Let’s take a closer look…
With no birth time I don’t know Snipes’ Rising Sign (Ascendant), but what I do know paints a dark enough picture of someone who is so arrogant that he thought he could get away with not paying taxes. Among other things, he has Sun, North Node, Moon, Mercury and Uranus in Leo, squared by Neptune in Scorpio and opposed by Saturn in Aquarius. This profile, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, tells me that he is not only an actor, but a selfish and self-centered one who thinks that he can do exactly what he wants to do when he wants to do it-and I am not just talking about not paying taxes like the rest of us poor people who are not in movies.
Wesley Snipes is a churlish L’Enfant terrible to the core-a narcissist with little regard for anyone but himself. He had all the Big Wigs from Hollywood like Denzel Washington and Woody Harrelson (talk about your renegade outlaw-this rec should get him more time for bad association) and a ton of others from the movie industry write letters to try to get the judge to go soft on his tax evasion charges. It backfired. Yesterday (April 24, 2008) the verdict came down: three years-the maximum under federal guidelines. Since it was a federal indictment, Snipes will serve every day of the sentence. Before you get all verklempt on me, know that he did not pay taxes for six years and tried to plead some cockamamie defense like the marginal dudes and their molls living on the fringe of civilization. What was Denzel Washington thinking? (What was Oprah thinking when she invited Tom Cruise back on her show-more sofa stomping and whooping and a-hollering about Katie or Scientology? Oprah, Om your way back onto Eckhart Tolle’s New Earth!) (more…)
There is an article that will be published in the Sunday, May 27, 2008 magazine section of the New York Times entitled “Triple A Failure” by Roger Lowenstein that is a must read for anyone who wants to begin to get a handle on what is going on in the financial markets these days. He makes a valiant and successful effort to lay out the role of the credit agencies (his primary source being Moody’s) in facilitating the current melt-down in the value of and the trust in the financial markets. What follows is an analysis of two of the more salient facts that he lays out for us. Moody’s, Standard and Poor and Fitch provide credit ratings for virtually all securities bought and sold, not only on the exchanges but also on unregulated auction markets. The Federal government outsourced their responsibilities to these agencies in the 1970’s so their imprimatur carries a regulatory seal of approval as well as a consumer reports rating. What is jaw dropping is that the financial institutions seeking these ratings also pay the rating agencies for them. If they don’t get approval for a particular “structured financial product” such as a mortgage backed security, they don’t have to pay. 
By Sarah McLean
