April 18, 2013
For those of you who haven’t heard, The Huffington Post has agreed to partner with CEPR to host a new website called Director Watch. Director Watch will bring to light the names of people serving on corporate boards who get large paychecks even as the companies they oversee are going down the tubes.
It will rely on crowdsourcing, meaning that people will submit information on directors who failed to effectively restrict CEO pay and ensure that the companies they oversaw were on sound footing, but nonetheless got rich in the process. The staff of Director Watch will verify the information and will post it on the Internet in a user-friendly and easily searchable format.
Because the site will be crowdsourced, we decided to use crowdfunding to raise the money needed to get Director Watch up and running (we need to hire staff to research the initial entries and to design the website). We have only 16 days left to raise over $13,000. Can you help?
We need to make our $17,000 goal in order to receive all of the funds donated so far. It’s a huge sum for us, but a drop in the bucket compared to the $96,000,000 salary that Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison earned in 2012. That figure was twice as much as he earned in 2011…yes, he received a hefty raise even though Oracle’s stock dropped 22% in fiscal 2012. And $17,000 is about the same amount as Erskine Bowles pulled in for an hour or two of labor as a director at Morgan Stanley (which also lost value under his and the other board members watchful eyes.)
As an added incentive CEPR is offering FREE shares of “stock” in Director Watch. (This nearly got us kicked off the indiegogo site for violating the terms of use, as we had promised that we would not “offer, sell or distribute stocks, bonds or other securities, real estate, insurance or banking or financial services.” So please remember that while stock in Director Watch is most definitely priceless, it has no financial value.)
No, stock in Director Watch comes with a different kind of reward. As Dean recently stated: “The point of Director Watch is to let everyone know that the Erskine Bowles of the world are not decent honorable types who warrant public respect, but rather key accomplices in the corruption at the top of corporate America. With Director Watch, someone will be watching.”
Director Watch needs your support.
