Free Republic

The annual expo of oil and gas prospects and industry networking, NAPE Conference, is blasting President Barack Obama and Texas EPA Czar Al Armendariz, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Tx. for enforcing a stranglehold of regulations against them. According to the Houston Chronicle, “speakers are sparing no jabs in taking the White House to task for three years of policies that they say have reinforced the nation’s tether to oil imports and kept gasoline prices high.” Bruce Vincent, president of Houston-based oil and natural gas producer Swift Energy, said, “these have been the most difficult three years...

Senior executives at Solyndra collected hefty bonuses -- ranging from $37,000 to $60,000 apiece -- as the Fremont company bled cash and careened toward bankruptcy this summer. Bankruptcy documents filed in Delaware earlier this week reveal that more than a dozen senior executives at the defunct solar manufacturing company were awarded sizable quarterly bonuses April 15 and again July 8. Solyndra ceased operations in late August and filed for bankruptcy Sept. 6. About 1,100 employees were laid off without severance pay. The bonuses, awarded to more than a dozen executives, came on top of what were already highly competitive salaries....

President Obama met with executives from the nation’s largest corporations and demanded large cash payments for education. Corporate bosses eagerly agreed to fork over what amounts to additional taxes for a schools system that does little to educate future employees. President Obama agreed to do nothing in return to improve the state of the public schools. He orated: “We’ll tell you what you need. Your job is to feel guilty and sign checks.” Corporate executives and government officials held hands and sang verses from Gilbert and Sullivan, with an especially rousing rendition of “We are the very model of a...

For the seventh year in a row, a survey of chief executives has ranked California as the nation's worst state in which to do business. More than 500 U.S. CEOs polled by Greenwich, Conn.-based Chief Executive magazine based their opinions on numerous factors, including regulations, tax policies, work force quality, education resources, quality of living and infrastructure

The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted by the FBI on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to the thriving industry. Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the executives were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others. Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By...

Michael Savage has obtained exclusive information of Executives traveling with Obama to Rio. No known English language news agency has published the names of this list yet, Savage is the first. To read the names go to MichaelSavage.com he has made them available to the public. More to come. - Mike Mazzeo, The Free World Blog

<p>A backlash against China's powerful presence in the Zambian economy has been triggered by an incident in which 11 miners were shot by Chinese managers.</p> <p>Police said that the Chinese executives opened fire on workers protesting against poor pay and conditions at the Collum coal mine in the southern Sinazongwe province on Friday.</p>

Poll: Should Congress set restrictions on executive pay? A Daily Poll.

President Obama sent a clear message to corporate executives and Republicans opposing his stimulus plan — he's in charge. In sternly worded remarks from the Grand Foyer of the White House Wednesday morning, Obama decried excessive executive bonuses and severance packages as "the height of irresponsibility," and he announced that he is capping compensation for executives who receive "extraordinary help" from the federal government at $500,000. "For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation pacakages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only in bad taste, it's a bad strategy, and I will not tolerate it...

Detroit's Big Three refused to adopt the bottom-up approach that Toyota, Nissan and other international manufacturers used to achieve success. The failure is even more egregious because GM, Ford and Chrysler management knew about the bottom-up secret to Japanese auto-making success and ignored it. Time magazine describes the painful, lost opportunity the top-down management mindset of Henry Ford bequeathed to the Big three produced: Of all Detroit's failures – the failure to master small cars, failure to cut costs, failure to get tough with the UAW, failure to improve fuel efficiency – the failure to learn, says MacDuffie, is perhaps...

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay. In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation....

WASHINGTON - Senators told oil executives Wednesday that high oil prices cannot be explained by supply and demand and the oil industry's concentration — and OPEC price collusion — is contributing to the costs facing consumers. ADVERTISEMENT Executives of the five largest oil companies were appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said there's an unexplained "disconnect" between prices — at nearly $130 a barrel — and legitimate supply and demand. "We need to get prices under control.... We can only conclude that the oil markets have failed," said Sen. Herbert Kohl, D-Wis. But Shell Oil...

From Times OnlineApril 23, 2008 Executives harpooned by online 'whalers' Spies and conmen target bosses in e-mail attacks to install malicious software with access to most privileged data Jonathan Richards Corporate bosses have become the latest target of cyber-criminals, after a string of attacks in which senior management have been singled out to receive fraudulent e-mails. Internet fraudsters have taken to sending personally addressed e-mails to chief executives and other high-level executives with a view to installing malicious software on computers that have access to the most privileged company information. In the latest e-mail scam, known as "whaling" because it...

With all the madness in the world, I meditated Tuesday on two matters of great gratitude. One is that through vigilance and good fortune we have, so far, gone six years without another major attack on U.S. soil. The other is that I wasn't one of the Texas officials who was forced to attend a workshop in Austin in which PR flacks would try (under a $20,000 contract) to teach me techniques for selling Gov. Perry's massive toll road boondoggle. It was a small part of a $7 million to $9 million campaign that will include feel-good ads pushing Perry's...

WASHINGTON, April 20 -- The U.S. House of Representatives Friday approved a bill that would give stockholders a right to cast non-binding votes on the pay of top company executives. The "say on pay" bill, which passed 269-134, would also let shareholders vote on any executive "golden parachute" compensation negotiated as part of a purchase or sale of a company. After the vote, presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promised to introduce what an aide described as an "identical" bill in the Senate. The bill would give "shareholders the power to debate and fight back against exorbitant executive compensation," Obama...

EMC's top salesman Dave DeWalt has left the storage giant to saddle up as CEO and president of security firm McAfee DeWalt joined EMC in 2003 when it bought his last CEO charge Documentum in 2003. After a management reshuffle last summer, some analysts put him in the race to succeed current EMC CEO Joe Tucci. DeWalt's responsibilities as EMC's executive VP and president of customer operations and content management and archive fall to current vice chairman Bill Teuber. DeWalt, 42, will take over from McAfee's interim boss Dale Fuller on April 2, who will serve as an advisor to...

The U.S. Transportation Department's inspector general has urged the FAA to consider disciplining two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Citing the report by the acting inspector general, Todd Zinser, whose office acts as the department's internal watchdog, the Times said the Federal Aviation Administration executives, as well as a third, now-retired official, learned after the fact that false information was given to the commission in May 2003 about the FAA's contacts with the Air Force on the morning of the attacks....

The University of California's Board of Regents should show more respect for the taxpayers. The UC system is embroiled in a scandal over secret compensation deals and lavish perks. So what do the regents do last week? Approve large raises for top executives. Few of us would begrudge UC employees a modest raise to cover the rising cost of living. But the regents last week approved $770,000 in raises for 71 UC executives, some getting pay hikes of as much as 15 percent. "They have the greatest disparity to the comparable positions elsewhere," Judith Hopkinson, chairman of the regents' compensation...

The University of California's Board of Regents created three high-ranking jobs to supervise the system's troubled finances Thursday, the same day it agreed to let about 60 top executives keep some $1 million in extra compensation they weren't supposed to get. The regents retroactively approved the raises and other perks, most of which audits had revealed were obtained by the president's office without going through the proper channels. Three separate audits - performed by the Bureau of State Audits, an outside firm and the university's internal auditor - were launched after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that executives were getting...

This is the pension squeeze companies aren't talking about: Even as many reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for workers -- complaining of the costs -- their executives are building up ever-bigger pensions, causing the companies' financial obligations for them to balloon. Companies disclose little about any of this. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of corporate filings reveals that executive benefits are playing a large and hidden role in the declining health of America's pensions. Among the findings: • Boosted by surging pay and rich formulas, executive pension obligations exceed $1 billion at some companies. Besides GM, they include General...

Under pressure from the Hill, the Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing the adoption of the so-called "Katie Couric" clause. The SEC wants publicly traded companies to give shareholders more information about multimillion-dollar salaries of their executives and employees. The name comes from the "Today Show” co-host, who is leaving NBC at the end of May to join CBS as anchor and managing editor of the to be retitled "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric. " It’s been widely reported that Couric is to receive $15 million over five years. The SEC proposal – primarily aimed at requiring the disclosure...

University of California officials said Monday they are fixing the tax forms of more than a dozen executives, after an audit found their pay wasn't reported correctly. UC President Robert C. Dynes said he and 19 other senior managers will get corrected W-2 forms for benefits the university did not properly report as taxable compensation. UC executive pay has been an issue for several months following a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle reporting that UC quietly paid top leaders millions in stipends and other compensation at a time when student fees were being hiked to offset state...

DETROIT - Auto executives worldwide believe sales of hybrid cars and low-cost, fuel efficient models will outpace sales of sport utility vehicles, pickups and luxury models over the next five years because of lingering concerns about fuel prices, according to an annual survey released Wednesday. ADVERTISEMENT Eighty-eight percent of the executives said they expect gas-electric hybrids to gain market share, up from 74 percent in 2004. Seventy-nine percent said they expect low-cost cars to gain share. Just 35 percent expect the luxury market to grow — compared to 48 percent two years ago — while 36 percent expect SUVs will...

Many articles have been written about the phenomenon of “outsourcing”—the practice of sending work needed within a company to be performed outside of the company. More recently, the word has become synonymous with “offshoring”—the practice of sending the work to be done by lower-paid workers overseas, often in third-world or emerging countries such as Mexico, China, and India. These phenomena have been going on for some time—one of the first industries to be moved outside of the United States has been textiles. Indeed, while garment manufacturing was first sent to low-cost locales, there was some outcry over the growth of...

Suppose you could eliminate the factors often blamed for the shortage of women in high-paying jobs. Suppose that promotions and raises did not depend on pleasing sexist male bosses or putting in long nights and weekends away from home. Would women make as much as men? Economists recently tried to find out in an experiment in Pittsburgh by paying men and women to add up five numbers in their heads. At first they worked individually, doing as many sums as they could in five minutes and receiving 50 cents for each correct answer. Then they competed in four-person tournaments, with...

<p>How can a US Bankruptcy judge grant United Airlines permission to break a contract with it's employees, regarding their pension.</p> <p>So many individuals have put their lifes work into this airline, just to have the Chief Financial Officer Jake Brace rip the rug right out from under them. These pensions are what employee's worked for; now UAL has gotten permission from a federal bankruptcy judge to terminate it's employees' pension plans.</p>

Corporate boards are shedding their sleepy images and becoming more ruthless when something is not quite right at the top. The result: Top U.S. executives are being knocked off their pedestals faster than ever. Boards are asking high-level company officers to hit the road for anything ranging from a financial scandal, lackluster results, improper insider trades or even an affair with another executive. In February, U.S. companies announced 103 CEO changes compared with 92 in January, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and employment research firm. It was the fourth consecutive increase in monthly turnover and the first...

A union representing some of University of California's lowest-paid workers will rally in San Francisco next week to protest what it says are $2.4 million in bonuses recently handed out to medical center administrators. Workers represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 called the bonuses "outrageous" when other employees haven't received raises for two years and student fees are going up. A UC statement said the bonuses are in keeping with an incentive plan in place since 1992. Executives receive base salary plus an incentive award based on performance. "The incentive compensation is a...

A survey of 7,300 senior executives around the world by consultant McKinsey Co found that four out of five executives think outsourcing is good for the global economy. Split continent-wise, the ratio was the same for executives in Europe, Asia and the US, the survey, released on Thursday, said. When queried on the implications of outsourcing on their own businesses, 70 per cent of the Europeans said it's good, 97 per cent of Indians said the same, as did 86 per cent of Chinese. But the figure falls in America, which is home to the world's most globalised companies --...

MORGANTOWN (AP) -- Weirton Steel Corp. has asked a federal bankruptcy judge for permission to offer top executives $4 million in bonuses for staying with the company until it emerges from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Northern Panhandle steelmaker last week promoted Chief Financial Officer Mark Kaplan to president and named D. Leonard Wise its new chief executive. Wise, 68, replaced former President and CEO John Walker, who resigned in June. Kaplan, 41, could get as much as $1.4 million under the plan, including a $600,000 bonus in three installments and $500,000 when the company's reorganization plan is approved or...

<p>Drawing such a cool reception that he had to ask the crowd for applause, Gov. Gray Davis on Wednesday told hundreds of California business leaders he understands the strains they face during the state's fiscal crisis.</p> <p>"You are the golden goose, and if you don't succeed we can't succeed," Davis told executives at the 77th annual Sacramento Host Committee Breakfast at the Sacramento Convention Center.</p>

<p>FORT WORTH, Texas (CNN) -- Outraged by news that troubled American Airlines had planned to give its executives bonuses, flight attendants rescinded their approval of wage cuts and plan to vote again, a union official said late Friday.</p> <p>No date for the new vote was set. Wednesday, the flight attendants agreed to more than $10 billion in wage concessions over six years. The airline had said it would file for bankruptcy protection if the union did not approve the cuts.</p>

<p>DALLAS -- When the week began, American Airlines' rank-and-file held the power to keep the world's largest carrier out of bankruptcy.</p> <p>By week's end, however, the pressure had shifted toward the company's executives as plans to give them bonuses and protect their pensions threatened to undermine employees' willingness to sacrifice their own wages and benefits.</p>

After Employees Agree to Cuts, American Airlines Discloses Trust to Shield Executives FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- One day after American Airlines employees agreed to annual cuts of $1.8 billion, the cooperative spirit turned acrimonious Thursday as union leaders expressed outrage over newly disclosed perks granted to executives. One angry union leader said if workers had known earlier about a pension trust created last year to protect executives' benefits in the event of a bankruptcy filing, they might have voted against the steep concessions intended to keep the world's largest carrier out of Chapter 11. The executive perks, which included...

Think CEO pay is out of control? Wait till you see what these guys get when they retire. For a brief, shining moment, it looked as if outrage had finally triumphed over excess. Earlier this month, soon after Delta Air Lines disclosed that CEO Leo Mullin had hauled in a bonus of $1.4 million plus $2 million in free stock in 2002, howls of protest from shareholders and employees prompted a dramatic turnabout. After all, in 2002 the airline had lost $1.3 billion, slashed thousands of jobs, and seen its stock price collapse by 58%. Mullin announced that he was...

MICHAEL EISNER and Bob Iger, the top executives at Walt Disney, were awarded more than $24 million (£15 million) between them in pay and bonuses last year even though the company’s share price plunged by more than a third. Mr Eisner, chairman and chief executive, last year took home a $5 million bonus and $1 million as a salary. Mr Eisner, who has come under fire from investors because of the poor performance of the entertainment group’s ABC TV network and other faltering aspects of the business, chose to take much of the $5 million bonus in restricted shares, which...

<p>"For a list of all the ways that technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three."</p> <p>Twenty years ago, the majority of newly recruited executives failed. Now, thanks to two decades of evolving human-resources philosophy, research, testing and execution, the majority of newly recruited executives "leave to pursue other opportunities."</p>

<p>SAN FRANCISCO — As the crackdown on corporate fraud continues, some executives are suing their former companies, saying they were fired after refusing to cook the books.</p> <p>There's no nationwide tally of such lawsuits. But with so much shady accounting and pressure to meet Wall Street numbers in recent years, attorneys say more corporate executives and whistle-blowers are striking back and not taking the fall for higher-ups.</p>

<p>SILICON Valley's vaunted meritocracy is badly in need of a tuneup. The problem is not that hard work isn't rewarded and innovation and ingenuity don't pay. It's that for many valley executives, pay no longer appears to be connected to performance.</p>