Free Republic

One of the top 10 employers in Flagstaff, Walgreens, announced Friday that it was closing its distribution center by April and laying off all 345 employees. ... Walgreens recently announced it was seeking to relocate its corporate headquarters overseas to lower its income tax bill. One estimate put first-year tax savings for the country’s largest drugstore chain at more than $700 million. The Wall Street Journal reported July 15 that Walgreens is considering buying the rest of Alliance Boots, a drugstore chain that operates in the United Kingdom but is headquartered in Switzerland. If Walgreens does purchase the rest of...

Charts and maps of America’s Amazing Shale Oil Revolution; and the new ‘Big Three’: Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian Mark J. Perry | July 15th, 2014   Skip to Responses     Below are four charts and two maps that help tell the story of America’s Amazing Shale Oil Revolution:1. The Big Three. Yesterday, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) updated its monthly “Drilling Productivity Report” with new estimates of oil production through August in America’s three, super-giant oil fields, the “Big Three”: the Bakken in North Dakota and Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin in Texas. As...

General Motors Co has ordered Cadillac dealers to stop selling some versions of the CTS model-range because the automaker does not have a fix yet for cars recalled in late June over an issue where engines can be shut off if the driver's knee bumps the ignition key, the company said on Saturday. Details of incidents leading up to the June 30 recall, including three occasions where GM employees bumped the keys and shut off the engines in 2012 CTSs, were made public on Saturday by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees safety recalls. The so-called stop...

In early July 1944, delegates from 44 countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A three-week summit took place, at which a new system was agreed to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the Second World War. The US was already the world’s commercial powerhouse, having eclipsed the British Empire several decades earlier. America was also on course to be among the victors of “Europe’s conflict”, even though its economy was largely unscathed by war. As such, Bretton Woods was US-dominated and produced a settlement largely on US terms. Seventy years ago this...

Republicans love fracking in Colorado — and it could help them flip a critical Senate seat this fall. The onslaught against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.) reached a fever pitch this week when Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) had to cancel a special legislative session meant to keep two hydraulic fracturing initiatives backed by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) off the November ballot. Udall, who had stayed out of the fray on the two measures, was forced to take a side much to the GOP's glee. Now, with Colorado as one of the top natural gas producing states in the nation,...

Three undergraduates from Singapore are relieved they were not on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 which crashed in eastern Ukraine after being allegedly shot down by militants. The Boeing 777 came down in cornfields in the separatist-held region on Thursday, killing all 298 people on board on Thursday (July 17). In April, 23-year-old Nicholas Ng and his two friends had booked a return ticket to Europe through a travel agency. But the National University of Singapore student's booking was cancelled after he missed the deadline to submit the required documents, such as his passport details. His friends also cancelled their...

Last month, I nailed Bill and Hillary Clinton for their gross hypocrisy on the death tax. But that’s just one example. Today, we’re going to experience a festival of statist hypocrisy. We have six different nauseating examples of political elitists wanting to subject ordinary people to bad policy while self-exempting themselves from similar burdens. Our first three examples are from the world of taxation. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Times report about a billionaire donor who is bankrolling candidates who support higher taxes, even though he structured his hedge fund in low-tax jurisdictions specifically to minimize the fiscal...

t they do best: Go on strike. By 1988, the company had lost a number of high-dollar contracts, and the end of their beginning was clearly at hand. In the decade to follow, their competitors warmly embraced America’s newfound fascination with the civilian market, concealed carry, and home defense. Colt, on the other hand, decided to take a more pragmatic approach. And, by “pragmatic”, I mean “liberal” approach: A wealthy industrialist, from the heart of a non-gun-owning Manhattan family, decided he could steer the company to better times. With a man who knew nothing about guns at the helm, Colt...

Total lending has now risen faster than economic output, even before adjusting for inflation, in every quarter since late 2011. Lending accelerated further in June, according to figures released on Tuesday by the central bank, the People’s Bank of China. Yet Mr. Miller’s survey and others show that private businesses are becoming less and less interested in borrowing money because they see few opportunities to invest it profitably. “Although there is no way to predict with accuracy and certainty the point at which China will reach the limits of its debt capacity, I believe that current rates of credit...

Everyone is exactly who he or she says on the internet – at least according to one Washington Post writer. That conclusion is her rationale to say Christians are awful people. Sally Quinn, Washington Post columnist and OnFaith founder, claimed that, “When it Comes to Hateful Internet Speech, Christians Are the Worst.” In her July 17 article, Quinn examined a white-supremacist site and comments on her articles to conclude that Christian “haters” “need a place to unleash their dark sides.” For her introduction, Quinn pointed at white-supremacist Stormfront to note how the site targeted others: 39 percent Jews, 33 percent...

Cultural Inertia: Remember how 45 years ago we were suddenly able to say: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we (fill in the blank)"? If only we could say the same today. It's worth remembering Neil Armstrong's July 21, 1969 "giant leap for mankind," if only as a measure of what the country used to be able to accomplish, but increasingly can't do today. When President Kennedy announced his goal of "sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth" in less than nine years, it was a laughably audacious promise. By...

Florida is leading the nation in job growth, adding more than 37,000 jobs this month. The Tampa Bay area has added over 25,000 jobs in the last 12 months, third among metro areas in Florida, according to state officials..

Across his remarkably successful presidency, Ronald Reagan repeatedly made the link between the U.S. economy and U.S. international security and defense. He consistently argued that weakness at home leads to weakness abroad.Reagan was aiming at the dismal Carter years. But he understood for all times that economic strength at home sends a powerful signal for international security overseas.When Reagan went to Reykjavik to meet with Gorbachev, he believed the resurgent American economy would hammer the nails on the coffin of Soviet communism. And he explained to Gorbachev that if the Soviets didn’t come to the negotiating table with nuclear weapons,...

Piketon , Ohio - Roughly 1400 people woke up to bad news Thursday morning. It's called a warn notice, and it means their livelihood is on the line. "These are the higher paying jobs in the area," Herman Potter said. But those jobs are now in jeopardy. Herman Potter is president of the Steel Workers Union in Piketon, Ohio. His employer, Fluor B&W issued a warn notice, stating layoffs are possible. Fluor B&W was hired by the Department of Energy to clean the former Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plant and re-industrialize the property three years ago. The way things stand now,...

Since China joined the WTO. So many U.S. companies laid off workers and closed factories. John Bassett III, a third-generation furniture factory owner in Virginia, refused to do that. He decided instead to take on the Chinese. "He's absolutely relentless, “says Beth Macy, author of Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local -- and Helped Save an American Town. Bassett traveled from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to northern China to visit a factory that made knockoffs of the furniture his factory made. Bassett pretended to be interested in doing business with the Chinese manufacturer,...

Paul Craig Roberts: The entire U.S. gold hoard is now goneFormer U.S. Treasury official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts told King World News the entire United States gold hoard, including gold supposedly held at the Fed for other countries, is now gone. This is very bad news for Germany and other countries which have trusted the Fed to safely store their gold. Excerpts from the interview: Eric King: Dr. Roberts, I know you’ve seen the report on Bloomberg about Germany supposedly being happy with storing their gold at the New York Fed. It seemed to be a propaganda piece. What was...

A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision We'll be clean when their work is done We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be freeI.G.Y-D. FagenPaternalism: Behavior by a person, organization or state, which limits some person or group's liberty or autonomy for their own good. Paternalism can also imply that the behavior is against or regardless of the will of the person [being restricted], or also that the behavior expresses an attitude of superiority. -Wiki The core of the enlightenment...

Yellen Yap Silliness The spotlight on Fed Chair Janet Yellen is rather amusing given she is more disingenuous than former Chair Ben Bernanke. Some of the headlines are downright silly. For example, Bloomberg reports Dollar Rises to Highest in 3 Weeks on Yellen Comments. The dollar reached the strongest in a month versus the euro as wholesale prices in the U.S. rose more than forecast and the Fed saw modest to moderate growth in June. New Zealand’s dollar slumped the most in seven weeks after inflation accelerated slower than expected and a gauge of dairy prices dropped to its lowest...

Hillary Clinton thanked the Republican establishment and its big business allies for taking on the Tea Party and defeating conservative candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's June runoff. In a Thursday interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Clinton said tea partiers and conservatives needed to be reined in. And she said it was about time the GOP establishment got a "wake-up call from the big business wing" that wants to continue the bipartisan big government policies that have made Washington, D.C.'s suburbs the country's wealthiest "boomtown." "Finally, the Republican establishment and their business supporters have woken up," Clinton said, noting...

I periodically comment about government corruption, often in the context of trying to make the general point that shrinking the size and scope of the public sector is the most effective way of reducing sleaze in Washington. Now let’s get specific. I’ve already cited Obamacare, the tax code, and the Export-Import Bank as facilitators of corruption. Let’s augment that list by looking at government intervention in the financial sector. We’ll start with some findings on the effectiveness of lobbying. In some new research, two professors at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center found that being active in Washington is beneficial for...