createpositivechange

Tag: CBS

  • Patriots’ Kraft wants English club

    English football teams are the latest craze for U.S. sports tycoons.

    New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, in the United Kingdom for the NFL game in London last weekend between the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, says he is interested in buying a Premier League soccer – oops, football – team. He already owns Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution.

    “We looked seriously at Liverpool,” he told Sky Sports News on Thursday, unwilling to disclose which team he wants to buy. “We still do have an interest in playing in the Premier League. We’d like to close our deal and then talk about it.”

    American tycoons are planting red-white-and-blue flags throughout England: earlier this year, yanks George Gillett and Tom Hicks purchased Liverpool F.C. (apparently beating out Kraft). Gillett owns the Montreal Canadiens while Hicks owns the Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers.

    Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner bought the Aston Villa club in 2006. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer gained controlling interest in Manchester United in 2005.

  • Soft landings for Merrill’s O’Neal and other ex-chiefs

    The cushioned exit of Stan O’Neal as CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co. this week was proof again that nothing succeeds at the top levels of business like not succeeding.

    O’Neal is to receive a reported $161.5 million in stock options and retirement benefits. He was ushered out because he had lost favor with his board after announcing that the company had a $2.24 billion quarterly loss.

    While $161.5 million seems like enough to get by on, it doesn’t equal amounts received by other dismissed executives.

    In January of this year, Robert Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot, was given a $210 million severance package. That figure, according to the New York Times, “quickly made him the standard-bearer for failure-based pay.”

    Nardelli, like O’Neal, was said to have a harsh management style, a style that might have been tolerated if Home Depot’s stock hadn’t been in the doldrums.

    However, it may be a style that’s in demand. Nardelli became chairman and CEO of Chrysler in August.

    In 2006, Hank McKinnell, CEO and chairman of Pfizer Inc., exited his job ahead of schedule. He received close to $200 million in severance.

    McKinnell was certainly not alone. Citing a report by James F. Reda and Associates, the New York Times reported that 35 dismissed CEOs took away a total of $799 million in 2006.

    Among that year’s golden parachuters was Jay S. Sidhu, chairman and chief executive of Sovereign Bancorp Inc. He received a package worth $73.56 million when he resigned in 2006.

    The terms of these severance packages simply reflect the realities of the market place, analysts say.

    CEOs are in demand. Therefore, they can negotiate the plush terms of their firings at the times of their hirings.

    But, not surprisingly, the resignation packages do prompt criticism from the public, from shareholders and from politicians.

    That happened after Walt Disney Co. dismissed its president, Michael Ovitz, in 1996.

    Ovitz, who had been on the job for 14 months, was given $140 million in severance pay. Shareholders filed suit, but a judge ruled in 2005 that Disney had not violated its fiduciary duty.

    A severance package given to Carly Fiorina, CEO and Chairman of the Board, Hewlett-Packard Co. drew a shareholder suit that is yet to be settled.

    Her company dismissed Fiorina in February 2005. She received $21.4 million.

    Shareholders have pointed out that should the company’s stock improve, Fiorina also stands to make millions more by exercising stock options.

    Fiorina’s severance had other perks, including $50,000 in financial counseling. She also got to keep her personal computer equipment and receive free tech support for three years.

    Jill Barad, chief executive of Mattel Inc., received $37 million when she resigned in 2000 after the company reported a loss.

    As a part of her package, the company forgave a $3 million home loan and sold her a company car at “a nominal price.”

    Like some of the other executives who lost their jobs in the most public of fashions, Barad and Fiorina have landed on their feet.

    A website lists Barad’s speaking fee at $50,001 and above. Fiorina has signed on with the soon-to-air Fox News business news channel.

  • Google, Facebook battle for friends

    Despite losing to Microsoft in its bid for a piece of Facebook, Google isn’t giving up on social networks.

    The behemoth of search is partnering with other tech companies and social networks to develop a competing approach called OpenSocial. The open-source technology will enable developers to write applications that can be used on many sites, including partners in the project, such as LinkedIn and Friendster.

    This is a markedly different approach from that of Facebook, which does not share its technology with others.

    With 50 million users, a $240 million investment by Microsoft and a valuation of $15 billion, Facebook has a big head start. But the open-source approach has been proved over and over on the web. And then, of course, there’s the seemingly unlimited force of Google.

    A number of major players have been in both camps. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested in both Facebook and LinkedIn. Napster co-founder Sean Parker was both the founding president of Facebook and a co-founder of Plaxo, which is a partner in OpenSocial.

    Thiel and Parker are not the only web kingpins in this fray. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen is involved in two OpenSocial partners – LinkedIn and Ning.

    With such a stellar cast, it’s going to be quite the show: Facebook and Microsoft and the millions of uncounted developers and publishers who will embrace open source.

    We’re in for a real spectacle.

  • Kay Bailey Hutchison Protects Oil Interests

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  • Princeton, donors’ family battle over $880 million

    In 1961, A&P supermarket heir Marie Robertson and her husband, Charles, gave $35 million in stock to Princeton University for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

    Today, the gift is worth more than $880 million.

    But the university and the descendants of the couple have spent millions in legal costs in a years-long fight over how the money should be used.

    A New Jersey judge’s decision last week that the dispute should go to trial has drawn nervous attention from college administrations across the country. The New York Times has called it “one of the largest lawsuits ever filed exploring how closely colleges must adhere to the original intent of donors.”

    The Robertsons’ children – Anne R. Meier, Katherine Ernst and William Robertson – maintain that the donation was meant to help prepare graduate students for careers in federal government, particularly in foreign and international affairs. They filed suit against the university in 2002, claiming that Princeton had failed to adhere to their parents’ instructions and had spent the money for other uses.

    The suit also charges that Princeton took control of the foundation set up to administer the gift, and commingled its funds with the university endowment.

    Princeton officials respond that the Robertson offspring are trying to overturn the structure set up by the original grant, and use the money for their own purposes.

    Both the university and the Robertsons have launched web sites about the suit. And both sides say they expect to win at trial.

    Regardless of the outcome, colleges are likely to pay much closer attention to the restrictions that often come with major gifts.

  • America’s ruling families

    We’ve come to expect political dynasties. They’re a fact of life in the U.S., perhaps even more than royal succession is in the modern UK.

    The 2008 presidential campaign is the first since 1952 without a sitting president or vice president. An entire generation has grown up thinking the race for the White House requires the presence of a Bush or a Clinton.

    Even beyond the obvious – the Bushes, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Adamses – many American clans have passed the political baton from one generation to the next.

    In recent decades, Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker, the “dynastic dynamic” has accelerated.

    The presidential field includes not only Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of a former president, but Mitt Romney, son of a former governor of Michigan. Hertzberg notes that there are currently five U.S. senators whose fathers preceded them in the Senate. A prominent example in the House is Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose father was a member of Congress and the mayor of Baltimore.

    Such connections yield intriguing Muckety maps. One of our favorites was created by the marriage of Howard Baker and Nancy Kassebaum, which linked not only their separate Senate careers, but the legacy of Kassebaum’s father, former Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, and Baker’s former father-in-law, Sen. Everett Dirksen.

    Political dynasties tend to overlap with the business and media spheres. (Think Maria Shriver.) After Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs died in an airplane crash, he was succeeded by his wife, Lindy. One daughter, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, was mayor of Princeton, N.J., before dying of cancer. Another, Cokie Roberts, is a correspondent for ABC and NPR, and the wife of journalist Steven Roberts. A son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., is a powerful Washington lobbyist.

    Offspring of the powerful can learn from their parents’ example and their parents’ mistakes. Or can they choose not to learn at all. Hertzberg’s column closes with an observation on George W. Bush:

    “Bush’s failure to learn much of anything for the past six years suggests a deficit of character, not of experience; his unwillingness to employ his father’s skills and advice on behalf of the nation shows a disrespectful disregard for a dynast’s biggest advantage. He has given both freshness and family a bad name.”

  • Christopher Hitchens revives the enemies list ([Muckety](https://web.archive.org/web/20071031184448id_/http://news.muckety.com/2007/10/30/christopher-hitchens-revives-the-enemies-list/165))

    In the early 1970s you couldn’t have a better opponent than Richard Nixon.

    Indeed, when the embattled president’s Enemies List became public, there was no complaining from those who made the cut.

    Newsman Daniel Schorr and actor/activist Paul Newman treated their inclusion like a badge of honor. To have Nixon against you was to have the world for you.

    These days, the best possible seal of disapproval might come from Christopher Hitchens, the erudite, outrageous, provocative, witty and indefatigable contrarian.

    When Hitchen’s your enemy, you don’t need friends.

    Regularly venting his spleen, Hitchens has pieced together an Enemies List that might even make Nixon envious, were he alive.

    For starters, Hitchens, who is 58, has never liked Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity who received worldwide approval for her work with the poor, the ill and the needy in Calcutta.

    In essays and in his book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens has argued that Mother Teresa wasn’t modest, wasn’t humble, and wasn’t really opposed to poverty and that she buddied up to dictators.

    Hitchens also doesn’t like the late Pope John Paul II, in part because he fast-tracked Mother Teresa on the road to sainthood.

    Absolutely no Hitchens love is lost on the Dalai Lama. And he doesn’t like The Rev. Mr. Jerry Falwell either.

    None of these dislikes is that surprising given the fact that God himself (or herself) is a frequent Hitchens target.

    Hitchens takes on the diety in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. To the surprise of many, the book became a bestseller this spring and its sales may net Hitchens $1 million.

    Beyond that it has helped increase the visibility of atheism in this country and it has given Hitchens a regular chair on talk shows and in debates against true believers.

    Hitchens, a former member of the British left who is now difficult to classify, doesn’t confine his scorn to religion or the religious.

    A short list of his favorite non-religious targets includes Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton – both war criminals in Hitchens’ opinion.

    Also among the disliked are Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Mel Gibson and Princess Diana.

    The next best thing to having Hitchens hate you may be to have Hitchens like you.

    The writer, who is now an American citizen, has been strong in his support of Scooter Libby, Ahmed Chalabi, Tony Blair and George W. Bush (sometimes).

    He also remains a strong voice for the Iraq war.

    And he has a wide and varied list of literary and journalistic saints, beginning with George Orwell.

    But, in general, Hitchens, who knows the value of enemies, hasn’t spent his time making nice. His list is long and getting longer.

  • Colbert Vote Skyrockets

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  • Focus is on Nyc Charter Schools

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  • The Real Dirty Sexy Money

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