#Darren Hawkins

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic-era lifeline from the federal government, the struggling freight trucking company Yellow is filing for bankruptcy.

After monthslong negotiations between Yellow’s management and the Teamsters union broke down, the company shut its operations late last month, and said on Sunday that it was seeking bankruptcy protection so it could wind down its business in an “orderly” way.

“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” the company’s chief executive, Darren Hawkins, said in a statement. Yellow filed a so-called Chapter 11 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

The downfall of the 99-year-old company will lead to the loss of about 30,000 jobs and could have ripple effects across the nation’s supply chains. It also underscores the risks associated with government bailouts that are awarded during moments of economic panic.

Yellow, which formerly went by the name YRC Worldwide, received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases. Government watchdogs have scrutinized the loan because of the company’s financial turmoil and close ties to the Trump administration, which awarded the loan.

Since then, Yellow changed its name and embarked on a restructuring plan to help revive its flagging business by consolidating its regional networks of trucking services under one brand. As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that it owed to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.

The fate of the loan is not yet clear. The federal government assumed a 30% equity stake in Yellow in exchange for the loan. It could end up assuming or trying to sell off much of the company’s fleet of trucks and terminals. Yellow aims to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets, according to court documents. Mr. Hawkins said the company intended to pay back the government loan “in full.”

The White House declined to comment.

Yellow estimated that it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, per court documents. Some of its largest unsecured creditors include Amazon, with a claim of more than $2 million, and Home Depot, which is owed nearly $1.7 million.

Yellow is the third-largest small-freight trucking company in a part of the industry known as “less than truckload” shipping. The industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, while customers have been reluctant to accept higher prices.

Those forces collided with an ugly labor fight this year between Yellow and the Teamsters union over wages and other benefits. Those talks collapsed last month and union officials soon after warned workers that the company was shutting down.

After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused “irreparable harm” by halting its restructuring plan. Yellow employed about 23,000 union employees.

“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Mr. Hawkins said. The Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them,” he added.

In late June, the company filed a lawsuit against the union, asserting it had caused more than $137 million in damages by blocking the restructuring plan.

The Teamsters union said that Yellow’s executives unjustly blamed the union for the demise of the company, which had been “plagued with financial trouble for nearly two decades,” officials said in a statement.

“Teamster families sacrificed billions of dollars in wages, benefits and retirement security to rescue Yellow,” said Sean O’Brien, the union’s general president. “The company blew through a $700 million government bailout.” Calling Yellow’s top executives “dysfunctional” and “greedy,” he blamed them for failing to “take responsibility for squandering all that cash.”

The bankruptcy could create temporary disruptions for companies that relied on Yellow and might prompt more consolidation in the industry. It could also lead to temporarily higher prices as businesses find new carriers for their freight.

“Those inflationary prices will certainly hurt the shippers and hurt the consumer to a certain extent,” said Tom Nightingale, chief executive of AFS Logistics, who suggested that prices would probably normalize within a few months.

In late July, Yellow began permanently laying off workers and ceased most of its operations in the United States and Canada, according to court documents. Yellow has retained a “core group” of about 1,650 employees to maintain limited operations and provide administrative work as it winds down. Yellow said it expected to pay about $3.4 million per week in employee wages to operate during bankruptcy, which “may decrease over time.” None of the remaining employees are union members, the company said.

The company also sought the authority to pay an estimated $22 million in compensation and benefit costs for current and former employees, including roughly $8.7 million in unpaid wages as of the date of filing.

Yellow had readily accessible funds of about $39 million when it filed for bankruptcy, which it said would be insufficient to cover its wind-down efforts, and it expected to receive special financing to help support the sale process and payment of wages.

Jack Atkins, a transportation analyst at the financial services firm Stephens, said that Yellow’s troubles had been mounting for years. In the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate, Mr. Atkins said. The demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable.

“Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive,” Mr. Atkins said. “It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed.”

David P. Leibowitz, a Chicago bankruptcy lawyer who represents several trucking companies, said Yellow had found itself in a “perfect storm, and they have not managed that perfect storm very well.”

The company’s financial problems fueled concerns. It lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it defrauded the federal government during a seven-year period. Last year it agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle the lawsuit.

Congressional oversight committees have scrutinized the company’s relationships with the Trump administration. President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force, and Yellow had financial backing from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with close ties to Trump administration officials.

Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote in a report last year that top Trump administration officials had awarded Yellow the money over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department. The report noted that Yellow had been in close touch with Trump administration officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employed Teamsters as its drivers.

In December 2020, Steven T. Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, defended the loan, arguing that had the company been shuttered, thousands of jobs would have been at risk and the military’s supply chain could have been disrupted. He predicted that the federal government would eventually turn a profit from the deal.

“Yellow had longstanding financial problems before the pandemic, was not essential to national security and thus should never have received a $700 million taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department,” Representative French Hill, Republican of Arkansas and a member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, said in a statement. “Years of poor financial management at Yellow has resulted in hard-working people losing their jobs.”

[jauntilyplacedcaps]

[fullcaps-ethan]

guess who's in this year's INAMMO B)

....

MEEEEE

i'm overjoyed i got to draw my fav characters for this!

participant list under the cut!

[winchesterszvonecek]

My Top 5 Chicago Fire Characters

#1: Brian ‘Otis’ Zvonecek

2012-2019

#2: Randy ‘Mouch’ McHolland

2012-

#3: Violet Mikami

2020-

#4: Darren Ritter

2018-

#5: Evan Hawkins

2021-2023

[datshitrandom]

Darren Criss as Blaine Anderson | Glee 4.11 'Sadie Hawkins' | Rare Wardrobe Photos

[gleesongtournament]

Glee Song Tournament Round 1

[d-criss-news]

Via Mason Alexander Park and Amanda Lee Hawkins' Instagram Story (June 27th, 2022)

[klainelynch]

My mental status can best be described by the fact that I’m making Glee memes in the year of our Lord 2022

.

[Image Description: The car swerve meme. The car is labeled Glee “writers,” and it is swerving away from Keeping Blaine older than Kurt since he was introduced as a mentor character and swerving towards Making Blaine a junior in s3 for no fucking reason. End ID]

[blairwarbler]

Glee TV Show Darren Criss Blaine Anderson 7 Rare Unpublished Wardrobe Photos 411 (x)

[fictionalreads]

Chicago Fire Season 11 Episode 2

Gallo

GOOD FOR YOU GALLO! Moving on and stuff.

LMAO Gallo you can just talk about your life, no need to segue into it by asking about his life.

Gallo, you’ve moved on remember?

LMAO SHES HERMANN’S NIECE

Ritter put it together immediately.

Cruz

JAVI

Joe I kinda like the beard.

Don’t feel bad Joe. Severide is a legend.

Him liking Severide doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you! You’re his dad!

They helped Javi!

Severide is so kind.

AWE JAVI!

Brett

Take a breath. I know it seems easier to focus on work but you really need to deal with this.

Tell them Brett

Mouch is a lovely man.

Be careful Brett

Awe shit he got a hammer

Fuck the sister died

Emergencies

Oh new guy knows the patient.

Damn he lost his leg.

THEY CHEATED THE PAPERWORK AND THEN TRIED TO BLAME HIM?! Dirty dirty people.

EXPOSE THEM

Miscellaneous

They turn into adorable mush when kids are around 😊

Oh his first name is Sam.

TRUDY PLATT!!

Hermann, why are you looking at Severide and Ritter? Severide’s married and Ritter’s gay. The only one you need to look at is Gallo.

What is Carver hiding?

[gins-potter]

I like Hawkami, but they are taking up too much screen time, especially Hawkins who is a recurring character and doesn’t work at 51.

They need to shift some focus from this couple to other main characters, in particular the POC characters on the show like Ritter, who keep getting pushed aside and who deserves to be treated like the main character he is and should be given better storylines.

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

nah, don't agree with this one. violet, one half of hawkami, is a person of colour too so idk that you can argue against them having screen time because it's taking away from poc screen time. i do agree that ritter deserves more screen time and better storylines, but i think you can do that and not lose hawkami screen time. the shows been balancing lots of characters and multiple ships and storylines at the same time for a long time.

send me unpopular opinions

[abyssnighthawk]

CP OCs for my story “You’re Next”

[jauntilyplacedcaps]

[laundrybiscuits]

“Who’s Eddie?”

Darren doesn’t sound jealous or anything. It’d be a little hypocritical of him, considering he’s got a boyfriend and all. But Darren’s stayed the night a few times, more than anyone else Steve’s been sleeping with lately, and Steve thinks they’re getting to be pretty good friends at this point, and Steve’s been trying this thing lately where he’s more honest with his friends.

“Why do you ask?” Steve’s stalling, and he knows he’s stalling.

“You say Eddie sometimes in your sleep. Just wondering. He an ex or something?”

“No. Not an ex. Just a guy I—just a guy I liked, when I was a teenager.” It’s not completely true, he doesn’t think. But it’s close enough.

“Never got up the courage for a sweet little farmboy fumble?” Darren’s a city boy, and he likes to tease Steve about his supposedly agrarian roots even though Steve keeps telling him he’s never even been on a farm. (Aside from harvest festivals, and apple picking, and 4-H fairs, and his grandpa’s—okay, Darren has a little bit of a point. Not much.)

“He’s dead. He died,” Steve says. They’re just words. They can’t hurt anymore.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” says Darren, because Darren is not actually an asshole. He’s looking carefully at whatever Steve’s face is doing. Steve doesn’t know. Tentatively, he asks, “Was it because…?”

“No,” says Steve. Then he backtracks. “Maybe. Partly.”

Hunt the freak, right?

It wasn’t Jason Carver’s teeth in Eddie’s guts, but if things had broken a little differently, if they hadn’t had to worry about the human monsters in Hawkins…Steve thinks a lot about how it might have gone. Sometimes he hates Eddie for not being just a little bit more normal, and then he hates himself for thinking like that.

Steve has never said yes to a guy named Jason. It’s so fucking stupid and pointless. Maybe he’s missed out on the love of his life by turning down Jason Jones or whoever, and it's not even like Jason was the only one responsible. But he just can’t. He can’t.

He thinks it’s probably not even about Eddie himself, like as a real person. Eddie was just some guy, some kid, who was funny and handsome and sweet and wild, who loved the things he loved as if nobody had ever told him not to. 

A lot of people had told him not to. 

Eddie died because of ravening nightmare beasts and one superpowered evil dude with a god complex.

Eddie died because he liked playing a game about stories and magic.

Eddie died because some people, the people who raised Steve, the people who Steve used to love and look up to—those people couldn’t understand him, and thought that gave them the right to take away his life.

Growing up, Steve had always thought of himself as a lifelong Hawkinsite, the kind of guy who sticks around and puts down roots. But when Robin had asked him to go with her to New York, near the tail end of '86, it had been so easy to say yes. Leaving Hawkins behind had felt like escaping the jaws of a trap, even if it meant leaving a limb behind. They’ve been to Paris and London and LA, staying in filthy student hostels and drinking cheap wine, living the kind of life that had once seemed as make-believe and impossible to Steve as the kids’ wizard games. 

Steve dates men, now. He thinks that would have seemed even more impossible than Paris to his sixteen-year-old self. 

He still dates women sometimes. He’s had a couple girlfriends. Mostly, though, he’s not looking for anything too slow or serious, and that’s easier to get with men once you know where to look. He’s got Robin, he’s got the kids to see on Thanksgivings and Christmases, what else does he need? 

They’d moved out of New York around '91. Rent got to be too much, and Dustin had just bought a place in Oak Park with his then-girlfriend because the kid U-Hauls faster than a lesbian. 

So now, they share an apartment on the north side of Chicago, close to the lake. It’s pretty nice. Steve’s pushing 30, bartending six nights a week, and Robin answers phones at a fancy dentist’s office in the Loop. It’s been a lifetime since they’ve run from anything with too many teeth under the wrong sky. 

“Tell me about Eddie,” Darren says into the silence that's been stretching out too long.  

Steve closes his eyes.

“He was brave,” says Steve. “Every single day of his life, he was brave.”

(Now with follow-up!)

[toppersjeep]

Blake Gallo-That’s The Way I Love You

Summary: Your a firefighter at firehouse 51 and Matt Casey’s sister. After Casey left you kinda looked out for Blake. You really like Blake but you feel like he’s stuck on Violet. Once you learn he’s hanging out it’s someone new you get upset and confront him.

Your POV

“So how’s Matt doing” Ritter asked. “He’s doing great so see the boys” I said putting the gear back in the Squad truck. “How’d that date go the other night with Halstead right” Ritter said. “Jay yeah I mean it went good I think” I said. “You think” Ritter said.

Blake walked by. I looked at him then at Ritter. I don’t think Darren knew how I felt about Blake.

“Blake Matt said to tell you hello” I said. “Well I say hi back you know I’ve texted him” Blake said. “He’s just been very busy with work” I said. “Yeah I get that” Blake said. “I think I’m gonna go make some lunch up” I said.

“Can we have some sandwiches” Tony said. “You and Cap are so lazy” I said. “I’ll help you out” Ritter said following me into the firehouse. “You don’t have to help me” I said. “It’s Blake isn’t it” Ritter said. “What are you talking about” I said.

“I see the way you look at him and care for him” Ritter said. “He has no idea I exist he’s all about Violet” I said. “And Violet is with Hawkins” Ritter said grabbing the bread. “I just don’t know I thought being with Jay would distract me” I said.

“He is pretty good looking” Ritter said. “Sure but the last time I dated someone who was an officer it didn’t end well” I said. “Then maybe you should talk to Blake” Ritter said handing me the lunch meat. “Maybe” I said.

“So Darren how’s that guy you were talking to” Blake said walking into the kitchen. “Blake just come out with it” Ritter said. “Alright I met this girl” Blake said. “Really” Ritter said looking at me. “Yeah at Brinks the other night” Blake said.

“When you were avoiding Violet and Evan” Ritter said. “We had fun but I don’t know” Blake said. “You know it’s not fun just going around from girl to girl right” I said. “I didn’t say that Y/N” Blake said. “I’m gonna go bring sandwiches to Kelly and Joe” I said grabbing the plates.

I walked out to the apron. I set the plates of sandwiches on the Squad table.

“Looks good” Cap said. “One at a time please” I said. “Alright Casey got it” Tony said. “I’m serious boys” I said. “Thank you Y/N looks great” Joe said. “And a special one for Javi of course” I said handing it to Javi.

“Thanks Y/N” Javi said with a smile. “Can I talk to you” Blake said. “Y/N you have a visitor” Kylie said. “Hey I hope this isn’t too weird” Jay said. “No it’s fine” I said. “I was wondering if you wanted to be my date to the Gala tonight” Jay said.

“I.. would love that” I said he smiled. “Then it’s a date” Jay said kissing my cheek. Blake still just stood there then walked away. “I’ll see you tonight then” I said. “Yes you will I’ll meet you there” Jay said. “Yeah” I said he hugged me then left.

Blake was by Truck 81 talking to Ritter. I then walked over.

“I’ll leave you guys” Ritter said. “I’ll see you later” Blake said to Ritter. “Blake” I said. “So you and Jay I figured you guys would” Blake said. “Blake I honestly don’t think there’s anything there” I said. “I see something though” Blake said.

“Blake I don’t want to be with him though” I said. “Because of the past” Blake said. “You don’t understand you never have” I said walking away. “I’m so confused here first you tell me what I shouldn’t do then I can’t say you look good with someone” Blake said.

“Forget it” I said walking into the firehouse.

Later…

I met Jay outside the gala.

“You look very beautiful” Jay said taking my hand. “And you look incredible” I said fixing his tie. “You sure I wasn’t sure” Jay said. “Well I like it” I said. “Shall we” Jay said opening the door.

We went up to the floor were the gala was. We both greeted people. And took a table with Trudy and Mouch.

Ritter showed up with Gallo. But neither of them had brought anyone. What about that girl he was talking about. Blake looked over at me and smiled.

“Wanna dance” Jay said. “I’m not a good dancer Jay” I said he laughed. “Mean neither I never really come to these things” Jay said. Blake was then talking to Kelly. I should tell him before I never get the chance to.

A guy like him won’t be single forever.

“I get it” Jay said. “Get what” I said. “Your thing for Blake” Jay said. “No Jay I really.. fine your right I’m sorry” I said. “No no don’t apologize just go talk to him” Jay said. “You sure” I said. “It’s fine we’ve been friends forever we will always be friends” Jay said hugging me.

“Thanks” I said.

I then walked over to Blake.

“You look so beautiful seriously” Blake said. “Well thank you can I talk to you” I said. “Sure” Blake said as we walked outside to the balcony. “Truth is I wasn’t trying to yell at you earlier” I said. “I know” Blake said.

“Blake .. it’s just you’ve been so obsessed over Violet you don’t even realize what’s here” I said. “Y/N” Blake said. “Blake I really like you a lot I always have since I met you” I said. “Y/N” Blake said. “No let me fini…

He the pulled me into a kiss. I immediately kissed him back. It was everything I had dreamed of with him.

“I’m an idiot for taking so long to notice but I really like you too” Blake said.

[datshitrandom]

[LQ] Darren Criss as Blaine Anderson | Glee 4.05 The Role You Were Born to Play • 4.07 Dynamic Duets • 4.08 Thanksgiving • 4.11 Sadie Hawkins • 4.14 I Do • 4.18 Shooting Star • 5.14 Bash • 6.01 Loser Like Me • 6.05 The Hurt Locker 2 • 6.06 What the World Needs Now • 6.13 Dreams Come True | Rare Wardrobe Photos [Source: x]