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Shirley Sherrod Was At USDA In 2009

March 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Shirley Sherrod Was At USDA In 2009 

Shirley Sherrod Was At USDA In 2009, Shirley Sherrod says that she was forced to resign from her position at the USDA after her comments were taken out of context. The NAACP has retracted its initial statement condemning those comments and says they were “snookered.” They are calling for the administration to reconsider Sherrod’s ouster.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the woman Sherrod allegedly discriminated against considers Sherrod a “friend for life” and insists that she worked tirelessly to save her family’s farm.

82-year-old Eloise Spooner says Sherrod “kept us out of bankruptcy.”

“Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,’ “Spooner told the AJC. “She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”
Sherrod also told the AJC that the incident took place 24 years ago, and that she told the story in order to emphasize the need to move beyond race. “The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t,” she said.

Shirley Sherrod, a USDA official in Georgia, has resigned after publicly admitting that race played a factor in her decision to limit how much aid would be given to a white farmer.

Sherrod, who is African American, made the comments during a local NAACP banquet on March 27, according to information displayed on the video. A clip of her speech first appeared Monday morning on BigGovernment.com and aired that evening on Fox News.

Her resignation as the agency’s state director of rural development was quickly accepted by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. He cited a zero-tolerance policy and told CNN that he was working to “reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department.”

In her controversial speech, Sherrod discussed the first time she was “faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm.” She claimed that during the conversation, the man “was trying to show me he was superior to me.”

“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland,” Sherrod told the crowd. “And here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land.”

Octavia Nasr Fired After 20 Years

March 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Octavia Nasr Fired After 20 Years 

Octavia Nasr Fired After 20 Years, A CNN veteran of 20 years, Octavia Nasr called her tweet about Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah ‘an error of judgment’. Photograph: CNN
Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, was never going to be the best medium to make a nuanced point about Middle East politics. But Octavia Nasr gave it a go.

The cost was great: Nasr was fired as CNN’s senior Middle East editor after 20 years with the US-based news channel.

The offending tweet was sent on Sunday morning following the death in Beirut of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who was instrumental in the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Using her official CNN Twitter account Nasr wrote: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

The tweet was immediately picked up by supporters of Israel, to which the Islamist group is bitterly opposed. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in the US released a statement demanding Nasr “apologise to all victims of Hezbollah t*rror*sm whose loved ones don’t share her sadness over the passing of one of Hezbollah’s giants”.

The text was swiftly removed from her Twitter feed, but by then it had been heavily circulated, with criticism mounting.

Nasr responded on Tuesday with a blog on the CNN website, calling her initial message “simplistic” and “an error of judgment”. Her respect for the ayatollah, who she had interviewed for Lebanese television in 1990, was owing to his stance on women’s rights, notably his demands that “honour killings” stop, she explained.

But this was not enough. The next day, Nasr was reportedly called in to see her bosses at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta. The New York Times quoted an internal memo from a senior vice-president, Parisa Khosravi, which said: “We have decided that [Nasr] will be leaving the company.”

The memo added: “At this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

Lisa Howe Fired After Six Seasons

March 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Lisa Howe Fired After Six Seasons 

Lisa Howe Fired After Six Seasons, Howe was reportedly forced out after she revealed her partner is pregnant,  Belmont pres.: “We expect people to commit themselves to high moral standards” Whole episode reeks of intolerance and reflects extremely poorly on Belmont

Belmont students have rallied in support of ousted women’s soccer coach Lisa Howe. Cooper Neill/The Belmont Vision, One of the greatest things about morality is how those who claim to act on its behalf are often the ones drinking from the emptiest cups. Take Marty Dickens, for example.

As the chairman of Belmont University’s board of trustees, Dickens has served as the voice of godliness behind the Nashville school’s recent decision to fire Lisa Howe, its women’s soccer coach, because she has the audacity to be gay and expecting a child with her partner. As Dickens told The Tennessean on Sunday, “We expect people to commit themselves to high moral and ethical standards within a Christian context. That includes members of the board, faculty and administration.” Dickens went on to explain that Belmont, a Christian university, boasts a very strict no-sexual-relations-outside-of-marriage policy, and since gays can’t marry in the state of Tennessee, well, hey, Howe had to go.

Every day, men like Marty Dickens wake up and thank God for their positions as unofficial deities. Every day, I wake up and thank God for men like Marty Dickens. Without such people, after all, who would we intolerance-seeking journalists have to write about?

But, alas, I digress. Until late last week, when she was let go from her position, Howe was one of the most respected figures on campus. In six seasons at the school, she guided a once-floundering program to a 52-48-16 mark, including an appearance in the 2008 NCAA tournament, a school-first. Howe was, without question, a dogged worker, a keen soccer mind, a beloved mentor, a positive influence.

In a dignified statement released Monday via her attorney, Howe thanked Belmont students for their support: “I respectfully ask members of the media to turn their attention away from me and toward the broader issues at stake that affect so many people in the Belmont community — such as what it means to be a diverse Christian community and how we can support and respect each other despite our differences.”

Despite her success things took a turn for the worse when Lowe recently asked Belmont administrators for permission to tell her players of her partner’s pregnancy. After not hearing back, Howe repeated the request. Further silence ensued and finally — with rumors of the impending baby swirling around her team — Howe held a closed-door meeting to set the record straight. “She didn’t want us to hear it from other sources,” Erica Carter, a senior forward, told The Tennessean. “She has never talked about her personal life before. We always hear rumors, speculation and things. She wanted this to come directly from her.”

By telling her players that her female “friend” was due with their baby, Howe was telling her players that she was a lesbian. By telling her players that she was a lesbian, Howe was violating what is, in effect, Belmont’s very own “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — which, in its defense, permits homosexuality … as long as nobody knows about it.

Hence, Howe — according to many members of her team — was pressured into resigning by the school (the university claims a “mutual decision” was made), which suddenly finds itself battling Bob Jones University for the top spot on the prestigious U.S. News and World Report annual BEST AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TO ATTEND IF YOU HAVE NO TOLERANCE OF ANYONE list. Wrote Gail Kerr of The Tennessean: “Here is a woman who has been ousted by a Christian university because she is choosing to become a mother in a nontraditional way and refuses to lie about it or hide who she is. During the Christmas season. Imagine that.”

Here’s the good news: In the traditionally conservative, Bible Belt city of Nashville, people are livid. As men like Bob Fisher, the university president, and Mike Strickland, the athletic director, speak only in limp press releases (neither Fisher not Strickland returned calls from SI.com), Belmont’s students are demanding accountability. Led by the gritty reporting of sports editor Pierce Greenberg, the Belmont Vision, the school’s student newspaper, has been hammering the story with unrelenting vigor. On Sunday, meanwhile, some 40 students braved snow and fierce cold to hold a protest outside the campus. “For us,” Becca Stone, a Belmont senior, told the Vision, “firing Coach Howe because of her sexuality was not the Christian thing to do.”

Personally speaking, my favorite piece of this saga is Dickens, thus far the only Belmont official willing to stand up and admit that while the university might not hate gays, per se, it sure doesn’t like ’em. “We do adhere to our values as Christ-centered,” Dickens said, “and we don’t want to make apologies for that.”

Because the Bible is vague and textured and ancient and, at times, contradictory, the most respected theologians are often those who leave room for interpretation. It was Robert McAfee Brown, author of Theology in a New Key, who once said, “The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.”

For characters like Dickens, however, there is no wiggle room, and stones can be tossed at will. In his eyes, and in the eyes of Belmont’s administrators, Howe’s homosexuality violates a moral code that must be adhered to.

Zoe Cruz Fired After 25 Years At Morgan Stanley

March 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Zoe Cruz Fired After 25 Years At Morgan Stanley 

Zoe Cruz Fired After 25 Years At Morgan Stanley, One morning last November, Zoe Cruz walked the length of hallway from her executive suite at Morgan Stanley to the office of her boss, chairman and CEO John Mack, who’d called her in for an impromptu meeting. The distance, roughly 50 feet, represented the final leg of her journey to the highest echelons of Wall Street: Three weeks earlier, the 63-year-old Mack had signaled that Cruz was his first choice to replace him as the head of Morgan Stanley when he retired.

She had come far from the trading floor where she’d started 25 years ago. She had survived mergers, regime changes, and uncertain markets, not to mention the deeply ingrained sexism of Wall Street. With Mack’s help, she had risen through the ranks of upper management to become, at age 52, one of the most powerful and highest-paid women—people—in finance. She thought that she was ready for what was coming next.

Not that things were ever predictable in a career like the one she had chosen. The subprime-mortgage crisis was roiling Wall Street, and Morgan Stanley was getting hit just like everyone else. In recent months, the company had suffered losses of more than $3.7 billion, and $6 billion in additional losses were projected. But Cruz thought Morgan would be better able to weather the storm than most other firms. It was a tough time, to be sure, but she had seen tough times before. And she didn’t think she had anything to worry about personally. Just the week before, she and her husband had gone out to dinner with Mack and his wife, raising glasses of red wine in the dark, wood-paneled Italian restaurant San Pietro.

And so that morning in November, Cruz walked into Mack’s office and took in the view of Central Park that would one day be hers. Her destiny must have seemed inevitable, even imminent.

Then she was fired.

“I’ve lost confidence in you,” Mack told her solemnly. “I want you to resign.” The company’s board of directors had authorized his decision the day before. As a friend of Mack’s characterized his thinking: “It’s you or me. And guess what? I choose you.”

Cruz was stunned. “I have to call my husband,” she said. Morgan Stanley had been her life. She’d worked there her entire career, made the company billions. Her son had married the daughter of another Morgan Stanley executive. And John Mack had been her mentor, her friend. After the ten-minute meeting, she got up and left the building and never went back.

If that meeting in Mack’s office had been the meeting she was hoping for, Cruz would have made history: No woman has ever been CEO of a Wall Street firm. Now it looks like that won’t change for a very long time—there are no other high-ranking women in serious contention for a top job. If women across Wall Street viewed Cruz’s firing as a blow, there were men at Morgan Stanley who seemed almost gleeful about it. The woman they had nicknamed the “Czarina,” the “Wicked Witch,” and, most famously, “Cruz Missile” was out of the picture. They joked that it was worth the $9 billion loss to have her gone. In her rise through the company, Cruz had become not just one of the most powerful women on Wall Street but also the most loathed. It’s a matter of opinion whether those two things are inextricably linked, but for Cruz the same qualities that propelled her almost to the top also prevented her from reaching it.

Of all the recent firings on Wall Street, Cruz’s is the one that’s still vehemently debated. It’s not just because a top executive was forced to take the fall for her boss, though that does seem to be the case. The fascination comes from the fact that Cruz is a woman, and that she had climbed further up the Wall Street food chain than any other woman ever had. She was fired at a time when women on Wall Street were starting to wonder—after more than a quarter-century of getting M.B.A.’s and slugging it out in the firms’ trenches—when one of them was finally going to make it to the CEO’s office. And she was fired at a time when the first serious female candidate is running for the presidency and women’s anxieties about competing in a man’s world are playing out on the national stage. Cruz, of course, would prefer to be seen as an executive rather than a female executive. But it’s impossible, at this point, to make the distinction.

From the beginning, she had the uncompromising ferocity that seems to be characteristic of nearly all women who achieve great success. She was born Zoe Papadimitriou, in Greece, and her parents, who moved the family to the U.S. when she was 14, pushed her to succeed in a land where they were outsiders. After attending high school in a Boston suburb, Cruz went to Harvard, and then Harvard Business School, where she was one of only 168 women in a class of 755. As an undergraduate, she had met and married classmate Ernesto Cruz, a gregarious and equally ambitious immigrant from Nicaragua. Not long after she graduated from business school, she gave birth to the first of their three children, Ernesto Cruz III.

Carol Bartz Yahoo CEO Nearly 3 Years

March 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Carol Bartz Yahoo CEO Nearly 3 Years 

Carol Bartz Yahoo CEO Nearly 3 Years, Carol Ann Bartz (born August 29, 1948) is an American business executive, the former president and CEO of the Internet services company Yahoo!, and former chairman, president, and CEO at architectural and engineering design software company Autodesk.

Bartz was born in Winona, Minnesota. Her mother, Shirley Bartz, died when Carol was eight years old. A few years later, she and her younger brother Jim moved from Minnesota to the home of their grandmother, Alice Schwartz, on a dairy farm near Alma, Wisconsin. In high school, Bartz did well in mathematics, and was also homecoming queen. She began college at William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri, and subsequently transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1971. While in college, she supported herself as a cocktail waitress. Carol Bartz also has two half brothers and two half sisters all living in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Bartz was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree (2002) from New Jersey Institute of Technology, an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from William Woods University.

On January 13, 2009, Bartz was named CEO of Yahoo!, the internet services company which operates the fourth most-visited Web domain name in the world, succeeding co-founder Jerry Yang. During a conference call with financial analysts later in January 2009, she announced her intention to make sure Yahoo! got “some friggin’ breathing room” so the company could “kick some butt.” Rob Hof of Business Week was skeptical that Bartz or anyone else could save the company: “… it’s not yet clear if Bartz can turn Yahoo around no matter how good she may be.”

In May 2009, Reuters reported that she had already “worked through an impressive checklist” at her new company, “upending the organizational structure, replacing executives and cutting costs, including 675 jobs, or 5 percent of the workforce.” Analysts described her efforts as precisely what the company required, but, as reporter Alexei Oreskovic observed:

For Yahoo’s ranks, still shell-shocked from deep cuts in 2008 – including 1,600 axed jobs – the hope that Bartz brings is increasingly mixed with a dose of fear and uncertainty. Yet broad support remains for Bartz despite the tough talk, canceled holiday parties and forced vacations that have come to define her era.

With a new round of job layoffs and the removal of a number of Yahoo! sites, “anxiety within the ranks has been exacerbated by what some say is a growing sense of secrecy”, for which Bartz has a notable reputation: “The informal flow of information once common within the company has come to a halt.” Bartz was also quoted to have said that she would “drop-kick to fucking Mars” employees who leak to the press. Oreskovic quoted a fearful anonymous insider: “We are all sort of wanting to believe in her because we really want to see Yahoo! turned around, but it still doesn’t make it any less scary when you don’t hear about what’s coming up. Everything is on a need-to-know basis.”

At her one year mark at Yahoo in January 2010, Bartz gave herself a “B-” grade for the job done in 2009: “It was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated. I did move fast, but this is a big job.” Others in the media, however, rated her job higher given the challenges she had to manage.

When Bartz was hired by Yahoo in early 2009 she was paid an annual base salary of $1 million. She was eligible for an annual 400% bonus and received 5,000,000 shares in addition to an equity grant of $18 million of stock (to compensate for the forfeiture of the value of equity grants and post-employment medical coverage from her previous employer). In 2010 Bartz was named “most overpaid” CEO by proxy voting firm Glass-Lewis when she received $47.2 million in compensation.

On September 6, 2011, Bartz was removed from her position at Yahoo! (via phone call), and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company. Bartz expressed her desire to remain on the Board of Directors. However, on September 9, 2011, Bartz resigned from the company’s Board of Directors. on January 4, 2012, Yahoo announced that she would be replaced by Scott Thompson.

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