I would beam myself into your kitchen this afternoon for a glass of wine. We'd sit down, put our feet up, and discuss this must-read article in Forbes called "How Obama Thinks."Here are a few blurbs I hope will make you curious enough to read the entire article (and please NOTE that all links in these snippets were added by me):
Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." * * * Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
This is good stuff, girls.Let's meet up for cocktails and discuss.



6 comments:
I have had high income years, and low income years, and I have to say that I'd rather pay more taxes when I have more income than when I have less income! The information you provided regarding x% of rich people paying y% of taxes would be more informative if you could tell us relative incomes. What percent of reported income did that top 10% make? As written, it really only gives us a small part of the story.
Kobico, re incomes, redistributions of same, and income tax burdens, please see the link in my post. But if my sourcing you find to be insufficient, let me know, via email, and I'll be happy to provide you with more.
Re the disproportionate share the "rich" bear, here's one source:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/top-1-paid-more-in-federal-income-taxes-than-bottom-95-in-07/
I don't mind paying taxes to fund national defense, and some of the infrastructure that provides us some of the means of a 'civilized' society that other cultures and ideologies lack or abuse; but this regime in DC at present is screwing me and a generation not yet born, just to put America "in its place". NASA's mission is to make Islam feel good?
Fire the Democrats in '10. Fire Barry in '12. Let him go back to disorganizing communities, instead of an entire nation.
Preaching to the choir.
(Although, I will point out that many aspects of colonialism sucked, big time.)
Actually, the link you provided clarified that the reason the top 1% of income earners pay a higher share of taxes now is that they experienced "much greater income growth" in the period between 1986 and 2006. That actually makes sense.
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