Economy
Related: About this forumWeekend Economists: "So much to do, so little done, such things to be." April 20-22, 2012
Our thread quotation is from the late, great Elizabeth Taylor, who left this earth 13 months ago. And yet, she is immortal, as long as film and fame last.
The studios were famous for grooming and shaping their talent, just as they pleased. And if you wanted to be a star you sure as heck did what they said. But not a young Elizabeth Taylor. Very early on, then signed to MGM, she refused to acquiesce to the studio’s “request” that she change her name and remove the mole on her face.
She would marry whom she loved and refused to be trapped in relationships that no longer worked. Some might say that she did not respect the institution of marriage. Eight marriages, seven husbands – that’s far too many. But I would argue that, as a passionate, strong-minded woman, Elizabeth was simply unable to abide by anything less than an ideal marriage. It is after all the most incredible gift to humankind, marriage - the opportunity to share love, joy and true connection with another person. Unlike many women, Elizabeth did not need to marry for financial security. She could marry for love. And when the relationship proved to be less than what it was meant to be, she had the courage to be true and to move on....http://www.jewishjournal.com/lifecoachjew/item/elizabeth_taylor_-_always_true_to_herself_39110327/
Or, as Dame Elizabeth herself said: "I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed too - for being married so many times."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elizabeth_taylor.html#B7Yt3jQ1iqB2QOF2.99
A hagiography, perhaps, but much is forgiven this woman, who did her best in every venture she tried.
She broke through the glass ceiling, in the early sixties becoming the first actor, male or female, to be paid a million dollars. Think of it - a woman, the highest earner in any industry. Unheard of! Elizabeth was unquestionably a woman who knew her worth and demanded it.
Or as the actress herself remarked: "If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elizabeth_taylor.html#B7Yt3jQ1iqB2QOF2.99
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)The sole branch of Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank, FSB will reopen on Saturday as a branch of Alma Bank...As of December 31, 2011, Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank, FSB had approximately $51.9 million in total assets and $50.7 million in total deposits. Alma Bank will pay the FDIC a premium of 1.85 percent to assume all of the deposits of Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank, FSB. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the failed bank, Alma Bank agreed to purchase approximately $15.7 million of the failed bank's assets. The FDIC will retain the remaining assets for later disposition...The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $14.0 million. Compared to other alternatives, Alma Bank's acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank, FSB is the seventeenth FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the first in New Jersey. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was First State Bank, Cranford, on October 14, 2011.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)(February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty and distinctive violet eyes.
National Velvet (1944) was Taylor's first success, and she starred in Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.
Her much publicized personal life included eight marriages and several life-threatening illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the "Greatest American Screen Legends". Taylor died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.
Early life
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born at Heathwood, her parents' home at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a northwestern suburb of London; the younger of two children of Francis Lenn Taylor (1897–1968) and Sara Sothern (née Sara Viola Warmbrodt; 1895–1994), who were Americans residing in England. Taylor's older brother, Howard Taylor, was born in 1929. Her parents were originally from Arkansas City, Kansas. Francis Taylor was an art dealer, and Sara was a former actress whose stage name was "Sara Sothern". Sothern retired from the stage in 1926 when she married Francis in New York City. Taylor's two first names are in honor of her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Mary (Rosemond) Taylor.
Colonel Victor Cazalet, one of their closest friends, had an important influence on the family. He was a rich, well-connected bachelor, a Member of Parliament and close friend of Winston Churchill. Cazalet loved both art and theater and was passionate when encouraging the Taylor family to think of England as their permanent home. Additionally, as a Christian Scientist and lay preacher, his links with the family were spiritual. He also became Elizabeth's godfather. In one instance, when she was suffering with a severe infection as a child, she was kept in her bed for weeks. She "begged" for his company: "Mother, please call Victor and ask him to come and sit with me."
Biographer Alexander Walker suggests that Elizabeth's conversion to Judaism at the age of 27 and her life-long support for Israel, may have been influenced by views she heard at home. Walker notes that Cazalet actively campaigned for a Jewish homeland, and her mother also worked in various charities, which included sponsoring fundraisers for Zionism....
A dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, she was born British, through her birth on British soil and an American citizen through her parents. She reportedly sought, in 1965, to renounce her United States citizenship, to wit: "Though never accepted by the State Department, Elizabeth renounced in 1965. Attempting to shield much of her European income from U.S. taxes, Elizabeth wished to become solely a British citizen. According to news reports at the time, officials denied her request when she failed to complete the renunciation oath, refusing to say that she renounced "all allegiance to the United States of America."
At the age of three, Taylor began taking ballet lessons. Shortly before the beginning of World War II, her parents decided to return to the United States to avoid hostilities. Her mother took the children first, arriving in New York in April 1939, while her father remained in London to wrap up matters in his art business, arriving in November. They settled in Los Angeles, California, where her father established a new art gallery, which included many paintings he shipped from England. The gallery would soon attract numerous Hollywood celebrities who appreciated its modern European paintings. According to Walker, the gallery "opened many doors for the Taylors, leading them directly into the society of money and prestige" within Hollywood's movie colony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Taylor
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)On Friday, April 13, 2012, Courthouse News reported a class-action lawsuit by students filed in federal court against the Art Institute of California and its owner, Educational Management Corporation (EDMC). As reported in Truthout, Sen. Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) husband, former governor of Maine John McKernan, is chairman of the board of EDMC and a former CEO of the company. The company also faces an $11 billion false claims lawsuit by the federal government and 11 states.
The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Chinea Washington, claims The Art Institute of California, Hollywood, led her to believe that federal grants and loans would cover the entire $89,000 cost for a bachelor's degree in interior design.
In November 2011, after three years of study, Washington was provided notice by the "college" that she had reached the federal loan/grant aggregate limit of $52,340 and that it would cost $37,000 to complete the degree. Washington dropped out with $52,160 in debt. Because The Art Institute's credits are not transferable, Washington has been swindled out of $52,000 and three years of her life.
The only way to describe $89,000 for a four-year degree with non-transferable credits from a non-academic college is as a fraud and a swindle, and that characterization possibly fails to convey the frustration and downright victimization students like Washington must feel....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The shareholders of Wall Street giant Citigroup are out to prove that corporate democracy isn’t an oxymoron. They’ve said no to the exorbitant $15 million pay package of Citi’s CEO Vikram Pandit, as well as to the giant pay packages of Citi’s four other top executives.
The vote, at Citigroup’s annual meeting in Dallas Tuesday, isn’t binding on Citigroup. But it’s a warning shot across the bow of every corporate boardroom in America. Shareholders aren’t happy about executive pay.
And why should they be? CEO pay at large publicly-held corporations is now typically 300 times the pay of the average American worker. It was 40 times average worker pay in the 1960s and has steadily crept upward since then as corporations have morphed into “winner-take-all” contraptions that reward their top executives with boundless beneficence and perks while slicing the jobs, wages, and benefits of almost everyone else.
Meanwhile, too many of these same corporations have failed to deliver for their shareholders. Citigroup, for example, has had the worst stock performance among all large banks for the last decade but ranked among the highest in executive pay. The real news here is new-found activism among institutional investors – especially the managers of pension funds and mutual funds. They’re the ones who fired the warning shot Tuesday. Institutional investors are catching on to a truth they should have understood years ago: When executive pay goes through the roof, there’s less money left for everyone else who owns shares of the company...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The victory highlights how the balance of power between shareholders and managers is shifting at some of the biggest global banks
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/U1K9E8/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The renationalisation of Argentina’s largest oil company is also a blow to a once-favoured business family who will need to renegotiate borrowings
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/ZE9K33/EXB2V2/204L2/C4JP8U/5VNTPE/LE/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Pressure on Japan to restart its nuclear reactors is rising after nation recorded its biggest fiscal-year trade deficit since records began
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/ZE9K33/EXB2V2/204L2/C4JP8U/7APB1M/LE/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Russia has ordered that charges be brought against TNK-BP, BP’s Russian oil venture, over damages caused by oil spills in Siberia
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/DWBC88/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are investigating allegations an employee of the bank was involved in Raj Rajaratnam’s insider trading scheme
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/7APBHI/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has made its first big investment in a US public company by acquiring a 5.2 per cent stake in the jewellery retailer
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/ZGQNR3/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)US investment bank reports an increase in sales and trading of fixed income securities that trumped gains produced by its competitors
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/FK82VK/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Wall Street has enjoyed its best quarter for bond trading in two years, rounded off with a surge in revenues at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/GD6A2S/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Bank of America reported improved core profits for the first quarter, aided by a rebound in trading revenues but failed to turn a profit in home loans
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/UXDMSS/KQC4EB/FDFZE/ZGMKJ5/NJZX58/T3/t?a1=2012&a2=4&a3=20
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...The shift underscores how dependent on Wall Street the bank has become, as profits from trading in bonds, currency and commodities surged despite capital markets swings and uncertainty in Europe. By contrast, income at its traditional consumer and business banking unit fell by nearly one-third from a year ago....
MOVE YOUR MONEY HAS MADE A DIFFERENCE, I'LL WARRANT! THE ARTICLE LISTS A LONG LITANY OF WOES, BUT NOT EVEN A MENTION OF CONSUMER REVOLT.
Tansy_Gold
(17,851 posts)"Her choices were determined not by the wishes or beliefs of others, but by her own truth, her own soul."
We should all be able to live so.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I missed reviewing her last year. She was born a month before my mother....and lived much longer, in spite of her bad health.
Tansy_Gold
(17,851 posts)I'm waaaaay behind on the day job due to various disruptions in this week's schedule, so I'm struggling to get everything caught up and then finish packing the car for tomorrow's show.
I did get a new battery this morning so I shouldn't have difficulties with that. And the drive to this show is much longer than the previous one, so plenty of time for the alternator to charge it up if I drain a little with the lights on.
And I splurged this morning, too, on a couple little comfort things for myself -- a larger cooler for my lunch so I will have plenty of cold drinks and a new chair so I will look more professional and less campy.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Soon after settling in Los Angeles, Taylor's mother discovered that Hollywood people "habitually saw a movie future for every pretty face." Some of her mother's friends, and even total strangers, urged her to have Taylor screen tested for the role of Bonnie Blue, Scarlett's child in Gone with the Wind, then being filmed. Her mother refused the idea, as a child actress in film was alien to her. And in any regard, they would return to England after the war.
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper introduced the Taylors to Andrea Berens, the fiancée of John Cheever Cowdin, chairman and major stockholder of Universal Pictures. Berens insisted that Sara take Taylor to see Cowden who, she assured, would be dazzled by her breathtaking beauty. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer also became interested in Taylor, and MGM head Louis B. Mayer reportedly told his producer, "Sign her up, sign her up! What are you waiting for?" As a result, she soon had both Universal and MGM willing to place her under contract. When Universal learned that MGM was equally interested, however, Cowden telephoned Universal from New York: "Sign her up, he ordered, don't even wait for the screen test." Universal then gave her a seven-year contract.
Taylor appeared in her first motion picture at the age of nine in There's One Born Every Minute (1942), her only film for Universal. After less than a year, however, the studio fired Taylor for unknown reasons. Some speculate that she did not live up to Cowden's promise. Walker believes that Taylor's intuition told her "she wasn't really welcome at Universal." She learned, for instance, that her casting director complained, "The kid has nothing," after a test. Even her beautiful eyes—they were a deep blue that appeared violet and stunned those who met her in person, with a mutation that gave Taylor double eyelashes—did not impress him: "Her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child," he said. But Walker admits that "this was not so far off the mark as it may appear now." He explains:
Taylor herself remembers that when she was a child in England, adults used to describe her as having an "old soul," because, as she says, "I was totally direct." She also recognized similar traits in her baby daughter:
Taylor's father served as an air raid warden with MGM producer Sam Marx, and learned that the studio was searching for an English actress for a Lassie film. Taylor received the role and was offered a long-term contract at the beginning of 1943. She chose MGM because "the people there had been nicer to her when she went to audition," Taylor recalled. MGM's production chief, Benny Thau, was to remain the "only MGM executive" she fully trusted during subsequent years, because, writes Walker, "he had, out of kindly habit, made the gesture that showed her she was loved." Thau remembered her as a "little dark-haired beauty...[with] those strange and lovely eyes that gave the face its central focus, oddly powerful in someone so young." MGM, in addition, was considered a "glamorous studio," boasting that it had "more stars than there are in heaven." Before Taylor's mother would sign the contract, however, she sought certainty that Taylor had a "God-given talent" to become an actress. Walker describes how they came to a decision:
Mrs. Taylor wanted a final sign of revelation...Was there a divine plan for her? Mrs. Taylor took her old script for The Fool, in which she had played the scene of the girl whose faith is answered by a miracle cure. Now she asked Elizabeth to read her own part, while she read the lines of the leading man. She confessed to weeping openly. She said, 'There sat my daughter playing perfectly the part of the child as I, a grown woman, had tried to do it. It seemed that she must have been in my head all those years I was acting'.
MGM cast Taylor in Lassie Come Home (1943) with child star Roddy McDowall, with whom she would share a lifelong friendship. He later recalled regarding her beauty, "who has double eyelashes except a girl who was absolutely born to be on the big screen?" The film received favorable attention for both actors, and MGM signed Taylor to a conventional seven-year contract starting at $100 a week and with regular raises. Her first assignment under her new contract was a loan-out to 20th Century Fox for the character of Helen Burns in a film version of the Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre (1944). Taylor returned to England to appear in another McDowall picture for MGM, The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).
Taylor's persistence in seeking the role of Velvet Brown in MGM's National Velvet made her a star at the age of 12. Her character is a young girl who trains her beloved horse to win the Grand National. Velvet, which costarred fellow young actor Mickey Rooney and English newcomer Angela Lansbury, became a great success upon its release in December 1944. Many years later Taylor called it "the most exciting film" she had ever made, although the film caused many of her later back problems due to her falling off a horse during filming.
Viewers and critics "fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor when they saw her in it." Walker explains why the film was popular:
Its enormous popularity rubs off on to its heroine because she expresses, with the strength of an obsession, the aspirations of people—people who have never seen a girl on horseback, or maybe even a horse race for that matter—who believe that anything is possible...A philosophy of life, in other words...a film which...has acquired the status of a generational classic...
Velvet grossed over US$4 million and MGM signed Taylor to a new long-term contract. Because of the movie's success she was cast in another animal film, Courage of Lassie (1946), in which Bill the dog outsmarts the Nazis. The film's success led to another contract for Taylor paying her $750 per week. Her roles as Mary Skinner in a loan-out to Warner Brothers' Life With Father (1947), Cynthia Bishop in Cynthia (1947), Carol Pringle in A Date with Judy (1948), and Susan Prackett in Julia Misbehaves (1948) were all successful. Taylor received a reputation as a consistently successful adolescent actress, with a nickname of "One-Shot Liz" (referring to her ability to shoot a scene in one take) and a promising career. Taylor's portrayal of Amy in the American classic Little Women (1949) was her last adolescent role.
MGM studio provided schooling for its child stars with classrooms within the studio grounds. Taylor, however, came to dislike being cut off from typical schools with average students who were not treated like stars. She recalls her life before studio acting as a happier period in her childhood:
One of the few times I've ever really been happy in my life was when I was a kid before I started acting. With the other kids I'd make up games, play with dolls, pretend games. . . . As I got more famous—after National Velvet, when I was 12—I still wanted to be part of their lives, but I think in a way they began to regard me as a sort of an oddity, a freak.
I hated school—because it wasn't school. I wanted terribly to be with kids. On the set the teacher would take me by my ear and lead me into the schoolhouse. I would be infuriated; I was 16 and they weren't taking me seriously. Then after about 15 minutes I'd leave class to play a passionate love scene as Robert Taylor's wife.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Self-Dealing and the War Service Industry, Part II
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8484-self-dealing-and-the-war-service-industry-part-ii
Self-Dealing and the War Service Industry, Part I
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8324-self-dealing-and-the-war-service-industry-part-i
THREE-PART, THREE HANKY TEAR-JERKER
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Let's face it. The subject of taxes intimidates a lot of people, and it can be an understandably touchy subject. So we won't inundate you with charts, graphs, and tables to tell you why the rich are getting away with murder on tax day. We've got something better for you on this Tax Day, just 24 hours after Republicans rejected the Buffett rule (a proposal which was sensible, if far too easy on the rich).
Instead of bogging you down with data, we offer you: The Elvis Index.
As we've noted before, Elvis had a manager named Col. Tom Parker - who, in the true huckster/promoter spirit, was neither a "Colonel" nor "Tom Parker." (He was a Dutch immigrant.) Col. Parker famously said back in the 1950s that ""I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis up in the 90 percent tax bracket."
That's right. Back in the 1950s - when we were that country that Rick Perry and other conservatives wax nostalgic about - Dwight Eisenhower was President, the nation was enjoying its postwar economic boom, and the top tax rate for ultra-high-earners was 90 percent. (It was either 91 percent or 92 percent throughout the Eisenhower Presidency.)
Today the official top tax rate for ultra-high earners is 35 percent - and between capital gains tax cuts and other accounting tricks, very few of them pay even that much. Here's a snapshot...
Eskow, Campaign for America's Future; from Federal data)What has this succession of tax breaks for the wealthy done for - or to - the rest of us? Let's consult the Elvis Index:
FOLLOW ELVIS AND HIS TAXES AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Four dollars for a gallon of gas is ridiculous enough, but $4 for a gallon of water could someday became a reality, that is if oil tycoons like T. Boone Pickens and water bottling companies have their way. Privatization of water in which companies control the public's water sources and free water is a thing of the past appears to be what Pickens and corporations such as Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, and Nestle are banking on to increase their vast fortunes. Companies, brokers and billionaires are buying up groundwater rights and aquifers. Groundwater is necessary for agriculture and more water is needed to meet a growing demand for food. Many countries have already over-pumped their groundwater to feed increasing local populations. Combine this with climate changes and an ever-increasing strain on water resources due to a rapidly growing world population and you have got a future where water is called "blue gold" because of its scarcity and high cost.
Bleak future
The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development estimates that half the world's population will reside in areas with significant water stress by 2030. According to a government report entitled Global Water Security, the demand for water will be 40 percent above sustainable water supplies with needs around 6,900 billion cubic meters due to population growth. By 2025, the world's population will likely exceed 8 billion people.
Private corporations already own 5 percent of the world's fresh water. Australia is an excellent example of a country already suffering from multiple water droughts. Farmers are selling water rights to brokers, unaware of the long-term effects. The United States is by no means immune to these plots. Royal Dutch Shell owns groundwater rights in Colorado and oil tycoon Pickens is buying up all he can in Texas. He owns more water than any other person in the U.S. His plan is to sell the water owns, around 65 billion gallons annually, to Dallas and other major cities affected by droughts. Pickens hopes to profit off of desperation, saying "There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing." He also owns a massive wind farm in the area and natural gas resources, but has admitted that he is no environmentalist, only an entrepreneur who goes where the money is.
Stopping the madness
The public might not even be able to rely on the government to do the right thing and protect everyone from private water owners buying up all the water and then selling it for as much as people are able to pay. Lawmakers in most states did not foresee water privatization because water was once plentiful. As such, in some cases the only people who legally have a right to stop water privatization plans are the people who reside on the water property. For Pickens and his land near the Ogallala Aquifer this means that he, his wife and three of his employees are the only people who have a say in his privatization plans, according to EarthFirst.com. The only way people can fight this despicable process is to refuse to support it. Water districts across the U.S. are refusing to purchase water from private companies. If Pickens, Monsanto and others have no one to sell the water to then they will give up. They are only in it for the money. No buyers means no profit.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A yearlong experiment with competitive bidding for power wheelchairs, diabetic supplies and other personal medical equipment produced $200 million in savings for Medicare, and government officials said Wednesday they are expanding the pilot program in search of even greater dividends.
The nine-city crackdown targeting waste and fraud has drawn a strong protest from the medical supply industry, which is warning of shortages for people receiving Medicare benefits and economic hardship for small suppliers. But the shift to competitive bidding has led to few complaints from those in Medicare, according to a new government report.
The report found only 151 complaints from a total population of 2.3 million Medicare recipients in the nine metropolitan areas, including Miami, Cincinnati and Riverside, Calif.
As a result, the program is expanding to a total of 100 cities next year, along with a national mail order program for diabetes supplies such as blood sugar testing kits. Eventually the whole country will participate....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...As you may recall, one of the proximate causes of the Great Panic of 2008 was the fact that American banks had run up huge amounts of leverage, something that makes the banking system extremely vulnerable to sudden shocks — like, say, a housing bubble bursting.
Well, European banks were even more leveraged than American banks. The top chart on the right, courtesy of a new IMF report, shows that American bank leverage peaked in 2008 at a ratio of about 25:1, and since then has dropped to a much more sustainable 15:1. European banks, even after four years of deleveraging, are still at 25:1. This means they remain vulnerable to sudden shocks — like, say, Spain going bust — so they'll need to continue deleveraging for several more years....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The teenage Taylor was reluctant to continue making films. Her stage mother forced Taylor to relentlessly practice until she could cry on cue and watched her during filming, signaling to change her delivery or a mistake. Taylor met few others her age on movie sets, and was so poorly educated that she needed to use her fingers to do basic arithmetic. When at age 16 Taylor told her parents that she wanted to quit acting for a normal childhood, however, Sara Taylor told her that she was ungrateful: "You have a responsibility, Elizabeth. Not just to this family, but to the country now, the whole world".
In October 1948, Taylor sailed aboard the RMS Queen Mary to England to begin filming Conspirator. Unlike some other child actors, Taylor made an easy transition to adult roles. Before Conspirator's 1949 release, a TIME cover article called her "a jewel of great price, a true star sapphire", and the leader among Hollywood's next generation of stars such as Montgomery Clift, Kirk Douglas, and Ava Gardner. The petite Taylor had the figure of a mature woman, with a 19" waist. Conspirator failed at the box office, but 16-year-old Taylor's portrayal of a 21-year-old debutante who unknowingly marries a communist spy played by 38-year-old Robert Taylor, was praised by critics for her first adult lead in a film. Taylor's first picture under her new salary of $2,000 per week was The Big Hangover (1950), both a critical and box office failure, that paired her with screen idol Van Johnson. The picture also failed to present Taylor with an opportunity to exhibit her newly realized sensuality.
Her first box office success in an adult role came as Kay Banks in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950), alongside Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett. The film spawned a sequel, Father's Little Dividend (1951), which Taylor's costar Spencer Tracy summarized with "boring… boring… boring". The film did well at the box office, but it would be Taylor's next picture that would set the course for her career as a dramatic actress.
In late 1949, Taylor had begun filming George Stevens' A Place in the Sun. Upon its release in 1951, Taylor was hailed for her performance as Angela Vickers, a spoiled socialite who comes between George Eastman (Clift) and his poor, pregnant factory-working girlfriend Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters).[6] The film, based on Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, was an indictment of "the American dream" and its corrupting influences, notes biographer Kitty Kelley.
Although Taylor, then only 17, was unaware of the psychological implications of the story and its powerful nuances, it became the pivotal performance of Taylor's career. Kelley explains that Stevens, its director, knew that with Elizabeth Taylor as the young and beautiful star, the "audience would understand why George Eastman (Clift) would kill for a place in the sun with her." Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, allowed on the set to watch the filming, became "wide-eyed watching the little girl from National Velvet seduce Montgomery Clift in front of the camera," writes Kelley. When the scene was over, Hopper went to her, "Elizabeth, where on earth did you ever learn how to make love like that?"
Critics acclaimed the film as a classic, a reputation it sustained throughout the next 50 years of cinema history. The New York Times' A.H. Weiler wrote, "Elizabeth's delineation of the rich and beauteous Angela is the top effort of her career", and the Boxoffice reviewer unequivocally stated "Miss Taylor deserves an Academy Award".
Taylor became increasingly unsatisfied with the roles being offered to her at the time. While she wanted to play the lead roles in The Barefoot Contessa and I'll Cry Tomorrow, MGM continued to restrict her to mindless and somewhat forgettable films such as: a cameo as herself in Callaway Went Thataway (1951), Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Girl Who Had Everything (1953) and Beau Brummel (1954).
Taylor's next screen endeavor, Rhapsody (1954), another tedious romantic drama, proved equally frustrating. Taylor portrayed Louise Durant, a beautiful rich girl in love with a temperamental violinist (Vittorio Gassman) and an earnest young pianist (John Ericson). A film critic for the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "There is beauty in the picture all right, with Miss Taylor glowing into the camera from every angle… but the dramatic pretenses are weak, despite the lofty sentences and handsome manikin poses."
Taylor's fourth period picture, Beau Brummell, made just after Elephant Walk and Rhapsody, cast her as the elaborately costumed Lady Patricia, which many felt was only a screen prop—a ravishing beauty whose sole purpose was to lend romantic support to the film's title star, Stewart Granger. The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) fared only slightly better than her previous pictures, with Taylor being reunited with The Big Hangover costar Van Johnson. The role of Helen Ellsworth Willis was based on that of Zelda Fitzgerald and, although pregnant with her second child, Taylor went ahead with the film, her fourth in 12 months. Although proving somewhat successful at the box office, she still yearned for more substantial roles.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Right likes the parts of "big government" that limit our freedoms and attacks those that expand them...so accustomed are we to hearing the Right – a movement that historically opposed women's sufferage and black civil rights and still seeks to quash workers' right to organize and gay and lesbian Americans' right to marry– claim to be defenders of our liberties....Dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that “freedom” for the Right offers most of us anything but. It’s the freedom for companies to screw their workers, pollute, and otherwise operate free of any meaningful regulations to protect the public interest. It’s about the wealthiest among us being free from the burden of paying a fair share of the taxes that help finance a smoothly functioning society.
The flip side is that programs that assure working Americans a decent existence are painted as a form of tyranny approaching fascism. The reality is that they impinge only on our God-given right to live without a secure social safety net. It’s the freedom to go bankrupt if you can’t afford to treat an illness; the liberty to spend your golden years eating cat food if you couldn’t sock away enough for a decent retirement....you have to disaggregate what we mean by “government.” You can divide it up, roughly, into a “security state,” a “social welfare state,” a “public infrastructure state,” and a “regulatory state” (there’s obviously some overlap with such broad categories).
...the expansion of the security state—criminalizing more behavior, increasing law enforcement’s surveillance of the public, and locking up more people—is a real threat to our personal liberties, and it, like the disastrous “war on drugs” is supported heartily by the Right (with a small number of exceptions in the libertarian wing of the conservative movement). The security state rounded up innocent Arab Americans after 9/11 and routinely locks up hundreds of thousands of nonviolent immigrants seeking economic opportunities. A greater share of our own population is behind bars than any other country in the world – we even lock up children “at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations,” according to Wired -- and while that sad reality is a bipartisan affair, it is driven by conservatives' innate respect for authority and desire for public order, not liberals' attempts to cut down on pollution...MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)....The weak link in all this apparently was an inebriated Secret Service agent who didn’t speak enough Spanish to understand the perfectly legal business contract he was engaging in. The 24-year-old woman offering her services to this gentleman is very beautiful, and she emphasized to The New York Times that she was not a prostitute or a whore; she was an “escort.” The marketing line for such expensive escorts is that a client is paying for class and, most important, discretion.
There would have been no scandal if the man had paid his bill. Failure to fulfill a legal contract amounts to theft of services. Thus the wronged woman went to the police, and the police, in turn, did their duty and took up the woman’s case against the US agent. Sex had nothing to do with the scandal; it was a contractual arrangement gone awry. The man might as well have been refusing to pay for a haircut.
One of the themes being voiced in this scandal is that a matter of national and military honor is at stake, that it's a violation of our "core values." It’s the same distracting note of concern we hear from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta when soldiers in Afghanistan photograph themselves grinning like geeks holding up the blown apart legs of a suicide bomber. Panetta said what these men did was “not worthy of our core values.”
So exactly what are our “core values” in this scandal? First, it has to be recognized that these so-called core values are generally expressed in the realm of public relations to respond to some embarrassment. It's a sad fact of our times that our real values are those expressed in the realm of secrecy where most of US foreign and military policy unfolds. Real values are how we really operate -- not how we envision ourselves....Something is wrong when individual sexual peccadilloes become a more serious matter for public shame than collective actions like a disastrous and violent 40-year Drug War, a misguided 50-year embargo of a tiny island nation and encouraging profit-making business while ignoring violence against working people. MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)SO THEN THE PLAN IS TO DESTROY THE OILFIELDS, I SUPPOSE...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Last edited Sat Apr 21, 2012, 10:05 AM - Edit history (2)
"When people ask me, 'Why can't labor organize the way it did in the thirties?'
the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal." - Thomas Geoghegan
MORE QUOTES:
"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato
"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they
are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume
that its might makes it right." - Joseph Sobran, Columnist
"By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever
cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in
other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction" - William Osler (Canadian
Physician, 1849-1919)
"Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters
down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and
the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where
lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like
mere highway robbery." - Stephen Crane
A FINAL WARNING
"Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked;
contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free.
No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything-you can't conquer a free man;
the most you can do is kill him." - Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The U.S. Treasury Department wants the public to believe the government’s bailouts of the financial sector might make money for taxpayers. It’s easy to see why.
If the government could show an overall profit, the implication would be that bailouts must be a good thing. Put aside the moral hazard they create, by encouraging reckless behavior. Never mind that the country’s largest too-big-to-fail banks are larger today than when the financial crisis began in 2007. The leaders who pulled off this amazing feat would deserve our praise, and everything will have worked out for the best -- or so goes this line of thought.
Whatever logic there is to this reasoning falls apart, however, if the prospect of future gains is false. And sure enough, it probably is.
The Treasury Department a week ago released its latest cost estimates for the government’s numerous crisis-response programs. “Overall, the government is now expected to at least break even on its financial stability programs and may realize a positive return,” the report said. Unfortunately this conclusion rests heavily on wishful thinking and creative accounting, which becomes obvious when you dig into the report’s footnotes.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and Goldman Sachs would have conquered another continent.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)...a real threat to human survival. If the area in which Unit 4 is struck by another 7.0 magnitude earthquake, there's a 70 percent chance that "the entire fuel pool structure will collapse" and massive doses of lethal nuclear radiation will be released into the atmosphere. The disaster would release approximately "134 million curies is Cesium-137 — roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at Chernobyl as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP)." Experts believe that the amounts are sufficient to "destroy the world environment and our civilization", which makes containment "an issue of human survival." ("The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity: Fuel Pool Number 4", Washington's blog) http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/the-largest-short-term-threat-to-humanity-the-fuel-pools-of-fukushima.html
...If such a disaster were to occur, "people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside," says nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen...
On March 8, 2012, Dr. Hiroaki Koide, Research Associate at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University, gave his bleak assessment of the situation on the Japanese a news program called, “Morning Bird”. Koide explained how 1,500 rods are presently located in a "fuel pool" that has been severely damaged. The rods have to be cooled constantly or a "huge amount of radiation contained in the spent fuel will be released outside". If an earthquake hits and undermines the pool, the coolant will exit the pool, the rods will melt and radioactive plumes will rise into the atmosphere. Koide explained that the rods could not be safely removed from the existing pool because "if you hoist them up in the air, huge amount of radiation will come out from the spent fuel and people nearby will die."
...concerns have been brought to the attention of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration and EU, and to leaders around the world. The reaction has basically been the same everywhere, which is, "It's Japan's problem. Let them deal with it."...There is no way to overstate the media's complicity in concealing critical information about the tragedy that is presently unfolding at Fukushima. If there is another earthquake, the media will certainly be every bit as responsible as the government officials who saw the danger, but chose to do nothing.
I'M SPEECHLESS
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT'S A TYPO...IT'S SUPPOSED TO SAY "UNCONFUSE"
http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/cia-claims-release-of-its-history-of-the-bay-of-pigs-debacle-would-confuse-the-public/
17 April 2012 UPDATE: Fifty-one years after the failed attempt to invade Cuba, the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Justice continue to claim that releasing the final volume of a CIA history of the debacle would “confuse the public” and should therefore remain withheld. The National Security Archive originally requested the document in 2005. Last year, the Archive filed a FOIA lawsuit to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Bay of Pigs debacle. That prompted the release of three volumes of the five volume history (one volume was already available at the Johnson Presidential Library); the CIA and DOJ have continued to fight the release of the fifth volume. Judge Kessler, of the US District Court in Washington DC, is expected to soon rule on the case.
In late 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency explained to Judge Kessler of the US District Court in Washington DC that releasing the final volume of its three-decade-old history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle would “confuse the public,” and should be withheld because it is a “predecisional” document. Wow. And I thought that I had heard them all.
On the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the release of a five-volume CIA history of the Bay of Pigs affair. In response to the lawsuit, the CIA negotiated to release three volumes of the history — the JFK Assassination Records Review Board had already released Volume III– with limited redaction, currently available on the National Security Archive’s website. At the time, the Director of the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation project, Peter Kornbluh, quipped that getting historic documents released from the CIA was “the bureaucratic equivalent of passing a kidney stone.” He was right. The Agency refused to release the final volume of this history, and the National Security Archive is not giving up on the fight.
Volume five of the history, written by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer –who sued the CIA himself to release the history in 1987, and lost– is described by the CIA as an “Internal Investigation document” that “is an uncritical defense of the CIA officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs operation… It offers a polemic of recriminations against CIA officers who later criticized the operation and against those U.S. officials who its author, Dr. Pfeiffer, contends were responsible for the failure of that operation.”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Following a more substantial role opposite Rock Hudson and James Dean in George Stevens' epic Giant (1956), Taylor was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress four years in a row for Raintree County (1957) opposite Montgomery Clift; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) opposite Paul Newman; Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) with Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn and Mercedes McCambridge; and finally winning for BUtterfield 8 (1960). The film co-starred then husband Eddie Fisher and ended her contract, which Taylor said had made her an "MGM chattel" for 18 years.
Suddenly, Last Summer's success made Taylor among the top ten most successful actors at the box office, and she remained in the top ten almost every year for the next decade. In 1960, Taylor became the highest paid actress up to that time when she signed a $1 million dollar contract to play the title role in 20th Century Fox's lavish production of Cleopatra, which was released in 1963. During the filming, she began a romance with her future husband Richard Burton, who played Mark Antony in the film. The romance received much attention from the tabloid press, as both were married to other spouses at the time.Taylor ultimately received $7 million for her role.
Her second Academy Award, also for Best Actress in a Leading Role, was for her performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), playing opposite then husband Richard Burton. The film was a turning point for both Taylor and Burton, as it was the "most exciting and daunting project either of them had ever contemplated," writes Walker. Taylor saw the film as her chance to act, "to really act," and a chance to emulate one of her favorite dramatic actresses, Vivien Leigh, who played roles as a "tragic heroine." For this part, however, Taylor worried that she did not look old enough, as her character was to be twenty years older. To compensate, she added gray hairs and transformed herself both physically and vocally: she intentionally gained weight, minimized makeup, and added excessive mascara to her eyes along with smudgy bags beneath them.
Taylor and Burton would appear together in six other films during the decade, among them The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), and The Taming of the Shrew (1967). By 1967 their films had earned $200 million at the box office. When Taylor and Burton considered not working for three months, the possibility caused alarm in Hollywood as "nearly half of the U.S. film industry's income" came from movies starring one or both of them. Their next films Doctor Faustus (1967), The Comedians (1967) and Boom! (1968), however, all failed at the box office.
Taylor appeared in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) opposite Marlon Brando (replacing Clift, who died before production began) and Secret Ceremony (1968) opposite Mia Farrow. By the end of the decade her box-office drawing power had considerably diminished, as evidenced by the failure of The Only Game in Town (1970), with Warren Beatty.
Although limited by a "thin and inflexible voice",[27] Taylor continued to star in numerous theatrical films throughout the 1970s, such as Zee and Co. (1972) with Michael Caine, Ash Wednesday (1973), The Blue Bird (1976) with Jane Fonda and Ava Gardner, and A Little Night Music (1977). With then-husband Richard Burton, she co-starred in the 1972 films Under Milk Wood and Hammersmith Is Out, and the 1973 made-for-TV movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)THE FIRST QUESTION YOU HAVE TO ASK IS: WHY DO WE HAVE TO GO TO AUSTRALIA TO HEAR ABOUT THIS LOCAL SCANDAL?
AT SOME point in the future, historians will look back at this era as the time when America basically lost its collective mind.
The latest example is Ted Kelly, the recently retired chief executive officer of Boston's Liberty Mutual insurance company. Ask any official or business person across the state, and they'll sing Ted Kelly's praises: good guy, insanely smart, devoted to the common cause, all of that manifest in that Liberty Mutual grew at breakneck speed under his leadership and gave millions of dollars away.
There's something else, though, that came out this week. Mr Kelly had an annual compensation package of $US50 million for the past four years. Yes, there's a zero after the 5. That's just shy of a million dollars a week, $192,000 per working day, $24,000 an hour. To run an insurance company....every Liberty Mutual policyholder, all those regular people making ends meet at kitchen tables, have paid for Mr Kelly to take $200 million out of the company, their company, over the past four years.
Every Massachusetts taxpayer is footing part of his salary, given that the state granted Kelly's company a $46.5 million tax break for a new headquarters in Boston. The whole thing is grotesque...Was there no one else on the planet who could do it nearly as well for $10 million? These boards (OF DIRECTORS), of course, are the real problem. Mr Kelly revealed this week that the Liberty Mutual directors are paid $200,000 a year, a figure never previously reported....This isn't fair market value; it's a rigged game: executives hurling bundles of money at each other, then using the raises as benchmarks. Is there a synonym here for grotesque?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...The report, released on Tuesday, found that the number of the New Yorkers classified as poor in the year increased by nearly 100,000 from 2009, pushing the poverty rate up by 1.3 percentage points to 21 percent, The New York Times reported.
According to the report, more than 1.7 million residents were poor in 2010, with the Hispanic and black New Yorkers, including children, constituting the hardest-hit.
The figure is the highest and reflects the largest year-to-year increase since the city’s adoption of a more detailed definition of poverty in 2005...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)...On Monday, the U.S. Senate blocked the proposed Buffett rule that would set a minimum 30% federal tax rate for millionaires in a 51 to 45 vote that fell like a stone, and far off the target of 60 votes needed to tax the wealthy. Washington fears the rich. But the rich, they fear something else.
Few Americans know what it is like to have one million dollars a year to their name. Whether it comes in the form of a salary, a lottery windfall, or investment income, a million dollars is luxury living at its best. After taxes, it’s $600,000 a year in high tax cities like Manhattan, or $50,000 a month. That’s more than the annual median income of the typical American household, which is around $46,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
With $50,000 a month, you could rent out a $6,050 a month 1,100 square foot apartment at Trump Place on Riverside Blvd. You could send your teen to York Prep for a cool $3100 a month, or around $37,100 a year, and you’d still have $40,850 left over. You could send two kids there, and still have $37,750 to play with. You could invest $30,000 a month, or around $360,000 a year, and still have over $7,000 a month to pay your utility bills, insurance and eat. And that’s based on New York City, where the cost of living is designed for the wealthy. A million will go even further in Los Angeles and further yet in Buffet’s Omaha. The only thing you cannot do with a million a year, is live like you were bringing in a hundred million a year...Yet, despite all of this luxury that a million dollars a year provides, Washington is afraid to tax the wealthy, even those who say they can afford to pay more. Of course, more taxes means the wealthy will have less money to invest in the market, and that is bad for the financial services industry. President Obama put the Buffett rule in his platform on April 7, making it known to all that he wanted a vote on this and soon. By April 14, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index experienced its biggest weekly decline all year.
That the policy makers fear their campaign donors might not be anything new, but Monday’s vote is a bit revealing. The Buffet rule is probably dead, unless Obama is re-elected and the Democrats increase their numbers in the Senate....That’s right, political unrest, growing social inequality and a fear that governments will finally bend to the wishes of the 99ers is the top concern of the rich.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>The story is as improbable as "The Black" (an Arabian) outrunning Thoroughbreds with a young boy astride. Race riding takes great strength and fitness, and the Grand National is one of the most grueling races in the world. And even as a horse loving young girl I thought the film a great bore.
But since it's the only ET film I ever watched, I contribute it for what it's worth, lol (as I've said before, my taste in film is quite juvenile - I only like special effects or jaw-droppingly beautiful cinematography (like in "The Black Stallion" in which I only like the parts with the horse but can endure the rest because it's so beautifully done, or "Little Women" in which I enjoyed the marvelous textures, especially of fabric).
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Taming of the Shrew (fabulous)
Ivanhoe (also fabulous)
Father of the Bride (pretty awful, I thought Steve Martin did a better job, and she talked way too fast as if nervous)
and
A Little Night Music(she seemed subdued and fragile. Most actresses play Desiree as larger than life; perhaps it was having to sing...)
I think I tried to watch Cleopatra, but it obviously left little impression.
Tansy_Gold
(17,851 posts)i saw it years ago, when I was in college the first time, and even though I don't actually remember a lot about it, I remember thinking it was damn good and that Elizabeth Taylor had been grossly underrated as an actress. if I had some spare time I'd watch it again to find out what my reaction is 40+ years later.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)She was not a strong enough person, I think, to work in an industry of massive egos without massive support from someone like Burton, or Todd.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)It's been so long, I'm not sure I ever saw all of the movie, National Velvet.
I never was into horses, but my daughter took lessons for several years.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)I read somewhere that Naomi Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, are expecting baby in June.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A year ago, in Action Comics, Superman declared plans to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
"'Truth, justice, and the American way' — it's not enough anymore," the comic book superhero said, after both the Iranian and American governments criticized him for joining a peaceful anti-government protest in Tehran.
Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman's lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That's a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It's also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.
But not everyone's motivations are as lofty as Superman's. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons...There's also an "exit tax" for the very rich who choose to leave. During the last 25 years, a number of millionaires and billionaires have renounced their citizenship. Among them: Ted Arison, the late founder of Carnival Cruises (Costa Concordia, anyone?) , and Michael Dingman, a former Ford Motor director. But those of more modest means renounce, too. They say leaving America is about more than money; it's about privacy and red tape. On April 7, 2011, Peter Dunn raised his right hand before a U.S. consular officer in Toronto and swore that he understood the consequences of giving up his U.S. citizenship. Dunn, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen who has lived outside the United States since 1986, says he renounced because he felt American citizenship had become more of a liability than a privilege. As an American, Dunn had to file tax returns and report all of his bank accounts - even joint accounts and his Canadian retirement fund. If he didn't, he would be breaking U.S. law and could face penalties of up to $100,000 or 50 percent of his undeclared accounts, whichever is larger. Dunn says he was tired of tracking IRS policy changes, and he had no intention of returning to the United States. Renouncing his citizenship, as he puts it, was "a no-brainer." ...Dunn, who blogs about expatriation, takes issue with being characterized as a tax evader. He says the taxes he pays in Canada are higher than what he would pay in the United States, and he says he had always complied with the IRS before renouncing. But, Dunn says, the IRS approach to enforcing compliance is misguided. "It's making life difficult for a lot of people," he says. "It's driving us away."
AND THERE'S SO MUCH MORE...WHICH LEADS TO THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP OF THE GOVERNMENT...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Does the Tax Man have the right to prevent us from traveling, even without a formal charge of evasion or another crime? Maybe we're about to find out....You're standing at the airport. The ticket agent clacks away on the keyboard. She looks up. "I'm sorry," she says. "We can't let you board the plane today." Why? "It's the IRS. They say you haven't paid all of your taxes." It sounds like the opening scene of a straight-to-DVD Washington thriller. It's actually a few votes from becoming a reality. A new bill, quietly making its way through Congress, allows the federal government to stop people with unpaid taxes from leaving the country-- even if they haven't been charged with tax evasion or any other formal crime. It all started last fall, when Senator Barbara Boxer introduced the "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act" (or "MAP-21" as it's now called), to reauthorize funds for federal highway and transportation programs. While that doesn't sound like anything having to do with your taxes, the bill includes a little-noticed section that allows the State Department to "deny, revoke or limit" passport rights for any taxpayers with "serious delinquencies." Here's how it would work. If someone owed more than $50,000 in back taxes, the IRS would be able to send their name over to the passport office for suspension, provided that the IRS already either filed a public lien or a assessed a levy for the outstanding balance. The bill does provide a few exceptions though. For example, if a person has set up a payment plan (that they're paying in a timely manner), is legitimately disputing the debt, or has an emergency situation or humanitarian reason and must travel internationally, they may be able to leave for a limited time despite their unpaid taxes.
IS THAT LEGAL?
Timothy Meyer, a constitutional law professor at the University of Georgia, who's also served as a State Department lawyer, believes that, for all its creepiness, the rule is probably legal. He concludes that if the passport provisions of MAP 21 became law and were challenged, chances are, the courts would find that they satisfy Due Process concerns. Even though there's no judicial hearing before your travel rights are restricted, the bill does protect a passport holder who's challenging the alleged tax debt. And according to Professor Meyer, that's probably enough here. "Courts have upheld statutes calling for the revocation and denial of passports to those in arrears of child support payments," he explains. "In part, because the child support payments can be contested." As Meyer points out, MAP 21 certainly isn't the first law to limit a person's right to travel because they owe somebody money. The State Department screens passport applications every day for people who owe child support of more than $2500--a lot less than the $50,000 proposed here. And the tax system is routinely used to get Americans to make good on their outstanding liabilities. In fact, over the next few weeks, some folks won't be getting the refund check they're expecting if, for instance, they've defaulted on their student loans, owe state or local taxes, or haven't ponied up for the child support they owe. Most people don't realize it, but the IRS is in contact with federal and state agencies throughout the year, making sure you've paid your debts before they send you a chunk of change back in the mail.
Kramer Levin partner and member of the IRS Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, Russell Pinilis, is sympathetic to both sides of the issue, but thinks that overall, MAP 21 reflects the frustrating position the government faces when someone just won't pay their taxes.
"The problem," he says, "is that the government isn't a normal creditor. They're not lending you money. They can't put you in jail, and they have to be able to do something."
There's no question that the IRS has trouble collecting the revenue they're supposed to, and that those of us who pay our taxes are hurt by the people who don't. The IRS has even developed the concept of the "tax gap" as a way to gauge people's compliance (or lack there of) with their federal tax obligation. According to the most recently released data, Americans owe $450 billion more in federal taxes than they actually paid, an increase in $105 billion from the last time the IRS looked at the issue. Professor Daniel Shaviro, a tax policy expert at New York University School of Law, recognizes that there is a legitimate policy goal at play in the proposed travel restrictions: making sure someone stays in the country and really pays the taxes they owe. After all, he says, someone who owes a huge amount in taxes might present a flight risk. He does, however, worry about the possibility that the passport rules could be misused, say, to harass specific individuals whom government officials dislike.
IRS + TSA = UH OH
A LITTLE MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Here is a quiz for you. Is predicting crime before it happens: (a) something out of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report; (b) the subject of of a Department of Homeland Security research project that has recently entered testing; (c) a terrible and dangerous idea which will inevitably be counter-productive and which will levy a high price in terms of civil liberties while providing little to no marginal security; or (d) all of the above.
If you picked (d) you are a winner!
The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us one step closer to a turn-key totalitarian state. This may sound alarmist, but in cases like this a little alarm is warranted. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioral cues, like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyze these cues algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with nefarious intentions. There are several major flaws with a program like this, any one of which should be enough to condemn attempts of this kind to the dustbin. Lets look at them in turn.
First, predictive software of this kind is undermined by a simple statistical problem known as the false-positive paradox. Any system designed to spot terrorists before they commit an act of terrorism is, necessarily, looking for a needle in a haystack. As the adage would suggest, it turns out that this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Here is why: let's assume for a moment that 1 in 1,000,000 people is a terrorist about to commit a crime. Terrorists are actually probably much much more rare, or we would have a whole lot more acts of terrorism, given the daily throughput of the global transportation system. Now lets imagine the FAST algorithm correctly classifies 99.99 percent of observations -- an incredibly high rate of accuracy for any big data-based predictive model. Even with this unbelievable level of accuracy, the system would still falsely accuse 99 people of being terrorists for every one terrorist it finds. Given that none of these people would have actually committed a terrorist act yet distinguishing the innocent false positives from the guilty might be a non-trivial, and invasive task....Of course FAST has nowhere near a 99.99 percent accuracy rate. I imagine much of the work being done here is classified, but a writeup in Nature reported that the first round of field tests had a 70 percent accuracy rate. From the available material it is difficult to determine exactly what this number means. There are a couple of ways to interpret this, since both the write-up and the DHS documentation (all pdfs) are unclear. This might mean that the current iteration of FAST correctly classifies 70 percent of people it observes -- which would produce false positives at an abysmal rate, given the rarity of terrorists in the population. The other way of interpreting this reported result is that FAST will call a terrorist a terrorist 70 percent of the time. This second option tells us nothing about the rate of false positives, but it would likely be quite high. In either case, it is likely that the false-positive paradox would be in full force for FAST, ensuring that any real terrorists identified are lost in a sea of falsely accused innocents.
The second major problem with FAST is the experimental methodology being used to develop it. According to a DHS privacy impact assessment of the research, the technology is being tested in a lab setting using volunteer subjects. These volunteer participants are sorted into two groups, one of which is "explicitly instructed to carry out a disruptive act, so that the researchers and the participant (but not the experimental screeners) already know that the participant has malintent." The experimental screeners then use the results from the FAST sensors to try and identify participants with malintent. Presumably this is where that 70 percent number comes from. The validity of this procedure is based on the assumption that volunteers who have been instructed by researchers to "have malintent" serve as a reasonable facsimile of real life terrorists in the field. This seems like quite a leap. Without actual intent to commit a terrorist act -- something these volunteers necessarily don't have -- it is likely to be difficult to have test observations that mimic the actual subtle cues a terrorist might show. It would seem that the act of instructing a volunteer to have malintent would make that intent seem acceptable within the testing conditions, thereby altering the subtle cues that a subject might exhibit. Without a legitimate sample exhibiting the actual characteristics being screened for -- a near impossible proposition for this project -- we should be extremely wary of any claimed results.
The fact is that the world is not perfectly controllable and infallible security is impossible...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Just quickly reading through this weekend's fare has exhausted me....it's depressing, really. To think that with all the shocks and consequences we've endured since W, this kind of nonsense and crime and stupidity is accelerating, not declining...it's enough to put a body back in bed forever.
I hope the Final Crash comes soon, for all our sakes. Because the only other alternative is Fukushima's Final Solution.
MEANWHILE...
It's going to be busy out in the real world for me. I'll see you when I get a break.
I did a typical Demeter thing. I bought a dwarf peach tree, which I have to plant today. Peaches are iffy, dwarves moreso, but dammit! I have to have something to look forward to!
The Kid and I toured a new program for her...it's only a year old, and it's perfect. Stimulating and protected, not just day care. I may have to get a job in that town, just so the cost of transportation doesn't kill my budget, but then, I could give up the paper route and have evenings and weekends and maybe even more...if I can find a job, of course.
This program is what I had hoped the prideful city of Ann Arbor offered its vulnerable students...and was that a disappointment!
So, wish us both luck! See you!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Leading world economies yesterday pledged $430 billion in new funding for the International Monetary Fund, more than doubling its lending power in a bid to protect the global economy from the euro-zone debt crisis.
The promised funds from the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies aim to ensure the IMF can respond decisively should the debt problems that have engulfed three euro zone countries spread and threaten a fragile global recovery.
"This is extremely important, necessary, an expression of collective resolve," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said. "Given the increase that has just taken place, we are north of a trillion dollars actually. So I was a bit mesmerized by the amount."
The $1 trillion figure includes both the IMF's existing and newly won resources, as well as loans already committed.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)THE HEAD of the International Monetary Fund mission to Ireland, Ajai Chopra, has said his team has been pushing for Ireland to receive “additional European support that goes beyond the current set-up”.
Mr Chopra also repeated a call made by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde for Europe’s bailout structures to be changed so that they can “bypass sovereigns” and take direct stakes in struggling financial institutions, adding that it “could make a world of difference”.
Asked if this meant there was disagreement among the members of the so-called troika on how to deal with Ireland, Mr Chopra said the IMF did not want to be “too prescriptive” in telling the European Central Bank and the European Commission what to do.
“Europe has its own decision-making process. I think they’re aware of the issues,” he said.
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Motorola Mobility CEO and Chairman Sanjay Jha's compensation more than tripled in 2011 to $47.2 million, including awards tied to the company's split from Motorola Solutions.
The old Motorola divided into two companies in January 2011, and Google is now awaiting final approvals for its purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/story/2012-04-20/motorola-mobility-ceo-pay/54448220/1
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Shifting from Google's CEO to executive chairman proved to be lucrative career move for Eric Schmidt.
Google awarded Schmidt a compensation package valued at $101 million last year, according to a Friday regulatory filing. The amount is 322 times higher than the $313,219 package that Schmidt received in 2010 during his final full year as the Internet search leader's CEO.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-04-20/eric-schmidt-google-chairman-pay/54446032/1
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)posted by alp227 in LBN
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/world/europe/budget-talks-collapse-in-the-netherlands-elections-expected.html?_r=1
The announcement is unwelcome news for Europe’s single currency zone, particularly because the Netherlands is one of just four countries using the euro currency that have maintained a coveted AAA credit rating.
Over the weekend, officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank met in Washington and sought ways to bolster contingency plans if the debt crisis in Europe worsened. The United States Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, declined to pledge any new money to a rescue fund but urged European leaders to be aggressive.
“The success of the next phase of the crisis response will hinge on Europe’s willingness and ability, together with the European Central Bank, to apply its tools and processes creatively, flexibly and aggressively to support countries as they implement reforms and stay ahead of markets,” he said Saturday.
So - the Netherlands has an AAA credit rating but it, too, must embrace "austerity?" And don't get me started on Geithner - the slobbering half-wit "assistant" to the Bankster Franken-monster. It is so clear that all this is nothing but the vehicle on which the 1%er Vampires are intending to crush any vestige of the "commons" - any vestige of power or even simple security for workers, mothers, children.
Alas, here, unlike in France (at least unlike in France if I understand what I've read correctly - since nothing makes any sense just about anywhere with our Corporate Overlords and their Media Tools filtering and talking-pointing ... on top of my own ignorance, which our Masters do nothing to rectify - I mistrust my own ability to understand what I read and sort it all out) - anyway, unlike in France, the challenge is coming from the Right - the Islam-hating fear-mongering Right - like here, sad to say.
The likely fruit of that - here and there - scares me more than anything except the poisoning of the earth.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.
Multimedia
Graphic An Investigation Evolves. Graphic Turmoil at Wal-Mart: The Players.
Add to PortfolioWal-Mart Stores IncGo to your Portfolio »
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/business/at-wal-mart-in-mexico-a-bribe-inquiry-silenced.html?_r=1
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Taylor starred in the 1980 mystery film The Mirror Crack'd, based on an Agatha Christie novel. In 1985, she played movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons in the TV film Malice in Wonderland opposite Jane Alexander, who played Hedda Hopper. Taylor appeared in the miniseries North and South. Her last theatrical film was 1994's The Flintstones.
In February 1996, she appeared on the TV program, The Nanny as herself, and the star of the show, Fran, identifies her to a friend by using all of her husbands' names, stating that she would be meeting "Elizabeth Taylor-Hilton-Wilding-Todd-Fisher-Burton-Burton-Warner-Fortensky." In 2001, she played an agent in the TV film These Old Broads. She appeared on a number of television series, including the soap operas General Hospital and All My Children, as well as the animated series The Simpsons—once as herself, and once as the voice of Maggie Simpson, uttering one word, "Daddy".
Taylor also acted on the stage, making her Broadway and West End debuts in 1982 with a revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. She was then in a production of Noël Coward's Private Lives (1983), in which she starred with her former husband, Richard Burton. The student-run Burton Taylor Theatre in Oxford was named for the famous couple after Burton appeared as Doctor Faustus in the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of the Marlowe play. Taylor played the ghostly, wordless Helen of Troy, who is entreated by Faustus to "make him immortal with a kiss".
In the early 1980s, Taylor moved to Bel Air, Los Angeles, which was her residence until her death. She also owned homes in Palm Springs, London and Hawaii.
In March 2003, Taylor declined to attend the 75th Annual Academy Awards, due to her opposition to the Iraq War. She publicly condemned then President George W. Bush for calling on Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq, and said she feared the conflict would lead to "World War III".
The February 2007 issue of Interview magazine was devoted entirely to Taylor. It celebrated her life, career and her upcoming 75th birthday.
On December 1, 2007, Taylor acted on-stage again, appearing opposite James Earl Jones in a benefit performance of the A. R. Gurney play Love Letters. The event's goal was to raise $1 million for Taylor's AIDS foundation. Tickets for the show were priced at $2,500, and more than 500 people attended. The event happened to coincide with the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike and, rather than cross the picket line, Taylor requested a "one night dispensation." The Writers Guild agreed not to picket the Paramount Pictures lot that night to allow for the performance.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)SINGAPORE — In the 1470s, the prominent Spinola family of Genoa had an apprentice business agent in Barcelona named Christopher Columbus helping to handle their shipments, preparing the young sailor for his later voyages of discovery to the New World.
These days, that Italian clan and other ultra-affluent families are moving assets to Singapore by setting up family offices in a city-state often touted as the Switzerland of Asia.
Wealthy people from Europe and the Americas have long looked to the East for ways to build and preserve their fortunes. But only recently have they started opening family offices - private companies that manage the trusts and investments of rich households - in the region in earnest.
"Because Asia has been a place where we've been investing very heavily - more than 50 percent of our assets are in Asia for the last 15 years - we feel a need to come closer," Federico Spinola, son of the family patriarch, told Reuters from New Caledonia, a Pacific archipelago known as the "Land of Eternal Spring".
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Pop quiz, hotshot. You're the prime minister of Spain. It's 2005. Unemployment is at a two-decades low. Housing prices are booming. You're worried that they might be booming too much. You want to put a brake on the economy. You also hope to build up a rainy day fund for any possible bust. How big a budget surplus should you run?
If you've been following the biggest economic debate the past half century, you might think this question is besides the point. Haven't we learned that monetary policy, not fiscal policy, is the best way to manage the economy -- with the possible exception of when short-term rates are at zero? We have. But the irony of Europe is that a defective currency union reverses this logic. When one central bank sets interest rates for different countries with different economic needs and different budgets, it's fiscal policy that matters most. There's no other way to stabilize the economy.
Welcome to life in a suboptimal currency area. After all, countries that share a currency also share monetary policy. If they don't share fiscal policy too -- that is, there is no centralized treasury -- they can get into trouble. Just ask Europe. But as Christian Odendahl at The Economist points out, this also means that each individual country's fiscal policy becomes a much, much more important economic tool than it would otherwise be. Let's think about why this is, and what it says about the future of the euro.
As previously mentioned, monetary policy is usually the first, best, and only policy tool to stabilize the economy. It's quicker and more efficient than government spending. (Anything that cuts out Congress is usually a good idea). But all of that changes when it comes to the ECB. At best, the ECB runs a one-size-fits-one policy. Interest rates make sense for Germany, but not really for anybody else. At worst, the ECB runs a one-size-fits-none policy. Interest rates don't make sense for anybody: They're too low for Germany, but too high for Spain. So, rather than stabilizing the economy, monetary policy actually destabilizes the economy. The booms and busts both get bigger. It's left to each country to use government spending to temper both.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)It's a hard slog - "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was a very easy read by comparison. It has been especially hard to read the section on Rwanda, relatively brief though it is, which I just finished. I haven't finished the book yet - I take breathers. But the section on Easter Island particularly supports something I've thought for a long time: if humans have enough to eat, and can raise their children in relative security they will endure almost anything and question virtually nothing. The Easter Islanders lived in what I think we would call an Oligarchy - deep class divisions and inequality which seem to have persisted a long time without challenge. As long as the people could eat, they kept doing what they'd always done - obeying the Chiefs, abiding by their cultural norms - including destroying every natural resource they needed to survive. And it's important to keep in mind, I think, that these were modern humans, with all the mental capacity - the observational and reasoning powers - we have today.
Until every last essential resource was destroyed, and people started to starve. Then all hell broke loose. Much too late to save anything, the result was a total breakdown of the social system and cannibalism.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)by Jane McAlevey
The “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists is on life support, and unless it can be revived, this fight may yet be lost—along with many other climate battles down the road.
At the height of the Keystone debate, four unions stood with the titans of the fossil fuel industry to lambaste progressive environmentalists as extremist job killers. The Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) president, Terry O’Sullivan, went so far as to describe unionists who opposed the climate-destroying pipeline as being “under the skirts of delusional environmental groups which stand in the way of creating good, much needed American jobs.”
This January, when President Obama again rejected the expedited construction of the pipeline, O’Sullivan doubled down, saying, “We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women.”
... to counter the industry’s wedge strategy, climate activists need to build an immediate and just response to the jobs issue directly into their campaign. The anti-Keystone movement should have demanded that millions of dollars go immediately into a mini-stimulus package for climate-related infrastructure work along the same route as the pipeline. This means victory would not have been declared until the 5,000 unemployed workers who shouldn’t be building the pipeline are hired in a one-time stimulus for the exact same workers. It means the “victory lap” would be somewhere in Nebraska at a shovel-ready site with 5,000 construction workers going to work fixing broken bridges, expanding high-speed Internet access into rural areas or fixing up agricultural damage. This would speak to the needs of the 17 percent of workers in construction who are unemployed—a legitimate concern of the labor leaders who have played such a destructive role in this debate.
In the "Trades" (Laborers, Plumbers, Electricians, etc.) unions, the leadership lives or dies by jobs - thus the statement by a plumber I know who told me that the Plumbers would "build a pipeline to hell if it meant jobs." Also apt the well known "it's hard for a wo/man to see something when his/her livelihood depends on not seeing it."
The failure of this Administration to put these workers to work is part of the utter failure of environmental protection under Obama's Corporatacracy. For another, look no further than what is now being written about Deepwater - which is exactly what anyone with half a brain cell already knew.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)The corruption of the entire planet's governing system is beyond anything we ever realized. It's worse than we thought.
Having a lot of experience with "the trades" up north, their only thoughts are "build something! Anything". No matter how detrimental or ridiculous or mind numbingly stupid it is.
Easter Island, here we come.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)seriously, I don't think I've even heard of it. Though of course I know Greg Palast's work. Thanks - adding to my reading list. (Why we read these things I do not know - we've really known it all for a long time - these just flesh out the details. I couldn't finish "Economic Hit Man" for that reason - though part of it was also finding the author a bit self-serving (not that most - inevitably - are not. But I admit that "worse than we thought" intrigues me. )
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Back in the days Palast was a private investigator and Perkins was pushing nuclear power plants for Shaw Construction.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)What is not corrupted?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Taylor was married eight times to seven husbands. Taylor's husbands were:
Conrad "Nicky" Hilton (May 6, 1950 – January 29, 1951): Taylor believed that she was in love with the young hotel heir, but also wanted to escape her mother. Hilton's "gambling, drinking, and abusive behavior", however, horrified her and her parents, caused a miscarriage, and ended the marriage in divorce after nine months.
Michael Wilding (February 21, 1952 – January 26, 1957): The "gentle" Wilding, 20 years older than Taylor, comforted her after leaving Hilton. After their divorce Taylor admitted that "I gave him rather a rough time, sort of henpecked him and probably wasn't mature enough for him."
Michael Todd (February 2, 1957 – March 22, 1958): Todd's death ended Taylor's only marriage not to result in divorce. Although their relationship was tumultuous, she later called him one of the three loves of her life, along with Burton and jewelry.
Eddie Fisher (May 12, 1959 – March 6, 1964): Fisher, Todd's best friend, consoled Taylor after Todd's death. They began an affair while Fisher was still married to Debbie Reynolds, causing a scandal; Reynolds eventually forgave Taylor; she voted for her when Taylor was nominated for an Oscar for BUtterfield 8, and starred with her in These Old Broads.
Richard Burton (March 15, 1964 – June 26, 1974): The Vatican condemned Burton and Taylor's affair, which began when both were married to others, as "erotic vagrancy". The press closely followed their relationship before, during, and after their ten years of marriage, due to great public interest in "the most famous film star in the world and the man many believed to be the finest classical actor of his generation." Taylor wanted to focus on her marriage rather than her career, and gained weight in an unsuccessful attempt to not receive film roles.
Richard Burton (October 10, 1975 – July 29, 1976): Sixteen months after divorcing—Burton said, "You can't keep clapping a couple of sticks of dynamite together without expecting them to blow up"—they remarried in a private ceremony in Kasane, Botswana, but soon separated and redivorced in 1976.
John Warner (December 4, 1976 – November 7, 1982): As with Burton, Taylor sought to be known as the wife of her husband, a Republican United States Senator from Virginia. Unhappy with her life in Washington, however, Taylor became depressed and entered the Betty Ford Clinic.
Larry Fortensky (October 6, 1991 – October 31, 1996): Taylor and Fortensky met during another stay at the Betty Ford Clinic and were married at the Neverland Ranch.
Taylor had many romances outside her marriages. Before marrying Hilton she was engaged to both Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis—who did not know until the relationship ended that Taylor's mother had encouraged it to build publicity for her daughter—and the son of William D. Pawley, the United States Ambassador to Brazil. Howard Hughes promised Taylor's parents that if they would encourage her to marry him, the enormously wealthy industrialist and film producer would finance a movie studio for her; Sara Taylor agreed, but Taylor refused. After she left Hilton, Hughes returned, proposing to Taylor by suddenly landing a helicopter nearby and sprinkling diamonds on her. Other dates included Frank Sinatra, Henry Kissinger, and Malcolm Forbes. In 2007, Taylor denied rumors of a ninth marriage to her partner Jason Winters, but referred to him as "one of the most wonderful men I've ever known."
Taylor had two sons, Michael Howard (born January 6, 1953) and Christopher Edward (born February 27, 1955), with Michael Wilding. She had a daughter, Elizabeth Frances "Liza" (born August 6, 1957), with Michael Todd. During her marriage to Eddie Fisher, Taylor started proceedings to adopt a two-year-old girl from Germany, Maria (born August 1, 1961); the adoption process was finalized in 1964 following their divorce. Richard Burton later adopted Taylor's daughters Liza and Maria.[46]
In 1971, Taylor became a grandmother at the age of 39. At the time of her death, she was survived by her four children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I think part of her mystery was she didn't know herself very well, either.
Our weekend is up...it was a busy one, and if the news was depressing, there's still Spring outside (the lilacs are in bloom, and the peonies are full of buds...in April!)
I haven't planted the peach tree yet...it was rather busy, but that's next on the to-do list (not work-related).
Remember, where there's Life, there's Hope...and probably cleaning and cooking.