Video Tax The Rich via Opednews.com
Hollywood Legend Ed Asner's Animated Short Outrages the Right
Quicklink submitted by Meryl Ann Butler Dec. 11,2012
Ed Asner, TV's Lou Grant, is as engaging and pointed as ever, as he tells the tale of the 99% and the 1%. Not to be missed! A perfect example of the arts at work. Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by award-winning artist Mike Konopacki, and written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. The 8 minute video shows how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren't so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land.
Coalition of Billionaires and Super-Rich Tell Obama: Make Us Pay More So the Poor Aren't Hurt: A group of prominent and wealthy Americans is calling for a rise in the estate tax.by Alex Kane at Alternet.org
December 11, 2012 |
...Forces on the right continue to refuse to agree to paying higher taxes as the January 1 deadline approaches, with automatic spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to go into effect. But other wealthy Americans are getting on the right side of things, and are calling for a raise in how much taxes they pay.
The proposal is significantly stronger than President Barack Obama’s proposal on the estate tax. The rich Americans part of this project are calling for the estate tax level to return to its pre-George W. Bush rates, which would “raise a half a trillion dollars—$536 billion—over 10 years.” Obama’s proposal, on the other hand, “leaves $256 billion of that revenue on the table,” the group says,
The proposal calls for a “4 million per couple exemption and a graduated rate starting at 45%.”
“I can afford to pay the estate tax, and I should,” said Disney. “I think a $4 million exemption for my husband and me combined is entirely reasonable. We have the choice of taxing a small percentage of the wealthiest in this country, or we can cut programs that benefit everyone. I don’t have any interest in compounding my already significant advantages, and the advantages of my children, with a weak estate tax, especially on the backs of the middle class.”
President Obama took a turn to the right somewhere and never looked back. Obama claimed to be on the side of average American citizens and yet is more interested in helping out the 1% . Obama said no to war and then became just another war president and is now aiming to attack Syria and eventually Iran and who knows how many other countries the US doesn't like or whose natural resources the US government and American and Western multinational corporations want to take control of . If the free market place doesn't open up a country to be pilfered by the USA and the West then NATO and the USA will bomb them.
America was in favor of Assad and Saddam and others before it was against them. From time to time these US/Western puppet regimes need to be taught who's the boss .
How Washington's Political Culture Turned a Community Organizer Into a Deadly Drone Killer President
A letter to president Obama. at Alternet.org December 11, 2012
...After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets. You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya.
You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us.
You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or (given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read. You came into office proclaiming a “ sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents ( 92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history.
Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution.
Though you deep-sixed the Bush administration name for it -- “the Global War on Terror” (ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) -- you’ve accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding. You’re still keeping uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised to close within a year. You’re overseeing planning that, according to recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at least 2017 or possibly well beyond .
You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed as director not a civilian but a four-star general you assumedly wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season). You’ve overseen the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military/ You’ve overseen the further post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine “Intelligence Community”
-- and though who remembers anymore, you even won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?
Meanwhile under the guiding hand of Nobel Peace Prize President Obama American Empire is building and expanding more military bases to encircle the globe. No nation is too little or too big to be targeted at some point by the USA military and Special Ops and CIA. America has to be ready in case one of their friendly dictators , despots and authoritarian regimes are faced with pro-democracy protests that need to be crushed in a timely manner. This is especially true after the Washington and Pentagon intelligence missed the boat on the so-called Arab Spring which Obama is now turning into the Arab Nightmare installing its choices of new authoritarian Muslim theocratic leaders and government against the wishes of the citizens of whatever nation.
The True Costs of Empire
Posted by David Vine at TomDispatch.com, December 11, 2012.
...We built, for example, 505 bases at the cost of billions of dollars in Iraq (without a single reporter uncovering anything close to that number until we abandoned all of them in 2011). Over the years, millions of soldiers, private contractors, spies, civilian employees of the U.S. government, special ops types, and who knows who else spent time on them, as undoubtedly did hundreds of reporters, and yet news of those American ziggurats was rare to vanishing. On the whole, reporters on bases so large that one had a 27-mile fortified perimeter, multiple bus lines, and its own electricity grid and water-bottling plant generally looked elsewhere for their “news.”
Our latest base-building mania: Washington’s expanding "empire of bases" for its secret CIA and Special Forces drone wars in the Greater Middle East goes almost unnoticed (except at sites like this). We now, for instance, have a drone base in the Seychelles, an archipelago that evidently needs an infusion of money. Unless you had the dough for a high-end wedding in the middle of the Indian Ocean or a vacation in “paradise,” you’ve probably never heard of the place.
No matter. You’re still paying for the deployment of 82 people to those islands to fly and land crash-prone drones in our now endless “covert” robotic air wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. With the so-called fiscal cliff now eternally on the media horizon, there’s been reporting recently on how your tax dollars are being spent, but do you have the faintest idea what it actually costs you to garrison the globe? No? Then you’re in good company, and the Pentagon certainly isn’t interested in telling you either.
Fortunately, basing expert and TomDispatch regular David Vine decided to make sense of what garrisoning the planet means to our pocketbooks. Read this piece and you’ll know what it costs all of us to build and support that Baseworld and more generally the American global military presence. Think about it: at the cost of possibly $2 trillion since 9/11, it should be one of the stories of the century. If it were, maybe by now we would be starting to pull back from the “military cliff.” Tom
and so it goes,
GORD.
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