(Akiit.com) How a Cleveland entrepreneur lost everything and bounced back after tangling with an infamous con man…

How a Cleveland entrepreneur lost everything and bounced back after tangling with an infamous con man.

Entrepreneur Phil Davis has experienced his share of ups and downs in his business life, including shuttering his first Cleveland-based venture after losing his biggest client.

But nothing could have prepared him for the day he was forced to close his award-winning chicken-and-waffle restaurant chain–Phil the Fire–amid a swirl of financial fraud accusations, lawsuits and a damaged reputation.

“I couldn’t see the bottom,” said Davis, 50. “A con man is only as good as you are greedy.”

The con man Davis is referring to is Kirk Wright, who in 2008 was convicted for swindling just over $150 million out of 500 investors, including former NFL stars Steve Atwater and Blaine Bishop. Wright ran a classic Ponzi scheme, and to this day Davis calls him the black Bernie Madoff. Davis became a victim of the deceitful web after entering into a partnership with Wright to open a second restaurant in downtown Cleveland. Wright turned the tables on him, says Davis, by attempting to accuse him of fraud and forcing him out of his own business. Unable to get a job in the restaurant industry, Davis had to take an $8.50-an-hour job loading boxes for UPS.

It has taken the entrepreneur six years to rise from the ashes. This time around, Davis is pinning his hopes on iCubed International, through which he has designed one of the world’s smallest microwave ovens, the iWavecube. Measuring less than 12 cubic inches, the mini-microwave oven has caught on slowly during the economic downturn, but he has found an outlet through online retailing. He now has his eyes set on building a $1 billion company in five years.

“We’re on the cusp of doing something big,” says Davis, who declined to give revenue figures but expects to sell up to 100,000 units over the next 18 months. “There’s nothing I can’t get done.”

Davis–born and raised in Cleveland–tasted entrepreneurial life as a senior at Stanford University, when he revived the college’s yearbook for African-American students. After earning an economics degree at Stanford and an MBA at University of Virginia in 1985, he landed a position at Ocean Spray in Boston.

Within three years, he was pursuing his next project, BertSherm Products, Inc., which developed the children’s deodorant Fun ‘N Fresh. The health and beauty item took off, making it to the shelves of Target Corp., Kmart Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

“He has the ultimate belief in his ability to think like a customer,” says Boake Sells, former CEO of Revco, which also sold the deodorant.

Wal-Mart–the largest purchaser–stopped carrying the products as part of a reorganization of its merchandising. That spelled the end of BertSherm, and Davis went back to doing some consulting work.
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(Akiit.com) His baby sister said it best via an old Joni Mitchell sample in one of her hits from the late ’90s: “You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.” Now, nine months after Michael Jackson’s sudden death at age 50, Sony, his longtime label, is ready to cash in on the music the superstar left behind. Of course, this move is nothing new. Several pop artists have sold more records and made more money dead than alive: Elvis, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin chief among them.

But Michael, whose record sales and business contracts set unprecedented benchmarks when he was here among us, continues to break records after his death. Sony just announced that the King of Pop’s estate has signed a $200 million guaranteed contract for 10 projects over seven years. The deal, good through 2017, could be worth up to $250 million if certain conditions are met. An album of previously unreleased material is supposed to hit stores in November, just in time for the holidays. Other future projects may include a DVD compilation of his classic videos, a video game and a reissue of perhaps his most satisfying album, 1979’s Off the Wall.

This new deal comes as no surprise, given that Michael has sold more than 31 million albums worldwide since his death in June. And it’s not a stretch to say that even after the man closed his eyes for the last time, he has helped to resuscitate an ailing industry. That was certainly the case in 1982 when Thriller, the biggest blockbuster album of all time, hit the streets and sold more than 20 million copies within the first year. The industry was in a sad state then, as record sales lagged and pop was undecided about where to go. Then came Michael, the former Motown prince, with a sound that braided together all the loose strands of the previous decade: disco, punk and funk. His pop amalgamation was fresh, vivacious, a sonic revolution. Also at the same time, he turned the music video into an art form just as MTV was born. And when the cable station threw shade at videos from people of color, it was Michael and mighty Sony (then known as CBS) who kicked down the door.
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(Akiit.com) Recognizing the importance of the African-American vote in recent presidential and congressional elections, conservatives have reverted to an old tactic in an attempt to court our support. It goes like this, take the a limited version of facts, ignore the ones that inconveniently reveal the bigger picture or messy underlying issues; and use jacked up rhetoric to “shock and awe” people’s fears and anger.

That is really the best way to describe the motivation behind legislation being proposed by a white male state senator in Georgia and an offensive ad campaign (also designed by a man) claiming that organizations like Planned Parenthood are engaging in some kind of “black genocide” and target their services to black women. The ad campaign on billboards across Georgia says, “Black children and an endangered species“, and the bill would essentially require doctors to ask their patients why they were seeking an abortion, under the guise of ensuring non- discrimination.

This campaign is a new low even for conservatives who time and again have made it clear they are willing to ignore the truth in service to their ideology. It is cynical and sinister that not only are conservatives attempting to scapegoat black women as part of a larger strategy to erode the rights of all American women, they have so twisted and distorted the facts, the African-American community is actually being seduced into participating in eroding rights we have fought so hard for; thereby denying black women one of our most basic civil rights guaranteed by law as Americans: the right to make decisions about her health care. Why should black women have to explain themselves when exercising their rights?

It’s true that black children are endangered. They are in grave danger due to a lack of access to appropriate health care, nutrition, education and opportunity. I’m all for ending the cycle of poverty and violence that claims the lives of far too many of our children, but that is not what this campaign is about. While it is true that proportionately, African-American women have abortions at a higher rate than their peers, the reasons behind those numbers matter a great deal.

According to research by Guttmacher, women of color who also disproportionately are paid less and therefore more likely to be low-income, are less likely to have health insurance or access to affordable preventive medical care and are less able to afford prescription birth control. As you would expect, African-American women therefore have higher rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion. We also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and still earn less than white women and Americans on the whole. Despite significant improvements over the last 40 years, the truth remains that African-Americans also have higher rates of incarceration, truancy and illiteracy.
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(Akiit.com) The throng of angry whites jeered, catcalled, and spat out borderline racial insults at the small group of mostly black protesters. This wasn’t a march against Jim Crow in Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson, Mississippi, or Cicero, The year wasn’t 1963. The charged racial confrontation happened on March 14, 2010 in the self-billed All-American, mostly white Los Angeles suburban bedroom city of Torrance, California. The march was called to protest the unwarranted stop, search and harassment of Robert Taylor, a prominent Los Angeles African-American minister and civic leader by two white Torrance police officers on March 4. Following the stop, there were hundreds of outraged letters many filled with vile, crude and profane racist pot shots at blacks, in local newspapers blasting Taylor and civil rights supporters.

The Taylor stop fit the all too familiar pattern of many unwarranted stops of black and Latino motorists. Torrance police officials claimed that he and the car he drove allegedly fit the description of a suspect and car involved in a robbery and assault a day earlier. The problem is Taylor is not even remotely close in appearance to the description of the suspect. The picture circulated was of a short, stocky dark complexioned 30-something black male. Taylor is tall, in his 60s, and light complexioned.

Predictably, as in most racial profiling allegations, Torrance police and city officials hotly denied the profiling charge. They justified it with the stock story that crime is on the rise in the city, but offered no compelling stats to back up that claim. Taylor’s stop would have likely ignited the usual finger pointing, charge swapping, and then faded fast except for one thing. Torrance has been slapped with a Justice Department lawsuit, civil rights lawsuits, court settlements, and hundreds of verbal complaints over the years by black and Latino motorists, shoppers, African-American mail carriers some in full uniform that work at postal stations in Torrance, and residents such as Taylor who allege they were racially profiled.

Torrance is hardly unique. The past decade, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and other big and small cities have repeatedly been called on the carpet for alleged racial profiling. In an address to a joint session of Congress in 2001, then President Bush blasted racial profiling, “It’s wrong and we will end it in America.” It hasn’t.

The refusal to admit that racial profiling exists by many public officials and many in law enforcement has done much to torpedo nearly every effort by local and national civil rights and civil liberties groups to get law enforcement and federal agencies not only to admit that racial profiling happens but to do something about it. The throng of white protesters that harangued the blacks and other supporters who protested the Taylor stop in Torrance was ample proof of that.
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(Akiit.com) WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama has talked to schools and nutrition groups across the country in her effort to reduce childhood obesity. On Tuesday, she will face the food companies that make the snacks and junk food that stuff grocery aisles and school vending machines.

Not that the companies mind. The Grocery Manufacturers Association — which counts Kraft Foods Inc., Coca Cola Co. and General Mills Inc. among its members — invited her to speak at its science forum.

Welcoming the first lady and embracing her campaign for healthier kids, launched earlier this year, could have advantages.

The industry is positioned to take some blows in the coming year, including a child nutrition bill about to move through Congress that could eliminate junk food in schools, digging into some companies’ profits.

The Food and Drug Administration is also beginning to crack down on misleading labeling on food packages, saying some items labeled “healthy” are not, and the Senate last year mulled a tax on soda and other sweetened drinks to help pay for overhauling health care.

That tax did not make it into the health care bill, but it could be seen as an opening shot in a quietly growing effort to target food companies, especially as local, state and federal governments scrounge for revenue in a tight fiscal environment.

Michelle Obama has not previously taken her anti-obesity campaign directly to the large food companies. She said recently, however, that she would like to see more customer-friendly food labels “so parents won’t have to spend hours squinting at words that they can’t pronounce to figure out whether the foods that they’re buying are healthy or not.”

She has also said she will push companies that supply foods to schools to improve nutritional quality. Her campaign is largely focused on school lunches and vending machines, along with making healthy food more available and encouraging children to exercise more.
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