The U.S. Postal Service said it will offer early retirement to almost one in four workers, close administrative offices and eliminate more than 3,000 jobs as it grapples with a financial crisis. The announcement follows the service’s statements in January that this year’s deficit may dwarf the $2.8 billion loss in 2008 and may force it to reduce the six-day-a-week delivery schedule. Mail volume has dropped as economic activity slows and people and businesses turn to e-mail and electronic billing and payment, postal officials have said. The service today said it sees ‘no signs of economic recovery in sight. About 150,000 of the service’s 646,000 workers will be offered early retirement, the service said in a statement. The agency also is closing six district offices that together have ‘a little over 500 positions, spokeswoman Sue Brennan said in an interview. The targeted administrative offices are in Lake Mary, Florida; North Reading, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; Edison, New Jersey; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Spokane, Washington, officials said. The closings will not affect customer service, the service said. An additional 1,400 staff in the remaining 74 district offices will be eliminated, Brennan said. More than 1,400 mail processing […]
The level of AIG’s corporate bad behavior has just sunk to a new level of low, as the New York Times reports this morning of a pending lawsuit, quietly filed by AIG on Feb. 27, against the US seeking the return of $306 million in tax payments. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This translates into AIG suing its majority shareholder, the US, asking for more money, when it just received a $200 billion dollar government bailout, and to add insult to injury, it’s apparently using taxpayer bailout money to fund the costs of the lawsuit. This new information comes on the heels of the recent outrage of AIG’s payout of $165 million in bonus money to the traders of the company’s notorious financial unit, the very people who brought down AIG and the entire economy with its risky (criminal?) financial transactions. As more layers get peeled back the darker this story gets. The majority of tax payments AIG seeks to get back from the US involve its use of shady offshore tax shelters, which have come under increasing scrutiny by the IRS. The IRS denied AIG’s claims for return of the taxes paid in 2008, ruling […]
LUXEMBOURG — A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar. Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket. Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform. ‘It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency,’ he said. Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value — though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits. Some analysts said news of the U.N. panel’s recommendation extended dollar losses because it fed into […]
Although his country now leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions, a top Chinese official on Wednesday sought to turn up the heat on the United States for talking a good line on global warming — but not acting. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., responded by preaching cooperation, or what she called ‘co-opetition’ — cooperation in bringing on line some energy technologies, but competition in other fields. She proposed establishing special ‘clean energy free trade zones’ in both China and the United States. Such zones would show how eliminating tariffs would accelerate development and deployment of the latest clean energy technologies. But tough talk came from Xie Zhenhua, a member of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party and head of China’s Climate Change and Coordinating Committee. ‘China is not a country that does nothing: On the contrary, we have done a lot,’ Xie said Wednesday. He ticked off a list of market-based measures such as financial incentives and taxes used by China to cut emissions. Cantwell and Xie both spoke at a Washington, D.C., symposium sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ‘The United States is in the same boat,’ Xie […]
WASHINGTON — The White House is getting a new garden. First lady Michelle Obama is scheduled to break ground Friday on a new garden near the fountain on the South Lawn that will supply the White House kitchen. She will be joined by students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District of Columbia. The children will stay involved with the project, including planting the fruits, vegetables and herbs in the coming weeks and harvesting the crops later in the year. Mrs. Obama spent time earlier this week at an exhibit on rooftop gardening. ‘We’re going to get a big one in our back yard, the South Lawn,’ she promised the volunteers. Such a White House garden has been a dream of noted California chef Alice Waters, considered a leader in the movement to encourage consumption of locally grown, organic food. She has been appealing for change through the taste buds since the 1960s. She organized a series of fundraising dinners in Washington before President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January that served foods purchased from local producers at an area farmer’s market to show how it can be done. Reached Thursday at her Berkeley, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
