Millions of dollars worth of government contracts designated for service-disabled veterans are being siphoned off by fraud and abuse, according to a recent government report. In a case-study of 10 firms, including one Florida company, the Government Accountability Office found ineligible companies had won about $100 million worth of contracts earmarked for service-disabled veteran-owned companies. The ‘program is vulnerable to fraud and abuse, which could result in legitimate service-disabled veterans losing contracts to ineligible firms,’ according to the report, which was presented to Congress last week. Florida is home to 1,421 service-disabled veteran-owned businesses, according to the government’s Central Contractor Registry. And while the government has a mandate to set aside 3 percent of all federal contracts for such firms, it often misses the mark. During fiscal year 2008 — the latest data available — service-disabled small businesses won $3.3 billion worth of federal contracts, or about 1 percent. But the GAO study suggests that even those modest results are overstated. In one case, the GAO found a full-time Department of Defense contractor, who was disabled and worked at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, was passing along a $900,000 contract to manufacture furniture to […]
Charities across the nation are serving record numbers of people this week in advance of he Thanksgiving holiday — and there just aren’t enough turkeys for everybody. In Darlington, S.C., local businesses prepared 1,000 turkeys to give away on Tuesday, reports Tonya Brown for Carolina Live, but by 11 a.m. twice that many people had showed up and the birds were long gone. The crowd was so overwhelming that local police had to come in for traffic and crowd control. In Opa-locka, Fla., people started lining up outside city hall six hours before doors opened for turkey handouts, reports Helen Berggren for the Miami Herald. Because of the crowd, city officials — some of whom donated hundreds of dollars of their own money — started handing out turkeys two hours ahead of schedule. By noon, all 1,350 birds were gone. In Lafeyette, Ind., on Monday, hundreds of residents lined up before sunrise in near-freezing temperatures, according to the Journal & Courier’s Dorothy Schneider. ‘I just want to thank everybody from the bottom of my heart,’ said Elva Casas, who recently lost her job and insurance and worried about feeding her four children. All 1,200 turkeys were given […]
WASHINGTON — The government insurance fund that protects more than $4.5 trillion of U.S. bank deposits slipped into the red at the end of September, after fifty banks collapsed during the third quarter. The deposit insurance fund dropped by $18.6 billion during the third quarter of 2009 to negative $8.2 billion, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. set aside $21.7 billion in provisions for additional bank failures. This is the second time in the agency’s history that the balance has fallen into negative territory. The FDIC has already called on the industry to prepay $45 billion in assessments at the end of the year that will be set aside to cover the cost of bank failures in 2010. Fifty U.S. banks failed in the third quarter, the largest quarterly total since 55 banks went bust during the second quarter of 1990. The FDIC’s list of ‘problem’ banks swelled to 552 at the end of September, its highest level in 16 years and up from 416 in June. Despite the turmoil in the industry, banks posted a modest $2.8 billion profit in the third quarter of 2009, as their securities portfolios recovered and banks with less than […]
WASHINGTON — Greenpeace welcomed the Indian Government’s ambitious National Solar Mission (NSM), released on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s summit today with President Obama. The NSM is a good step by India towards climate change mitigation, and it challenges President Obama to make the shift to deep emissions cuts and adequate climate finance that the world needs to avoid a climate catastrophe. ‘India’s National Solar Mission is yet another sign of progress that should challenge President Obama to commit the US to our responsibilities for a fair, ambitious, and binding global climate agreement,’ said Damon Moglen, Greenpeace USA global warming campaign director, ‘In addition to cutting emissions, President Obama must put money on the table at Copenhagen to support international funds of at least $140 billion per year that will protect the world’s most vulnerable communities from the worst impacts of climate change, stop tropical deforestation and help developing countries switch to renewable energy.’ India’s National Solar Mission forms a part of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and has an ambitious target of achieving 20,000MW solar power by 2022. Preliminary calculations by Greenpeace show that on the basis of the NAPCC alone, […]
The CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the two investment banks that collapsed during last year’s financial meltdown, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even as the company’s shareholders lost everything, says a new report from Harvard Law School. The top five executives at Bear Stearns made a total of $1.4 billion from bonuses and equity sales between 2000 and 2008, while the top five executives at Lehman Brothers made around $1 billion during that same period — the period during which the companies ran up the bad investments that would see them collapse in 2008, according to ‘The Wages of Failure’ (PDF), a report from Harvard Law School’s Program on Corporate Governance. ‘The people who invested in these companies should feel betrayed,’ Nell Minow, a compensation expert at the Corporate Library, told NBC’s Lisa Myers. ‘The whole idea of capitalism is that the people provide the capital and the executives take care of it for us. In this case, the people provided the capital, and the executives took it.’ Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne personally made $388 million in the eight-year period leading up to the bank’s collapse, while Lehman Brothers […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
