I really like the TED talks and think that for the most part, they're interesting and worth the investment of time. That they provide their talks online for free is also just amazing. That said, their refusal to publish a talk about one of the most critical problems that the US faces today is disappointing. It doesn't matter whether we're in an election year or not, income inequality is a serious problem and it's getting worse each year.
I can understand that TED wants to remain neutral and non-partisan but honestly, look at the discussions there and it's obvious that modern Republicans would find it to be political and a bunch of junk. The GOP doesn't believe in the environment just as they don't believe that income inequality is a problem.
Read the entire article because they discuss some of the other subjects that are somehow acceptable to TED. What Next, refusing climate change discussions because Republicans don't believe it's real? More on this failure by TED at the National Journal.
TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”
“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”
You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.
While they're not completely wrong with criticizing the former Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin for giving up his US citizenship, they're also missing a few big problems. For starters, many expats like myself would be much more supportive if Senator Schumer and Casey did the exact same thing for corporations. Corporations continue to live by their own rules. Heck, if "corporations are people" as some say, let's start acting that way on all counts and not just when it benefits the corporations.
As it stands today, any American who rescinds their US citizenship still has to pay taxes for ten years plus an exit tax. For corporations the tax change happens immediately. Why is that fair? Remember when Halliburton decided to pack their bags and move to Dubai? I don't recall the same eagerness by Congress to create any special laws to punish them or any other US company that shifted their headquarters overseas.
While we're at it, what about all of the US corporations who shift their money to offshore locations to avoid taxes. Why not tack on something to the Ex-PATRIOT Act to punish them as well? If Schumer and Casey don't, it's only because they're a little too happy picking on individuals rather than corporations who pay out big dollars for campaigns.
Why bother with a new tax law that impacts a small number individuals each year when a tax law that could impact thousands of corporations would have a much stronger impact? This double standard on individuals versus corporations can only make sense in Congress. Corporations keeping money offshore and changing countries for tax reasons is much more costly than individuals moving away. I don't agree with Saverin's extreme move but Schumer and Casey are also being unreasonable if they're only going after Saverin.
The other big point that Schumer and Casey miss is that yes, being a US expat is a lot more of a hassle than being an expat for other First World citizens. Even if an individuals is under the annual income level for paying US taxes, they still need to both report income as well as report extensive and very private details on their banks. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor, you're lumped into one group in terms of documentation.
If you are a multi-millionaire or billionaire, you have a team managing your accounts and it's easy enough. For regular individuals with normal middle class incomes and savings, it's a heavy and expensive process. Even for US residents - rich or poor - living in the US, the reporting on foreign accounts has become a painful exercise. I have plenty of normal, middle class friends living in the US who grew up elsewhere who now have to report on the details of what they have in their birth country or risk painful fines.
Again, Schumer and Casey have a very valid point that Saverin didn't mind taking advantage of the stable environment of the US to build his soon-to-be billions, but now that he's cashing in he's moving to a country that does not have capital gains taxes. That said, the two senators are kidding themselves if they think the system is working well today.
Stop picking on regular individuals and at least be fair to both individuals and corporations. There's no reason why corporations should continue to get the free rides as they are receiving today. When Congress does this, it only makes it even more obvious how bought off they are by corporations.
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Mitt Romney gratuitously brought up Rev. Wright a few months ago.
Here's the transcript of Romney speaking:“I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like America to be more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.”
So, to reiterate the golden rule: Don't discuss Mitt Romney's religious influences in the Mormon temple, but do discuss Barack Obama's religious influences in a Christian church.
So Christian wackos are fair game. Mormon, less so.
You see, Christian faith is full of wacky crazy with all sorts of wacky beliefs, but Mormon temples aren't. So please don't mention Romney's Mormonism and his influences, but feel free to take a whack at President Obama's Christianity and his influences.
It's interesting that Romney has a double standard on Mormonism versus Christianity when he claims they're the same thing.
A lot of our friends in the mainstream media have given Romney a pass on the Mormon issue. They say it's religious bigotry to discuss Mitt Romney's religious influences in Mormonism (though I doubt they'd say the same if his religion were Scientology). Yet Mitt Romney goes after Barack Obama's religious influences not three months ago, and no one hears a word about it from the media.
And spare us the "Romney was going after the man (Wright) and not the faith (Christinaity)" argument. So, you mean, it would be okay for us to go after individual Mormon preachers and what they have to say about Mormon teachings, like Jesus having slept with his mother, Jesus being the brother of Satan, about the special underwear Mormons wear, about the way Mormons try to secretly steal the souls of the dead - all of that is okay so long as we link it back to a particular Mormon who made the comments? So, for example, it would be okay to declare open season on Joseph Smith?
Really?
Romney is trying to have it both ways.
There's a part of me that thinks that Mitt Romney is playing cute with this issue. It's entirely possible that Romney is bringing up Rev. Wright in order to remind folks about the wacky preacher AND when there's a backlash against Romney for bring up Wright, Romney will simply say, you're right, religion SHOULD be off limits, and voila, Romney takes his Mormonism off the table.
Whatever the justification, Mitt Romney has made one thing perfectly clear: He thinks his Mormonism is relevant to this campaign.
UPDATE: CNN's Roland Martin, who I've disagreed with on some things in the past, agrees that Romney has just put his own faith on the table:
Martin was on CNN this morning along with The Blaze‘s Will Cain, who also had questions about the latest anti-Obama ad that emphasized his middle name: “what are you trying to reinforce there?” Martin interjected that this was precisely “why this is so stupid.” “You can try all day to drudge up Jeremiah Wright,” he warned conservatives, “but you’re now putting Mormonism on the table… you’re not putting on the table how African Americans were treated by the Mormon religion.” Cain agreed that “I don’t think it’s smart to use Rev. Wright as a salacious bullet point again,” but argued that the President’s vision for America in its entirety was a legitimate ground of debate for the election.
Romney just put Mormons' longstanding racism on the table.
Martin is referring to the Mormon's longstanding racism against African-Americans, that only receded in the 1970s after a nationwide boycott. Though there are reports that racism in Mormonism is alive and well even today. This from a recent Washington Post article:
Until 1978, the LDS church banned men of African descent from its priesthood, a position open to nearly all Mormon males and the gateway to sacramental and leadership roles. The church had also barred black men and women from temple ceremonies that promised access in the afterlife to the highest heaven.
As he explored joining the church in 1988, Perkins said he asked Mormons near his Los Angeles home about the racial doctrines. They gently explained that blacks were the cursed descendants of Cain, the biblical murderer, he recalls.
The LDS church has neither formally apologized for the priesthood ban nor publicly repudiated many of the theories used to justify it for more than 125 years.
[A]nother Mormon scripture, The Pearl of Great Price, says, “blackness came upon” Cain’s descendants, who were “despised among all people.”
Pressed by Russert, Romney refused to say his church was wrong to restrict blacks from full participation.
Even under intense pressure from black Mormons, the church has refused to formally repudiate past interpretations of doctrine or scripture that tie spiritual worthiness to race.
It's time to ask Mitt Romney if he was ever told by a religious mentor that blacks were the despised descendants of Cain, and just as importantly, what did Romney say, if anything, in response?
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Last July when London prosecutors claim Rebekah Brooks was attempting to hide seven boxes of relevant evidence from a police probe, the former top lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was dealing with the crisis point of the phone-hacking scandal under investigation.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Brooks allegedly conspired with Cheryl Carter, her personal assistant, to remove the boxes from the premises of News International, the News Corp. U.K. unit she headed, between Wednesday July 6 and Saturday July 9.
News International and the London Metropolitan Police Service, which has been collecting evidence related to phone- hacking and other illegal activities at Murdoch-owned newspapers in the U.K., declined to comment on the contents of the boxes or to explain how they know about their removal.
Adelson, an anti-union casino owner whose right-wing ideology makes him a perfect fit to fund Walker’s campaign, isn’t Walker’s only out-of-state backer. Nichols reports that 74 percent of all Walker’s donations “came from residents of other states[.]
Walker received two $250,000 donations in the latest period. One came from Las Vegas Sands president Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino mogul who, along with his wife, put $17.5 million into Winning the Future, a super PAC supporting Gingrich.
The super-giving period may be over — see here for that quirk in the law governing recalls — so Adelson may have made his last deposit. But never mind, he's invested and he knows what he's buying.
Says the career politician who makes a lot more each year than most Americans or even his home state, has a solid government pension and government health care which is likely better than what most Ohioans have, if they have a plan. He's a fraud, but also unfortunately, quite typical for the far right wing Cincinnati crowd. It's just a little too easy for a loudmouth like Portman, who has never had to work in the private sector, to be so dismissive of the harshness of Romney-style capitalism. Bloomberg:
Still, Portman, 56, defended Romney’s business record, dismissing an advertising offensive by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that highlights job losses at a steel mill that was taken over in 1993 by Bain Capital LLC, the Boston- based private-equity firm Romney co-founded and led. The mill, GST Steel, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001.
“You know, that is capitalism,” Portman said. “There are not different kinds of capitalism; there’s the free market, and he can show where his efforts, net, created 100,000-plus jobs -- that’s pretty good,” Portman said of Romney.
Portman said the trading loss disclosed May 10 by JPMorgan shouldn’t be a reason to “rush headlong” into implementing measures under the Dodd-Frank Act aimed at strengthening financial regulation.
It's high time we start removing the perks of Congress and make them similar to what normal people have to live with every day. Until the pampered crowd there wakes up to their privileged status that far exceeds the norm, they need to have it all cut back. Forget about the pension plans and health insurance and let them navigate that swampland like everyone else.
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The idea of non-binding votes has been around for a while and to date, the end result has been a failure. When a vote is meaningless, a vote is meaningless. If anything the meaningless vote only frustrates shareholders. Binding votes needs a lot more serious attention in Europe as well as in the US. FT via CNBC on what is being called the "shareholder spring" by one commissioner:
Shareholders in Europe’s listed companies will be given a binding vote on pay while those who invest in banks will gain powers to set a cap on bonus levels, under plans being drawn up by senior EU officials.
The initiative from Michel Barnier, the EU’s top financial services regulator, would hand bank investors the voting power to curb “morally indefensible” pay and limit the gap between the lowest and highest paid. Banks would also be forced to disclose their top 20-30 earners.
The French commissioner outlined his plans in an interview with the Financial Times in which he laid out his response to pay rebellions that have rattled executives at Barclays, Citigroup and AstraZeneca.
Sugar is related to a lot of health issues and now scientists are saying it's bad for the brain as well. It's something that many of us enjoy so cutting back is not easy, but probably a good idea. As they say, moderation is generally the key.
Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brainpower, according to US scientists who published a study Tuesday showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats' memories.
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup -- a common ingredient in processed foods -- as drinking water for six weeks.
Sounds like some people I know.
"Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new."
High-fructose corn syrup is commonly found in soda, condiments, applesauce, baby food and other processed snacks.
Yes, I think that's called "Do the complete opposite of what George W. Bush did from 2000-2008." For those who don't remember, the Bush administration averaged 20,000 new jobs per month during his term in office. According to mathematicians that would be 111,000 fewer jobs per month than during the Obama administration.
Bush's ability to ignore his own failed economic policies ought to be interesting. Not that he didn't ignore a number of realities during his eight years in Washington, but preaching about economics after the mess he left is really too much.
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