The recent Supreme Court decision to allow corporations unlimited spending on political ads was the right decision in the case. It is not something we should be cheering for in the larger sense of what it means for American politics.
One good thing about this decision is that it levels the playing field by granting corporations the same advantages Unions and other organizations have when it comes to political campaigns and support of candidates. Another positive twist is that the level of awareness and debate could increase significantly; specifically by exposing a segment of the population who would otherwise be ill-informed in general about politics because what they know is only what they see in TV advertisements in their respective markets.
But this case is an isolated one, which does not address the real problem…the fact that too much money in politics not only adds to corruption but also makes it virtually impossible for the average citizen to campaign and compete in elections.
Many people on the right argue that this is about the First Amendment right to free speech. I don’t agree with that. The corporation is not an individual that can participate in rights. For example, does a corporation (remember it’s a piece of paper) have the right to keep and bear arms? How about the right to a speedy trial, why would it need that if it is never put in a jail cell? How about the right to the pursuit of happiness? Is a piece of paper capable of being happy or sad?
We have structures in place to allow individuals of a political opinion or ideology to band together and fund the propagation of their ideas. That is a healthy way of getting the opinion of the people into the public view. But I doubt very seriously that Nike will be concerned with individual tax rates if they can find a politician who will grant them special privileges for their business.
I think most Americans would agree that special interests, corporations and lobbyists already have way too much influence over politics and the legislative process. The Court’s decision opens the floodgates for corporations to increase their influence without limits. How does that serve the people? How does that help the people make their voices heard? Will this ratchet up the polarization of debate, further fueling the divisions in the electorate?
Insurance companies are corporations. How on earth will letting them spend freely on politics increase competition in the marketplace allowing us to negotiate lower prices and policies that fit our lifestyles and budgets. What about multinational corporations, which have no allegiance to America but will now have the opportunity to influence our political process through unlimited funding to promote ideologies that serve their particular interests? Think about the potential hazards this could lead to…special interests on steroids. Corporations will be able to fund the people who are friendly to them regardless of what it means to this society and our freedom.
The case I would like the Supreme Court to decide is if the current campaign finance laws are constitutional and actually serve the people. I would argue that we need significant limits on campaign financing activities. We should have a system that encourages average individuals to serve in public office. Today we have a system that encourages wealthy lawyers who can rarely avoid scandal as their power and influence is auctioned to the highest bidder(s).
In short, the money should be funneled through individuals, have low limits and be tax-free. Corporate profits should be directed to equity growth, dividends and R&D; allowing individual investors the opportunity to participate in the wealth generating machine that corporations are capable of being.
George Soros, one of the wealthiest men in the world, as well as one of the largest hedge fund owners, is behind Obamacare.
Health Care for America Now (HCAN), endorsed by President Obama as the coalition pushing his health-care (euthanasia) reform, is a project of billionaire British-agent speculator George Soros, his Tides Foundation, and the Saul Alinsky counter-insurgency networks Soros used to ramp up the Obama Presidential candidacy.
Though labor unionists will come into Washington on June 25 to rally and lobby for the Obama “reform,” the HCAN organization sponsoring the D.C. events explicitly opposes the single-payer health-care plan favored by labor and by most Americans.
The group was established in July 2008 as an adjunct to the Soros operations supporting the Obama candidacy. At the outset, HCAN National Campaign Director Richard Kirsch wrote (July 16, 2008, Huffingtonpost) under the headline, “Why Not Single-Payer?” “I want to take a moment and address those of you who have been asking why Health Care for America Now is not focusing on creating a single-payer health insurance system.” Kirsch explains that he used to believe in that sort of thing, but came to realize it would scare people.
HCAN has a $40 million budget, with $10 million pitched in by The Atlantic Philanthropies — a Bermuda-based organization fronted by Soros acolyte Gara LaMarche. Also in the money mix: notorious Democratic donors Herb and Marion Sandler, the left-wing moguls who made billions selling subprime mortgages and helped Soros fund his vast network of left-wing activist satellites. By their side is billionaire Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, whose “Progressive Future” youth group has dispatched clueless volunteers armed with clip-boards and literature bashing Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to scare up support for Obamacare.
And two more left-wing heavyweights joining the HCAN parade: the corruption-plagued SEIU (which has battled numerous embezzlement scandals among its chapters across the country while crusading for consumer and patients’ rights) and Obama’s old chums at fraud-riddled ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Oh the tangled web we weave. The tentacles of all the progressive organizations are intertwined as much as the sub-prime market was woven throughout the stock market. These progressive groups with their new super majority finally feel as though they can pass through their agenda.
It doesn’t cease to amaze me how connected all of these groups are. This begs the question – who is the head of the snake? Is it George Soros? There was a lot of speculation and perhaps a lot of fact, of his attempting to bring down the United Kingdom. Many of these radical left wing groups are funded and run by the same individuals. I hope that somebody can someday figure out the exact tree/web/links in the chain, and make a movie out of it. It could be called The Twilight Zone – never mind that movie already exists… but perhaps something similar!
George Soros is also involved in another scheme that has not received much attention at all. He has received over $300K of taxpayer dollars to open a restaurant in a very run-down, poor area of New York where, on average, people only make about $30K per year and pay their taxes like law-abiding citizens. Mind you, this man made millions, if not billions, last year during the collapse so please keep that in mind as you read about his ties to progressive groups, his encouragement for government run health care and cap & trade, etc.
George Soros is opening up another Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in the old rust belt of up-state New York; Troy. His company, Soros Strategic Partners, owns over 70% of the famous rib joint among other things like moveon.org, factcheck.org, hedge funds, not to mention he is also the single largest contributor to the DNC.
When Soros found the right building to create an additional franchise, the building came with a gift of approximately $218K of back taxes. Normally, the back taxes on a building would be tacked on to the purchase price of the property but, because it’s Soros and as we’ve seen with ACORN and his other groups, he can just bully his way into welfare for the rich and additional perks that men like him could afford on their own.
Further, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que is getting a five-year deferment on the property tax that improvements on its property would have otherwise obligated it to. That five-year lag will continue for 20 years.
Meaning that Dinosaur Bar-B-Que will spend the next two decades paying less than its fair share of property taxes – while the locally owned businesses against which it competes will have to pay their full obligation.
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que is also being given exemption from $60,000 in sales tax for materials used to improve its building, and the $53,000 fee for recording its mortgage is being waived.
These are just further examples of progressive policies and individuals becoming cancers on our society.
To add insult to injury Congress, with their lovely perks, and inside the beltway lifestyle, would obviously keep their benefits and would not be required to participate in the plan. If Congress, the very people who are proposing this rubbish, are unwilling to use it themselves, that should set off alarms for every American.
Union workers enjoy some of the most extensive and costliest health benefits, and union officials complained their members would be unfairly burdened by a health care tax because their contracts cannot be changed quickly enough to avoid it.
Union members also represent one of the biggest and most powerful Democratic constituencies and their support of any health care reform proposal is viewed as essential to getting a bill passed in Congress.
Baucus has proposed the tax threshold on health care benefits be set higher than the cost of policies available to federal employees and he has proposed exempting until 2013 those plans negotiated as part of union contracts.
Isn’t there some type of law that states all men and women are created equal? Doesn’t singling out one or two groups go against that entirely?
If Obamacare is passed, this will be used as a backdoor method for Card Check because more will be enticed to join unions, where they still have a choice of their own health-care - ”mark my words!”
Oh, and next time I hear somebody bring up crony capitalism, I’ll be sure to wave several examples of “crony Capitol Hillism” in their face to make my point that corruption and greed go hand in hand and it’s no different whether you are in DC or NYC.
Cash for clunkers sounds like a great idea. It seems so simplistic: I get money for turning in my old car. However, there is much more to this than meets the eye.
Cash for clunkers is another brilliant liberal idea, and by brilliant, I mean brain dead.
Liberals say that if you trade in your old used car, you will receive $4.5K for a new one. It can’t be the basic if it comes out of D.C., so why isn’t the media challenging this piece of legislation? We all know the answer to that one…ask ABC.
There are numerous downsides to this bill:
- If dealers anticipate a rebate for a trade in, they will only increase their base price for the car to make up for it.
-People drive old cars because they cannot afford new ones so how will $4.5K actually help? The down payments that many banks are asking for are much higher due to risk and tighter lending practices. The monthly payments are also tough to meet if you are of low income status. I just bought a new Mini Cooper and have a great credit/beacon score… but because I couldn’t put down $15K on the spot, I couldn’t get a bank loan. I had to settle for the higher rate at the BMW dealership.
-This will also increase the cost of used cars. If more people are trying to purchase new cars, then used car dealerships will suffer and will be forced to raise their prices to make a profit, rather than make a profit from volume of sales. In essence, this will hurt the lower middle class and the poor – the very people he professes to help.
-Charities will be negatively affected by this law. There are over 350K charities that are used car donors. These charities will see a direct decrease in donations if people believe they are getting a kick-back. These charities will have to cut staff and operations, causing more unemployment and fewer used cars for those who really need them.
-The proposed cost of this law would be $4B. This is another “government pays” bill. Therefore, one would think that maybe this is another bill that is circular… The Government will tax you to help pay for your car… why not just pay for it yourself then? All estimates that come out of the government are conservative at best; therefore, you can and should always take on another 50% to the original value.
-Other industries may suffer if there are consumer shifts. Priorities of consumers will shift based on whether they think they are getting a better deal. If cars go up something else will inevitably go down.
-The fact that the Democrats are global warming alarmists happens to be another excuse they will use. They will exclaim that used cars cause more pollution… I don’t believe that in the slightest, so I won’t even touch on it. There is still plenty we do not know about hybrids and whether or not they truly are as effective as people would like to believe. I also do not believe in the hoax or the hype – ’nuff said. Personally, my Mini Cooper’s gas mileage goes up as it gets older…just sayin’
-This is another pay-to-play scheme to pay off the $400M campaign donations given to Democrats and Obama by the UAW. If old cars are scrapped, new cars will have to be manufactured and purchased and more money into the pockets of the UAW.
This type of legislation has been tried before, in another country no less:
Germany has used a similar program for a few months, and of course it has actually cost at least three times more than government “estimates.” More than this, studies of the German experience have shown it has largely led to a mere shift of spending priorities. Consumer electronics sales fell in ratio to automobile spending meaning there has been no net gain for Germany’s economy.
It is so interesting and disturbing how Obama and the Democrats have gone after charities and small business. Charities have been attacked on both the stimulus front, the taxable deductions front, and now this idea for clunkers. A study showed that conservatives give more to charity than any other ideological group, because they do so through their churches. These churches are involved in many charities across the nation and it’s quite disheartening to see the Liberals be so antipathetic towards religious movements.
Obama and the Democrats are hell-bent on making people so dependent on the government, and only the government, that they will soon need to get their diapers changed by them too. This is insanity!
It comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following the auto industry news, that GM will be filing for bankruptcy this week and their first action was filing for bankruptcy protection this morning.
On Friday, GM’s stock was well below the $1 mark and continued to fall throughout the day.
The bankruptcy filing, made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, marks the climax of a lengthy debate over the auto maker’s future after it sought a bailout from the U.S. government in December to stay alive. In the end, GM couldn’t complete its restructuring out of court and filed for bankruptcy-court protection to get billions more in aid from U.S. taxpayers.
The question now facing 56,000 auto workers, 3,600 GM dealers and the Obama administration: Will it work?
The U.S. government has agreed to provide GM with another $30 billion in aid, in addition to the $20 billion the auto maker has already borrowed, to see it through its restructuring and exit from bankruptcy protection. In return, the government will get a controlling stake in the company. The Canadian and Ontario governments are putting in $9.5 billion for a 12.5% stake.
I thought that Obama didn’t want to be in the car business? It seems like the government is becoming fascist, as Thomas Sowell recently noted:
We’re not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that’s the route we seem to be going.
I’m sorry, but this really is getting insane and it only proves the most recent article coming out of the Russian Pravda paper, no less, entitled, “American Capitalism Gone With a Whimper.”
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?
The government has never been able to run any type of business well, mainly due to the fact that the majority of politicians have never worked in the business world, they are either lawyers or just came straight out of college with a BS in political science – and BS is extremely apropos. The government tried running Amtrak and how well did that go? The government tried running the Mustang Ranch, and couldn’t manage to make a profit from sex of all things!
Obama wants control of the auto industry because of his voting bloc, the unions (namely the UAW), who contributed over $400M to his campaign and so he can pass his green agenda via vehicles. We can all drive around some solar powered tin cans that need to be recharged every 40 miles and get nowhere!
Peter Schiff also had an interesting take on where our economy is headed and some final words regarding GM that he posted on youtube, Friday:
