Mock, Paper, Scissors

…need a little more air:

Jeffrey Skilling, the convicted former Enron Corp. chief executive officer, may get out of prison in as little as four years if a judge approves a deal with prosecutors over objections by victims of one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history.

Yes, former CEO of Enron and current Federal Prisoner Jeffrey Skilling decided to buy his freedom by giving “up all claims to $40 million in forfeited assets.” Which when you consider Enron’s initial bill for fraud was $40 BILLION makes it, oh… 1/10 of 1% of his ill-gotten gains.

That’ll learn him.

(Business Week)

As part of a law suit here in Silicon Valley, via the emails of various CEOs, we have learned that titans of industry–those Galtian overlords–conspired to keep engineers from switching companies and presumably receiving higher wages. Instead of letting the invisible hand of the market determine the going rate for engineering talent, they had a Gentlemen’s Agreement to not steal employees from each other.

The inner workings of Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, and others are in the public spotlight.

Steve Jobs, who was a world-class asshole, which might be the secret to being such a gifted CEO, threatened a patent lawsuit against Palm if they did not stop poaching Apple engineers. Jobs wrote to then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan:

I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies.”

Which is about as close to making him an offer he cannot refuse as you can get. Seriously, when the company with the highest value in the world tells you about its deep pockets while threatening litigation, you better believe that you’ve been warned. Next thing: a horse head on your pillow.

Eric Schmidt of Google (motto: Don’t Be Evil) of course was evil: Google’s former senior staffing strategist Amnon Geshuri informs Schmidt that a recruiter, having pursued an Apple employee, will be “terminated within the hour.”

Schmidt seems to have realized that all of these gentlemen’s agreements were probably unethical and potentially illegal. But being Eric Schmidt, instead of stopping the practice, he ordered everyone to quit leaving a paper trail, “less the company be sued later.” So, in short, a cover-up to a conspiracy. Nice work, Nixon. Can you recommend a plumber?

Likewise, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini doesn’t want the handshake agreements to be “broadly known.” This pretty clearly indicates that these guys knew what they were doing was wrong, if not illegal and in a delicate knife-in-the-back twist of irony, declaring that there be no paper trail is now in the paper trail.

Yes, these CEOs are the same guys who squash any attempt to collectively bargain, who fight any regulations that might interfere with the alleged free-markets.

Now if only we had an Attorney General who was amongst the breathing, there might be charges and a highly entertaining frog-march of the elites to the pokey. But we don’t. We also don’t have a media that is covering this story. The business press isn’t covering this story, and if you want to consider how it could be that wages did not improve with the economy, here is one part of that puzzle. But the press is covering the vital issue of Beyoncé lip-syncing and the ever-present threat of celebrity side-boob.

The Verge has the entire collection of documents up in a gallery. It’s infuriating, but it is really worth reading.

(Hat tip: Scissorhead Lambchop)

“Let us accept Rev. Al’s point and the president’s point about fairness,” Fiorina replied. “But equally, it is not fair that public employee union pensions and benefits are so rich now that cities and states are going bankrupt and college tuition is going up 25 and 30 percent or police and firefighters are being cut. There’s a lot that isn’t fair right now.”

For the record, Fiorina is the person who started the first big wave of technology mass-firings and off-shoring to low-wage counties like India and China. During her brief tenure at HP, Fiorina fired over 18,000 employees and coined the phrase Right-sizing to dismiss it. When the Board canned her, she got a very fair $43 Million golden parachute for her troubles.

(Raw Story)

Prarie Weather has a really good post up that deconstructs the mythology that the economy is ready to roar back if only there were some qualified people to fill the jobs.

While it might seem obvious, the issue is that the employer is not willing to pay for the skills that they want. So it is really that they would hire people if only they were willing to work for a pittance, or better yet for free.

Hostess Brands Inc., makers of the ubiquitous Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread, is going out of business. The management claims it is because the associated workers’ unions would not accept a pay cut, and not enough scabs crossed the picket lines to keep production going:

Hostess Brands Inc. had earlier warned employees that it would file to unwind its business and sell off assets if plant operations didn’t return to normal levels by 5 p.m. Thursday. In announcing its decision, Hostess said its wind down would mean the closure of 33 bakeries, 565 distribution centers, approximately 5,500 delivery routes and 570 bakery outlet stores in the United States.

The Irving, Texas-based company had already reached a contract agreement with its largest union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But thousands of members in its second-biggest union went on strike late last week after rejecting in September a contract offer that cut wages and benefits. Officials for the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union say the company stopped contributing to workers’ pensions last year.

He denied that the decision to shut down could be a last ditch negotiation tactic to get the union back to the table.

[CEO Greg] Rayburn, who first joined Hostess earlier this year as a restructuring expert, had earlier said that many workers crossed picket lines this week to go back to work despite warnings by union leadership that they’d be fined.

“The problem is we don’t have enough crossing those lines to maintain normal production,” Rayburn told Fox Business.

And that last paragraph is the tell.

What’s interesting in the article is that it barely mentions any other factors that might be involved, like price increases of ingredients or that the demand for these “treats” has dropped in what is a highly competitive market segment.

Which is cold comfort to all those people who are losing their jobs. We are sure Rayburn will be feted as a principled Job Creator and move onto another gig.

Update 1: Gawker notes that: Out of 18,500 individuals employed by Hostess, only 5,000 belong to the bakers’ union. The strikes began on Nov. 9, when the company imposed a contract that would cut workers’ wages by 8 percent. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) said the contract would also cut benefits by 27 to 32 percent.

Update 2: Fortune has an article from August that is interesting; essentially Hostess got “Bained”:

“… Within a month of taking over, Rayburn had to preside over a public-relations fiasco. Some unsecured creditors had informed the court that last summer — as the company was crumbling — four top Hostess executives received raises of up to 80%. (Driscoll had also received a pay raise back then.) The Teamsters saw this as more management shenanigans. “Looting” is how Hall described it in TV interviews.

Rayburn announced that the pay of the four top executives would go down to $1 for the year, but that their full salaries would be reinstated no later than Jan. 1 (2012). Hostess pays Rayburn $125,000 a month, according to court filings. At the same time Rayburn became CEO, Gephardt’s son Matthew, 41, the COO of the Gephardt Group, was put on the Hostess board as a $100,000-a-year independent director.

[snip]

What the hedge funds want is some degree of capitulation from a union whose members will otherwise lose thousands of jobs in liquidation. If the hedge funds don’t get it, they’ve concluded, the company isn’t worth saving.”

(NBC)

…you’ve already lost:

It’s about customer choice and not politics, [Federated, owner of Macy*s] CEO Terry Lundgren tells petition organizer. “Trump’s brand has become toxic and contemptible, it represents mean spirited bullying and chicanery,” Angelo Carusone replied.

The petition, which urges Macy*s to dump Trump as a spokesperson for the ubiquitous store, already has 570,000 signatures.

I would say that it is a colossal marketing fail already. Anyway, you can read the back and forth between the CEO and the activist Angelo Carusone who is largely credited with being the driving force who got Glenn Beck off TeeVee and delivered a body blow to Junkie Limbaugh by successfully getting their advertisers to drop them over their inflammatory and racist comments.

(BuzzFeed)

There is an apocryphal story flittering about Greater Wingnuttia today claiming that in Nevada a CEO with 118 workers fired 22 workers because The Kenayn Usurper won re-election and now he needs to shrink his business to pay for extra regulations from Obamacare:

“Well unfortunately, and most of my employees are Hispanic — I’m not gonna go into what kind of company I have, but I have mostly Hispanic employees — well unfortunately we know what happened and I can’t wait around anymore, I have to be proactive. I had to lay off 22 people today to make sure that my business is gonna thrive and I’m gonna be around for years to come. I have to build up that nest egg now for the taxes and regulations that are coming my way. Elections do have consequences, but so do choices. A choice you make every day has consequences and you know what, I’ve always put my employees first, but unfortunately today I have to put me and my family first, and you watch what’s gonna happen. I’m just one guy with 114 employees — well was 114 employees — watch what happens in the next six months. The Dow alone lost 314 points today. There’s a tsunami coming and if you didn’t think this election had consequences, just wait.”

Notice how he implies that he is going to fire Hispanic employees? In gambling that is called The Tell. It’s BS. But let’s look a little deeper…

Aside from the fact that he did not and it seems could not do the math quickly enough to say he now had 92 employees (and trust me, every business owner knows exactly how many people are on the payroll, especially after a layoff), wouldn’t say what his business is, it’s name, or how he plans to deal with presumably more demand and a smaller staff, you know, the whole thing is totally believable.

Perhaps he forgot to mention the backwards B that was carved on his face election night?

(CBS Las Vegas)

Please, only a chump thinks that US Corporations have an effective tax rate about zero.

(Image: Business Insider)

America’s best-loved CEO (which puts him slightly behind tapeworms) has left his job as a pundit at Fortune Magazine and joined (momentarily?) the unemployed. His departure comes following his BLS-Truther moment where he claimed that The Kenyan Usurper Hawaiian Devil Baby cooked the books to show that the economy was improving.

Welch, who takes a backseat to no one (not even Carly Fire’em All Fiorina when it comes to firing people (see 1000,000 jobs lost during his reign)), could not believe that somehow the serfs had found jobs in this bad economy. The Coup De Grâs came when his employer Fortune Magazine actually called him out on his BS.

And the fearless former CEO Welch (which in past tense, Welcher means a person who does not keep his obligations), “sent an e-mail to Reuters’ Steve Adler and Serwer saying that he and his wife Suzy, who have jointly written for Reuters and Fortune in the past, were “terminating our contract” and will no longer be sending our “material to Fortune.” How’s that for professionalism?

Here’s the best part:

Fortune tried to contact Welch to find out if the resignation was related to our reporting of his tweet, but Welch didn’t return our phone call.

Courageous Jack Welch: Always the professional.

(CNN Money, and CNN Money)

So now the Stench scoop of the day from David Corn at Mother Jones magazine is this little gem:

Willard explains the Bain Capital business plan: not creating jobs but “harvesting” companies they take over.

Which of course can only remind me of this movie:

Seriously, who (other than a farmer) ever says harvest and not mean something ghoulish?

(Mother Jones)

OK, I lied:

Comment Cat is not amused.

…Willard wants to export our vulture capitalism to the rest of the world:

“The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work and the fostering of free enterprise,” said Romney. “Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America’s own economy – and that is, that free people perusing happiness in their own ways build a strong and prosperous nation.”

Romney said that freedom and free markets is not perfect, but it is more reliable and more successful. He said he wants to negotiate new partnerships and create what he will call the Reagan Economic Zone – a new free trade zone. “We’re going to couple aid with trade and private investments,” said Romney.

–His Willardness, talking at something humorously known as CGI, the Clinton Global Initiative. And it is only fair to note that Clinton signed every Free Trade Agreement that came to him and exported our jobs in the process.

Shorter Willard: “Screw Democracy, show me the cheddar!”

In a nutshell, Willard’s Reagan Economic Zone is the World Trade Organization without what few pesky regulations inhibit it from complete Corporate Rule of the entire planet. He’s been selling this snake oil since at least September of 2011, which means he’s held it as a policy position for an amazingly long time. For Willard.

But on a bright note, Willard can now join the club that names something after Saint Ronnie, so he’s completed a checklist item to win the preznincy.

(Mediaite)

Hey guys, remember the other day when we posted this picture and chuckled over how uncomfortable magical panties enthusiast Willard looked with all those coal miners? Me Neither!, but anyway it seems he had a reason to be nervous: the miners from Murray Energy were forced to attend without pay and upon threat of being fired if they didn’t attend.

“Our managers communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend,” Moore said. He confirmed that pay was docked for all the workers.

Think Progress did a little digging on Murray: “According to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics, Murray Energy has donated more than $900,000 to politicians in the last year — all of them Republicans.”

(Think Progress)

Charles Schumer

Yeah, I know.

It’s uglier than we thought:

“We got the pre-spun job quantity data already, where we learned that nearly 3 times the headline print was due to seasonal and B/D adjustments and is thus nothing but noise. Now we get the quality. As can be seen below, courtesy of Table A9 from the Household Survey, in July the number of part-time jobs added was 31K, bringing the total to 27,925, just shy of the all time record of 28,038. Full time jobs? Down 228,000 to 114,345, lower than the February full-time jobs print of 114,408. Once again, more and more Americans are relinquishing any and all benefits associated with Full Time Jobs benefits, and instead are agreeing on a job. Any job. Even if it means working just 1 hour a week. For the BLS it doesn’t matter – 1 hour of work a week still qualifies you as a Part-Time worker.”

“Once again, more and more Americans are relinquishing any and all benefits associated with Full Time Jobs benefits, and instead are agreeing on a job. Any job. Even if it means working just 1 hour a week. For the BLS it doesn’t matter – 1 hour of work a week still qualifies you as a Part-Time worker.”

This has been the thing sticking in my mind. I’ve written before about seeing a former colleague of mine (a gifted engineer) working as a sales guy at Best Buy selling flat screen teevees instead of designing them.

I get it. There is a point where putting food on the table outweighs all other concerns, and so why not accept that Sales Associate job at the big box store, who will give you just enough hours to not qualify for benefits? Complain? Hey, there’s a line out the door waiting for your spot.

It isn’t just that this is the new normal, it is that you can make the argument that this is the policy of the United States. This is the desired outcome from our elected officials and their paymasters when they design legislation.

But here’s the thing that really worries me: the rising middle class in Asia is a market of 3.5 Billion people; our declining middle class in the US is 350 Million. So who do you think is going to buy more stuff? Where do you think that the market is?

Our multi-national corporations have gamed this system; it is not just that the cost of production is lower “over there” (wherever the there is), but it is also where they want to sell stuff. The various Free Trade Agreements have made this possible, and there are more in the works.

Generally, I am of the opinion that legislation can be undone; globalization is not a law of nature like gravity. But I’m guessing that even if NAFTA, CAFTA, and all the other X-AFTAs were repealed (and that’s not going to happen), these companies have moved on. Those jobs are not coming back; we’ve already gone past the tipping point.

(Zero Hedge)

This is an example of what can happen when local governments privatize public services:

Tomas Lopez, the 21-year-old lifeguard, was fired on Monday after he left his station to help a man who had been pulled out of the water in an unprotected area of Hallandale Beach. According to the Orlando Sun Sentinel, Lopez and an off-duty nurse tended to the man, a 21-year-old from Estonia, until paramedics arrived. The man—who is recovering at a local hospital—was in a “swim at your own risk” area of the beach about 1,500 feet south of the boundary lifeguards are expected to patrol.
…snip…
“We are not a fire-rescue operation,” Jeff Ellis, head of company that manages the lifeguards, told the paper. “We are strictly a lifeguard organization—we limit what we do to the protected swimming zones that we’ve agreed to service.” The company has provided lifeguards for the area’s public beaches and pools since 2003.

And so the issue is?

“We have liability issues and can’t go out of the protected area,” Lopez’s supervisor, Susan Ellis, told WPTV. “What he did was his own decision. He knew the company rules and did what he thought he needed to do.”

Sweet baby Jeebus with a life preserver. Rescuing someone outside of your imaginary border could open you up to a lawsuit, while letting him drown is OK? I’d like to know what the city manager has to say about this.

“We take the safety of all visitors to our beaches very seriously,” Hallandale Beach City Manager Renee Crichton said in a statement. “Whether they are in a protected area or unprotected area, we believe aid must be rendered.”

One of the common complaints I hear from Wingnuts about Public Employees is that they say that something “is not my job.” And so here is a private sector company in charge of lifeguards saying that rescuing someone is not their job. But we probably won’t hear a single peep about that.

(The Lookout)

“The average American family lost 38.8 percent of its wealth from 2007 to 2010, with the biggest losses concentrated among households with the most assets tied to their homes, a Federal Reserve study shows.”

Well, for most families, that is.

(Americablog)

…it’s better than most of the programming on CNN:

Ex-CNN exec caught on video putting dog poo in mailbox

On the bright side, the video to go along with the dog poop in the mail box story will be better than Brisket^®‘s teevee show!

Just as proof that the rules for the 1% don’t apply to you and I:

Meanwhile, details emerged about former CEO Scott Thompson’s departure. Thompson, who was ousted Sunday, will not receive a severance or unvested stock options, according to a document filed by Yahoo with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He will keep a cash bonus of $1.5 million he received in February and restricted stock worth $5.5 million that he received in March. Thompson’s brief tenure at the Internet company blew up when he was found to have claimed a computer science degree he did not earn.

Not bad pay for 4 months of work in a job that you lied to get to.

(Mercury News)

There is a club. You are not in it.

Silicon Valley has been on the edge of our collective seats this week waiting for the Fates to determine, well, the fate of Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson, he of the mysteriously awarded CS Masters Degree from a college that doesn’t offer one, at least not at that time that his resume claims that he earned it.

Anyway, in the land of credentials (it is common here for people to state at the beginning of meetings their colleges, degrees, and honor society memberships, and I wish I was kidding about that) to have someone rise in the ranks without a degree is not unusual (see Faceberg, Mark or Jobs, Steve or even Ellison, Larry), and is somewhat an expected archetype. However, having someone rise in the ranks with a wholly fictitious resume is somewhat unusual.

Now, if Yahoo! was a small and stable tech company, I suppose this story of false credentials would probably fly under the radar, but Yahoo! is anything but small and stable. It is still (amazingly) the most visited web portal on the internet, and even while it is understood by many to be in serious trouble, it is still a billion dollar company. One would think that when hiring a new CEO that someone, somewhere, might have the job of vetting the candidates.

Maybe the thinking is that Thompson who came to Yahoo! from PayPal (a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay) was already vetted by his previous employer, and I suppose that he was, so why bother vet him again? After all, if (then eBay and now HP CEO) Meg Whitman hired him, well, he’s gotta be as good as Skype. (Meg bought Skype but did not buy the intellectual property rights, or apparently the source code… eBay sold Skype–or whatever it was that Meg bought–back to Skype’s founders and overall lost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal after she left eBay.)

Anyway, since it was revealed about a week ago that Thompson’s credentials are anything but real, he’s apologized multiple times to the remaining Yahoo! employees (he’d already laid of 2,000 of ‘em), his apologists have issued numerous explanations (including that an executive recruitment company inserted the degree and he never noticed), and the media has had numerous, thoughtful “conversations” about resumé padding. No one has used the ugly words, lied or liar. Mistake, scandal, I swear I even saw boo-boo; the language has been gentle.

Scott Thompson is a liar. He lied about an easily fact-checked degree on his resume, which makes him an idiot as well as a liar. The people who vetted his candidacy are idiots. They should be walked out the door, too. For cause.

And before we get into the padding a resume vs. lying ethical discussion, I think that there is a world of difference between including the unpaid internship working for your father and declaring you have a degree from an accredited university. Let’s not go there. There is no way to spin it to his advantage.

So there is a strange and terrible object-lesson to this story. Someone who managed to lie his way into the boardrooms and upper echelons of corporate America, literally climbed into the 1% got caught in what I can only think would be a career-killing lie, and he was not walked out the door immediately as you or I would be. (True story: I saw know someone who was fired for claiming to know Power Point. This person is just as credentialed as Scott Thompson and clearly more honest, so in theory s/he could be running Yahoo!)

I don’t wish ill will on any working stiff. Scott Thompson will fail upwards. His departure press release doesn’t mention it, but I’m sure he got a handsome golden parachute for his less than 6 months tenure (January 4, 2012 to today). Thompson’s family will never know hunger or insecurity. He will find himself at another company or more likely at a hedge fund or venture capital fund; maybe Meg will hire him to work at HP.

UPDATE 1: Yahoo! has named an interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, who helped steer (Fox) News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Carol Bartz was the previous CEO of Yahoo! who was fired over the phone in 2011.

“Someone took charge of a cover-up, which we were victim to and I regret. I also have to say that I failed … and I am very sorry for it.”

–Rupert Murdoch

Where’s Willard’s Wallet?

Notable humorist and magical panties enthusiast Willard 2.0 shares an amusing anecdote from his family history:

“One of most humorous [stories] I think relates to my father. You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors … They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” said Romney. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Romney said he recalled a parade in which the school band marching with his father’s campaign only knew the Wisconsin fight song, not the Michigan song.

“So every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.

That’s so funny, Willard, you madcap raconteur! Oh, it just must have had all of the other swells at the club in stitches, simply in stitches! I bet Bunny Bixler wetted herself, didn’t she, when she heard that old chestnut, eh?

There’s nothing like how the misfortune of others–that you caused by laying them off–is inadvertently funny when it gets in the way of your plans to pursue oligarchy. Oh, you scamp, tell us another story!

(TPM)

“I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”

Our everyday guy Willard to NASCAR attendees wearing plastic ponchos in the downpour. No one understands why he has trouble connecting to the huddled masses.

Notorious eaves-dropping soulless homunculus James Murdoch, son of billionaire media mogul and ethics-challenged wing-ding Rupert Murdoch, has resigned his post as the top executive in charge of News International. However, before you pass around a collection plate to give him a nice going-away lunch, News Corporation said that Murdoch would be moved over to the company’s international television business, and that he remains News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer.

“See I’m a Detroit guy, so, you know, I only have domestics. I have a couple of the Cadillacs at two different houses. You know, small crossovers.”

–Willard, back in September, trying to be an everyday guy. So you see, he thought when he talked about his wife having a couple of Caddies that it had already been pre-screened.

(ABC News)

UPDATE: “Romney’s a dork.” — Kathleen Parker of the WaPo.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(AFP)

Robotic magical panties enthusiast Willard chose a football stadium to make a triumphant address to Detroit, and, um, no one came:

Before 1,200 guests of the Detroit Economic Club, Romney took to the podium on the 30 yard line of Ford Field stadium — home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions — surrounded by 65,000 empty seats.

Stick a fork in him, he’s done.

(Destination 2012)

Willard ought to fire his debate prep team for not doing a better job getting him prepared for the most obvious question of the night.

Also, if you were an IRS Agent, wouldn’t this nervousness just make you whet your lips? There’s a story there.

Notable hair-helmeted millionair heir Willard thinks attacks on him are signs of class warfare and envy.

Meanwhile, plans continue for the design of his California beach-front mansion as soon as he gets permission to rid the property of the $16-million teardown.