Not surprisingly, in this selection from a Reuters piece on a new industry group fighting for CEO pay status quo, the group reveals its true colors: the average stockholder (meaning the average owner of the company) couldn't possibly understand the complicated reasons why a CEO needs to be paid an outrageous sum of money - hence say-on-pay is bad for business and bad for America:

With business leaders facing rising scrutiny from shareholders and lawmakers about their compensation, a new organization wants to tell corporate America's side of the executive pay story.

Leaders of the Center on Executive Compensation, an industry-backed group based in Washington, say they want to offer a reasoned view about how to create good pay practices.

The center says its mission is not to blindly defend CEO payouts that have angered investors, but to strengthen the links between pay and performance industrywide while ensuring companies remain competitive.

The media has "rightly" put the spotlight on instances of excessive CEO pay, "but our concern is that paints a picture of corporate America in total," said Richard Floersch, the center's chairman.

"For the vast majority of companies, they are dedicated to a very strong executive compensation program with very strong principles around pay for performance," he said. "Unfortunately, that story doesn't come out when you do have some of these outlier situations."

Activist investors have lashed out over executive payouts they consider too lavish, while members of Congress have publicly scolded some corporate chiefs for receiving outsized pay packages at a time when their companies have been hard hit by the U.S. mortgage crisis.

CEOs themselves play no direct role at the new center, an offshoot of the HR Policy Association, which represents human resources officers at big U.S. companies.

The center has a 16-member advisory board made up of chief HR officials at companies such as American Airlines (NYSE: AMR), International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM)) and Lockheed Martin Corp (NYSE: LMT).

Shareholder rights activists say they do not have high hopes that the executive compensation center will advocate for investors.

"This is part of the effort of the business community to protect the status quo from angry shareholders and a concerned Congress," said Richard Ferlauto, director of pension and benefit policy at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a frequent critic of executive pay plans.

"It just shows that the business community is mobilizing, rather than reforming pay," he said.

The executive compensation center opposes the "say-on-pay" investor proposals and a bill pending in Congress calling for a mandatory shareholder vote on executive pay, saying they could end up forcing companies to adopt "cookie-cutter" pay plans aimed at winning shareholder support rather than be in the corporations' best strategic interests.

"There are a lot of unintended consequences and negative consequences from adopting a shareholder vote," said Charles Tharp, the center's executive vice president for policy.