Tell It To Al

David Oreck, founder of a well-known maker of vacuums and air purifiers, says he’s upset his namesake company is in bankruptcy.

He says Nashville, Tenn.-based Oreck Corp. was a perfectly profitable company when he sold his stake in it to a private equity firm in 2004. He blames the firm, New York-based American Securities Capital Partners, for taking on too much debt and paying themselves too hefty a dividend.

American Securities says the company struggled in the face of increased competition, a recession, and Hurricane Katrina which sacked it’s manufacturing plant in Gulf Port, Miss., and that it did what it could to turn its fortunes around.

A bankruptcy court is sifting through the wreckage now, and Mr. Oreck hopes his family can buy the company back in a bankruptcy auction.

Mr. Oreck is also out with a book this month, “From Dust To Diamonds,” in which he details how to run a business the right way. He says he hopes his namesake company’s chain of private equity owners will read it.

Mr. Oreck, meanwhile, will turn 90 this year, and hopes he has enough time  left in his life to turn his namesake company back around. “At age 90, when they ask you, ‘what do you have to look forward to?” the answer is. ‘tomorrow,” he laughed in a telephone interview.

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

I thought my column, “Twinkie Deserves A Big, Fat Taxpayer Rescue” was clearly sarcastic – a work of satire pointing out the absurdities of bailing out anything, from banks to automakers.

Click here to read the column, and then check out the comments from readers. They are clearly smart enough to read and write, but so many of them can’t detect sarcasm from a columnist with known sarcastic tendencies. They don’t seem to get it even after a paragraph that marvels at the Twinkie as “the most ingenious clump of white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oil, and yellow No. 5 food coloring that ever rolled off a factory floor.”

“I know why Al Lewis wants Twinkies bailed out,” one reader wrote.  “The big money in Twinkies is all Democrat money.  The same reason they aren’t putting “Pretty Boy” Jon Corzine behind bars.”

All I can say is dude, Google up what I’ve written about Mr. Corzine before you blabber online. You can start with a column I wrote just before writting my Twinkie column. Cick here to read it.

Here are some other comments from people who took my Twinkie bailout column way too seriously:

“ABSOLUTELY NOT!  First, WE THE PEOPLE can’t afford it.  Already we are headed for a debt of $20,000,000,000.  I live on a budget, so should the US Governement.”

“WTH is wrong with you? This garbage about using tax payer’s money to bail out failing companies and nationalize industries is not only completely out of line, it is un-american. ”

“This article is rubbish. … Hostess should definitely be left to die. Not only do they make some of the worst junk food on our grocery store shelves, they also appear to have poor management.”

All I can say is thanks to those who got it, and took the time to comment as well: “LOL You didn’t read the article, did you?” wrote one reader. ”He was being sarcastic!”

Yeah, what he said. 

Kodak is not going to be in the digital camera business. It’s not going to be in the photo paper and film business. And now it’s not going to be in the printer business, either. Click here to read more in The Wall Street Journal.

What’s going to be left of this iconic company when its bankruptcy organization is complete?

Probably nothing.

Click here to read a column I wrote on Kodak last year, predicting as much. I had a lot of fun writing headlines using photography puns. And then I asked my readers to do the same. Click here to read an anthology of Kodak puns. A few one liners can really tell the story,  like “Kodak just doesn’t see the whole picture.”

You’ve read about people squatting in their own homes – not paying their mortgages yet not getting evicted either.

It is the story of our times. So much so it even and IRS agent can do it.

Beverly Hood, an IRS veteran, has been investigating financial frauds for a quarter century. But she ended up filing bankruptcy and having foreclosures proceeding filed against her when her husband’s business fail.

It is an irony that someone who investigates mortgage fraud gets investigated for mortgage fraud herself. It is also a warning that these hard economic times can hit anyone.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

The world has been way too hard on “Octomom” Nadya Suleman. She deserves credit for getting this far through our so-called economic recovery without having to file bankruptcy until now.

Click here to read the details on her filing. She had octuplets on top of six other kids before that,  and yet she is only $1 million in debt.

One million dollars in debt with 14 kids. I’d like to see one Fortune 500 CEO try to live on $1 million for just one year, especially in Orange County, Calif., which has a whole host of financial problems and may be headed for its second bankrupty filing, itself.

There used to be a time when having 14 kids was considered noble. One of my great grandmothers, for example, had 12. They had to live on a farm in Germany, growing their own food.

This isn’t possible for most people today. Octomom has tried to raise money by allowing herself to become a public spectacle. She now says she’ll do porn to support her children, if she has to. So what?

Society has always had to struggle with dire situtations like these, hence the nursery rhyme:  “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.”

It’s easy to say Octomom shouldn’t have had so many children. It’s also easy to say a company or a county shouldn’t have taken on so much risk and debt. The problem is, they did. And that’s what the bankruptcy courts are for. Give Octomom a break.

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.

Wherever there’s a financial crisis, we can look back and almost always find someone who sounded the warning bells and was completely ignored.

In the case of bankrupt Harrisburg, Pa., that someone was Charles Chivis, an activist who stood up for minorities and the poor as they suffered from pollution from Harrisburg’s garbage incinerator.

The mismanaged plant was finally shuttered in 2000. Before Chivis died in 2004, he warned that the city’s plan to pump hundreds of millions into retooling the plant was a dangerous folly.

Turns out he was right. The plant is cited as one of the main triggers for the city’s recent bankruptcy filing.

Chivis was hardly alone. A group called the Coalition Against The Incinerator also warned that Harrisburg was taking a financially reckless path. The group no longer exists, but you can click here to read its archived Internet site.

Click here to read my column on Chivis on MarketWatch.

Where’s all the green jobs?

About 1,100 of them were just vaporized as solar panel maker Solyndra filed bankruptcy. The company received $535 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration, and the president had touted the company as an example of America’s future.

Chapter 11 is not much of a future.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

I went to Sbarro this week for the first time in years after the Italian eatery – a fixture in so many American malls – filed bankruptcy.

The pizza looked great. But then I took it back to my little mall table on a plastic tray and ate it. My only question is, how come this company didn’t have to file bankruptcy years ago?

A posting on my Facebook page by an old friend Josh Rappaport captured my sentiments best: “I’ve never seen a place with pizza that looks so good yet tastes so bad. That’s Sbarro for you. Won’t be missed!”

Sbarro is reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maybe they can reorganize their pies, too.

Click here to read my column.

Remember how the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill was going to reduce personal bankruptcies by making it harder for people to file?

The Associated Press counts 1.4 million bankruptcies filed in 2009, the seventh-worst year in history, behind 1998 and the years 2001 to 2005. Click here to read more details from the AP.

By contrast, bankruptcies totalled more than 2 million in 1995. But that was a product of people scrambling to file before the new, more-onerous filing requirements took effect.

Bankruptcies dipped in 2006, when the economy was still strong, but they rose steadily as the nation slouched toward recession by the end of 2007.

Bankruptcy courts are littered with personal tragedies, particularly lost jobs and catastrophic illnesses. It often goes like this: Get cancer, lose job because the chemo leaves you too sick to work, lose health care benefits – because you can no longer afford them and you don’t have a job that provides them.

The nation’s unemployment rate is now at 10% and health care reform looks like it’s going to be about as effective as bankruptcy reform.

Whatever Congress reforms just seems to get more bankrupt.