James asks…
Can my work force me to pay for plane tickets with a particular credit card?
Hello,
My work forces me to pay for any business travel plane tickets with the corporate American Express card that they procured for me in my name. Are they allowed to do this by law? My division is located in Utah and the Corp HQ is located in NY. The reason I ask is I would rather put them on my Delta American Express and get the miles put directly onto my Sky Miles account. As it is now I have to pay AMEX $75 for the reward program for my corporate card and then go through the headache of transferring those points to my Delta amex.
If you are curious, I am responsible for paying the balance on the corporate card and then submitting an expense report in order to get reimbursed. Honestly, it seems as if they are over-stepping their bounds, and infringing on my rights, by requiring me to use a certain card if they aren’t going to directly pay the charges on the card.
Thanks.
Ed I thought I covered that but to put it more base… I live in a “Free” country? Why should my work be able to dictate what card I use if they don’t pay the bill directly?
admin answers:
You are on company business. You have been issued a company credit card to travel to/from this business. Why on earth do you think they are infringing on your rights?
Charles asks…
I paid off my Victoria’s Secret balance with cash in-store but it never got posted! Possible cashier theft?
I shopped at Victoria’s Secret last November and upon checking out I agreed to opening an Angels credit card account to earn points and rewards. After that transaction completed the cashier mentioned I can pay off the credit card immediately with her so that I wouldn’t have to worry about a bill. I ended up paying cash to her and for the exact amount since I tend to carry different denominations of cash and coins. My husband always teases me for always paying everything down to the penny.
I saw the monthly statements mailed to me but I never opened it since I paid it off already. Then I started getting annoying phone calls throughout the day from their collector and found out I am way past due with a few late fees! Worst of all it is now reflected on my hard earned perfect credit!!!!!
I went to the VS store to have them investigate and they found no transaction with the same dollar amount around the same time I checked out. So I think the cashier may have pocketed my cash payment!
I demanded surveillance footage but they said they didnt have access to that and to call some corporate number. The said they will investigate which will take around 5 days. I will be calling this week for an update.
So lesson learned- if you pay your store credit with cash always ask for a reciept! That was my mistake. I don’t remember getting a reciept for it but I do remember the cashier becoming excited… excited to have pocketed my hard earned cash and ruining my credit!!
I have a feeling VS will just blow me off and say I never paid and still owe. I am considering hiring an attorney to obtain surveillance footage. I just hope they keep their tapes for over 3 months. I can afford an attorney- I just want my credit fixed!
I am open to suggestions or any similar experiences of this matter. I already know I am at fault for not asking for a ‘payoff’ reciept. My mission is to hunt down proof that I handed that cash to the cashier. At least I am trying. I have a few other credit cards that have been paid off for years yet I still get monthly statements showing zero balance which is why I ignored their mail. Please refrain from scolding me or leaving obnoxious answers that are unhelpful.
admin answers:
I feel with you. It happened to me once. They set up the cashier when I complained and sure enough, she did it again, She went to jail, I got credit and a $50 gift certificate.
George asks…
AREN’T THESE BAIL OUTS JUST MORE CORPORATE WELFARE ?
Will the govt. now step in and save all the homeowners with massive credit card and foreclosure debt,,so they can start all over like big business?? Where is the difference?? And where does it end??If govt. has got all this money for banks ,insurance companies and lending institutions debt woes,,When will they bail out all the Americans in the same shape thru,,the same kind of incompetence ??And shouldn’t the thrifty,,savers and people who pay their bills be rewarded with bonuses,,like the CEO’s who run successful companies??And where are the Republicans who want govt.. OUT OF BIG BUSINESS?? Why are they silent now ?? VERY PUZZLING !!!! SOLOMON
admin answers:
Yes, indeed.
If Hugo Chavez had nationalized two huge Venezuelan corporations without a vote, Bush and the rest of the American corporate politicians would have called him a communist dictator, yet in the US this decision is not even questioned.
“The endless invocations of the virtues of private enterprise, individual entrepreneurship and self-reliance, used to demonize socialism and defend a system that exploits the vast majority for the benefit of a financial elite, have been exposed as frauds. When it comes to big capital, losses are socialized. Only profits remain private.
The same forces who year after year have inveighed against “big government” in order to justify the removal of all legal impediments to the accumulation of corporate profits and private fortunes, and carry out the destruction of social safeguards for the working class, have engineered a massive expansion of government power to safeguard the interests of the financial elite.
The bailout has as well exposed the real relations of political power and influence behind the façade of American democracy. The largest government bailout of private companies in world history—whose ultimate cost to taxpayers is likely to reach hundreds of billions—was sanctioned in advance by the Democratic Congress and given instant approval by the leadership of both parties and both of their presidential candidates.
There have been no investigations into the greatest financial scandal in world history. Neither party has any interest in bringing to light the swindling and skullduggery of the Wall Street moguls, because they are both bound hand and foot to those responsible for the financial debacle.
What has been revealed is the existence in the United States, behind the increasingly tattered veneer of democratic institutions, of a plutocracy—the political rule of the rich. When it comes to the basic interests of the financial aristocracy, both parties and all of the official institutions of society snap to attention and do the bidding of their Wall Street masters.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/fafr-s10.shtml
For its part, the Wall Street Journal, the unwavering champion of “free market” capitalism, published an editorial Tuesday entitled “Surviving the Panic.” It argued for a massive government intervention to buy up all of the worthless paper on the books of Wall Street’s finance houses and thereby secure their profits together with the multi-million-dollar incomes of their top executives.
The newspaper warned ominously, “More major bank failures are a certainty, including some very large ones.”
Its solution? The setting up of a new Resolution Trust Corporation, of the type created during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, which would “provide a buyer for securities for which there is no market.” In other words, the US Treasury’s vaults should be opened up to bail out major Wall Street investors and CEOs who made billions off of a speculative housing bubble that has now burst, precipitating the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s and threatening millions of working people with the loss of their jobs and homes.
Wall Street’s newspaper of record offered no indication of how it would pay for such a bailout for the rich. Undoubtedly, the answer will come after the November election, in the form of a ferocious assault on working class living standards and the dismantling of what remains of America’s tattered social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/econ-s17.shtml
Chris asks…
Is the state of our economy due to the fact that people in power were able to manipulate deregulation?
I believe state of our economy is due to the fact that people in power in business and government were able to manipulate deregulation and leverage the stock market to their advantage.
Once upon a time, all mortgages were 20% down, at a fixed interest rate. The people that bought houses could afford houses. People saved money for their down payments. They rarely walked-away from their 20% savings investment in their home.
Then, deregulation came along. “Greed Is Good” was the mantra of the day. In order to stimulate the economic marketplace in the late 70′s due to a recession, congress passed legislation to deregulate the commercial banking / Savings and Loan industries. Thus, the collapse a few years later in the early1980′s of numerous S & L’s, due to bad decision making on the part of greedy CEO’s who had pushed the deregulation and choose to make bad investments to earn outrageous interest rates. These high-rate, high-risk loans to under-capitalized, high-risk people were made with the banks and S & L’s depositors funds – people lost their retirement money, pension plans were wiped-out. But, prior to the Black Monday crash of October 1981 the corporate CEO’s rewarded themselves outrageous compensation packages and golden parachutes… do you recall The Keating Scandal?
Regulation’s were tightened back up… but then in early 2001, the economy went south again… partly due to 9-11. So, to stimulate the marketplace, more deregulation… this time of the mortgage and energy industries.
Energy deregulation came very quickly, with V.P. “Tricky Dick” Cheney having the first-ever closed-door, zero-oversight private meetings at the White House of Energy Company Executives to create policy to regulate… the Energy Industry? (think fox guarding hen house…). Too soon after came the spectacular energy industry failures… (remember Enron? Kenneth Lay was a personal FOB, “Friend of Bush” ) and the massive compensation packages awarded to the CEO’s by themselves. Then, as in the early 1980′s, regulation had to be re-instituted.
The mortgage industry took off… everyone was happy… lots of money was made by most everyone… lenders, home owners, home builders, investors, wall street… but, no one in government had the foresight to look toward the inevitable over-correction, the “bursting-of-the-bubble” in the market… we were distracted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… if you’re not with us, then you’re against us!
A primer: Mortgage loans are “bundled” in sets (blocks) of billions of dollars of investments… which had always been traditionally considered as “safe” (remember the down payments that used to be made…?). Lenders then sell these blocks of bundled mortgage loans to large investors, primarily Fannie May and Freddie Mac, quasi “US government-backed agencies” (think the US Post Office, another quasi government agency, overseen by uncle Fed, but run as it’s own “company”). This selling-off of the bundled loan packages freed-up the mortgage lenders to create new loans, because they had been “re-paid” when sold to Fannie May & Freddie Mac. When the loans being made were sound, the marketplace worked well…
When deregulation or the mortgage industry in early 2002 happened, just about anyone that could fog a mirror and breathe at the same time could suddenly get a mortgage. Previous rules and reg’s on lending went out the window. The more loans they made, the more fee’s they could collect. Lenders made lots of money, meaning their companies made lots of profit. Wall Street invested heavily in these mortgage securities, which now were weighted-down with the shady, undocumented “B” and “C” grade-paper sub-prime loans. More loans, more fees… more loans, more money to loan out, which were based on these mortgage bundles now loaded with poor-performing loans. This fed the gluttony in America for more and more credit: credit cards, equity loans – borrow, borrow borrow!! The wall street CEO’s rewarded themselves handsomely… their companies were making outrageous profits… before they eventually collapsed.
I BLAME UNCLE FED FOR THIS MESS – AND I PARTICULARLY BLAME THE REPUBLICANS, who have such a need to deregulate industries to the extent that corporate greed takes-over and fiscal common-sense falls by the wayside.
Just because they could deregulate doesn’t mean they should have deregulated… when guidelines / rules / regulations go away, greed ALWAYS takes over… EVERY, SINGLE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ve worked in Real Estate, Mortgage Banking and as an Escrow Closer for the past 20+ years… saw this disaster coming for the last 5 years…
YOUR THOUGHTS??
P.S. – I didn’t make the loans, I was an administrative staff-support person…
I was personally sickened by the loans being made to the people I knew couldn’t repay them… but I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, except by getting-out of the industry (that was 4 years ago…).
admin answers:
DEMOCRATS make the rules to fit their socialist agenda!
Mandy asks…
Is capitalism right or wrong?
When Ronald Reagan shuffled the nation by encouraging us to embrace FreeEnterprise we all “felt good” and it worked. But it grew into a corporate capitalism since then, so hated by Karl Marx and now look what it has become: BigBanks need a bailout.They get it at a low %, while our credit card interest rates remain high. Is that how capitalism is supposed to work?
The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research calculated that the below-market rates offered by the Federal Reserve to JPMorgan Chase — and 17 other large banks — accounted for 41 percent of the profits at Dimon’s banks.
They accounted for 47 percent of the profit at Bank of America, the group said.
A report by the CEPR compared the rates the Fed charged large banks to the rates it charged smaller banks.
The difference amounted to $300 for each of the 120 million families in the country — or roughly $34 billion.
“Most people, if you asked them what do you want to do with $300, I doubt the answer would be, ‘Why don’t we subsidize the large banks?’” said Dean Baker, the group’s co-director. “A lot of things we think are important cost much less — $30 billion annually would go a long way to subsidizing health care [costs for American families].”
Financial experts blasted the subsidy as corporate welfare.
“It rewards their irresponsible behavior in the past and encourages them to do the same thing again in the future,” said Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
If a company fails it goes bankrupt. But if a corporation fails it gets a bailout. What are the benefits to taxpayers if any?
When corporations form by buying up large amounts of small companies they should be made clear that if ever in the future they fail, they ought to sell off the smaller entities before begging for bailouts. And guess what, this is EXACTLY what happening now (in Europe) after the public’s outrage.
admin answers:
Capitalism, for that matter any social system, is not to be viewed in isolation for a few benefits it may shower on a group of people but has to be assessed for the overall benefits it brings to the people living under that system. If you take Russia, people had to be kept under lock and key with guards with guns, so that they may not escape the worker’s heaven. China was worse with people living in pre-industrial poverty chained by medieval traditions taboos and customs. In both places people were kept without even any means of communicating with the outside world, even though China is a military superpower the majority of the population is living in poverty and slavery, much like what was happening in Russia before the perestroika.
Communism assumes that if the state owns all the resources and it is held as common stock and a few enlightened people control the resources they will equitably distribute the resources controlled by them. For that we have to assume that the people entrusted with the responsibility to control the resources will by some magic become as capable as Gods and will somehow understand and foresee the requirements of every individual and weigh it with unerring judgment and distribute the resources in proportion to each individuals need in proportion to the total individual needs and the available resources, and also that each person regardless of the pay he is doled out will somehow rise up to the ideals and work to his full potential without needing any coercion. The power amassed by the party bosses will eventually enslave the people who are turned into vassals of the party bosses much like in the feudal system.
Socialism is a watered down avatar of communism which do not per se advocate full ownership of resources, but calls for arbitrary intervention and control of all economic and social activity by the elite ruling group at their whim who give the benefits to the people they favor.
Fascism is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means bundle or union, and is a dictatorship of a group that holds all the resources and the land and distributes them to whomever it pleases within the group in total exclusion of all people outside the group.
Capitalism rightly assumes that no man is God and that the only person who can assess your requirements is Only You and that only by mutual consent can and should people relate with one another. Capitalism requires the individual, when he associates with any group, to assert his will over that of the group in all matters, and associate with the group only on specific issues and not based on abject surrender of his mind, his will, to the group ethos. Each individual is equal before law whether he is rich or poor or black or white or man or woman or a leader or a follower. It requires you to retain control of your mind, and reject surrender, of any of the controls of our life, to any group formed in the name of whatsoever entity or intent. Pure capitalism does not permit even a democratically elected government to steal or limit an individual’s right or to enslave him except legally, when it is proved beyond doubt that he has committed a crime. It does not grant any sort of privilege to any person whatever be his status in life.
Under capitalism no one is prevented from doing any business nor is anyone given the sole right to do any business unlike in socialism and fascism where people are arbitrarily regulated by the leadership as to what they can do or cannot do.
There is no protection, nor is there any bailouts, efficient businesses thrive and inefficient ones die off just like people die.
Wherever capitalism is adopted as the system of governance, there is affluence, where communist, socialist or any other repressive systems prevail poverty and slavery are the results.
What you have described in it’s gory detail is the working modality of socialism and/or fascism.
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