The primary thing republicans were talking about, was that the subcommittee was not supplied with requested documents by President Obama’s Administration over the Salyndria loan.

Totally forgotten, and not even mentioned by the republicans, is that the Salyndria loan program was actually started under republicans, during the Bush Administration.

Understandably, the Obama Administration should absolutely provide any documentation asked for by the Peoples representatives. The republicans are simply trying to dupe the People by misdirection.

The real story is, how they are not voting on bills that will directly create jobs for the United States citizens that they represent.

The Republicans, the Democrats, and President Obama all talk about how people are living from paycheck to paycheck, but never mention the millions and millions of the People who have no job at all.

Call, e-mail, write, visit your Representative and Senators, let them know. Better still VOTE them out of office.

In his speech he ask’s the People to tell their elected officials to do the right thing. What is the right thing you ask? With both parties in bed with Wall Street, Big Business, Foreign Interests, and their own pockets, it gets confusing to them what the “Right Thing” is.

The Right Thing is this:

Enacting legislation that helps the People to achieve and protect,  the rights and promises of the Constitution. There is no other standard to wich they can be held.

Wether its the smallest law, or the farthest reaching, the People should be taken into consideration first and foremost when our leaders enact, repeal, defund and fund laws.

You have to ask yourself if the Republicans are right, they have voted 80+ times this congress on defunding/limiting the Environmental Protection Agency. (certainly none of the People breath, eat, drink or live near any big plant that pollutes). They have voted for the repeal of the Health care plan (certainly the People do not ever have medical problems). They want to remove the regulations enacted to keep Wall Street from losing another 6 trillion (thats 6,000,000,000,000) of the Peoples assests.

How many times have they voted for anything that would directly provide to the People? Not once.

Every single Republican proposed bill basically boils down to: Give the rich more money, and the poor will benefit.

In the near 40 years I’ve been watching politics and agendas, the one that I KNOW, doesn’t create wealth in the middle and lower class, is the “trickle down” economic plan. You simply cannot expect a trickle to increase the wealth of 99% of United States citizens. It has to be a FLOOD.

Personally, I don’t think they are doing what is “right”. Do you?

Call your Representatives and Senators, let them know if what they are doing is “right” or better yet, VOTE them out of office.

Have you ever lifted a bag of cement? If you haven’t, they weigh from 80 to 100lbs. Do you REALLY think we will be paying to import something this heavy from China? The prohibitive shipping costs alone allow Cement producers here in the U.S. quite a large leeway for proffit.

They want to change it so the EPA cannot institute regulations and rules about the emissions from cement factories (among other industries).  Mainly pertaining to such things as mercury, wich is known to cause many ailments, including Asthma, Autism, brain damage, etc.

Republicans say that these regulations, wich would require factories to lower their emissions of some of these harmful chemicals will drive some of the cement plants out of business.

What it’s really about: This is a way for Republicans to keep the “Job’s Act” from going onto the floor for debate and a vote.

It seems to me, The Jobs bill president Obama has proposed, would give these cement companies alot of demand for their product. Maybe even record breaking demand, as bridges, roads and other parts of the infrastructure of this country requires concrete and cement.

This would give these companies the extra proffit to put these potentially LIFE SAVING emission controls into place.

Act now, contact your Representatives and Senators or better yet, vote them out of office!

Source: Tax Reform

We will use the example of a person  with a median (average) income ($26,261 a year) buying a car and an exact ($1,000,000) millionaire buying a new car. We will assume a “fair” tax rate of 23%.

We will assume the median income person buys an economy car, a Nissan Sentra with a cost of $20,620 fully loaded. They would be paying $4742.60 in “fair” tax. That is 18.06 % of their annual income.

If they choose the same car, base model at $16,092, they would be paying $3701.16 or 14.09% of their annual income.

We will assume the millionaire buys a mercedes c class sedan (a “luxury” car) with a cost of $61,430 fully loaded. They would be paying $14,128.90 in “fair” tax. That is 1.41% of their annual income.

If they choose the same car, base model, at $34,800, they would be paying $8004 or 0.80% of their income.

As you can see, this simply does not translate into a “fair” tax. One person is paying a MUCH MUCH higher percentage of their income in tax than the other. You can see it is really a way for the millionaires to pay less taxes than than they do now. Some people will say “But millionaires buy lots of expensive things!” Some do, most don’t. In fact most invest their earnings (not taxable under the fair tax as proposed) or simply save it.  They can afford to save it, or simply already have these expensive items.

Remeber we used an exact millionaire as an example. Persons with higher incomes than that pay an even SMALLER effective tax rate.

1% of U.S. citizens are millionares. Are you in that 1%? They are lobbying to have you pay more, while they pay even less than they do now.

Call your Representatives and Senators, better yet, vote them out of office!

There are times when even the most political among us are well served by jumping on the non-partisan, moderate bandwagon. There are other times when to do so would be to surrender a good cause to the forces that created the very climate for its need.

Turning prison reform over to Newt Gingrich and Company may be one of those other times.

Newt, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has become a walking, talking contradiction in terms. It would be easy to assume that his lust for power has co-opted whatever little personal integrity he has left.

Back during Newt’s first 15 minutes – the cultural revolution of 1994 – he was the rarest of specimens. The ink was barely dry on his Contract with America, when he cynically signed a $4.5 million book deal with Rupert Murdock. A champion of family values, allegations of adultery, dead-beat dad and illegal misallocations of tax-exempt donations followed on the heels of the Clinton sex scandal.

Newt is remembered for visiting his surgery-recovering wife in the hospital to talk over the terms of their divorce. Renowned for delusions of grandeur, he once compared himself to Napoleon and dubbed himself a latter-day Winston Churchill.

Former Republican congressman and now MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough, summarized Newt’s career since 1994 as “anything but impressive.” Scarborough bluntly declared as Gingrich’s modus operandi “…to smear any public figure who fails to share his worldview. His insults are so overblown and outrageous that after the rhetorical dust settles, the reputation most damaged is his own.

“By tossing red meat at media talkers, Newt keeps himself in the middle of the shout fests that erupt among competing organizations. That, in turn, keeps him on blogs and talk radio, which helps sell more books, which helps him rack up millions of dollars.”

Examples of his outrageous comments include blaming Democrats for a mom drowning her two young children and accusing Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, of “…behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny.” He once warned that Barack Obama’s “secular socialist machine” represented “…as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

“At some point, people will learn to stop taking Newt Gingrich seriously,” offered former Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-OK). “Newt is utterly unconcerned with the welfare of the country…He cares about (a) Newt and (b) power for Newt.” This is an odd characterization of an intellectual with an earned Ph.D. in Western European History from Tulane University, one who seemingly would be above cheap, tawdry political grandstanding.

Knowing Newt’s history, I cringed on January 7 when I saw the article by Newt and Pat Nolan in the Washington Post, “Prison Reform: A Smart Way for States to Save Money and Lives.” Worse yet, I became alarmed over the haste with which prison activists applauded the news.

The first red flag that caught my attention was that Nolan is a vice president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry to prisoners. While very effective within prison walls, Prison Fellowship has come under scrutiny for its failure as a tool to reduce recidivism once active prisoners are released. Secondly, the cast of characters signing on with Newt to the Right on Crime Campaign include such luminaries as Ed Meese, Grover Norquist, William Bennett and Richard Viguerie, all of whom have enjoyed a certain savory reputation.

Coming from these law-and-order, “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” political demagogues, it is natural to look for the hidden agenda. Alan Bean, writing for his Friends of Social Justice blog, sees the conservative talk about prison reform merely providing cover for law-and-order states like Texas that are going broke. The interest, then, is not in prison reform but in prison cost reform.

The poor, the disenfranchised and the ignorant have never been targets for rehabilitation by conservative pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps Republicans. Without a comprehensive re-entry strategy, we can be assured that rudderless former offenders on the streets will ultimately be blamed on progressive social activists attempting to make good use of declining education funds.

If the Contract with America for Newt was all about a $4.5 million book deal and the power to live the jetset life without conscience, his meddling in prison reform is likely to leave shattered the hope that people, including New Gingrich, are capable of change.

Beware Neocons bearing gifts!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/politics-articles/newt-on-prison-reform-beware-neocons-bearing-gifts-4246682.html

About the Author
Author Stan Moody has served in the Maine Legislature, was a prison chaplain and has written scores of articles on prison reform. He is a board member of Solitary Watch and has received the ACLU-ME Civil Liberties Baldwin Award. Stan’s articles can be read at http://www.scribd.com/stanmoody and https://moodyreport.wordpress.com/.

There are 441 members of the House of Representatives.  6 of these members, although they “represent” THE PEOPLE have no vote. These are the representatives for Washington DC, Guam, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands and the resident commisioner from Puerto Rico. (who should all have a vote, as they are subject to taxation by the federal government)

There are 100  senators.  100% of them are reported as millionares.

That gives us a total of 535 voting members of the congress as a whole. 267 of these are millionaires, or 49.90%.. rounded up thats 50%.

Lets take the House of Representatives (commonly refered to as the peoples house)

That leaves us with 435 voting members in the House of Representatives. Now of those 435, at least 167 of them are known to be millionares, or 38%. 

1% of THE PEOPLE are millionares. Does this mean that millionare’s have 37% more representation than non millionaires? Given that theres such a small percentage of millionaires, and such a large representation of them in the congress, it means they have higher than 38% representation per capita.

100 out of 100 Senators have reported wealth of over 1 million dollars, with the average median wealth for a senator being reported at 2.38 million. This number does not include things such as personal residences as federal law does not require reporting of these assets.

Base pay for congressional members-$174,000 per year (they set their own wages too!). The average median income for THE PEOPLE was  $26,261. One must ask, are these people truly representing my best interest? Should they not have their pay tied to the median income of the people they represent?

The average wealth of congressional members went up by 16% in 2008-2009 while the average wealth of THE PEOPLE went down 5%.

82 members have investments in General Electric, a company that payed $0.00 dollars in taxes last year because of tax loopholes.

63 members have investments in Bank of America, who recieved “bail-out” money.

There must be a change in the United States, and it starts with us, THE PEOPLE, changing our non-voting habits into voting every election habits.

Remember get out and VOTE!

Source: Tax Reform

Source: Tax Reform

Source: Tax Reform