By some accident of fate, on February 25, 1997, the multiple layers of anti-corporate rage converged over the Mighty Ducks hockey arena in Anaheim, California. It was Disney’s annual meeting and about 10,000 shareholders crowded into the arena to rake Michael Eisner over the coals. They were upset that he had paid more than $100 million in a severance package to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who’d lasted only fourteen scandal-racked months at Disney as second in command. Eisner was further attacked for his own $400 million multiyear pay package, as well as for stacking the board with friends and paid Disney consultants. As if shareholders weren’t angry enough, the obscene amounts of money lavished on Ovitz and Eisner were thrown into harsh relief by an unrelated shareholders’ resolution chiding Disney for paying starvation wages to workers in its overseas factories, and calling for independent monitoring of these practices. Outside the arena, dozens of National Labor Committee supporters were shouting and waving placards about the plight of Disney’s Haitian workforce. Of course the monitoring resolution was trounced, but the way the issues of sweatshop labor and executive compensation played off one another must have been music to Charles Kernaghan’s ears.

Eisner, who apparently expected the gathering to be little more than a pep rally, was clearly caught off guard by this confluence of events. Wasn’t he simply playing by the rules—making his shareholders rich and himself richer? Weren’t profits up a healthy 16 percent from the year before? Wasn’t the entertainment industry, as Eisner himself reminded the restless gathering, “extremely competitive”? Ever the expert at speaking to children, Eisner ventured, “I don’t think people understand executive compensation.”21

Or maybe they understood it all too well. [...]