Free Republic

East St. Louis is short $9.5 million between a budget deficit and back payments owed to its fire and police pensions. As a result, city leaders are closing a firehouse and laying off nine firefighters. Nine firefighters have been asked to hand in their gear and their fire station will temporarily close as East St. Louis, Illinois, faces a $5.5 million budget deficit and interception of nearly $4 million in state funding for debts owed to its police and fire pensions. Unfortunately, with 100% of the City’s state revenues being redirected to the police and fire pensions, we are faced...

Pacific Gas & Electric Company shareholders are facing the possibility of a worst-case scenario -- the value of their holdings getting completely wiped out -- after a federal bankruptcy judge’s ruling.

"This settlement framework avoids wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and years on protracted litigation and instead will provide billions of dollars and critical resources to communities across the country trying to cope with the opioid crisis"

1. Limit new federal student loans to: a. $15,000/first, second, third, fourth year - college education on a state/regionally/nationally accredited engineering track or domestic licensing/certification law teacher/nursing/physician assistant track, b. $8,000/first year - general college education, c. $10,000/second, third, fourth year - general college education, d. $5,000/additional year, but to no more than $40,000 for any student in total student loan indebtedness - undergraduate college education [students taking more than four years to graduate] e. $12,000/additional year - general college education, four-year college degree already earned by the student, f. $25,000/first/second/third year - bar acceptable, state/regionally/nationally accredited law school education,...

One of the most infamous sports apparel brands in American history appears to be nearing its sad end, as LaVar Ball’s ‘Big Baller Brand’ made news this week after someone spotted the company's previously high-priced merchandise being sold for several dollars at a local volleyball tournament. When you combine the comical clearance sale with the fact their official Twitter page hasn't tweeted since Match, and even worse, the website has also yielded a ‘website under construction’ banner on the homepage for the last several months, it’s painfully obvious that the ‘Billion Dollar Brand’ as LaVar Ball infamously tabbed it will...

Progressives never learn.  Even as Democrats running for president line up behind a national $15/hour minimum wage, on the West Coast, where cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco all have implemented this demand, a restaurant chain with over 2,000 employees has filed for bankruptcy, citing the high minimum wages that have increased its costs. Jeremy Hill reports for Bloomberg (hat tip: Legal Insurrection): Progressive wage policies helped force upscale eatery operator Restaurants Unlimited Inc. into bankruptcy, according to court documents filed Sunday. The company, which operates 35 restaurants ranging from fine dining to "polished casual" eateries, including Henry's Tavern, Stanford's, and Kincaid's, filed for Chapter 11 protection...

The singer-actress whose real name is Stefani Germanotta made waves in the music industry with her 2008 debut album and went bankrupt in 2011. She was able to get out of the slump thanks to the popularity of her work Lady Gaga has it all. This year the singer-turned-actress won three Grammys, two for 'Shallow' and one for 'Joanne,' and besides that, the 32-year-old also won an Oscar for Best Original Song, and was nominated for Best Actress for her role in 'A Star Is Born,' at the Academy Awards. Her total awards tally is up to nine Grammys till...

The New York Times obtained 10 years of Donald Trump’s tax documents from his federal income tax returns — for the years 1985 – 1994. To be clear, The Times did not obtain Trump’s actual tax returns, rather they obtained printouts from his IRS transcripts with numbers from his tax form, 1040, from an individual who had legal access to them..... At first glance, it is being reported that Donald Trump core businesses (hotels, apartment buildings and casinos) took a $1.17 billion loss. Big deal, he’s in the real estate business which fluctuates all the time. The Times also said...

Ready to go back to the 'Shattered' era, New York? The old 'drop dead' epoch and 'fun city' times? Looks like that's what's on the cards, based on this New York Post report, warning that the socialist-led city is in dire danger of bankruptcy if there's an economic downturn: New York City is careening closer to all-out financial bankruptcy for the first time since Mayor Abraham Beame ran the city more than 40 years ago, experts say. As tax-fleeced businesses and individuals flee en masse, and city public spending surges into the stratosphere, financial analysts say Gotham is perilously...

In his 1980 classic, “The Cost of Good Intentions,” author Charles Morris chronicled how New York liberals spent the city into disaster. Free housing, college tuition, health care and welfare skyrocketed until a fiscal crisis ended the binge. As the city nearly went bankrupt, crime soared and families and businesses fled. Liberals have been replaced by progressives, but no matter what they call themselves, a new generation of New York pols are ignoring history as they tax and spend at astronomical levels. This time, there isn’t any excuse about good intentions. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo both...

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the insolvent State of California is putting together a "Strike Team" that could move to nationalize the assets of the bankrupt PG&E utility. Newsom told lawmakers in his State of the State speech, "We're facing hard decisions that are coming due."  In his first month in office, Newsom has been dealing with a $7-billion tax shortfall since December, $1 trillion in unfunded public employee pensions, President Trump threatening to withhold $9 billion in wildfire aid, and cancelation of the state's $98.1-billion high-speed rail boondoggle. div class="article_body bottom mrf-hidden"> Undeterred by the tsunami of grim financial challenges, the wildly progressive rookie governor trumpeted that he...

The Wall Street Journal has been against Trump’s trade tariffs, and any chance they get they will put blame on the tariffs for bad things, even when it is obvious they are not to blame. On Thursday they had a front-page story which attributed a wave of Chapter 12 bankruptcies (50 total in the U.S.) partially to small tariffs put in place by Trump in 2018. Any business reporter with a brain knows that those small tariffs had nothing to do with bankruptcies that occurred in 2018. Those farmers had to be struggling with too much debt for years, and...

Pacific Gas & Electric filed for “Chapter 22� as California’s largest utility was again forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to the state’s social justice regulatory structure. Facing $300 million a month in unreimbursed power costs under California’s 1996 “deregulation� law that gave the state control of wholesale electric power purchases, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in April 2001 in San Francisco court, listing $9 billion in debt. The three-year reorganization cost the state between $40 to $45 billion and was directly responsible for the recall of California...

Sixty-three, out of America’s most populous seventy-five, cities do not have enough money to pay all of their bills. Chicago-based municipal finance watchdog, Truth in Accounting (TIA) revealed these stark news in its third annual, Financial State of the Cities. [Snip] The cities in the worst fiscal condition are New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and San Francisco. These cities, like many states and cities in the U.S. have large unfunded pension liabilities, which are greatly affected by the volatility of pension assets. ... New York City remains as number 75, the worst financial condition of the most populated cities,...

A U.S. Bankruptcy Court decision wiping out half of Puerto Rico's general obligation bonds represents a potential Death Star precedent against Wall Street buying municipal bonds from states without a balanced budget. The reason that high-tax rate and potentially insolvent states like California, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland have continued to have access to massive new borrowing is Wall Street's ability to sell general obligation municipal bonds to high-income individuals who can benefit from receiving federally tax exempt interest. Most muni investors also believe that the federal government will bail out any state financial crisis. Few Americans understand that...

PG&E Corp. stock cratered Monday after the company said it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid the financial anguish stemming from its part in helping spark a wave of historic wildfires in California. Shares of the company dropped nearly 50 percent in early trading Monday, one day after the company said Chief Executive Geisha Williams was stepping down. The company provided the official 15-day advance notice that it and its wholly owned subsidiary, Pacific Gas and Electric, intend to file petitions to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on or about Jan. 29.

California utility owner PG&E Corp is in discussions with investment banks about a multibillion-dollar financing package to help navigate bankruptcy proceedings, a sign the company's Chapter 11 filing preparations are intensifying in the wake of potentially staggering liabilities from wildfires, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. PG&E Corp is in touch with large banks about so-called debtor-in-possession financing that could total between $3 billion and $5 billion, though the exact figure remains in flux and could end up being higher, the sources said.

Nancy Pelosi said it looks as if Trump just wants to abolish Congress and that a border wall is immoral. Elizabeth Warren says the Republican Party is corrupt and caters to the rich and powerful .... Here is just a small sample of what Pelosi, Warren, Obama, the Clintons, and other Democrats have done over the years where the media and other Democrats not only didn't care, but supported the moves wholeheartedly. Obama, the authoritarian, couldn't get DACA through Congress, so he dictatorially and unconstitutionally implemented it. Pelosi didn't care about Obama usurping congressional authority. ... The immoral and corrupt...

What’s left of the Boy Scouts of America (now operating as Scouts BSA) is on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, according to recent news reports. With estimated assets of more than $1 billion, Scouting’s problems go beyond the financial, deep into the problems with America’s civil culture today. The U.S. Boy Scout movement reached its numerical height in 1969 with 6 million members, in a year with President Richard M. Nixon as honorary head of the Scouts and Eagle Scout astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping out on the moon. I was a Cub Scout that year, once a week proudly wearing...

Sears, the 125-year-old icon, has 24 hours to survive. The employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its chairman, Eddie Lampert, to buy the company out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund, ESL Investments. ESL is the only party offering to buy Sears as a whole, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC. Without that bid or another like it, liquidators will break the company up into pieces. But as Lampert stares down a deadline of Dec. 28 to submit his offer, he is...