And now the [Wounded Knee M]assacre site, which passed into non-Indian hands generations ago, is up for sale, once again dragging Wounded Knee to the center of the Indian people’s bitter struggle against perceived injustice — as well as sowing rifts within the tribe over whether it would be proper, should the tribe get the land, to develop it in a way that brings some money to the destitute region.

James A. Czywczynski of Rapid City is asking $3.9 million for the 40-acre plot he owns here, far more than the $7,000 that the deeply impoverished Oglala Sioux say the land is worth. Mr. Czywczynski insists that his price fairly accounts for the land’s sentimental and historical value, an attitude that the people here see as disrespect.

Student-centered concierge companies represent a relatively small sliver of the industry, but a growing one. Katharine Giovanni, founder and chairman of the International Concierge and Lifestyle Management Association, recalls how she at first dismissed a colleague’s idea for a service targeted to students.

“I laughed at him,” she said, and warned, “You’ll be doing a lot of beer runs.”

That was six years ago—and the niche requests now go far beyond kegs. A few months ago, a student at Suffolk University in Boston asked BCCG to buy and ship 300 bottles of a Merle Norman perfume as a gift to his mother in Saudi Arabia. The bill topped $15,000, according to the concierge firm. At the last minute, the young client pulled the order, losing a hefty deposit.

But $20 billion won’t be enough to bring smiles to the faces of bankers and traders on Wall Street, who have spent the past month dealing with the fact that five years after the start of the financial crisis, their bonuses don’t appear to be recovering as quickly as they expected.
“It’s just hard,” one bank executive told Daily Intelligencer. “People feel like if they didn’t get paid last year, and their business did well this year, they should get paid for both years. It doesn’t work like that anymore.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said long-term commitments to measures such as tax reform and trade would provide a “certainty premium” that would help bring corporate cash off the sidelines. “If we can just allow people to keep their confidence up by getting some of these issues off the table,” he said, “you would see the economy grow and momentum continue to build, and unemployment continue to ease down, and housing starts [go] up and housing prices [go] up. All that will continue to build on itself.

According to court papers, the Filipino workers originally responded to job offers from Industrial Personnel and Management Services Inc., a recruiting firm based in Quezon City, Philippines, and a second company. The workers had to pass skill tests showing they could perform the trades required by Grand Isle Shipyard, including welding and pipefitting, and were told they would be paid $16.25 an hour for regular time and $24.37 an hour for overtime, along with transportation to the United States, housing and food.

Actual pay was as low as $5.50 an hour, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that the workers were required to sign two different contracts, containing differing rates, with the contract containing higher wages complying with federal law filed with the U.S. Embassy in Manila, and a second contract, with lower wages, filed with the companies.

“Plaintiffs executed the contracts because they believed that, in order to work in the United States, they had no choice,” according to the suit. “Further, they were deceived and/or otherwise fraudulently induced to sign the contracts with the promise that (Grand Isle Shipyard) would sponsor them for E-2 visas, making them eligible for permanent resident status.”

When they got to Louisiana, the workers allege they were housed in substandard facilities and charged exorbitant rates for the living quarters. They also were charged fees for equipment used during their work, the suit said, even though the companies “ultimately retained, and clearly benefited from, these work-related tools and equipment.”

You are correct, though some of the brands we carry are union made, many are not. The unfortunate reality is that there are not many unions left in the garment industry and so the name was cultivated as a signifier of well-made and aesthetically timeless goods. There have been customers that take issue with the store’s name and we certainly understand and respect their opinion, though by and large the majority of our customers understand the use of the name as an overarching narrative of the store. This being that we strive to carry well-made items that will age well in regard to both wear from use and stylistically.

Crucially, in the dot-com bust there weren’t the same moral and political arguments that we see in the current one. Economists who demand to know why U.S. mortgages don’t stay with people who walk away from their homes didn’t demand to know why the equity holders of Pets.com didn’t have to dip into their personal savings to pay off the losses creditors took. Very Serious People wonder if debtors’ prisons are necessary for homeowners who would walk away from a mortgage or view bankruptcy as an exit strategy, yet no Very Serious People called for the mass imprisonment of Webvan or Flooz shareholders after those firms declared bankruptcy as an exit strategy. Nobody argues that the shareholders of the dot-com era received a gigantic government bailout through the law when they were not personally on the hook for sticking creditors with an 83.4 percent average loss. Meanwhile, efforts to allow for a cleaner way of allocating the housing bubble losses, from retaining value of the household through bankruptcy reform to local municipalities taking action through eminent domain, face a minefield of political and financial industry opposition that gives the impression that the banks “own the place.

Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground.

Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale. It’s the Dick Parsons Management Style. In each of the three companies Parsons was appointed to lead, they all failed spectacularly, and somehow Parsons and a handful of top executives always walked away from the yellow-tape crime scenes unscathed.