Marin Libertarian Party Newsletter Winter 2011
THE LATEST NEWSLETTER CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE
Marin Libertarian Party Newsletter December 2011
CHANGE YOU CAN’T BELIEVE IN
NTU study measures the impact of tax compliance on the US economy: for 2009, 7.75 billion hours on all Americans; 3.8 billion hours for individual taxpayers, estimated to be worth $110.6 billion, with an additional $29.33 billion for tax preparation tools / services; 3.2 billion hours for corporate tax related paperwork, estimated to be worth $159.4 billion.
But fear not. Most tax legislation enacted over the past 10 years that provided lower tax rates and targeted tax deduction and credits will expire at the end of 2010. Couple that with the push by Obama and Pelosi for higher taxes of all sorts, in addition to the revenue required to pay down bank bailout debts and fund ‘health care reform’, then we can hope to see the total tax burden in dollars and hours go much higher.
Obama gets Nobel Peace Prize
Peace Doesn’t Work, Obama Informs Nobel Committee
Accepts Peace Prize by Defending Merits of War
by Jason Ditz, December 10, 2009
President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize today, and as expected he acknowledged that even he isn’t clear why he got the prize, noting that there were millions of people more deserving.
But President Obama’s “acceptance speech” was far from an expression of contrition, spending most of the speech defending his War in Afghanistan as an inherently just war, and rambling on about all the other recent American wars and his ostensible justifications of them.
Then, in what must’ve been one of the least humble and least appropriate speeches ever given before the Nobel Committee, Obama declared non-violence to be impractical and insisted that the “limits of reason” meant that the American military would continue to have to be used for “moral” reasons.
“War is Peace”
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.
No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantánamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.” Paul Craig Roberts
The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
Federal Salaries Explode
Posted by Chris Edwards
That’s the subject of a USA Today analysis, which reveals an outrageous increase in salaries at the top levels of the federal workforce. I’ve been complaining about excessive federal pay for some time based on one set of data, and now Dennis Cauchon provides strong support for my thesis using a different set of data.
Cauchon finds that since the economy fell into recession, the number of federal workers earning more than $150,000 has more than doubled. The federal government has become extremely bloated and top heavy, even as families and businesses across the nation have had to tighten their belts. With 383,000 workers earning six-figure salaries, the government has become an elite island of overcompensated administrators immune from the competitive job realities of average families.
There are a remarkable 22,000 federal civilians earning salaries of over $170,000, illustrating that Big Government works for the benefit of well-off insiders, not average Americans. And Cauchon only looks at salaries and wages. Average annual federal benefits are more than $41,000, which pushes total federal compensation even further ahead of the private sector average.
The Bush administration let federal pay and benefits grow completely out of control, as it did with other areas of federal spending. President Obama has an opportunity to fix these problems. He should call for a multi-year freeze on federal pay, work to overhaul a system that moves workers up the pay scales too rapidly, and begin purging the upper ranks of federal management.
Plundering California
Public-sector unions have brought the state to its knees.
The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees—thanks largely to the power of their unions—have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens.
Read more here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574583960607848486.html
NO MORE GROCERY BAGS IN MARIN
“Our goal is that every city and town in the county will join the Board of Supervisors in banning non-reusable bags by Earth Week, 2010,” said Supervisor Charles McGlashan. “We’re hoping to make a positive shift in people’s behavior.”
McGlashan joined fellow Supervisor Susan Adams and representatives from several environmental organizations at the Marin County Farmers Market in San Rafael on Thursday to drum up support for the proposed bag ban, which would make it illegal for groceries and retailers to provide paper and plastic bags to their customers.
SUPPORT Y0UR LOCAL, MARIN LP CANDIDATES THIS FALL
Joel Smolen – U.S. Congressional Representative for the 6th Districe of CA
Sandy Keating: State Assembly for 6th Distict
Why I’m a libertarian. By Paul Kelley
Back in the 1960’s Abraham Maslow developed a viewpoint within psychology academia with the idea of ‘self-actualization’ at its core. This was a stark counter to the mechanistic behavioral theories of such notables as B. F. Skinner, whose ‘skinner box’ work on rats in rat cages was great fuel for government bureaucrats trying to take control over everybody else’s lives. ‘Behavior modification’ was an outgrowth of Skinner’s work, which involved a more proactive police state detaining and re-training non-conformists through such popular methods as shock therapy, group therapy humiliation, and extreme drug therapy. This was all fictionalized in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”. Maslow’s self-actualization posited that human nature is basically ‘good’, meaning generous and non-coercive, but gets twisted when the inner process of development of self gets thwarted. So the best way to develop a non-coercive society is through a non-interventionist policy – limited government. (I don’t recall Maslow ever discussing political philosophy, but this is what I took away from his work). That was the late 60’s, and a few years later, the libertarian party was born. I was immediately attracted to it, because it’s proponents seemed to have the same message that I had picked up from Maslow, and others.
The libertarian philosophy is the only political philosophy that has the realization of this ‘self-actualization process’ at its core. Socialism, fascism, communism, Obama-ism, Clinton-ism all rely on the brute force of the militarized state to enforce social conformity to narrowly defined modes of existence, easily managed and shepherded by the bureaucratic class. Bill Clinton once said that his Americorps program, which paid a stipend for participation in government service programs, was “citizenship at its best” (the fuhrer knows what’s best). Obama’s rhetoric implies that somehow, he knows what’s right for everyone – he knows the values worthy of enforcement. But it sounds like the same old fascist rhetoric.
I’ll take the free market, thanks.
Next MLP Meeting:
Location: Round Table Pizza Restaurant, Red Hill Shopping Center
914 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., San Anselmo, CA 94960
Time: 7:00PM – 8:30 PM
Date: Monday January 25, 2009
Objectives: Finalize MLP officer elections
Map out MLP 2010 Strategy
Marin Libertarian Party Newsletter December 2009
CHANGE YOU CAN’T BELIEVE IN
NTU study measures the impact of tax compliance on the US economy: for 2009, 7.75 billion hours on all Americans; 3.8 billion hours for individual taxpayers, estimated to be worth $110.6 billion, with an additional $29.33 billion for tax preparation tools / services; 3.2 billion hours for corporate tax related paperwork, estimated to be worth $159.4 billion.
But fear not. Most tax legislation enacted over the past 10 years that provided lower tax rates and targeted tax deduction and credits will expire at the end of 2010. Couple that with the push by Obama and Pelosi for higher taxes of all sorts, in addition to the revenue required to pay down bank bailout debts and fund ‘health care reform’, then we can hope to see the total tax burden in dollars and hours go much higher.
Obama gets Nobel Peace Prize
Peace Doesn’t Work, Obama Informs Nobel Committee
Accepts Peace Prize by Defending Merits of War
by Jason Ditz, December 10, 2009
President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize today, and as expected he acknowledged that even he isn’t clear why he got the prize, noting that there were millions of people more deserving.
But President Obama’s “acceptance speech” was far from an expression of contrition, spending most of the speech defending his War in Afghanistan as an inherently just war, and rambling on about all the other recent American wars and his ostensible justifications of them.
Then, in what must’ve been one of the least humble and least appropriate speeches ever given before the Nobel Committee, Obama declared non-violence to be impractical and insisted that the “limits of reason” meant that the American military would continue to have to be used for “moral” reasons.
“War is Peace”
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.
No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantánamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.” Paul Craig Roberts
The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
Federal Salaries Explode
Posted by Chris Edwards
That’s the subject of a USA Today analysis, which reveals an outrageous increase in salaries at the top levels of the federal workforce. I’ve been complaining about excessive federal pay for some time based on one set of data, and now Dennis Cauchon provides strong support for my thesis using a different set of data.
Cauchon finds that since the economy fell into recession, the number of federal workers earning more than $150,000 has more than doubled. The federal government has become extremely bloated and top heavy, even as families and businesses across the nation have had to tighten their belts. With 383,000 workers earning six-figure salaries, the government has become an elite island of overcompensated administrators immune from the competitive job realities of average families.
There are a remarkable 22,000 federal civilians earning salaries of over $170,000, illustrating that Big Government works for the benefit of well-off insiders, not average Americans. And Cauchon only looks at salaries and wages. Average annual federal benefits are more than $41,000, which pushes total federal compensation even further ahead of the private sector average.
The Bush administration let federal pay and benefits grow completely out of control, as it did with other areas of federal spending. President Obama has an opportunity to fix these problems. He should call for a multi-year freeze on federal pay, work to overhaul a system that moves workers up the pay scales too rapidly, and begin purging the upper ranks of federal management.
Plundering California
Public-sector unions have brought the state to its knees.
The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees—thanks largely to the power of their unions—have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens.
Read more here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574583960607848486.html
NO MORE GROCERY BAGS IN MARIN
“Our goal is that every city and town in the county will join the Board of Supervisors in banning non-reusable bags by Earth Week, 2010,” said Supervisor Charles McGlashan. “We’re hoping to make a positive shift in people’s behavior.”
McGlashan joined fellow Supervisor Susan Adams and representatives from several environmental organizations at the Marin County Farmers Market in San Rafael on Thursday to drum up support for the proposed bag ban, which would make it illegal for groceries and retailers to provide paper and plastic bags to their customers.
SUPPORT Y0UR LOCAL, MARIN LP CANDIDATES THIS FALL
Joel Smolen – U.S. Congressional Representative for the 6th Districe of CA
Sandy Keating: State Assembly for 6th Distict
Why I’m a libertarian. By Paul Kelley
Back in the 1960’s Abraham Maslow developed a viewpoint within psychology academia with the idea of ‘self-actualization’ at its core. This was a stark counter to the mechanistic behavioral theories of such notables as B. F. Skinner, whose ‘skinner box’ work on rats in rat cages was great fuel for government bureaucrats trying to take control over everybody else’s lives. ‘Behavior modification’ was an outgrowth of Skinner’s work, which involved a more proactive police state detaining and re-training non-conformists through such popular methods as shock therapy, group therapy humiliation, and extreme drug therapy. This was all fictionalized in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”. Maslow’s self-actualization posited that human nature is basically ‘good’, meaning generous and non-coercive, but gets twisted when the inner process of development of self gets thwarted. So the best way to develop a non-coercive society is through a non-interventionist policy – limited government. (I don’t recall Maslow ever discussing political philosophy, but this is what I took away from his work). That was the late 60’s, and a few years later, the libertarian party was born. I was immediately attracted to it, because it’s proponents seemed to have the same message that I had picked up from Maslow, and others.
The libertarian philosophy is the only political philosophy that has the realization of this ‘self-actualization process’ at its core. Socialism, fascism, communism, Obama-ism, Clinton-ism all rely on the brute force of the militarized state to enforce social conformity to narrowly defined modes of existence, easily managed and shepherded by the bureaucratic class. Bill Clinton once said that his Americorps program, which paid a stipend for participation in government service programs, was “citizenship at its best” (the fuhrer knows what’s best). Obama’s rhetoric implies that somehow, he knows what’s right for everyone – he knows the values worthy of enforcement. But it sounds like the same old fascist rhetoric.
I’ll take the free market, thanks.
Next MLP Meeting:
Location: Round Table Pizza Restaurant, Red Hill Shopping Center
914 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., San Anselmo, CA 94960
Time: 7:00PM – 8:30 PM
Date: Monday March 1, 2010
Objectives: Support local candidates
Map out MLP 2010 Strategy
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