U.S. soldiers may be home for the holidays this year, as ‘Someone’ reported today that U.S. President, George W. Bush, has “declared peace.” -In what has been described as a “seance” that purportedly involved the former first lady, Nancy Reagan channeling the late John Lennon as he spoke to Richard Nixon from his honeymoon bed in 1969, saying, “[President Nixon] should just ‘declare peace’…he’d be far more popular…and it’d be much more economical…just declare peace!”
For purported footage of the event, hit play below:
“…AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND…” –MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
“…if teachers teach you to do to others that which is bad for yourselves, -teach violence, execution, wars- know that they are false teachers.” -Jesus Christ (Lk. vi. 45)
“In the former law it was said: “Do good to men of your own nation, and do evil to strangers.” But I tell you, love not only your own countrymen, but people of other nations. Let strangers hate you, let them fall upon you, wrong you; but you speak well of them, and do them good. If you are only attached to your countrymen, why, all men are thus attached to their own countrymen, and hence wars arise. Behave equally towards men of all nations, and you will be sons of the Father. All men are his children and therefore all brothers to you.” -Jesus Christ (Mt. v. 43)
Uncle Sam may be coming after the buyout kings. If the tax collector gets his way, Henry R. Kravis, Stephen A. Schwarzman, David Bonderman, David M. Rubenstein and the rest of the leveraged-buyout crowd could soon be forced to add some zeros to the taxable income line on their federal forms… Read on.
History is pretty clear on this one: Whenever the finance industry discovers a path to quick investment riches for a select few—S&Ls, junk bonds, Long-Term Capital Management, Enron, the list goes on—a massive reckoning can’t be far behind. Today’s implosion in the making? Private equity… Read on.
MORE than a year ago, Victor Fleischer, an untenured professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, finished a draft of a paper about the tax treatment of private equity. At the time, he was just hoping to get the paper published. Taxes are an unglamorous topic, and… Read on.
Talk about an inside job. It’s little wonder that CEO pay continues to soar when the consulting firms many corporations hire to determine executive pay levels also earn millions of dollars for handling other consulting work for the same company. After all, why tick off… Read on.
The deals are just the start. The original ‘barbarians at the gate’ now command a $107 billion global empire. Here’s how the buyout giant fires up its companies with a profit-or-perish creed. It’s a great time to be Henry Kravis, as he’s quick to remind people… Read on.
The Internal Revenue Service has begun an inquiry into suspected tax abuses at hedge funds and private- equity firms after determining many firm partners don’t file returns and may have improperly characterized transactions. The tax-collection agency is studying whether funds… Read on.
For mysterious reasons, people can suddenly become indignant about government policies they have accepted for years as a matter of course. Such a seismic shift seems to be happening in public attitudes toward taxation of America’s super-rich financiers. The three leading Democratic candidates… Read on.
As a central villain in the famous book “Barbarians At the Gate,” Henry Kravis has become one of the world’s richest mavens of private equity — the Wall Street sector that buys up companies, breaks them apart and sells their assets. In 2006, Kravis made $450 million, or more per hour ($51,000) than the average American makes in a year… Read on.
Not long after the Blackstone Group bought Travelport Ltd. last August, workers at the company’s office campus here began feeling the squeeze. Two months after the deal closed, scores of employees were lugging boxes of personal belongings to their cars, having lost their jobs. Under Blackstone’s ownership, the travel-reservations conglomerate has laid off 841 people, about 10% of its work force… Read on.
“Everything about America is threatened today … this is an epic struggle for the future of America,” Edwards told the cheering crowd. “Corporate greed and the very powerful use their money to control Washington and this corrupting influence is destroying the middle class.” While all of the presidential campaigns… Read on.
Today we are living under the control of that military-industrial complex. In 1975, there was a great movie called Rollerball starring James Caan. In a nutshell, it was about a futuristic society (2018) where corporations controlled everything. Not individual corporations mind you, but giant worldwide conglomerates… Read on.
Private equity funds are complicated entities. Essentially, they are unregulated pools of private capital raised and controlled by investment managers, otherwise known as “general partners.” Typically, managers buy up undervalued companies, de-list them from public exchanges… Read on.
Florida’s tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by… Read on.
Henry R. Kravis, the billionaire founder of the corporate buyout movement, was working the hallways of Capitol Hill, hoping to kill legislation that would raise his taxes and those of other investment fund executives. While known to powerful people in Washington through longstanding personal.. Read on.
Topping each other’s deals — $31.4 billion! $39 billion! $45 billion! K.K.R.’s Henry Kravis and the Blackstone Group’s Stephen Schwarzman are locked in combat at the top of the private-equity heap. The rivalry has only sharpened since Blackstone’s I.P.O. sparked public outrage.. Read on.
On the eve of the 1986 leveraged buy-out of Safeway Stores Inc., the board of directors sat down to a last supper. Peter Magowan, the boyish-looking chairman and cheif executive of the world’s largest supermarket chain, rose to offer a toast to the deal that had fended… Read on.
Hundreds of migrant farmworkers marched through Miami this past Friday to protest a Florida tomato grower maneuver that will cut some tomato picker wages by 40 percent. The growers are refusing to honor deals the state’s top farmworker group has cut with McDonald’s and Taco Bell… Read on.
Last Friday, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) introduced a bill to remedy a long-standing tax inequity that allows private equity fund managers the right to claim performance fee income as capital gains rather than ordinary income. This tax break, based on the misnomer “carried interest,”… Read on.
Soon after Rep. Eric Cantor called a meeting of lobbyists two weeks ago, his aides had to find a larger room. Instead of the couple dozen they had expected, 75 showed up. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, convened the gathering to discuss how to defeat a set of fast-moving proposals that would vastly increase taxes on private-equity firms and hedge.. Read on.
This week, Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley, the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, have been holding “informal meetings” to consider whether the stratospheric incomes of private-equity partners ought to be treated as compensation rather than as capital gains, for tax purposes. Way back in the 1970s, newly-minted MBAs… Read on.
A leading private equity executive on Friday broke ranks with his industry by arguing it does not pay enough tax and warning that the government’s capital gains tax reforms, designed principally to tackle perceived abuses in the sector, would not be sufficient to silence critics. The intervention by Jon Moulton… Read on.
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” So said fictional character Gordon Gekko, the embodiment of a 1980s corporate raider in the movie Wall Street. Yet, sadly, just as the Gekko character was based… Read on.
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Jeff Faux
Jeff Faux is the principal founder of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) of Washington, D.C. He was President of EPI from 1985 until August 2002, when he became the Institute’s first Distinguished Fellow in order to devote more time to his research and writing. He is also the author of The Global Class War. Read full bio.
*Based on Henry Kravis’s 2006 income of $450 million as reported in Forbes magazine. Calculated at a tax savings of 21.45% (35% income tax + 1.45% Medicare Tax 15% carried interest paid), Henry Kravis saved approximately $96 million in taxes in the year 2006.
According to the 2007 U.S. Financial Report, here’s Government Accountability Office’s included memo that tries to give the lowdown on the unaccounted for future liabilities:
“Fiscal year 2007 marked the second year in which the Statement of Social Insurance has been presented as a basic financial statement. As noted above, this year, we were able to render an unqualified opinion on the 2007 Statement of Social Insurance. This is a significant accomplishment for the federal government. This statement shows that projected scheduled benefits exceed earmarked revenues by approximately $41 trillion in present value terms for the next 75-year period.
Considering this projected gap in social insurance, in addition to reported liabilities (e.g., debt held by the public and federal employee and veterans benefits payable) and other implicit commitments and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support, the federal government’s fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007, up more than $2 trillion from September 30, 2006, and an increase of more than $32 trillion from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000.
This translates into a current burden of about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American household. (page 33)”
And then this:
“Unsustainable Debt…”
“As noted earlier, the Government must borrow from the public to finance any gaps between expenditures and revenues. Increased borrowing leads to higher debt service (net interest) which in turn can make it more difficult to balance expenditures and revenues in the future. Chart J shows that by 2030, public debt is projected to rise to 68 percent of GDP, surpassing the non-wartime peak of 49 percent in 1993. By 2040, public debt is projected to be 128 percent of GDP, well above the World War II peak of 109 percent, and by 2080, debt is projected to approach 600 percent of GDP.
At some point before the debt reaches such unprecedented levels, the world’s financial markets would likely cease lending to the United States. Although the precise point at which this would occur is unknown, these projected debt levels cannot be sustained indefinitely. Many economists believe that persistent debt/GDP levels over 100% are unhealthy. The U.S. is projected to surpass that mark within the next 30 years, with the debt/GDP ratio at that point on a continually and dramatically rising trajectory (more than 10 percentage points per decade through 2080). Avoiding the catastrophic consequences of this fiscal path will require action to bring program expenditures in line with available resources. How soon those actions are taken will greatly influence their ultimate impact on the Nation. (page 19)”
“Did you notice anything off about these two paragraphs? Maybe the idea that we’re fast approaching a debt that’s 600 TIMES THE GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT OF THE WEALTHIEST NATION ON EARTH? How about the fact that the financial report itself characterizes the consequences of this trend as “CATASTROPHIC”?”
==interesting and scary….If this information scares you or is something you have not heard before, you should really check out Ron Paul and some of his speeches on yourtube and else where as he is one of the few politicians who has been trying to warn against the dangerous fiscal policies of our central bank, the federal reserve, as well as the spending habits of the US Federal Government.
Tax rebate checks will be distributed to most tax-paying Americans. The rebates serve as a one-time tax cut initially based on their 2007 incomes.
Overall, the Treasury will distribute more than $110 billion to 130 million taxpayers by July.
Who will be getting checks?
One-time payments will be sent to at least 117 million low- and middle-income households, 20 million senior citizens living off of Social Security and 250,000 disabled veterans.
To be eligible for a full rebate, single tax filers must have 2007 adjusted gross income (AGI) below $75,000 and joint filers must have AGI below $150,000.
Single filers with AGI below $75,000 will get rebates of as much as $600. Couples with AGI below $150,000 will receive rebates of up to $1,200.
In addition, parents will also receive $300 per child under 17; there is no cap on the number of qualifying children eligible.
Tax filers who do not owe income taxes, but have at least $3,000 in income – which can include Social Security and disability payments – will get $300 rebates per person or $600 per couple.
The stimulus allows for a 5% phaseout rate for households above the income caps of $75,000 for single filers and $150,000 for joint filers. The rebates of those taxpayers will be reduced by the amount of income above the cap multiplied by 5%.
Will I have to pay it pack?
No. And here’s why.
Your stimulus payment is a one-time tax cut – an advance on a credit you’ll receive on your 2008 return. You will not owe tax on your payment when you file your 2008 tax return, and it will not increase the amount you owe or reduce your 2008 refund.
The stimulus payment is based on your 2007 income initially. If it turns out that your 2008 income and number of children would have qualified you for a larger rebate than the one you received, you’ll be sent the difference. If it turns out your 2008 income was lower than in 2007 and you should have gotten a lower rebate, you get to keep the difference.
“If you were supposed to receive a larger payment than you did, you will get the extra money,” said Treasury spokesman Andrew DeSouza. “If you received more than what you should have gotten, you will not be penalized.”
WASHINGTON – Growing numbers of middle-class Americans say they are not better off than they were five years ago, reflecting economic pressures amid growing debt, a study released Wednesday shows. Their short-term assessments of personal progress, according to the study, is the worst it has been in almost half a century.
The survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based research organization, paints a mixed picture for the 53 percent of adults in the country who define themselves as “middle class,” with household incomes ranging from below $40,000 to more than $100,000.
It found that a majority of Americans said they have not progressed in the past five years. One in four, or 25 percent, said their economic situation had not improved, while 31 percent said they had fallen backward. Those numbers together are the highest since the survey question was first asked in 1964. Among the middle class, 54 percent said they had made no progress (26 percent) or fallen back (28 percent).
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Middle-class prosperity also lagged compared with richer Americans. From 1983 to 2004, the median net worth of upper-income families — defined as households with annual incomes above 150 percent of the median — grew by 123 percent, while the median net worth of middle-income families rose by just 29 percent.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications filed for unemployment insurance jumped by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 to 407,000 for the week ending March 29. The increase left claims at their highest point since Sept. 17, 2005, following the blows of the devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes.
“This report supports the view that the jobs market is deteriorating toward recessionary conditions,” said T.J. Marta, a fixed-income strategist at RBC Capital Markets.
The latest snapshot of labor activity was worse than economists had anticipated. They had predicted claims would be much lower, around 365,000….Meanwhile, the number of people continuing to collect unemployment benefits rose by a sharp 97,000 to 2.94 million for the week ending March 22, the most recent period for which that information is available. That was the highest since July 17, 2004.
The following is an excerpt from today’s New York Times article By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: April 5, 2008:
“The nation’s employers eliminated tens of thousands of jobs for the third month in a row, the government reported Friday, and top Democrats immediately called for new measures to help suffering American workers. After the early-morning report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that 80,000 jobs had disappeared in March, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said she would propose a second economic stimulus package. Hers would supplement the $150 billion in tax rebates scheduled to be mailed to millions of Americans beginning next month.”…
…”
The March decline was the largest job loss since March 2003 when the economy was still shaking off the lingering effects of the 2001 recession. Since the start of the year, 232,000 jobs have disappeared, the bureau said yesterday.
More than once in the past, three consecutive months of job losses have marked the start of a recession. “It is our view that we are already in one,” said Drew Matus, a Lehman Brothers economist, offering a view widely held on Wall Street.”…
…”
Unemployment rose in every sector of the work force, except among teenagers. Hourly wage gains slowed for production workers, who constitute 80 percent of the work force. The 5-cent rise last month brought the average wage to $17.86 an hour, an increase of 3.6 percent since the previous March, not enough to keep up with inflation.
“You can talk all you want about the importance of stock portfolios and the wealth embedded in your home,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, “but when you get right down to it, most people depend on their paychecks.”…
Life in West Tennessee 