Posted on 04/25/2010 9:36:20 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
Meg Whitman says she lives by the principle of doing the right thing. It's there in the very first line of her autobiography.
"What is the right thing to do here?" she recalls challenging her underlings at EBay, where she was chief executive, ..
I've been trying to reconcile that principle with her actions in what's become known as her "spinning" scandal.
Eight years ago, it came out that Whitman was among an elite group of favored executives who had accepted preferential stock deals from Goldman Sachs while it was seeking business from their companies.
In spinning, executives would typically get shares in coveted initial public stock offerings, which they would "spin," or resell, into a soaring market, usually within days and sometimes within hours. Their quick and almost entirely risk-free profits were effectively gifts, and the investment banks the givers.
Whitman attempted to dodge responsibility for her actions by claiming that there was "nothing illegal" about them at the time. (This is rather at odds with a credo appearing on page 130 of her book: "Be accountable.")
Whitman's campaign suggests that the episode already has been thoroughly masticated in the press. "This is news that is literally very old," Whitman's spokesman, Tucker Bounds, told me.
Possibly, but it's also newly relevant. For one thing, Goldman Sachs is all over the news, these days for its alleged ethical shortcomings, as is the rest of Wall Street. More pertinently, Whitman, whose wealth from EBay now exceeds $1 billion, is running for governor. She has placed her business smarts and her "integrity" (the word appears on her website in big letters) front and center among the reasons Californians should vote for her. So if her business ethics and judgment have come into question, it's proper to review the facts.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.latimes.com ...
“So if her business ethics and judgement have come into question”
While it appears her ethics are questionable, since she has made so much money can anyone say that of her judgement. I thought that today’s business standard was make money, make money, make money, and ethics be d$%^$#. Some may ask “would I rather have a governer who knows how to make/save money, or one who is ethical.” Interesting choice.
LATimes attacking the Republican front-runner? What a surprise. Don’t tell me...this was on the front page.
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/images/a/2620.jpg
Michael Hiltzik
April 21, 2006
The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of one of its top columnists last night, saying he violated the paper’s policy by posting derogatory comments under an assumed name.
The paper said in an online editor’s note that Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize winner who writes the Golden State column, had admitted posting remarks on both his Times blog and on other Web sites under names other than his own. The Times said it is investigating the matter. Editor Dean Baquet declined comment, and Hiltzik said he could not comment.
The deceptive postings grew out of a running feud between Hiltzik and conservative bloggers in Southern California. One is Hugh Hewitt, a radio talk show host and blogger. The other is an assistant Los Angeles district attorney named Patrick Frey, who maintains a blog under the name Patterico’s Pontifications.
When commenters on Frey’s Web site criticized Hiltzik, an examination by Frey of the Internet addresses involved showed it was the Times writer who responded in remarks posted under the name “Mikekoshi.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042002375.html
“Mikekoshi” described Los Angeles writer Cathy Seipp “as a ‘tool’ and as someone ‘hampered by her own ignorance.’ “
“Mikekoshi” said of Hewitt: “The prospect of having Hugh Hewitt running around loose in public without a muzzle should make any intelligent person nervous.”
******
Hiltzik speculated that Hewitt’s “reactionary conservatism has become increasingly marginalized on the fringes of American political life.” Then on Patterico’s blog entry doubting that notion, a commenter called Nofanofcablecos insisted that “Hewitt’s losing readers because he’s a conservative crackpot.”
After Googling Hiltzik and Mikekoshi and discovering that they both showed up on some sumo wrestling mailing list, Patterico noticed that Hiltzik clearly identified himself there as a Times financial writer with the message-board moniker of Mikekoshi. Patterico then saw that they also posted from the same IP addresses in his blog comments, and that Nofanofcablecos shares one of these with Mikekoshi.
Hiltzik lost his Times position as Moscow correspondent a dozen years ago, after he was discovered hacking into co-workers’ e-mail. That’s what brought him to the paper’s business section. I also wrote that he’s such a knee-jerk case he actually thinks the Left only criticizes newspapers for not doing their job well enough; the Right, he insists, complain when papers are trying to do their job at all.
I would prefer that we did not have a Gub that knew how to spend more than we take in. I doubt she can deliver anymore than the current Gub when it comes to shrinking much of anything.
That, sadly, is a feat none of the candidates will be able to master in one much less two terms.
You know what they say about a busted clock. ;-)
I guess working to re-elect Boxer and endorsing Gore for president were the “right” things to do.
I won’t vote for this hag.
Mr. Hiltzik’s reputation at The Times is mixed. In 1993, while serving as a correspondent in Moscow, he was recalled to Los Angeles after it was discovered he had been reading his colleagues’ e-mail messages. Six years later, he and a fellow Times writer, Chuck Philips, received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on corruption in the entertainment industry.
Mr. Hiltzik has been writing his Golden State blog, which carries the same name as his newspaper column, since last fall. As a blogger, Mr. Hiltzik is often strident in his liberal views, and has engaged in public political scrapes with a number of conservative bloggers.
Mr. Hiltzik himself has written about the problematic nature of newspaper-sponsored blogs.
“Can a company that derives economic value from its reputation for literacy, judiciousness and taste comfortably lend its imprimatur to an unfiltered online diary?” Mr. Hiltzik wrote in his print column and on the Golden State blog last October. “Blogs are by nature almost impossible to censor.”
Mr. Hiltzik continued, “How these experiments will work out is anyone’s guess. Anything may happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/business/media/24hiltzik.html
If Whitman is telling the the truth about her principles; she needs to get out the race.
She probably won’t because she is another one of the long list of lying cheats.
Yeah she knows how to take money.
This is so predictable.
She’s tight with Mitt Romney, all the way back to HARvarD.
Romney did his Obamacare. Witless, loved Gore, Boxer.
These corporate GOP are like body snatchers. Total corporate lefties, faking and faking fairly well to the non informed as conservatives.
What does she want?
She has never been interested in politics, she didn’t even vote, suddenly she and Mitt Romney are spending 150 million dollars to buy her the California Governor’s seat as though it was the only thing that mattered in life.
What does she want?
Hillary Clinton, your cattle futures are calling...
The LA Times is very VERY concerned about ethics. Theirs and all the dems they’ve endorsed over the years.
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