#1
Just like the UAE. The entire economy is oil monies, nothing else. Saudis could not even build a bicycle. They use oil monies to propagate their gutter religion where an arab rules the world.
Let them eat sand.
[Warren Buffett] wrote of the so-called "super-rich," which he apparently defines as households earning $1 million or more a year: "Most wouldn't mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering." Isn't that nice of Mr. Buffett?
But if he were truly sincere, perhaps he might simply try paying the taxes the IRS says his company owes? According to Berkshire Hathaway's own annual report -- see Note 15 on pp. 54-56 -- the company has been in a years-long dispute over its federal tax bills.
According to the report, "We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the IRS for the 2002 through 2004 tax years at the IRS Appeals Division within the next 12 months. The IRS has completed its examination of our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2005 and 2006 tax years and the proposed adjustments are currently being reviewed by the IRS Appeals Division process. The IRS is currently auditing our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2007 through 2009 tax years."
Americans for Limited Government researcher Richard McCarty, who was alerted to the controversy by a federal government lawyer, said, "The company has been short-changing the tax collection agency for much of the past decade. Mr. Buffett's company has not fully settled its tax bills from 2002-2009. Yet he says he'd happily pay more. Except the IRS has apparently been asking him to pay more going on nine years." Can we just start beating people that spout their mouth off about how we all need to sacrifice more and then don't do it with rubber hoses? Pleeeeeeease? At least can we tar and feather them?
In the Obama years, bad news has always surprised the media.
It is the most common adverb of the Obama years: unexpectedly.
● Sales of U.S. previously owned homes unexpectedly dropped in July, reported Bloomberg.
● Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region unexpectedly contracted in August by the most in more than two years as orders plunged and factories shed workers,reported Bloomberg Businessweek.
● Consumer spending unexpectedly fell in June, reported Reuters.
● Dismal economic data on Thursday pointed to an unexpectedly abrupt slowdown in manufacturing and a pickup in inflation, reported the New York Times business page.
This is just in the past week; hundreds of articles each month note that some new bit of economic data is contrary to the expectations of experts. But the term is starting to become an object of ridicule within the conservative blogosphere as the country endures its third year of hard economic times under President Obama.
Three years after a financial crisis, unemployment has hit painful highs, GDP growth has been sluggish at best, and some predict a double dip recession. During this period, the Obama administration and its allies have repeatedly made bold promises about imminent prosperity from an infamous chart that projected that the stimulus would keep unemployment rate below 8 percent, to the administrations Recovery Summer tour of 2010, to Nancy Pelosis prediction that passing Obamacare would create 400,000 jobs almost immediately, to the presidents prediction that we would enjoy 3.1 percent growth this year and 4.1 percent growth in 2012 and beyond.
For about three years now, conservative bloggers have chuckled at how frequently the unveiling of bad economic news comes with the adverb unexpectedly in media reports. As Instapundits Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, and others have often asked, unexpected to whom?
I think its a combination of cognitive dissonance, the terra nova nature of the post-bubble economy, and a healthy dose of partisanship, suggests Ed Morrissey, who has blogged about the ubiquitous adverb regularly at HotAir.com.
Perhaps the perpetual surprise reflects a media desire to focus on pockets of growth or prosperity at least with a Democrat in the White House. In a widely diversified $14 trillion economy, one can almost always find some areas of economic improvement.
Certainly, a media that wanted to paint a more dire portrait of the economy would have no shortage of material to work with. Theres considerable evidence that Americas problems in job creation are much worse than the most widely cited numbers would indicate.
For example, President Obama spent much of the past year touting the number of consecutive months of private-sector job growth that the country had enjoyed. But that boast comes with some asterisks. Traditionally, the population of American workers grows each month, and while economists differ a bit on precisely how many new jobs are needed each month just to keep the unemployment rate stable, its often more than the figure Obama cites. The Heritage Foundation puts the figure at 100,000 to 125,000; some argue that any serious reduction of the unemployment rate will require adding 200,000 jobs per month. Only four months out of the past 17 have seen at least 200,000 jobs added; some months of growth have been minimal, such as January 2010, when the economy added 16,000 private-sector jobs,. Nonetheless, like a bloop single keeping a batters hitting streak going in baseball, meager months of job growth permit Obama to keep bragging about how many consecutive months he has presided over private-sector job growth.
Obama is lucky that these months of sluggish growth have occurred while a staggering number of Americans have helped keep the unemployment rate down by leaving the work force. From February 2001 to February 2009, the American work force grew from 143.7 million people to 154.4 million, an increase of about 10.7 million, or about 89,000 per month. In July 2011, the work force was back down to 153.2 million. For the entirety of the Bush years, the civilian labor-force-participation rate was never lower than 65.8 percent and remained between 66 and 67 percent for almost every month of the two terms. For Obamas presidency, it debuted at 65.7 percent and has dropped to 63.9 percent, the lowest since July 1983.
If we presume that the countrys 1.1 million discouraged workers (who dont count as officially unemployed because they have stopped looking for work) would like a paying job someday, we can reasonably conclude that the unemployment rate wont be significantly declining anytime soon; as more unemployed workers are hired, those who have stopped looking for work will start looking again and be added to the official count of the unemployed.
In the business media, some voices do note these hidden jobless. But even then, theres often a tone of mystery or befuddlement, as if no one ever considered that the governments primary solution to high unemployment, the stimulus, could fail to achieve its goal.
Groupthink is another possible explanation for why, even after three years, each bit of bad news seems to strike the business-media world as a surprise. One columnist who covers these issues closely observes that many bank economists, such as those at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan, have been similarly optimistic in recent years, only recently slashing their forecasts. Generally, theyre all using the same model that the White House uses, all built with a lot of these Keynesian assumptions about the impact of government spending, and about multipliers, and so on, he says. If you think those multipliers are way too high, then that would explain why they have been overly optimistic.
In a way, the monthly unemployment report and quarterly economic data are like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Each month, the administration and its faithful await the new data with optimism and eager anticipation, certain that this will be the month that the long-awaited national hiring spree begins. Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics snatches away the football and after 30 months, many who watch the economy professionally still cant see it coming.
In December 2010, about a half-hour after new job numbers showed unemployment hitting 9.8 percent, one CNBC anchor closed a segment, After the break, well have your e-mails about signs of economic recovery, then he paused and chuckled, motioning to the unseen teleprompter. Yeah, that was written before 8:30.
If you ever have to get into a fistfight, make sure your opponent is an economist often consulted by the mainstream media, because that way youll always have the element of surprise.
#5
An inherent problem with analyzing the Tea Party is that it does not have a hierarchy, so cannot be approached the way a typical organization is approached. Gathering statistics about it is pretty difficult.
Also figuring out its agenda is very hard, because it for the most part doesn't have targets, only broad goals. For example, it supports smaller government, but what does that mean?
That is, it is not a populist democratic movement. It is a populist republican movement. It wants elected officials to create a smaller government, not to be told how to do it.
When you hire a ditch digger, you hand them a shovel and tell them to dig a ditch "there". You don't want to have to tell the *how* you want the ditch dug. Just start digging.
#6
I'll tell you one thing, if they put Sharron Angle in a leadership position I would have lots of problems with the Tea Party. They have to make sure they they oust the idiots and religious extremists from their leadership.
If they stay about debt reduction, fiscal responsibility, and a strong America I support them. Deviate far from that message and I can't
#7
Karl Denninger has a good rant today on this topic:My property taxes have gone up while the value of my house (as measured by the market) has gone down. I'm not alone - this is true for most people. We get crap results and it can't be fixed by Leviathan. The correct solution is to end "free" public education and if the states wish, implement a voucher system that you can cash anywhere, or if you homeschool, keep - provided the kid learns. But that would eviscerate the teacher unions, and so we can't have that. We could have volunteer fire departments, but that would eviscerate the fire unions, so we can't have that. We could have private airline security that was accountable when they blew it, but that would eviscerate the TSA, so we can't have that. And we could have a Sheriff with citizen watches, an armed population that can carry concealed or openly as they wish without permits and yes, even posse when necessary but that would eviscerate the police unions, so we can't have that. We could bar price-fixing, reimportation bans and cost-shifting in medicine, but that would put a stop to all the outright scams in the medical industry, so we can't have that.
#8
Anonymoose "When you hire a ditch digger, you hand them a shovel and tell them to dig a ditch "there". You don't want to have to tell the *how* you want the ditch dug. Just start digging".
#9
Excellent, really!
The worse one can do is underestimate your enemy and leftard propagandists(lamestream media)are utterly unable to see anything else than themselves when they examine the Tea Party.
So, what they see is gutless corrupt crooks, the mirror image of themselves, like any sociopath will do.
[Dawn] IT is a feature of our times that many a good intention has turned into a right-wing menace, and Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign galvanising swaths of urban India in recent days is a prime example.
The problem is pervasive. You look behind the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia only to discover the Moslem Brüderbund and Salafists ...Salafists espouse an austere form of Sunni Islam that seeks a return to practices that were common in the 7th century. Rather than doing that themselves and letting other people alone they insist everybody do as they say and they try to kill everybody who doesn't... poised to hijack the agenda. You try to justify Muammar Qadaffy's ...whose instability has been an inspiration to dictators everywhere... violent exit from Tripoli and you will find the chiefs of his torture chambers spearheading the rebel campaign to topple him. Want to get rid of Assad in Syria?
Prepare to receive his opponents with a menacing radical religious agenda.
An instructive instance of sound intentions getting subverted in connivance with history came in the late 1970s in Iran,
where liberal enthusiasts joined and led a spectacular campaign to overthrow a corrupt US-backed monarch.
Though they succeeded they were quickly upstaged by an obscurantist religious clique, which decimated the left and exiled the liberals, believe it or not, with Washington's support. The revived Tehran-Washington bonhomie blossomed briefly during the Iran-Contra affair.
The 1970s saw the rise and fall of hope in Islamabad where the Pakistain National Alliance sought to tame Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's autocratic rule but mutated into an Islamic revivalist movement to save the reasonably liberal country. Ziaul Haq became the self-styled saviour. (The virus mutated again into a lawyers' movement recently to throw out another military dictator. Many of the lawyers who led the campaign for democracy showered rose petals on the fanatic who killed Salmaan Taseer.)
At about the same time in the 1970s a mass movement gained momentum in India against Indira Gandhi. Here too a range of liberals and leftists (except communists aligned with Moscow) threw in their lot with Jayaprakash Narayan, a West-backed father figure who rose to challenge the Congress party's penchant for the Nehru-Gandhi dynastic rule. The movement was hijacked by religious interlopers of Hindu, Mohammedan and Sikh denominations.
The most potent of these infiltrators was the neo-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded in the 1920s as a club of disgruntled Maharashtrian Brahmins peeved at Gandhi's rise as a pacifist nationalist leader the RSS evolved as a broad-based Indian clone of Mussolini's Black Shirts. Though it started out as a petit bourgeois outfit spewing hatred against India's Christians and Mohammedans, it was soon eyed as a powerful communal insurance against the secular volatility that stalked the country.
Like the Nazis who began by fighting for Germany's mythical golden past and spawned a culture of hate against imagined foes, the RSS nursed grievances against Mughal rule and other make-believe fall guys to conjure up images of perpetually wronged Hindus, never mind that 'Hindu' came into vogue as a word in mediaeval Iran as a way of describing darker-skinned Indians.
The sum and substance of it all is that powerful Indian tycoons, including the Ambanis and the Tatas, are projecting a key RSS activist from Gujarat ...where rioting seems to be a traditional passtime... as a feasible future leader of India.
The biggest giveaway of Anna Hazare's ideological preference for the Hindu right lies not so much in the RSS-style palm-down salute he has been shown taking on television but in his praise of Gujarat ...where rioting seems to be a traditional passtime... Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the business-backed RSS leader. Even so, Hazare's prescriptions against corruption are not unique. They were first published in a 2007 World Bank study for sub-Saharan African states. Right-wing supporters of his fast can take heart from the fact that an uncorrupt economy will not necessarily lead to greater democracy. Look at Singapore.
It is equally noteworthy that the agitation Hazare leads detracts from and does not focus on recent corporate scandals.
Government ministers and business executives have been landing in jail, a rare occurrence in India.
For slightly over two decades, India's corporate media have flirted with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, projecting the former bureaucrat and economics teacher as a crusader against chronic poverty and stifling state controls over business.
My Pak colleague (and fabulous host at the idyllic English countryside resort of Devizes) Irfan Husain wrote last week how I hold Manmohan Singh responsible for much of the corruption dogging India. What I forgot to share with Irfan -- over an outstanding rabbit stew he cooked and over several meals that included succulent steaks and oven-grilled trout -- that I see in Dr Singh's rule shades of the Weimar Republic.
Why do I find Dr Singh less than transparent as opposed to the praises for integrity heaped on him by an ever-fawning media?
One, it was to save Dr Singh's policies when he was finance minister that MPs were bribed in a trust vote, which he would have lost. MPs were again bribed when he was prime minister to similarly bail him out. In the first case, the MPs were placed in durance vile but not the bribe-givers.
Two, Dr Singh used a bureaucratic loophole to assert he was a resident of the remote tribal state of Assam. This is hardly what a man of integrity would claim. But it was a requirement if he was to be elected to the Rajya Sabha from that state. The law has since been redefined under his initiative and now any citizen of a certain age can contest from any state to the Rajya Sabha subverting the federal character the constitution had envisaged for the upper house.
Dr Singh holds the distinction of being the third longest-serving prime minister without ever becoming a member of the Lok Sabha. Ergo: he never won a popular poll mandatory for a prime minister even in Pakistain.
Corruption was always around in the corridors of power in India. But ministers would resign when found culpable. Dr Singh has not remained unsinged by the recent spate of graft charges against his cabinet colleagues though he has denied personal responsibility. Now a former minister placed in durance vile for corruption has threatened to summon him as witness.
There was something rotten about the state of Denmark as the Bard said, and also in the Weimar Republic as history tells us.
But the stench hanging over India is not about trillions of rupees salted away in foreign banks by an alliance of businessmen and politicians. It is about perpetuating an inequitable system by parliamentary democracy if feasible, or by fascism ...a political system developed in Italia symbolized by the Roman fasces -- thin reeds, each flimsy in itself but unbreakable when bound into a bundle. The word is nowadays thrown around by all sorts of people who have no idea what they're talking about... if necessary. Anna Hazare looks primed to support both.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/26/2011 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Emanuele Ottolenghi
