NewsTrust - Corporate Governance - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

Bonus Battle

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Link TV - By Erin Coker - Sep. 19 (News Analysis) - The Fed stepped up today with the US version of a worldwide backlash on bonuses for bankers. Led by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, this is another example of the G20 nations' rising power. Sarkozy is dragging a reluctant US along on his crusade to curb banker's pay. It only works if the whole world does it - and that could never have happened in the past, even though majorities of Americans have steam coming out of their ears over the obscene bonuses.

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Flushing Blackwater

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Aug. 26 (Investigative Report) - Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations--made under oath by former Blackwater employees--that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

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Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Kate Murphy - Aug. 06 (Investigative Report) - A single-payer plan would allow the delivery of healthcare to remain private, but the government would pay for it out of a single federal health insurance fund. Like Medicare or Canada’s healthcare program, it would cut out the middleman by bypassing private health insurance companies. But such companies are well-represented on the boards of directors of media conglomerates—a factor that may help explain the blackout of such a popular possibility for reform.

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Why Silk Soy Milk's Parent Company Is Throwing American Farmers and Consumers Under the Bus | Environment | AlterNet

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Ari LeVaux - Jul. 15 (News Analysis) - Even as demand for organic food continues to explode, organic farmers in America are getting thrown under the beet cart they helped build. The Chinese are taking over market share, especially of vegetables and agricultural commodities like soy, thanks to several American-based multinational food corporations that have hijacked the organic bandwagon they only recently jumped onto.

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Stimulus money going to scofflaw companies

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Michael Grabell, David Epstein - May. 21 (Special Report) - One company paid nearly $1 million for destroying seagrass in the Florida Keys marine sanctuary. Another settled a discrimination case after federal investigators found it refused to hire black employees. A third firm was rebuked by the Army for poorly screening the interrogators it hired -- interrogators who later abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Despite those problems, the three companies have won millions of dollars in contracts under the economic stimulus package.

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Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By Fred von Lohmann - Mar. 13 (Special Report) - Even as it attacks DRM on music, Apple is continuing to add more DRM to its own hardware (we recently documented all of Apple's various hardware DRM restrictions). The latest example is the new iPod Shuffle. According to the careful reviewers at iLounge, third-party headphone makers will have to use yet-another Apple "authentication chip" if they want to interoperate with the new Shuffle. Normally, of course, independent headphone makers could simply reverse engineer the interface. The "authentication chip" is there so that Apple's lawyers can invoke the DMCA to block those efforts. So this shows us, yet again, what DRM is for -- not stopping piracy, but rather impeding competition and innovation. iLounge sums up what this means for consumers: This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans: are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality? It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight. Couldn't have said it better myself.

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2nd UPDATE:G7: Weber: Will Not Rule Out ECB To Act On Rates

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

nasdaq.com - By Andrea Thomas - Feb. 14 (News Report) - "The leading indicators in particular give reason to hope that a certain degree of bottoming out might possibly appear in the second half of the year. But there is the need to be cautious."

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The Economic Crisis Returns with a Vengeance

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Media Channel - By Mark Jurkowitz - Feb. 05 (News Analysis) - In a sign of how quickly the media narrative has shifted from pomp and circumstance to layoffs and bankruptcy, the grim U.S. economy was the overwhelmingly dominant story one week after Barack Obama’s festive inauguration. The financial crisis filled 45% of the coverage studied from Jan 26-Feb. 1, as measured by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. A week earlier, it was Obama’s move into the White House that consumed most of the media’s attention, also accounting for 45% of the newshole, or the time on TV and radio and space in print and online.

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Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Johann Hari - Jan. 08 (News Report) - Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible. There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us.

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Playing to strengths? The brighter side of performance management

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

HRZone - By Annie Hayes - Apr. 19 (News Report) - A mad professor wearing a white lab coat with a cheeky grin - the imagery is just too tempting. But beyond the starch and perky exterior is there any substance to the positive psychology approach and what do we actually mean by it? Alex Linley, founder of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology, explains: "Research and practice discipline concerned with positive topics and positive appreciative and affirmative questions. It's as much about the questions we ask as the topics we study." Any clearer? I thought not. Delve a little further and what we are talking about is a way of management that plays to workers' strengths. A 'what they can do' rather than 'what they can't do' philosophy. So why use it?

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Female presidents seeing a shift in power

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

InForum - By Amy Dalrymple - Apr. 01 (News Report) - Two women presidents leading Moorhead colleges expect they'll soon have more company. Pam Jolicoeur at Concordia College and Ann Valentine at Minnesota State Community and Technical College say more women are moving into president roles. "There's major change going on," Jolicoeur said. Nationally, women hold about 23 percent of college presidencies, according to a 2006 survey by the American Council on Education.

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Should Nursing Homes Be for Profit?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Emily Udell - Jan. 28 (News Report) - "They're not there to invest in the care for the residents, they're there to make money," says Charlene Harrington, a professor of nursing at [UCSF] and author of the 18-month study. "The way these chains have made money is by cutting the staff to the bare bones and pocketing the profits." Harrington, who is part of a team that has researched nursing homes for 25 years, says the privatization of chains allows companies to shirk regulatory scrutiny because they are not required to file financial documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or state regulatory agencies.

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Nacchio Gets Six Years, $71 Million In Forfeitures and Fine

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:47:43 -0700

Colorado Confidential - By Jim Spencer - Jul. 27 (News Report) - They came for their symbolic pound of flesh, the people Joe Nacchio screwed. They filled a federal courtroom Friday. They craned their necks to see the Qwest executive who had fired some of them and had overseen a stock-price crash that cost others their life savings. Some of them grinned at the prospect of the man who had ruined their lives getting sentenced for 19 counts of insider trading. Most simply stared at him. The lawyer for some retirees talked about karma, that what goes around comes around. Where Nacchio is going he won't be coming back for six years

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Harkin introduces legislation to ensure retirement security for U.S. workers

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:58:20 -0700

CCH Internet Research Network - By (no author named) - Jul. 11 (News Report) - Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced legislation on June 28 to protect U.S. workers' pensions and ensure that employees receive the retirement benefits they are entitled to. The Restoring Pension Promises to Workers Act of 2007 (S.1725) would restore basic fairness to America's pension system by forcing corporations that provide lavish executive pension arrangements to also provide a guaranteed, defined benefit plan for the rest of their employees.

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Blackwater Sues Slain Employees' Families to Silence Them

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 15:31:45 -0700

AlterNet - By Daniel J. Callahan, Marc P. Miles - Jun. 08 (News Report) - ..blackwater not only refused to give the families any information, but they also stated they would need to sue blackwater to get it...

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CEO Gets $27 Mill In Stock As Gas Prices Break Records

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:51:02 -0700

Oil Watchdog - Mar. 31 (News Report) - Chevron CEO David O'Reilly received $27.8 million in stock options this week just as the price of gasoline hit record highs in O'Reilly's hometown in Northern California, closing in on 4 bucks per gallon at some Bay Area stations. Chevron's been making a killing on high gasoline prices in the West, particularly California, where gas prices are 70 cents higher than around the nation and Chevron refines more than one quarter of the gasoline. O'Reilly's options point to big first quarter profits for the West's biggest refiner, which explains the $4 per gallon price a lot better than problems with Iran or the cost of crude or any of the other phony reasons the oil companies have given us lately. O'Reilly's Spring pay day should remind Chevron shareholders who meet in April why management is opposing a shareholder bid to split O'Reilly's position of Chairman and CEO into two separate jobs. As the AFL-CIO reports:

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Stunning Revelations: The untold story of Taser-related deaths

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:39:19 -0800

In These Times - By Silja J.A. Talvi - Nov. 13 (Special Report) - TASER International Inc. maintains that its stun-guns are "changing the world and saving lives everyday." There is no question that they changed Jack Wilson's life. On Aug. 4, in Lafayette, Colo., policemen on a stakeout approached Jack's son Ryan as he entered a field of a dozen young marijuana plants. When Ryan took off running, officer John Harris pursued the 22-year-old for a half-mile and then shot him once with an X-26 Taser. Ryan fell to the ground and began to convulse. The officer attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but Ryan died.

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