This naturally includes such principles as totally banning interest on loans because it “pits man against man” or some such nonsense. Awesome…

Read here:

The transitional government leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil called on Libyans to show “patience, honesty and tolerance” and eschew hatred as they embark on rebuilding the country at the end of an 8-month civil war.

Abdul-Jalil set out a vision for the post-Qaddafi future with an Islamist tint, saying that Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation in the country and that existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified.

In a gesture that showed his own piety, he urged Libyans not to express their joy by firing in the air, but rather to chant “Allahu Akbar,” or God is Great. He then stepped aside and knelt to offer a brief prayer of thanks.

“This revolution was looked after by God to achieve victory,” he told the crowd at the declaration ceremony in the eastern city of Benghazi, the birthplace of the uprising against Qaddafi began. He thanked those who fell in the fight against Qaddafi’s forces. “This revolution began peacefully to demand the minimum of legitimate rights, but it was met by excessive violence.”

Tens of thousands gathered in the eastern city of Benghazi Sunday as Libya’s transitional leader declared his country’s liberation, three days after ousted dictator Muammar Qaddafi was captured and killed.

President Obama congratulated Libya on their declaration of liberation.

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KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said if the United States and Pakistan ever went to war, his country would back Islamabad, drawing a sharp rebuke Sunday from Afghan lawmakers who claimed the country’s top officials were adopting hypocritical positions.

The scenario is exceedingly unlikely and appears to be less a serious statement of policy than an Afghan overture to Pakistan, just days after Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Islamabad must do more to crack down on militants using its territory as a staging ground for attacks on Afghanistan.

“If fighting starts between Pakistan and the U.S., we are beside Pakistan,” Karzai said is an interview with private Pakistani television station GEO that aired Saturday. “If Pakistan is attacked and the people of Pakistan need Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”

He said that Kabul would not allow any nation, including the U.S., to dictate its policies.

Both Washington and Kabul have repeatedly said Pakistan is providing sanctuary to militant groups launching attacks in Afghanistan.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration’s decision to pull the plug on a financially flawed long-term care insurance plan is likely to worsen a dilemma most middle-class families are totally unprepared for.

A nursing home can cost more than $200 a day and a home health aide averages $450 a week, usually part-time. Yet long-term care is one major health expense for which nearly all Americans are uninsured. Only about 3 percent of adults have their own policy, and Medicare doesn’t cover it.

Families confront their financial exposure when a frail elder takes a turn for the worse, a teen is calamitously injured in a car crash or a middle-aged worker suffers a debilitating stroke.

The demise of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS, means it could take a decade or longer before politicians seriously engage the issue again. By then the retirement of the Baby Boomers will be in full swing.

“Long-term care is a critical issue, and people are in total denial about it,” said Bill Novelli, former CEO of AARP. “I am very sorry the administration did what they finally did, although I understand it. It is going to take a long time to get this back — and fixed.”

The irony, experts say, is that paying for long-term care is the kind of problem insurance should be able to solve. It has to do with the mathematics of risk.

Most drivers will have some kind of accident during their years behind the wheel, but few will be involved in a catastrophic wreck. And some very careful drivers will not experience any accidents. The risks of long-term care are not all that different, says economist Harriet Komisar of the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute.

“A small percentage of people are going to need a year, two years, five years or more in a nursing home, but for those who do, it’s huge,” Komisar said. “Insurance makes sense when the odds are small but the financial risk is potentially high and unaffordable.”

Komisar and her colleagues estimate that nearly 7 in 10 people will need some level of long-term care after turning 65. That’s defined as help with personal tasks such as getting dressed, going to the toilet, eating, or taking a bath.

Many of those who need help will get it from a family member. Only 5 percent will need five years or more in a nursing home. And 3 in 10 will not need any long-term care assistance at all.

For those who do need extended nursing home care, Medicaid has become the default provider, since Medicare only covers short-term stays for rehab. But Medicaid is for low-income people, so the disabled literally have to impoverish themselves to qualify, a wrenching experience for families.

Liberals say the answer is government-sponsored insurance, like the CLASS plan the Obama administration included in the health overhaul law, only to find it wouldn’t work financially.

The administration was unable to reconcile twin goals of CLASS: financial solvency and affordable coverage easily accessible to all working adults, regardless of health.

Conservatives have called for private coverage, perhaps with tax credits to make it more affordable.

Some experts say it will take a combination of both approaches.

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With his jobs plan stymied in Congress by Republican opposition, President Obama on Monday will begin a series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: “We can’t wait” for lawmakers to act.

According to an administration official, Mr. Obama will kick off his new offensive in Las Vegas, ground zero of the housing bust, by promoting new rules for federally guaranteed mortgages so that more homeowners, those with little or no equity in their homes, can refinance and avert foreclosure.

And Wednesday in Denver, the official said, Mr. Obama will announce policy changes to ease college graduates’ repayment of federal loans, seeking to alleviate the financial concerns of students considering college at a time when states are raising tuition.

The president’s announcements will bookend a three-day Western trip during which he also will hold fund-raising events in the two cities — both Nevada and Colorado are election battlegrounds — as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The “We can’t wait” campaign is a new phase in Mr. Obama’s so-far unsuccessful effort — punctuated until now by his cries of “Pass this bill!” on the stump — to pressure Republicans to support the job creation package he proposed after Labor Day. It comes after unanimous votes by Senate Republicans in the past week to block the plan; House Republican leaders have refused to put the measure to a vote.

Polls show overwhelming support for pieces of the $447 billion package, which includes expanded tax cuts for workers and employers, and spending for infrastructure projects and for state aid to keep teachers and emergency responders at work. But Republicans oppose provisions in Mr. Obama’s plan that would offset the costs with higher taxes on the wealthy.

Should the bill ultimately fail, Democrats believe they at least have the better political argument, and they vow to exploit what they call the Republicans’ obstruction in the 2012 campaign.

Yet any political benefit would be small consolation for the White House, given the forecasts of nonpartisan economists that without such a stimulus plan, the economy is likely to relapse into recession next year just as the president faces re-election.

“The only way we can truly attack our economic challenges is with bold, bipartisan action in Congress,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director. “The president will continue to pressure Congressional Republicans to put country before party and pass the American Jobs Act, but he believes we cannot wait, so he will act where they won’t.”

Privately, some Republicans worry that they could suffer from that line of attack. On Sunday the Senate Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, offered an alternate narrative, saying that Mr. Obama, for all his complaints about Republican opposition, had given little prominence to his signing of three free-trade agreements that won bipartisan approval this month.

“They’re ashamed to mention any of the things that they do with Republicans because it steps on their story line,” Mr. McConnell said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “Their story line is that there must be some villain out there who’s keeping this administration from succeeding.”

By resorting to executive actions, using his wide-ranging authority to oversee federal laws and agencies, Mr. Obama seems intent on showing that he is not powerless in the face of Republican opposition but is trying to strengthen the economy and help Americans in trouble.

Aides said Mr. Obama would announce at least one initiative each week through the rest of the year, including steps to help returning veterans and small businesses. Yet the officials acknowledge that the coming policy changes, executive orders and agency actions are generally less far-reaching than the legislative proposals now before Congress.

Recent executive actions provide examples of what is to come.

READ MORE HERE 

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SOURCE

Testimony before The Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures and the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Committee on Ways and Means
United States House of Representatives

September 22, 2011

Chairmen Tiberi and Boustany, Ranking Members Neal and Lewis, and other members of the committees, thank you for this opportunity to address you concerning economic consequences of subsidizing natural-gas technologies.

My name is David Kreutzer. I am Research Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change at The Heritage Foundation. For over 25 years before coming to Heritage I taught university-level economics including public finance. In addition, my writing on tax policy has appeared in The National Tax Journal,The Journal of Political Economy, and Public Finance Quarterly.

The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

The New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act (NAT GAS Act) proposes a variety of subsidies for natural-gas technology in transportation. If enacted we could expect:

• Preferential benefits for special interests,
• Increased burden on the federal budget, and
• Reductions in national income.

These subsidies in the NAT GAS Act have the effect of reducing the price of some technology below its real cost, which distorts the price signals on which markets depend for efficient operation. These resulting inefficiencies reduce the total value of economic output.

How Does the Act Create Subsidies?

Though the subsidies in the act are tax cuts in name, they are too narrowly defined and contrived to be a tax cut in any meaningful sense. For instance, Section 104 (a) reads:

• (a) Increase in Credit- Paragraph (2) of section 30B(e) (relating to applicable percentage) is amended to read as follows:
• 2) APPLICBLE PERCENTAGE- For purposes of paragraph (1), the applicable percentage with respect to any new qualified alternative fuel motor vehicle is–
• (A) except as provided in subparagraphs (B) and (C)–
• (i) 50 percent, plus
• (ii) 30 percent, if such vehicle–
• (I) has received a certificate of conformity under the Clean Air Act and meets or exceeds the most stringent standard available for certification under the Clean Air Act for that make and model year vehicle (other than a zero emission standard), or
• (II) has received an order certifying the vehicle as meeting the same requirements as vehicles which may be sold or leased in California and meets or exceeds the most stringent standard available for certification under the State laws of California (enacted in accordance with a waiver granted under section 209(b) of the Clean Air Act) for that make and model year vehicle (other than a zero emission standard),
• (B) 80 percent, in the case of dedicated vehicles that are only capable of operating on compressed or liquefied natural gas, dual-fuel vehicles that are only capable of operating on a mixture of no less than 90 percent compressed or liquefied natural gas, and a bi-fuel vehicle that is capable of operating a minimum of 85 percent of its total range on compressed or liquefied natural gas, and
• (C) 50 percent, in the case of vehicles described subclause (II) or (III) of subsection (e)(4)(A)(i) and which are not otherwise described in subparagraph (B).
• For purposes of the preceding sentence, in the case of any new qualified alternative fuel motor vehicle which weighs more than 14,000 pounds gross vehicle weight rating, the most stringent standard available shall be such standard available for certification on the date of the enactment of the Energy Tax Incentives Act of 2005. [1]

A truly useful tax cut would reduce and simplify the marginal corporate tax rates, which currently bounce around between 25 percent and 39 percent depending on corporate income.

Just this past week the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee held hearings regarding paid tax preparers.[2] In opening statements it was noted that a Government Accountability Office study found nearly all returns completed by paid preparers contained errors. The errors in one category were estimated to cost the federal government over $100 billion. This finding is an indictment of the complexity of the tax code as much as it is an indictment of paid preparers. In any event, the NAT GAS Act adds to the complexity with amendments to the current (already too complex) tax code.

The amendments this act superimposes on the existing tax code will only make the job of those paid tax preparers even more difficult and prone to error. Again, the purpose of the complexity is to narrowly tailor benefits to select recipients. This is the hallmark of a subsidy.

An Illustration

An example will illustrate how the act subsidizes certain technologies and distorts investment decisions.

Under the act, converting heavy-duty trucks from diesel to natural gas generates a tax credit of 80 percent for expenditures up to $80,000 per truck. So, imagine a trucking company considers investing in either a brand new truck that would cost $80,000 after trade-in or investing in an $80,000 natural-gas retrofit of its old truck. Under the current tax system that would allow expensing those costs not subject to the tax credit and assuming a marginal tax rate of 35 percent, the decision to choose the natural-gas retrofit reduces the firm’s tax liability by $41,600 more than had it spent the exact same $80,000 on a brand new truck. That is a subsidy for the natural-gas equipment.

The company spends $80,000 in either case but receives the additional $41,600 on its bottom line only when it chooses the natural-gas option. This $41,600 tilting of the scales comes at the expense of taxpayers—either current payers if taxes are raised now, or future taxpayers if the government simply borrows to cover the lost revenue. Though the taxpayers bear the full cost, the trucking company is unlikely to actually receive the full $41,600.

Why Would the Subsidy Be Inefficient?

The need for the subsidy is a clear signal the natural-gas technology would not be able to compete on a level playing field. If the $80,000 natural-gas retrofit were the better business choice, the trucking company would buy it without a subsidy. If, on the other hand, the before-subsidy profit of the new diesel truck (staying with the example above) were greater, then the subsidy of the natural-gas choice is partially offset by lower profit.

At the limit, the natural-gas retrofit could be $41,599 less profitable without the subsidy but still be the choice with the subsidy. In this case, the taxpayers pay $41,600 to provide a net gain to the trucking company of $1. The $41,599 difference is the net loss to the economy.

This loss is not redeemed by moving the analysis upstream to the supplier of the natural-gas technology. Yes, the supplier is receiving the full $80,000 and hiring workers, buying inputs, and paying dividends that will sum up to the $80,000, but the same story would have been true for the diesel-truck manufacturer. The difference is that the diesel truck creates greater value for the trucking company.

Cost-Effective Technology Does Not Need a Subsidy

Of course, it would be possible to imagine a scenario where the natural-gas retrofit provides the greater profitability. If so, there is no need for the subsidy, as it already makes better economic sense. Fuel purchases are the single largest component of a trucking company’s operating expenses and there is ample incentive to switch to cost-saving technology.[3] Indeed, some companies track their fuel economy to the hundredths of a mile per gallon and thousands have already adopted a variety of fuel-saving technologies.[4]

Will Low Natural Gas Prices Continue?

Of course the relative advantage of natural gas depends on its cost as well as the cost of petroleum-based fuel. The recent employment of hydraulic fracturing technology has dramatically expanded the economically viable unconventional reserves both in the U.S. and worldwide. This new technology is at least partially responsible for the recent reduction in natural gas prices. However, natural gas prices are susceptible to fluctuation and prices spikes. Further, concern over the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing and the relatively short experience with long-term production profiles of hydraulically fractured wells create uncertainty about the ability to produce these unconventional reserves at low prices.

The attached chart shows natural-gas spot prices since 1997. The price variability is evident. In February of 2003 there was a one-day spike that tripled the price of natural gas. The anomaly was so stunning that it precipitated investigations by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.[5]

The conclusion of the investigations was that a cold front sweeping across the Northeast near the end of a cold winter taxed already depleted supplies. Though that spike was short-lived, the event highlights that natural gas is not immune to price fluctuations. Eyeballing the chart also gives little confidence that consistently low prices will hold for extended periods. The average price for the five years from 2004 to 2009 was 77 percent higher than the price has been since 2009.

Perhaps there is little risk that hydraulic fracturing will be blocked by local or federal regulations, or that unconventional reserves will prove more costly to exploit than has been anticipated. There is reason to be optimistic, but there are no guarantees. In any event, this risk is best evaluated by those consumers and producers who bear it.

NAT GAS Act is a Poor Anti-Terror Plan

Virtually every energy plan promises to reduce revenues to foreign regimes hostile to the U.S. Some supporters of the NAT GAS Act claim that it will reduce oil imports by 1.5 million barrels per day some decades hence. Reducing imports makes sense only as long as the replacement costs less than the imports. Expanding drilling, both onshore and off, meets this criterion and no subsidies are needed to promote expanded drilling.

Whether or not cutting imports saves money is important for our economy, but whether we cut imports by 1.5 million barrels is not that important when it comes to defunding unfriendly foreign actors. The reason is that there are many other consuming countries that buy significant amounts of petroleum and who would buy up at least some of the barrels we would save.

If the goal is to cut imports, increasing domestic production is an option that requires no preferential tax treatment or burden on the federal budget. Opening access for additional production in domestic onshore and offshore areas that are known to have significant petroleum reserves could achieve the 1.5 million-barrel-per-day reduction in imports more quickly than the subsidies in the NAT GAS Act and the additional domestic production would create government revenue to help balance the budget.

The second chart shows the impact of cutting in half our oil imports in 2035 from the EIA projected level of 8 million barrels per day to 4 million barrels per day. This 4 million-barrel-consumption cut would reduce price by about 10 percent. For illustration, the chart lists total revenue for OPEC and its members.[6] Without cutting U.S. imports, OPEC revenue is projected to be about $2.3 trillion per year in 2035. By cutting our imports in half this revenue would fall to $2.1 trillion. Though $200 billion per year is a significant amount of money, oil exporters would still have huge revenues to use as they want.

It should be noted that whatever costs the U.S. incurs to cut the imports also cuts revenues to friendly democratic exporters of petroleum and provides reduced costs to other importers. For instance, China’s oil import bill, for an unchanged level of imports, could drop by more than $50 billion per year in 2035 if we cut our imports in half.

Conclusion

With narrowly targeted amendments to the tax code, the NAT GAS Act creates subsidies for selected technologies. These subsidies promise preferential benefits for special interests, greater burdens on the federal budget, and less economic output. The NAT GAS Act would not significantly cut funding for hostile foreign regimes.

Data from the United States Energy Information Administration,
at http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdd.htm (July 31, 2011).

Data from the United States Energy Information Administration,
International Energy Outlook 2010, at http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html (July 11, 2011).
Calculations by the Author.

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Although Obama’s latest poll numbers are higher (barely) than 37%,  he has tied his re-election hopes to a bunch of  dumb asses who like to copulate in public and sleep in excrement.

Good luck with that one, buddy.

For fun, note the blatant AP bias in the first sentence. Let’s rewrite it, shall we? “Slightly fewer than two-thirds of the country find the Wall Street protests to be bullshit, and almost the same amount say they think American’s politicians are full of shit as well.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protests, and even more – 58 percent – say they are furious about America’s politics.

The number of angry people is growing as deep reservoirs of resentment grip the country, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll.

Some 37 percent of people back the protests that have spread from New York to cities across the country and abroad, one of the first snapshots of how the public views the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. A majority of those protest supporters are Democrats, but the anger about politics in general is much more widespread, the poll indicates.

“They’ve got reasons to be upset, they’ve got reasons to protest, but they’re protesting against the wrong people,” Jan Jarrell, 54, a retired school custodian from Leesville, S.C., says of the New York demonstrators. “They need to go to Washington, to Congress and the White House. They’re the ones coming up with all the rules.”

Read the rest here.

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WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Even before Moammar Gadhafi’s death Thursday, the Treasury Department was already starting to thaw some $37 billion worth of frozen Libyan assets to make them available to the new government in Tripoli.

The new Libyan government will get all the money. Eventually.

Earlier this year, the United States froze its piece of what some analysts believe to be as much as $150 billion in assets that had been available to the Gadhafi regime around the world.

Outside of the United States, those assets range from real estate to stakes in the Italian bank UniCredit, the British publisher Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, and Italy’s soccer club Juventus.

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BRUSSELS (AP) – Finance ministers from the 17 countries that use the euro approved the payment of Greece’s next batch of bailout loans Friday, avoiding a potentially disastrous default, but acknowledged the country’s debt remained too high.

Greece’s debts are only one piece of Europe’s economic puzzle, and the finance ministers were meeting in Brussels on Friday to address two more complicated — and arguably more important — issues: boosting the financial firepower of the eurozone’s €440 billion ($607 billion) bailout fund in order to prevent the larger economies of Italy and Spain from spinning out of control and forcing weak banks to boost their capital buffers to shore up their defenses against market turmoil.

Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos welcomed the news that Athens would get the next €8 billion ($11 billion) installment, calling it a “positive step.” A day earlier, Greek lawmakers approved new, deeply contentious austerity measures.

The new measures will ensure next year’s fiscal targets are met and “sets the basis for the necessary structural reforms,” he said.

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__________________

Got problems? Tell Barack Obama. He can help. He might even give you money.

On more than one occasion, the president has cut personal checks to struggling Americans who’ve written to the White House, according to an excerpt from a new book by Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow about the ten letters the president reads every day.

“It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” the president told Saslow.

How many times has President Obama intervened on someone’s behalf, and with what kind of problems does he help? Mortgage payments? Medical bills? And when he wants to help someone out with a personal check, how does it work? Does he send a check signed “Barack Obama” directly to the individual in need, or does he send the money to a bank or company on the person’s behalf? Do people even know when Obama has helped them out, or does the help arrive anonymously through a lawyer?

The White House declined to answer any questions about the practice.

FULL STORY HERE 

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Libya’s new leaders will have to dig deep to find billions of dollars in cash and assets that Muammar Gaddafi and his family stashed around the world, and then will face daunting legal hurdles to recover them all, experts said on Friday.

About $19 billion in assets believed to have been under the control of Gaddafi or associates have been located and frozen by the United Nations and member countries, U.S. officials have said since rebel forces began fighting to oust him from power.

But other estimates suggest Gaddafi controlled as much as $30 billion in assets in the United States alone, plus large holdings in Europe and South Africa, said Victor Comras, a former money laundering expert for the United Nations and U.S. State Department.

“Gaddafi was no dummy,” Comras told Reuters. “The obvious and easy money, that held in Western banks and financial institutions, has largely already been located and blocked.”

Like other despots such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Democratic Republic of Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Gaddafi “likely also squirreled away large sums in assumed names or secret numbered accounts, or lockbox/deposit box stashes of currency, precious metals and marketable art and collectibles,” said Comras.

Other assets could include indirect holdings of shares and stakes in businesses and property held under assumed names or controlled by trusted associates.

FINANCIAL FORENSICS

“Finding this money will require very advanced financial forensics and it will still be quite difficult to locate,” Comras said.

John Christensen, former economic adviser to the tax haven of Jersey and now head of the Tax Justice Network, said assets could be hidden in trusts and front companies.

“When the actual person dies, the trustees often help themselves to the trust,” he said. “I’ve seen this happen in Jersey on a small scale and it happens on a large scale as well.”

Juan Zarate, a former White House and U.S. Treasury official who led the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s assets, said: “The recovery of assets is complicated not just by the hunt itself but by the difficulties with identifying and disentangling ownership interests.”

Recovery could ironically be aided by the fact that Gaddafi and his family regarded the Libyan state’s wealth and assets as their own, said Roger Tamraz, a Dubai-based financier who has had extensive dealings with Libya.

Seeing Libyan state wealth as their own, they kept most money or assets they held overseas in sovereign entities such as the Libyan Investment Fund, which would be easier for Gaddafi’s successors to recover than assets converted to personal use and then concealed, he said.

“When they were running the show, (the Gaddafis) didn’t feel they had (to distinguish) between what was government (wealth) and what was private,” Tamraz said.

FRAGILE BANKING SECTOR

Yet the NTC is moving cautiously in its efforts to recover overseas assets due to the fragility of the Libyan banking system, European and U.S. officials said.

Before they can haul in any assets, experts and officials said, the new authorities in Tripoli will have to establish government procedures and mechanisms for efficiently and accountably handling large amounts of recovered wealth.

The United Nations gave approval last month for the U.S. government to release $1.5 billion in frozen Libyan assets to Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), but a U.S. official said Thursday that the NTC had asked for the release so far of only about $700 million of that amount.

European officials and private experts said there is no worldwide legal framework or treaty setting procedures for tracing, recovering and repatriating assets misappropriated or abused by deposed regimes.

“There is no single international legal regime,” so assets will have to be recovered country by country, said Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. State Department official.

Efforts to recover assets could be further complicated by legal claims, for example from victims of violence such as IRA bombings in Northern Ireland carried out with explosives allegedly supplied by Gaddafi, said Winer.

Dealing with such claims and recovering all assets acquired over Gaddafi’s 42-year reign is going to be an “unholy legal mess to sort out,” he said.

Bankers managing assets for Gaddafi and his family might “now act as if the assets belong to them,” particularly with those converted into personal holdings, said Comras.

“Some of these culprits may eventually be brought to justice. Others are likely to remain undiscovered,” Comras said.

SHARES IN JUVENTUS

Countries where Libyan sovereign assets deemed to have been under the control of Gaddafi or his family include the United States, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Malta and several African nations.

A State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks said that, as of 2006, a Libyan government fund’s holdings in Italy included 2 percent of Fiat, 15 percent of Tamoil energy company, and 7.5 percent of soccer club Juventus where Gaddafi’s son Saadi once sat on the board. The cable said the fund, known as LFICO, also had over $500 million in investments in Britain.

Pearson, the British publishing giant which owns London’s Financial Times, announced in March that, under legal advice, it had frozen a 3.27 percent stake in its shares held by the Libyan Investment Authority.

“We are monitoring the situation closely,” a spokesman for Pearson said on Friday. “Once the relevant sanctions are lifted, Pearson will take the necessary steps to ensure that the shares and any dividends paid into a blocked account are unfrozen as soon as possible.”

Pearson, he said, “has long made it clear that it hopes these assets can be used for the benefit of the Libyan people as quickly as possible.”

(Additional reporting from Glenn Somerville and Andrew Quinn in Washington and Peter Apps in London; Editing by Roger Atwood)

SOURCE 

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Occupy Wall Street Survey Topline
Douglas E. Schoen, LLC

In interviews, protesters show that they are leftists out of step with most American voters. Yet Democrats are embracing them anyway.

Results for the Occupy Wall Street survey are based on 198 face-to-face interviews conducted in Zuccotti Park on October 10th and 11th.

Link to the poll results published in a narrative format.

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Full article

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Fascinating.

Full article

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STORY & VIDEO HERE 

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Market rebounds to almost unchanged on the headline news….

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Read here:

Think it takes a million bucks to make it into the Top 1% of American taxpayers?

Think again. In 2009, it took just $343,927 to join that elite group, according to newly released statistics from the Internal Revenue Service.

Occupy Wall Street protesters have been railing against the Top 1%, trying to raise anger and awareness of the growing economic gap between the rich and everybody else in America.

But just who are these fortunate folks at the top of the income ladder?

Well, there were just under 1.4 million households that qualified for entry. They earned nearly 17% of the nation’s income and paid roughly 37% of its income tax.

Collectively, their adjusted gross income was $1.3 trillion. And while $343,927 was the minimum AGI to be included, on average, Top 1-percenters made $960,000.

But the income threshold for this exclusive group changes every year, largely with the performance of the stock market, experts said.

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Is this a last chance to shake the tree and push out weak hands or a true roadblock ? Who knows what is real anymore. All parties expect to resolve the problems by this weekend despite  speed bumps.

Full article

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hahahaha

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The power of the interwebs

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWUi-ozMAU 450 300]

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