RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Sonnie Johnson, the CEO and inspiration of Change the Game (ctghq.org), the new website and activist program launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center that sets out to expose the failure and racism of progressive policies and to use hip hop culture to reach constituencies previously untouched by conservative messages.

FP: Sonnie Johnson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Johnson: Thank you for having me. I have the feeling this will be the first of many.

FP: You have great intuition!

So let’s begin:

What is Change the Game all about and what inspired you to create it?

Johnson: I never wanted to start my own project. I wanted to bring my talent to projects that currently exist, and I tried. It wasn’t long before I realized if I wanted to do something different, if I really wanted to change the conversation, I was going to have to do it myself.

Plus, there are a lot of black conservatives holding on by a thread. They are one Bundy Ranch, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown story away from leaving the conservative movement. We’ve lost some really great advocates already. They say they don’t have a home on the conservative side of the aisle. I wanted to provide that home.

FP: Why has hip hop and its constituency been so insulated from conservative messages? Why have so many conservatives been insulated from hip hop?

Johnson: Excellent question. If both sides asked themselves and answered honestly, we could actually have an honest conversation on race and culture.

In my very first “political” speech, I did a comparison between Jay-Z and Ronald Reagan. I took quotes straight from Reagan and mirrored them to lyrics by Jay-Z. I thought I was nailing my political coffin, but I wanted people to see we are saying the same thing. Every Tea Party speech I’ve ever given has hip hop symbolism or direct quotation. When conservatives don’t know the message is coming from hip hop, I get standing ovations.

During the past ten years and two days, the ostrich cabinets did nothing. Every warning was ignored. They lied to the people.

Do not prevent jihadists from leaving our country. Let them leave. I am prepared to go to Schiphol [airport] to wave them goodbye. But let them never come back.

Madam Speaker, war has been declared against us.

Madam Speaker, actually I was expecting flowers from you. I am celebrating an anniversary these days. Exactly ten years and two days ago, I left a party whose name I cannot immediately remember. During these ten years and two days. I have been much criticized. Most importantly for always saying the same thing.

My critics are right. Indeed, my message had been the same during all these years. And today, I will repeat the same message about Islam again. For the umpteenth time. As I have been doing for ten years and two days.

I have been vilified for my film Fitna. And not just vilified, but even prosecuted. Madam Speaker, while not so many years ago, everyone refused to broadcast my film Fitna, we can today watch Fitna 2, 3, 4 and 5 daily on our television screens. It is not a clash of civilizations that is going on, but a clash between barbarism and civilization.

The Netherlands has become the victim of Islam because the political elite looked away. Here, in these room, they are all present, here and also in the Cabinet, all these people who looked away. Every warning was ignored.

As a result, also in our country today, Christians are being told: “We want to murder you all.” Jews receive death threats. Swastika flags at demonstrations, stones go through windows, Molotov cocktails, Hitler salutes are being made, macabre black ISIS flags wave in the wind, we hear cries, such as “F-ck the Talmud,” on the central square in Amsterdam.

Indeed, Madam Speaker, this summer, Islam came to us.

“A Hillary Clinton White House might adhere to the letter of the law, but a de facto second Clinton co-presidency would, like the first, violate both the spirit and the good sense of the Constitution. Buy one, get two—but at far too high a price. ”

It was the first and only time in this country’s history that supreme executive authority had been simultaneously wielded by two people, man and wife. Bill was away on a foreign trip. That left his wife, who’d only recently rebuffed Henry Hyde’s bid to remove them both from power, in command of the nation’s domestic affairs. At this delicate juncture, Bill’s powerful spouse confided her innermost thoughts to a private diary she habitually kept close by and ready for burning in the event of discovery. Few Americans know anything of this diary’s contents, which can now be publicly revealed.

I refer, of course, to the private papers of Queen Mary II, who ruled England with her husband, King William III, from 1689 to 1694, an example of joint sovereignty unique in English history. Mary’s share in the government of England was recently described in an essay by historian Richard Price, based on her heretofore neglected private papers. It is a curiosity of history that, much like a later ruling couple in America, William and Mary fought off efforts to displace (if not impeach) them by one Henry Hyde, Mary’s uncle, the 2nd earl of Clarendon.

The reign of William and Mary is a relatively rare historical example of smoothly functioning joint executive power. The couple’s accession to the throne was the foundation stone of England’s Glorious Revolution, which replaced a reigning king with a monarch elected by Parliament. As the daughter of the displaced king, and wife of the new one, Mary’s presence on the throne smoothed over the break in succession. William, however, held full executive power, by grant of Parliament.

With the king frequently out of the country prosecuting a war against France, Mary was left to take control of domestic affairs. Parliament passed a Regency Bill granting her authority while William was away, yet the nature of the arrangement remained ambiguous. What if Mary’s commands contradicted William’s wishes? What if William issued a counter-order negating hers? Thanks to Mary’s limited enthusiasm for governance, along with her determination to solidify the joint monarchy’s tenuous legitimacy, these difficulties were never faced. For all practical purposes, Mary successfully served as William’s vicegerent.

William and Mary are the exception that proves the rule. From ancient Rome to contemporary Latin America, history shows that in the absence of clear, hierarchical lines of authority, joint executive power tends to produce debilitating confusion and weakness.

Although she frequently invokes her White House years as a credential, Hillary Clinton’s scandal-plagued past is nowadays generally dismissed as irrelevant to her political future. Most Americans, for example, have long since forgiven, forgotten, or discounted the Whitewater affair, Mrs. Clinton’s startling acumen at investing in cattle futures, even Vince Foster’s suicide. And when it comes to Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and other such friends of Bill, the public’s sympathies seem to be solidly on the First Lady’s side.

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.