I HATE THEM ALL // Current

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18 days ago

Mixed Feelings About Haiti

"The growing US military deployment in Haiti is provoking mixed feelings in the Caribbean country and beyond. There is... more

DeliaTheArtist
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Stranded by Arrow Trucking, employees strike back with lawsuit

A class-action lawsuit against Arrow Trucking was expected to be filed in federal court Monday. A principal charge: The Tulsa, Okla., flatbed carrier broke federal law by not giving its employees 60 days' notice about its precarious financial state

Instead, Arrow last week stranded hundreds of its drivers around the country. Many of them found out their employer was shutting down when their company-issued fuel cards wouldn't work. On Tuesday, the company abruptly told its headquarters staff to pack up and go home.

"It was just outrageous conduct, I think, to do it on the eve of Christmas," said Chuck Ercole, an attorney with Klehr Harrison Harvey Branzburg LLP in Philadelphia. "People's paychecks on the 15th bounced."

Mr. Ercole, who said he's been contacted by some 100 Arrow employees, planned to file suit Dec. 28 in federal district court in Tulsa, Okla. The suit claims the company violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), which mandates that employees with at least 100 employees give them 60 days' notice before a plant closing or mass layoff.

The suit will also address other violations of state and local laws that Arrow employees have alleged, including bounced paychecks, unpaid medical premium payments, and nonreimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses, Ercole said.

With the company in apparent limbo – and company executives unreachable – Arrow's next step was unclear. If it files for bankruptcy, that might make for a more orderly disposition of assets, the attorney said, although employees' claims would come behind banks that loaned money to Arrow as well as Daimler Trucks and Navistar, which leased trucks to the company.

The two companies swung into action to help the stranded drivers after reports of Arrow's shutdown last week. Daimler booked at least 75 Greyhound tickets to get drivers home and gave $200 in compensation for personal travel to another 150 drivers or more. As of Monday, Daimler had recovered 590 of the nearly 1,000 Freightliner trucks it had leased to Arrow.

A key question in the lawsuit is whether Arrow executives knew their company was in trouble or whether a lender pulled out unexpectedly. Apparently, the company's operations broke down after the weekend of Dec. 19, when its drivers could no longer use their company credit cards to buy fuel.

Transportation Alliance Bank, an Ogden, Utah, issuer of credit cards to truck owner-operators and trucking companies, would not confirm that it was the issuer of those cards. But in an ad earlier this year, it prominently featured a quote by Arrow's chief financial officer calling the bank "a strategic partner."

In court, Arrow will claim that a creditor pulled out suddenly, Ercole predicts. But "my experience has been in these cases that we're going to find evidence months earlier that things were precarious."A class-action lawsuit against Arrow Trucking was expected to be filed in federal court Monday. A principal charge: The Tulsa,... more

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1 month ago

Hoekstra: Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab may be connected to Fort Hood shooter

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Holland) spoke to the Associated Foreign Press shortly after a terror suspect was detained following a... more

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1 month ago

U.S. raises debt ceiling to 12.4 trillion

Washington: The Senate voted Thursday to raise the ceiling on the government debt to $12.4 trillion, a massive increase over the... more

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1 month ago

Lets Bail Out the Pot Dealers

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Some dude outside my supermarket just asked me to sign a petition to legalize marijuana. Apparently he was so high that he forgot he's in California, where pot is already more legal than budget-balancing. Last year I was granted a medical-marijuana license, even though I'm healthy and I don't smoke weed. I went to a doctor's office that consisted of a desk, a TV, two cans of air freshener and a man wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt. I told Dr. Magnum P.I. about my constant anxiety, insomnia and headaches — two more conditions than any previous patient had bothered to mention. He freaked out and gave me a pot license for only six months until I saw a psychologist. My lovely wife Cassandra, however, got a full year's prescription by claiming she was afflicted with a condition called "menstruation." Looking back, I'm pretty sure I could have used that too.

There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks. Most are like nice tea shops, where salespeople behind a counter open glass jars so you can smell the Sugar Kush, look at the Purple Urkel under a magnifying lens and ask about the effects of Hindu Skunk. At the Farmacy, I spun a wheel to determine my first-time-buyer gift and was handed a pot lollipop. If the pot-dispensary people ran General Motors, the recession would be over. Although GM cars would be engineered to just stare idly at the road for hours. Which is more than they're good for now.
(See TIME's photo-essay "The Great American Pot Smoke-Out.")

The vast majority of that Sugar Kush is still in our house, mostly because Cassandra found an even more effective solution to menstruation called pregnancy. But also because shopping for pot in California is more fun than using it. So when Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the Federal Government would quit busting dispensaries, removing even the hint of consequences for medical-marijuana use, my heart ached for small-time American pot dealers. They can't compete on price, selection, customer service, quality control or not-getting-arrestedness, and they have no skills that translate into another industry. They're almost as bad off as journalists.
(Watch TIME's video about taxing marijuana in California.)

Of all the potheads I know — did I mention I live in Los Angeles? — only one still uses a dealer. He hasn't made the logical switch from purchasing illegal drugs to committing medical fraud partly because he doesn't want his name on a dispensary list for professional reasons, partly out of loyalty to his dealer and partly because to motivate a stoner, the invisible hand of capitalism first has to endure a long, boring conversation about how cool it would be to have an invisible hand.

But competition, it turns out, improves capitalism, even among the members of society least capable of doing math. "The dispensaries have really made my drug dealer step up," my friend told me. Not only is the dealer now charging $100 for a quarter ounce, compared with the $120 he'd charged for decades, but he has also started offering home delivery instead of shady parking-lot meetings. "He got more reliable. He used to be, 'Yeah, I can't do it today. Maybe tomorrow.' Sometimes you'd page him, and he'd never call you back. Now I'm like, 'I'm going to be at my house at 4 p.m.,' and he's like, 'I'll be there.'",9171,1935092,00.html Some dude outside my supermarket just asked me to sign a petition to legalize marijuana. Apparently he... more

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1 month ago

Obama Is...

"There’s something particularly elusive about Barack Obama’s political identity. He’s a bipartisan... more

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1 month ago

Palast: Supreme Court to OK Al Qaeda donation for Sarah Palin?

I thought that headline would get your attention. And it's true. I'm biting my nails waiting for the Supreme... more

SleepDirt
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1 month ago

Lithuania fesses up to its black sites

The likely location of a CIA black site in Lithuania was first the subject of speculation in a piece that ran at this site,... more

SleepDirt
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1 month ago

House Rep. stole voter data before defecting to GOP, Dems say

A US House representative from Alabama took voter registration information from Democratic Party offices before defecting to the... more

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1 month ago

Obama Orders 1 Million US Troops to Prepare for Civil War

Russian Military Analysts are reporting to Prime Minister Putin that US President Barack Obama has issued orders to his Northern Command’s (USNORTHCOM) top leader, US Air Force General Gene Renuart, to “begin immediately” increasing his military forces to 1 million troops by January 30, 2010, in what these reports warn is an expected outbreak of civil war within the United States before the end of winter.

According to these reports, Obama has had over these past weeks “numerous” meetings with his war council about how best to manage the expected implosion of his Nations banking system while at the same time attempting to keep the United States military hegemony over the World in what Russian Military Analysts state is a “last ditch gambit” whose success is “far from certain”.

And to Obama’s “last ditch gambit”, these reports continue, he is to announce in a nationwide address to his people this coming week that he is going to expand the level of US Military Forces in Afghanistan by tens of thousands of troops, while at the same time using the deployment of these soldiers as a “cover” for returning to the United States over 200,000 additional American soldiers from the over 800 bases in over 39 countries they have stationed around the Globe bringing the level of these forces in America to over 1 million, a number the US Military believes will be able to contain the “explosion of violence” expected to roil these peoples when they learn their economy has been bankrupted.
These reports further state that at the same time Obama will be attempting to keep his Nation from violent disintegration, the tens of thousands of additional troops he will send to Afghanistan are to be ordered to Kandahar where the Americans and their NATO allies will begin their final attempt to secure their TAPI (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India) pipeline, which without the Western Nations, due to their grave lack of alternative energy resources, and being cut off from these vast Central Asian supplies (which both Russia and China are seeking to insure), are warned will totally collapse.
Making the American’s (and by extension the West’s) situation even worse are new reports coming from the International Energy Agency stating that “under pressure” from the US government they have been “deliberately underplaying” a looming Global oil shortage for fear of triggering panic buying and raising the Americans fear over the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to our World’s last remaining oil resources.Russian Military Analysts are reporting to Prime Minister Putin that US President Barack Obama has issued orders to his Northern... more

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1 month ago

AL GORE caught in a lie

Presenting at the Copenhagen Climate Conference on December 14, 2009, Al Gore told attendees at that Arctic ice would be gone in... more

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1 month ago

L.A. synagogue attack may be organized crime, police say

JTA) -- The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating whether Israeli organized crime is connected to an attack at a local... more

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1 month ago

Winchester to Deliver 200 Million 40-Cal. Rounds to Homeland Security

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Winchester Ammunition was recently awarded a contract by the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE)... more

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1 month ago

Israel tells foreign dignitaries not to visit Gaza

Jerusalem - Israel does not want foreign dignitaries to visit the Gaza Strip, because that would grant undue legitimacy to Hamas,... more

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1 month ago

obamas big sellout

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans."

Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy.

What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.

http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/money/131596-obamas-big-selloutBarack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that... more

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1 month ago

Joyce warns of US armageddon

THE OPPOSITION finance spokesman, Barnaby Joyce, believes the United States government could default on its debt, triggering an... more

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1 month ago

The bankruptcy of the United States is now certain

It's one of those numbers that's so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while... Within the next 12 months, the U.S. Treasury will have to refinance $2 trillion in short-term debt. And that's not counting any additional deficit spending, which is estimated to be around $1.5 trillion. Put the two numbers together. Then ask yourself, how in the world can the Treasury borrow $3.5 trillion in only one year? That's an amount equal to nearly 30% of our entire GDP. And we're the world's biggest economy. Where will the money come from?

How did we end up with so much short-term debt? Like most entities that have far too much debt - whether subprime borrowers, GM, Fannie, or GE - the U.S. Treasury has tried to minimize its interest burden by borrowing for short durations and then "rolling over" the loans when they come due. As they say on Wall Street, "a rolling debt collects no moss." What they mean is, as long as you can extend the debt, you have no problem. Unfortunately, that leads folks to take on ever greater amounts of debt… at ever shorter durations… at ever lower interest rates. Sooner or later, the creditors wake up and ask themselves: What are the chances I will ever actually be repaid? And that's when the trouble starts. Interest rates go up dramatically. Funding costs soar. The party is over. Bankruptcy is next.

When governments go bankrupt it's called "a default." Currency speculators figured out how to accurately predict when a country would default. Two well-known economists - Alan Greenspan and Pablo Guidotti - published the secret formula in a 1999 academic paper. That's why the formula is called the Greenspan-Guidotti rule. The rule states: To avoid a default, countries should maintain hard currency reserves equal to at least 100% of their short-term foreign debt maturities. The world's largest money management firm, PIMCO, explains the rule this way: "The minimum benchmark of reserves equal to at least 100% of short-term external debt is known as the Greenspan-Guidotti rule. Greenspan-Guidotti is perhaps the single concept of reserve adequacy that has the most adherents and empirical support."

The principle behind the rule is simple. If you can't pay off all of your foreign debts in the next 12 months, you're a terrible credit risk. Speculators are going to target your bonds and your currency, making it impossible to refinance your debts. A default is assured.

So how does America rank on the Greenspan-Guidotti scale? It's a guaranteed default. The U.S. holds gold, oil, and foreign currency in reserve. The U.S. has 8,133.5 metric tonnes of gold (it is the world's largest holder). That's 16,267,000 pounds. At current dollar values, it's worth around $300 billion. The U.S. strategic petroleum reserve shows a current total position of 725 million barrels. At current dollar prices, that's roughly $58 billion worth of oil. And according to the IMF, the U.S. has $136 billion in foreign currency reserves. So altogether... that's around $500 billion of reserves. Our short-term foreign debts are far bigger.

According to the U.S. Treasury, $2 trillion worth of debt will mature in the next 12 months. So looking only at short-term debt, we know the Treasury will have to finance at least $2 trillion worth of maturing debt in the next 12 months. That might not cause a crisis if we were still funding our national debt internally. But since 1985, we've been a net debtor to the world. Today, foreigners own 44% of all our debts, which means we owe foreign creditors at least $880 billion in the next 12 months - an amount far larger than our reserves.

Keep in mind, this only covers our existing debts. The Office of Management and Budget is predicting a $1.5 trillion budget deficit over the next year. That puts our total funding requirements on the order of $3.5 trillion over the next 12 months.

So… where will the money come from? Total domestic savings in the U.S. are only around $600 billion annually. Even if we all put every penny of our savings into U.S. Treasury debt, we're still going to come up nearly $3 trillion short. That's an annual funding requirement equal to roughly 40% of GDP. Where is the money going to come from? From our foreign creditors? Not according to Greenspan-Guidotti. And not according to the Indian or the Russian central bank, which have stopped buying Treasury bills and begun to buy enormous amounts of gold. The Indians bought 200 metric tonnes this month. Sources in Russia say the central bank there will double its gold reserves.

So where will the money come from? The printing press. The Federal Reserve has already monetized nearly $2 trillion worth of Treasury debt and mortgage debt. This weakens the value of the dollar and devalues our existing Treasury bonds. Sooner or later, our creditors will face a stark choice: Hold our bonds and continue to see the value diminish slowly, or try to escape to gold and see the value of their U.S. bonds plummet.

One thing they're not going to do is buy more of our debt. Which central banks will abandon the dollar next? Brazil, Korea, and Chile. These are the three largest central banks that own the least amount of gold. None own even 1% of their total reserves in gold.

I examined these issues in much greater detail in the most recent issue of my newsletter, Porter Stansberry's Investment Advisory, which we published last Friday. Coincidentally, the New York Times repeated our warnings - nearly word for word - in its paper today. (They didn't mention Greenspan-Guidotti, however... It's a real secret of international speculators.)It's one of those numbers that's so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while... Within the next 12... more