Author: Justin Lane

President Obama unveiled his new plan to create jobs and help restore the economy. Unfortunately, unless you are a multinational corporation, the new jobs plan won’t be much help to you. Obama chose to unveil the new plan at a Maryland manufacturing plant, a fitting setting. Few industries so wholly encompass the current American worker’s plight as industrial fabrication and manufacturing. Often the employees, the line and floor workers, are left to carry the business while corporate executives enjoy exorbitant salaries and bonuses. Then, those same executives, having never spent a day on the line or the floor of...

Ring of Fire has been covering the efforts to fight for fair wages for labor. It’s an ongoing fight. Recently, workers have been going on strike across the Midwest in protest of the wage and labor practices of McDonald’s. The protests now span several states and have expanded to include more fast-food businesses. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Popeye’s, and Long John Silver’s are all targets of the new-wage movement. The picketers are demanding that these establishments offer a wage of $15 per hour, which in many cases is double what they are being paid now. Late last month, McDonald’s was...

A California court has shown, yet again, that it’s in the service of big business this past week when it decided that California Wal-Mart employees cannot sue for sex-based discrimination as a group. The court cited that the women did not have enough in common to establish a class certification. In 2001, a group of women from various Wal-Mart stores filed a claim in San Francisco claiming that they had been denied promotion and pay. The lawsuit alleged that the retail giant’s employment policies created a structure that made the disparate treatment of women systemic. Unfortunately, the actions of...

Below are Ring of Fire’s top stories from the past week. Top Video Industry Influence to Blame for Tavares, Florida Explosion On July 29th, an explosion at a gas plant in Tavares, Floridainjured eight people, leaving five of them in critical condition.  Three months prior to that, a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas killed 14 people and left numerous people injured and homeless.  And three years before that, an oil rig operated by BP, Transocean, and Halliburton exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 people and destroying an entire ecosystem. … Read more. Florida Gas Plant Explosion Leaves...

Often, False Claims are resolved through settlements with the government but sometimes the fraud committed is so egregious that it becomes a criminal matter. Such is the case of Yuri Khandrius. Khandrius is a 50-year-old man from Brooklyn, N.Y. guilty of assisting in a scheme to defraud the Medicare program of $77 million. For this, he was sentenced on Tuesday to 8 years in prison; after the 8-year term, he will have a 3-year supervised release. The Court also ordered Khandrius to pay $446,655 and restitution of $10 million. The crime that Khandrius committed was conspiring to commit Medicare...