Quote of the week: I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph. – Shirley Temple

Here are eight stocking stuffers to unwrap.

1) The conversation between Libertarians and the rest of us (who aren’t on some nutty fringe) would go a lot smoother if we would all agree that laws and regulations do not prevent bad behavior.

Rather, they are merely guideposts to measure the quality of deviance in a way that allows the US’s local, state and federal judiciary to hand out retribution.

If you need further proof of this, I offer you two words – Bernard Madoff.

In an under-regulated world, Ponzi schemes might not be illegal. In fact, you can assume that is a near certainty, judging by the number of famous institutions and wealthy people that poured billions into Madoff’s fund, even as

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We cite these companies: General Motors (GM), Ford (F), Toyota (TM), Nissan (NSANY), Honda (HMC) and Daimler (DAI).

Today, President Bush approved an emergency bailout of the U.S. auto industry Friday, offering $17.4 billion in rescue loans in exchange for tough concessions from the deeply troubled carmakers and their workers. The government will have the option of becoming a stockholder in the companies, in effect partially nationalizing the industry.

If the carmakers fail to prove viability by March 31, 2009, they will be required to repay the loans, which they would find all but impossible. A firm will be deemed viable only if it can show positive cash flow and can fully repay the government loans.

Under terms of the loan, General Motors (GM) and Chrysler must provide the government with stock warrants giving it the option to buy GM and Chrysler stock at a specific

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Lawsuit that pitted former executives of XShares against its current directors has been dismissed by the court.

 

Finally, there is some good news for exchange-traded fund company XShares Group. The Supreme Court of New York County has dismissed a lawsuit filed against the company by former executives.

The lawsuit, XShares v. Jeffrey Feldman et al., was filed by Donald Aven, former XShares Securities executive vice president of national sales, and Samuel Aven, an investor in the company.

The suit named XShares founder Jeffrey Feldman and 10 other company managers or officers as defendants, and alleged improper actions related to the management of the company (see story here).

Justice Charles Ramos stated that no proper amended complaint had been put before the court and also found that the caption was incorrect in naming XShares Group LLC, as the plaintiff, instead of the Avens as plaintiffs individually and on behalf of

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City fashion is a dangerous thing. Its followers rarely come out smiling. So although there is a chorus now calling for mergers and acquisitions in the small company sector, this seems more to do with fund managers’ concerns about illiquid stocks than any commercial rationale.

But still, the merger of two small AIM–listed resource stocks Victoria Oil & Gas (VOG) and Bramlin (BML)may be more than just a case of two drunks leaning on each other for support. Sharing the same chairman, Kevin Foo, they should at least be pretty familiar with one another and the link goes rather deeper than this.

‘Blue sky’ potential

The major shareholder of Victoria Oil & Gas is the Abu Dhabi-based, Noor Petroleum. Not only does Noor know of Bramlin, it is also introducing into the enlarged group the assets of Falcon Petroleum (PFC). Victoria has signed a twelve month option to

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I have two objections to this crap, one being that the People’s Daily is wrong; the United States did NOT ‘plunder’ anybody; rather, the U.S. just took advantage of a bunch of ignorant rubes and hustled them out of their money!

My Puny Mogambo Mind (PMM) is actually retreating into a little Mogambo Inner Bunker (MIB) of its own, and I find that I avoid looking at what is happening at the hands of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, as all of this money is going to show up in an explosion of prices, including food and energy, and that is when societal hell breaks loose and it’s, “Game Over, Player One.”

So I was doing a pretty good job of evading things, and I had finally relaxed enough to pry open one corner of my mouth in which a straw could be inserted so that I might

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Last year, I wrote that if Uncle Sam gets his way, we’d all be on no-fly lists, unless the government gives us permission to leave - or re-enter - the United States. That day has now arrived, but in addition to obtaining Big Brother’s permission to travel internationally, a final rule pursuant to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s “Secure Flight” initiative says we must now get it to travel from state-to-state.”

At some point in the future, you’ll need to reveal your name, gender, and date of birth when you make a domestic airline reservation. The airline will contact TSA to determine if you’re cleared to board. If you’re on any of TSA’s watchlists (which include such deceased “terrorists” as Saddam Hussein, along with live ones such as Sen. Edward Kennedy), you’ll need to provide an official document acceptable for federal identification purposes in order to travel.

Examples of acceptable

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And now that the governments of America have literally become the economy (and paying themselves handsomely in the process!), there is no way that the government can be allowed to shrink…

The U.S. Department of Commerce says that, the way it looks to them, even after spending a lot of time adjusting and smoothing and rounding the data so that things look as good as possible, third-quarter Gross Domestic Product is going to be down again - like this is some Big Freaking News (BFN) to us guys out here who are either being laid off, or hearing rumors that we are going to be laid off, or listening to other people yammering about how they were laid off, or being blamed for profit shortfalls and statistically poor performance, but which they calculate without any “smoothing” factors like how the customers are all a bunch of idiots and so are my

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A total of 11 defendants were named, with allegations including: breach of fiduciary duty, breach of loyalty duty, theft of business opportunity and fraud.

 

Exchange-traded funds provider XShares has filed suit in New York state court against its founders, Jeffrey Feldman and Anthony Dudzinski, "alleging actions that enriched the officers to the detriment of the company," according to a report by journalist Lawrence Carrel.

The report, which is dated Nov. 3, appears on the companion blog to the book written by Carrel and published by John Wiley & Sons, "ETFs for the Long Run." (The full article can be found here.)

No date was listed in the article for the suit, filed with the Supreme Court of New York. A total of 11 defendants were named, with allegations including: breach of fiduciary duty, breach of loyalty duty, theft of business opportunity, corporate mismanagement, misappropriation of corporate assets, self-dealing and fraud.

According to Carrel's report, several specific allegations are made. One is that former CEO

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I’d like to point out a couple of very interesting reads that I stumbled upon today. the first was actually written by my brother, Abe. It appears in the Jpost In the article Katsman compares the current situation in Iraq to that of Vietnam. Politically, similarities abound. “Some quick history: Finally concluding that they could not defeat the American-backed Republic of South Vietnam, the communist North Vietnam signed the Paris Agreement in January, 1973, which called for cessation of attacks by the North and recognition of Saigon’s fragile democratic government. America withdrew its troops, but continued air support and arms to the anticommunist, increasingly stable South Vietnamese, as well as to its neighboring anticommunist Republic of Cambodia.

But a hated President Nixon resigned in scandal, and his obsessive, personally vindictive critics then elected to Congress in 1974 could not bear to support

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[Editor's note: just this week Mikhail Tanich, the poet profiled below by Grigory Pasko, would have celebrated his 85th birthday.] Mikhail Tanich: «Jail – is the Russian melody…» Grigory Pasko, journalist Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. Over the past 16 years - from 1992 through the year 2007 – there have been more than 15 million people convicted of a crime in Russia. More than one in ten out of a population of 140 million. Nearly a million people per year. Of these, 5 million and then some have been deprived of liberty. Vladimir Radchenko, first deputy chairman of the Supreme Court (ret.), head of the center of the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Legal Studies under the government of the RF, considers that humanization of criminal legislation and of the practice of its application can not be evaluated simply ...