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To U.S. Presidential Voters: Be Afraid, Be very Afraid
'Want MORE of the Bush economic disaster? Then support MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty for president. This, in today's Star Tribune, explains why:
http://www.startribune.com/business/85005147.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO...
"With state revenue cratering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty's call for major corporate tax cuts represents a doubling down on the concept of supply-side economics. Would the tax cuts bring the payoff he promises? Hard to say. But what is certain is that his latest proposals do not go nearly as far as those of a commission he empowered more than a year ago to recommend ways to overhaul business taxes in Minnesota.
This year, Pawlenty wants the Minnesota Legislature to cut the Minnesota corporate income tax by 20 percent from 9.8 percent of adjusted net profits to 7.8 percent, cut income taxes for small businesses by 20 percent, and exempt local investors from capital gains taxes made on certain local investments."
The banks don't want to refi because TARP guantees the full value of the loan.
I'm so glad you are covering this (red light cameras) - In Georgia, they passed a law that if a light has a camera, the yellow timing must be 1 second longer than the minimum time standard ... guess what? Tickets went down 80%! 80% of tickets "generated" by these cameras occur within the first second of the red light ... people trying to make the yellow.
In fact, the revenue went south so fast, some municipalities are removing them, because they now cost more than they generate!
@brian re: romney: I thought he inherited it from George Romney.
Hey there everyone, If you want to see a good example of the disconnect... here it is. on Sunday I called into the Bill Cunningham show and I argued with him over the 16% income tax that the wealthiest Americans pay. He began yelling at me, calling me a liar and fool. Even hung up on me. Check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTbqjGskf4
BTW: I tried posting this to the daily topics yesterday, but it would not show up for some reason?
thom you mentioned once before about how mitt romney created his wealth. can you tell us again i feel its important for us to know. did romney create jobs or did he just buy up failling companies for a quick buck ?
Why is it that if a corporation, as defined by the recent Supreme Court decision, is a collection of individuals, it is not subject the same political contribution restrictions as individuals? Short of a constitutional amendment, should not Congress pass a law that requires those contributions be paid by individuals out of their own pockets instead of out of a kitty controlled by a few people who decide where the money is applied? Should not those individuals be named and subject to the individual limit for contributions? And should those people be allowed to make that contribution to the candidate or cause of their choice? Or not make a contribution at all? Or am I completely bonkers on this?
Perhaps because it is people like me who have to deal with the reality of the extremist, paranoid, xenophobic and scapegoating tendencies of the self-pitying pallid egocentric on an everyday basis, and Thom doesn’t, explains why I am far less sanguine about the Timothy McVeighs and Joe Stacks of the world than he is. I think it is horrifying that anyone can justify their actions on any level—even when you cherry-pick the few things that made “sense” in Stark’s statement. Anyone who read the entire tract (like me) can plainly see that this was just something he tossed in “justify” himself and give people the impression of a “higher cause.” The rest reads like man who can only be described as a fanatical, runaway conspiracy theorist, and probably borderline insane.
Let’s recap what Stark insinuated in his statement, and what has been reported in the media thus far. Stark first burned down the house he, his wife and stepdaughter were living in. The wife and stepdaughter lost everything they owned. Stark then got into his airplane. If he was so broke, how could he afford to have an airplane? I’ll get into that later. Then he crashed the plane into that North Austin office building. The man he killed was a black Vietnam veteran named Vernon Hunter. If anyone deserves to be called a “hero,” it is Hunter.
What drove Stark to this homicidal terrorist act? Consider: In the early 1980s, Stark was involved with a band of tax resisters who apparently advised him on how to avoid paying taxes, and according him not very good advice. Stark’s claim that he paid his “fair share” of taxes is a patent, self-serving lie. He didn’t “follow the rules” of civil society; he did everything he could to avoid paying taxes that every other citizen paid to maintain a civil society. He all but confessed to be a serial tax cheat, and under-reported his income. Thus even his complaint about the 1987 tax amendment is pure self-serving shibboleth.
Two start-up companies he founded in California foundered—and not because of high taxes, but because he didn’t pay any taxes. The state Franchise Tax Board suspended the licenses of those companies for failure to meet even his minimal responsibilities. His first wife apparently didn’t believe in paying taxes either. At the time of their divorce, Ginger Stark was filing for bankruptcy, owing over a $125,000 in back taxes. Since then Stark all but admitted he continued to fail to report income, and seemed to have no clue that early retirement distributions were subject not only to income taxes like any other income, but penalties as well. All of which, of course, could explain why he had plenty of cash to buy a private plane.
Stark brought all of his problems upon himself. All the rest is his puny effort to rationalize his terrorist act. “Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer," Stack wrote. Thom should be ashamed to suggest that this guy in any way, shape or form is a “brother in arms.” I couldn’t help but observe last week that Thom had Obama’s disease, trying to make “nice” with all those right-wingers. It never ceases to amaze me how many areas of “agreement” he has with these people, even though they would never make that claim themselves.
I think that we need a strategy change in regards to talking about the Citizen's United case. People that defend the decision say that we have free speech rights and that is why the decision is correct. However, where does the Constitution declare money as speech? I think that we should be true Constitutionalists and only defend the free speech as speech, and state that the government has always restricted our use of money. Therefore it should also be able to restrict it in the political sense.
PS: I do know that the Supreme Court declared money as speech, but that decision was wrong and that needs to be pointed out every chance we get.
thom can you explain to us once again ,how mitt romney created his wealth?
@harry
I guess you didn't have the experience of David Peel with and in the Lower East Side...
@Captain Bebops: The UPS strike of about 5-7 years ago was successful; that's the only one i remember. Jim Hightower, however, probably has record of many of them.
(didn't mean to hit post, but anyway)
glass of wine and perhaps a bit of something else that two corrections are in order.
A) In a post above I said Gordon Brown when I meant Michael Gordon.
B) I thanked Thom and Jim Hightower, I should also thank Shawn (sp?) Taylor and Louise Hartmann, and the rest of the crew that puts on the show.
It struck me, after a
@Adlof -- It's Thom "opinion" that national strikes are ineffective and I don't recall much of any in the US at all so how can one say they are ineffective if we've never had one. It just might be this time.
Thom, have you had the "Cost of War" counter on your web-page that shows a running total of the wars? It's at least $3000 per second.
http://costofwar.com/
"How do you find the Bush Ranch? Easy. Just head toward Waco and follow the slime trail." -harry ashburn
Codex Alimentarius 2012 part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h93lkcv6Ees
Codex Alimentarius 2012 part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExzTkzzVtnI&feature=related
http://www.knowthelies.com/?q=node/5269
The Dietary Supplement Safety Act = CODEX ALIMENTARIUS!... John McCain's New Bill Will End Health Freedom! Submitted by SadInAmerica on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 8:27pm.
McCain’s bill would wipe out even the minimal protections contained in DSHEA. It would give the FDA full discretion and power to compile a discreet list of supplements allowed to remain on the market while banning all others! (This is a RED ALERT! If this bill passes it will mean nutritional death to BILLIONS! ~ S.I.A.)
McCain’s bill is called The Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA). It would repeal key sections of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). DSHEA protects supplements if
1) they are food products that have been in the food supply and not chemically altered or
2) if they were sold as supplements prior to 1994, the year that DSHEA was passed. If a supplement fits one of these two descriptions, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cannot arbitrarily ban it or reclassify it as a drug.
These protections are far from perfect. They discourage companies from developing new forms of supplements. New supplements may be arbitrarily banned by the FDA or adopted by drug companies in a way that precludes their further sale as supplements.
McCain’s bill would wipe out even the minimal protections contained in DSHEA. It would give the FDA full discretion and power to compile a discreet list of supplements allowed to remain on the market while banning all others.
Everyone knows that the FDA is friendly to drug companies (which pay its bills and provide good revolving door jobs) and hostile to supplement companies. Under this bill, this same Agency could quite arbitrarily ban any supplement it wished or turn it over to drug companies to be developed as a drug and sold for multiples of its price as a supplement.
We must prevent this bill from gaining traction! Protect your access to supplements by contacting your senators today and asking them NOT to co-sponsor the Dietary Supplement Safety Act but rather to oppose it.
TAKE ACTION
McCain’s Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA) appears to be supported by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which is funded by major league sports teams including baseball, football and others. The recent suspensions of NFL and other professional sports figures is much in the news, and the goal of the sports industry appears to be to shift the spotlight from their players to the supplements industry. In his comments, Senator McCain cited six NFL players recently suspended for testing positive for banned substances and purportedly exposed to these substances through dietary supplements.
The problem here of course is one of illegal sale and use of steroids. So why dismantle the supplement industry in order to control already illegal substances?
The FDA currently has complete and total authority to stop illegal steroids and, more broadly, to regulate dietary supplements. If the agency were doing its job, it could and would have prevented the sale of illegal steroids. The answer to this problem is not to give FDA more power. The Agency simply needs to do it’s job.
TAKE ACTION
Why would a bill be offered to solve an illegal steroid problem that does not really address the steroid problem but instead gives the FDA complete and arbitrary control over all supplements? The answer is simple.
There are a lot of vested interests which are threatened by supplements. Drug companies do not like them because they represent a low cost, safer, and often more effective alternative to drugs. The FDA does not like them because supplements do not come through the FDA approval process and therefore do not support the FDA budget.
Why not simply require that supplements be brought through the FDA’s drug approval process? Wouldn’t that create a level playing field?
That is probably the argument that Senator McCain has been sold. But it is a completely false argument. The FDA drug approval process costs as much as a billion dollars. It is not economically feasible to spend such vast sums on substances that are not protected by patent, and natural substances cannot legally be patented.
This is the great “Catch 22” of American medicine. The FDA, which is supposed to guard and promote our health, is hostile to the kind of natural medicine—based on diet, supplements, and exercise—that represents the real future of healthcare. The Agency has either been captured by drug interests or is trapped in a catastrophically expensive, toxic, and ineffective patented-drug model.
Senator McCain has no doubt offered this bill in good faith. But he has been sold a bill of goods by special interests. And he has been naïve enough not to know that he is being used.
TAKE ACTION
This exceptionally bad bill also requires the reporting of all minor adverse events related to supplements. This is in addition to the already existing requirement to report adverse events. This will further stack the deck against small supplement companies by creating new, unnecessary, even more cumbersome, and of course very expensive administrative hurdles. The result: the consolidation of the supplement industry into a few big companies.If passed, this bill will likely result in the disappearance from store shelves of many supplements currently on the market. In addition to fewer supplements, there would likely be much lower doses available. Unbridled authority would be handed to the FDA, an agency that needs a top to bottom overhaul, not ever more power over our lives.
The FDA will like this because it believes that it can more easily control a few industry giants. But isn’t it more likely that the industry giants will eventually gain control over the FDA?
The FDA is already misusing the adverse event reporting process that exists. Drugs rack up thousands of adverse event reports without any action. Just recently, the FDA yanked from the market a supplement product based on just a couple of alleged adverse event reports without even allowing the company (an old and respected firm) to provide any counter-evidence or counter-argument.
The bill also allows the FDA to yank a product (at the company’s expense) if there is a “reasonable probability” that it is “adulterated” or “misbranded”. Let’s remember that “adulterated” could mean there is a minor record keeping error on the producer’s part and “misbranded” can mean that the producer simply tells the truth about the product. An “adulterated” and “misbranded” supplement in Orwellian FDA speak may actually be both completely safe and effective.
If passed, this bill will likely result in the disappearance from store shelves of many supplements currently on the market. In addition to fewer supplements, there would likely be much lower doses available. Unbridled authority would be handed to the FDA, an agency that needs a top to bottom overhaul, not ever more power over our lives.
If McCain’s bill passes, we can look to Europe for a snapshot of what we may be in for: EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, has sharply reduced the list of available supplements and is in process of reducing potencies to ridiculous levels, such as less beta carotene than can be found in half of a large carrot. Europeans already look to the US to obtain their dietary supplements. If this bill passes, where will we obtain ours?
Please take action immediately. TAKE ACTION Tell your senators NOT to co- sponsor this legislation and to do everything in their power to defeat it. Then forward this to your friends and family and ask then to do the same!
Surely, Scott was kidding. The last two years have been horrific (except for the election of Obama).
Since I love our younger people, I want the best for them.
http://original.antiwar.com/don-robertson/2010/02/21/before-you-enlist/
The heart of the witness!
http://www.paxchristiusa.org/news_events_more.asp?id=1507
Was Scott kidding?
Hi guys -- You and I know that the bugaboo of Communism is passe', but the run of the mill right-winger doesn't. They are still afraid of commies under the bed -- and terrorists too. I meant to say it for their sake -- to get the vast majority of Walmart shoppers to think about what they are doing.
they are still calling Obama a commie to say he's bad, so they still think commie is bad....
@NELS: It is spelled, "S-C-R-O-T-U-S."
@Scott: Everywhere there is a Living Wage Ordinance proves you incorrect.
Ann Mah is right! But it seems this country is regressing. Most people will not admit that sexism and the double standard is far more pervasive than racism. I can't tell you how many men of color demand that women overlook male politicians convicted not just accused of domestic violence. I think more most men black history month means black males. Equal protection under the law is a myth. The tea Party men are white guys who take exception to the fact that they are not insiders and one of the ‘elite.’
In the face of an emerging oligarchy, many white males are enraged by the realization that they are relatively powerless to contain their economic decline. Yet, instead of reaching out to their fellow Americans, joining their demand for equality, the Tea Party activists are abandoning democracy, and demanding that their erstwhile privileges be restored… or else. Sadly, their struggle to evolve has devolved from problematic to deadly