I would really appreciate Thom devoting an hour, sometime soon, to the topic of State Banks. How they are established, who controls them, what are the benifits vs drawbacks. Perhaps have a guest that is an expert in the topic. I'm intrigued by what Thom as mentioned in passing about these banks and would really like to know more.

I'll do some research on my own, but its hard to figure out sometimes which websites are full of BS and which ones are on the money.

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@Zero G, I heard part of that interview on Democracy Now on my drive this morning. Pretty pathetic that our government is outsourcing espionage. I wonder what percentage of such operatives are double agents, taking money from both sides? Every day I become more and more convinced that our Government is being ran by nothing more than incompetent people put in place by the corporations for there purposes. Even stupidity can't account for this level treacherous behavior.

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The latest ‘pull that nose ring’ message of the anti-abortion ring leaders is that any health care plan without specific exclusions for abortion means that tax money is being spent on abortion. They claim that their religious rights are being denied because the taxes they pay go into the pot of tax dollars that pay for an abortion. The idea is that every penny paid in taxes is ‘owned’ by the taxpayer and represents their views and morals when it is spent. To make this easy to understand, consider that every cent spent on taxes is equivalent to that number of pennies. I guess you could say that the ‘head’ on every penny is actually a representation of the taxpayer. So where does that taxpayer go?
If you are a lefty you probably go to www.nationalpriorities.org or a similar group where you try to get changes to support America with government spending. But this isn’t about what the lefties are up to.
We are speaking of those people who consider abortion more important than any other issue when voting, those whose penny heads don’t want to have the ‘abortion taint’. I have sad news for you. You have been supporting abortions for quite some time. Just take a look around your home. Is there anything there that is made in China? China is not just a Communist country, it actively enforces strict population control which includes abortion. Every penny you have spent on goods from China is supporting abortion. That is not the end of it though. Your penny could have ended up in the hands of someone that shot a soldier when it was used to pay off the overlords controlling the roads in Afghanistan. Your penny head could have been spent in the local grocery where a pedophile received it in change before he raped a 5 year old child. Or, your penny head could have been given to you in change from a murderer that spent it and you gave it to your grandchild.
Maybe you just bought stock and included companies based in the Mariana Islands. One of the activities Tom Delay worked on was ensuring that labor laws were not enforced in territories so women could be forced to have abortions. Maybe your penny head went into the basket at Church. Then the church spent it on electricity. Then the electric company spent it on out –of-state services. Then it ended up in the hands of a farm worker who sent it to Mexico to support his family. They spent it on food at the local market. A drug dealer received that penny head and used it to buy a gun from an American bringing in guns from Arizona. Then the gun was used in a drug war where a baby was killed in crossfire. Your penny head really gets around!
So now that you are tainted with abortion, rape, murder and communism do you feel any better? Do you still feel that same affinity to the penny head you pay in taxes? Is your penny head still the appendage of your values and morals?

I have long been arguing that the National Security State and democracy are incompatible. The WaPo has started a new series documenting the expansion of the Secret govt., the privatization of security, etc. The black budgets are not reviewable by Congress except for 8 Congresscritters who have no recourse to illegal activities, as was evident by the warrantless wiretap "program" which Jay Rockefeller wrote a inconsequential handwritten letter which languished in Dick Cheny's safe for years.

Today on Democracy Now! Bill Arkin is interviewed about the series.

An explosive investigative series published in the Washington Post today begins, "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." Among the findings: An estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. More than 1,200 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in 10,000 locations. We speak with one of the co-authors of the series, Bill Arkin.

Tea Bagger wardrobe change I'd like to see: Take those goofy teabags off your hats and use yoyos instead.

http://hubpages.com/hub/No-2010-Unemployment-ExtensionSuicide

No 2010 Unemployment Extension=Suicide

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By patp

Unemployed Man Commits Suicide

It is official, the US Senate Republican Party has blood on its hands! Last week, a Michigan father of three committed suicide by shooting himself when he could no longer handle the pressures of having no money to feed and care for his family. He was losing everything he had worked so hard to accumulate. He became despondent when his sole source of income, his megar unemployment checks, were cut off when congress failed to pass the unemployment extension bill. With no chance of finding a new job

, he had lost all hope. This man had worked 32 years at the same company when he became unemployed in 2009. An excerpt from his suicide letter reads ," I am sorry, I have now lost every ounce of pride I ever had. You will be better off without me." A Memorial Service was held on Saturday July,17th 2010. He had collected Unemployment Compensation

for less than a year. His employer had paid into unemployment

for him for 32 years, yet he could only collect benefits for less than a year, how can that be? Michigan has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the United States. The seasonally adjusted rate was 13.2 % in June 2010.

The Republican Party opted to fillibuster and not pass legislation that would have extended unemployment benefits for 2.2 million Americans. They fillibusterd until it was time to go on Vacation. The same scinerio occured in May when they recessed after fillibustering and again went on vacation and left the bill in limbo.

What a shame when we can bailout big business, and forget the average working class American! Shame on all who have delayed the passage of the Unempoyment Extension Bill!

@charell, thank you for the heads up on Richard Wolff. I have heard him speak on various topics and he conveys worthwhile information.

It looks like the ironic outcome of the BP mess will come in the form of a truly poetic gesture that involves a middle finger offered by BP's treasurer to British and American taxpayers. The Financial Times reports that "BP is forecast to pay about $10bn less tax over the next four years as it meets the costs of its huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting the revenues of Britain and the US that receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the company each year." Because the laws of both the US and the UK allow companies to deduct from their taxes what are called "business expenses" - and don't include excemptions that exclude from those normal business expenses things like cleaning up messes caused by doing business the wrong way, cutting corners and violating environmental laws - BP will transfer about a third of all their costs of dealing with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster away from the company and directly onto the taxpayers of the US and the UK by deducting all these costs from their taxable profits. The company could well end up paying no income taxes at all, possibly even for several years, even though it's selling billions of dollars of oil and oil products and making billions in profits all over the world. The easy solution is for both the US and UK to amend their tax laws to stop letting companies deduct illegal activities or those things that result from failure to comply with industry or government standards. That easy solution, though, probably won't happen because BP and other oil companies also spend hundreds of millions of dollars bribing - er, lobbying - members of Congress, thus preventing such changes in the tax laws. And, like the cost of cleaning up the oil spill, their lobbying costs are also tax-deductible as business expenses, meaning that you and I are paying up to a third of those costs.

Wow! Just wow.

So, because BP is not paying as much income tax, since it will not have income to tax, it is screwing taxpayers. I guess because it's not paying its fair share.

Exactly what principle do you think taxation should be based on? Whatever you payed in the past, is what you owe in the future, regardless of how your situation changes? An income tax is on earnings, not losses.

Also, a good portion of those bribes and lobbying costs are just payoff so the government won't create new regulations and raise taxes on those businesses. In other words, much of the time, these companies are not corrupting the government, so much as being shook down, and paying their protection dues to the protection racket that is the U.S. Federal Government, so they won't be wiped out of the market. It's like the small time shopkeeper paying off the mob. Sure, some do corrupt the government; Goldman Sachs, Haliburton, ect. But most are just trying to keep their business from being ruined.

Also, as far as I am aware, the Federal government lowered the safety standards and capped liability at $75M to encourage offshore drilling. And BP operated on the basis of these new guidelines as well as the liability cap. So, unless you think following Federal guidelines is criminal, calling BP criminal makes no sense at all.

Also, this is alot like blaming and penalizing victims rather than criminals. It is the U.S. Federal govenrment that is 'screwing taxpayers.' Just look at how much it takes year in and year out. They are clearly the looters, and BP is clearly amoung the looted. It's payed far more in taxes than you have. If anybody owes more taxes, its the niggardly ones who are just not earning enough to be taxed more.

What can we say to uninformed when republicans tells lies as follows? We did not vote for healthcare because it did not have a public option. We did not vote for financial reform because it did not break up the big monopolistic banks.

re: #32: that's chump change! you can hardly buy a country for that!

1.2 Trillon divided by 400 familes = 3 Billon per family on average. Christ all mighty these poor fellows can't have the estate tax applied to them, they may only end up with 2.99999... Billon when daddy tips over :..-(

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