RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration is playing with fire at the UN Security Council, actively considering the idea of capitulating to Arab demands over a resolution on Gaza. Now on the table are draft versions from the United States, Europe and Jordan/the Arab group.

The Europeans are pushing for the introduction of an “international monitoring and verification mission” in Gaza that would supposedly ensure the implementation of the ceasefire agreement. What it would actually do is prevent Israel from exercising the right of self-defense against Hamas attacks emanating from Gaza in the future, since the international personnel would immediately serve as human shields for Palestinian terrorists. The European proposed mission would also supposedly investigate and report on violations, despite the reality that UN missions in other Arab countries (such as Lebanon) have never satisfactorily fulfilled similar mandates.

The United States draft resolution asks Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to develop options for a verification mechanism for “dual-use” materials – such as concrete – that Israel would be expected to allow into Gaza. That’s the same Secretary-General who spent the 50-day war slandering Israel with the charge of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians.

The United States holds the presidency of the Security Council for the month of September and may view a Gaza resolution as a “victory” during its tenure. The frequent course of UN diplomacy is to expect the U.S. to capitulate to European demands as a faux “middle-ground.” Moreover, it would not be the first time that the Obama administration played protecting Israel against international coalition-building on other fronts.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States is open to a new U.N. resolution on Gaza but only if it contributes to sustaining the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations said Wednesday.

Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters that a resolution must “do no harm” to the cease-fire that has been holding in recent days and Israeli-Palestinian talks that are scheduled to resume in Cairo, and should “play a positive role in supporting a durable solution.”

“Nothing underscores the urgency of securing … a negotiated two-state solution like the crisis in Gaza and the heartbreak that so many people on both sides suffered throughout that crisis,” she said.

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior figure in the Palestine Liberation Organization, told a news conference here Tuesday that the Palestinians are demanding a commitment to the 1967 borders and a deadline for the end of Israel’s occupation, adding when pressed that “within three years, the occupation should end.”

She also criticized the failed U.S. peace initiative by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, saying it allowed Israel “to persist in policies” that she characterized as unilateral and abusive.

This is hardly a new issue for this President. For starters, he has been as deceptive about his relationship to Islam as all of this sitting government’s reluctance to name Islam, the enemy. And even those who have dared venture into those troubled waters, have been reticent to suggest how we should proceed with each new iteration of Islam’s blood-lusting assault.

Those discussing the ISIS/ISIL phenomenon, treat this particular viral infestation as a unique manifestation in much the same way they have treated every seemingly new but separate spawn of this agency of hell.

This aversion to naming the enemy has gone from frustrating to idiotic to damnable as those primarily entrusted with the security of this nation continue to squirm in their seats at the very prospect of questions forcing them to declare their rudimentary understanding of this seventh century scourge. For many, it is just as well they are not asked because their answers would make the strongest of us embarrassed to share the same gene pool.

That ISIS/ISIL is a blood-lusting and dangerous group of murderers is a given. If they make a threat – to anyone, they should be taken at their word regardless of how unlikely it seems they could carry it out. They have proven their resolve and, their resolve is tempered in the furnace of Islam. Denying this makes men in dignified political positions look like the three monkeys. Whatever else can be said about gaggles like this, their points of origin all remain constant; Islam.

So, if ISIS/ISIL, Ansar Al Sharia, Boko Haram, Al Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah ad infinitum have as their common denominator, Islam and if these groups can be traced back to Islamic nations who either intentionally or unwittingly (publicly speaking), spawned these groups, why is it so difficult to declare them Islamic? Because there are nearly 2 billion Muslims in the world and the majority of them are not “actively” involved in Jihad.

Using the incredibly sophomoric math politicians like to use, they come to their conclusions like this; “if it ain’t got a bomb in a vest, it’s a friendly”. Of course most discerning people would be able to conjure up a list of questions to determine if this approach is correct and most, like myself have asked those questions and to a one, we have received the exact, same response; “These groups do not represent Islam, they are fringe”, which neither answers the question nor suggests any depth of understanding of the networking required to carry out these attacks.

The nominal corporate-income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the highest in the developed world. That’s the on-paper rate. The effective corporate-income-tax rate — i.e., the actual rate — is . . . a matter of some dispute, but Martin A. Sullivan, a highly regarded economist specializing in taxation, puts it around 28 percent. Others have estimated the rate to be much lower: A Government Accountability (ha!) Office study put the figure at about 13 percent.

Let’s put it at 0.00 percent.

In reality, the effective corporate tax rate varies substantially from firm to firm and from industry to industry. As Sullivan points out, corporations that operate exclusively within the United States pay an effective tax rate very close to that 35 percent statutory rate, and energy and mining companies generally pay a relatively high rate. On the other hand, multinationals doing most of their business abroad often pay much lower rates, as do many technology and pharmaceutical companies. For example, in 2013 Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil all had effective tax rates higher than the U.S. statutory rate, but most of their taxes were owed to foreign governments. Microsoft paid about 19 percent. According to S&P Capital IQ, neither Merck nor General Motors paid any corporate income taxes for the second quarter of this year, even though both brought tons of money. (About 22 and a half tons of money in Merck’s case, if you stacked it up in hundred-dollar bills.) Total federal revenue from corporate income taxes in 2013 was $274 billion, or 9.8 percent of total receipts.

When you point out to your average soy-milk-’n’-class-warfare type that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and is alone among non-batzoid countries (looking at you, Zimbabwe and North Korea) in imposing that rate on the worldwide operations of domestic firms rather than only on business done in the United States, Moonbeam will reliably point to those lower effective rates as evidence that everything is hunky-dory. But the enormous variability in real tax rates between politically favored companies (Hello, First Solar!) and those lacking in political tax patronage is not an argument against reforming the corporate tax system — it’s an argument for abolishing it altogether.

At the risk of engaging in some absurd oversimplification, we do not really tax corporate income, meaning revenue, but corporate profits, meaning revenue minus everything that can be counted as a business expense — salaries, materials and supplies, inventory, maintenance, etc. (Ordinary operating costs are 100 percent deductible in the year in which the purchase is made, while capital expenses — investments in assets that have a useful lifespan of more than one year — are deducted over time.) A corporation could, in theory, reduce its taxable income to zero every year simply by giving its CEO a cash bonus equal to what would otherwise be its taxable income.

But in that case, the CEO would have to pay taxes on that money as personal income, presumably at the top rate of 39.6 percent, which is higher than the top corporate rate. And that is why it makes sense to scrap the corporate income tax entirely.

‘Utopian” can be a damning word. But, as the late socialist philosopher G. A. (“Jerry”) Cohen noticed, the word also carries a positive valence. Who, after all, wouldn’t enjoy eating pie in the sky?

In his very short 2008 book, Why Not Socialism?, Cohen capitalizes (pun intended) on this point. In dismissing socialism as utopian, conservatives are tacitly acknowledging its appeal as an ideal — indeed, as something that is too good for us.

Jason Brennan, assistant professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University, has recently published a pithy, nearly-as-short rebuttal titled (what else?) “Why Not Capitalism?” In it, Brennan attempts not only to refute Cohen’s arguments, but to show that a capitalist utopia would be even better than a socialist one.

Cohen’s book begins with a fictional story of a camping trip. Friends go into the woods, taking things like fishing rods, pots and pans, and canoes, which are treated as “under collective control for the duration of the trip.” Cohen writes, “There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.”

Cohen expects that most of his readers would prefer this “socialist” camping trip to a “capitalist” one. Imagine the clingy wilderness-goers having to barter with one another every time somebody wants to use the potato peeler! Not only is such a market system inherently less appealing (in Cohen’s eyes), it would also be less efficient, since nobody would be able to do anything without engaging in irksome market transactions.

Why not organize all of society around the socialist ideals realized in this camping trip? Cohen anticipates some answers. For instance, it may be the case that the possibilities of human camaraderie are too limited to extend beyond a small group of friends. Even if true, however, that observation doesn’t undermine socialism as an ideal. It only shows that the ideal is not achievable — for now. Cohen optimistically believes we may yet “design” better “social technology” to make the ideal a reality.

“Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation,” Cohen writes in the concluding lines of Why Not Socialism? “Our attempt to get beyond predation has so far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.”

For Brennan, the right conclusion is satire. In Why Not Capitalism? he amusingly draws on the world of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, an animated series on Disney Junior, in order to parody Cohen.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/09/03/Kerry-The-Bible-Commands-America-Protects-The-Planet-For-Muslim-Countries

Wednesday at a ceremony to appoint Texas lawyer Shaarik Zafar to be special representative to Muslim communities, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was the United States’ Biblical “responsibility” to “confront climate change,” including to protect “vulnerable Muslim majority counties.”
Kerry said Scripture, in particular the Book of Genesis, make clear it is our “duty” to protect the planet and we should look at Muslim countries “with a sense of stewardship of earth,” adding, “That responsibility comes from God.”

The world seems to be falling apart.
Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to his nuclear arsenal and warns the West not to “mess” with Russia.
The Middle East terrorist group the Islamic State keeps beheading its captives and threatening the West. Meanwhile Obama admits to the world that we “don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with such barbaric terrorists. Not long ago he compared them to “jayvees.”
Egypt is bombing Libya, which America once bombed and then left. Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that a quiet Iraq without U.S. troops could be “one of the great achievements” of the administration. Not now.
China and Japan seem stuck in a 1930s time warp as they once again squabble over disputed territory. Why all the sudden wars?
Conflicts rarely break out over needed scarce land — what Adolf Hitler once called “living space” — or even over natural resources. A vast, naturally rich Russia is under-populated and poorly run. It hardly needs more of the Crimea and Ukraine to screw up. The islands that Japan and China haggle over are mostly worthless real estate. Iran has enough oil and natural gas to meet its domestic and export needs without going to war over building a nuclear bomb.

As the Obama administration struggles to address the threat from ISIS and plans to go to Congress in the coming weeks to up its commitment against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, multiple media reports indicate that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups. And yet financial and military support for the FSA is the keystone to the administration’s policy in Syria.

Some background is essential.

It was just over a year ago that the Institute for the Study of War’s Liz O’Bagy was opining in the Wall Street Journal about her travels to Syria and purported discovery that the Syrian “rebels” really weren’t bloodthirsty jihadists, but moderates worthy of U.S. financial and military support — in particular, heavy weapons. Her claims about the Syrian rebels, particularly the FSA, were cited and praised by Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain.

That view, of course, quickly came crashing down as O’Bagy came under fire for failing to disclose that she was also a paid agent of a Syrian rebel front. (She had also lied about her academic credentials.) Within two weeks of her op-ed appearing, she was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, though she was hired two weeks later by Senator McCain as a Senate staffer.

At the same time that O’Bagy’s career was taking a hit, the narrative that the Syrian “rebels” were all secular moderates was quickly collapsing. A Rand Corporation study appeared two weeks after O’Bagy’s op-ed saying that nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hardline Islamists (as if there were a discernible difference). Meanwhile, the FSA was under serious pressure from the very jihadist groups that Ms. O’Bagy had assured were not a problem.

Another practical problem developed with providing weapons to the FSA. As soon as weapons shipments from the CIA were arriving in Syria, the FSA weapons caches were being raided by jihadist groups, including ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, under very suspicious circumstances. The problem got so bad that by last December, both the U.S. and the UK had stopped weapons shipments to the FSA.

But by April of this year, the Obama adminstration’s CIA weapons spigot was turned back on, with the FSA now receiving heavy weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. And in late June, President Obama asked Congress for $500 million to arm and train the FSA.

Under the headline “The World in Flames,” Henry Kissinger warns in a London Sunday Times op-ed of the consequences of state failure and anarchy in the Muslim world. Read it carefully: Kissinger reviews the collapse of America’s idea of exporting democracy during the Arab Spring and its dire consequences. He suggests that the US needs to work with Russia to put out the fire:

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the US, in turn shaping relations between them.

Russia’s goals are largely strategic: at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger, global scale, to enhance its position vis-à-vis the US.

America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds — correctly — but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the US needs to oppose strategically.

Neither Russia nor America has been able to decide whether to co-operate or to manoeuvre against the other — though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes.

Political Islam has brought large parts of the world into something resembling the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Kissinger says (and of course I agree: I have been citing the 30 Years War example for a decade):

Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of central Africa — where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighbouring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasise similarly — a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of falling out of the international state system altogether.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to — but broader than — Europe’s 17th-century wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological and traditional national- interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponised” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.

Some conventional wisdom about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is easily debunked. One such bit of nonsense is that Palestinians have or will turn on Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank after the losses in the recent fighting with Israel. After suffering over 2,000 casualties, seeing 32 tunnels destroyed, and losing two-thirds of its rocket inventory by firing them with little effect or having them destroyed by Israel, the perception is that Palestinians, deep down, have had enough, and see no benefit from the Hamas strategy of confronting Israel every two years.

Of course, this theory suggests that anything any Palestinian in Gaza believes or desires has anything whatsoever to do with who governs the territory, and in what fashion. If you subscribe to the notion that all politics is local, then Hamas is now stronger than ever. That seems to be the message explaining why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is now by far the top choice [1]to become the head of a unified PA-Hamas government, securing a 61% to 32% victory over Mahmoud Abbas if elections were held today. Most remarkable is that support for Hamas has soared in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), which escaped the fighting. Palestinians in the West Bank are demonstrating that resistance is easy to support when someone else, somewhere else is fighting and getting hit. This “courageous” support for Hamas from Palestinians in the West Bank mirrors the “courage” shown by Hamas leaders who hid below ground while allowing the locals to be killed as human shields.

Of course there is an easy explanation out there for Hamas’ popularity, and the lagging support for Abbas, Fatah, and his Palestinian Authority. That would be the purported “land grab” by Israel in the West Bank, all of 988 acres, which naturally will destroy the chances for peace and reconciliation and the two-state solution. Muslim extremists can massacre people in one country after another in the Middle East and Muslim world, but Israel taking land it already controls to build houses, pending any legal challenges (got that?), is the ultimate threat [2] to the survival of the world.

This “logic” depends on the badly mistaken notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central explanation for the behavior of Islamists anywhere. If only Israel would stop building houses, then peace would be achievable between Israel and the Palestinians, and all the myriad Muslim grievances in dozens of countries on every continent would miraculously disappear. Such is the obsession with what Jews do, but more to the point, the intensity of the hatred [3] of Jews and the state they control — a cause that journalists the world over, many parts of what might be called the “global left,” have signed onto. U.S. President Barack Obama seems to have been immersed in the holy waters of rage at Israel as well, according to spokesmen [4] in his administration, most notably Martin Indyk:

And Mr. Obama — No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength — is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.

St. Louis is now Ground Zero for the “war on black males”: So named by Spike Lee after a white cop shot a black teenager, unleashing ten days of riots and rage and free shopping in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

But here is what Spike Lee did not say: Black people are winning the war. At least in St. Louis.

Black-on-white crime is an everyday fact of life in this once vibrant city. And more and more people — the ones who are left, anyway — are wondering why local media refuse to tell the truth about it.

The latest example came Sunday evening. A group of black people on bicycles surrounded, threatened, and robbed two horse-drawn carriages — the kind you find in the nicer parts of town where tourists congregate.

A place where black mob violence used to be rare. Not anymore. Not for a long time. Not in St. Louis.

The local CBS affiliate reported that two suspects have been arrested, and the owner of the carriage company put on a brave front, saying crime is unusual in that part of St. Louis:

“We’ve been there seven nights a week for 35 years and never had an issue with anything,” Jerry Kirk says. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had an incident this way, and I’m not aware that there’s ever been an incident like this ever before.”

To its credit, the news station allowed readers in the comments section to tell the full story of racial violence and denial that its own reporter did not — or could not — say. And they did, by the hundreds:

“I’m from St. Louis,” said one reader at the CBS St. Louis web site. “This happened in the big tourist area called the Riverfront, right along the Mississippi. Right across the river is East St. Louis, Illinois, totally crime ridden. The truth is that rampaging “teen” boys come streaming across the bridge all the time to beat people, rob them and terrorize families, especially during big festivals. Yes, I’ve seen it personally and it was damned scary. I’m shocked to hear this carriage owner say this has never happened to his employees before. They’re either very, very lucky, or he’s lying. The area needs cops stationed down there along the Riverfront 24/7. Thank God Missouri finally has concealed carry.”