Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) has not commanded much public attention since Hillary Clinton started channeling Warren’s book, Fighting Chance, which claims the “system is rigged” against the middle class because it is controlled by and for the elites who tilt the game in their favor. But in a bold effort to take all the oxygen out of the Clinton campaign, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) laid out a bare-knuckles legislative road map on Wednesday to kick Wall Street in the teeth.
by Chriss W. Street16 Apr 2015, 11:00 AM PST0
Netflix, Inc. beat its aggressive prediction that it would add 4 million new streaming subscribers in the quarter ending March by adding 4.88 million subscribers. After shares leaped 47% over the past three months, the fabulous numbers sent the stock up about 11 percent to $531 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
by Chriss W. Street16 Apr 2015, 5:51 AM PST0
In what may be a very bad sign of a deteriorating defense posture for Uber Technologies’ argument that its drivers are independent contractors versus employees, a San Francisco federal judge denied Uber’s summary judgement motion and the case is now
by Chriss W. Street16 Apr 2015, 4:30 AM PST0
Google thought it had agreed last year with European competition regulators that the company’s 90% dominance of Internet searches was “not an illegal business.” But new European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager sought to put Google in chains on Wednesday by accusing the company of abusing its dominance in web searches to the detriment of competitors.
by Chriss W. Street16 Apr 2015, 4:00 AM PST0
A university degree was once perceived as the social elevator to a higher net worth. But the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that 40 million Americans have racked up an average of four loans with an outstanding net balance of $29,000 to obtain a college education.
by Chriss W. Street15 Apr 2015, 7:58 PM PST0
The International Association of Machinist (IAM) were cocky on March 17 when they filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board for a vote to organize 3,175 jet assembly workers at the Boeing Company’s nonunion factories in South Carolina. But with a week before the April 22 vote and panicking that they are about to lose, the union is on the verge withdrawing the vote.
by Chriss W. Street15 Apr 2015, 2:15 PM PST0
Florida Governor Rick Scott flew into Southern California and spent Sunday and Monday trying to lure away shipping and logistics companies from the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego. When Governor Brown was asked by reporters at
by Chriss W. Street14 Apr 2015, 4:54 AM PST0
China recently flooded American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic known as a “denial of service attack” to block providers that allowed China’s Internet users to circumvent websites blocked by government policies. The action was initially thought to be another example of China’s use of a program called the “Great Wall.” But academic researchers have determined that China appears to have reverse-engineered the capabilities of a powerful National Security Agency (NSA) program that was first described to the public in the leaked Edward Snowden files two years ago.
by Chriss W. Street13 Apr 2015, 11:30 AM PST0
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just published the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary (JOLTS) report for February. The job openings percent for the workforce hit a 14 year high of 5.1 million, while the layoffs and discharges percentage stayed at a historic low. But despite the job availability rate more than doubling since 2009, the hiring rate only grew by 30 percent in the same period. Adjusted for population growth, the American economy is still down by 5.9 million jobs.
by Chriss W. Street13 Apr 2015, 5:00 AM PST0
Seven months after a Sacramento Bee investigation revealed how State of California departments play a personnel shell game to pad their budgets with millions in tax dollars earmarked for staffing salaries, an audit released Friday on the Department of Finance’s website confirmed that phantom employees are very widespread, and some of the cash allocated for salaries has been used to pay for raises and other unauthorized spending instead.
by Chriss W. Street13 Apr 2015, 4:00 AM PST0
On April 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared a strong El Niño advisory reflecting substantially above-average surface sea temperatures forming across the equatorial Pacific. This means that there is a 60 to 70 percent probability that America could experience a monster winter like the El Niño that hit in 1997-1998, causing torrential rains in the Southeast, ice storms in the Northeast, tornadoes in Florida, and mass flooding in California.
by Chriss W. Street11 Apr 2015, 10:15 AM PST0
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria denied Walt Disney Company’s effort to strike a copyright lawsuit that a trailer for their multi-billion dollar blockbuster Frozen featuring the character Olaf was “substantially similar” to a Mill Valley, California, animator’s film short called The Snowman.
by Chriss W. Street11 Apr 2015, 9:00 AM PST0
Despite hot stock market gains over the last three years, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) actuaries just demanded that public pensions increase funding by a stunning 10 percent next year and make similar annual increases for each of the next 5 years due to an inappropriate “assumption.” That means that CalPERS’ annual payment could leap 61% from $4.5 billion this year to $7.25 billion in five years.
by Chriss W. Street11 Apr 2015, 7:55 AM PST0
Hollywood moguls and the vast majority of leftist entertainers have joined forces in a last-ditch effort to bully wavering Democratic lawmakers into backing President Obama’s fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the centerpiece of what he calls his “pro-trade agenda.”
by Chriss W. Street9 Apr 2015, 4:15 AM PST0
Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and possiuble Republican presidential candidate, recently blasted “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology” during California’s water crisis.” Fiorina’s campaign is specifically targeting Governor Jerry Brown’s difficult political choices in handling the drought–with a possible view to undermining his own potential presidential campaign.
by Chriss W. Street8 Apr 2015, 5:00 AM PST0
The California Teachers’ Retirement Trust (CalSTRS) board directed its staff and consultants last week to evaluate the risks of investing in thermal coal companies.
by Chriss W. Street7 Apr 2015, 4:00 AM PST0
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates the financial risks posed by the lending activity of American national banks, has officially reported that banks are expanding sub-prime credit by raising borrowing limits for credit card holders. The new concerns follow an OCC report last June that flagged “problematic” recent high-risk corporate takeovers, car loans through auto dealers, and commercial finance lending.
by Chriss W. Street6 Apr 2015, 1:00 PM PST0
With the Sierra Nevada snowpack at its lowest level since 1950, California Governor Jerry Brown announced last week that he would implement the first mandatory water reductions in state history. But Brown also called on districts to streamline permitting practices for water projects, and to invest in new water infrastructure technologies. Brown’s comments amount to his first vocal support for widespread desalinization.
by Chriss W. Street6 Apr 2015, 11:33 AM PST0
UPS is probably America’s premier example of how Fred Taylor’s scientific management methods are being applied using “telematics” to break down every worker task to eliminate all un-essential movements–and then use the right tools, training and incentives to achieve optimum workflow productivity and dump excess Teamster members. By giving their employees an Apple i-Watch, managers across almost all industries could soon be using telematics to increase productivity and dump employees.
by Chriss W. Street6 Apr 2015, 5:30 AM PST0
Government cash “incentives” have been the key to Tesla’s initial success, because buyers can often use the incentive and rebate payments to meet their down-payment for a $100,000 vehicle. But incentives may be reduced or terminated in the company’s biggest markets in California and Norway that represent 25 percent of sales.
by Chriss W. Street6 Apr 2015, 4:00 AM PST0
Governor and stealth Presidential candidate Jerry Brown last September passed the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Families Act,” It declares employees in companies of all sizes must receive at least three paid sick days, which appears to be a huge expansion of the welfare state. But the law’s exemption for unions is aimed at forcing small businesses into healthy union workplaces.
by Chriss W. Street5 Apr 2015, 4:01 AM PST0
According to the California Realtors’ home ownership affordability report, only 28 percent of Los Angeles residents can afford to buy a home in Los Angeles, due to the combination of low inventory and the fact that the Dodd-Frank Consumer Protection Act made it much harder for immigrants and first-time buyers to qualify for a loan.
by Chriss W. Street5 Apr 2015, 4:00 AM PST0
Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order Wednesday implementing California’s first-ever mandatory water restrictions that require cities and towns to cut their water usage by 25 percent over the next nine months. But Brown will not cut oil company water use for fracking because the industry pays over $20 billion in state and local taxes.
by Chriss W. Street4 Apr 2015, 10:59 AM PST0
About 11.3 percent of Bay Area residents are living at or below the poverty level, according to a Joint Venture Silicon Valley Institute analysis entitled, “Poverty in the Bay Area.” Despite low unemployment in Santa Clara County, the heart of the Silicon
by Chriss W. Street2 Apr 2015, 4:06 PM PST0
With University of California tuition more than doubling in the last decade, about two-thirds of Californians now rate affordability at America’s largest public college system as poor. Despite Federal Reserve warnings about default risks for student loans, the UC system intends to raise tuition by 5 percent next year and 21.5 percent over the next 5 years.
by Chriss W. Street2 Apr 2015, 4:30 AM PST0
