Tag Archives | Business

Marijuana: America’s Next Big Business Boom?

By on October 23, 2012 in News 5

Picture: R3D-3Y3 (PD)

The Daily Beast

With pot use up and legalization perceived as being just around the corner, reports that smart businessmen are looking at legalized marijuana as a smart investment:

Full dark in downtown Denver, and inside one of the twinkling high-rises that make the skyline, drug dealers are putting money into envelopes. They’re trying to be discreet. No one signed the security logbook in the lobby. All assume the room could be bugged. But if your image of the drug trade involves armed gangs or young men in parked cars, these dealers offer a surreal counterpoint. There’s a finance veteran, two children of the Ivy League, multiple lawyers, and the son of a police chief. At their side is a Pulitzer Prize–winning communications consultant, two state lobbyists, and a nationally known political operative. And the guest of honor: a state senator who likes the look of those envelopes being stuffed.

… Read the rest

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Discover Ordered To Repay $200 Million It Stole From Cardholders

By on October 1, 2012 in News 9

Kudos to Obama’s newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for cracking down on this. In short, Discover’s telemarketers offered customers unnecessary “add-on services” which were implied to be free, and then charged customers’ accounts for said services. In July, Capital One was forced to pay $210 million over the same practice. The Los Angeles Times reports:

More than 3.5 million Discover credit card customers will share $200 million in refunds in the wake of a federal investigation that determined the bank tricked people into signing up for payment protection plans and other add-on services. Regulators said scripts for Discover’s telemarketers “contained misleading language likely to deceive consumers about whether they were actually purchasing a product.”

Consumer advocates said the enforcement actions show that the new consumer bureau is on the job. “Banks have been doing this for years, but we never had a regulator who protected consumers before,” said Ed Mierzwinski, director of the consumer program for the U.S.

… Read the rest

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Banks Falsify Credit Card Lawsuits in Ninety Percent of Cases?

By on August 16, 2012 in News 6

Philip Taylor (CC)

We hear every week about the massive LIBOR interest rate fixing, or the shady practices by which banks drain money from local municipalities, or the false promises given to homeowners across the country by the finance industry, or as much as 90% of foreclosed homes remaining off the market but still shuttered in and out of dispassionate algorithms, or that San Francisco’s assessor discovered ‘errors’ in 84% of home mortgage foreclosures (read: scams). It’s not a big leap of the imagination then to consider that almost all credit card lawsuits brought by banks are fraudulent. Lenders are still continuing the dubious fraud that caused such a scandal last year with robo-signing.

via Russia Today:

US credit card companies have been churning out lawsuits and improperly collecting debt from consumers 90 percent of the time, at least according to a New York judge who deals with these cases.

… Read the rest

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Hospitals Begin Planting Debt Collectors In Emergency Rooms

By on April 26, 2012 in News 36

254668516_97856d3d0fThe New York Times reports on a new model of emergency care—debt collectors posing as medical staff:

Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.

This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health, were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the country.

To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all. The attorney general, Lori Swanson, also said that Accretive employees may have broken the law by not clearly identifying themselves as debt collectors…

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The Hypocritical Use of Piracy As a Corporate Weapon

By on April 1, 2012 in News 4

News CorpMyles Peterson writes on TorrentFreak:

Rupert Murdoch, media tycoon, founder and Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, has been a fanatical supporter of tougher anti-piracy legislation including PIPA and SOPA in the US. But this week it was claimed that Murdoch’s piracy crusade is a rather hypocritical one, with his News Corporation now at the center of a major piracy scandal in which it’s accused of encouraging piracy to cripple competitors.

Troubled international media giant News Corporation felt the ice crack beneath its feet this week after years of enduring ill winds blowing from phone hacking scandals in the United Kingdom and United States. The Australian Financial Review and the BBC’s Panorama programme combined to publish a four-year investigation into the operations of News Corporation subsidiaries, unveiling damaging claims of a plot to facilitate and encourage piracy with the aim of crippling pay-television rivals.

The allegations cast shadows across the main-stream media landscape, with implications for the conduct of news outlets and the arguments of anti-piracy lobby groups through to the structure of the pay-television landscape itself …

Read More: TorrentFreak… Read the rest

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Greg Smith’s NY Times Op-Ed Cost Goldman Sachs $2.2 Billion for Shareholders

By on March 15, 2012 in News 19

Christine Harper reports on Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. saw $2.15 billion of its market value wiped out after an employee assailed Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s management and the firm’s treatment of clients, sparking debate across Wall Street.

The shares dropped 3.4 percent in New York trading yesterday, the third-biggest decline in the 81-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index, after London-based Greg Smith made the accusations in a New York Times op-ed piece.

Smith, who also wrote that he was quitting after 12 years at the company, blamed Blankfein, 57, and President Gary D. Cohn, 51, for a “decline in the firm’s moral fiber.” They responded in a memo to current and former employees, saying that Smith’s assertions don’t reflect the firm’s values, culture or “how the vast majority of people at Goldman Sachs think about the firm and the work it does on behalf of our clients.”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, 84, whose “Volcker rule” would limit banks like New York-based Goldman Sachs from making bets with their own money, called Smith’s article “a radical, strong” piece.

… Read the rest

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Wal-Mart Will No Longer Have People Greeters At The Door

By on March 11, 2012 in News 17

Wal-Mart GreeterSign of the times? Claire Gordon writes on AOL Jobs:

After 30 years, “People Greeters” will no longer welcome Walmart customers with a “cart and a smile.” Four months after Walmart got rid of its night-shift “People Greeters,” the big-box retailer is moving its day-shift greeters inside the store. Walmart claims it’s all in the name of better customer service, but the announcement has left some greeters uncertain about the future of their jobs.

Jerome Allen has greeted morning shoppers at Walmart for five years, the last two at a supercenter in Fort Worth, Texas. He heard through the grapevine that the store was reassigning its night-shift greeters, but was surprised when the store manager called him into his office on Thursday, and told him that there would be no more door greeters at all.

Allen’s new position, which begins Feb. 6, will be to stand in “high traffic” areas of the store, ask customers if they need any assistance, and direct the flow of traffic.

… Read the rest

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The Need For State-Based Innovation

By on February 8, 2012 in News 6

onegoodthingleadstoanotherPoliticians and pundits constantly call for the government to step out of the way and let entrepreneurs and “job creators” build the industries of the future. New Left Project argues that this current conventional wisdom is all wrong, and more often than not, game-changing innovation is funded by the government, not the private sector:

The current debate, in the UK and abroad, on the need to cut back the state in order to unleash the power of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector, builds upon a stark contrast that is repeatedly drawn by the media, business and libertarian politicians: a dynamic, creative competitive private sector versus a sluggish, bureaucratic, inert, `meddling’ public sector.

It is assumed that the private sector is inherently more innovative, more able to think out of the `box’ and to lead a country towards long-run innovation-led growth. But many examples in the history of innovation, entrepreneurship and competition, in different sectors and across different countries, paint a very different picture – of a risk taking innovative state – especially in the most uncertain phases of technological development and/or in the most risky sectors – versus a more inert private sector, which only invests (in innovation, in new start- ups, in networks) once the state has absorbed most of the uncertainty.

… Read the rest

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No More Taco Bell Until Abortion Ends (Video)

By on February 8, 2012 in News 92

Site editor’s note: if you have been following this political/internet/media explosion you may find this recent story posted to disinfo.com in December as an interesting footnote to the outcome.

These people will enjoy no more burritos until unborn babies are no longer terminated. Until Abortion Ends is a perplexing and to some extent inadvertently amusing trend in which people pledge to give up various things “until abortion ends”. (Although I assume they actually mean “until abortion becomes criminalized”.)

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