Right now, says Bob Monks, a veteran corporate-governance activist, Mr Icahn, for all his faults, "is the manifestation of the legitimacy of ownership power and its entitlement to demand accountability from management".
Democrats, meanwhile, have been reluctant to put up an all-out fight for the large tax increases needed to pay for the expanding entitlement programs demanded by an aging population, without any cuts.
"They believe they have the right entitlement to demand more for playing in the competition.
However, some commentators have taken this kind of defence to be inadequate, holding that the argument must establish not only a general entitlement to demand agreement for judgments of beauty, but an entitlement in each particular case (Savile 1987, Chignell 2007).
Sugar must now navigate through a likely period of political battles as Pentagon spending competes with teetering federal entitlement programs and demands for a balanced budget.
Wall Street plutocrats display a sense of entitlement when they demand billions for bailouts.
For years, the party has demanded entitlement cuts, but the moment the president actually offered one, he was attacked.
Republicans will certainly demand entitlement cuts in return for a rise in the legal ceiling on how much the government can borrow, he reckons.
That's often described as a courageous position, but it's actually anything but: nobody in the Beltway dinner-party circuit has ever been ostracized for demanding entitlement cuts.
The key is having a health insurance system that can say no — no, we won't pay premium prices for drugs that are little if any better, we won't pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit But even as Republicans demand "entitlement reform", they are dead set against anything like that.
We slip into the familiar glove of being a child in our family, automatically taking on its demands, entitlements, language and rules.
