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<p>BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Steve Appleton, the chief operating officer and chairman of Micron, has died in a small plane crash in Boise. He was 51.</p> <p>Micron spokesman Dan Francisco confirmed Appleton's death Friday. Trading in Micron stocks has been halted.</p>

"We’re experiencing the beginning of the repercussions of the financial crisis,” said Michel-Edouard Leclerc on Wednesday during an interview on Europe 1, France’s largest radio network. He is the CEO of the second largest retailer in France, E. Leclerc, a privately owned cooperative association with 555 stores—mostly hypermarkets—in France and 117 stores in other countries. Sounding like a CEO one minute and like a populist presidential candidate the next, he emphasized that his company has done relatively well in 2011, sales being up 5%. Strategy: offer deals and cut prices. The whole industry, he said, “ate up inflation” with their...

A surprising piece of news was buried in an article this week. Friday, The Mercury News reported the three top executives at Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called Hangar One, sits a few miles from the Googleplex and it’s well known the Google executives have special permission from NASA to park their jets at Moffett.

Herman Cain has every right to feel uncomfortable. According to news reports based on anonymous sources, the GOP presidential frontrunner is suspected of unspecified acts of sexual harassment while running the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. Cain’s first accuser considered coming forward, but now says she will stay in the shadows. Like a hit-and-run driver, she wounded Cain and now speeds off into the night. What, if anything, transpired between Cain and his associates remains as unclear as this episode’s ultimate impact on Cain’s upstart, surprisingly successful, and — for many — refreshing candidacy. Too bad this media Nor’easter...

Charles E. "Ed" Haldeman, Jr., has announced his plans to step down as chief executive officer of mortgage giant Freddie Mac sometime in the next year. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which regulates Freddie and its counterpart Fannie Mae, announced Wednesday that Haldeman is looking to leave the government-sponsored enterprise some time next year.

Herman Cain's former employees at Godfather's Pizza recall him as an energetic and dynamic leader. They say he listened to new ideas and went out of his way to remember everyone's name and wanted his team to do the same. Four times a year, Godfather's executives would hold corporate meetings with all 300 employees in the company's auditorium in its Omaha headquarters. According to two former employees, at each meeting, Cain would pick one executive at random and call them onto the stage to identify each employee by name. If the executive missed any names, they would be required to...

NEW CANAAN, Conn. – Daisy Franklin of Norwalk was among the nearly 100 protestors who came to the New Canaan home of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt Saturday to take part in the first known Occupy Wall Street rally in Fairfield County. "I worked in a small Norwalk manufacturing company for 15 years until it was forced to shut down a year ago," Franklin, 55, told the crowd, using a bullhorn. "Now, I get by on less than $200 a week of unemployment for me and my daughter. When you run out of money, you run out of options. So,...

Top business executives feel less confident about the U.S. economic outlook and their ability to hire new workers than in previous quarters this year, according to a survey released Thursday by Business Roundtable. Only 36% of chief executives thought their company's U.S. employment would increase in the next six months and 24% thought it would decrease, according to a survey of 140 chief executives conducted by Business Roundtable between Aug. 29 and Sept. 16. By contrast, in the second quarter poll, 51% of executives thought their company's U.S. employment would increase and only 11% thought it would decrease.

Black & Decker is a household name across the US, as in the UK – as the maker of home and garden improvement products such as the power drill. The company made $8.4bn in sales in 2010 in the US, with net earnings of $198m. The 101-year-old Maryland-based company has also recently risen in the Fortune standings of top businesses from number 543 to number 288. For this stellar performance, John Lundgren, the CEO, was paid $32.6m last year, a 253% raise over the previous year. In short, this looks like a solidly successful business that might seem worth emulating...

"In my own business, securities regulations have prohibited me from hiring brokers for more than three years. I was even fined fifteen thousand dollar expressly for hiring too many brokers in 2008. In the process I incurred more than $500,000 in legal bills to mitigate a more severe regulatory outcome as a result of hiring too many workers. I have also been prohibited from opening up additional offices. I had a major expansion plan that would have resulted in my creating hundreds of additional jobs. Regulations have forced me to put those jobs on hold. In addition, the added cost...

Dana talks to Gibson CEO - Henry Juszkiewicz about the OVERSTEPPING of this administration - and the Dept. Of Justice raiding Gibson of inventory....AGAIN.

Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, Inc. was on The Dana Loesch Show on Friday. Gibson is under attack by the the Obama Justice Department for accusations that the company broke American Indian laws. Juszkiewiz said the government suggested that the company's use of unfinished wood from India is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because of the Justice Department's interpretation of a law in India. The Holder Justice Department raided at least two Gibson manufacturing plants this week forcing hundreds of workers off their jobs. Juszkiewiz says the company lost a million dollars this week. Finally, Henry...

“How can the government help me?” This seems to be a growing sentiment among the American middle class. “The land of opportunity” is quickly becoming the “nation of the needy.” Here’s a question I received from a reader just last week: “I am not happy with how things are going since the Bush Administration allowed tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy. These cuts were supposed to end for those who just keep earning more off the middle class. My question is: I am told that investors can invest as little as $1000.00 in real estate, and make a living...

The CEO of Starbucks is urging fellow business leaders to join him in getting Washington’s attention by refusing to give money to political campaigns until there is a serious plan to rein in deficits. “I am asking that all of us forgo political contributions until the Congress and the president return to Washington and deliver a fiscally disciplined long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people,” Howard Schultz wrote Sunday in an email to business honchos obtained by POLITICO. Schultz called on CEOs and other corporate executives to “voice your perspective publicly,” and he has done the same in...

CEOs of the nation's leading banks, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, sent a letter to the White House and Congress on Thursday urging them to hurry up and reach a debt agreement. In the letter, sent by the Financial Services Forum to President Obama and members of Congress, the CEOs said an agreement needs to be made this week, or else there will be "grave" consequences. "A default on our nation's obligations, or a downgrade of America's credit rating, would be a tremendous blow to business and investor confidence -- raising interest rates for everyone who borrows, undermining the...

As you may have heard once or twice before, it’s a marathon, not a sprint (unless, of course, you’re talking about a sprint, then it’s a sprint, not a marathon). But we digress. Mark Rosenthal, CEO of Current TV, uses the sports metaphor to express his lack of concern over the second-week ratings drop for Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. The show saw its ratings shrink by nearly a third during the week of June 27, averaging 93,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic.

Welcome to Big Business Watch Big Business Watch tracks the public policy agenda of big business and aggressively challenges CEOs when their policies run counter to the tenets of free enterprise, limited government and liberty. Big Business has played a major role in passing ObamaCare and some of the largest corporations are backing Obama's effort to regulate energy. We can't ignore the driving force big business plays in public policy. Welcome to Big Business Watch Big Business Watch tracks the public policy agenda of big business and aggressively challenges CEOs when their policies run counter to the tenets of free...

"Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Mao Zedong and Chevrolet." That could be GM's new slogan if recent comments by CEO Dan Akerson are taken to heart. Akerson shared a somewhat bizarre vision for GM in an interview with the Detroit News when he stated, "Whoever comes after me; it's going to be a more important appointment than mine because he or she will have to carry on a cultural revolution here. It's just like the Communist Party in China in the 1960s, there has to be a cultural revolution here." These comments come just weeks after the Washington Times...

I admit that when five of the Republican candidates for president appeared at their lecterns in the first televised debate of the season, I said to myself, oh no. Not another black guy. We’ve already been snookered into electing the first black president who has turned out to be a total flop at managing the country. I watched the entire debate, however, and by the time it was over, I was convinced we should have waited and made this guy our first black president. We should have withheld the honor until a black candidate appeared whose job application showed him...

Greg Hengler reminds us why, as a politician, it’s wise to pick your friends and economic examples carefully. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama made an appearance at Caterpillar to claim that passing his Porkulus bill would keep the manufacturer of heavy equipment from conducting layoffs. Jim Owen, their CEO at the time, responded that Obama was wrong. Thanks to that dustup, the firm gets plenty of attention when it comes to Obama’s economic policies and friendliness towards the business and investment community.CNBC asked Caterpillar’s current CEO, Doug Oberhelman, to evaluate the changes made at the beginning of the year...

The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensation Study was conducted by Hay Group, a management-consulting firm. The study analyzes CEO pay from the biggest 350 U.S. public companies by revenue that filed their definitive proxy statements between May 1, 2010, and April 30, 2011. Survey Methodology & Terms Definitions Footnotes How to Use This Chart: Click on a column heading to sort by that category. For an individual executive's full compensation details, as well as a link to the proxy statement, click the relevant row. All figures in thousands

HHS this month sent a letter to 83-year-old Forest Labs CEO Howard Solomon, announcing it would henceforth refuse to do business with him. What earned Mr. Solomon the blackball? Well, nothing that he did—as admitted even by HHS. In any case, the federal complaint contained no suggestion that Mr. Solomon was involved with, or even aware of, misconduct. And the question of his continued leadership was never part of the plea deal. Only after a federal court ratified the deal in March did HHS drop its intent-to-ban bomb. Mrs. Sebelius unearthed a dusty provision in the Social Security Act that...

Few things raise the dander of radical egalitarians more than the growth of CEO pay. The umbrage is as much aesthetic as it is economic, as evidenced by the fact that the most impassioned complaints leveled against these corporate titans are not so much criticisms of their failure to deliver value for money but over the gap between CEO pay and wages for everybody else. That's because the former criticism raises the inconvenient question, value to whom? And therein lays the answer to the riddle posed by this column. First the facts. CEO pay has undoubtedly been on a tear....

Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons has a message for those outraged by a four-minute video of an elephant hunt in Zimbabwe on his Go Daddy video site. More Video Watch: Hunter Illegally Kills Bear Using Pastries Watch: Nat Geo: Leopard Queen Watch: Hole Rips in Roof of Plane"I think if you had all the facts and you knew exactly what was going on and the difference it makes in these people's lives there," he told ABC News Radio, "you'd feel completely different." Parsons has said he participated in the hunt because the elephants were a nuisance destroying crops the local...

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is backpedaling on his support for Obama’s health care law. The coffee giant CEO said in a statement that the way the bill is written under the current guidelines, the pressure on small business because of the mandate is “too great.” Martha MacCallum spoke to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum about Schultz’s statement and the impact to small business owners.

U.S. CEOs IN BRAZIL WITH OBAMA JEFFREY R. IMMELT - CEO, GENERAL ELECTRIC Jeffrey Robert Immelt is the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the U.S.-based conglomerate General Electric. He holds an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from DartmouthCollege where he currently serves on the board of trustees and was president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Alpha, and an M.B.A. from HarvardBusinessSchool. On January 21, 2011, President Obama announced Immelt's appointment as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers.. "Immelt will retain his post at G.E. while becoming "chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a...

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned, NPR just announced. This follows yesterday's news that then-NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) was videotaped slamming conservatives and questioning whether NPR needs federal funding during a lunch with men posing as members of a Muslim organization (they were working with political activist James O'Keefe on a "sting.") Vivian Schiller quickly condemned Ron Schiller's comments, and he moved up an already-announced decision to leave NPR and resigned effective immediately.

Not even two months into his term, Gov. Rick Scott is already hurting his credibility as the "CEO" governor. He sold voters on his knack to govern Florida like a business. We all took that to mean he would make decisions based on facts and financials after thorough due diligence. Yet when Scott killed high-speed rail this week, he used little more than ideology and politics. He said goodbye to the number-crunching, bid-vetting pragmatism of the boardroom and hello to the fear-mongering of Tea Partiers' living rooms.

Ex-Huffington Post CEO joins Glenn Beck’s siteBy Michael Calderone Thu Jan 6, 12:25 pm ET The left-leaning Huffington Post and Glenn Beck's recently launched news site, The Blaze, don't have a lot in common politically. But Betsy Morgan, who was previously chief executive of the Huffington Post, has been named president of the conservative TV and radio star's "four month-old information network." Morgan's role will be to build The Blaze into the "premiere digital network curating content, community and debate and further leveraging Beck's loyal audience," according to a release. Media watchers may be surprised by the move, but Morgan...

Steve Jobs has catapulted Apple to the top of the tech heapLOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Steve Jobs is known as both mercurial and visionary, part rock-star CEO and part master salesman, a meticulous micromanager who can drive his employees to distraction — and one of the most important figures in American industry in the past half-century. Jobs’s tenure as the chief executive at Apple Inc. during the past 10 years is well-documented. After pulling his own company back from the brink of bankruptcy before the decade started, he almost single-handedly went on to save the recording industry with the iPod...

Derek Jeter has had a great career, but last year he hit .270 (mediocre). Nonetheless, he's fielding offers like $45 million for 3 years. Yet no one seems very angry about exorbitant pay in athletics, as compared to CEOs. Here's Holman Jenkins over at the WSJ: Said one fan on a New York paper's website: "As far as the money is concerned, I really don't care what they pay him. It's not my money." If it were catching, this healthy-minded attitude toward the paychecks of our fellow man would make the world a better, happier place. Jeter clearly has alpha...

  The electorate’s repudiation of Barack Obama and his Congressional allies was not only a rejection of Big Government, but also of business elites who were buffeted from the downturn by political dealing at the expense of ordinary people.Unless Corporate America heeds the election results, it too will risk the wrath of an informed and energized public. Here are CEOs who must pay attention to what happened yesterday:Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler- Not only did Kindler (above) lead the charge of Big Pharma CEOs for ObamaCare, he actually got a multi-million dollar bonus from Pfizer for doing so. This is...

The NPR CEO who fired Juan Williams runs away from an O’Reilly Factor ambush interview. For anyone who’s ever watched the O’Reilly Factor from time to time, you know that one of the highlights of O’Reilly’s brand of journalism is taking the interview to the guest, if the guest is a major-league coward who’s too afraid to enter the so-called "No Spin Zone." As it just so happens, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, the villain responsible for the Juan Williams firing out of political correctness and liberal double-standards, fits the brand of "coward" perfectly. So after less than a week of...

One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages. The award for complete obliviousness would have to go to Blackstone cofounder Stephen Schwarzman, who earlier this summer compared government attempts to raise taxes on financiers such as himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Silver medals should certainly be handed out to the many executives and corporate lawyers who were grousing last week about the new Dodd-Frank bill, which includes a rule requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their chief executive and their...

CEOs who fire people tend to make more money. That's been the trend recently, according to 'CEO Pay and The Great Recession' from the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS: The 50 top CEO layoff leaders received $12 million on average in 2009, compared to the S&P 500 average of $8.5 million. Each of the corporations surveyed laid off at least 3,000 workers between November 2008 and April 2010. Seventy-two percent of the firms announced mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports. ... At a time when we should be pulling together to strengthen our shared economic futures, CEOs...

The full article has been removed, but, who does this remind you of. According to an article dated June 30 2005, it states the reason CEO's get fired is because: 31 percent of CEOs get fired for mismanaging change 28 percent get fired for ignoring customers 27 percent get fired for tolerating low performers 23 percent get fired for denying reality 22 percent get fired for too much talk and not enough action

Since our ugly economic maelstrom begun, the companies responsible for shedding the largest numbers of workers have the highest-paid CEOs at their helms. Clearly, there's something wrong with this picture. This unpleasant finding headlined the Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) report, CEO Pay and the Great Recession. Shareholders need to think about whether incentivizing management brutality is really the best path toward bettering corporations' long-term prospects. When leaders aren't heroes The IPS report shows that corporate America's "layoff leaders" are making out like bandits. CEOs who presided over the worst mass layoffs earned almost $12 million on average last year,...

They’re preparing an IPO and want the feds’ shares — all of the feds’ shares — to be part of it. Treasury’s considering it, but you know how it is: Once you’ve got hold of something special, it’s … so hard to let go. “We want the government out, period,” Mr. Whitacre said in comments after speaking at an automotive conference in northern Michigan. “We don’t want to be known as Government Motors.”… Eliminating government ownership, he said, would be good for employee morale and would improve G.M.’s image. While unusual, selling all the shares during an initial offering is...

Oracle’s Larry Ellison has come top of a list of the 25 highest-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. He made $1.84 billion. His friend Steve Jobs, boss of Apple, came fourth with $749 million. In this case, pay includes “salaries, bonuses, perks and realized gains on both restricted stock and stock options”. The “realized gains on options accounted for 97% of Mr Ellison's total compensation,” says the Journal. Most of Jobs’s income comprises the $647 million gain on restricted stock that vested in 2006. This means he actually earned his...

Watching Hannity with a guess host. One of the guests mentioned he talked with a "captain of industry" who was a Zero supporter. Supposedly this "captain of industry" claimed he was not voting for new entitlements, higher taxes, redistribution of wealth, and more regulation. Jeez. Sort of funny 100% of Freepers knew exactly who Zero was and is and this "captain of industry" was so ignorant and fool.

Walmart Executive-Worker Pay Gap Strikes Chord in Chicago and Beyond By Ed Smith's math, the CEO of Walmart earns more in an hour than his employees will earn in a year. Smith, an alderman in Chicago, presented posters at a city council meeting showing that Walmart CEO Michael Duke's $35 million salary, when converted to an hourly wage, worked out to $16,826.92. By comparison, at a Walmart store planned for the Windy City's Pullman neighborhood, new employees to be paid $8.75 an hour would gross $13,650 a year. Smith's numbers could be a bit off. Equilar, an executive compensation research...

(Reuters) - The White House renewed its sharp criticism of BP (BP.L) (BP.N) CEO Tony Hayward after he attended a yacht race off the English coast on Saturday as his company struggles to plug its huge Gulf of Mexico oil leak. "This has just been part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said in an interview taped for ABC's "This Week" week program, referring to Hayward. Sheila Williams, a spokeswoman for the energy giant, said Hayward attended the boat race at the Isle of Wight, saying he was spending some...

BP's chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has revealed to Sky News that embattled chief executive Tony Hayward is to have a changed role in dealing with the oil spill, SkyNews.com reported. Asked about Hayward's ongoing role, Svanberg said: "He is now handing over the operation to Bob Dudley." Dudley is the managing director of the oil giant.

From The Hill BP's chief executive wouldn't have a job if President Barack Obama were in charge of the oil company, the president said Tuesday. "He wouldn't be working for me after any of those statements," Obama said during an interview on NBC's "Today" show, referencing comments made by Hayward in which said he wanted his pre-spill life back. Obama emphasized that administration officials were constantly in touch with the chief executive and other top officials at BP. Read more at floppingaces.net...

All over the country, corporate CEOs and trade groups are asking their lawyers the same question: How can we get our companies involved in this political election season without leaving tracks? After a landmark Supreme Court ruling this year freed executives to spend unlimited corporate cash on campaigns, some predicted that businesses would flood television airwaves with pro-industry political ads -- but that just hasn't happened yet. Image-sensitive corporations are still trying to make sure that, if they jump into 2010 politicking, they do so as anonymously as possible, according to Republican political operatives and trade group leaders. Many corporate...

The list of attendees at President Barack Obama's dinner with CEOs was released Monday evening. Obama dined with members of the Business Council, a group of 150 chief executives of leading private-sector companies. The president was expected to make his pitch for financial regulatory reform legislation, as well as solicit advice on how to grow the economy. Guests convened at 6:45 p.m. in the State Dining Room, but a list of attendees was only released after the dinner began. Several participants have drawn attention during the Obama administration.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs named to TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential list (with cover photo). • Leaders: Sarah Palin, Manmohan Singh and other global movers and shakers • Heroes: The inspiring feats of an urban farmer, an air-traffic controller in Haiti and icons like Bill Clinton • Artists: Lady Gaga, Conan O'Brien and others who make us dance, giggle and retweet • Thinkers: Steve Jobs plus scientists, statesmen and a Supreme Court Justice

Former Fannie Mae executives largely attributed their company's demise to an "impossible" balancing act to satisfy private shareholders and a public mission, in testimony prepared for a congressional hearing. "I wish I could have maintained the delicate balance of the roles assigned to Fannie Mae, and I am sorry that I could not," ex-Fannie Chief Executive Daniel Mudd said in written testimony for Friday's hearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The former Marine and current chief executive of private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group LLC ascended to the top job at Fannie in 2004 after an accounting scandal prompted a...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Alcoa (AA) said it expects to take an $80 million charge to cover costs associated with new health care legislation, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The wave of corporate announcements of the special multimillion dollar charges to their income statements that will be necessary to account for the costs of the newly enacted healthcare legislation has sparked anger among Democrat leaders. Obama Administration Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke called the announcements “unpatriotic.” “Although these kinds of adjustments to company earnings may be required under Securities and Exchange regulations, there’s no need for them to be so public about it,” Locke complained. “If people start to think that the new law is more of a burden than a benefit they may turn against the President. So,...