In Mr. Obama's mind, it is a one-way street, and he takes no responsibility for the divisions, dismissing Republicans who consider him highhanded.
The executives, John D. Carifa, president and chief operating officer of Alliance, and Michael J. Laughlin, chairman of its funds distribution division, were dismissed even as the company scrambled to reach a settlement with regulators who are considering action against it.
The official, Jose Sierra, director of the council's blue-collar division, was dismissed by the council's board last month for interfering in elections at two of the council's 56 locals.
This conspiracy of silence insulated Burns from the hostility that greeted Gore Vidal's more explicitly gay novel, "The City and the Pillar," which appeared the following year and which the hypercompetitive Burns, who once called Vidal "our principal rival in the welterweight division," cattily dismissed as a "dismal failure".
By contrast, many of the old Time Warner divisions, once dismissed by dot-com acolytes as stodgy relics, have steadily forged ahead.
DaimlerChrysler said yesterday that it returned to profitability in the first quarter as it stopped losses at the Chrysler division by dismissing workers and closing factories.
Days after Saatchi & Saatchi in New York lost its longtime assignment to create campaigns for Tylenol products, the Johnson & Johnson division that sells Tylenol dismissed the agency from its remaining creative assignments, for the Mylanta, Pepcid and St.
PepsiCo and Interpublic said they had agreed in principle to settle two lawsuits that PepsiCo had filed against Foote, Cone & Belding, an agency that is part of the FCB Group division of Interpublic, after PepsiCo dismissed Foote, Cone on Sept. 19.
The shifts, to be formally announced this week, will come soon after the principal Coca-Cola rival, the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, realigned its agency roster by dismissing divisions of Interpublic and consolidating most assignments at agencies owned by Omnicom.
