IntegrativeNews:

A dark night rises part 2

2012-07-23T16:58:00.001-07:00

As this story unfolds, the debate surrounding it turns to gun politics. Well this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there a lot of people that really don't know why the founding fathers thought it necessary that we should have the right to bear arms. Most conservatives agree about three ways gun are used. Primary self defense,recreation,and hunting. Liberals only acknowledge two. Hunting and self defense, but they ignore the broader application of self defense. We commonly referred to self defense as civilian on civilian crimes, but this doesn't even touch on the real meaning the founding fathers intended.
The Founding Fathers on Arms:
"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference —they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." George Washington First President of the United States
Which brings us to THE REASON. WE THE PEOPLE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS:
Jefferson on Armed Rebellion
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
-- Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy.
Whatever gun legislation comes through in this next election cycle, remember this is what it's all about. it's up to you to reserve the right and fight for it.

A Dark Night Rises Part I: Return fire nowhere to be found.

2012-07-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

First and foremost my heart goes out to those affected by shooting in aurora Colorado. There's nothing more devastating than unexpected loss of life and such a tragic way, in such a peaceful setting. The dust had not even settled down on the ground before people started making a case for more gun control.

I've been around the internet and talk radio trying to figure out what everybody's general opinion on the subject is. I found two main arguments, the first of which is The focus of today's post:

Conservatives tend to believe that had there been a law abiding citizen with a firearm, the situation would have ended with less blood shed. While this is probably true, let's look at some facts.

This guy was frigging prepared. Any liberal will point out James Holmes had full body armor, (kinda cowardly, eh?) a long gun, smoke grenades, and a gas mask. What can one man or woman with a gun possibly do to thwart that? Someone who is confident in their abilities doesn't wear body armor. James Holmes was scared. people who exhibit fear are far more likely to make a bad decision and get shot, in firefight situations. Anyone with Gunfighting credentials will tell you, He would have been severely hindered by return fire.

Had someone like my Father been in that movie theater he would have shot that guy in the face. The only reason this guy killed as many people is he did is because the people were flat unaware of what was going on. I understand that they were 20 - 30 minutes into the movie, everyone was captivated, but if someone like my dad had been there, a very different scenario would have greeted us all on the news the next morning.

My Dads the kinda guy that sits with his back against the wall in the diner when he goes out to eat, he reads the newspaper, but you better believe every time the bell on the front door of the restaurant rings he will look up, for the simple fact that if anyone was to come through the front door that meant him, or anyone else nearby harm, he was going to have the last word.

He is a part of a large group of people who understand that a firearm is just an extension of someones will. In Law abiding hands, they are a tool for hunting and for defense. In the hands of a disgruntled PhD student , they are a destructive thing indeed.

James Holmes Is the issue here, not what tools he used to commit an act of terrorism.

Hopefully you get what I'm trying to say here. If not, comment, We'll talk it out.

Tomorrow: Part II.

Lesson on democracy from #Iceland

2012-05-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

…
In Iceland, the people have made the government resign, the primary banks have been nationalized, it
was decided to not pay the debt that these created with Great Britain and Holland due to their bad
financial politics, and a public assembly has been created to rewrite the constitution.

And all of this in a peaceful way. A whole revolution against the powers that have created the current
global crisis. This is why there hasn’t been any publicity during the last two years: What would happen if
the rest of the EU citizens took this as an example? What would happen if the US citizens took this as
an example.

This is a summary of the facts:

2008. The main bank of the country is nationalized.
The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market stops. The country is in
bankruptcy

2008. The citizens protest in front of parliament and manage to get new elections that make the
resignation of the prime minister and his whole government.
The country is in bad economic situation.
A law proposes paying back the debt to Great Britain and Holland through the payment of 3,500
million euros, which will be paid by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with a 5.5%
interest.

2010. The people go out in the streets and demand a referendum. In January 2010 the president
denies the approval and announces a popular meeting.
In March the referendum and the denial of payment is voted in by 93%. Meanwhile the government
has initiated an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis, and many high level
executives and bankers are arrested. The Interpol dictates an order that make all the implicated parties
leave the country.

In this crisis an assembly is elected to rewrite a new Constitution which can include the lessons learned
from this, and which will substitute the current one (a copy of the Danish Constitution).
25 citizens are chosen, with no political affiliation, out of the 522 candidates. For candidacy all that was
needed was to be an adult and have the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly starts in
February of 2011 to present the ‘carta magna’ from the recommendations given by the different assemblies
happening throughout the country. It must be approved by the current Parliament and by the one
constituted through the next legislative elections.

So in summary of the Icelandic revolution:
-resignation of the whole government
-nationalization of the bank.
-referendum so that the people can decide over the economic decisions.
-incarcerating the responsible parties
-rewriting of the constitution by its people

Have we been informed of this through the media?
Has any political program in radio or TV commented on this?
No! The Icelandic people have been able to show that there is a way to beat the system and has given
a democracy lesson to the world >>

The political uses of the latest “terror plot”

2012-05-10T07:17:00.001-07:00

One day after publicly announcing that the CIA had foiled an Al Qaeda plot to bomb a commercial airliner, US officials revealed Tuesday that the would-be bomber was in fact an informant working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence.
This turn of events is in line with so many domestic terror plots “disrupted” by federal authorities, which—in the overwhelming majority of cases—have featured confidential informants acting as agent provocateurs, instigating stage-managed plots and providing targeted patsies with money, dummy bombs and fake weapons before they are rounded up.
The account given for this latest operation is decidedly murky. Officials have claimed that the plot originated with the infiltration of a group affiliated to the Yemen-based Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula by the CIA-Saudi double agent. Why the US government would choose to expose such a seemingly valuable mole by making the supposed plot public is unclear to say the least.
It is impossible to sort fact from fiction in the versions being reported by the media. A highly skeptical attitude toward the most basic claims about this episode is more than warranted. However, the saturation news coverage is itself an unmistakable indication that, with less than six months to go before the US presidential election, elements within the Obama administration and the state apparatus want to move the “war on terror” to the front burner of American politics.
A key motivation for this was made clear Wednesday by the Washington Post, which published an editorial entitled “The US is right to strike hard at terrorists in Yemen.” The Post cites the alleged bomb plot to retroactively justify the Obama administration’s sharp escalation in US drone strikes against Yemen, with more missiles fired from the pilotless aircraft at targets in the country in the first four months of this year than in all of 2010 and 2011 combined.
The editorial went on to praise White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan for delivering a speech last week defending drone attacks as both legal and “ethical.” Brennan argued that the strikes were sanctioned by the Authorization of the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in September 2001 and used to justify both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
As the media provided wall-to-wall coverage of the alleged terror plot, virtually no attention was given to the announcement Tuesday by the Pentagon that US special forces “trainers” have been sent back into Yemen to aid troops of the country’s US-backed dictatorship in an ongoing civil war. They had been withdrawn during the mass uprisings that toppled dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for 33 years, only to see him replaced by his deputy. The Pentagon also revealed that an amphibious assault battle group, including some 2,000 Marines, has been deployed off Yemen’s coast in the Gulf of Aden.
Thus, the “war on terror”, in the form of the reported bomb plot, is being utilized to justify yet another US war, this time in Yemen. The country is of great strategic concern to the US, as it commands the choke point between the Red and Arabian Seas, a key oil shipping route, and borders Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer.
There are doubtless political calculations in making the bomb plot public as well. Obama launched his re-election campaign by glorifying his role as the man who ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden. He appears determined to make it impossible for the Republicans to attack him from the right on the “national security issue” by touting his record as the most militarist president in the country’s history.
Finally, aside from immediate foreign policy and political objectives, publicizing the purported bomb plot serves an institutional purpose, providing a justification for the perpetuation of a massive apparatus of military aggression and domestic repression.
In Congressional testimony on Wednesday, FBI chief Robert Mueller cited the plot to call for swift renewal of provisions granting the US government sweeping authority to spy on electronic communications. The provisions are set to expire at the end of the year.
CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria pointed to this side of the issue in an online column posted this week, noting that Washington remains “firmly committed to the war on terror at home” and to the “expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.”
“Since September 11, 2001, the US government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror,” he writes. “Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 US Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.”
Zakaria notes that the vast powers of this intelligence apparatus “now touch every aspect of American life”, with “some 30,000 people, for example … now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.”
After more than a decade of first the Bush administration and then that of Obama attempting to terrorize the American people with the supposedly ubiquitous threat of terrorism, the breathless announcement of new “bomb plots” appears to be producing diminished returns.
The overwhelming majority of the American people is opposed to war and has seen again and again how the “war on terror” has been used to justify military aggression abroad. Moreover, millions of working people in the United States and around the world are confronting far more immediate threats in the form of mass unemployment, declining living standards, the lack of a future for the youth and the destruction of public education and basic social services.
The 2012 election contest between the Democratic and Republican parties will offer no opportunity to vote for or against the continued buildup of the US military and intelligence apparatus and the threat it poses to the democratic rights and very lives of working people on a world scale. Nor will it allow the people to vote for or against the assault on jobs, wages and social conditions in the interest of the banks and the financial elite. Both parties are fully committed to these policies.
None of this can be opposed within the framework of the capitalist two-party system. Such a struggle can be waged only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program to put an end to the profit system.
This is the program fought for by the Socialist Equality Party and its presidential and vice presidential candidates, Jerry White and Phyllis Scherrer. Take forward the fight against militarism and in defense of social rights by supporting and becoming active in the SEP election campaign.

Bill Van Auken

wsws.org

Buffett Rule Rorschach: 7,000 Millionaires Paid No Income Taxes in 2011

2012-04-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

The White House's new campaign banner/economic principle is the so-called "Buffett Rule," which holds that no millionaire should pay a lower effective tax rate than a typical middle class family. Sound sensible, yes? Of course it does. The tax code is progressive and purposefully so. Marginal income tax rates increase with income. The more you make, the greater share of income you pay. Disagreeing with this general principle puts you to the right of a typical Republican.

But the Buffett Rule wasn't meant to hold up to strict constructionism. "You cannot build a tax code on the principle that no millionaire, ever, should ever have an effective tax rate lower than their secretary," my Atlantic colleague Megan McArdle wrote this morning. Well, you could, she allows, but you'd have to give the IRS extralegal responsibilities to seize rich people's income beyond what they owe.

To understand why, consider the 76 million people who don't legally owe individual income taxes in 2011 (please, please note: does not include payroll, excise, state and local taxes). The vast majority of this group was poor. They didn't owe individual income taxes because they didn't owe a lot of money to start, and various exemptions, like the earned income tax credit, wiped out the rest.

But among families making more than $100,000, there were also half a million tax units -- enough to replace the population of Tucson, Arizona -- that also paid no income tax. Even more surprising, 7,000 millionaires also paid no individual income tax.

Let's focus on these 7,000 tax payers. I think they help to show why, even if the Buffett Rule is a sensible principle, it wouldn't be a commonsense law.

As Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center explained to me, there are three buckets of factors that can bring taxable income down from $1 million to zero. One is tax tricks. The IRS should crack down more. Two is relying heavily on investments. The administration can try to level taxes for earned income and investment income. Third is great misfortunes. When investments lose significant income, a house or business is destroyed (i.e. a casualty loss), or a family member gets sick and incurs high medical costs for the self-insured, all these things chop away at taxable income and eventually bring a millionaire's income taxes to zero.

"You can attribute some of those 7,000 non-tax payers to investment choices they made, like tax exempt bonds," Williams told me, "but a lot of this might be unfortunate happenstance. A tornado tore through your home, you got a very expensive form of cancer, you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in an investment. Those aren't choices people made, they're just legal deductions under the law."

The fact that 7,000 millionaires didn't pay income tax in 2011 is a Rorschach test for the Buffett Rule. Are you outraged by the figure? Then you probably think the rule should be enshrined into law. But if you see the figure as an artifact of a complicated tax code doing its best to account for a varied and complicated country of 150 million tax units, you might not be so outraged. We can, and we should, raise taxes on millions of more Americans, and we should start with the rich, because they can afford to pay sooner. But it's best to see the Buffett Rule as a political tool designed to drive a wedge between the White House and Republicans who have written off tax increases forever.

From:Archive

Easy Derivitave Explination And the Financial Collapse of the world.

2011-10-22T22:00:00.001-07:00

The Economic Collapse Blog
October 22, 2011
Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino. The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end. The word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard. A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made. Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.5 quadrillion. Keep in mind that the GDP of the entire world is only somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 trillion. The danger to the global financial system posed by derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. For now, the financial powers that be are trying to keep the casino rolling, but it is inevitable that at some point this entire mess is going to come crashing down. When it does, we are going to be facing a derivatives crisis that really could destroy the entire global financial system.
Most people don’t talk much about derivatives because they simply do not understand them.
Perhaps a couple of definitions would be helpful.
The following is how a recent Bloomberg article defined derivatives….

Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates.

The key word there is “speculation”. Today the folks down on Wall Street are speculating on just about anything that you can imagine.
The following is how Investopedia defines derivatives….

A security whose price is dependent upon or derived from one or more underlying assets. The derivative itself is merely a contract between two or more parties. Its value is determined by fluctuations in the underlying asset. The most common underlying assets include stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates and market indexes. Most derivatives are characterized by high leverage.

A derivative has no underlying value of its own. A derivative is essentially a side bet. Usually these side bets are highly leveraged.
At this point, making side bets has totally gotten out of control in the financial world. Side bets are being made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks are making a ton of money from it. This system is almost entirely unregulated and it is totally dominated by the big international banks.
Over the past couple of decades, the derivatives market has multiplied in size. Everything is going to be fine as long as the system stays in balance. But once it gets out of balance we could witness a string of financial crashes that no government on earth will be able to fix.
The amount of money that we are talking about is absolutely staggering. Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research estimates that the notional value of the global derivatives market is $1.4 quadrillion, and in an article for Seeking Alpha he tried to put that number into perspective….

If you add up the value of every stock on the planet, the entire market capitalization would be about $36 trillion. If you do the same process for bonds, you’d get a market capitalization of roughly $72 trillion.
The notional value of the derivative market is roughly $1.4 QUADRILLION.
I realize that number sounds like something out of Looney tunes, so I’ll try to put it into perspective.
$1.4 Quadrillion is roughly:
-40 TIMES THE WORLD’S STOCK MARKET.
-10 TIMES the value of EVERY STOCK & EVERY BOND ON THE PLANET.
-23 TIMES WORLD GDP.

It is hard to fathom how much money a quadrillion is.
If you started counting right now at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion dollars.
Yes, the boys and girls down on Wall Street have gotten completely and totally out of control.
In an excellent article that he did on derivatives, Webster Tarpley described the pivotal role that derivatives now play in the global financial system….

Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.

Most people do not realize this, but derivatives were at the center of the financial crisis of 2008.
They will almost certainly be at the center of the next financial crisis as well.
For many, alarm bells went off the other day when it was revealed that Bank of America has moved a big chunk of derivatives from its failing Merrill Lynch investment banking unit to its depository arm.
So what does that mean?
An article posted on The Daily Bail the other day explained that it means that U.S. taxpayers could end up holding the bag….

This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn’t get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to “give relief” to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.
This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input.

So did you hear about this on the news?
Probably not.
Today, the notional value of all the derivatives held by Bank of America comes to approximately $75 trillion.
JPMorgan Chase is holding derivatives with a notional value of about $79 trillion.
It is hard to even conceive of such figures.
Right now, the banks with the most exposure to derivatives are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and HSBC Bank USA.
Morgan Stanley also has tremendous exposure to derivatives.
You may have noticed that these are some of the “too big to fail” banks.
The biggest U.S. banks continue to grow and they continue to get even more power.
Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.
These banks have gotten so big and so powerful that if they collapsed our entire financial system would implode.
You would have thought that we would have learned our lesson back in 2008 and would have done something about this, but instead we have allowed the “too big to bail” banks to become bigger than ever.
And they pretty much do whatever they want.
A while back, the New York Times published an article entitled “A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives“. That article exposed the steel-fisted control that the “too big to fail” banks exert over the trading of derivatives. Just consider the following excerpt from the article….

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.
The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

So what institutions are represented at these meetings?
Well, according to the New York Times, the following banks are involved: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Why do those same five names seem to keep popping up time after time?
Sadly, these five banks keep pouring money into the campaigns of politicians that supported the bailouts in 2008 and that they know will bail them out again when the next financial crisis strikes.
Those that defend the wild derivatives trading that is going on today claim that Wall Street has accounted for all of the risks and they assume that the issuing banks will always be able to cover all of the derivative contracts that they write.
But that is a faulty assumption. Just look at AIG back in 2008. When the housing market collapsed AIG was on the wrong end of a massive number of derivative contracts and it would have gone “bust” without gigantic bailouts from the federal government. If the bailouts of AIG had not happened, Goldman Sachs and a whole lot of other people would have been left standing there with a whole bunch of worthless paper.
It is inevitable that the same thing is going to happen again. Except next time it may be on a much grander scale.
When “the house” goes “bust”, everybody loses. The governments of the world could step in and try to bail everyone out, but the reality is that when the derivatives market comes totally crashing down there won’t be any government on earth with enough money to put it back together again.
A horrible derivatives crisis is coming.
It is only a matter of time.
Stay alert for any mention of the word “derivatives” or the term “derivatives crisis” in the news. When the derivatives crisis arrives, things will start falling apart very rapidly.
Source: Economic Collapse Blog

#PoliticsOfProtest

2011-10-20T13:59:00.001-07:00

#Occupy the #Teaparty next!

2011-10-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ya know, i think its funny how the tea Tea party folks see themselves as embattled patriots taking Back a hijacked country that has strayed down the path to immortality.

Im Sure most of them love their country, and apple pie and all that propaganda stuff, but what most of these people love to do is take a bible passage out of context, and assume that Obama is the antichrist, the Muslim hellbent on making sharia law replace the constitution.
These are the same type of people that in 6BC believed the earth was flat. The worst part is, the tea party is funded by the Koch Brothers.

The Occupy protests on the other hand, aren't really from anywhere. Like a flame, the conditions were right and they sprang into existence. most of these people are just as duty bound as tea partiers to restoring their country to its rightful owners, aka the people, instead of corporate interests. For Christs sake, General Electric didn't pay a single penny in taxes this year, but they have several defense contracts with the DoD? WE'RE PAYING THEM EVEN THOUGH THEY DO NOT PAY TAXES? The Average American isn't putting up with it anymore. No matter how much the media tries to paint the protestors as anarchist liberals, no matter how much the media focuses on small incidents in the protests rather than the protests as a whole, this occupation is no longer just a national issue. Its getting outside our borders what we're up to, and they want in.

New York Rome,London,Toronto,Detroit,Chicago,Boston,Buffalo,
Ashland Oregon, Portland,Detroit and Seattle All have had or will have protests affiliated with the OWS movement within the week.

As long as it is the Goal of the Occupy Protests to remove the special relationship Corporate persons have with the government, i will consider myself first and foremost, a Member if the 99 percent.

Who Creates Jobs?

2011-10-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

Please hold, while the party you are trying to reach is located.

2011-09-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is Stupid!

2011-09-08T04:46:00.000-07:00

Microsoft and bill gates thinks that most people will actually buy software (windows) if they had the money.

Meanwhile, in Kansas

2011-09-06T03:28:00.000-07:00

Listen here. #Americas Sitdown #DebtTalk

2011-08-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

America, we are entering a period in American politics in which not only are we decide how the next few years play out, but we are preparing to decide on the VERY SURVIVAL of this country. Current statistics on (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/) indicate that 74 percent of this country is Aware of this, and wants to fix it! The only problem that America seems to have, is a lack of understanding in why we are on the wrong track. If you miss diagnose the problem, you are sure to apply the wrong remedy.

http://www.usdebtclock.org

This link will take you to a detailed version of the debt clock. Click it before moving on.

"There is a debate about the causes of the record deficits in the United States. Republicans argue that we have a "spending problem", by which they mean spending is increasing too fast, while the left argues that we mainly have a "revenue problem", by which they mean taxes are too low."

(Via http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2010/04/47-percent-don-t-pay-taxes-no-big-deal/24826/)

Taxes Are by no means too low. This isn't a Spending problem.You want to know why?

Forty Seven percent of the population of the United States Of America DO NOT. PAY. TAXES.

Clearly a Revenue Problem, Eh?

Heres a link to an article about the Teabaggers convoluted views on tax policy.

(http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/47-of-tea-partiers-pay-no-federal-income-taxes/38924/)

Taxed enough already? Or Not at all? We need to start addressing this great Revenue problem turned conservative stranglehold.

H.I. Mencken #Quote #PALIN

2011-08-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

:) Enjoy

#Politics and Me! - Part II

2011-08-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

HERE. WE. GO!

Ive Come to realize, the city i grew up in, pretty much spiraled downhill after2005. I was in 8th grade around that time. My family wasn't poor or anything. Dad worked for General Motors in the Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti. I had what i wanted. Being A Southern style Christian conservative, all I did was Hunt, Fish,Hunt,Fish.(Seriously, Ive been across the continent hunting.) Everything around me that I saw wrong with the city was just the liberals fault. It was easy. Then, as I got around 10th 11th grade, and my political views started changing a bit. The economy flat out sucked, and my saviors (the Republican party) simply watched as the banks took the biggest check ever. Everything i was taught to believe in, didn't make sense anymore.

My political beliefs are somewhat mixed, as Ive said before in part 1.

I was Brought up as a 7th Day Adventist. ( A Moderately conservative church)

Naturally, i was against abortion, partly because I'd been in that position before. (Luckily mom almost punched the doctor to get him to STFU about it.)

I'm pro gun, because I see enough reasons in my neighborhood alone for it to be imperative that i can feel safe at all times. as Ive said in part one, i have Cerebral palsy. I weigh about 150 lbs, almost 6'0. because of my condition, my balance sucks. Luckily i come from a family of gunslingers. I can handle myself with a pistol, and know how to use it well enough to know How to use it, and WHEN IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO USE IT.

I don't agree with many republican social issues, gay marriage, tax cuts for corporations, anything less than 80 percent income tax on the top 2 percent is treason, that sort of thing.

This would be the beginning of my departure of right wing politics. Socially, they bother me.

(Liberals Know what I'm talking bout. :D) I've been able to find away to justify keeping the conservative family values, and merge it with my justifications for my political beliefs, and it works.

I was hoping someone would find me on twitter that was in the same political background. (WINK WINK @IntegrativeNews WINK @Walldestroyer91 WINK) :P

Cheers

TripHoward
@IntegrativeNews

#Politics and Me!

2011-08-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

I was in fourth grade during bush's first election. We had a mock election in class one day around Halloween. this was my first real contact with things of the political sort. Needless to say, i was hooked. i virtually became obsessed with how the government worked. I was raised a Conservative Christian, so my beliefs and my hobbies kind of merged. I was always arguing with someone about my beliefs. It didn't occur to me how ridiculous most of my beliefs were at the time, but luckily things change. In middle school, they called me Preach. (as in preacher) I actually had three MySpace accounts banned for trolling people of a Homosexual nature. (Believe me, I'm not like that anymore. I feel embarrassed that I did things like that.) So, I've done a bit of growing up since then, and currently hold a vastly diverse mixture of political beliefs.

For Example

I'm Anti Abortion,but Pro Assisted Suicide.
(You have the right to life, and the right to end it when you see fit)

I'm Pro Gun.
Every Man has the right to defend himself.

I support Universal Healthcare.
If Every man has the right to life, they ought to have the right to live it healthily, no?

I Support Gay Marriage for the simple fact that i know how being judged feels. I Was born with Cerebral Palsy. I can still walk and talk and formulate a hell of a debate, but i don't get around like the most of men. School sucked for obvious reasons.

I wish this post could be three or four pages long, but i need sleep.

You've only just glimpsed the surface. you ain't even touched it yet. let alone scratched it.

--Trip

Hello World!

2011-08-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

Integrative News is just a natural continuation of my Twitter account, (@IntegrativeNews) now on its second resurrection. Every other day I'll be chiming in on things in the political spectrum, trying as hard as i can to be unbiased. (stick with me on this one >.>)

Ill be adding newsreels to the sidebar, as well as links to relevant sources for my in depth articles on relevant news.

First Article Shortly. :)