The fact of the matter is that the income differences within the top 5% are far wider than the differences between the lower tax brackets and the “rich” American in the 96th percentile.

For Obama, being “rich” begins with $250,000 in annual income, the bottom rung of the top 5 percent. Compare this “rich” income to that of, for example, Hank Paulson, President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary when he was the head of Goldman Sachs.

In 2005 Paulson was paid $38.3 million in salary, stock and options. That is 153 times the annual income of the “rich” $250,000 person.

Despite his massive income, Paulson himself was not among the super rich of that year, when a dozen hedge fund operators made $1,000 million. The hedge fund honchos incomes were 26 times greater than Paulson’s and 4,000 times greater than the “rich” man’s or family’s $250,000.

For most Americans, a $250,000 income would be a godsend, but envy can make us blind. A $250,000 income is not one that will support a rich lifestyle. Moreover, many people prefer lesser incomes to the years of education, long work hours and stress of personal liability that are associated with many $250,000 incomes. In truth, those with $250,000 gross incomes have more in common with those at the lower end of the income distribution than with the rich. A $250,000 income is ten times greater than a $25,000 income, not hundreds or thousands of times greater. On an after-tax basis, the difference shrinks to about
6 times.

The American tax code taxes the $250,000 income at the same rate as it taxes a $100,000,000 or higher income. On an after tax basis, after the federal government grabs 30% in income taxes and state government grabs 6%, the “rich” man or woman or family earning $250,000 has $160,000. In New York City, where there is a city income tax in addition to state and federal, this sum diminishes further. State sales taxes take another 6 or more percent of most consumption expenditures.

When all is said and done, the after-tax value of a $250,000 income in New York City is about $140,000.

Is this rich? It might be in a small town in Alabama, but not in New York City. The “rich” person or family won’t be purchasing a Manhattan apartment, much less a brownstone. They won’t be driving a luxury car. Indeed, they won’t be able to afford a parking garage for an economy car. If they fly anywhere, it won’t be in a first class seat.

For the most part, $250,000 incomes are located in large cities where the cost of living is high. For example, a husband and wife who are associates at major law firms, each of whom works 60 hour weeks and has no job security, earn $125,000 each. They might both have student loans to pay down. For the Obama administration to lump these people in with Hank Paulson or billionaire hedge fund operators is propagandistic.

What is the difference between the $250,000 “rich” income and the $245,000 “non-rich” income? After Obama’s tax scheme goes into effect, the $245,000 income will benefit from a tax cut, and the $250,000 will have a tax increase. Will people in the 96th percentile ask for pay cuts that will drop them into the 95th percentile?

In America, the truly rich are those in the top 0.5% of the income distribution. These are the people with yachts, private airplanes, and who are still rich after they lose half their wealth in a stock market collapse caused by government policy that accommodated financial gangsters.

“Oh well, I was worth $600,000,000 last year and only $300,000,000 this year. Perhaps we should stop drinking $1,000 bottles of rare vintages and move down to $100 a bottle wines. Probably shouldn’t buy that new yacht or that villa in the south of France.”

The upper middle class with $250,000 gross incomes are major losers of the financial collapse. Many of the people in this income class are leveraged to the hilt in order to maintain appearances and can be swept away as easily as the very poor. But those who were frugal and invested for their future have lost 50% of their savings. These wiped out people are the ones who will bear the brunt of Obama’s tax increase.

If the tax rate on a multi-million dollar annual income goes up by 5 percentage points, the cutbacks won’t really affect the lifestyle. But for the $250,000 gross income group, it means no prospect of private schools and Ivy League education for the children, who will be attending state colleges with the rest of the non-rich.

Obama is attacking the only income class that has any independence– the upper middle class professionals. The real rich are few in number and seldom present any opposition to government. Recently, the New York Times reported (March 23, 2009) that the 400 richest Americans’ “share of the nation’s total wealth has nearly doubled to more than 22 percent.” The average income of the 400 richest Americans is $263 million annually. That is 1,052 times the income of the “rich” $250,000 income.

What the Obama administration is really doing is taxing ordinary people in order to bail out the super rich. The 95% of Americans who get the tax cut will find that it is offset many times by the depreciation in the dollar and the raging inflation that will result from monetizing the multi-trillion dollar budget deficits made necessary by the bailouts of the banksters.

In the United States, government has become expert at manipulating both left-wing and right-wing ideologies. It keeps those on both ends of the spectrum set at each other’s throats in order to ensure the government’s continuing independence from accountability.

Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs were not free, because they owed their feudal lords, the government of that time, a maximum of one-third of their labor. Nineteenth century slaves were not free, because their owners could expropriate 50% of their labor.

Today, no American is a free person. The lowest tax rate, not counting state income, property tax and sales tax, is 15% Social Security tax and 15% federal income tax. The “free American” starts off with a 30% tax rate, the position of a medieval serf.

In medieval Europe, when tax rates reached beyond 30%, serfs rebelled and killed their masters.

Editors Note: This story was published originally on March 23rd, 2009. -Gibb

Infowars - Last week a caller to the Alex Jones Show mentioned a speech transcript posted on the CFR website where U.S. National Security Adviser Jones declared the following:

Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal (sic) Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.

Jones made the remark at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on February 8, 2009.

Mr. Jones is basically telling us the National Security Council is run by Henry Kissinger. The NSC is the principal forum used by Obama for considering national security and foreign policy matters. Biden, Clinton, Geithner, Gates, Mullen, Emanuel, Summers, and others are listed as participants, but not Henry Kissinger.

In 2006, the Associated Press reported that Kissinger advised Bush and Cheney, a fact included in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial.”

In other words, the Bush and Obama administrations — never mind the “change” rhetoric — receive the same advice (instructions) from the ruling elite.

Earlier this year, Kissinger went on the floor of the stock market to declare Obama had a chance to create a New World Order.

Said Kissinger:

He can give a new impetus to American Foreign policy, partly because the perception of him is so extraordinary around the world. I think his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when really a New World Order can be created — it’s a great opportunity, it isn’t just a crisis.

Kissinger — along with David Rockefeller, Paul Arthur Allaire, and Richard Holbrooke — directs the American Friends of Bilderberg. He is also connected to the globalist Aspen Institute, the Committee of 300, the Trilateral Commission, and sits on the advisory board of JP Morgan Chase.

“Kissinger has been patiently waiting since at least 1973 for his New World Order egg to hatch,” notes the August Review.

Kissinger earlier praised Obama’s picks for economic recovery, and why not?

Obama picked Trilateral Commission wonder boy Timothy Geithner to be Secretary of the Treasury. The rest of the team are protégés of Robert Rubin, also a Trilateral and former Treasury Secretary under Clinton.

Obama’s top foreign policy advisor has been Zbigniew Brzezinski, the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller.

Finally, before Obama was elected, Kissinger went on the Charlie Rose Show and talked about the New World Order:

But never mind. It’s all a crazy conspiracy theory, never mind another indication that the one-worlders control the president, this time admitted by top NSC honcho James Jones, who just so happens to be a member if the Trilateral Commission.

By Judi McLeod - CFP - Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack Obama.

“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes.  In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit.  Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States.  That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower.  The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI).  MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.  Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.  “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale.  The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996.  But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding.  When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value.  On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.  By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors.  Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder.  The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.

If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.

It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs.  Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives.  John is the brother of William Ayers.

What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.

Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.

But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.

The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.

Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”.  He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!

Editors Note: Its not about left and right, its about freedom vs slavery. Read this quote from Bill Clintons mentor on the left / right / liberal / conservative scam: “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.” - Carol Quigley. -Gibb

By Edward Luce in Washington - FT - The liberal backlash against President Barack Obama has begun with many prominent left-leaning economists in the US attacking the administration’s plans to bail out the banks.

Obama to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, officials say

• Story Highlights
• Goal is to “disrupt, dismantle, defeat al Qaeda and destroy safe haven,” official says
• Afghan government had requested the additional troops, military tells CNN
• The plan does not include an exit strategy, administration official says
• Administration also wants to triple U.S. aid to Pakistan, to $1.5 billion a year

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama plans to send another 4,000 troops to Afghanistan along with hundreds of civilian specialists in an effort to confront what he considers “the central challenge facing [that] country,” senior administration officials said Thursday.

The president also will call on Congress to pass a bill that triples U.S. aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year over five years, the officials said.

Obama is expected to announce new strategies for both countries Friday.

The troops, which are in addition to the 17,000 the president announced earlier would be sent to Afghanistan, will be charged with training and building the Afghan army and police force. The plans include doubling the army’s ranks to 135,000 and the police force to 80,000 by 2011, the officials said.

Military officials earlier told CNN that the Afghan government had requested the additional troops.

In a background briefing with reporters, one official painted a somber picture of the situation.

“Al Qaeda’s central leadership has been moved from Kandahar, Afghanistan, to a location unknown somewhere in Pakistan,” he said. “And in that location they’re plotting against the United States. They are working with their friends and partners, the Taliban, against American interests.”

The plan marks a new strategy, focusing on the growing threat in Afghanistan and now Pakistan, the officials said.

The goal, said one official, is to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and destroy the safe haven that has developed in Pakistan and prevent it from rebuilding in Afghanistan.”

Earlier Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told reporters that the United States needs to improve its level of intelligence support for military operations in Afghanistan. Blair also said a lot more work is needed to get Pakistan on the same page as the United States in fighting terrorists along the border.

The plan does not include an exit strategy. A senior administration official said commanders on the ground would make periodic assessments.

“This is a strategy, not a straitjacket,” the official said.

Obama has spoken with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said, and was “gratified by their reception.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to attend a U.S.-backed international conference on Afghanistan next week at The Hague, State Department officials said.

Kirwanesque - Spitting on Article 13

Article Thirteen
“Section 1; Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude; except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Apparently neither the White House Staff nor the members of the US House of Representatives can read; what is clear is that they did not read Article Thirteen of the United States Constitution, cited above. That ‘Article’ was added to the Constitution for very good reasons, and neither it nor any of the other Articles are to be abridged without the consent of the governed. If they could read and comprehend what the words mean, then all should understand that the legislation that the House just passed is Unconstitutional!

The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, known as the GIVE Act was passed yesterday by a 321-105 margin and now goes to the Senate.

When you have a dictator that is not yet an adult, it seems that some very strange things happen on the way to trying to govern a nation. This latest attempt to spit upon yet another amendment to the Constitution must be challenged and rejected - but this time the authors of this attempt to seize the lives of US citizens, for the shoddy political aims of a childish dictator who apparently cannot even read; should be punished.

After all just how many members of congress or the White House have volunteered to serve this nation, (service in the Israeli Defense Forces does not count) in any way whatever that involves the term involuntary? That actual number cannot be very high given the degree of self-absorpsion among that crowd-of-certified-criminals who refer to themselves as politicians.

“Government-mandated “community service” is integral to Barack Obama’s vision of “change.” Obama has described such service as a key element of creating “a new era of responsibility - a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.” [Duties that are self-created and self-fulfilling]

“The problem with such service, apparently, is that it is neither mandated nor brokered by the government. So from the perspective of those who believe that life should be organized by the state, such spontaneous service simply doesn’t count.” [given the revulsion of so many in congress against the government being allowed to run something like a public health care plan - it is difficult to understand this government's passion to draft every person in the country (all the way up to 65 years of age) depending on what skills might be needed by the government, at discount rates, inside a totally government controlled legion of politically neutered bodies - in the military you have no right to speak your political thoughts]?

“Before it created a small but significant scandal, the Obama campaign’s position paper on national service promised that as president he would “inspire” Americans to render “universal voluntary service. It was not explained how service could be both “universal” and truly “voluntary.” [In less than two months on-the-job; Obama has gone from being an inspirational figure-head to becoming a leader of criminally-inclined incompetents that are rapidly destroying the idea that Barack ever possessed any judgment, when it comes to ‘understanding character traits' in those he appoints to high or important offices; anywhere within his "administration." So why should anyone want to emulate a man who is rapidly proving that he's just about the dumbest kid on the block - especially when it comes to who should serve in "public service"] ⁽¹⁾

“The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act; in section 6104 of the bill, entitled “Duties,” in subsection B6, the legislation states that a commission will be set up to investigate, “Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

Section 120 of the bill also discusses the “Youth Engagement Zone Program” and states that “service learning” will be “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”

“The legislation, slated to cost $6 billion over five years, would create 175,000 “new service opportunities” under AmeriCorps, bringing the number of participants in the national volunteer program to 250,000. It would also create additional “corps” to expand the reach of volunteerism into new sectors, including a Clean Energy Corps, Education Corps, Healthy Futures Corps and Veterans Service Corps, and it expands the National Civilian Community Corps to focus on additional areas like disaster relief and energy conservation,” reports Fox News.

The Senate is also considering a similar piece of legislation known as the “Serve America Act,” which also includes language about “Youth Engagement Zones”.

“Fears about Obama’s plans to create involuntary servitude were first stoked in July 2008, when Obama told a rally in Colorado Springs, “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

Despite denials that Obama plans to institute a mandatory program of national service, his original change.gov website stated that Americans would be “required” to complete “50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year”. The text was only later changed to state that Americans would be “encouraged” to undertake such programs.”

Does any of the above garbage leave you with a warm and fuzzy feeling about just how well intentioned our Boy-Dictator is being, when it comes to using or abusing the youth of this nation, in a cause or causes he has yet to specifically name? Moreover the world is changing so fast now that it is almost impossible to tell the players any more, without first Goggling their names. Our foreign policy is something that seems to change every two weeks or so - along with whichever bunch of ‘yes-people” are either currently in favor or under investigation - so how will having a civilian Youth Corp. to augment the US military be of any direct help to our soon to become permanent Foreign Legions?

And, since both the volunteer military and the volunteer youth corp. will get script for pay, when compared to the huge and private-military-contractors (mercenaries), that will also be serving in the same places overseas with the underpaid US military and in US cities with the conscripted volunteer Youth Corp: The question has to be raised - What’s it all for Barack; are we emulating Il Duce, the Third Reich or maybe the Communist Youth Brigades?

Of course we’ll never know the specifics until AFTER the legislation is passed - if history has any bearing here - on how things will continue to be done on Obamanation’s watch? Why don’t we do something really revolutionary this time: Why don’t we mandate that this entire Black Hole be discussed among the people whose loved ones will be taken, and whose lives will be impacted? Isn’t that something that the Constitution had in mind when it left everything up to the people to decide, instead of to the bought and paid for hacks that have hijacked our national voice and stolen our treasury?

This “new concept” of consulting people ought to especially apply to this Dictator who lacks vision, and is a total-stranger to experience as shown by his total lack of concentration on any of the real problems that he inherited.

Had he been the ‘leader’ he claimed to be he would never have appointed so many proven failures to key offices throughout his administration. But then maybe that’s why the White House is now run by Israeli-Americans; as typified by Rahm Emanuel, the snake who apparently came up with this cute little number to keep American youth busy. In 2006 Rahm called this “Universal Civil Defense Training,” I guess that fits nicely if you’ve spent your obligatory two year stint in the Israeli Defense Forces (but NOT in the US military). I did six years in the US Air Force, belligerently, but managed an honorable discharge anyhow. It was a jail sentence that seemed interminable, but that was the late 50’s and it was not optional.

This time the Congress ought to apologize to the nation for failing to think this piece of garbage through, before they “put it to a vote” as they have always done, since Bush Junior stole the White House.

Jim Kirwan

NOTES: