Business News

Bought & Paid For Members Of Congress Weakened Financial Reform

1:34 am EST July 15th, 2010 | Politics | 4 Comments

The only word to describe people who indulge in this sort of behavior has to be “whore.”

Joseph Crowley

The Office of Congressional Ethics has sent corporate donors and fund-raising hosts more than three dozen requests for documents involving eight members who solicited and took large contributions from financial institutions even as they were debating the landmark regulatory bill, according to lawyers involved in the inquiry.

The requests are focusing on a series of fund-raisers last December, in the days immediately before the House’s initial adoption of the sweeping overhaul, which could win final approval this week. Some of the fund-raising events took place the same days as crucial votes.

For example, on Dec. 10, one of the lawmakers under investigation, Representative Joseph Crowley, a New York Democrat who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, left the Capitol during the House debate to attend a fund-raising event for him hosted by a lobbyist at her nearby Capitol Hill town house that featured financial firms, along with other donors. After collecting thousands of dollars in checks, Mr. Crowley returned to the floor of the House just in time to vote against a series of amendments that would have imposed tougher restrictions on Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, one of the top hits for Joe Crowley is as a DLC “New Dem Of The Week.”

Topic: Business, Economy, Financial Reform, US House

The Gold Bubble Hits Esquire

4:01 pm EST February 10th, 2010 | News | 4 Comments

All that shilling by right wing radio hacks like Glenn Beck is paying off, as people are now advising purchases in gold the way they did for subprime and dotcom. Look, at least if we had a bubble in something like green tech it would have the side benefit of staving off the end of the planet for a decade or two.

Topic: Business, Economy, Gold

Toyota Prius Brakes Now A Problem

10:12 am EST February 3rd, 2010 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Great.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius hybrid is prompting complaints over its brake system, though accounts differed over the size and gravity of the problem, according to reports.

Toyota said Wednesday that it had received ‘dozens’ of complaints about the car’s brakes, various news reports said.

Topic: Business

Government Intervention Was Needed To Push Toyota Recall

3:53 pm EST February 2nd, 2010 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Remember, giant corporations are always looking out for us and we don’t need a big nanny state government. Also, tax cuts

Toyota did not agree to recall millions of its vehicles that have potentially dangerous accelerators until after his department had extensive discussions with the automaker, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood tells NPR.

‘We persuaded them that it was in their best interests, but more importantly in the interests of the driving public … to find a fix for these vehicles,’ LaHood said on Talk of the Nation a short time ago.

Topic: Business

Apple Profits Beat Estimates

7:12 pm EST January 25th, 2010 | News | 1 Comment

steve jobs iphone

If Apple is doing this well now, what if the economy wasn’t in the crapper?

Apple on Monday reported growth in revenue and net income for the first quarter of 2010, buoyed by strong iPhone and Mac shipments.

The company reported a net profit of US$3.38 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 26, compared to $2.26 billion in the first quarter of 2009. The company reported earnings per share of $3.67, which beat estimates of $2.09 from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Topic: Apple, Business, Tech

Corporate Overlord Watch

12:33 pm EST December 17th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Since they rolled out the iPhone and experienced a gigantic surge of customers, AT&T has spent less and less on infrastructure. According to free market true believers, this shouldn’t be. In their scenario companies like AT&T respond to consumer demand by creating a better service. In reality, unless they get prodding from outside, they’re more than happy to reap the benefit of being the only source of iPhones without doing anything serious about their network.

Topic: AT&T, Business

Melissa Bean Tries To Weaken Banking Regulation

2:30 pm EST December 8th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Another Democrat in Congress does the bidding of her Wall Street masters to the detriment of her constituents (well at least the ones who actually work for a living).

Topic: Banking, Business, Economic Crisis, Melissa Bean

MySpace: Rupert Murdoch’s Folly

2:05 pm EST December 5th, 2009 | Media | 5 Comments

What happens when luddites try to run web properties.

Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. ‘It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,’ explains another former executive. ‘There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.’

Topic: Business, Rupert Murdoch

I Hope I’m Wrong

2:59 am EST November 30th, 2009 | News | Comments Off

But this whole mess with Dubai makes me seriously flashback to Lehman Brothers, etc. Billions of dollars and no rules…

Topic: Business, Economy

DOJ Looking At Monsanto For Antitrust Inquiry

2:11 am EST November 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 28 Comments

This is the sort of thing I like to highlight when people complain about not enough changes coming. There are whole host of things, as the Bush administration showed, subject to the power of the executive branch and a new president with a sane political philosophy can make those changes.

During the Bush administration, the Justice Department did not file a single case under antimonopoly laws regulating a dominant firm. But that stretch seems unlikely to continue.

This year, the Obama Justice Department tossed out the antitrust guidelines of its predecessor because they advocated ‘extreme hesitancy in the face of potential abuses by monopoly firms.’

‘We must change course,’ Christine Varney, the Obama administration’s chief antitrust enforcer, said at the time.

Of all the new scrutiny by Justice, the Monsanto investigation might have the highest stakes, dealing as it does with the food supply and one of the nation’s largest agricultural firms. It could also force the Obama administration, already under fire for the government’s expanded role in the economy, to explain how it distinguishes between normal rough-and-tumble competition and abusive monopolistic business practices.

Monsanto says it has done nothing wrong.

Topic: Business, Corruption, Crime