Those immersed in corrupt practices have been around since time began. They know the gullible, ignorant and the greedy and understand how easily it is to sway them and involve them in dirty deeds.

Analysts and executives expect 2012 US auto sales to grow 4 percent to 9 percent, the third consecutive annual gain. The only reason automakers are not more bullish is the risk that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe may trigger a broader slowdown.

All three U.S. automakers took market share in the United States for the first time in 23 years. But they can expect tougher competition in 2012 as the Japanese rivals rebound, and Hyundai and Volkswagen gather steam.

Warren Buffett's utility company is making a big buy in the turmoil-filled solar energy market.

MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a holding company controlled by Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, Fortune 500), has agreed to buy the $2 billion Topaz Solar Farm project from First Solar.

The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.

The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.

The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it produced here plus had to import gas from places in Europe.

But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.

The unemployment rate, which has refused to budge from the 9 percent neighborhood for two and a half frustrating years, fell sharply in November, driven in part by small businesses that finally see reason to hope and hire.

The unemployment rate, which has refused to budge from the 9 percent neighborhood for two and a half frustrating years, suddenly dropped in November, driven in part by small businesses that finally see reason to hope and hire.

A new city law aimed at making fast food for kids follow nutritional guidelines won't be making Happy Meals healthier, just more expensive — if you want a toy.

Beginning Thursday, it will cost an extra dime in San Francisco to get a toy in a Happy Meal — a move one county supervisor called a marketing ploy prompted by the new law.

The overnight police raids in Philadelphia and Los Angeles that dismantled two of the nation's biggest Occupy Wall Street encampments leave just a few major "occupations" still going on around the U.S. But activists are already changing tactics and warning of a winter of discontent, with rallies and marches every week.

American Airlines used to bill itself as "something special in the air," and it was.

The holiday shopping season got off to a strong start on Black Friday, with retail sales up 7 percent over last year, according to the most recent survey. Now stores just have to keep buyers coming back without the promise of door-buster savings.

Buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year, according to a Saturday report from ShopperTrak. It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the biggest year-over-year increase since 2007. Chicago-based ShopperTrak gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the U.S., including individual stores and shopping centers.

United Airlines officially entered the biofuel age on Monday, by launching its first U.S. commercial flight that's partly powered by algae-based jet fuel.

United Continental Holdings (UAL, Fortune 500) said its subsidiary Continental Airlines was operating the flight on a Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) 737-800 from Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston to Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

United said this flight makes it "the first U.S. airline to fly passengers using a blend of sustainable, advanced biofuel and traditional petroleum-derived jet fuel."

 

Much like the Shamrock Shake, McDonald’s McRib sandwich is a seasonal menu item. Last month it made a grand reappearance. But weird factors are afoot with the McRib and its ingredients; as mentioned on the Hectic Gourmet, things aren’t what they appear to be with this culinary concoction.

The combined profits of the Big Five oil companies — ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron — has already exceeded $100 billion this year.

Banks assert the right to the same profits. Why not us? 

Customers are dumping their banks in droves ahead of the nationwide "Move Your Money" and "Bank Transfer Day" movements this Saturday.
Given the recent spotlight on attempts -- and ultimate failures -- by some of the nation's biggest banks to tack on new debit card fees, thousands of disgruntled consumers have already either left or pledged to leave their current bank for a community bank or credit union, which are known for having fewer and/or lower bank account fees.

Goldline International, the precious metal retailer that has capitalized on conservatives’ anxiety about the economy by forging synergistic relationships with right wing TV and radio hosts, is facing a new series of legal challenges after authorities filed criminal charges against the company and its executives yesterday. Several major conservative talkers — including two former GOP presidential candidates — have endorsed and recommended Goldine, which critics have long contended is little more than a scam.

CNNMoney (NEW YORK) -- Bank of America said Tuesday it's axing its plan to charge a $5 fee for customers who use their debit cards to make purchases. In September, the bank announced that it would begin charging most customers the monthly fee early next year. But after widesp …

Many big banks are lining up to assure customers they won't impose the debit card fees that have sparked a backlash against Bank of America.

According to a person familiar with the company's plans, JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), the country's biggest bank, has decided not to charge customers for debit card purchases. The decision follows a test of the fee the bank began in two states in February. That test will be dropped in November.

US stocks rallied right out of the gate Thursday, with the major indexes jumping more than 3% in the afternoon, after European Union leaders agreed to expand Europe's bailout fund and take major losses on Greek bonds.

With about less than an hour left in the trading day, the Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) shot up more than 400 points, or 3.5%. The S&P 500 (SPX) gained 49 points, or 3.9%, and the Nasdaq composite (COMP) surged 99 points, or 3.8%.

Call it "Occupy Facebook." Or, perhaps, "UnOccupy Facebook."

Hoping to capitalize on frustrations with the social networking giant, not to mention some of the anti-corporate sentiment bubbling up on Wall Street and beyond, entrepreneurs have launched an upstart site called Unthink.

The Tampa, Florida-based startup wants to be everything that Facebook and rival Google+ are not -- and it has the manifesto and sassy YouTube video to prove it.

The trend is clear: Personal computer sales are slumping, and smartphone and tablet sales are booming. But Intel proved late Tuesday that the PC isn't going away anytime soon.

Semiconductor sales in Intel's (INTC, Fortune 500) PC division rose 22% last quarter, driving Intel's overall revenue to its sixth consecutive quarterly record.

If a company discloses that its profits plunged by nearly 75%, why are its compensation expenses only down about 25%?

I was not a math major in college. Or even economics for that matter. But something seems off. Yet this is what Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) reported Tuesday morning. And that, in a nutshell, is why the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't going away.

There's violent unrest in the world, banks are collapsing, and the economy's once again teetering on the brink—which means that Prof. Nouriel Roubini is right back in his element.

The month-old Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, with nearly $300,000 in the bank and participants finding satisfaction in the widening impact they hope will counter the influence on society by those who hold the purse strings of the world's economies.

The sun rose on Tuesday to shine upon a fascinating spectacle: Rupert Murdoch and his son James, who rule the News Corp.

Merchants triumphed over bankers in a battle for billions Wednesday as the Senate voted to let the Federal Reserve curb the fees that stores pay financial institutions when a customer swipes a debit card. It was murkier, however, whether the nation's consumers were winners or losers.

At some point, the pain of high unemployment across the country may lead to some new thinking in Washington, but until that time, welcome to the second Great Depression.

In the boardroom, it's as if the Great Recession never happened.

As millions of procrastinators scramble to meet Monday's tax filing deadline, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

Rescuers have blasted through 163 feet of solid rock in an effort to find an Idaho silver miner who has been missing since a cave-in last week, Hecla Mining Co. said Friday.

The nuclear accident was largely caused because of Tepco's penny-pinching, just as the Gulf oil spill was caused by the fact that BP cut every corner in the book.

As anyone who has read a tech blog in the past few years will know, AT&T; has been under attack for not being able to match the network capacity of larger rival Verizon. And when they won the majority of the bids for the open spectrum in 2008, Verizon also had a clear path to the future. Now AT&T; is taking another path: buying T-Mobile.

Here's the release with the details of the deal. AT&T; will pay roughly $39 billion to Deutsche Telekom for T-Mobile USA. Deutsche Telekom will also get a roughly 8 percent ownership stake in AT&T; as a result of the deal. And a Deutsche Telekom executive will join AT&T;'s Board.

On another thread, there seems to be a belief by a few people that when a man and woman are hired to do the same kind of job, the man can be paid $75,000 per year and the woman $70,000 per year without it being gender discrimination. The thinking is that the man received higher pay from that employer because of his better "negotiating skills", and because of that reason, it is all perfectly legitimate and not gender discrimination.

I believe that is blatant gender discrimination. If we look at the Equal Pay Act, it seems to agree.

In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act (EPA) as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to pay discrimination based on gender.

In general, the Equal Pay Act applies to most employees for work done for most employers, although there are certain exceptions. The Act prohibits pay differentials based on gender for employees working in substantially equal jobs requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions. There's no exemption for executive, administrative, professional, or outside sales employees even though they have exempt status under the FLSA.

http://www.hrhero.com/topics/epa.html

What do you think about this?

Record earnings fueled by the highest profit margins since 1993 are giving executives more leeway than ever to boost dividends as the bull market enters its third year.

Japan's nuclear crisis deepened dramatically Tuesday. As safety officials sought desperately to avert catastrophe, the government said radioactive material leaking from reactors was enough to "impact human health" and the risk of more leaks was "very high."

As some 30,000 protesters overwhelmed the state capitol building in Wisconsin today, Democratic state senators hit the road, reportedly with State Police officers in pursuit. The Dems left the state in order to deprive Republicans the necessary quorum for taking a vote on Gov.

You can't watch Al-Jazeera English on TV, but part of your monthly check to the cable company goes to support the news brought by Rupert Murdoch.

Many people in the UK will not have heard of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal. But perhaps they should have done. The prince has a lot of money invested in the UK and wields considerable, albeit discreet, influence.

On Wall Street, business has hardly ever been better, with profits this past year projected to settle at the fourth-highest all-time total. Wall Street bonuses, new data show, are enriching bankers and traders at levels not far off the records set in the go-go years right before the 2008 financial industry meltdown.

At JPMorgan Chase, news reports last week detailed, $9.33 billion in 2010 compensation will be divvied up among 26,314 employees, for a $369,651 per employee average, about the same as the $378,600 average in 2009.

While jobs remain painfully scarce, some young people are finding employment in the medical marijuana industry. Tony is one of them. Of course, legal or not, selling pot in California has always been a profitable business endeavor. Now, though, it's gaining traction as a legitimate business. Several factors are probably influencing the change, including revenue in a recession and politicians both liberal and conservative speaking out about the downside of continued prohibition.

The Climate Bill is dead. Comprehensive action on energy and climate change issues is not likely to come from the federal government any time soon. One of the oft-repeated opposition mantras is that times are too tough to think about climate action -- and the costs curbing emissions might impose on those who can afford additional costs the least. But in fact, it is exactly because of the economic landscape and the massive shedding of jobs in historically significant sectors that makes now the ideal time to make strategic public investments in our shared clean energy future. Without leadership from the feds, states are taking matters into their own hands.

The $7.2 billion from the estate of philanthropist Jeffry Picower represents the largest forfeiture in US history. So far, $9.8 billion has been collected on behalf of Bernard Madoff victims – nearly half the $20 billion that investors lost.

If any single corner of U.S. policymaking is more corporate owned than trade policy, I don't know of it. There isn't even pretense about it - corporate lobbyists draft, sculpt and finalize our trade policy, which is why we have a trade policy that has simultaneously destroyed our economy and driven down international labor, environmental and wage standards.

Why is this not entirely surprising? Despite stagnant unemployment numbers and continuing economic hard times thanks to the recession and corporate greed, CEO's paycheck are not hurting.

In fact, they're "climbing," according to this article from the WSJ, right back into into the healthy millions. Lucky them:

Many people wrongly think that businesses create jobs. They see that a job is usually at a business, so they think that therefore the business "created" the job. This thinking leads to wrongheaded ideas like the current one that giving tax cuts to businesses will create jobs, because the businesses will have more money. But an efficiently-run business will already have the right number of employees. When a business sees that more people are coming in the door (demand) than there are employees to serve them, they hire people to serve the customers. When a business sees that not enough people are coming in the door and employees are sitting around reading the newspaper, they lay people off. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line, even though U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to-back annual gains since 2004.

The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011.

In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee's target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional "merit increases" based on their individual performance.

In another nice gesture, Google will pay the taxes on the $1,000 holiday cash bonuses, thus allowing employees to keep the whole thing.

Seniors prepared to cut back on everything from food to charitable donations to whiskey as word spread Monday that they will have to wait until at least 2012 to see their Social Security checks increase.

The September jobs report was just released and demonstrates that America is on a far slower path to recovery than anyone originally predicted.

Program hated by many expires Sunday, and might actually make a profit

Martin Luther King Jr. said that he had dream, he didn't mention anything about a Mercedes straight out of the imagination of Doc Brown. Yet for the luxury car company's campaign to promote its new "gull-wing" SLS AMG coupe, Mercedes chose to highlight the vehicle's upward-opening doors by evoking great moments in putting hands in the air like you just don't care -- Muhammad Ali peacocking around the ring, Leonard Bernstein conducting, joyous revelers at a tumbling Berlin Wall, and, notably, a brief image of the slain civil rights leader, arms aloft. "It's a universal gesture," a voice explains. "A way of telling the world, 'We did it,' without saying a word. Introducing the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG. The best, or nothing. That is what drives us." If, by "We did it," you mean that you equated the quest for basic human rights with the quest to obtain a $175,000 set of wheels, well, then, yes you did. Mercedes-Benz -- too soon!

"What can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: there are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren't ready to do it — they're in the wrong places, or they have the wrong skills.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The first wave of mass-produced advanced batteries funded by the Obama administration's economic recovery program are starting to roll off assembly lines, setting the stage for new hybrid and electric vehicles.

Mozambique's government is reversing bread and water price increases that had touched off deadly riots, the planning minister said Tuesday.

An oil platform exploded and burned off the Louisiana coast Thursday, the second such disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in less than five months. This time, the Coast Guard said there was no leak, and no one was killed.

Federal investigators seeking the cause of the rig explosion that led to BP's massive Gulf oil spill focused Monday on communication and chain of command, wondering at times whether the key players knew enough to handle an emergency.

Who could have imagined that the bailout of the auto industry, one of the single most unpopular moves by the Obama administration, would become one of its best talking points?

But don't for an instant imagine that the comeback of the nation's rescued car companies, particularly General Motors, will change the way we debate government's role in the economy. When it comes to almost anything the government does, ideology trumps facts, slogans trump reality, and loaded words ("socialism") trump data.

Report comes day ahead of carmaker's expected IPO filing

President Barack Obama is going after Senate Republicans who have stymied his proposal to create a $30 billion fund to help unfreeze lending for credit-starved small businesses.

A public interest law firm is preparing to sue the Canadian owners of a pipeline that ruptured in southern Michigan and dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into a Kalamazoo River tributary.

Here's a look at Tony Hayward's tenure with BP:

The deal.

Explained in under 4 minutes.
By Rick Wolff.

7 weeks after benefits started lapsing, aid for the unemployed is reinstated

New claims for jobless benefits normally rise this time of the year

As corporations begin reporting second quarter earnings this week, they will paint a picture of robust recovery that starkly contrasts with the stalled job market.

BP finally choked off the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday — 85 days and up to 184 million gallons after the crisis unfolded — then began a tense 48 hours of watching to see whether the capped-off well would hold or blow a new leak.

When Warren Buffett looks at America's economy, he sees recovery. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo! News and the Huffington Post, Buffett disagreed with New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who wrote recently that he fears the U.S.

The state's unemployment rate fell to 9.1 percent in May, and while there were about 8,600 new jobs last month, nearly all of them came from a temporary influx of jobs for the Census.

For the first time since the beginning of the recession, economic growth — modest and fragile, but growth nonetheless — has spread to every corner of the country.

Vowing to "make BP pay," President Barack Obama accused the oil giant of "recklessness" in his first address to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night, eight weeks to the day after the catastrophic oil spill began destroying waterways, wildlife and a prized Gulf Coast way of life.

A freelance pilot and photographer confirmed a second leak in the Gulf and a possible coverup.

A Foxconn Technology worker tried to kill himself Thursday, becoming the 13th person to commit suicide or attempt to do so this year at the company, which makes high-tech products for industry giants such as Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, state media said.

Shoppers at Costco Wholesale Corp. are beginning to pick up a few modest extras such as doormats and coffee makers along with their must-haves like food, the company said Thursday.

Jewelry and gift seller Tiffany & Co.'s net income more than doubled in the first quarter as its revenue rose in the U.S. and soared 50 percent in Asia, the company said Thursday.

Economists forecast the pace of U.S. growth will pick up in the year ahead as consumers and businesses accelerate spending, according to a new survey.

Being behind bars won't keep a group of Indian prisoners from joining the global work force.

NASA has unveiled the first images from a new satellite designed to predict disruptive solar storms, and scientists say they're already learning new things.

The economy is being boosted by higher retail sales, stronger factory output and a rise in companies' stockpiles.

United Airlines and Continental Airlines agreed to combine in a $3 billion stock swap to create the world's biggest airline, people with knowledge of the deal said Sunday.

A bit of good news.