attempt at explaining it.

Update #2: It appears that the shareholder voting system I was complaining about will end on January 1, 2010. Hurray! See the comments for details.