Tag Archives: business

The Investment Firm Started by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Pick Was Accused in Fraud Case

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly cast himself as an anti-Wall Street populist and blasted an international cabal of bankers for supposedly screwing American workers. Yet, since being elected, he has turned to Big Finance titans to run his administration, and one of them—Wilbur Ross, Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce—founded a giant private equity firm that was accused of committing fraud and deceit in a case the firm settled by paying a multimillion-dollar fine.

In 2000, Ross founded WL Ross & Co., a private equity firm that specialized in taking over troubled companies. In August this year, the firm settled a case with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the firm not accurately disclosing fees it was charging investors, resulting in them paying excessive fees for nearly a decade. Ross had sold the firm in 2006, but the failure to properly disclose fees began in 2001 and continued until 2011. The settlement was part of a much larger crackdown by the SEC on how private equity firms charged fees to their investors.

According to SEC documents in the case, WL Ross & Co. advised investment funds in exchange for management fees, but those fees were supposed to be offset by special “transaction fees” paid by some of the companies that were being invested in. But millions in those transaction fees were allocated to other funds, and investors ended up overpaying their management fees to WL Ross & Co. The SEC determined the firm had violated the law prohibiting firms from engaging “in any transaction, practice, or course of business which operates as a fraud or deceit upon any client or prospective client.” In August, the firm agreed to pay back $11.9 million in fees and a $2.3 million civil penalty, although it did not admit any wrongdoing.

Under Wilbur Ross’ management, the firm helped engineer the purchase and combining of a number of American steel companies, including the iconic Bethlehem Steel, which Ross united as the International Steel Group. Ross sold the collection of American steel companies to Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, who folded the companies into the international steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal.

Ross, who made his name and billions of dollars as a specialist in buyouts and restructuring troubled and bankrupt companies, has a long history of working with Trump. In the early 1990s when Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were floundering, Trump managed to stave off lenders and keep the businesses afloat with the help of Ross, who at the time ran the Rothschild Inc. investment firm’s bankruptcy practice.

Excerpt from – 

The Investment Firm Started by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Pick Was Accused in Fraud Case

Posted in Anker, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Investment Firm Started by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Pick Was Accused in Fraud Case

Forget the Wall. If You Want Less Illegal Immigration, Go After Employers.

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Controlling illegal immigration has never seemed all that hard to me. The vast majority of those who are in the United States illegally—either by crossing the border or overstaying their visas—are here to find jobs. So if you want to reduce illegal immigration, you need to make it hard for employers to hire anyone who’s not authorized to work. But in the LA Times today, Wayne Cornelius says that’s not in the cards:

There has never been much public or congressional appetite for a harsh crackdown on employers, especially the small businesses that depend most heavily on workers in the U.S. illegally. They are pillars of their communities and campaign contributors. Besides, immigration agents have had higher enforcement priorities — tracking down immigrants who committed serious crimes or pose national security threats.

President-elect Trump has called for full implementation of an electronic employment eligibility verification system called E-Verify….E-Verify, however, is no panacea. It does not prevent immigrants who are ineligible to work from getting jobs by providing valid information pertaining to other people (borrowed documents). And as long as penalties are weak, requiring employers to use E-Verify will not significantly reduce violations.

Will Congress approve crippling fines or even prison sentences for business owners who ignore E-Verify rules? Will lawmakers direct the Justice Department to make these scofflaws a top priority? Unless and until that happens, many employers will continue to view hiring those in the U.S. illegally as a low-risk, high-reward crime. In 2014, the probability that one of the nation’s 6 million employers would be investigated for violating immigration laws was 0.03%.

I don’t personally care all that much about the level of illegal immigration. The current numbers strike me as reasonable. But obviously a lot of people do care, and most of them are Republicans. They talk tough, they build walls and fences, and they promise to hire lots of border enforcement agents. But this is all a sham. If the economic incentives continue to exist, so will illegal immigration.

The problem is that Republicans can’t come to grips with their two main constituencies. Social conservatives generally hate undocumented workers and want to deport them all. Business conservatives want no such thing. So Republicans thunder on TV that borders are borders, and by God we need to control them. Then they quietly go back to their jobs and do nothing.

The obvious way to cut down on illegal immigration has always been to go after employers. Not only does this attack the root of the problem, but it’s practically self-funding. You hire lots of ICE auditors and then pay for them by levying big fines on employers who break the law. As the problem diminishes, you collect less money but you also need fewer auditors.

E-Verify isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But it could be made good enough. And once that’s done, enforcement could be made pretty widespread and the fines could be made pretty high. If you do that, you can forget about the wall. It’s just a distraction.

Bottom line: Anyone who claims to be fiercely opposed to illegal immigration but doesn’t support strong employer sanctions is just lying to you.

Excerpt from:

Forget the Wall. If You Want Less Illegal Immigration, Go After Employers.

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget the Wall. If You Want Less Illegal Immigration, Go After Employers.

Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week’s real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it’s just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was “Crooked Hillary” and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump’s scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn’t confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it’s all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn’t a big problem because the press didn’t want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

Read this article: 

Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

Top 10 Companies Using the Sun for Power

Target already has a reputation for having everything (seriously, who among us hasn’t walked in for one item and walked out an hour later with 20?), and now it can add one more thing to the list: the top capacity for solar power of all the corporations in the U.S.

That’s the word from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), which has been tracking the top corporate solar users in the U.S. for the past five years. It’s Target’s first time in the No. 1 position, after edging out Walmart, the usual winner. As Target grows its solar capacity, so do companies nationwide — the 2016 Solar Means Business report from SEIA concluded that more American businesses are installing solar than ever before.

So who else is using solar power in spades? Here are the top 10 companies:

Top 10 Companies Using Solar Power (Based on Megawatts Installed)

  1. Target Corporation (147.5 MW). Target’s goal is to increase its number of buildings with rooftop solar panels to 500 by 2020. The retailer currently has 300 buildings equipped with panels.
  2. Walmart (145 MW). In 2005, Walmart’s chief executive officer at the time, Lee Scott, said, “Climate change used to be controversial, but the science is in and it is overwhelming. Every company has a responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.”
  3. Prologis (107.8 MW). Prologis — an owner, operator and developer of industrial real estate — has put in more solar capacity than 27 different U.S. states.
  4. Apple (93.9 MW). A former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, is now the Apple executive overseeing environmental policy, social initiatives and worldwide government affairs.
  5. Costco Wholesale (50.7 MW). The solar array on Costco Wholesale’s warehouse in Lake Elsinore, Calif., covers 45,000 square feet, which will prevent 458 tons of carbon from going into the atmosphere every year. The developers have compared this to planting 112 acres of trees.
  6. Kohl’s (50.2 MW). As of the end of last year, retailer Kohl’s had 163 solar power systems activated in 15 states.
  7. IKEA (44 MW). Ninety-one percent of IKEA stores are powered by the sun.
  8. Macy’s (38.9 MW). By the end of 2016, Macy’s is scheduled to install additional solar power systems on its facilities, for a total of 113.
  9. General Growth Properties (30.2 MW). In 2015, real estate investment trust GGP reduced its overall carbon footprint by 23,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of removing nearly 5,000 cars off the roads in the U.S.
  10. Hartz Mountain Industries (22.7 MW). “Solar power represents both a means to be kinder to the earth by reducing pollution and is a significant factor in reducing our operational expenses,” said Emanuel Stern, president and chief operating officer for Hartz Mountain Industries, which deals in commercial real estate.

According to the SEIA report, since 2012, the top U.S. businesses have increased their solar capacity by 240 percent. This uptick in solar has helped to create thousands of American jobs, and the corporations in the report are generating “enough clean electricity to offset more than 1.1 million metric tons of harmful carbon emissions a year,” according to SEIA’s interim president, Tom Kimbis.

Read More About Solar Power:
We Could Power America with Relatively Few Solar Panels, So Why Aren’t We?
How to Solar Power Your Business
Four Reasons the Cost of Solar Energy Keeps Falling

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

About
Latest Posts

Wendy Gabriel

Wendy Gabriel is a freelance eco-writer based in California. Wendy’s work has been featured in numerous publications and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fox Business News and Mashable.com. For nearly six years, she was a weekly contributor on a popular radio talk show in the Upper Midwest with a segment titled “Simple Tips for Green Living.”

Latest posts by Wendy Gabriel (see all)

Top 10 Companies Using the Sun for Power – November 24, 2016
Which Is Better? Plastic vs. Glass Food Storage Containers – October 28, 2016
How To Find A Truly All-Natural Shampoo – October 20, 2016

Connect with us:

Recent Posts

Do the Gilmore Girls Recycle?
Top 10 Companies Using the Sun for Power
Give Thanks for Environmental Progress in 2016
How Games Can Make Sustainability Fun

Read

Connect With Us

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Pinterest
Google Plus

Advertise With Us

Copyright ©. 2016 Earth911. All Rights Reserved.

Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Sign up for our newsletter for exclusive updates on contests, new products, and more.

earth911

Originally posted here: 

Top 10 Companies Using the Sun for Power

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Top 10 Companies Using the Sun for Power

Trump vows to create jobs by cutting regulations. That won’t work.

In his first post-election national address — conveyed via YouTube — President-elect Donald Trump detailed his plans to “make America great again” in his first 100 days in office.

These plans include renegotiating international trade deals, imposing new bans on lobbying within his administration, and ending restrictions on fossil fuel production. That would fly in the face of the U.S. commitment to ratchet down emissions under the Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty supported by 71 percent of Americans.

“On energy,” Trump said, “I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That’s what we want. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

That order of business, however, does not address the dearth of “millions of high-paying jobs” in the energy sector. Fossil fuel jobs have been in decline not because of overregulation, but due to the low prices of gas, oil, and coal. (That said, those prices are forecast to rise again.)

In fact, the shale drilling industry is already exempt from a number of the major federal environmental laws, including the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act.

As for “clean coal,” someone should probably tell the President-elect there’s no such thing. But we have a feeling he’s not going to listen.

From: 

Trump vows to create jobs by cutting regulations. That won’t work.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump vows to create jobs by cutting regulations. That won’t work.

Private Prison Company Frees Itself From Its Old Corporate Identity

Mother Jones

The Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison company that was the subject of a recent Mother Jones investigation, has announced that it’s rebranding itself in the wake of increased scrutiny of the for-profit prison industry. CCA will now be known as CoreCivic, a “diversified government solutions company.” Don’t let the corporatespeak fool you; it will remain a private prison corporation offering “high quality corrections and detention management.”

The makeover comes after a slew of bad news for the company. After Mother Jones published its investigation, the Department of Justice announced it would phase out its use of private prisons. The Department of Homeland Security said it would reevaluate its relationship with private prisons. CCA shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against the company for allegedly failing to disclose that its practices could put its government contracts in jeopardy. Over the past six months, CCA’s stock price has fallen more than 50 percent, and the company announced a round of layoffs last month.

“Rebranding as CoreCivic is the culmination of a multi-year strategy to transform our business from largely corrections and detention services to a wider range of government solutions,” said Damon T. Hininger, the president and CEO of the business formerly known as CCA in a press release about the rebranding. “The CoreCivic name speaks to our ability to solve the tough challenges facing government at all levels and to the deep sense of service that we feel every day to help people.” The release claims the rebranding has been years in the making and was finalized before the Justice Department’s announcement in August.

The company formerly known as CCA is also adopting a “new visual identity”:

This includes a bolder, sleeker and more modern typeface, as well as a color palette intended to evoke attributes such as safety, strength, passion, stability, integrity and seriousness. The brand’s symbol, a 13-stripe American flag stylized to also represent a building, speaks to the Company’s commitment to public service, the professionalism of its employees and its expanding government real estate focus. There’s also a nod to the Company’s heritage with the right side of the symbol angled at 19.83°, representing the year that the Company was founded, and the left side of the symbol angled at 20.16° to mark the year the Company rebranded as CoreCivic.

Read more about the history of CCA and private prisons and Shane Bauer’s investigation into a CCA prison in Louisiana.

Continued here: 

Private Prison Company Frees Itself From Its Old Corporate Identity

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Private Prison Company Frees Itself From Its Old Corporate Identity

Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last week, a self-driving truck delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser from Loveland to Colorado Springs. This was obviously meant as a big FU to Coors, since the route “coincidentally” took all this frosty Bud right past Coors headquarters in Golden, Colorado. Most people, however, are interpreting this event as merely technological: it represents the dawn of the era of self-driving trucks. Tim Lee comments:

According to Otto’s blog post on the trip, “our professional driver was out of the driver’s seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back.”

But this doesn’t mean the nation’s truck drivers need to start working on their résumés. Technology like this may eventually displace human truck drivers, but the tech is several years away from causing mass unemployment. The key reason is that Otto’s self-driving technology is initially limited to highways. When the truck reaches ordinary city streets, it hands control over to a human driver to handle tricky traffic situations. This means that even after a truck is outfitted with Otto’s self-driving technology, it will still need a human driver in the truck.

Hmmm. “Several years” sounds ominously near-term, so truck drivers might want to start worrying about their jobs right now. Beyond that, there’s a way this could put truckers out of business well before that. Here’s how.

Pick a route that has a lot of truck traffic. Let’s say, Chicago to Cleveland. Outside of each city, you build a big truck depot and dispatch center. In Chicago, teamsters drive the trucks from the city out to the depot. Autopilots drive the trucks to the Cleveland depot, where a driver gets in and takes the truck to its destination. Rinse and repeat. The job of a truck driver is to drive back and forth from destinations in the city out to the depot, which they can do five or six times a day. Trucking firms save a ton of money even though the autopilot is designed for highway driving only.

Building the depots would be cheap and easy, since you don’t really need much there. It’s basically just a dispatch center. You could pretty easily have hundreds of them dotted across the country near all of our biggest cities. The only thing that would stop this from happening is the knowledge that they’ll only last a few years before they’re put out of business by fully automated trucks that can go from dock to dock with no human intervention. Either way, truck drivers are in big trouble.

Read article here: 

Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

41 Insane Facts About Tesla Motors

It can sometimes feel like 21st century history is being written by a handful of entrepreneurs and their organizations: chances are that generations to come will talk of Elon Musk in the same way that we rememberHenry Ford, who famously said “The remains of the old must be decently laid away; the path of the new prepared. That is the different between revolution and progress”. Both are visionaries who have changed the way we think about vehicle manufacture and performance, and each has embraced the spirit of their time and applied it to their business and engineering strategies. But while Ford is by now an established historical figure, Musk is still living out his story.

The entrepreneursdual background in economics and physics, combined with a canny eye for the zeitgeist, has provided the right chemistry to cook up his $12.1 billion fortune. And while Paypal is long behind him and space tourism plays a big part in his future plans, Musks Tesla Motors concern remains very much in the present. The manufacturers first half-decade ended in failure, with thescrapping of their flagship Roadster vehicle but Musk and his organization have never lost faith in the inevitability of the dominance of electric cars. With a staff of 14,000 and a market value of $33.5 billion from which Musk draws a salary of just a dollar a year Teslas wedge of the industry has grown to reflect the vision of its iconic boss.

Of course, bubbles have burst before, and weve seen many a hubristic entrepreneur wade too deep into a river of their own hype; but like Ford before him, Musks success and his potential rests on his informed vision of not just how the world will look tomorrow or next year, but in ten, twenty, fifty years time. Teslas lithium-ion battery Gigafactory, for example, will be powered by 100% renewable energy remarkable, considering it will be the second largest building in the world. Such scale, vision and conscientiousness is why Tesla is a major, major company to keep an eye on and you can begin by checking out some of the startling facts and figures in this smart new infographic.

This post originally appeared on Jennings Motor Group.

Photo Credit: Herman Caroan/Flickr

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Link:

41 Insane Facts About Tesla Motors

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 41 Insane Facts About Tesla Motors

Republicans Pretend They Want More Powerful Bank Oversight

Mother Jones

Oh man, this is rich. Here is wingnut Rep. Jeb Hensarling griping about the fact that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau didn’t find out about the Well Fargo scandal sooner:

“Why does it take the L.A. Times to break this story, when we’re paying federal investigators to investigate?” Hensarling recently told Fox Business Network.

“Where was the CFPB? Why did they come in so late to the game?” he continued. “They have immense powers and this is their job to enforce these basic consumer laws and it appears they were asleep at the switch.” Hensarling also has criticized regulators for the $185-million settlement with the bank, which allowed Wells Fargo to avoid admitting any wrongdoing.

If Hensarling had his way, the CFPB would be eliminated and Wells Fargo might well have escaped from the whole affair unscathed. Now he’s pretending that he thinks the CFPB is too weak. Sen. Sherrod Brown has it right:

“Hensarling reminds me of the kid who kills his parents and then wants to collect orphan benefits,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of the CFPB’s biggest backers. “He’s tried to underfund it. He’s tried to undercut. He’s done all he could to block bank regulations.”

Make up your mind, Jeb. Do you want the CFPB to more powerful or less powerful? You can only have it one way.

Read More – 

Republicans Pretend They Want More Powerful Bank Oversight

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Pretend They Want More Powerful Bank Oversight

Trump Foundation Involved in Yet More Corruption

Mother Jones

Donald Trump’s foundation is in the news again:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole. In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

Sorry Donald. You’re not allowed to use your charity to pay off your business obligations:

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing as I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

I don’t think I can count the number of reporters who have investigated the Clinton Foundation or the number of pieces they’ve written. The net result has been (a) no actual serious misconduct uncovered, but (b) a steady drumbeat of stories implying that something improper was going on.

Now then: how many reporters have been investigating the Trump Foundation? I might be missing someone, but basically the answer is one: David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post. The net result has been (a) plenty of actual misconduct uncovered, but (b) very little in the way of public attention to it.

This is why so many people can somehow believe that Hillary Clinton is less trustworthy than Donald Trump. In truth, it’s not even close. Trump is probably the world champion in the sport of lying; he cares about nothing but enriching himself and getting even with his enemies; and his political positions change with the wind. He’s just about the least trustworthy person on the planet.

But he’s entertaining. Gotta give him that. And really, isn’t that what matters?

See original article:

Trump Foundation Involved in Yet More Corruption

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Foundation Involved in Yet More Corruption