The tragic story arc of this past year is familiar fare by now. Still, even today, it reads like an overwrought Hollywood movie pitch: It starts on Wall Street with the collapse of the iconic 158-year-old Lehman Brothers. The shockwaves reverberate worldwide, banks put their credit lines in a deep freeze, the U.S. government steps in to take over Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) and orchestrate the sales of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) and Merrill Lynch to Bank of America (NYSE: BAC). At unemployment offices, blue-collar workers mingle with Ivy grads who, just weeks before, pulled in six figures annually, not including bonuses. There are trillion-dollar bailouts, political bungles, Vegas retreats for unapologetic execs, and the biggest bankruptcies in American history.

And that's just the opener.

We've been through bad times brought on by corporate misdeeds before. (The Enron and WorldCom scandals are fairly recent history, actually.) Only this time no one -- not shareholders, not citizens -- was spared.

Cue lawmakers and corporate watchdogs
Financial disasters and reform go hand in hand.

The accounting shenanigans at Enron and WorldCom lead to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, legislation which was designed to increase accounting transparency, ensure independent auditing processes and install harsher penalties for public companies that violated the laws.

This crisis -- The Great Recession, the Great Retirement Reset, Apocalypse '08, or whatever moniker you like -- has spilled over even into the general economy, triggering massive unemployment and impacting even strong non-financial companies like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), and Whole Foods (Nasdaq: WFMI). Naturally, the collateral damage has inspired a frenzy of proposed reforms.

The Shareholder Bill of Rights Act is the most prominent, widely publicized proposal on corporate governance to come out of this crisis. It's the kind of sweeping regulatory overhaul that will change how business is conducted in American listed companies.

It's a memo to Wall Street, executives, and corporate boards, informing them that it's no longer business as usual. But what does that mean to us, the very shareholders this bill is designed to protect?

We really canchange things -- together
We want to ensure that this is a realshareholder bill of rights -- one written byshareholders forshareholders.

We have a history of making sure individual investors are heard and our rights heeded. It was The Motley Fool community that launched the grassroots campaign that led to the passage of the SEC's "Regulation Full Disclosure" in 2000 which served to level the access to corporate information for all investors.

We've testified before congressional committees, urging greater transparencyin the mutual fund industry and demanding more corporate accountability to shareholdersin the aftermath of Enron. We've been asked to advocate on behalf of individual shareholders (that's you, our community) on important topics such as improving financial reporting. And now, we want all of our voices to be heard on this important piece of legislation.

Now, again, we feel it is our duty as individual investors to ensure that the Shareholder Bill of Rights represents our best interests, not those of Wall Street or K Street. And we need your help.

Based on the Fool community's comments we will compose a Foolish call to action to publicly champion and promote to the officials on the Hill who took an oath to represent our best interests.

This isn't just lip service, either. "We're in this brief moment of time when the average citizen is on a level playing field with the lobbyist," Michael Greenberger, University of MarylandLaw School professor and a former director of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said to the New York Times. It's our turn to take the field, Fools, and level it once and for all.

How the Shareholder Bill of Rights affects you
We begin by taking a closer look at the major components of the proposed bill. This is your primer on the Shareholder Bill of Rights -- a rundown of each proposal, the pros and cons, and how reform will affect you and your portfolio.

1. Say on pay: Owning shares of a company makes you a minority owner, and that gives you a right to vote. The bill would put executive compensation on the ballot (a rarity among public companies these days). But will your single vote really make a difference? Find out in " Let's Fix Say on Pay." LINK .

2. Annual board of directors elections: The Shareholder Bill of Rights seeks to give shareholders the opportunity to oust (or reelect) every single board member at the table. If you thought you had that right before when your proxy statement arrived in the mail, you're in for a shocker. " Let's Fix Board Elections" reveals Wall Street's dirty little boardroom election secret. LINK . Continued...