Free Republic

Give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credit for not rushing to follow his counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico by declaring a state of emergency over illegal immigration. No doubt the anti-immigration zealots would be encouraging such a move. Schwarzenegger surely knows, as all Californians do, that illegal immigration has an enormous impact on the state. There are an estimated 2.4 million undocumented workers working on the state's many farms, in restaurants, on street corners and in homes. This shadowy and unknown subculture - the largest of any state in the union - causes uncountable impacts on the state in terms of...

Anyone who's ever temporarily "lost" a car in a parking garage - and that's most people - would surely be understanding if the state government "misplaced" one of its thousands of fleet cars occasionally. But 30,000? A recent audit of the state fleet of 70,000 vehicles, as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's push to aggressively manage the government's assets, found that as many as 30,000 can't be accounted for. Five or 10 missing would be simple mismanagement. Losing track of 30,000 cars would require a remarkable feat of negligence, ineptitude or corruption - or some combination thereof. Not only does...

Your company's chief executive might be a pretender, and that may be a good thing, according to Stanford University Professor of Management Science and Engineering Robert Sutton. Sutton, the author of a 2001 study of corporate innovation, "Weird Ideas that Work," says that a close look at the evidence shows that chief executive officers (CEOs) probably deserve less credit for their company's fortunes than they receive, and that the best of them manage a tough balancing act: secretly aware of their own fallibility, while also realizing that any sign of indecisiveness could be fatal to their careers. "In just about...

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2005 – The European Union lifting its arms embargo against China would bring "serious and numerous" consequences, according to a Defense Department report released this week. The European Union has embargoed arms sales to China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In the past year China has run an intense lobbying effort to have the ban lifted, a move strongly opposed by U.S. officials. "We think the Chinese would be able to obtain in Europe a lot of military or dual-use technologies that would be of great qualitative benefit to them," a senior DoD official said July...

Despite new law, banks lose data on 2 million customers07/02/2005 The Asahi Shimbun Banks have lost information on more than 2 million customers in the three months since a law went into effect calling for stricter protection of personal data. The figure was compiled from reports of financial institutions submitted to the Financial Services Agency by Thursday. Many of the companies announced the results of their internal investigations. The agency will make a formal announcement of the results of the reports in the near future. The agency may also issue recommendations for revisions or orders to improve business operations at...

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices. ...The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare's PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the "corporate psychopath" -- the nonviolent person prone to the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others." Does your boss fit the profile?

    click here for reeeeally  large version  

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...

BOSTON -- NStar has canceled the health benefits of more than 1,900 striking workers -- a tactic one labor expert called unusually aggressive and an indication that the electric and gas utility is digging in for a long strike. NStar linemen, engineers and other workers walked off the job Monday after a five-year contract expired and negotiations toward a new agreement collapsed. That same day, the company canceled union members' medical, dental and vision benefits through Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts, NStar spokeswoman Caroline Allen said Wednesday. SNIP "When employees do not report for duty and instead strike the company,...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United Nations chose a State Department finance expert as its new management chief Tuesday and announced a series of reforms in response to the oil-for-food and sexual exploitation scandals and staff concerns about the organization's leadership. The package announced Tuesday includes protection for whistleblowers, an anti-fraud and corruption policy, a unified standard of conduct for peacekeepers to prevent sexual abuse, and expanded financial disclosure requirements for senior officials. Christopher Bancroft Burnham, currently acting undersecretary of state for management, was hired as the world body's management chief and charged with strengthening "accountability, ethical conduct and management...

The American public recognizes that the United Nations has major ethical and leadership problems. This same American public is growing more frustrated with the United States membership in the UN each day. To help this floundering world body, the President of the United States has nominated a man with the two missing elements that the United Nations sorely needs. The Secretary of State on the United States has said that he is the best man for the job. The former Prime Minister of Great Britain has said that he is an extremely good choice for America. On the other hand,...

Finally, more than four years after its hideous birth, the Clinton "Roadless Rule" is dead. The Bush administration and the Forest Service just announced a final rule that effectively undoes Clinton's reckless decree. Dying with the "Roadless Rule" are the following: - threats of catastrophic wildfire - threats of forest infestation and disease - lack of public access to public lands - improper resource management - unhealthy forests - top-down federal overreach Recall that Bill Clinton, just eight days before he left office, in the dark of night, penned his infamous, unilateral, executive order that locked up over 58 million...

The intellectual force behind President Bush's plan to overhaul Social Security, the man the president calls his favorite "Democrat economist," is not an economist. He is Robert C. Pozen, a lawyer and mutual fund executive who serves as chairman of MFS Investment Management in Boston. A registered Democrat, Mr. Pozen donated money to the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry last year and voted for him on Nov. 2. He was a classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton at Yale Law School. But all that has not stopped President Bush from embracing Mr. Pozen's main idea to bring the nation's public...

Forty-three of John Bolton's former colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute want to set the record straight: They've sent a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defending Bolton's conduct and management style. "We were colleagues of John Bolton during his tenure as senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute from January 1997 through May 2001. We are writing to tell you and your colleagues that the various allegations that have been raised before your Committee, concerning Mr. Bolton's management style and conduct in other organizations and circumstances, are radically at odds with our experiences in more than four...

The average salary offered to Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad students saw a steep jump this year, with the highest being HSBC's $152,000 for a position at its London office. Also, around 250 students graduated this year, up 47 per cent from last year. The placement season, which began on March 14 and closed on Monday, saw a total of 477 jobs being offered to 247 students (three students opted out of the placements sessions). GECIS, an arm of GE Capital International Services, offered the highest salary -- Rs 14.50 lakh (Rs 1.45 million) -- for placement in the country. The...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Nearly four years have elapsed since the Oslo process (1993-2000) between Israelis and Palestinians foundered in bloodshed. Over that period, two U.S. administrations have tried to forge policies that would reduce the violence and point toward a solution to the conflict.It has not been a single-minded pursuit. Since September 11, 2001, the prime focus of Washington has been the management of unprecedented U.S. military interventions in the region, which removed regimes from power in Afghanistan and Iraq. The notion of Israeli-Palestinian peace as the key to regional stability has been replaced by the war on terror and the insistence on...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday he wants a plan on his desk in 90 days on how the state can better manage state waters and seashore. California, with 1,100 miles of coastline, is among the most economically dependent on the tourists drawn to its beaches and on ports that serve as gateways to Mexico, Canada and Pacific Rim nations. The state's shore, ports and oceans account for an estimated $60 billion in direct spending and $15 billion in annual tax revenues. "The health of our ocean resources and the economy they support benefits not only California, but...

AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs The story of a botched CRM upgrade that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue. Hard lessons learned. BY CHRISTOPHER KOCH Executive Summary Last fall, AT&T Wireless frantically tried to complete a CRM upgrade to Siebel 7. It had to be done in time to handle the customer service challenges accompanying a Federal Communications Commission deadline for allowing customers to change carriers without changing their phone numbers. The effort was a failure. Systems crashed and stayed down. Customer reps could not keep up, and angry customers abandoned the...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Sen. Dianne Feinstein is "disappointed" that President Bush has not apologized to relatives of those killed Sept. 11, 2001, and the California Democrat faulted Bush for lacking "hands-on management" in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks. Feinstein, a member of the Intelligence Committee and head of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee, said Wednesday that Bush and his advisers failed to "connect the dots" on Aug. 6, 2001. That's when a CIA briefing warned that supporters of Osama Bin Laden were living in the United States, could enter and exit the country as they...