Richest Person in the World

Carlos Slim, 72, is a telecommunications mogul who controls America Movil SAB (AMXL) in Mexico. In 2010 and 2011, Slim landed at the top of the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.

Despite the fact Carlos Slim's net worth plummeted $478.4 million in just one day, he still remained the richest person on March 2. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Slim's fortune soared 11 percent this year.

Slim was born in 1940 in Mexico. His father, Julian Slim Haddad, arrived alone in Mexico from Lebanon when he was 14 years old. He gave his son early business lessons with a savings book and weekly allowance teaching him financial management.

In 1961, Carlos Slim completed his professional studies in civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He was simultaneously a student and professor. Slim taught algebra and linear programming at UNAM.

Carlos Slim's early businesses included construction, real estate and mining. Later he expanded into many other industries including copper, aluminum, tobacco and telecommunications.

Besides being a savvy businessman, Carlos Slim is a family man. He was married to Soumaya Domit Gamayel in 1966. She died in 1999 and they have six children.

On his website, Carlos Slim states, “Technology does not open roads; it creates important bridges, but it is to us to want to cross them.” He also says, “Work well done is not only a responsibility to oneself and society, it is also an emotional need.”

No cartoons today, cause it's not funny!

Bailey: I'm really starting to believe that Obama is going to be here for another term. The reason why is because the Republican Candidates are giving it to him. The presidential race is starting to look a lot like the super bowl game between New York & New England. And I'm not alone in my opinion because all of my friends who are hard core republicans are saying the same thing!

Trump: Gasoline to Hit $7 a Gallon This Year

Gasoline prices could soar as high as $7 a gallon this summer thanks to supply threats stemming from Middle East unrest as well as OPEC policy, says real estate mogul Donald Trump.

Iran has already cut off supply to France and to the U.K. to protest sanctions from the west, who accuse Tehran of developing a nuclear weapons program.

U.S. military officials have said they feel they can ration with Iran, although fears are growing that Israel may consider a unilateral strike on Iran anyway, which is sending crude oil skyrocketing.

Editor's Note: The ‘Unthinkable’ Could Happen — Wall Street Journal
Watch the Aftershock Survival Summit Now, See the Evidence. 

Higher oil prices lead to high gasoline prices, which have prompted some U.S. refineries to close up shop when people buy less fuel, which further exacerbates supply issues.

The result: pain at the pump — prices are soaring and well earlier than they should be.

Prices commonly peak in spring and summer due to seasonal factors like the price of refinery feedstocks and the arrival of the U.S. summer driving season.

"We are going to have a crisis, a crisis on energy like you've never seen before, and if you see gasoline is going to be at $4 and it already is at $4 — the highest it's ever been in history at this time of the year," Trump tells CNBC. 

"Oil continues to go up, gasoline is going to be at $5 or $6 or maybe $7 a gallon in the summer when they really have the demand. And it's going to really be destructive to this country."

Don't blame speculators on rising prices either. OPEC countries are ensuring prices stay high by regulating output, Trump said. Read More at Link Below:


http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/Trump-Gasoline-prices-Gallon/2012/02/21/id/430010

Pat Buchanan out at MSNBC

MSNBC President Phil Griffin said last month that he didn't think Buchanan's book "should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC."

The network said on Thursday that "after 10 years, we have decided to part ways with Pat Buchanan. We wish him well."

Buchanan, in a column posted on Thursday, called the decision "an undeniable victory for the blacklisters."

The former GOP candidate had seemed increasingly out of place on MSNBC as it emphasized liberal commentary in recent years. But he kept a regular presence, even forging an unlikely chemistry with talk show host Rachel Maddow despite disagreeing on most issues.

Buchanan wrote that advocacy groups like Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League brand people as racists or anti-Semites if they dare "to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate." They seek to silence and censor dissent while proclaiming devotion to the First Amendment, he said.

"I know these blacklisters," he wrote. "They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight."

http://news.yahoo.com/pat-buchanan-msnbc-015053514.html

Bailey: Maybe the liberals should go ahead and have all of the books that supposedly offends someone burned.

Obama –Can Take his 8.3 Unemployment Rate and Shove It

If anyone joined the Democrats and the Old Establishment Republicans to celebrate the slight decrease in the unemployment rate, you may want to reconsider the motives behind this news.

Is the 8.3 % unemployment accurate? Logic tells you it couldn’t possible true, but the banks, Wall Street, Obama and the Democrats are in the streets doing an “I told you so” dance. But buyers beware, if it sounds too good to be true – you know the rest.

Well Obama and the Bureau of Labor just did a snow job on us and you can take that statement to the bank. They just neglected to count the 2.8 million who had quit looking for employment. It’s like Granny being shoved over the cliff – these 2.8 million were just quietly shoved over the cliff, never to be counted again by the Bureau of Labor. Below Labor Board statistics:

From the labor board February 2012: In January, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.) Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in January, little different from a year earlier.

Actually the Bureau of Labor came up with the 8.3 unemployment rate because they derive their false figure from Americans that are employed or that are unemployed and still looking for work.

The master magician along with the Democrats and Liberal News Media just fooled Wall Street, many economists and pundits from coast to coast bought this lie hook, line and sinker. We shouldn’t be surprised, because this kind of shenanigans has been the story of our life the past 37 months.

A 787 billion dollar stimulus squandered and redistributed a Healthcare bill that’s a financial disaster, a “Green Company” scandal that is eating us alive plus high inflation, high fuel prices, weapons that have and probably still are walking across the border of Mexico into the hand of the cartel.

The CBO said the National Deficit will grow at least 1.08 trillion dollars and the actual unemployment rate will continue increasing, not decreasing.

http://www.teapartynation.com/

PRESS RELEASE – LOUISIANA V. BRYSON, U.S. SUPREME COURT

Illegal aliens could alter the upcoming reapportionment of congressional districts
under a plan put forward by President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce who
authorized the Census Bureau to count foreign nationals in the 2010 Census.
Today, U.S. Border Control, Border Control Foundation and other organizations received the consent of the Clerk of the House of Representatives to file amicus curiae briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting an effort to prevent the Obama Administration from using a flawed 2010 Census that included foreign nationals in the count to alter radically the allocation of political power in the United States.

The amicus brief was filed in support of the State of Louisiana’s motion to file an original complaint against the Secretary of Commerce who oversees the Census Bureau. Louisiana took this unusual step of bypassing U.S. District Courts and filing this action directly in the U.S. Supreme Court due to the critical urgency to obtain a swift ruling.

In a shameful attempt to manipulate the census for political advantage, the Obama’s Census Bureau chief falsely claimed that the Constitution compels him to count “everyone living in this country, regardless of immigration or citizenship status.”

http://www.usbc.org/national-security/immigration-news/press-release-louisiana-v-bryson-u-s-supreme-court/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usbc%2Fborderalert+%28U.S.+Border+Control%29

Barack Obama’s Tax Hikes: 21 Down, More to Come

It's looking more and more like President Barack Obama's principal reason for wanting to be president was so that he would be in a position to spend the people's money. Under his leadership—or lack thereof—the national debt has increased by more than 40 percent to almost $49,000 per person.

So far he's done it on largely on borrowed money. With the economy still in the doldrums, federal tax receipts are down, not because of inequalities in the system as the liberals charge but because of a pronounced decline in productive economic activity that can be taxed. And things don't look like they are going to get any better any time soon; in fact it's almost certain they are going to get worse.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2012/01/21/prepare-for-3-big-tax-hikes-courtesy-of-barack-obama

PETER ROFF 

Super salaries

Do yourself a favor as a taxpayer and look at how much money your local school superintendent is making. I can assure you that you will literally be appalled. It is truly almost that of a sin when they are literally making very well into the six-figure range. I have no problem paying my share of taxes for the school system, however I do have a problem when a majority of my hard- earned money is going to line the pockets of these individuals. At a minimum, their salaries should be cut in half.
http://newssun.suntimes.com/news/10041065-418/talk-of-the-county.html

Even the Canadians!

By noon on Jan. 3, when most Canadians were back on the job, the holidays over, each of the country's 100 highest-paid chief executive officers had already earned the $44,366 the average person makes working full-time all year.

If you, like me, reacted negatively to this news, you might also be unhappy to learn that we have been dismissed by many Canadian commentators as envious, naive, unaccountably blind to the brilliance of the men who run some of our biggest companies, and shockingly ungrateful to men like Magna International's Frank Stronach, who arrived here penniless and built a multibillion-dollar auto-parts company from scratch.

These are insults, not arguments. They're meant to keep lower-earners in their place. But staying put and saying nothing is not a good strategy for the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who make up the rest of the country's workforce. The already wide gap between Canada's top 100 CEOs (along with another 2,360 Canadians who make up the richest 0.01 per cent of Canadian tax filers) and the rest of us continues to grow at a brisk pace. Last year, the top 100 CEOs made 189 times more than the average Canadian salary. In 1998, they made 105 times more. Thirty years ago, they made 25 times more.

As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives rightly says in its report this month, people who earn an average of $8 million a year "no longer live in the world occupied by the rest of us."

In this alternative world, created and populated by people like them-selves, the 100 top CEOs get to decide how much they, and the other 99.99 per cent, should be paid.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/High+your+business/6001415/story.html

Can Mike Stoops live up to his own legend?

MUCH WILL BE expected of the prodigal brother now that he has officially returned to Oklahoma's football family after eight years wandering in the Arizona wilderness.

Mike Stoops' groupies apparently also believe he has the power to cure cancer, feed the starving masses and bring world peace. And they won't mind if he deals with those problems as long as he's finished before the start of spring practice.


Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/sportsextra/article.aspx?subjectid=202&articleid=20120114_202_B1_MUCHWI8987

Bankrupt Solyndra seeking to pay bonuses

Now seems an unlikely time for handing out bonuses at bankrupt Solyndra LLC, but that’s the plan of company attorneys intending to dole out up to a half-million dollars to persuade key employees to stay put.Nearly two dozen Solyndra employees could receive bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 each under a proposal filed by Solyndra’s attorneys in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.The attorneys say the extra money will add motivation at a time when workers at the solar company have little job security and more responsibilities because so many of their colleagues have been fired.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/11/bankrupt-solyndra-seeking-to-pay-bonuses/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

Bailey: The types of people that come up with these justifications for paying more money to their employees especially this company are mentally very sick or have their heads up their a***s! 

Yahoo dangled US$27m pay for CEO

Yahoo dangled a US$27 million pay package to lure new Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson away from PayPal.Yahoo offered Thompson a deal that includes a US$1 million salary and a bonus of up to US$2 million this year. Yahoo is guaranteeing to pay him US$1 million of the bonus; the remaining US$1 million will hinge on Yahoo’s financial results.

Thompson will also receive stock incentives valued at US$22.5 million. The stock awards could be worth more or less, depending how Yahoo’s long-slumping shares fare under Thompson’s leadership.

To top it off, Yahoo is paying Thompson US$1.5 million to offset money he forfeited by leaving PayPal. A US$6.5 million chunk of the stock awards are also meant to offset some of the compensation Thompson would have gotten at PayPal, according to the filing.

Thompson received a US$10.4 million compensation package at PayPal in 2010. It included a US$645,000 salary. EBay has not yet revealed how much it paid Thompson last year.

Unless more money and stock is added later in the year, Yahoo will not be paying Thompson as much as former Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz, who was hired three years ago and fired four months ago. Yahoo chief financial officer Tim Morse has been running Yahoo since Bartz’s ouster.

Bartz’s compensation package during her first year on the job was valued at US$47.2 million. Much of that, though, included stock incentives that are not as valuable as the original calculations envisioned.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2012/01/08/2003522682

Bailey: I read stuff like this all the time and think, wow I could live the rest of my life in luxury on just $200,000. It blows my mind just to think about how out of touch with the rest of us these people are.  They receive a yearly bonus of 1.5 million & they actually think its a average wage, when it takes most of us a life time to make that much!

The Company Men (Movie)

If you recently lost your job, you need to watch this movie.


The story centers on a year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company - and how that affects them, their families, and their communities.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172991/