This is our first issue of the Revenge Is… revised newsletter format. We have redesigned our website to include lots of information about current issues, resources, volunteer organizations and other information we think you will find useful. We also hope you will find our articles informative. Visit us here regularly at www.revengeis.com for our new products, new information, and new prices.
Our automobile companies are racing fast and furious to develop the next generation of electric cars. From the Chevy Volt, the Ford Fusion to the Tesler Roadster, they are all relying on lithium ion batteries to obtain the desired clean energy and high miles per gallon. However, does this mean that we are on the road to trading the energy dependence on the Middle East for oil for an energy dependency for lithium? Bolivia controls almost 50% of the world’s lithium, the mineral needed for the batteries being used to power the electric vehicles under development. Bolivia has been described as the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” Read more…
When you think it couldn’t get any worse …. In recent years, UBS, a Swiss bank, helped engineer blatant tax evasion by an estimated 52,000 US taxpayers who, with UBS’s help, hid an estimated $14.8 billion of unreported taxable income in confidential Swiss bank accounts and evaded US tax. Last fall, USB agreed to pay the US $780 million in fines for its promotion of this tax evasion but it continues to refuse to turn over the identity of the tax-evading taxpayers. It turns out that US taxpayers are paying UBS’s fine for its promotion of and complicity in this blatant and widespread tax evasion, which has cost the US Treasury millions of dollars of unpaid taxes by wealthy taxpayers. (As a result of this case, Switzerland has agreed to new treaty provisions that will significantly erode its historic bank secrecy laws.) And how is this happening? UBS is one of the biggest counterparties to credit default swaps entered into by AIG who received TARP funds (i.e. taxpayer money) from AIG. Read more…
In this new digital world we inhabit, we now read about newspapers being shut down almost weekly. When the Carbondale Valley Journal closed after 34 years as Carbondale, Colorado’s only newspaper, the residents missed the information it had provided for so long: the obituaries, births, proposed local developments, and local sports news. Rebecca Young missed the funeral for a friend of hers as, without an obituary in the Carbondale Valley Journal, she did not learn of her friend’s death for several weeks. Young emailed fellow Carbondale residents to find out if they were as upset as she was about losing their local newspaper. She received 45 responses from upset residents within a day. With six other residents, Young started a new weekly newspaper called the Sopris Sun (named after a nearby snow-capped peak), which is run as a nonprofit and staffed primarily by volunteers. “It just beat the dickens out of sitting around whining that our paper was dead,” Young said.
We welcome your comments and suggestions about the new format for our newsletter. Please send them to us at info@revengeis.com and visit our store.
Sincerely,
Marilyn Barrett
