The New York Times has a front page news article that appears under the headline "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." From the story:

The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population....data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties...data suggest that the rich do not seem to have concerns about the civic good uppermost in their mind

You'd think that the definition of "rich" might be something having to do with assets or income. But instead, the measure that the Times uses to define its claim is:

Before basketball player LeBron James even announced he was headed for Miami, TaxProf Paul Caron was sending that message, based in part on a post from the Tax Foundation presciently headlined, "State Jock Taxes: Is LeBron Better Off in Miami?" From TaxProf:

Here are the projected state and local taxes on a five-year, $96 million contract:

• $12.34m: New York Knicks
• $10.32m: New Jersey Nets
• $5.69m: Cleveland Cavaliers
• $2.85m: Chicago Bulls
• $0: Miami Heat

As the Tax Foundation post noted, "Miami has a clear tax advantage." (As the Tax Foundation post, and FutureOfCapitalism reader-watchdog-participant-community member B. via email also notes, he will still have to pay state and local taxes on a lot of road games, so the "$0" isn't a total, just a home game total.)

The Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week issued a press release headlined, "SEC Charges Italian Company and Dutch Subsidiary in Scheme Bribing Nigerian Officials With Carloads of Cash," that began, "The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Italian company ENI, S.p.A. and its former Dutch subsidiary Snamprogetti Netherlands B.V. with multiple violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in a bribery scheme that included deliveries of cash-filled briefcases and vehicles to Nigerian government officials to win construction contracts. Snamprogetti and ENI will jointly pay $125 million to settle the SEC's charges, and Snamprogetti will pay an additional $240 million penalty to settle separate criminal proceedings announced today by the U.S. Department of Justice."

A non-profit Catholic group is fund-raising for what it says is a $10 million voter mobilization plan for the 2010 congressional elections with a direct mail piece that accuses President Obama of waging "war on Christianity," "war on unborn children," and "war on Christian broadcasters."

The direct mail package, from Fidelis, includes a survey in which recipients are asked "What do you think is President Obama's true political ideology?" Choices include "Socialist," "Fascist," "Far Left," and "Communist."

Another survey question asks, "How much danger do you think liberty is in right now as a result of President Obama's policies, actions, and agenda for America's future?" Choices include "More serious than the threats we faced in World War II from Nazi Germany and the Japanese because the attack on liberty today is from our own government," "More serious than the threat we faced from the Soviet Union during the Cold War," "More serious than the threats posed by terrorists," and "All of the above."

The New York Times Company-owned Worcester Telegram & Gazette has been taking a tough stance against illegal immigration in editorials such as this one, while the Times company's flagship has been taking an opposite view in editorials such as this one, notices Worcester Magazine, which also complains that the Telegram & Gazette editorial page "continuously laments against big government's overbearingness and dominance."

From a direct-mail piece from "Hon. Donald L. Evans, chairman, George W. Bush Foundation," soliciting contributions to fund the "interactive exhibits and educational programs" of the Bush Presidential Center: "We'll make clear how President Bush worked to encourage personal responsibility, and how he understood that compassion was an ideal best practiced by individuals, in their communities — not by government programs."

Mr. Evans served as commerce secretary in the Bush administration.

Michael Hudson, chief economist of the Reform Task Force Latvia think-tank, has an intriguing op-ed in the Financial Times suggesting cutting taxes on wages while raising them on property: "Lowering taxes on wages would reduce the cost of employment without squeezing take-home pay and living standards. Raising taxes on property, meanwhile, would leave less value to be capitalised into bank loans, thus guarding against future indebtedness."

Carlyle and TPG are considering following in the footsteps of Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR and going public, the Financial Times reports. If they do, it's going to be interesting to see how it all works out. One of the supposed advantages of "private equity" is the ability to focus on long-term results rather than the short-term or quarterly results that public companies and analysts of them supposedly place too high a priority on. Going public would seem to signal that the managers of the private equity firms themselves don't make much of the argument that their private structure enables better performance, or, if they do buy the argument, that they are willing to sacrifice the advantages of the private structure for the other advantages that are offered by a public structure.

The architect Norman Foster is quitting the British House of Lords ahead of a new rule requiring all peers to pay British taxes on their worldwide earnings, the New York Times reports in a culture-section brief: "Mr. Foster, who designed the Hearst Tower in New York, the London office building known as the Gherkin and the revamped Reichstag in Berlin, was the fifth peer to quit the House of Lords before a deadline on Wednesday after which members had to become British residents for tax purposes."

Another example of what I call "conspicuous abstention": The New York Times has an article today about a beverage company, Honest Tea, whose products prominently feature the claim, "no high-fructose corn syrup."

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett gives an "exclusive interview" to Yahoo! News and the Huffington Post in which he proclaims, "This economy is coming back." Asked about Nobel lauraete New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's warnings of an impending great Depression, Mr. Buffett replied, "I don't think so."

"The government basically did the right thing," Mr. Buffett said. Easy for him to say, since they used stimulus money to subsidize his Burlington, Northern, and Santa Fe Railroad, and, as we noted earlier, Mr. Buffett's holdings got a lot of taxpayer aid, too.

Amity Shlaes has a new column up on Bloomberg about parallels between now and the 1930s: "an unsustainable monetary construct," trade barriers, increasing taxes, and government-ordered higher wages.

The Jerusalem Post (and Jeffrey Goldberg) catch CNN's senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, tweeting, "sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."

Ms. Nasr tries to dig herself out: "It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I'm sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah's life's work. That's not the case at all...It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated."

This is (one of many) reasons people watch Fox News instead of CNN.

From a new AllianceBernstein report on China by Anthony Chan:

the important change has to be for Chinese households to increase their propensity to consume, but without excessive borrowing. This will require tremendous efforts by the state to remove the need for "precautionary" saving by households. It will require the implementation of a comprehensive national pension system and the provision of adequate social welfare, healthcare and education to inject a stronger sense of personal financial security.

Yes, if the Chinese only had a Social Security, ObamaCare, and public school system like America, they'd be in as great shape as we are! It's really something when the American (actually, AllianceBernstein is French-owned, by AXA, so make it Western) financial companies are lecturing the Chinese Communists on the need for a greater state role in health, education, and welfare.

Three environmentalists were arrested in Maine protesting a wind farm, reports the FutureOfCapitalism bureau in Brunswick. The story:

Maine Earth First spokeswoman Emily Posner says one woman who was arrested attached herself to a truck hauling a windmill blade. The two others arrested were among about 50 people who blocked the road to TransCanada's Kibby Mountain construction site Tuesday morning.

Again, anyone under the impression that, post BP-spill, wind is going to have an easy time of it may want to re-think.