Given nothing to do, I get a lot done. But the moment I start to involve myself with others, I find the law of averages starts working against me. That one person in three or four doesn't come through, and then I start refocusing on the deficiencies of others, and things start to unravel.

It truly is easier to be retired.

This morning I read an informative piece of research on VIX from Harry Schiller, who is a RealMoney.com contributor. From a brief review of Harry's recent filings, I'm not so sure he's been all that accurate a forecaster, but his piece on VIX is well done.

I'm watching former SEC chairman talk about executive compensation packages on Bloomberg TV. He made a statement that the compensation committee at Exxon Mobil, among others, was acting in a thoughtless manner when awarding grossly extreme pay packages. So what's new?

An article at Yahoo Finance today from the Wall Street Journal's Joann Lublin says the same. This week, WSJ has been doing a lot of good reporting on this seemly practice.

How is it that an individual (perhaps somebody you know?) can justify a single year's executive compensation of $50 million, 100 million, or more? Clearly there is a code of financial self-indulgence among corporate executives who seem to be in play to see how far they can push the pay envelope. Isn't it time for shareholders to fight back?

I have a simple solution. An independent executive compensation committee of the Board should be required to fully disclose to shareholders all compensation they recommend for a corporation's top five or ten officers. Then their recommendation should go to a vote of independent shareholders for approval. And if the approval is not given, that vote of non-confidence in the executive compensation committee of the Board should be a vote of termination of those individuals as directors, and the executive pay should stay unchanged until the next AGM.

I think this is a serious problem with today's corporate culture, and it has spread widely through society. A rotting fish stinks from the head, as they say.

It is not a leap of thought to move into the discussion of self regulatory organizations either. You see, whenever there is a closed shop, the loss of objectivity is always going to be a problem.

I see that today with stock exchanges and securities commissions. Self-regulation is in effect just a code word for self-protection. Vested interests of the inside group are promoted and protected.

The Club pretty much has had things to themselves until Eliot Spitzer came along to set things right. The Club will fight this of course, but the broker-dealers association should be a trade association only, and have no mandate for regulation. The government regulator ought to also have no mandate for authority over regulation, but ought to be providing public education and awareness of financial markets, as well as recommending new legislation to the law makers. The investigation and prosecution branch should be exclusively mandated to bring forth civil or criminal charges, and a judicial panel ought to have exclusive jurisdiction in trying these cases.

I feel strongly that people involved in financial services and markets who break laws, rules and regulations should be subject to independent court rulings just as much say as they would be in any other facet of society. I don't understand the double standard.

You see, there is nothing special about financial services and markets to warrant self-regulation any more than a CEO ought to be able to cause his compensation to be in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars simply because he or she has control of a shareholder-owned corporation.

The problem of course is that the very people who espouse democracy really expect the rights and benefits of autocracy for themselves.

With all these ramblings, you can see I'm not too focused on markets today. It's almost Easter, which reminds me I've been doing this for two full years, and I have to wonder if I have done enough.

I think about these things when I open up the financial newspaper in our city today and see a full front page puff piece about the former Justice James Farley: "FARLEY: A LEGEND REFLECTS; AFTER A LONG CAREER, WONDERFUL TALES FROM THE COMMERCIAL LIST" complete with smiling photo and a sub-head: "Justice Farley's legacy: Good humour in bad times".

As you know, I have a quite different view.

Farley moved the courts close to the Club. He empowered the legal community and the vested interests of those who pay their exorbitant fees to stomp on the foundation elements of capital markets, and the time-honored rights of owners of capital.

Farley was a case of judicial activism at its stinking worst. Just ask the former shareholders of companies he ruled could be deep-sixed, like Stelco and Algoma Steel.

There needs to be an independent forensic accounting study done on the Farley cases. All I can do as an observer is say that if it looks, waddles and quacks, I think I know what it is.

Whether it is a Farley or a NASD, IDA, OSC, TSX, NYSE or an executive compensation committee or any other party that has served to hurt the individual owners of capital, I feel strongly there has to be a dissenting voice. But I don't see it. Instead, I see the other side organizing to an even greater degree.

And as media fragments into even smaller fragments, increasingly I see the value of a well-organized and promoted position.

What I also see every day are examples of people scrambling to take something for themselves, and too few actively doing things for the benefit of society. Too often, members of the Club cross the line, and that's not right, but they are oganized well enough to get away with it.

It's been a big morning on the economic calendar, and all North American markets are closed tomorrow, so I ought to get back to work. I see that the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury is now up to 5.03 pct. Wasn't it just a month ago that the Bond King told us that a 4.5 pct yield would be just fine?

This is just another example of how the Club works against your best interests. If you bought bonds a month ago on his advice, you got screwed, and I think by now we all know who was selling those bonds to you.

It's time for the opening bell.

---

Follow-up letter from "K" that I agree with 100-pct:

"Bill, The problem with all regulators is that they cannot just catch and punish the bad guys. They have to inflict endless bureaucratic paperwork on the rest of us. And once a bureaucrat gets to promote another piece of paper it never goes away. One thing that desperately needs to be done is to force b/d's to admit guilt when paying fines. This thing of neither admitting or denying is outrageous. /K"