By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
A few years ago, celebrated hotel billion-heiress, the late Leona Helmsley, famously asserted “only the little people pay taxes.”
Being an Amerikkkan, she was, of course, free to say that. But the simple reality is that for years she totally and illegally evaded paying taxes on her massive wealth and income, and, for that, she spent a short time in a government-financed vacation-resort-cum-jail-for-high-level-white-collar-criminals.
Few of her ilk in either Canada or the U.S. – the Top One Percent – the millionaires, mega-millionaires, billionaires and mega-billionaires – the gangster banksters and the corporate robber barons and the degenerate heirs and heiresses of past gangster banksters, corporate robber barons and Southern slave plantation owners – are quite as successful even today at paying almost no taxes.
But there’s no need to even bother trying. The nominal tax rates for the Top One Percent and the criminally-corrupt banks and corporations that they control have fallen so low and the number of tax loopholes has grown so high that their real total contribution is now almost negligible. read more »
Who should pay taxes — and for what?
Amerikkkan bigotry: Nature or Nurture?
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
There is a school of intellectual thought that has it that racism and other forms of bigotry – perhaps all rooted in genetic xenophobia – is Natural, even instinctual to humankind.
While there may be some logical substance to this position, the vicious, violent and virulent racism, misogynny (hatred of women), homophobia and bigotry that are so prevalent in Amerikkka can only be the product of systemic Nurture, rooted in a malignant and malevolent soil.
I am a Canadian and a Quebecer of predominantly Irish and English lineage. But I have lived and worked in five Amerikkkan cities – spread across the continental U.S. I have spent time in more than 100 Amerikkkan cities in 36 states. And I have interacted with Amerikkkans and Americans of both genders, a variety of races, numerous ethnic origins, all ages and all sexual orientations, all levels of education, all levels of income and all religious and political proclivities.
Although I have always chosen to live in mixed, downtown neighbourhoods, I have also slept in my car in shopping strip parking lots in Harlem and the South Bronx and I have frequented – numerous times – the Union Pacific railyards in downtown Las Vegas, where a large number of homeless people – mostly African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians – secured shelter on the ledges of the concrete abutments that supported Interstate highway overpasses where cars whizzed by just six feet overhead.
And I have never experienced any of the violence, the popular paranoia of which has turned much of Amerikkka into an armed cesspool. read more »
The kangaroo kkkonviction of Victor Bout
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Russian international arms dealer Victor Bout was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment today – by an Amerikkkan court
– for a crime alleged to have been committed halfway around the world.
That the United States of Amerikkka can seize it upon itself to kidnap a citizen of a foreign country – who may have never stepped foot in Amerikkka – who never committed a crime in Amerikkka – who never committed a crime that had any impact on Amerikkkan national security – and put that foreigner on trial in Amerikkka is a sad testament to the near-total dysfunctionality of international law.
Amerikkka – proving that might and only might is right – has appointed itself the policeman of the world, usurped for Amerikkkan law and Amerikkkan law alone primacy over international law or the laws of any other country and determined that it and it alone should be prosecutor, judge and jury, if it so chooses, of offences committed by foreign citizens in foreign countries.
The first problem with that, however, is that if Amerikkka is a policeman, then it is demonstrably the crookedest cop in history. read more »
Ontario NDP betrays the Other 99 Percent
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The minority Liberal government of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty (Ontario is Canada’s largest province with more than 40% of the country’s population) laid out its putrid budget proposals last week and Andrea Horwath, the leader of Ontario’s supposedly social democratic NDP, immediately signalled that she would be McGuinty’s Michael Ignatieff.
Michael Ignatieff, “Iggy The Enabler”, was Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s useful idiot during the last two years of minority Harper government. Ignatieff would huff and puff about blowing the minority Tories’ house down but whenever an issue finally came to a vote in the House of Commons, there were Ignatieff and his Liberal trained seals all lined up to rubber stamp the right-wing legislation.
Horwath now appears ready to have her third-place party play the same role of useful supportive idiot for the supposedly “centrist” Ontario Liberal government.
In recent days, Horwath has begun releasing an extremely modest list of extremely tepid demands in return for her party’s support for the budget. read more »
Canada should now bail out on the F-35s
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The auditor-general of Canada realeased a scathing report this morning on the extreme right-wing Conservative federal government’s plans to join the U.S. in the massive F-35 fighter jet purchase program.
Although auditor-general Michael Ferguson made hurculean efforts to avoid pointing the finger of blame directly at the Harper government or any of its cabinet ministers, the inferrence is clear both that the Department of National Defence – i.e., the generals – lied flagrantly to Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Associate Defence Minister Julian Fantino and that those two ministers lied flagrantly to Parliament and to the people of Canada.
While the Conservatives have spun the lie for several years now that the purchase of the jets would not cost more than $9 billion and that maintenance of the planes over the term of their lifespans would not exceed $6 billion, they clearly knew and ought to have known that their public story was a massive lie. read more »
The leftist path to a Mulcair NDP majority
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Canada’s social democratic federal NDP took a major step toward winning the next election in 2015 by choosing charismatic and thoroughly bilingual Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair today as its new leader.
But if the NDP is to ever win a national majority, then it will be up to every member and every supporter of the party to dissuade Mulcair from shifting the party toward the centre (read: “right”
Just as British Columbia leadership candidate Nathan Cullen was wrong in suggesting the NDP should divvy up all the federal ridings among themselves, the Liberals and the Green Party and not run candidates against each other, Mulcair and his supporters are delusional if they think shifting even more toward the centre (or right) is the formula for success.
A couple of years ago, The Globe & Mail (Canada’s only national newspaper and primarily a business daily), ran an online survey asking its readers to categorize themselves politically from among seven options: “Far Left,” “Left of Centre,” “Centre-Left,” “Centre,” “Centre-Right,” “Right of Centre,” and “Far Right.”
Forty-six percent of respondents chose one of the three options including the word “Left,” 42% chose one of the three options including the word “Right,” and just 12% chose simply “Centre.”
Moreover, if you add the vote totals of the three parties most commonly regarded by the public as being “leftist,” – the NDP, the Parti Quebecois and the Green Party – and add just 25% of the Liberal Party’s vote total, you come up with a “leftish” vote total of 45.225%.
The entire Liberal Party vote total was 18.9%. Although failed leadership candidate Cullen may view the Liberal Party as a “liberal” or “progressive” or “leftish” party, and although new NDP leader Thomas Mulcair may see room for expansion of NDP support by shifting toward the centre (or right), they are both wrong. read more »
On brazen Tory hypocrite Vic Toews
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
It has long been traditional for right-wing politicians in North America – Republican Teabaggers in Amerikkka and Conservatives (or Tories) in Canada – to don a fraudulent veil of morality as they hypocritically attempt to legislate the morality of the Other 99 Percent.
So it came as no surprise a few weeks ago when extreme-right-wing Conservative Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood up in Canada’s House of Commons and shrilly screamed at opposition Mps: “You’re either with us or you’re with the child pornographers.”
Toews, of course, was trying to ram through a Tory piece of legislation that actually had very little to do with child pornography and very much to do with allowing any cop in Canada to spy on any Canadian citizen of his or her choosing without even having to obtain a court warrant authorizing the electronic spying.
But while Toews was desperately trying to protray himself and his criminally corrupt Conservative Party as some sort of “pillars of virtue,” the sordidly sorry history of the Conservative Party proves that it is neither a party of morality nor a credible protector of children against child abusers. read more »
Jeb Bush: Amerikkka’s neo-lynching king
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
It was under then-Republican Teabagger governor Jeb Bush that Florida passed a law so grotesque that it led the U.S. in the wave of “legalized” lynchings that have happened since.
And while Florida may not be the only Amerikkkan state – in fact, there are at least 21, with another handful now pondering them – with a so-called “stand you ground” law, but it is the state where prosecutors and judges have most insanely hewed to the legal obscenity.
Last month’s savage slaughter of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin – an unarmed black kid weighing less than 140 pounds – by George Zimmerman – a well-armed, 280-pound, 28-year-old white man – demands nothing less than the repeal of every one of these so-called “stand you ground” laws, which are really nothing more and nothing less than a re-legalization of lynching. read more »
Republican Teabaggers’ secret agenda: To totally crush the Other 99 Percent
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The insane illogic of their entire economic program notwithstanding, Amerikkka’s Republican Teabaggers seem aggressively intent on ramming their lunacy down the country’s throat – even if it means totally crushing every last member of the Other 99 Percent – the poor, the working class and the middle class.
Numerous independent studies have been conducted in recent years – including a massive new study by the moderate Brookings Institution released just this week – of government taxation policies and their effects on private-sector investment.
Not one credible study has ever found one iota of evidence that taxing capital gains at a lower rate than earned income – or reducing taxes for corporations and/or the wealthy – has ever had the result of increasing private-sector investment in the domestic economy.
On the contrary, however, there is ample evidence not only that low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy directly cause massive government deficits but also tend to actually reduce private-sector domestic investment. read more »
‘Land of the free, home of the brave’!?!?
By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The United States of Amerikkka is fond of scolding other countries about their alleged democratic shortcomings and praising itself as “the land of the free” and “the home of the brave.”
But any Amerikkkan who is still brainwashed by all that brazen bullshit needs to have his or her head read.
Just recently, in a move almost totally ignored by the Amerikkkan corporate mainstream mass media, the House of Representatives quietly passed a Bill that would serve no other purpose than to kill whatever is left of Amerikkka’s fraudulent “democracy.”
H.R. 347, as the Bill is officially called, was passed by a vote of 432 to just three.
And its provisions are that anyone who protests in the vicinity of the White House, the Capitol, any federal government building, any political convention or any bank is liable, upon conviction, to 10 years’ imprisonment and a $25,000 fine. read more »
