Business News

Companies brace for end of cheap made-in-China era

Posted by Stephen on July 9, 2010 at 2:14 pm

Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that helped make southern coastal China the world’s factory floor.
A series of strikes over the past two months have been a rude wakeup call for the many foreign companies that depend on China’s low costs to [...]

Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal

Posted by Stephen on July 1, 2010 at 12:34 pm

Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew [...]

FDA defeated in federal court over censorship of truthful health claims

Posted by Stephen on June 4, 2010 at 3:48 pm

Health freedom has just been handed a significant victory by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which ruled last week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) violated the First Amendment rights of a nutritional supplement company when it censored truthful, scientifically-backed claims about how selenium can help reduce the [...]

Waco tanning salons bothered by 10 percent tax in health care bill

Posted by Stephen on March 24, 2010 at 11:13 am

Tanning salon customers may be paying a little more for their skin tone under the new federal health care legislation.
Beginning in July, salon operators will have to collect a 10 percent federal sales tax on tanning sessions.
The tax is meant to help fund health care system costs with money from a product that some doctors [...]

FCC Position May Spell the End of Unlimited Internet

Posted by Stephen on January 24, 2010 at 10:20 pm

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s unsurprising affirmation of support for network neutrality is a victory for the high-minded principle of open, unfettered internet access. Too bad it means the days of all-you-can-eat, flat-rate internet access are probably over.
Net neutrality sounds like a good idea. After all, it’s the internet’s openness to any and all users, applications [...]

Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections

Posted by Stephen on January 14, 2010 at 1:22 am

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product — a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or [...]

Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers

Posted by Stephen on December 1, 2009 at 5:02 pm

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few [...]

FDIC insurance fund closes quarter $8.2 billion in debt

Posted by Stephen on November 25, 2009 at 10:27 am

As the number of problem U.S. banks swells to the hundreds, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is increasingly hard-pressed to fill in the gaps where institutions have put depositor’s funds at risk.
Unfortunately, a dire prediction made by government officials in early 2009 has come true: the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund is now broke, according to [...]

General Motors to pay back bailout debt early, loses 1.2 billion quarterly

Posted by Stephen on November 16, 2009 at 6:45 pm

General Motors says it’s going to start early repayment of the company’s bailout debt.  The automaker owes 8.1-billion dollars to the U.S. and Canadian governments.  GM expects to pay back the debt by the end of 2011 and might even move faster.   Repayments will begin next month.
The company also announced it lost 1.2-billion dollars in [...]

Chevron’s Attempted Cover-up

Posted by Stephen on November 16, 2009 at 3:02 pm

Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line.
Chevron’s tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador’s government to [...]

Intel settles AMD claims but isn’t off the hook

Posted by Stephen on November 12, 2009 at 12:37 pm

Intel Corp. is paying Silicon Valley rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $1.25 billion to squash a legal battle over Intel’s sales tactics, a rift that led to antitrust charges against Intel in several countries and was headed toward a costly and nasty trial next year.
The settlement announced Thursday between Intel and AMD — which make [...]

Saved or created? W.H. can’t tell

Posted by Stephen on October 31, 2009 at 10:52 am

White House officials announced Friday that they had counted exactly how many jobs were created or saved by recent stimulus spending: 640,329.
So how many were saved and how many created? They don’t know.
In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can’t tell the difference between jobs “saved,” and jobs “created” by the $787 billion stimulus [...]

Man sues Home Depot over being fired for violation of dress code

Posted by Stephen on October 28, 2009 at 3:53 pm

If you haven’t heard already, a Home Depot employee was fired from a Florida store for a dress code violation. Sounds pretty clear cut and straight forward; he broke the rules, refused to follow the rules he agreed to when signing his contract of employment, and as a result was fired for insubordination. This wouldn’t [...]

Michael Moore’s Billionaire Backers

Posted by Stephen on October 26, 2009 at 9:56 am

Posted by David Boaz
I wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, “One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.” (In the final section, “Toward a Framework for Utopia.”)
Now Ira Stoll notes the irony that it [...]

Dollar loses reserve status to yen & euro

Posted by Stephen on October 13, 2009 at 12:31 pm

Ben Bernanke’s dollar crisis went into a wider mode yesterday as the greenback was shockingly upstaged by the euro and yen, both of which can lay claim to the world title as the currency favored by central banks as their reserve currency.
Over the last three months, banks put 63 percent of their new cash into [...]