Tell It To Al

There’s nothing more American than blue jeans, except that most of them are made in China, Mexico and just about every place else but America.

The exception is Round House Workwear, which has been making making jeans in Shawnee, Okla., since 1903, when it began outfitting railroad workers.

The company gets its denim from cotton mills in Texas, and its buttons and zippers from a company in Georgia.

This week, I talked to David Antosh, a third-generation jeans makers whose grandfather acquired Round House in the 1960s.

He’s proof we can still make things in America – even in the textile industry which faded away in America decades ago.

“A lot of people assume that nobody makes jeans here in the U.S.,” Antosh says. “If it were impossible, we wouldn’t be here.”

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

One of the most telling facets of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s dashed settlement with Citigroup, is it’s argument that the “public interest” shouldn’t be part of any judicial review.

The SEC accused Citigroup of fraud and then proposed allowing Citigroup to settle  the allegation for $285 million without admitting nor denying guilt. This, of course, is standard operating procedure for the SEC, but  a Federal Judge in New York nixed the settlement anyway.

Too many companies have slipped away from meaningful enforcement, allegedly committing frauds and considering the fines a cost of doing business. Judge Jed Rakoff insisted the public has a right to know the truth: Did Citigroup commit fraud or not?

The SEC, however, had the temerity to argue it’s none of the public’s business.

Never mind all the bailout money Citigroup received when it blew itself and the U.S. economy to smithereens. “The public interest … is not part of [the] applicable standard of judicial review,” the SEC argued. In other words, there’s no need for the court to check to see whether the public interest has been served. Just sign the papers, your honor, and move on to the next thing.

Judge Rakoff wisely ruled otherwise:

“When a public agency asks a court to become its partner in enforcement by imposing wide-ranging injunctive remedies on a defendant, enforced by the formidable judicial power of contempt, the court, and the public, need some knowledge of what the underlying facts are: for otherwise, the court becomes a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts, while the public is deprived of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.”

So who does the SEC agency represent? The public or the companies it is supposed to regulate?

Click here to read Judge Rakoff’s decision. And click here to read a column I wrote on the case a couple weeks ago.

Is the world going to end on Dec. 21, 2012, as predicted by those who interpret the Mayan Calendar?

Not really.

I mean, it’s only money.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

If you think you can’t be conned, you’re probably the  biggest sucker sitting at the table.

I, for one, am a sucker for a good story. Here’s the tale of a preacher who nearly convinced me he had an amazing gift, and what happened when I put him to the test.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

What would happen if we put Moe, Larry and Curly in charge of curbing the nation’s deficit spending?

About the same thing that happened with the Super Committee.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch

NBC has ordered up a pilot for a remake of the 1960s TV classic, “The Munsters.”

Click here for the details.

It’s reportedly going to have a darker, less  campy feel than the original. And I am a darker, far less campy soul than the Al Lewis who played Grandpa on the original Munsters.

Here’s why I deserve at least an audition for the part of Grandpa:

1) I am the most famous Al Lewis after the actor has, unfortunately, passed. No stake in the heart. No blazing sunshine. No Holy Water. Turns out he was a mere mortal, and I am keeping his memory alive with my name.

2) People started associating me with Al Lewis  decades before he died. The truth is, when I was in about third grade, I noticed the guy who played Grandpa on the Munsters was Al Lewis. The name struck me as cool. So I shortened my first name, Alan, by two letters, and I have been known as Al Lewis ever since. My parents, who named me for actor Alan Ladd after seeing the 1953 western movie “Shane,” weren’t happy that I preferred vampires to gunfighters.

3) See photo comparison above. That should cinch it right there.

4) In 2007, I interviewed Michele’ Lilley, of Manhattan Beach, Calif., who is the little sister of Butch Patrick, who played Eddie on The Munsters. She had her brother send me this autographed picture of himself and Woof-Woof. Click here to see what Lilley does. She makes really cool keys. She also mentioned that I seemed as nice a guy as the Al Lewis on the Munsters. Although, I’m really not that nice. I am dark and not very campy.

5) I’m finally old enough to be Grandpa. When I turn 50 next month, I’m going to join AARP.

6) As a business columnist, I have gotten to know more blood-sucking parasites than all the people in the “Twilight” series put together.

7) I have also witnessed more horrors than Stephen King, from the Enron trial to Bernie Madoff’s sentencing.

8 I have always stuck up for the vanishing working-class that this family of fine, upstanding monsters represents.

9) Whoever they get to play Herman Munster will look much taller standing next to me.

10) I hate the Addams Family. It wasn’t spooky, or funny. Just weird. Can’t wait to see the return of The Munsters.

Why do they call it “public service” when so many people leave Congress much richer than when they went in?

The fees Newt Gingrich bagged being a “historian” (no way was it for being a lobbyist) for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is just another example of the riches available to those who take a spin through Washington’s revolving door. Never mind Gingrich’s criticism of Fanne and Freddie as primar culprits in the demise of America’s economy. The money was good for him.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

How’s that new Mob museum in Vegas? Bankrupt.

I visited what’s left of the The Las Vegas Mob Experience, now buried in Chapter 11 and a raft of lawsuits and counter suits.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Gotta love a venture capitalist with a sense of humor.  Colorado VC Jason Mendelson performs “I’m A VC” with some of his partners. Click here for a better link if the above embedded video doesn’t worm.

A Colorado commodities broker has shut down her firm, refusing to reopen until Barack Obama is removed from office.

Ann Barnhardt of Barnhardt Capital Management in Lone Tree, Colo., also warns on her website that the futures and options markets are about to blow, thanks in part to Democrat Jon Corzine’s imploded hedge fund, MF Global.  Click here to read her stuff. Here are a few highlights:

“I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. …  The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse.

“Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate.

“MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt.

“I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other “iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform.”

Click here to read my column on the MF Global debacle.