Business Blog

By Stephen McDill RAYMOND- Veteran political journalist and author Curtis Wilkie spoke to honors students at Hinds Community College on Wednesday, regaling them with stories from the many political trails he has traveled in his long career- from Jimmy Carter to John McCain. The Greenville native’s newest book “The Fall of the House of Zeus” [...]

Shopper stampedes in your store that kill or injure workers are your responsibility.That’s the message Chief Administrative Law Judge Covette Rooney of the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission has given Wal-Mart for inadequate crowd management following a November 2008 trampling death of a worker at one of the company’s retail locations in New [...]

By Wally Northway It could be that production at the Toyota manufacturing plant in Blue Springs is going to be delayed — again — this time due to the March 14 earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Yesterday, Toyota released a statement saying it had “communicated to team members, associates and dealers (in North America) that some production [...]

By Wally Northway Mississippians shouldn’t just be saddened by the news of the passing of legendary blues pianist Pinetop Perkins, we should be worried, too. Who will ever replace him? The master keyboardist died at his home in Austin, Texas, today. He was 97 years old. Pinetop’s influence had spread well beyond his hometown of [...]

Correction: A gentleman from the Chamber e-mailed me this morning (March 22) to say that his organization’s report states that a cut-off date of March 2010 was used. Because the Kemper project and Gulf LNG “were not complete as of March 2010-in fact, they’re not complete as of today-they were included. The third project, Grand [...]

By Ted Carter Mississippi’s state-hopping governor has hospital administrators across the state scratching their heads and wondering: What’s he talking about? And smokers? He’s got them choking on their Luckys. What Gov. Haley Barbour’s talking about is raising taxes – something he says he hasn’t done but President Obama has. In a speech to the [...]

By Stephen McDill JACKSON- In MBJ-TV’s final installment this week of the Forest Thigpen interview, the president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy chimes in on the biggest political question of the year: will Haley Barbour make a play for the White House? “I’ve compared it to- what he seems to being doing now- [...]

By Wally Northway A decision recently rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court opens employers to liability for discriminatory employment practices in a theory that up until the ruling had gained little traction in the higher courts. Now, human resources managers need to be aware that the “cat’s paw” liability theory has been deemed constitutional and [...]

By Ted Carter The American Bankers Association says legislation introduced in the Senate Tuesday gives it hope that banks can avoid a pending cut in the fees they receive from merchants on debit card transactions. The so-called Durbin amendment, named after sponsor Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, mandates the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors put [...]

By Stephen McDill Hinds County and others not compliant with SeeTheSpending.org data requests In talking with the Mississippi Center for Public Policy president Forest Thigpen, MBJ-TV has learned more about the non-profit, non-partisan organization’s most recent project called SeeTheSpending.org. Thigpen, a Delta State alum and former Thad Cochran staffer, says people have gone to the [...]