What we are seeing here is the contradicion, exposed at the time of Enron, between finance capital at its most rational and the executive stratum of companies. The former wants to reduce the latter to gilded employees, reliable intelligentsia in the production of surplus value. The latter wish to believe, that they, not the shareholders, are the sovereign owners of their particular bit of the means of production expected to be ingenious in managing share prices. This contradiction becomes wobbly of course at a time of falling stock exchanges.
This is also a longer term contradiction within late finance capital, although helped on with a little popular rhetoric like this exposee on the front page of the Independent this morning
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=399878
Ultimately finance capital will win, by reformist degrees. This is a manifestation of the tendency of capital to become a more and more abstract expression of the social nature of the means of production, preparing the way for socialism, but not without overt class struggle. The irony is that the Independent thinks it is independent, and that is why it can raise the issue.
The struggle in the UK however will only get so far, without a comparable struggle in the USA.
Oddly this may require the democratic forces (small 'd') to make some tactical alliances with the most rational elements of finance capital.
The pension fund managers are the most obvious way to do it.
Chris Burford London