Gaddafi & Berlusconi | Tax Rates, Red & Blue States | Americans & Happiness
/Boys Club
Gaddafi’s Connection to Italy and Berlusconi The Daily Beast
The close friendship between Muammar Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is not widely publicized in the US. A bit tongue in cheeck, TDB writes that Gaddafi’s greatest gift to the Italian billionaire could be teaching him the nubile sex ritual known as “bunga-bunga”.
Berlusconi’s photo shaking hands with Gaddafi is on all Libyan passports issued since 2008 when the two leaders signed a bilateral “Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation” in Libya. When Italy got involved with NATO bombardments, Gaddafi expressed his disappointment in Berlusconi. “I am so shocked, I feel betrayed, I don’t even know what to say to Berlusconi.” In secret messages that will be released by Italy’s foreign ministry next week, Gaddafi blatantly threatens to turn the tiny island of Lampedusa into an “inferno by infiltrating the refugees with armed fighters.” Italy’s foreign minister Franco Frattini says, “Gaddafi also planned to masquerade military cadavers in civilian clothing and blame NATO.”
Berlusconi may be the top Italian leader with a historically tight relationship with the Libyan dictator, but he is hardly the only one, writes TDB. As the defections pile up on Italian soil, is Italy the new Argentina for runaway ruthless men?
Food for Thought
The Great Political Migration The Daily Beast
(Note: AOC does not embrace a fundamentally Conservative ideology because of the Republican War on Women. We believe the women lose valuable rights in the states cited by author Michael Medved as part of the new America. However, Medved writes a coherent, informative essay that makes the case for red states, and it is well worth the read.)
Between 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of “residents lost to other states” were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as red states in which Republicans generally dominate local politics: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia. Expanding the review to a 10-year span, the biggest population gainers (in percentage terms) have been even more conservative than last year’s winners: Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Texas, in that order.
RedTracker
On Tuesday, France richest woman followed the declaration of America’s Warren Buffett, asking her similarily indebeted government to raise taxes for its wealthiest citizens.
L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt’s open letter, co-signed by 15 of her super-rich countrymen, called for higher but “reasonable” levies on “the most favored French taxpayers.” Ms. Bettencourt is the billionaire who made headlines last year over alleged tax evasion.
As is expected at WSJ, the paper wrote that if Madame Bettencourt wants to give her money to the French welfare state, she can do so. A better use of her efforts, the paper writes, is to call for reforms that would make it easier for today’s young entrepreneurs to create the kind of wealth that made France great.
Letters: Data bears out Buffett’s assertion on fair share The Palm Beach Post
Statistics from the IRS support Mr. Buffett’s assertion. In 2008, those earning more than $1 million declared more taxable income by 3.9 percent and paid less taxes by 8 percent at a lower effective tax rate of 12 percent than in 1998. There is no question that the “rich are getting richer,” as pointed out also in the article by use of a different set of data.
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich NYTimes
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
Obamanonics vs Reaganomics WSJ
Lisa’s Slow Living Life Makeover Begins in Holland, Michigan AOC Health
AOC friend and writer Lisa Catherine Brown has moved with her husband Coley to Holland, Michigan. After reading Michael Medved’s essay, we’re reflecting on Lisa’s new home Holland, Michigan as the #2 happiest city in America — according to The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, based on interviews with more than 353,000 Americans during 2009, asked individuals to assess their jobs, finances, physical health, emotional state of mind and communities.
Lisa’s article expresses in first-person reflections how she and her husband/family are dealing not only with the changes in America, but evolutions in the life priorities of many Americans.
Her words offer a counterpoint to Medved’s essay, perhaps digging deeper beneath the surface about what motivates different groups of Americans.
Lisa is an American for whom life is more complex than tax rates.
Reading her own priority list of what drove her and Coley to Holland, is not an ode for the right for a shootout at the Alamo and the worship of God and eternal damnation for sinners, come hell or high water.
For us, the intersection of Medved’s thinking and also Lisa’s is Washington State. To be honest, we didn’t know that Washington has no state income tax. We do know that the state has progressive values, and we consider it to be a state supportive of women’s rights (BUT we’re checking!).
While tracking Texas and Rick Perry, it’s Washington State that has our attention, our delve into the state’s success angle. Is there a formula in Washington State that works for most Americans — progressives and economic conservatives alike? We’re checking.
NOTE: In an example of AOC serendipity, which is infused throughout our daily life on this website, Lisa’s six-month’s-old article ‘A Day of Peace | For 24 Hours, Give Peace a Chance’ became yesterday’s top read and remain’s in the top 5 today.
A Day of Peace | For 24 Hours, Give Peace a Chance
Employees at the A123 Systems factory in Livonia, Mich. Does America Need Manufacturing? NYTimes
By almost any account, the White House has fallen woefully short on job creation during the past two and a half years. But galvanized by the potential double payoff of skilled, blue-collar jobs and a dynamic clean-energy industry — the administration has tried to buck the tide with lithium-ion batteries. It had to start almost from scratch. In 2009, the U.S. made less than 2 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. By 2015, the Department of Energy projects that, thanks mostly to the government’s recent largess, the United States will have the capacity to produce 40 percent of them. Whichever country figures out how to lead in the production of lithium-ion batteries will be well positioned to capture “a large piece of the world’s future economic prosperity,” says Arun Majumdar, the head of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The batteries, he stressed, are essential to the future of the global-transportation business and to a variety of clean-energy industries.
America lost five million manufacturing jobs in the last decade, a drop of about one-third. The smartsters said that in the global economy, America didn’t need manufacturing jobs. We were now the leisure economy and would create value out of ministering to our great national wealth. America would have a nanny force over in India ministering to our every need. It never made sense to us for one moment, and we never fell for the leisure economy business pundits.
America needs manufacturing jobs and we want the Republicans — who officially shun any kind of government intervention as described above in the case of lithium batteries — to explain exactly how American holders of capital will take these kinds of visionary risks going forward.
