After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Gillette's new boss hog
The big porker in this month's herd is James Kilts, who just became head hog at Gillette Inc., maker of razors, as well as such brand-name items as Right Guard deodorant and Duracell batteries. Gillette's kind of a wreck these days, with its stock down about half in the past two years, so Kilts has been brought out of retirement as Mr. Fix-it.
Kilts gained a reputation as a corporate fixer in the 1990s, when he engineered a massive merger of General Foods and Kraft. He then moved on to the ailing Nabisco, which he whipped into shape and sold to Phillip Morris in '98. His admirers in the brotherhood of CEOs gush that he's a role model for corporate America.
Sadly, he probably is. Kilts' success has been built on whacking thousands of workers, padlocking factories, and abandoning communities. Far from "fixing" companies, he bludgeons them, like a man trying to peel a grape with an ax. In Pittsburgh, once the home of Nabisco, he was picketed by the children of parents he fired, and he was hanged in effigy.
No skin off Kilts' nose, though—after firing the workers and selling off Nabisco's remnant's, Kilts personally pocketed $77 million for doing the deal and promptly retired.