Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (643519)	1/25/2012 11:57:41 AM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1570893

Buffett and Soros benefit from Obama’s decisions. Us not so much. 1/25/2012 floppingaces.net Whenever Barack Obama makes a key decision, it always seems to benefit special supporters. 80% of the money Obama threw away on “green energy” programs went to his big donors. It’s become painfully evident that crony capitalism has its fingerprints all over other Barack Obama decisions. Last year Barack Obama softened up Warren Buffett by awarding Buffett the Medal of Freedom, which Obama felt was appropriate for Buffett having accumulated more than $40 billion in personal wealth. In return, Buffett has become a cheerleader for Obama, voicing his support of Obama’s Buffett rule. WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. The devil, as they say, is always in the details: Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday. Recently Barack Obama said no to the Keystone Pipeline. An article from Bloomberg (which curiously went down the memory hole already) scrapes the ice off the windshield so we can see why: Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit. With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department. “Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.” The State Department denied TransCanada a permit on Jan. 18, saying there was not enough time to study the proposal by Feb. 21, a deadline Congress imposed on President Barack Obama. Calgary-based TransCanada has said it intends to re-apply with a route that avoids an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska, something the Obama administration encouraged. The rail option, though costlier, would lessen the environmental impact, such as a loss of wetlands and agricultural productivity, compared to the pipeline, according to the State Department analysis. Greenhouse gas emmissions, however, would be worse. If completed, Keystone XL would deliver 700,000 barrels a day of crude from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico, crossing 1,661 miles (2,673-kilometers) over Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Obama gives Buffett award. Buffett voices support for Obama. Obama makes decision to help put money in Buffett’s pocket. Tidy. Obama has what is realistically a complete moratorium on domestic oil exploration and production while at the same time helping to fund Brazil’s Petrobas search for oil. In addition, Obama granted Petrobas permission to operate a deep water vessel in the Gulf of Mexico: Petrobras has received final approval to operate the Gulf of Mexico’s first floating production, storage and offloading vessel, clearing the way for the Brazilian oil giant to start pumping oil from two deep-water fields, federal regulators said Thursday. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement took the “final regulatory step” in green-lighting the project, with the approval of a production safety system permit and a supplemental deep-water operating plan, the bureau said in a statement. The floating production, storage and offloading vessel, or FPSO, has a daily production capacity of 80,000 barrels of oil and 16 million cubic feet of natural gas. The ocean energy bureau said with the latest approvals, production at the Cascade and Chinook deep-water fields is expected to begin soon. The fields are in more than 8,000 feet of water about 165 miles off Louisiana, in an area called Walker Ridge. The reason? Soros. In August of 2010 George Soros sold off his stake in Petrobas. Billionaire George Soros’s fund management firm sold all of its Petroleo Brasileiro SA stock, dumping its biggest company holding ahead of a planned $25 billion offering by Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer. Soros Fund Management LLC, which oversees $25 billion, sold 9.1 million American depositary receipts representing Petrobras common stock and 5.88 million ADRs corresponding to preferred shares in the second quarter, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. But then he bought back into Petrobas: Billionaire investment manager George Soros built on his position in Brazilian oil and gas company Petrobras in the first quarter of 2011 for his Soros Fund Management firm, according to the guru watchers over at Guru Focus.com on May 17. He now owns 1.1 million shares of Brazil’s state owned oil company. Soros sold out of Petrobras in mid-2010 only to return to the market in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the purchase of roughly 588,000 shares. The stock has been a money loser for Soros since getting back into the market, according to his average share price calculated by Guru Focus. Petrobras closed May 17 at $34.27 per share, so Soros’s big purchases in one of Brazil’s top two most actively traded stocks was unaffected by his large purchase orders. May I draw your attention to the timing. Soros began “building” on his position from the fall of 2010 into the “first quarter” of 2011. The decision to allow operation of the deep water vessel is announced in the middle of March 2011, and it coincidentally just happens to follow Soros’ Petrobas holdings expansion. Now Brazil has signed an agreement with China for China to purchase Petrobas’ oil. The administration had already been found in contempt for its determined effort to keep US interests at bay in the Gulf while aiding Soros’ Petrobas. Curious.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (643519)	1/25/2012 1:12:43 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1570893

Drone pilot finds “river of blood” outside Dallas meatpacking plant By Eric Pfeiffer \| The Sideshow – A photo taken by a drone pilot outside a Dallas meat plant A drone pilot hobbyist in Dallas stumbled across a river of blood coming from a large meatpacking plant. The small drone plane had a camera equipped, which captured images of the red river, suspected of being made of pig blood from the plant "I was looking at images after the flight that showed a blood red creek and was thinking, could this really be what I think it is? Can you really do that, surely not?" the pilot tells sUAS News. "Whatever it is, it was flat out gross. Then comes the question of who do I report this to that can find out what it is and where it is coming from." The pilot, who has asked to remain anonymous, was put in touch with the Texas Environmental Crimes Task Force, who began monitoring the plant for violations. "Any time there is some type of discharge into the Trinity River… especially from an environmental standpoint, this is a real concern," Health and Human Services chief Zach Thompson told sUAS News. "I think they discovered a secondary pipe again is my understanding, so the question is who installed the pipe and why was it there." The drone hobbyist says he captured the footage from the plant using only a point and shoot camera and a $75 airframe.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (643519)	1/25/2012 1:27:17 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1570893

5 Republican Lies About Income Inequality By David Morris, On the Commons Posted on January 24, 2012, Printed on January 25, 2012 alternet.org Recent comments by Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for President all but guarantee the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year. When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by “jealousy or fairness” Romney insisted, “I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.” And in this election year he advised that if we do discuss inequality we do so “in quiet rooms” not in public debates. A public debate, of course, is inevitable. And welcome. To help that debate along I’ll address the five major statements that comprise the Republican argument on inequality. 1. Income is not all that unequal. Actually it is. Since 1980 the top 1 percent has increased its share of the national income by an astounding $1.1 trillion. Today 300,000 very rich Americans enjoy almost as much income as 150 million. Since 1980, the income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has increased a meager $303 or 1 percent. The top 1 percent’s income has more than doubled, increasing by about $500,000. And the really, really rich, the top 10th of 1 percent, made out, dare I say, like bandits, quadrupling their income to $22 million. Meanwhile a full-time worker’s wage was 11 percent lower in 2004 than in 1973, adjusting for inflation even though their productivity increased by 78 percent. Productivity gains swelled corporate profits, which reached an all time high in 2010. And that in turn fueled an unprecedented inequality within the workplace itself. In 2010, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the average CEO in large companies earned 325 times more than the average worker. 2. Inequality doesn’t matter because in America ambition and hard work can make a pauper a millionaire. This is folklore. A worker’s initial position in the income distribution is highly predictive of how much he or she earns later in the career. And as the Brookings Institution reports “there is growing evidence of less intergenerational economic mobility in the United States than in many other rich industrialized countries.” The bitter fact is that it is harder for a poor person in America to become rich than in virtually any other industrialized country. 3. Income inequality is not a result of tax policy. Nonsense. A painstaking analysis by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva found “a strong correlation between the reductions in top tax rates and the increases in top 1% pre-tax income shares from 1975–79 to 2004–08”. For example, the U.S. slashed the top income tax rate by 35 percent and witnessed a large ten percent increase in its top 1% pre-tax income share. “By contrast, France or Germany saw very little change in their top tax rates and their top 1% income shares during the same period.” 4. Taxing the rich will slow economic growth. An examination of 18 OECD countries found “little empirical support for the claim that reducing the progressivity of the tax code has spurred economic growth, business formation or job growth.” Indeed, Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva’s rigorous analysis came to the opposite conclusion. Our economy may be growing more slowly because we are taxing the rich too little, not too much. Economists Peter Diamond and Saez estimated the optimal top tax rate, that is the tax rate that would maximize revenue without slowing economic growth, could be as high as 83 percent. Redistributing income stimulates economies in part because when 1% make more they save whereas when the 99% make more they spend. As a result, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s, a dollar in tax cuts on capital gains adds .38 cents of economic growth while a dollar in unemployment benefits gives the economy a boost of $1.63 and a dollar of food stamps adds $1.73. 5. Taxing the rich would not raise much money. Of course it would. If only the richest 400 families, whose average income in 2008 was an astounding $270 million actually paid the statutory rate of 39 percent (revived as of next January 1st) an additional $500 billion would be raised over 10 years, putting a substantial dent in the projected deficit. In 2010 hedge fund manager John Paulson made $5 billion. That year, according to Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston, Paulson paid no income taxes. Am I envious Mr. Romney? You bet I am. But I’m also angry at the stark injustice of it all. And terrified of the power such wealth can wield in a country that allows billionaires to spend unlimited sums influencing legislation and elections. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans now believe the conflict between rich and poor is our greatest source of tension. I agree. It is a conflict that deserves to be aired fully and in public. David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn., and director of its New Rules project. © 2012 On the Commons All rights reserved. View this story online at: alternet.org