In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.
How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?
Terrorism is defined as “violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose.” This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?
Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt – and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.
So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves against their will.
In America , terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it. The US war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence in self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.
That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.
After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number – though no one knows exactly what that number is – of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a [lifetime] privilege license [or $50 per year for an annual license], plus taxes on any profits they made.
Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.[...]
Even though small-time bloggers aren’t exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any “activity for profit,” says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies “whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year,” he adds.
So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there’s the potential for it to be lucrative – and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising – the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads – regardless of how much or little money is actually generated – qualifies a blog as a business.
In just six months, on January 1, 2011, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves. OnJanuary 1, 2011, here’s what happens… (read it to the end, so you see all three waves)… First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts forinvestors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011. Personal income tax rates will rise. The topincome tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rateat which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). Thelowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates inbetween will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptionswill again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as highermarginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:
You know how, like, your grandparents have no choice but to buy the convertible bonds of casino companies and trade Chinese penny stocks because the rate on their money market fund is basically 2 basis points?
Yeah.
So, the reason for the seemingly endless drought in responsible yield options for savers is that banks needed to “reflate” themselves and “rebuild their balance sheets” for the good of the system. Yeah “The System“, that’s the ticket. So rates were brought down to effectively zero in an effort to stabilize housing and ensure liquidity for businesses who wanted to borrow or hire.
And since the part about stabilizing housing and helping business owners to hire people was a scam and was demonstrably unsuccessful, we can really only point to the reflating banks part and say that something has been accomplished.
Except the banks are doing a lot more than shoring up balance sheets with the zero-cost dollars they have been gorging on over the last 18 months – in addition to reporting record profitability and almost record compensation levels, they’ve also been attempting to buy both sides of the aisle, lobbying like there’s no tomorrow in our nation’s capital.
Get a load of this (from CNN Money):
The financial industry has spent $251 million on lobbying so far this year as lawmakers hammered out new rules of the road for Wall Street, according to the latest lobbying reports compiled by a watchdog group.
The financial sector spent more than any other special interest group from April through the end of June — a whopping $126 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics‘ latest estimates. Wall Street banks, as well as insurance and real estate firms, hiked the amount they spent on lobbying by 12% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year.
And really, what are you going to do about it? Probably nothing, because this has been going on for almost 2 years and you are busy DVRing True Blood and downloading apps that map out the closest Chipotle locations.
Lobbying is what industries do when pending legislation threatens their future profitability. This is perfectly normal, except in the case of the banks they are using yourmoney to lobby against protections that may save you from the next Frenzy-Depression combo that is surely around the corner.
And it is Your Money. Between TARP (which was paid off because of the reflation derby), extraordinary assistance, stupid-low interest rates and other treats from Congress, banks have been given carte blanche, much of it directly from taxpayers.
And now this money is being used to fund an army of roughly 240 lobbyists, many of them ex-government officials who “know how the system works”.
As always I remind readers that this has been going on for quite some time under Presidents of BOTH parties… ~jude
So . . . you think you know quite a bit about Obama and his band of thieves.
You don’t know anything yet. Read on all of this as it all comes together in the last part…….. a must read.
-
This is an interesting story put together from various articles and TV shows by the British Times paper. It shows what Obama and his friends are really all about. It’s not hope and change, it is money.
I warn you, the first part is a little boring, but stick with it. The
second part connects all the dots for you (it will open your eyes). The end explains how Obama and all his cronies will end up as
multi-billionaires. (It’s definitely worth the read. You will not be disappointed).
National Security Adviser James Jones issued a statement that begins: ‘The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.
The White House responded swiftly and sharply to publication Sunday evening of more than 91,000 secret documents painting a bleak picture of the Afghanistan war, calling the leak “irresponsible” and saying that the source – the whistleblower website WikiLeaks — “opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”
WikiLeaks said its “Afghan War Diary” consists mostly of reports “written by soldiers and intelligence officers … describing lethal military actions involving the United States military.” WikiLeaks gave three news organizations – The New York Times, The (British) Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel – advance access to the “war logs” trove.
White House National Security Adviser James Jones issued a statement that begins: “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.
I actually first read this when I picked up a copy of Time magazine [remember those?]It was a flimsy copy of the original Time and the article took up almost 8 pages…
So there is quite a bit missing here but the general idea is still intact. Despite the promised transparency from Senator Dodd and Senator Frank, whose two committees wrote the bill, the largely brokered on June 24th when committee members, their staff, lobbyists and reporters spent 20 hours crowded into a large senate hearing room, where last minute deals were made on the fly until 5 o’clock in the morning…
~jude/rockingjude
Illustration by John Ritter for TIME
By STEVEN BRILL– Fri Jul 2, 6:45 pm ET
The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME.
Two weeks ago, along a marble corridor in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, I watched about 40 well-dressed men (and two women) delivering huge value for their employers. Except that we, the taxpayers, weren’t employing them. The nation’s banks, mortgage lenders, stockbrokers, private-equity funds and derivatives traders were.
They were lobbyists – the best bargain in Washington. Capitol Tax Partners, for example, is one of 1,900 firms that house more than 11,000 lobbyists registered to operate in Washington. Last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), firms like Capitol Tax were paid a total of $3.49 billion for unraveling the mysteries of the tax code for a variety of businesses. According to Capitol Tax co-founder Lindsay Hooper, his firm provided “input and technical advice on various tax matters” to such clients as Morgan Stanley, 3M, Goldman Sachs, Chanel, Ford and the Private Equity Council, which is a trade group trying to head off a plan to increase taxes on what’s called carried interest, a form of income enjoyed by the heavy hitters who run venture-capital and other types of private-equity funds. (Time Warner, the parent company of TIME magazine, is also a client of Capitol Tax Partners.)
Since 2009, the Private Equity Council has paid Capitol Tax, which has eight partners, a $30,000-a-month retainer to keep its members’ taxes low. Counting fees paid to four other firms and the cost of its in-house lobbying staff, the council reported spending $4.2 million on lobbying from the beginning of 2009 through March of this year. Now let’s assume it spent an additional $600,000 since the beginning of April, for a total of $4.8 million. With other groups lobbying on the same issue, the overall spending to protect the favorable carried-interest tax treatment was maybe $15 million. Which seems like a lot – except that this is a debate over how some $100 billion will be taxed, or not, over the next 10 years. (Read about lobbyists and health care.)
And what did the money managers get for their $15 million investment? While lawmakers did manage to boost the taxes of hedge-fund managers and other folks who collect carried interest as part of their work, they agreed to a compromise (tucked into a pending tax bill) that will tax part of those earnings at the regular rate and another part at a lower capital-gains rate. The result? A tax bite about $10 billion smaller than what the reformers wanted.
It seems like a miracle that our anointed leader was able to convince BP to establish a $20 billion slushescrow fund to compensate those hurt by the ongoing oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico. After all, he had no constitutional power to force them to do so; so had to resort to Chicago-style arm twisting.
But, let us take a closer look at the effect on BP’s finances:
1. BP will establish a $20 billion fund, but will pay only $7 billion into it during 2010.
2. BP is a British corporation, but has a very large operating entity in the US.
3. By Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAP), BP must book the entire $20 billion expense in the year accrued, i.e., year the liability is incurred. Therefore, they will book a $20 billion expense in 2010, reducing their US tax liability by $7 billion.
4. Our anointed leader also convinced this massive corporation to show their concern for the “small people” by withholding dividends to their shareholders for the last 3 quarters of 2010. This reduces their outward cash flow by about $7.5 billion, including approximately 40% of that amount to US citizens. Assuming that the Bush tax cuts will survive through 2010, the US Treasury will lose another $450 million in taxes on that amount. We won’t even discuss the effect on the US economy.
Let us put the results into a table easily understood by the “small” people:
BP Cash Flow:
o Escrow funding ($7 billion)
o Dividend saving $7.5 billion
o Tax savings $7 billion
o Net favorable cash flow : $7.5 billion
US Treasury Tax Receipts:
o BP Corporate income tax (-$7.5 billion)
o BP Shareholders (-$0.45 billion)
o Net unfavorable tax receipts ($7.95 billion)
I guess we really should expect this. After all, our annointed leader is the most inexperienced man in any room he enters.
Scorecard:
BP Corporate Bean Counters – +1
Washington Tax Cheating Ambulance Chasers – 0
American People – We Got BP (Bean @#$%&!)
This isn’t so hard to understand – BP made their largest political contributions to Obama’s campaign. Obama plays politics acting tough on BP. We pay. Anything different from Obama’s corrupt deals?
Actually, I admire BP for their deal-making ability. After all BP is not a fly by night operation and Obama thought he and his minimal business experienced tax cheats could take on BP.
