Drop-outs Who Became President

I can't figure out why the Republicans are in such a tizzy about President Obama's college transcripts, and whether or not they have been released or should be released.

 

I couldn't give a hoot about Obama's transcripts or anybody else's.

Let's look at a list of the U.S. presidents who did not even graduate from college--let's call them the Presidental Drop-outs:

• George Washington: The death of his father ended Washington's formal schooling.
• Andrew Jackson: Received a sporadic education in the local "old-field" school.
• Martin Van Buren: Received a basic education at a poorly lit schoolhouse in his native village and later studied Latin briefly at the Kinderhook Academy and at Washingotn Seminary  in Claverack., New York. His formal education ended before he reached 14,
• William Henry Harrison: Attended college but never received a degree.
• Zachary Taylor: Had a sporadic formal education. His early letters show a weak grasp of spelling and grammar, and his handwriting would later be described as "that of a near illiterate."
• Millard Fillmore: Attended New Hope Academy for six months in 1819.
• Abraham Lincoln: Had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind.
• Andrew Johnson: Became a master tailor and was self-educated--he never saw the inside of a school room.
• Grover Cleveland: Elementary education came at the Fayetteville Academy and the Clinton Liberal Academy. After his father died in 1853, Cleveland left school and helped to support his family.
• Harry S Truman:  Truman was the only president who served after 1897 without a college degree.  In 1901, Truman enrolled in Spalding's Commercial College, in Kansas City,, but only lasted a semester. In 1923–25 he took night courses toward a law degree at the Kansas City Law School, but dropped out after losing his government job.

Source: http://bit.ly/wH6sr8

That's is quite an impressive list: ten presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, and  George Washington, were drop-outs yet were elected president of the United States. 

So, who cares for transcripts?

On the other hand, you won't  find any American president who squirreled away in offshore tax havens millions of dollars of money that he had earned in the United States of America in order to escape paying his fair share of taxes on those millions.

Millionaire Mitt Romey is the first and only member of that rogue's gallery!

This has nothing to do with transcripts. The plain truth is that Millionaire Mitt Romney is such an unattractive candidate, so uncharismatic, so bumbling, so out-of-touch with us, the 99% of Americans who aren't plutocrat tax-evaders, that the Republicans, in desperation, can only try to slander and smear President Obama in every way they can think of.

President Obama released his birth certificate and they said it was a forgery.  If he released whatever university transcripts the Republican ghouls want, they'd start screaming for his high-school transcripts.  If he released those, they'd be howling for his grade-school report cards.

All of this nonsense demonstrates nothing other than absolute and utter desperation.

Jagor

Mitt Romney for President of the United Plutocrats of America

The more I read about Millionaire Mitt Romney and the more I think about it, the more I realize that he is ideally qualified to be the president not necessarily of the Cayman Islands as I suggested in my previous post--that was sarcasm, of course--but President of the United Plutocrats of America.

The only demographic group that Millionaire Mitt really represents is the plutocrats, the 1%.  As one of 1%, and as a vampire capitalist, he has succeeded magnificently, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth while sucking the value out of American companies and exporting thousands of American jobs to low-wage foreign countries.  Millionaire Mitt Romney has realized the vampire capitalists' dream!
 
Of course, much if not most of that massive wealth has been squirreled away in offshore tax havens to avoid paying his fair share of taxes in his own country, the United States of America, the country where he made his fortune. 

Why anyone who has succeeded in cheating his own coutnry--and his fellow citizens--and still want sto be their president is beyond my understanding.

Now everybody agrees that President Obama has made many mistakes.  He had no previous experience in the executive branch of government like most of our great presidents.  He was thrust unprepared into the job of America's CEO.

That said, President Obama has learned on the job and the country is better for it.
On Election Day, November 6, 2012, the choice for us--for the 99% of the American people--is obvious: we must re-elect President Obama. 

I don't really mind if the 1% votes for one of their own, Millionaire Mitt Romney, so long as the 99% of us are not brainwashed or bamboozled into voting for somebody who is not our friend but, in fact, our enemy.

Jagor

Mitt Romney for President of the Cayman Islands

In his blog on Vanity Fair, James Wolcott recommended the blockbuster investigative report by Nicholas Shaxon about the untold millions salted away in offshore accounts by Republican presidential candidate Millionaire Mitt Romney.

Excerpts form Shaxon's report:

• As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

• Bain Capital is the heart of Romney’s fortune: it was the financial engine that created it. The mantra of his campaign is that he was a businessman who created tens of thousands of jobs, and Bain certainly did bring useful operational skills to many companies it bought. But his critics point to several cases where Bain bought companies, loaded them with debt, and paid itself extravagant fees, thereby bankrupting the companies and destroying tens of thousands of jobs.

• A full 55 pages in Romney's 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities. “What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.”

• A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it...Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.”

Read Nicholas Shaxon's blockbuster article, Where the Money Lives in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.

Read the Associated Press article published in the Washington Post on July 4, 2012, entitled, Mystery Bermuda-based company and other undisclosed Romney assets hint at larger wealth.

Jagor's comment:

After reading the above articles, I concluded that Millionaire Mitt Romney is running for president of the wrong country; with all the millions of dollars he's got stashed away in the Cayman Islands, he should running for president of the Cayman Islands, not the  United States of America.

Millionaire Mitt Romney could follow the precedent set by a sleazy Texan plutocrat named "Sir" Allen Stanford, who embezzled billions of dollars out of naive, middle-class Americans and virtually bought the island of Antigua, in the Leewards [Antigua is one of the 47 countries around the world that Jagor has visited].  Stanford is currently in prison serving a 110-year sentence for cheating investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

The simplistic and pathetic rebuttal of Millionaire Mitt's apologists that "it's legal" to stash away untold millions in foreign offshore tax havens doesn't hold water.

I have often written that something may be legal but it may also be immoral or unethical.  The defenders of Millionaire Mitt's tax avoidance should be reminded reminded that slavery was perfectly legal, although immoral and unethical, until the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Therefore it may currently be legal for Millionaire Mitt Romeny to stash millions and millions of dollars abroad in order to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. [He only paid a tax rate of around15% in 2010 as indicated by his income tax delcaration for that year--the only income tax return he has ever released; that's about half the rate most middle-class Americans are paying to Uncle Sam.]

And it may not be aginst the law for Millionaire Mitt Romney to lack sufficient faith in the American economy that he doesn't want to keep his money in his own country.  But But it sure isn't ethical--or patriotic. And it's not even intelligent for a man who is running for the presidency of the United States.  In fact, it's weird.

By contrast, Republican Richard M. Nixon released  all his financial records when he was running for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960--all his income tax returns, all his assets and liabilities, all of it.

 When the American people figure out that Millionaire Mitt Romney has perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in tax havens all over the planet, they are going to want to send him a one-way ticket not to the White House but to one of those tax havens.

My recommendation is that he gets a one-way ticket to George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands.  And I'll be glad to contribute to the cost of his airfare.

I'm sure Millionaire Mitt Romney has anough money to buy all the votes necessary to insure him the presidency of that island territory.

Jagor

55 School Drop Out Billionaires and Successful Entrepreneurs

According to this recenlty-published article on StrategicBusinessStream.com,most of the world’s richest men and women were school drop-outs.  We learn that: 

• Bill Gates: Dropped out of Harvard and held the position of the world richest man for thirteen consecutive years.
• Walt Disney: Dropped out of high school at 16 and founded a company which now has an annual revenue of about $30billion.
• Li Ka Shing: Billionaire owner of Hutchinson Whampoa; one of the largest conglomerates in Hong Kong, dropped out of school at the age of 15 and started out by selling watch bands.
• Lawrence J. Ellison: Dropped out of college twice and was told by his adoptive father that he would never amount to anything, but he went on to become a billionaire by building Oracle, the world’s second largest software company.
• Henry Ford: was born in abject poverty. He never saw the four walls of school but he went on to build Ford Motor Company 
•  Madame C. J. Walker: Born into the family of ex-slaves and farmers. Despite being widowed at the age of 20 and faced with extreme hardship, she started a cosmetics business and went on to become the first American self made female millionaire.

And so on and so forth...a total of 55 billionaires and spectacularly successful entrepreneurs who either dropped out or never saw the inside of a school.

Jagor's comment:

This is a great article.  It amply demonstrates that schools don't teach entrepreneurship or innovation; instead, they inculcate conformity and obedience.

When you start thinking about it, compulsory public schooling is a fairly recent idea, only dating from the 19th century in Europe, when the generals, plutocrats and politicans figured out that compulsory public schooling was an efficient way to manufacture millions of docile and obedient wage slaves to populate their farms, mines, factories and sweatshops and provide an abundant supply of cannon fodder for their incessant wars.

Read the full article to learn about the world's 55 most successful drop-outs:   
Drop-out Billionaires 

Jagor