POLITICS AND TAXATION
REPUBLICAN MUST READING
All good republicans should read Zbignew Brezinski's 215 page book, "The Grand Chessboard". A large and growing number of people believe that this book is the program for world domination that is being followed by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, and George W. Bush.
Mr. Brezinski says that there is only a short period when America can grab control of the center of the Eurasian continent. Once we pull the strings in the strategic center (also the home of the world's second largest oil reserves) we must then play off Europe against the Orient. This will assure that even a united Japan, China & Korea will not be strong enough to dislodge America from control of the planet's largest landmass.
In his summary, the author says the economic and human sacrifices required for the pursuit of world domination are not congenial to democratic instincts. Mr. Brezinski suggests that Americans would only support such sacrifices if they were provided with a deiect external challenge comparable to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Grand Chessboard was published in 1997.
This Nazi-like plan for world domination must have fallen on sympathetic eyes when our President read it. In 1942, during the Second World War, Prescott S. Bush (grandfather to our currnet President) was either a director of, or a top executive in four corporations that were seized by the US Government under the "Trading With the Enemy" act. The four corporations were: the Union Banking Corporation, the Holland-America Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, and the Silesian-American Trading Corporation. A financial godfather to all these businesses was the investment banking house, "Brown Brothers-Harriman". Prescott Bush was the managing director of Brown Brothers-Harriman.
Prescott's son George (our President's father) founded Zapata petroleum with a large loan from Brown Brothers-Harriman. For many years, starting in ther late fifties, the CIA used Zapata's oil rigs (on the Cay Sal Bank in the eastern Gulf of Mexico) to stage sabotage and terror raids to Cuba.
While John Deutch was CEO at Brown Brothers-Harriman it was purchased by Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank. Shortly afterward Mr.Deutch was named as the new Director of the CIA. In the week before 911 a vastly abnormal number of "put options" were sold on both United and American Airlines. (A put option is a bet that a stock will drop.) Perhaps by chance, the hijackers used those two airlines to smash American symbols. The great majority of the put options were purchased through Deutsche Banks's US subsidiary, Brown Brother-Harriman.
Read "The Grand Chessboard" by Zbignew Brezinski. Be a good Republican.
P.S. As of summer '08 Barak Obama's prime foreign policy advisor is . . . Zbignew Brezinski.
WOP - the Wealth Over People Curve
The "Wealth Over People" curve is the inverse of the Distribution of Wealth. All
the people in a nation are ordered by wealth (richest first) along the bottom
scale (called the "P" scale). Above the leftmost (richest) percent of people, we
place a dot at the maximum height (call it 100) of the vertical or Wealth "W"
scale. Then we record the wealth of each following percent of people as a dot at
their percent of the wealth of the richest one percent. In the USA the WOP curve is not a curve at all. It
looks like an "L". I suggest that government should tax wealth (not income) in
such a way as to (over time [say 30yrs]) make our wop look like a quarter circle
( a circle of radius 100 tangent to the W and P axes at 100). This still allows
the richest one percent to have a wealth of 7.5 times the wealth of the median
family. Business would no longer pay any tax.
The great majority of college graduates have never heard of the distribution of
Wealth, much less the WOP curve. Why not have the WOP curve introduced to all
students as an exercise in thier first algebra class?
Please check out the "L" Curve website. It's almost the same as the WOP. Be sure to zoom both in & all the way out.
Government Adopts Key Planned Parenthood Goal
Great news! You folks at Planned Parenthood can relax. The federal government
has embraced your cause . . . or . . . almost. Your end has been to reverse this
excessive, cancer-like growth of the human population. Now our government has
come onboard for reasons of its own. They see that they can free up trillions of
dollars (for the next few wars in central Asia) if our elderly and/or
incapacitated citizens should somehow catch a disease or infection (any of
several specially tailored ones) and die. It's the old "No Fat!, No Deadwood!"
routine, applied on a national scale. With the mass murder our troops (and their
space based weapons) will inflict upon the central Asians . . . world population
should start declining within two years! Congratulations!
MEAT BEES AND LIBERAL WHINING
I'm sick of liberal whining over our use of torture in Iraq. Of course the white
house okd it. It was at the request of the white house that Ashcroft's Office of
Legal Council prepared the memorandum on the use of torture in interrogation.
That rational for the use of selective torture ("necessity, and self-defense . .
. would eliminate any criminal liability") was sent to white house council,
Alberto Gonzales in August of 2002. A much longer legal opinion was submitted by
the pentagon to the white house in March 2003. The pentagon report detailed how
the administration could evade the United Nation's 1994 Convention on Torture,
and Congress's 1992 law forbidding our use of torture anywhere.
Yes. We torture! So what's new? For generations the CIA and all of our puppet
rulers have tortured. Ever hear of the Somozas? Bautista? Pinochet? the Sha of
Iran? Noriega? Marcos? Suharto? The list goes on and on. Do you sometimes watch
bees slowly drowning in your bee bottle? Liberals no doubt see this as torture
too. But what liberals fail to see is that mass starvation and/or murder is a
central componant of that "Nature" our environmentalists so adore. A single
spider will produce a thousand eggs. If she is lucky, she may catch one fly. The
mother eats most of that. So what do the little spiders eat? Each other. After a
few days only one, the most aggressive and voracious of the hatchlings,
survives. Throughout biology the storey is the same. Thousands of seeds or eggs
are produced. But only a few of the luckiest, and/or most agressive survive.
Our nation is merely following its animal instinct. It is taking sustenence (in
Iraq, oil) from any source where it can profitably be gained. Will this course
make us seem vicous? Yes, of course, when it is exposed. So our liberals are
well advised not to point to the holes in the spider's benevolent, democratic
mask. Not all torture chambers are abroad.
WEAK ON WICKED
Richard Dawkins (well known Oxford professor) makes a provokative statement. He says that those who
claim to reject evolution are either: 1)ignorant 2)stupid 3)insane or 4)wicked. Dawkins handles
convincingly the first three options. However, I feel his essay is weak on "wicked".
Let me flesh out the "wicked" option. Thomas Malthus' writings on population and economics were the
spark for both Wallace and Darwin's conceptions of the key ideas of evolution. Malthus said that any
biologic population expands at an increasing rate until it runs into some insurmountable barrier (food and
water shortage being the most common). When a population has grown to its envoirnment's carrying
capacity it will (roughly) remain there.
If each and every org consumed a subsistence diet, then all orgs would have (barely) enough, and could
reproduce. But that reproduction would dramaticly increase the population. With too many orgs and too
little food there would be large scale starvation. After the starved die, those who remain could again eat,
leading to the next wave of excessive births. Thus a population graph of equal consumers would vary
around the subsistence population like a set of saw teeth, or a sine wave.
But all orgs of a population do not consume equal amounts. The larger and more aggressive consume
a disproportionatly large amount. This leaves the weaker, less aggressive orgs with too little
to live on . . . and so they starve (or commit suicide). By this means of unequal consumption a population
can remain steady at the resourse saturation level. As Wallace and Darwin noted, it is precisly this
competition for dominance (which females are keenly sensitive to) that drives natural selection.
While most animals dominate thru physical means, a small man can dominate vast numbers of others by
vigorous use of an exceptional intelligence. One common method is to tell the marks what they badly
want to hear. For example: "You don't have to die! You can live forever! Just pay me and do as I say."
or, "Sure the King is evil. But you don't have to risk your life to overthrow him. God will punish him
when he dies!"
Thus those people who Mr. Dawkins classifies as wicked (those who falsly claim to reject Darwinism)
may be the most thourough going Darwinists of us all. They use the gullibility and ignorance of their
fellows to gain dominance over them. By using gile they (and perhaps many of their offspring) enjoy
a high standard of living while most men live at subsistence (and many quietly starve, or commit suicide).
P.S. The majority of violent deaths in the U.S. are suicides.
The Single Tax on Ground Rent
(modified from Wikipedia)
Henry George[economist 1839-1897] is best known for his argument that the "ground rent" on all land should be the prime source of revenue for government rather than going into private hands. The clearest statement of this view is found in his book,"Progress and Poverty". Although this could be done by nationalizing land and then leasing it out George preferred taxing unimproved land value (ground rent). He felt this would be less disruptive and controversial in a land where titles have already been granted to individuals. With this "single tax" the state could avoid having to tax any other types of wealth or transaction. Introducing a large land value tax causes the value of land titles to fall correspondingly. However, George was uncompromising about the idea of compensation for landowners. He saw the issue as a parallel to the earlier debate about compensating former slave owners.
Modern economists like the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize winner Milton Friedman agree that Henry George's land tax is potentially beneficial because unlike other taxes, land taxes impose no excess burden on the economy, and thus stimulate more rapid economic growth. Modern-day environmentalists have resonated with the idea of the earth as the common property of humanity and some have endorsed the idea of ecological tax reform, including substantial taxes or fees on pollution as a replacement for "command and control" regulation.
A tax on "ground rent" (what you could still lease your land for if everything on it burned) was first proposed by a group of 16th Century Frenchmen called the Fisicrats.
This group sought to bring logical analysis to questions of government. They reasoned that the owner of a parcel had a valid right to all that his buildings or his crops could earn. But the bare ground or "locational value" of his land was in no way due to his efforts. The locational value (ground rent) is increased only because more people come to live near it. They felt that since it is society as a whole which gives ground rent its value . . . then society should regain some (or even all) of that value in taxes.
See HenryGeorge.org
THOUGH ATTACKED, WE MUST REMAIN THE BULLY
Many ask why we were attacked on 9/11. I suggest that it was because we have played the bully on the world stage for more than a century. Generally our aggression has been centered on Latin America. But our massive support for Israel's brutality against the Palestinians during the last score of years , as well as our crushing of Iraq, has reasonably angered the Moslem world. Many writers ask when America will change its foreign policy from the pursuit of world empire to the pursuit of an equitable, peaceful world? I answer that America will not, and should not abandon its quest to rule the planet.
American foreign policy is a history of massive, long term support for brutal, corrupt, right wing tyrants who will toe our line (the Samozas, Chiang Kai-shek, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Suharto, etc, etc). However ugly this makes us, our foreign policy should not change. Big fish east little fish. Ethics and morality play no role. History only records the actions of the top players, the big fish. No one remembers their prey. Wealth is one form of power (the ability to have others do your bidding). And power is like wealth in that once you've had it for awhile . . . no one questions where it came from. Liberals recoil from the quest for dominance. But liberal thought itself is contradictory. The bind is this: Liberals accept the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you). However, they also tend to accept evolution rather than creationism. The central tenant of evolution is "Survive!"
When resources grow short the two principles come into conflict . . . and the rule of survival walks all over the golden rule. Lilly Tomlin had it right, "The problem with the rat race is . . .
Even if you win, you're still a rat." In history we see the celebration of brutality.
P.S. I'm not really a right winger. I'm a liberal progressive. But with Obama putting hawks and neo liberal economists into his cabinet. . .thought it would be good for progressives to look at their side of the argument. Jan. 2009