Earlier today, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the NAACP Nation Convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. What did media need in order to attend? That’s right, government issued photo identification (and a second form of identification too!), something both Holder and the NAACP stand firmly against when it comes to voting. Holder’s DOJ is currently suing Texas for “discriminatory” voter ID laws.
via Townhall.com.
The double standard appears obvious enough.
Denise Rich, the wealthy socialite and former wife of pardoned billionaire trader Marc Rich, has given up her U.S. citizenship – and, with it, much of her U.S. tax bill. Rich, 68, a Grammy-nominated songwriter and glossy figure in Democratic and European royalty circles, renounced her American passport in November, according to her lawyer.
Another fine Tax Avoidance / Laffer Curve example.
Good to see a rich Democrat in on the action (no pun intended.)
I was reading this story:
President Barack Obama will officially launch the battle over the impending fiscal cliff this morning, announcing a plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, while letting the rest of the tax cuts expire.
via Business Insider.
This got me thinking about how much money will really flow into the Treasury from “the rich”? I remember this from awhile back.
If you have not seen… it’s just plain excellent.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ?rel=0]
Another oldie but goodie:
For years, Kerry has invested millions in a number of green energy companies that have benefitted from the president’s efforts to aggressively subsidize the industry with taxpayer dollars.
These companies include Exelon, which received a $646 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2011 to build a solar facility in California and created only 20 permanent jobs, as well as Fisker Automotive, the fledgling electric car company that offshored its manufacturing operation to Finland after receiving a $529 million federal loan guarantee in 2010.
The loan guarantees, approved by the Department of Energy, were made possible by funding allocated in the 2009 stimulus bill, which Kerry supported. According to Kerry’s own office, the Senator “played a key role” in crafting the portions of the legislation designed to offer federal support for green energy projects.
Additionally, Kerry co-authored the controversial cap-and-trade legislation that would have effectively imposed a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions. Though the bill ultimately failed, the New York Times noted that Exelon and companies like it “would emerge as financial winners” if the legislation was enacted.
Kerry has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a venture capital firm run by John Doerr, a prominent Obama donor who served on the president’s Economy Recovery Advisory Board.
The firm, where former vice president Al Gore is a partner, invests heavily in alternative energy companies such as Fisker Automotive and Amonix Inc., a Nevada-based solar panel manufacturer that laid off two-thirds of its workforce earlier this year despite receiving nearly $6 million in federal tax credits.
Amonix was one of 16 companies (out of 27 overall) listed in Doerr’s “green-tech” portfolio to receive some form of federal support under Obama.
People — the problem in NOT in Washington. The problem in on Main Street. The goofballs in Massachusetts keep voting for this guy (the Lord knows we have our own corrupt politicians.) That said, how is the not a crime? And, where is the MSM on this story?
This story is actually over a month old. It’s been sitting in the “drafts” folder. Still just as relevant as the day it was published.
In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000. This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.
via ZeroHedge.
Whenever you see anything about the “unemployment” rate always keep in mind that number only tells part of the story. The bottom line is that things are really really bad out there. Well that and the MSM doesn’t want to tell you about it. Which is why you have to go to site like ZeroHedge to find out what’s really going on.
It must be spy on American’s week given posts on law enforcement asking for your cell data and how the NSA is going to expand its spying on Americans on a massive scale. Now we have this:
Cisco Systems told users of its new high-end home routers — in a roundabout way — they couldn’t use their routers for porn or to send certain types of e-mail and a whole list of other things. …
Last week, Cisco sent out an upgrade to the software that makes its routers work, called firmware. The upgrade affected two models, the EA4500 and the EA2700. Without asking, Cisco moved them to its “Cisco Connect Cloud” service. …
[T]he Cisco Connect Cloud Terms of Service forbids a whole bunch of things including porn, sending advertising e-mails — it won’t even allow you to “encourage any conduct” that would violate the law.
Wait, there’s more. Cisco reportedly [also] deleted a portion of [its] privacy statement that said Cisco would keep track of Connect Cloud customers’ “network traffic” and “Internet history,” ExtremeTech reported.
via Business Insider.
Does anyone think any company could have gotten away with this in the 1960’s or 1970’s? The outrage would have been tremendous.
We’re failing as a society to realize that it’s not polite to air our collective and individual dirty laundry. And we should be especially wary of sharing our family business with corporations that usually have a cozy relationship with the government.
This is very very very bad.
In addition to establishing Internet Freedoms and Net Neutrality we need to start a national discussion on Internet Privacy.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
via Wired.com.
Like most Wired articles this one goes into incredible detail about how the government spy’s on you and me.
Frankly, it’s kinda terrifying. I wrote in an earlier post about how we’re at the point in time where Fahrenheit 451 meets 1984. The government now has all the data in needs to know everything about your life. All they have to do now is choose to control it… oh, wait. Check out the Obama health care bill.
Somewhere right now a government jack-booted thug is ordering a few rat masks.
In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.
The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.
via NYTimes.com.
We’re very close to the junction of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.
There’s something too this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTyUvY66Mw?rel=0]
There is a similar situation going on with gun control in the states. The argument is always”we need the federal government to control all guns because they travel from state to state.”
This is a common theme with people on the “Left.” They realize that their policies are horrible and people will react by leaving. So it’s always not enough to just destroy one state/country, they need to destroy the whole world.
Enter the UN. Note that this week the brain trust at the UN said that we need a global tax to help the poor.
Beware the globalists.
So I’m reading two stories (here and here) about a new law that will effectively outlaw Roll-Your-Own tobacco stores. It’s something I kinda follow because I always thought it was a decent business model (until the government outlaws your business) and another fine example of what steps people will go through to avoid taxes.
In short:
A tiny amendment buried in the federal transportation bill to be signed today by President Barack Obama will put operators of roll-your-own cigarette operations in Las Vegas and nationwide out of business at midnight. …
The machines are used by customers who buy loose tobacco and paper tubes from the shop and then turn out a carton of finished cigarettes in as little as 10 minutes, often varying the blend to suit their taste. Savings are substantial – at $23 per carton, half the cost of a name-brand smoke – in part because loose tobacco is taxed at a lower rate.
via ReviewJournal.com.
And I was thinking about how sad this was for all the people who work in this industry: the store owners, their employees, the folks who manufacture the RYO machines, their families, the companies who make the cigarette tubes, and the loose pipe tobacco makers, and all of the folks who work in packaging all of these things.
And then… in the comment section of the Law Vegas article I read this:
James Fliess Jul. 6, 2012 | 2:47 p.m.Just a thought. My understanding, and maybe I’m wrong, is that cigarettes manufactured by these machines must cost (via taxes) as much as other cigarettes. How about this arrangement. The store sells the tobacco and supplies as they always have, but they do not have a rolling machine. A buisness next door does not sell tobacco or supplies, but it rents time on their rolling machine. Does it work?
Kudos to you Mr. James Fliess!!