Posts Tagged ‘Clinton’
Countrywide – a cautionary tale with a happy ending
What does it take to hold your powerful bosses accountable if they try to bully you out the door?
Documents, e-mails, a former deputy district attorney as your lawyer — and a never-say-die approach.
Such was the lesson learned by Michael G. Winston, a former executive at the Countrywide Financial Corporation. Mr. Winston spent three years in a legal battle against Countrywide, the once-mighty mortgage giant, and its current owner, Bank of America, contending that he was punished and pushed out for not toeing the company line. On Feb. 4, he won: a jury in California awarded him $3.8 million in damages…
Mr. Winston’s story provides a glimpse into how business was done at Countrywide at the height of the subprime craziness — and how assiduously Angelo R. Mozilo, the company’s fallen leader, worked to quash dissent in the ranks. Mr. Winston had the audacity to question Countrywide practices. Mr. Mozilo was not pleased and, before long, Mr. Winston was marginalized and later dismissed.
Mr. Winston, a prominent executive in the field of organization management, is a rarity among corporate whistle-blowers. Most of them get run over by their former companies. A fascinating detail in his case: after providing to the opposition his list of witnesses, which included former colleagues who had also been let go by Bank of America, the bank hired several of them back. Then they testified against him.
Let’s leave mutual defense treaties in the past
French President Nicolas Sarkozy believes the idea of Russia and Europe building up defenses against one another is something that should remain in the past.
The announcement came during Sarkozy’s speech at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg on Saturday.
“The idea that Russia should protect itself from Europe and that Europe should protect itself from Russia is a thing from the far past,” Sarkozy said, adding: “We must believe that we are fighting against one and the same threats.”
He said that terrorism and mafia are identical threats and that Russia and Europe must jointly fight against them.
Russian President Medvedev announced his initiative to draw up a new pan-European security pact in May 2008, and the first real draft was presented by the Kremlin in November 2009. It got responses from more than 20 governments and their administrations. The European Union and NATO have also studied the draft.
However, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said such a treaty was unnecessary.
Her position was echoed by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen who has stated repeatedly that the West is no threat to Russia and that extra security guarantees are uncalled for.
Unless, John McCain had won the 2008 election and appointed George W. Bush secretary of state and Dick Cheney secretary of war. All bets would have been off.
Huge loss of Clinton data from National Archives – UPDATED
Federal authorities are investigating the loss of a computer hard drive containing a huge quantity of personal information from Bill Clinton’s presidency in an apparent security breach at a National Archives record center.
Government officials briefed on the matter said the breach, which was confirmed in April, involved the loss of a drive containing a terabyte of computerized data, which could include millions of individual pieces of information, including personal information about one of then Vice President Al Gore’s three daughters.
The missing information included Social Security numbers and home addresses of numerous people who visited or worked at the White House, along with other material related to security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House in the Clinton years.
The National Archives and Records Administration said Tuesday in a statement that the agency “takes very seriously the loss of an external hard drive that contained copies of electronic storage tapes from the executive office of the president of the Clinton administration…”
Other officials said it was not known whether the hard drive had been stolen or accidentally misplaced. They added that it did not appear that classified information related to national security was taken but that analysts had not yet completed their review of the vast quantity of information stored on the drive…
It was not clear how anyone could have removed presidential computer records from the highly secured archive in suburban Maryland, although officials said the hard drive was removed from a storage area to a work space that was accessible to many archive employees and visitors.
There is no patch for stupidity. Mayhap I’m too brusque; but, someone in that neck of the prairie gets paid big bucks to guarantee crap like this doesn’t happen.
This doesn’t sound anymore difficult than shoplifting.
UPDATE: Hey – they’ve added a $50,000 reward!
