WASHINGTON — Members of both parties Monday voted to keep their cherished home- state projects as the Senate resumed debate on a spending bill covering foreign-aid and domestic-agency budgets. By a 63-32 vote, lawmakers rejected a bid by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to effectively strip about 8,000 of those earmarks from the $410 billion measure. Democratic leaders had hoped to pass the measure last week, but Republicans withheld the votes required to clear an important procedural hurdle. They insisted on the right to offer additional amendments. Now, it's anticipated the measure will pass today. Democrats stand poised to defeat all amendments because they don't want the measure to return to the House for a further vote.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Senate rejects McCain's bid to strip 8,000 earmarks
Friday, March 6, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill. And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent. The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years. He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence. At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend. And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination. It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction. It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Lehman Brothers seaside mansion on Jupiter Island in Florida, bought for more than $13 million five years ago, was just sold for $10.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
List of Macy’s Store Closings
– Ernst & Young Plaza (Citicorp Plaza), Los Angeles (135,000 square feet; 136 employees; opened in 1986)
– The Citadel, Colorado Springs, Colo. (195,000 square feet; 105 employees; opened in 1984)
– Westminster Mall, Westminster, Colo. (156,000 square feet; 110 employees; opened in 1986)
– Palm Beach Mall, West Palm Beach, Fla. (190,000 square feet; 71 employees; opened in 1979)
– Mauna Lani Bay Hotel, Island of Hawaii (3,000 square feet; 3 employees; opened in 1983)
– Lafayette Square, Indianapolis (160,000 square feet; 84 employees; opened in 1974)
– Brookdale Center, Brooklyn Center, Minn. (195,000 square feet; 72 employees; opened in 1966)
– Crestwood Mall, St. Louis (166,000 square feet; 176 employees; opened in 1969)
– Natrona Heights Plaza, Natrona Heights, Pa. (73,000 square feet; 124 employees; opened in 1956)
– Century III Furniture and Clearance, West Mifflin, Pa. (83,000 square feet; 3 employees; opened in 2000)
– Bellevue Center, Nashville, Tenn. (211,000 square feet; 76 employees; opened in 1990).
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Amazon says 2008 holiday season was 'best ever'
SEATTLE (AP) -- Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. called this holiday season its "best ever," saying Friday that it saw a 17 percent increase in orders on its busiest day -- a rare piece of good news in a season that has been far from merry for most retailers, including online businesses.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Madoff Fund Operator De La Villehuchet Found Dead
Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- A New York-based money manager who may have lost $1.4 billion of client funds invested with Bernard Madoff apparently killed himself in his Madison Avenue office, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
“Our investigative premise is that it was a suicide,” Kelly said today in an interview. The body of Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, 65, a co-founder and chief executive officer of Access International Advisors, was found today. The company raised money mainly from wealthy European investors. Madoff was arrested on Dec. 11 for allegedly running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
The death of de la Villehuchet, who founded Access in 1994 with Patrick Littaye, came as lawsuits mounted in connection with investors victimized by Madoff. Fairfield Greenwich Group, a hedge-fund firm that had $7.5 billion invested with Madoff, has been sued for allegedly failing to protect their clients’ assets. A New York woman who says she lost most of her savings is seeking $1.7 million in damages from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for Madoff losses.
The tally of investors hurt by Madoff continues to grow. Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish film director known for movies such as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” has about $280,000 at risk, El Economista reported.
Credit Lyonnais
De La Villehuchet was found “with his feet propped up on his desk, a trash pail nearby to collect blood,” and no sign of a second person, Kelly said in the interview.
The money manager had “multiple stab wounds” to his arms and wrists, and a box-cutter and pills were found nearby, Kelly said at a news conference. No suicide note was found.
Before he founded Access, De La Villehuchet was chairman and CEO of Credit Lyonnais Securities USA, the U.S. investment banking arm of the French bank, according to Access marketing documents. Prior to joining Credit Lyonnais in 1987, he ran Interfinance, an international broker firm specializing in French, Belgian and Italian stock markets that he founded in 1983.
Access managed $3 billion and had 26 employees according to marketing documents dated September, and its LUXALPHA SICAV- American Selectionfund invested solely with Madoff. Access said last week that it was working with lawyers to assess the situation. UBS AG was LUXALPHA’s administrator until this year, and is no longer involved with it, said Karina Byrne, a UBS spokeswoman.
Clients of Madoff had at least $36 billion with his firm, according to a Bloomberg tally that may include some double counting. Before his arrest, Madoff, 70, confessed to employees that his “giant Ponzi scheme” may have cost as much as $50 billion, according to an FBI complaint.
His misconduct may have stretched back to at least to the 1970s, two people familiar with the government’s inquiry of Madoff said last week. Madoff is now under house arrest at his New York apartment.
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Monday, December 22, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Madoff due in court for Wall Street fraud
NEW YORK (AFP) — US investment baron Bernard Madoff was Wednesday due in court for the first time since being accused of a 50-billion dollar scam as the US finance watchdog admitted it had long ignored warnings.
Rest of the Story AFP
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Detroit newspapers to end daily home delivery
(CNN) -- The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News will become the first major metropolitan newspapers in the U.S. to end daily home delivery, the papers announced Tuesday.
The Detroit News will still be available on newsstands daily, newspaper officials said Tuesday.
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"We're fighting for our survival," said David Hunke, publisher of the Free Press and CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, a joint operating agreement between the two papers. "We think its time to take a geometric leap forward in what we've known as newspapers."
Beginning sometime in the first three months of 2009, the two newspapers will provide home delivery on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays only, Hunke said during a news conference in Detroit, Michigan. Papers will be on newsstands every day, and the papers' online offerings will be expanded, he said.
"The dynamics of delivering information to audiences has changed forever due to technology," Hunke said in a statement on the plan.
Costs for paper, ink and fuel to deliver papers were forcing the papers into cuts in newsroom talent that would damage their abilities to report the news, Hunke said. Paying for delivery vehicles to cover 300,000 miles nightly, he said, did not make economic sense at a time when 63 percent of readers have broadband Internet access.
As for those without computers and broadband access at home, "this isn't necessarily gonna be the best news for them," Hunke said.
"Our economics have become unsustainable," said Jonathan Wolman, publisher and editor of the Detroit News.
"We've got to embrace reality, and we've got to embrace innovation," said Paul Anger, executive editor of the Free Press, owned by Gannett Corp., the country's largest newspaper publisher. The Free Press, the nation's 20th-largest daily paper, had a daily circulation of 298,243 and 605,000 on Sunday as of the end of September. Those numbers were down almost 7 percent and 4 percent, respectively, from the previous six months, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The Detroit News, the country's 49th largest newspaper, is owned by MediaNews Group and had a daily circulation of 178,280 in September. It does not publish a Sunday edition.
The Free Press' circulation is down 19 percent and the News is down 22 percent since 2002, the Free Press reported Tuesday.
Hunke said the newspapers would face about a 9 percent reduction in their workforces under the plan. However no layoffs in their newsrooms, which he described as "fiercely competitive," were planned.
The Detroit Media Partnership employs more than 2,100 people, CNN affiliate WDIV-TV reported. Personnel cuts would be negotiated with the papers' unions, Hunke said.
"We believe it will break the cycle of buyouts and downsizing" that has become common in the newspaper industry, Wolman said.
Newspaper publishers have had a rough year. Across the industry, daily circulation dropped 4.6 percent in the six months ending in September.
Gannett has been in the process of cutting 10 percent of its workforce across its 85 newspapersnationwide. McClatchy Co., the nation's second-largest newspaper company, has been pursuing cuts at its papers, including the Miami Herald. Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others, announced earlier this month it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, a 100,000-circulation newspaper owned by Freedom Newspapers, announced in October it would move from a daily to a four-day publication beginning in January. The national Christian Science Monitor is moving its daily content online and dropping its daily print edition next year.
Anger said Tuesday that Detroit readers have been seeking those kinds of changes in how they get their news.
"Generations of readers are telling us they'd like information delivered in a different way," he said, promising "a fast, reading provocative news report in print as well as online."
The Detroit papers will price their three-day home delivery subscriptions at $12 a month, including a daily edition delivered by e-mail, Hunke said.
Wolman said mail subscriptions would be available to home-bound readers.
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Monday, December 15, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Ron Paul "How Much is This Really Costing!" On Bailout (Video)
Bailout not Constitutional? Nationalization. Very Interesting.
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
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