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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
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Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?
Corporate Income Tax. Just Look!
By Alan Grayson | Committee to Elect Alan Grayson
Just look. Corporate income tax revenue has dropped all the way down from 7.2% of GNP at the end of World War II to only 1.2% last year.
Yogi Berra once said: “You can see a lot by just looking.” This is what you see if you look at corporate income tax revenue, as a percentage of GNP, since World War II:
Corporate Taxes Then and Now
Go to a different government website, do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that corporate profits are now 12.7% of GNP. Some division then tells you that corporations are paying less than 10% of their income in taxes.
Wow. That’s a tax rate that might make even Mitt Romney blush.
Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporations are people. Well, it appears that they are people who pay little or nothing in taxes.
Ben Franklin said: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” For corporations, though, neither is true.
There is something of a consensus among Washington, D.C. policymakers that corporate income taxes ought to be cut. That seems to be why the Obama Administration, unbidden by the Republicans, stuck in $100 billion in corporate tax breaks (“accelerated depreciation”) into the so-called “compromise” bill that extended the Bush tax breaks for the rich through this year. (A bill that I voted against, by the way.)
That consensus is wrong. Based on this data, the notion of more corporate tax giveaways is laughable. If you care anything about the federal deficit, then corporate income tax revenues need to be higher, not lower.
If we simply returned corporate income tax revenue, as a percentage of GNP, to where it was six years ago in 2006 (2.7% of GNP), then we would reduce the federal deficit by over $200 billion a year. That is roughly fifty times the amount by which the “Buffett Rule” would reduce the deficit.
Fifty times as much.
Why isn’t this all over the newspapers, radio and TV? Why aren’t our so-called leaders saying something about this? As Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra’s manager during most of his playing days with the Yankees, once asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
This text was originally disseminated by the Committee to Elect Alan Grayson.
Paid for and Authorized by the Committee to Elect Alan Grayson