Last week I posted a think-piece on this web site, titled
"The
Business of Greed". It was a broadside
indictment of maladies afflicting many of
today: cupidity, greed and avarice.
This week, I just came across a months-old letter I wrote United
Airlines president, chairman and CEO Glenn Tilton, which I think
zeroes in on those maladies. Although a year old, the letter not only
has retained its relevancy, but has gained more significance in view
of United's worsening financial and operating problems and
yesterday's rebuff by Continental Airlines of United's offer of a
merger. Needless to say, I received no response.
ADRIAN DELFINO
Lincoln, CA. 95648
Tel. (916) 408-1749
July 3, 2007
Mr. Glenn Tilton
Chairman, President and CEO
United Airlines, Inc.
Dear Mr.Tilton,
I applaud your skill in navigating United through its bankruptcy,
but decry the manner by which you achieved this. You broke the spirits and
betrayed the trust of loyal United employees who
supported you during the bankruptcy only because they care a lot about United. But what about you?
I just received copies of e-mail messages sent you by former
United Captains Dan Hanley and
Ray Brice who made some pretty incisive statements on your
management style and its effect on your associates working in the trenches. Their messages
left me with two impressions that will haunt me for a long, long time...
a) Your very
cavalier response to their letters, and
b) How very closely
their observations (and your Director Mark Brathurst's
scathing publiic comments on your stewardship) track
with the media's ongoing pummeling of the shortsightedness, cupidity, greed and
lack of human values in United's corporate culture.
c)
I am a retiree who served United for 32 years as Corporate
Historian and manager of corporate communications, then worked as Consultant on
many of the company's historical projects for another decade following
retirement.
I was on a first-name basis with Pat Patterson, George Keck, Eddie
Carlson, Dick Ferris and Jim Hartigan, all of whom
served as United president before your time. None of
them achieved your dubious distinction as the fourth largest shareholder of
UAL, just behind three giant financial institutions. None of them squandered
United's goodwill or tarnished its image just as you have done with the same
skill George W. Bush is doing to
United today is an airline despised by the traveling public,
lampooned by the media and hated by its rank-and-file employees who stay on the
job only because they have to...not because they want to.
Having pocketed last year's compensation package of over $40
million (an obscene amount, I must say), you are now reported in the media as
chanting a mantra..."someone please write us a big check". You are
obsessed with a merger that will throw more employees out on the streets, break
up more families and create more personal brankruptcies.
Mergers, downsizing, wage cutbacks and benefit reductions are the axis of evil
in today's business environment and you are probably its most ardent advocate.
Whatever happened to Pat Patterson's mantra that "United's
biggest assets are its people?"
That philosophy was cast decades ago, but it's as valid today as
it was then. But, that's history
and I hear tell that you're not into history. You want people
to "move on".
Think back, Mr.Tilton. Think back to
centuries past when Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte and their
ilk wielded power and amassed personal wealth beyond any man's wildest dreams.
Think back to more recent times when world figures like Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Josef
Stalin and their peers amassed power and wealth to match their
egos.
A wise man once remarked, "Whom the gods would destroy, they
first make mad with power".
This letter, Mr.Tilton, is not a
diatribe. It is a wake-up call...a strong plea, if you will, for you to change
your course and give back to United the mantle of greatness its dedicated
employees, past and present, built and once revered.
Let me end with this closing stanza from "Hey There,"
Rosemary Clooney's hit song in the 1950s which goes...
"Won't you take this advice
I
hand you like a mother
Or are you
not seeing things too clear
Are you just too far gone to hear
Is it all going in one ear
And out the other?"
Sincerely,
Adrian
Delfino
THE
BUSINESS OF GREED
“The business of America,” U.S. President Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge is said to have intoned in the early 1920s, “is business”.
Only a few are aware that there are two spurious elements in that
statement.
First, “Silent Cal” wasn’t really all that silent,
according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
executive editor David Shribman, who declared in a Fortune magazine article that America’s 30th President averaged eight
press conferences a month and was viewed by many as “a chatterbox”.
Second, he never really was supposed to have uttered that classic
comment. Shribman says “it’s unclear who did”.
No matter. Let’s dissect the phrase itself and see where it lies
in today’s business environment
of corporate bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures, outsourcing of jobs to
foreign countries, factory shutdowns, worker layoffs and outright dismissals
– all in the face of obscene corporate profits running into tens of
billions of dollars and greedy
executives walking away with golden parachutes worth tens of millions of
dollars, even as their companies file for bankruptcy protection.
What is happening?
If, as “Silent Cal” says, “the business of America is
businesss.” just what is that business that America is into? Producing
widgets? Providing skilled labor? Entertaining the masses?
It has been more than half a century since I sat in a university classroom
soaking up on the Malthusian Theory of population growth vis-a-vis human
starvation and Henry George’s ideology of single taxation on land. I know
little of what is going on in today’s academia.
However, I have talked with enough
corporate “young Turks” to sense that today’s crop of
MBA candidates are being tutored on such esoteric topics as matrix management,
high-tech production methods, global marketing strategies, jet age delivery
systems, online networking and similar 21st century business
applications. There is
little or no
room in such curricula for scrutinizing
the folks who invest sweat equity in the company.
There’s another quotation attributed to Coolidge that
today’s captains of industry would do well to heed.
“The man who builds a factory builds a temple” said
Coolidge, “and the man who works there worships there, and to each is due
not scorn and blame, but rewards and praise.”
So where’s the reality of that statement in today’s business
environment? The man who builds the temple gets rewards and praise (read GREED)
and the people who work there get wage and benefit reductions, if not layoff or
dismissal (read SHAFT).
No wonder America is on its way to becoming a Third World country. Its
expenses are way out of proportion to its revenues. Its trade deficit is a
national night-
mare. Its international image and legacy of
leadership are an embarrassment to its citizenry.
The Business of
Greed….. 2
There’s a
national outcry for change, and the scalps that people want are those of
politicians alone. They should also demand the scalps of corporate marauders,
lending predators, insensitive and greedy executives, financial manipulators
and all those in the business arena who are milking us dry. They are the folks
who wake up each morning chanting their mantra of Greed: “What can I do
to make more money today?”
President Coolidge uttered yet another aphorism that serves as a fitting
close to this commentary: “No enterprise,” he said, “ can
exist for itself alone, It ministers to some great need; it performs some great
service, not for itself but for others; so failing these, it ceases to be
profitable and ceases to exist,”
Therein, I think, lies “the business of America”.
*
*
* *
Adrian Delfino
Retired
Corporate Historian
United Airlines
Lincoln, CA.
April 28, 2008
But Tilton stands to get $11.9 million in compensation if there is a change in control at United, the company said in a regulatory filing Friday.
AP UAL's Tilton gets $1.4 million in '07 compensation Friday April 25, 7:09 pm ET By Dave Carpenter, AP Business Writer
UAL's Tilton gets $1.4 million in compensation for 2007 CHICAGO (AP) -- UAL Corp. Chairman and CEO Glenn Tilton received compensation valued at $1.4 million from the United Airlines parent in 2007, down from $39.7 million a year earlier when he got about $38 million in stock and option awards after the company emerged from bankruptcy.
But Tilton stands to get $11.9 million in compensation if there is a change in control at United, the company said in a regulatory filing Friday. The amount is based on UAL's stock price at the end of 2007.
United is widely believed to be working toward joining with either Continental Airlines Inc. or US Airways Group Inc. as airline industry consolidation steps up in the face of the slowing economy and spiking fuel prices.
Tilton's base salary in 2007 was $850,000, up 24 percent from the previous year. He also received $422,425 in non-equity incentive plan compensation and $155,968 in other compensation, The Associated Press calculations of total pay include executives salary, bonus, incentives, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year.
The calculations don't include changes in the present value of pension benefits, and they often differ from the totals companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. UAL listed Tilton's compensation as $10.3 million, which it said reflected the cost it recognized for financial accounting purposes in 2007.
Chicago-based UAL posted net income of $403 million for the full year -- its first annual profit since 2000.
If you get suckered into having a margin account to gamble on stocks, TD Ameritrade now charges you 8% for their base rate and depending on how deep in debt you are to them, they add a little extra for good measure. For example, if you had a balance between $10,000 and $24,999 they would add another 1 percent, making it 9.00%, less than $10.000 they add 1.25% making it 9.25% for money that couldn't be more secured, yes, it's secured by the stocks you hold in your account. If your stocks go down, you will be hearing from TD Ameritrade to get more money in your account.
If you are one of those lucky people, and your house value hasn't gone down, you could get an equity line of credit at US Bank at 4.49%. A whopping 4.76% LESS than TD Ameritrade if you had less than $10,000 out in margin. It looks like TD Ameritrade is more in the banking business than in caring for our retirement.
When a company offcial was asked about this, his answer was. "Joe Moglia is aware of situations impacting our clients." So, does he care?
Monday, May 12, 2008
This guy should come with a warning sign,
"Use at your own risk"
If you think you and I are the only ones who Cramer screwed, check this out. Sad that we have to do this. He needs to go, why doesn't CNBC see that?
Two faced double talking would be a kind statement.
We can only guess the high paid executives still have soup in their fancy dining rooms. And hopefully, hand soap in their bathrooms. Like the commentator said on Street Signs, you might want to be careful whom you shake hands with at the bank. Only deal with those that have high enough paying jobs to afford their own soap.
Hey Cramer, where's the Dow 14,500 you predicted? On the last day of 2007 it's 13,264.82, you missed it by 1,235.18 another of your predictions down the drain. Can't wait for next years predictions, they can't be any worse than this years.
How wrong can one man be? It looks as though self serving Jim Cramer is just one of those men. But, don't feel badly for him, he sells his books, and his hot stock tips on the street.com and the list goes on. Feel sorry for those who believed in him last year and are poorer for it at the end of 2007. Here is his 2007 Dow prediction and buy recommendations. The Dow will be 14,500, He said to buy SHLD when it was around $170.00, which is now $101.16 and MO was $88.51, now $76.23, NYX when it was $110.00 and is now $87.15. Buy AMD, it went to forty and is now around $7.75. It seems he's too busy promoting and selling his books to do the "Homework" he tells his listeners to do. That doesn't stop him from telling us to buy stocks like DRYS, DSX.
The only way you can see how good a person is with choosing stocks is to watch their portfolio and they keep NO secrets. Unlike Cramer, you always know what they are buying and selling. For example the S & P 500, Dow and the Russell 2000. Not Cramer, he films all his suggestion and then plays back his winners on another show and impresses unsuspecting new investors.
"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish" and you can sell him a six-pack of a beer from a company he's touting. The fact is, you could keep your life's savings if you went fishing and didn't listen to Cramer. Until he has a portfolio that can be followed, he is better left alone.
We're Under Construction For 2008
This man, and there is no question, has ruined lives if people listened to him, unfortunately, I know. He has no problems naming the most worthless CEO's, but who names someone like Jim who is loud, obnoxious, arrogant and dangerous to people's financial safety? He just doesn't have the courage to have an ongoing portfolio.Are we the only ones watching Jim Cramer, CNBC couldn't be. On December 24th I saw him, maybe not live in the morning, but saying, "You can't make money trading stocks. You need to buy and hold, or something very close to that." On another show he said, "You can't make money buying and holding stocks," or something very close to that, which is it? Then he says, "Do your homework." Then he recommends stocks like DRYS, DSX and a couple others in that industry, they have ALL gone down. Doesn't he do his homework before he makes such strong wrong suggestions??? Why does CNBC continue to treat him like he knows something? As bad as he is, he must have something on someone of importance.
Let's Watch Jim in 2008
RUN THE CITY LIKE A BUSINESS?
More Greed
CEO Pay
.
More Greed
We would like to hear your Cramer stories.
