Posted by: Fred ||
02/14/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Communism/Organized Crime, what ever you want to call the desperation of government spending, out of control, trying and trying to create a Utopia that for some reason is always just out of reach. And the people just roll over. Europeans have always laid their throats bare to such leftist governments. This is the very sad state so called progressives are dragging America towards, also.
#4
Champ's so-called "income inequality" theme and his new Obamacare and MyRA investment schemes finds their roots in a parallel effort of redistribution. It's not about healthcare or individual investment, it's about seizure. They've already herded everyone out of the banks and into the stock market through low or essentially no interest disincentives.
These leftist, give-away governments are all flat broke. Their desperation and willingness to do anything [wars, crisis, foreign meddling, fabricated ecological disasters] to divert attention and remain in power is quite obvious.
#5
The public sector work force, much of the law profession, grant and subsidy recipients - all of them will do literally anything to keep the gravy train of magic checks coming.
By that, I mean ANYTHING. Confiscating saved wealth of private citizens is just the beginning. The next step will be herding private citizens off to be tortured to death in concentration camps, if they feel they can get away with it.
All these years of focusing on welfare recipients got us off the trail of the real problem. Yes, the bloated welfare class is a bad thing. But the far greater danger is the government apparatus that maintains people in that state in order to "justify" an income doing something unproductive where they don't have to work very hard and can retire early.
A similar dynamic has occurred with the regulatory environment. The regulations are bad, true, but the people in that industry are the real danger.
How much money actually goes to the end user and how much stays in the pockets of toes who populate the government infrastructure of the welfare state? All of the people forming that infrastructure would send private citizens to the Ted Kennedy Memorial Reeducation Kamp to die of slave labor if in the process nobody touched their precious government funded income stream. Your local community college professor, the mousy public librarian who lives on your street, the local 911 dispatcher, the shovel-leaning public works guy, the paper shuffling mid level bureaucrat at NMFS or HUD or NASA, all of them and more, would literally kill you to live in comfort off of wealth stolen from you that you worked so hard to produce. If you believe otherwise you are fool of the highest order. The fact that it hasn't happened (yet) here doesn't mean that it never can.
Confiscating the money you have saved is only the first step.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
02/14/2014 5:47 Comments ||
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#6
I'm betting this doesn't apply to the Rothchilds, Soros, et al.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/14/2014 7:23 Comments ||
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#7
Is there anyway to cash in my IRA funds and get them to a safe place? I figure that my hard earned funds won't be there when I need them in a year or so.
If the gov't steals all savings it's time for us to make use of the 2nd.
#11
In the 1930's there was very little work. Folks walked along the railroad tracks picking up discarded spikes and plates in the 1930's to sell as scrap iron. Any guesses as to where much of that iron eventually turned up ?
#12
Bottom line, socialism is a failure. Capitalism and Free Enterprise is where miracles happen if you work. Read here that American GDP is twice or more than other parts of the world because Americans are more productive. Genuine capitalism requires being productive. Or you starve or go on socialist welfare which is always little or nothing in comparison to being or working for a Capitalist.
#13
The problem OE is that Free Market Capitalism is not conducive to atocratic control. The terminology is screwed up now-a-days. The market is far from free.
Cronyism, rent seeking, corporate welfare and unbounded power grabbing are not a Free Market. TBTF means that the gov't has to take over. Privatize profits and socialize risk, THAT'S now the American way.
#14
You can do this once. It is literally killing the golden goose. You will feast for a night, then starve. As such, it is nothing more or less than an admission of failure of the welfare state.
It is a primitive and ultimately ineffective parasite which kills its host.
#16
Step 1: create an retirement vehicle that only invests in the GIVERnment. This was proposed by Obama in the state of the union.
Step 2: tell all brokerage firms to divest IRA and 401k into new retirement vehicle. Penalties for early withdraw will be 100% tax. Retroactive to January 1, 2014.
#17
Nope - I think the next step is to create a 'Financial Crisis' which can be blamed on Wall Street.
Then comes 'ObamaInvest' much like 'ObamaCare' but for investments and all IRA, 401K's and Pensions must now meet stringent guidelines which boil down to 'invest only in Government managed investments or pay a substantial fee tax.' Everyone gets an account and the same payout no matter what, if anything, they pay in.
If you like your IRA, 401k, or Pension - you can keep it. It just won't be there when you need it.
[DAWN] A SECOND attack on a cinema in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. that left 13 dead on Tuesday was followed yesterday by an attack just outside the city on the house of a family associated with an anti-Taliban aman laskhar -- an attack in which nine people were killed. That is the bloody backdrop to the government's efforts to talk to the TTP. Alarmingly, the government seems unable to do anything more than suggest to the TTP that dialogue should not take place with violence in the background. Cleverly, the TTP continues to deny it has carried out specific attacks while not quite condemning the violence or the choice of target. Even if it is not elements within the TTP itself that have carried out the recent attacks, there is little doubt that the targets chosen on Tuesday and Wednesday fit the TTP's definition of the enemy and are therefore deemed worthy of attack.
Meanwhile, ...back at the pie fight, Bella grabbed the cocoanut cream... the vulnerable in Peshawar and surrounding areas -- in fact, most of KP and Fata presently -- must surely be on higher alert than usual because the cyclical violence against practices deemed un-Islamic by the Taliban appears to be part of the latest scheme of things. Attacking cinemas is the quintessential soft target and may be part of the myrmidons' understanding that were the security forces to be attacked at the moment, there would be a price to pay. Where does that leave cinema operators and other usual targets like audio and video outlets and mobile phone sellers? In the past, knowing that there's little the police or security forces can do to keep them safe, shops or locations that have drawn the Taliban's ire have put up banners pledging that no activities would be conducted that would displease the myrmidons. The attack on the cinemas in particular means that what the Death Eaters do not expect to win through talks, they will continue to pursue through other means. All sides must know this, and yet the pretence continues of peace through negotiations.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/14/2014 00:00 ||
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Robert Bigelow, founder and President of Bigelow Aerospace, believes that space property rights are essential in order to establish a space industry operating beyond Low Earth Orbit.
In an effort to move forward the discussion on property rights, Bigelow is seeking clarification from the Federal Aviation Administrations Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) on whether launching a Moon habitat allows them to have a zone of operation in which other persons are prevented from entering.
Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of my otherwise quite enjoyable job as a college professor has been the requirement to assign grades to students. Given that we're now about halfway through implementation of the Affordable Care Act--which even President Obama is happy to call "Obamacare"--it seems appropriate to assign midterm grades. These are not intended as a forecast of the final grade; moreover, implementation of Obamacare is the responsibility of many thousands of individuals, not just one. Nevertheless, as President Truman's legendary Oval Office desk sign reminds us, "The buck stops here" when it comes to presidential leadership. So whether President Obama likes it or not, the public and historians are likely to base their assessment of his performance on how well his "signature piece of domestic legislation" is implemented.
First Grading Standard: Promises vs. Performance
Both as a candidate and as president, Barack Obama has made at least 80 promises related to health care. For purposes of grading, I have focused on the 8 most consequential.
Promise #1: Universal Coverage. Candidate Obama promised on June 23, 2007: "I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American." The latest CBO projections last May show that as of the end of 2013, Obamacare will have reduced the number of nonelderly uninsured by less than 4 percent. This figure excludes 11 million unauthorized immigrants (51 percent of whom are uninsured). Even when Obamacare is fully implemented in 2017, it will cover only 92 percent of the nonelderly population who are not unauthorized immigrants (nearly everyone age 65 and above is already covered by Medicare), and 84.7 percent of that group already had coverage in March 2009, a full year before Obamacare was signed into law. Even if we concede that other countries relying on an individual mandate have failed to drive their uninsured rates below 1 percent (Switzerland) or 1.5 percent (Netherlands), Obamacare will close only 53 percent of the gap that existed when President Obama was sworn into office. Grade: F. Check out the other ACA promises at the Weekly Standard site. The country was sold snake oil, a Pig in a Poke (at least to about 40% of the people). Many people have been skeptical from the outset--approximately 60% disagreed with Obama's signature legislation (son of HilleryCare). Rantburgers saw the train wreck coming before its inception. The 2014 elections should be interesting as liberal politicians distance themselves from this signature legislation.
#1
I suspect the 'Hildebeast' and her crew are very busy working on a 2016 campaign, ACA fix. If Champ and his regime can just hold it together until the election.
We must never let a crisis go to waste.
[sarc off]
The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels 1984 and Animal Farm gave us the word Orwellian. That adjective reflects a vast governments efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself.
America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didnt Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands? Have the edicts on the barn wall of Animal Farm been changed again, with the production of new oil and gas suddenly going from bad to good?
Does anyone remember that the Affordable Care Act was sold on the premise that it would guarantee retention of existing health plans and doctors, create 4 million new jobs, and save families $2,500 a year in premiums, all while extending expanded coverage to more people at a lower cost?
Only in Orwells world of doublespeak could raising taxes, while the costs of millions of health plans soars, be called affordable. Is losing your existing plan and doctor a way of retaining them?
The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that Obamacare would keep hours worked and potential output during the next 10 years lower than they would be otherwise. That nonpartisan verdict should be bad news for workers.
Not in our brave new world. The Obama administration says it is pleased that workers will now be freed from job lock. What is job lock a made-up Newspeak word right out of 1984? Work fewer hours, make less money, and create fewer outputs and be happy.
About every January since 2009, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay. Is the detention facility now sort of virtually closed in the manner that Syrian president Bashar Assad and his chemical weapons are now virtually gone as Obama decreed years ago, and in the manner that we are still hunting down the murderers in Benghazi who were supposedly outraged over a video? Is there an Orwellian memory hole where these embarrassing proclamations are disposed?
In 2004, many in the media reported that George W. Bush, the demonized Emmanuel Goldstein of our era, had overseen a jobless recovery. Unemployment at election time in 2004 was 5.4 percent.
Yet since January 2009, only two months have seen joblessness dip slightly below 7 percent. A record 90 million able-bodied Americans are not participating in the workforce. Yet the president, in Orwellian doublespeak fashion, recently claimed that the job picture is good. If 5.4 percent unemployment was once called a jobless recovery, are we now in a jobless recovery from a jobless recovery?
In 2013, the IRS confessed that it had targeted particular political groups based on their names or political themes a Big Brother intrusion into private lives that was revealed at about the same time the Associated Press and National Security Agency eavesdropping scandals came to light. During the initial media frenzy, President Obama blasted the politicization of the IRS as outrageous.
After the IRS was confirmed to be delaying the tax-exempt requests of conservative groups at a far greater rate than their liberal counterparts, the agencys director, Douglas Shulman, stepped down at the end of his term. His replacement, acting commissioner Steven Miller, subsequently resigned from the agency. And the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt decisions, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before Congress. She and Joseph H. Grant, commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, both abruptly retired from the IRS.
Congressional committees and the treasury inspector general for tax administration found that groups loosely associated with the Tea Party were more likely to have their tax-exempt requests put on hold than other nonprofits. Yet recently, President Obama concluded of this entire mess that it did not entail even a smidgen of corruption.
It takes Orwells doublethink to explain how a scandal might have rated an outrageous before the people in charge quit, retired, or invoked the Fifth Amendment, and then, after their embarrassing departures, was reinvented as an episode without a smidgen of corruption.
In politics, of course, Left and Right, conservative and liberal, make up stuff. But Orwell, who also blasted the rise of European fascism, focused more on the mind games of the statist Left.
Why? He apparently feared that the Left suffered an additional wage of hypocrisy in more openly proclaiming the noble interests of the people. Because of those supposedly exalted ends of equality and fairness, statists were more likely to get a pass from the media and public for the scary means they employed to achieve them.
Right now in America, the words and deeds of both past and present become reality only when the leaders put them in the correct service of the people.
#1
American Exceptionalism from Government Motors, really. They understand the message while playing three card monte behind the scenes for crony capitalism.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.