Michael1942's Blog

My opinion: Mr. Lampert is seeking to resurrect a dying company that he set on this path. His own incompetency in understanding how retail works has more to do with the demise of these long time icons than lack of sales. It is commonplace for retailers to upgrade their stores as they age to improve the customer experience but that never happened with the Sears-Kmart stores. His lack of vision beyond his own pocket is the prime mover in the decimation of these stores. His merger of the two companies and subsequent gutting of the retirement benefits of thousands of employees added to this decline. Some employees at the store level lost as much as 50 thousand dollars in retirement funds in the merger as well as the cessation of pay increases. Mr. Lampert is the culprit here. MA
By Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli, Reuters 10 hours ago

(Reuters) – Sears Holdings Corp Chairman Eddie Lampert is in discussions with at least one potential partner to contribute to a $300 million bankruptcy loan the U.S. retailer is seeking, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc, has held discussions with Cyrus Capital Partners LP, an investment firm that holds some of Sears’ existing debt, about sharing the burden of funding portions of the $300 million loan, which would be separate from another $300 million bankruptcy loan that Sears’ banks have offered to provide, the sources said.
The sources asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. A Sears spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Sears’ survival will depend on the willingness of creditors and suppliers to keep the company afloat. Strong sales in the end-of-year holiday season will be key in determining that, putting pressure on the department store operator to secure enough financing to remain operational until then.
Through his hedge fund, Lampert has invested billions of dollars in Sears since he created it in its current form in 2005 through a merger with peer Kmart. As a result, he is the department store operator’s largest shareholder and creditor.
The bankruptcy loan from the banks, including Bank of America Corp , Wells Fargo & Co and Citigroup Inc , falls first in line for repayment in the Sears bankruptcy case, while the $300 million loan that Sears is seeking from lenders including ESL would be repaid afterwards.
Some people representing Sears while it navigates bankruptcy have also privately suggested to Lampert that he should seek to replace the $300 million loan from the banks with his own financing, some of the sources said. This would mean that Lampert would potentially be contributing to bankruptcy loans totaling $600 million, the sources said.
Such a move would potentially consolidate Sears’ obligations during bankruptcy proceedings, and give Lampert more control over the company’s court case since he would essentially be the main so-called debtor-in-possession lender, the sources said. As it stands now, Sears is contemplating having two such loans.
However, it isn’t clear whether Lampert can or is willing to provide financing to repay the banks lending Sears money in bankruptcy, the sources said. Lampert could demur on the idea and remain focused on contributing to the $300 million loan Sears wants that would be subordinated in repayment to the banks, the sources said.
The sources cautioned that negotiations between Sears, Lampert and other potential sources of bankruptcy financing remained fluid and might not result in a deal. Sears filed for bankruptcy protection in White Plains, New York on Oct. 15 with a plan to close about 142 of its 700 stores by year-end and sell up to 400 of its best-performing stores in an auction in January to a buyer that will keep them operational.
Lampert stepped down as Sears CEO following the bankruptcy filing, and is planning to bid for the stores that go up for sale.
Sears, which has close to 70,000 employees, has not turned a profit since 2011. It struggled with competition from e-commerce firms such as Amazon.com Inc , as well as brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart Inc .
The company listed $6.9 billion in assets and $11.3 billion in liabilities in documents filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York. A court hearing finalizing bankruptcy financing for Sears is expected during the week of Oct. 29.
(Reporting by Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli in New York; editing by Greg Roumeliotis and Grant McCool)

Apparently blaming someone else is the new norm in politics along with willingness to lie to win at any cost, this occurs across party lines however the party in power gets more press since they have set us on a path of division. Ignoring the fact that the “Tax Reform Bill” has been the main cause of the deficit which was predicted by
The Senate’s Official Scorekeeper
Says the Republican Tax Plan
Would Add $1 Trillion to the Deficit.  My question is who is telling the truth, the numbers or Mitch? MA
By JUGAL K. PATEL and ALICIA PARLAPIANO UPDATED DEC. 1, 2017
Senate Republicans’ $1.5 trillion tax cut would not pay for itself, according to a report released on Thursday by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The report is a significant setback for Republicans, who have asserted that the tax cuts would grow the economy enough to cover the cost of the plan.
Yuval Rosenberg, The Fiscal Times Tue, Oct 16 4:44 PM CDT
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks after the Republican weekly policy lunch on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
The quotes: “It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem. It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”
McConnell also called the failure to reform entitlements “the single biggest disappointment” of his time in Congress and said that, because of the popularity of the programs in question and the risk of a political backlash, entitlement reform likely has to come through bipartisan compromise. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” he said.
The context: McConnell’s comments, in an interview with Bloomberg, come a day after the Treasury Department said that the deficit grew to $779 billion in fiscal 2018, up 17 percent from the year before.
It’s true that, as the population ages, Medicare and Social Security are the main drivers of projected long-term U.S. debt, along with rising interest payments.
At the same time, budget watchers note that the GOP tax cuts passed last year are expanding the deficit rather than paying for themselves, as Republicans claimed they would. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said recently that legislation enacted in fiscal 2018, including tax cuts and spending increases, would add $445 billion to next year’s deficit — or 46 percent of the projected total.
Democrats argue that it’s unfair to single out safety-net programs for blame — and to put them on the chopping block — when repeated tax cuts and unfunded wars have contributed mightily to the debt over the last 20 years.
Democratic leaders seized on McConnell’s comments as evidence that Republicans were pursuing an agenda aimed at shrinking the government by starving it of revenue via tax cuts for the rich and then slashing safety-net programs for low- and middle-income Americans. “It’s gaslighting for the GOP to blow a $2 trillion hole in the deficit to give the rich a tax cut then suggest cutting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as the only fix for that new deficit,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted Tuesday.
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It is unfortunate that many Americans who are devoted “TOTUS’ supporters can only pick out 1 or two reasons they voted and supported him. Any one of their reasons is enough to terminate that support but the entertainment value appears to hold sway. MA.

Matt Bai 2 hours 5 minutes ago

Before he was treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin was a movie producer, so maybe he’d appreciate that when I think about him showing up at this “Davos in the Desert” confab in Saudi Arabia next week, my mind goes to “Lost in Translation,” the film with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
I picture Mnuchin and Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo, who as I write this might be the only journalist still planning to attend, wandering aimlessly through a sleek hotel and passing joyless hours with exotic teas at the hotel bar (it’s a dry country), unable to understand what anyone around them is saying, ruminating quietly on lives gone horribly awry.
On the plus side, I guess, there won’t be a line for the treadmills.
Pretty much the rest of the English-speaking world — governments, investors, media celebrities — seems to have concluded, reasonably enough, that celebrating the Saudi kingdom’s cosmopolitan future isn’t the tasteful thing to do right now, with all indications pointing to the savage murder of a Washington Post columnist by an army of Saudi thugs who carted a bone saw to Istanbul.
I mean, when you’ve brutalized a dissenter in a way that shocks the Turkish government, you have to know that you’ve really set the bar high.
But all that’s of little concern to the American president, who so far seems bent on sending Mnuchin to the annual conference anyway, and who continues to hedge and make excuses for his Saudi friends, thus isolating the United States, yet again, from the larger world community.
“They’re investing tremendous amounts of money” in American products, President Trump said of his “great ally” Saudi Arabia, which he claims — dubiously — has signed on to buy $110 billon in American-made weaponry.
Trump’s detractors will say that this is just another example of his being amoral and impulsive, bowing down to murderous autocrats because he aspires to be one of them. But that’s not giving Trump enough credit.
The president is absolutely pursuing a strategy here, which he laid out in his very first day on the job. And it’s not just morally bankrupt. It’s economically reckless, too.

In truth, every modern president has struggled to find the right balance between America’s lofty ideals and our strategic interests. During the Cold War that dominated the second half of the last century, Washington often came to see ruthless right-wing regimes in Asia, Latin America and Africa as necessary bulwarks against communism. It wasn’t a good look.
And since the emergence of Islamic terrorism as an overarching threat, no country has tested this balance as much as Saudi Arabia. The Saudis repress women and dissidents, but they’ve also lent out their land for U.S. military bases, and they’re seen as a crucial counterweight against Iranian influence.
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to walk that line between values and realpolitik in the region, and they mostly ended up talking about the former while ceding to the latter.
Trump, however, represents a radical departure from his predecessors, Republican and Democrat. He makes no pretense of balancing moral imperatives, or even military objectives, against the economic agenda that is his only real priority.
He made that exceedingly clear in an inauguration speech striking for its total indifference to moral leadership. Expanding on his “America First” philosophy, Trump laid waste to an American century in which he said we’d spent too much energy and money worrying about what happened to people in other countries.
“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world,” Trump said then, “but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”
Trump was articulating not so much his governing philosophy — he doesn’t have one — as his business philosophy. When you’re cutting the ribbon for a casino or some towering condo building, you don’t trouble yourself about whether the guy holding a shovel next to you is mob-connected (or, like your son-in-law, a slumlord).
No, if you’re a certain kind of businessman, you ask yourself only one question: Will this deal make money? You’re not in the business of morally policing your partners, as long as they’re not brutalizing you.
And this, to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, is probably why he appears so beholden to foreign bullies. It’s why he shrugs at Turkish goons beating up peaceful protesters near the White House, and betrays only the slightest irritation at the Russians trying to execute a man and his daughter in England, and remains untroubled by the horrific genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar — all while lashing out bitterly at Canadian dairy farmers.
If it doesn’t threaten American factories or farms, Trump isn’t especially interested. Abstract values aren’t something he loses a lot of sleep over, in foreign policy or in life.
Trump’s supporters — both the ones who wave signs at his rallies and the Chamber of Commerce kind — tend to love this about him, and I get why. They’ve had enough nation-building and finger-waving and coalition-leading for one century.
The idea of a president focused only on American jobs and industry, without all the other noise, has strong appeal in communities where Americans have often felt overlooked, and where they can’t really afford to worry about how the Saudis handle their critics.
Except that there’s a problem with this formulation. It assumes that America’s economic interests have nothing to do with its moral imperatives. And in the long term, that’s just wrong.

America’s most vital export isn’t cars or soft drinks or computer chips. It’s our culture. It’s our brand.
American businesses thrived overseas in the 20th century not just because we made a bunch of stuff, but because the stuff we made signified the American creed. In every part of the world, they watched our cowboy movies and smoked our cigarettes because they admired us. They knew Americans aspired to moral courage and the rule of law, even if we often fell short of the goal.
Coke didn’t just taste good; it tasted like America. Fords weren’t the best-driving cars on the road; they were the symbol of an empowered middle class.
Trump is, if nothing else, a brand master. He built his own, after all, with little more than fast talk and big hair. He did it so effectively that foreign investors were willing to plunk down millions on a property just because it carried his gold-plated name.
But he doesn’t seem to understand the risks he’s taking with ours. He can’t seem to grasp that, unlike a casino or a skyscraper, America’s potential for profit is inextricable from its moral standing. Without the enduring legacies of Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy and Reagan, we’re just another country growing soybeans.
The American president should react at least as strongly as our bankers to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, because we ought to stand for the right to dissent, and for the freedom of our press, and for basic humanity. That’s reason enough.
But we ought to do so, too, with the clear understanding that there is no such thing as “America First” without holding firm to American ideals.

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To The Supporters of  “conservative values” and the Republican (Dupublican) party, this is what the “Party of Mitch” has wrought. If you  rely on these so called entitlements then you could be in the line of fire for these cuts. To me the choice is clear change the leadership in Congress. MA

Nicole Goodkind 12 hrs ago

After instituting a $1.5 trillion tax cut and signing off on a $675 billion budget for the Department of Defense, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that the only way to lower the record-high federal deficit would be to cut entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
“It’s disappointing but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said of the deficit, which grew 17 percent to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018. McConnell explained to Bloomberg that “it’s a bipartisan problem: Unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.” The deficit has increased 77 percent since McConnell became majority leader in 2015.
New Treasury Department analysis on Monday revealed that corporate tax cuts had a significant impact on the deficit this year. Federal revenue rose by 0.04 percent in 2018, a nearly 100 percent decrease last year’s 1.5 percent. In fiscal year 2018, tax receipts on corporate income fell to $205 billion from $297 billion in 2017.Still, McConnell insisted that the change had nothing to do with a lack of revenue or increased spending and instead was due to entitlement and welfare programs. The debt, he said, was very “disturbing” and driven by “the three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid…There’s been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs. Hopefully, at some point here, we’ll get serious about this.”
President Donald Trump promised to leave Medicare untouched on the campaign trail, but Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Florida Senator Marco Rubio have long indicated their desire to cut entitlement programs to pay for their tax cuts.
“You have got to generate economic growth because growth generates revenue,” Rubio said at a Politico conference late last year. “But you also have to bring spending under control. And not discretionary spending. That isn’t the driver of our debt. The driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries.”
“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Speaker Ryan said on a conservative radio program around the same time.
Democrats, meanwhile, jumped on McConnell’s admission as proof that Republicans had long-planned to cut entitlement spending to fund the tax cuts that largely benefit corporations and wealthy Americans. “The truth comes out! This was their deceptive plan all along,” said Representative Lois Frankel of Florida.
“When Republicans in Congress said their tax cuts to wealthy multinational corporations would pay for themselves, they lied,” wrote Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan on Twitter. “Now, they’re going to try to come for hardworking people to foot the bill by slashing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We can’t let them.”
A recent Pew poll found that the majority of both Democrats and Republicans thought the rising federal deficit and cost of healthcare were major problems facing the U.S.– something that Democrats are taking note of and will try to package into their midterm campaign platforms over the next three weeks.
“Every Republican Senate candidate is on the hook for Mitch McConnell’s plan to cut Medicare and Social Security. First it was jeopardizing pre-existing conditions coverage, then it was pursuing an age tax that would charge older Americans more for care, and now it’s targeting the benefits Americans have paid into,” wrote Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman David Bergstein in a statement. “This platform is disqualifying, and just like taking away coverage for pre-existing conditions, it’s exactly what GOP candidates don’t want to be talking about weeks before the election.”

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