Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill.

Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website whoownsfacebook.com. At the high end of the proposed IPO market capitalization, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. His holdings aren’t listed in Facebook’s regulatory filings.

[snip]

“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin, in an e-mailed statement.

Saverin’s name is on a list of people who chose to renounce citizenship as of April 30, published by the Internal Revenue Service. Saverin made that move “around September” of last year, according to his spokesman.

Besides helping cut tax bills stemming from the Facebook, the move may also help him avoid capital gains taxes on future investments since Singapore doesn’t have a capital gains tax.

Would it be too much to say that America saved Eduardo Saverin? Probably. Maybe that’s just too overwrought. The Saverins were just another in a long line of immigrants who’d come to America for the opportunity it affords—the opportunity, among other things, to not have to worry that your child will be kidnapped just because you’ve become wealthy.

Just because his parents moved here doesn’t mean Eduardo Saverin owes America anything, right?

Yet if you study the trajectory of Saverin’s life—the path that took him from being an immigrant kid to a Harvard student to an instant billionaire to the subject of an Oscar-winning motion picture—it emerges as a uniquely American story. At just about every step between his landing in Miami and his becoming a co-founder of Facebook, you find American institutions and inventions playing a significant part in his success.

Would Eduardo Saverin have been successful anywhere else? Maybe, but not as quickly, and not as spectacularly. It was only thanks to America—thanks to the American government’s direct and indirect investments in science and technology; thanks to the U.S. justice system; the relatively safe and fair investment climate made possible by that justice system; the education system that educated all of Facebook’s workers, and on and on—it was only thanks to all of this that you know anything at all about Eduardo Saverin today.

“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.
Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors... The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

His campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said in a statement that “anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body. The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”

Campaign officials denied a request for an interview with Romney. They also declined to comment further about his years at Cranbrook.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”

“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.

Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

It's the best question the AMA's website does nothing to address. Have a look at the site. It's so mild it says nothing at all about anything, really. Fortunately, there's a contact site, so you can ask the AMA yourself. I wrote a charming, profanity-free letter asking why the AMA is silent when women are harassed, misled, misinformed, mistreated, left untreated and, as far as the statutes are concerned, raped? This is not medical care. It is complicity with torturers.

You too might want to write a letter.

Crossposted from Poor Impulse Control.

Here is what you are doing wrong, CNN.

For the better part of the past decade, you guys seem to treat the ticky-tack banalities of the modern world as extra-special gimcracks you just discovered yesterday. You are still reading Twitter to people, on live television. On election coverage nights, your anchors paw at "magic screens" like catnip-tweaked felines chasing after a laser pointer. You made Erin Burnett go out there, on live television, to demonstrate "the flick." Except "the flick" did not, strictly speaking, "work" consistently.

And between all the whooshing and flicking and zooming -- and, when, exactly, did the need to touch the news grow to the point that merely reading it become insufficient? -- everyone on screen is standing around with holographic weebles and political convention simulations. Anderson Cooper, representing your network's last thin shred of self-respect, stood out there on that stage and repeatedly made fun of what was going on around him. (What have you done to poor Anderson Cooper? He is now restaging the old MTV show "Boiling Points" on network television. That is where you have driven him.)

Your debates, CNN? They were a mess. You fully embraced the stupidity of reality television shows, with asinine introductions of the GOP candidates that reminded viewers of the opening credits of "Survivor." And then you asked questions like, "Deep dish or thin crust?" Over the course of a long primary season, viewers gradually grew tired of watching the debates. But they especially grew tired of watching yours.

Shall we continue? Well, there was that time we actually wanted to watch coverage of the May 18, 2010 primary coverage in Pennsylvania, and you guys were airing a Larry King interview with Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger! Why? Why in all the world?

You replaced Larry King with the insufferably thin-skinned Piers Morgan. You replaced Campbell Brown with "Parker-Spitzer." "Parker-Spitzer" was a complete trainwreck, and no one seemed particularly committed to allowing Kathleen Parker to participate in or emerge from the experience with her dignity intact. That show became "In The Arena with Eliot Spitzer." That was on for, like, a week? Now Spitzer is at Current. Surprisingly, we'd call that a lucky break.

Remember that time that Falcon Heene's transparently dishonest parents were caught in a transparent lie right to Wolf Blitzer's face, and Wolf Blitzer was the only person in America that did not instantly recognize what was going on? Or that time General David Petraeus fainted at a congressional hearing, and CNN ran a segment that was, ostensibly, a "closer look at what happens when public figures pass out?" If you recall, General Petraeus' mishap was compared to Marie Osmond's fainting spell on "Dancing With The Stars."

Do you guys recall that until you were shamed from doing so, you planned to send an army of 400 reporters to cover the royal wedding? That was eight times the number of people dispatched to cover the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. We seem to recall that eventually, it was decided that William and Kate would only merit the amount of personnel sent to Fukushima. Which was great! More people to staff that strange morning show where Ashleigh Banfield prank-calls people.

I'm sure we're leaving something out. Like the time your correspondent on the "Royals" beat, Richard Quest, was arrested in 2008 for drug possession when he was found in Central Park with meth in his pocket and a length of rope tied to his genitals. But we think we've made our point. Over the course of many years, CNN, you have made bad decision after bad decision. Your tanking ratings are not an accident. Things have gone exactly as you have drawn them up.

What's the momentum-building solution? Well here's our suggestion. What if everyone showed up for work at CNN tomorrow to find that all of the people who have been making these decisions were no longer there? What if you could free all of CNN's hard-working news professionals from the terrible grip of your toxic decisions?