ceo huf post

WASHINGTON - Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday.
It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.
At a time when lawmakers are facing tough choices in a quest to slash the national debt, the report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning Washington think tank, quickly hit a nerve.
After reading it, Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for hearings on executive compensation.
In a letter to that committee's chairman, Republican Darrell Issa, Cummings asked "to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today."
He also asked "why CEO pay and corporate profits are skyrocketing while worker pay stagnates and unemployment remains unacceptably high," and "the extent to which our tax code may be encouraging these growing disparities." In putting together its study, IPS chose to compare CEO pay to current U.S. taxes paid, excluding foreign and state and local taxes that may have been paid, as well as deferred taxes which can often be far larger than current taxes paid.
The group's rationale was that deferred taxes may or may not be paid, and that current U.S. taxes paid are the closest approximation in public documents to what companies may have actually written a check for last year.
$16.7 MILLION AVERAGE
Compensation for the 25 CEOs with pay surpassing corporate taxes averaged $16.7 million, according to the study, compared to a $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Among the companies topping the IPS list:
* eBay whose CEO John Donahoe made $12.4 million, but which reported a $131 million refund on its 2010 current U.S. taxes.
* Boeing, which paid CEO Jim McNerney $13.8 million, sent in $13 million in federal income taxes, and spent $20.8 million on lobbying and campaign spending
* General Electric where CEO Jeff Immelt earned $15.2 million in 2010, while the company got a $3.3 billion federal refund and invested $41.8 million in its own lobbying and political campaigns.
Though the companies come from different industries, their tax breaks fall into two primary areas.
Two-thirds of the firms studied kept their taxes low by utilizing offshore subsidiaries in tax havens such as Bermuda, Singapore and Luxembourg. The remaining companies benefited from accelerated depreciation.
Shareholders have responded favorably when companies in which they invest keep a tax bill low through legal methods, thereby benefiting earnings. But Chuck Collins, an IPS senior scholar and co-author of the report, said that is a mistake.
"I think it's an exposure of weakness in a company if their profitability is dependent on their accounting department and not on making better widgets," he said.
In prior reports, Collins said, out-sized CEO pay was often a red flag of bigger problems to come. The IPS has been putting a pay report together for 18 years. Among those whose leaders have made the high pay list in years past, only to have their businesses falter: Tyco, Enron and WorldCom.
(Reporting by Nanette Byrnes; Editing by Howard Goller and Todd Eastham)
(The following story was corrected to show Boeing paid CEO Jim McNerney $13.8 million, not billion)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

I existed before my birthday.

I existed before my birthday.

Why do we celebrate our lives by our birthday rather than the time of conception?  It would ritualize the actual trajectory of our lives rather than starting at a false date nine months in the future, as though we had not been existing.  It would call attention to the natural cycle of human reproduction.  The fetus as a stage of our growth visually reminds us of time as a transitional state that we are passing through, rather than a static or controlled position.  It also draws attention to copulation as the initial act of reproduction, though it is processed socially by the adults becoming a heightened union, it is incredibly normal.  If we celebrated our conception it would also celebrate the act between the mother and father that brought all of us into being, that simple yet physical exchange, it makes creation material and grounded more than the celebration of our emergence into society.  I existed before my birthday.  Life comes and life goes, like leaves fall from the trees we the life of the human individual rises and falls, I am a  part of this season of (wo)mankind.

Eat great for cheap tip #1

Buy Dean and Deluca spaghetti sauce, it costs eight dollars, only a little bit more than other brands but it tastes incredible and makes a gourmet meal without any work.

Mass

http://mono-kultur.com/issues/05

Marshal McLuhan, the medium is the message

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.[1][2]

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "turn on, tune in, drop out" (popularized by Timothy Leary), "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.[3] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence waned in the years before and after his death and he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.[4] In the Internet age, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.[5][6][7]
This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage
Ernest Pintoff, 16mm, 1967, 54 mins
Introduced by Alex Kitnick
This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage premiered in 1967 as one of the first installments of "NBC Experiment in Television," an innovative series of Sunday-afternoon cultural programs that would later include such diverse offerings as an animated special by Harold Pinter, Jim Henson’s live-action teleplay The Cube, and extended profiles of figures like writer Scholem Aleichem, cartoonist Al Capp, and architectural visionary Buckminster Fuller. McLuhan’s episode appeared at the height of his notoriety within popular consciousness: 1967 also saw the publication of McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, the fourth issue of Aspen magazine edited by McLuhan and Fiore, and an LP recording of The Medium Is the Massage released by Columbia Records.
An attempt to articulate McLuhan's ideas through the language of one of his paradigmatic subjects—television—This Is Marshall McLuhan intersperses observations by McLuhan himself with commentary from art-world figures like gallerist Ivan Karp, artists Malcolm Morley and Allan Kaprow, and Museum of Modern Art curator Inez Garson. As if to illustrate McLuhan’s dictum that "all media work us over completely," these remarks are punctuated by rapid-fire montages of pop culture and the avant-garde, mixing performances by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, go-go girls, stand-up comedians, and Madison Avenue’s most countercultural ads into a Laugh-In-era attempt at information overload. An evocative dispatch from a moment when culture's relationship to media was in a state of profound transition, this rarely screened film continues to resonate with our contemporary situation, its new technologies and their inventories of effects.
Alex Kitnick is a writer and curator based in New York. He edited the most recent issue of October (136). This past winter he curated the exhibition "Massage" at Andrew Roth.
Light Industry is a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York, founded by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter. For the past several months, they have been organizing an ongoing series of events across the city while preparing to move into their new space, which opens in September.

Samizdat

Samizdat (Russian: самиздат; Russian pronunciation: [səmᵻˈzdat]) was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.

Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as follows:

"(...) I myself create it,
edit it,
censor it,
publish it,
distribute it, and ...
get imprisoned for it. (...)"[1]

porter's photo

Shelby and Amy at the shoot for Ownly

Went to Portraits in Dramatic Time on Sunday night, and then watched Eiko and Koma's 'Water'

Angels In America at 20: The Play, Today

Bleeding Ear

Man of Destiny

can't kill rock - kids in the hall

Kids in the Hall - Jazz Hater

because the jazz loft opened in my apartment.