Consumer Safety Chief Leaves a Small Agency With Bigger Powers

By the end of her four-year term, which came to a close on Friday, she can say that she has presided over a significant increase of the agency’s powers. And Ms. Tenenbaum, 62, has not been shy about using them. The agency recently leveled its highest fine ever — $3.9 million — against Ross, the discount retailer, because it continued to sell what the commission said was defective children’s clothing, even after warnings from the agency.

She and the safety commission also waded into one of the most contentious topics in the sports world: protecting football players from head injuries. The result was the Youth Football Brain Safety initiative, which called for the replacement of youth league helmets with safer models paid for by the National Football League, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the N.F.L. Players Association.

“I just felt like it was something that needed to be done,” she said.

But before she could make much headway on issues, Ms. Tenenbaum had to persuade consumer advocates that she would work for them while reassuring manufacturers that the agency would not be unfair in carrying out its new powers. It was a difficult juggling act that some industry officials say Ms. Tenenbaum has managed to pull off.

“What I was most glad about is that she treated us and others in the industry as a resource, rather than the enemy,” said Carter Keithly, president of the Toy Industry Association. “We didn’t agree on everything, but she was always fair.”

For the Youth Football Brain Safety initiative, the N.C.A.A., the N.F.L. and the players association kicked in a total of $1 million to pay for the helmet replacements. “The support of Chairman Tenenbaum and the C.P.S.C. played an important role in making our helmet replacement initiative a reality,” Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, said in a statement. “We really appreciated her personal involvement and the agency’s in the work to make our game better and safer.”

Yet the commission under Ms. Tenenbaum’s leadership has not been exempt from criticism. Some of the biggest complaints followed the decision by agency lawyers to hold Craig Zucker, the chief executive of the company that made Buckyballs, liable for the recall of the magnetic children’s toy, even after the company was dissolved. Manufacturers have argued that holding an individual responsible for a widespread, and expensive, recall sets a disturbing example, and would discourage companies from being open in their dealings with regulatory bodies.

Ms. Tenenbaum said she could not comment on the case because it was continuing.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, one of the smallest agencies in government, was created in 1972. With a budget of about $120 million and 530 employees, the agency annually monitors more than 15,000 imported and domestically made products. Before Ms. Tenenbaum took the reins, it had been increasingly criticized in the light of deaths and injuries that critics said were the result of the agency being too close to the industries it regulated.

Ms. Tenenbaum, a lawyer, had no product safety experience when she was nominated for the job by President Obama. She had come up through the Democratic ranks in South Carolina, a state dominated by Republicans, serving as a legislative staff member as well as the state’s superintendent of education. In 1994, she ran an unsuccessful primary campaign for lieutenant governor, and 10 years later lost to Jim DeMint, a Republican, in the race to replace Ernest Hollings, a Democrat who was retiring, in the Senate.

Before her arrival at the safety commission, the Bush administration had sought to ease what it considered costly rules that placed unnecessary burdens on businesses, and the agency’s budget was largely gutted. Staff was cut and safety initiatives were stalled or dropped.

In 2007, a Washington Post investigation found that Nancy Nord, who was then the agency’s acting chairwoman, and her predecessor, Hal Stratton, had taken dozens of industry-sponsored trips that were paid for in full or in part by trade associations or manufacturers of products that were regulated by the agency. Ms. Nord said the trips were legal.

Kodak, Smaller and Redirected, Leaves Bankruptcy

Kodak is now a commercial imaging company serving business markets like packaging and graphics.

Its chairman and chief executive, Antonio M. Pérez, said the company was on track for profitable growth.

Kodak emerged from bankruptcy protection vastly different from the company of old, which was founded by George Eastman in 1880. Gone are the cameras and film that made it famous. It hopes to replace them with new technologies like touch screens for smartphones and smart packaging embedded with sensors.

Over the desk in Mr. Perez’s office hang pictures depicting Kodak’s future — including one of the company’s ultrafast commercial inkjet printers, the Prosper Press.

“Look for a case of a company that had to go through this kind of excruciating restructuring and kept innovating,” Mr. Perez said. “It just doesn’t happen, but we’ve done it.”

Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection last year, brought down by increasing competition, digital photography and debt.

The Eastman Kodak Company, credited with popularizing photography at the start of the 20th century, started to struggle toward the end of the century, first with Japanese competition and later when it failed to react quickly enough to the shift from film to digital photography.

Kodak had expected demand for film to decline, but gradually. The company thought that new demand from emerging markets like China would offset some of the decline in the United States. But Mr. Perez said Chinese consumers chose smartphones instead of cameras, and demand for film plummeted.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting plunge in interest rates left some of the company’s pension obligations underfunded. It was those obligations, along with other costs, that Mr. Perez said eventually resulted in the January 2012 bankruptcy filing.

Revenue dropped from about $13.3 billion in 2003 to $6 billion in 2011.

Under court oversight, Kodak continued to reduce costs, businesses and workers. It closed its consumer camera business and sold an online photo service. It spun off its personal and document imaging businesses to its pension plan and sold many of its patents. It took its name off the theater that hosts the Academy Awards each year.

Much of Kodak is gone except for its commercial and packaging printing businesses. The company emerged from bankruptcy with about 8,500 employees, just a fraction of the 145,000 it had at its peak in the 1980s. Revenue is expected to total $2.7 billion this year.

Bits Blog: Twitter General Counsel Leaves as Company Prepares to Go Public

Goodman Leaves PMC for CeaseFirePA

Shira Goodman, who spent years as deputy director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, has announced she will be leaving the court-reform group for to help run a Pennsylvania gun-control advocacy group.

Tesla’s Elon Musk Leaves Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us

The advocacy group, Fwd.us, is spearheaded by Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and counts many tech industry executives among its supporters. To drum up political support for overhauling immigration law, the group has bankrolled ads for lawmakers who support the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a lightning-rod issue for environmentalists.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Musk’s second company, SpaceX, a rocket manufacturer, confirmed that he was no longer involved with Fwd.us, but declined to elaborate. The news was first reported Friday evening by Reuters.

The Reuters report said that David Sacks, chief executive of Yammer, a social networking company, had also withdrawn support. His office did not return calls seeking comment. But Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for Fwd.us, said the group still has many backers.

“We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy – and we’re grateful for the continued support of our dedicated founders and major contributors,” she said. "FWD.us remains totally committed to supporting a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”

Fwd.us has been criticized by some environmental groups, though its backers have defended its “innovative tactics” as part of a broader strategy to rewrite immigration law. Fwd.us said it spent in “the seven figures” for three television spots that support senators who play a prominent role in the progress of the immigration bill.

One advertisement supports a plan for border enforcement by Marco Rubio, a Republican. Another supports Lindsey Graham, a Republican who like Mr. Rubio is part of the Gang of Eight that drafted the immigration bill. A third television ad is for Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska, where conservative voters are critical of legislation that offers relief to those who immigrate illegally to this country.

The advertisements prompted strong reaction from a coalition of liberal organizations that includes the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org. They announced earlier this week that they would suspend buying advertisements on Facebook, which they acknowledged would have little economic impact on the company.

Fwd.us includes people like John Doerr, a venture capitalist who invests in clean technology firms, and Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur who founded the electronic payment company PayPal with Mr. Musk and Mr. Sacks.

The group has declined to say who gave how much money to the cause, except to list major donors. By Friday afternoon, neither Mr. Musk nor Mr. Sacks were on the roster of contributors.

Analysis: Amid Tears Lance Armstrong Leaves Unanswered Questions in Oprah Winfrey Interview

Armstrong, the once defiant cyclist, also became choked up when he discussed how he told his oldest child that the rumors about Armstrong’s doping were true.

Even with all that, the interview will most likely be remembered for what it was missing.

Armstrong had not subjected himself to questioning from anyone in the news media since United States antidoping officials laid out their case against him in October. He chose not to appeal their ruling, leaving him with a lifetime ban from Olympic sports.

He personally chose Winfrey for his big reveal, and it went predictably. Winfrey allowed him to share his thoughts and elicited emotions from him, but she consistently failed to ask critical follow-up questions that would have addressed the most vexing aspects of Armstrong’s deception.

She did not press him on who helped him dope or cover up his drug use for more than a decade. Nor did she ask him why he chose to take banned performance-enhancing substances even after cancer had threatened his life.

Winfrey also did not push him to answer whether he had admitted to doctors in an Indianapolis hospital in 1996 that he had used performance-enhancing drugs, a confession a former teammate and his wife claimed they overheard that day. To get to the bottom of his deceit, antidoping officials said, Armstrong has to be willing to provide more details.

“He spoke to a talk-show host,” David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said from Montreal on Friday. “I don’t think any of it amounted to assistance to the antidoping community, let alone substantial assistance. You bundle it all up and say, ‘So what?’

Jeffrey M. Tillotson, the lawyer for an insurance company that unsuccessfully withheld a $5 million bonus from Armstrong on the basis that he had cheated to win the Tour de France in 2004, said his client would make a decision over the weekend about whether to sue Armstrong. If it proceeds, the company, SCA Promotions, will seek $12 million, the total it paid Armstrong in bonuses and legal fees.

“It seemed to us that he was more sorry that he had been caught than for what he had done,” Tillotson said. “If he’s serious about rehabbing himself, he needs to start making amends to the people he bullied and vilified, and he needs to start paying money back.”

Armstrong, who said he once believed himself to be invincible, explained in the portion of the interview broadcast Friday night that he started to take steps toward redemption last month. Then, after dozens of questions had already been lobbed his way, he became emotional when he described how he told his 13-year-old son, Luke, that yes, his father had cheated by doping. That talk happened last month over the holidays, Armstrong said as he fought back tears.

“I said, listen, there’s been a lot of questions about your dad, my career, whether I doped or did not dope, and I’ve always denied, I’ve always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is probably why you trusted me, which makes it even sicker,” Armstrong said he told his son, the oldest of his five children. “I want you to know it’s true.”

At times, Winfrey’s interview seemed more like a therapy session than an inquisition, with Armstrong admitting that he was narcissistic and had been in therapy — and that he should be in therapy regularly because his life was so complicated.

In the end, the interview most likely accomplished what Armstrong had hoped: it was the vehicle through which he admitted to the public that he had cheated by doping, which he had lied about for more than a decade. But his answers were just the first step to clawing back his once stellar reputation.

On Friday, Armstrong appeared more contrite than he had during the part of the interview that was shown Thursday, yet he still insisted that he was clean when he made his comeback to cycling in 2009 after a brief retirement, an assertion the United States Anti-Doping Agency said was untrue. He also implied that his lifetime ban from all Olympic sports was unfair because some of his former teammates who testified about their doping and the doping on Armstrong’s teams received only six-month bans.

Richard Pound, the founding chairman of WADA and a member of the International Olympic Committee, said he was unmoved by Armstrong’s televised mea culpa.

“If what he’s looking for is some kind of reconstruction of his image, instead of providing entertainment with Oprah Winfrey, he’s got a long way to go,” Pound said Friday from his Montreal office.

Armstrong acknowledged to Winfrey during Friday’s broadcast that he has a long way to go before winning back the public’s trust. He said he understood why people recently turned on him because they felt angry and betrayed.

“I lied to you and I’m sorry,” he said before acknowledging that he might have lost many of his supporters for good. “I am committed to spending as long as I have to to make amends, knowing full well that I won’t get very many back.”

Armstrong also said that the scandal has cost him $75 million in lost sponsors, all of whom abandoned him last fall after Usada made public 1,000 pages of evidence that Armstrong had doped.

“In a way, I just assumed we would get to that point,” he said of his sponsors’ leaving. “The story was getting out of control.”

In closing her interview, Winfrey asked Armstrong a question that left him perplexed.

“Will you rise again?” she said.

Armstrong said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s out there.”

Then, as the interview drew to a close, Armstrong said: “The ultimate crime is the betrayal of these people that supported me and believed in me.”

DealBook: Dimon Leaves New York Fed Board as His Term Ends

Yuri Gripas/ReutersJamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has left the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a position that had stirred some controversy after the bank’s big trading loss last year.

Mr. Dimon’s three-year term, his second on the board, expired at the end of December. While there are no official term limits, it is common for New York Fed directors to serve no more than two terms.

So far, Mr. Dimon has not been replaced. He was designated a Class A director, elected by and representing banks. Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, declined to comment.

Mr. Dimon’s role on the board came under scrutiny last May, when JPMorgan announced a multibillion-dollar trading loss at the bank’s chief investment office in London. The incident raised questions about how the risky position could have gone undetected by regulators, which include the Federal Reserve.

At the time of the news, some called for Mr. Dimon to resign from the board, including Elizabeth Warren, who was at the time running for a Senate seat.

Another critic, Simon Johnson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, drafted a petition in May that called for Mr. Dimon to resign.

“There is an undeniable perception problem,” Mr. Johnson wrote on the Economix blog of The New York Times. “It is damaging the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve.”

But others came to Mr. Dimon’s defense. Ernie Patrikis, a partner at White & Case and a former general counsel at the New York Fed, pointed out that the role of board members like Mr. Dimon was simply to provide the central bank with insight into the financial system.

“The information he provides is more than what he gets. It’s a one-sided relationship,” Mr. Patrikis said. “In my 30 years at the Fed, I never heard anyone say we should give a break to big bank or a small bank because the individual was a director.”

In addition to Class A directors, the board of the New York Fed includes Class B directors, who are elected by banks to represent the public, and Class C directors, who are appointed by the Federal Reserve Board and represent the public.

Mr. Dimon, who was one of three Class A directors, represented the biggest banks, with capital and surplus of more than $1 billion. His successor would also represent large banks.

Goodman Leaves PMC for CeaseFirePA

Shira Goodman, who spent years as deputy director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, has announced she will be leaving the court-reform group for to help run a Pennsylvania gun-control advocacy group.