Sunday, March 22, 2015

Greece struggles to get citizens to pay their taxes
ATHENS—Of all the challenges Greece has faced in recent years, prodding its citizens to pay their taxes has been one of the most difficult.

At the end of 2014, Greeks owed their government about €76 billion ($86 billion) in unpaid taxes accrued over decades; the government says only €9 billion of that can be recovered, with most of the rest lost to insolvency.

Billions more in taxes are owed on never-reported revenue from Greece’s vast underground economy, which was estimated before the crisis to equal more than a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product....

...Tax rates in Greece are broadly in line with those elsewhere in Europe. But Greeks have a widespread aversion to paying what they owe the state, an attitude often blamed on a combination of cultural and historical forces. During the country’s centuries-long occupation by the Ottomans, avoiding taxes was a sign of patriotism. Today, that distrust is focused on the government, which many Greeks see as corrupt, inefficient and unreliable.

“Greeks consider taxes as theft,” said Aristides Hatzis, an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Athens. “Normally taxes are considered the price you have to pay for a just state, but this is not accepted by the Greek mentality.”
'Net neutrality' rules discard bipartisan light-touch regulatory framework.
...The ultimate result of more government encroachment will be something akin to the sagging European Internet market, where investment in broadband infrastructure is only one-fourth of America's due to heavy-handed regulations. Even worse, this new power grab could trigger expanded intergovernmental powers over the Web through existing telecom treaties, jeopardizing Internet freedom.

What many in Silicon Valley don't understand is that, according to the Supreme Court's 2005 Brand X decision, nearly any "tech" company that builds a telecom-style network to deliver its content and apps has the potential to be captured by the FCC's new rules. If the agency tries to exempt some companies but not others, it will be choosing the politically favored over everyone else....
Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept.
...The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.

The new disclosures, provided in response to questions from The Washington Post, make clear that the 2008 agreement did not prohibit foreign countries with interests before the U.S. government from giving money to the charity closely linked to the secretary of state.

In one instance, foundation officials acknowledged they should have sought approval in 2010 from the State Department ethics office, as required by the agreement for new government donors, before accepting a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government.

The money was given to assist with earthquake relief in Haiti, the foundation said. At the time, Algeria, which has sought a closer relationship with Washington, was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues....
"Chilling comment on Adam Liptak's NYT piece on the South Carolina employment benefits lawyer who focused attention the statutory text that might wreck Obamacare."
...There's only that one pushback comment from NYHuguenot — which itself goes too far — and it only arrived 11 hours after Cold's chilling remark, which has 11 thumbs up. I read Cold's comment in the middle of the night and hit the "flag" icon but I couldn't bring myself to check any of the options. "Inflammatory" and "Personal Attack" seemed closest but not precisely apt. I decided to blog about it here instead. It's evil to waft the suggestion of a violent attack. It might influence someone, though it's certainly not an imminent enough incitement to support arresting Cold. It's evil, but it's also ludicrous for Cold to project her political will — her desire to preserve the legislation — onto the seriously ill, as if they'll use their waning hours on earth to go out on an attack — they've got nothing to lose — and they'll fixate on some lawyer who noticed something in a 900-page statute that was so terribly important and yet so miserably unread.

Lawless: Treasury throws unauthorized $3 billion to insurers under Obamacare, won’t say why
It’s right there in the Constitution: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

Which is why this latest episode of lawlessness from the administration is so particularly galling. “The U.S. Treasury Department has rebuffed a request by House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R- Wis., to explain $3 billion in payments that were made to health insurers even though Congress never authorized the spending through annual appropriations,” The Washington Examiner’s Philp Klein reported on Thursday.

That’s right. The payments insurers receive, dubbed “cost –sharing subsidies,” are designed to offset the costs incurred when they pick up the out-of-pocket expenses for low-income individuals covered by Affordable Care Act plans. If insurers had to cover these costs themselves, Obamacare would be infeasible. So, the federal government picks up the tab for the newly insured as they go about receiving “free” health care.

There’s just one tiny, unconstitutional problem: Congress never authorized the distribution of those funds. “[B]ut the Department of Health and Human Services, with the cooperation of the U.S. Treasury, made them anyway,” Klein reported....
New Zealander: Amnesty Is Obama’s Trump Card To Transform America
...Citing a speech in 2010 by White House consultant and radical leftist, Eliseo Medina, Loudon implores Americans to wake up before it is too late in this video interview. He says, with Mitt Romney losing to Obama in 2012 by 2 and ½ million votes, if Obama can succeed in legalizing “10, 15 or 20 million more votes, almost all of whom will vote Democrat,” Obama can lock in progressive electoral victories for the foreseeable future and “make it practically impossible for the Republicans to ever elect another president.”...
Feminist Reporter: Take Away White Men’s Guns
...“Suggestion: we don’t have to vaporize all the guns. Let’s just vaporize white men’s guns,” Grimes tweeted, linking to an article about Arizona shooter Ryan Giroux.

“White guys cannot be trusted to use guns responsibly. It is time to stop giving guns to white guys,” Grimes added. ”I mean, it’s time to stop giving guns to everybody, but we can start with the white guys.”...

AUDIO: Obama Admin Is ‘Going After’ Gun Dealers [VIDEO]
...Audio obtained by the US Consumer Coalition and provided to The Daily Caller presents the latest disturbing example of Choke Point’s overreach. The audio, presented above, captures a conversation between Alex Bacon, president of the ETF Network payment processor, and Brennan Appel, owner of the Global Hookah Distributors tobacco-products company.

Appel’s hookah company had its bank account shut down by Bank of America. Bacon, Appel’s payment processor, explained that Operation Choke Point unilaterally targets certain kinds of businesses and makes business owners’ lives “miserable.”

“Have you heard of a little thing called Choke Point? You know, and the CFPB?” Bacon asked Appel. ”They’re taking aim at industries like you and others to eliminate you from business by choking off your payment processing.”

“Well, they’re doing it by fiat. They’re doing it without a legislative process. They’re just doing it on a rather, you know, directed basis of their own free will,” Bacon said.

“They’re going after clinics, they’re going after collection agencies, they’re going after guns dealers, ammunition dealers, payment processors,” Bacon continued....
The Federal Housing Administration, the next housing crisis?
...When queried by members of the committee about the January 2015 premium reduction as well as the FHA's precarious financial status, Castro was at pains to provide even basic information about the current value of the FHA portfolio. He also refused to admit that the FHA was operating outside of the law, could not say when it would achieve the 2 percent capital reserve benchmark and repeatedly delivered a series of meaningless platitudes about the benefits of homeownership. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) pointed out that the FHA has offered "pricing gimmicks" while lowering its credit standards, down payment requirements and premiums, which are tactics that have been criticized elsewhere as "predatory lending."

Ironically, on the same day that Castro testified, the FHA was once again included on the Government Accountability Office's High Risk List due to the agency's "substantial growth in its insurance portfolio and significant financial difficulties." The FHA has been on the list since 2009.

Historically, the FHA has controlled about 10 to 20 percent of the mortgage market. But after Congress increased the size of mortgages the agency could insure from $360,000 to $625,000, the FHA controlled about 60 percent of the low down-payment mortgage market from 2008 to 2010. That means the income eligible for FHA mortgage insurance went from the national average of about $64,000 to $110,000. Put another way, more than twice as many people can get FHA insurance than they could before the limit was raised.

At the same time that eligibility has exploded, FHA has faced serious solvency problems, culminating in a $1.7 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury at the end of 2013. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that FHA insurance cost taxpayers $15 billion from 2009 to 2012. Nonetheless, the agency's website falsely claims it "is the only government agency that operates entirely from its self-generated income and costs the taxpayers nothing."

Even with all of the taxpayer money that has been thrown at the agency, the FHA is seriously undercapitalized. The law says FHA needs to keep 2 percent cash on hand, which would be about $18 to $20 billion, but as of the beginning of 2015, it had only less than half of 1 percent, or $4.7 billion....

Sunday, March 15, 2015

His Royal Glibness
...Every society has some people who don’t respect the law. But, when it is the people in charge of the law — like the President of the United States and his attorney general — who don’t respect it, that is when we are in big trouble.

Has anyone asked the question, “How could so many people across the country spend so much time at night marching, rioting, and looting, if they had to get up and go to work the next morning?”...
OPERATION CHOKE POINT UPDATE
...Related: Operation Choke Point closes another gun store’s bank account, except this time the owner recorded the credit union telling him why.

More: “Recordings of Shuetz’s conversations with the manager and a bank teller, which were published online by the U.S. Consumer Coalition, make it clear that the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) examined the credit union’s books and forced it to close Shuetz’s account — a move he blames on a Department of Justice initiative called Operation Choke Point.”...
Flashback 1989: UN Predicted Global Warming Would Destroy Entire Nations By 2000
...The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

Brown, who was the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, warned that “[c]oastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” Brown added that “governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human” ability to stop it....

Climate change’s instructive past
...In the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the past 8,000 years — for reasons concerning which there is no consensus. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England — leading, Rosen says, to Europe’s “first sustained population increase since the fall of the Roman Empire.” The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The MWP population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing and new wealthy classes.

Then, near the end of the MWP, came the severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for perhaps 155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses hanging from gallows were devoured.

Human behavior did not cause this climate change. Instead, climate warming caused behavioral change (10 million mouths to feed became 30 million). Then climate cooling caused social changes (rebelliousness and bellicosity) that amplified the consequences of climate, a pattern repeated four centuries later.

In “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,” Geoffrey Parker, a history professor at Ohio State University, explains how a “fatal synergy” between climatological and political factors produced turmoil from Europe to China. What he calls “the placenta of the crisis” of that century included the Little Ice Age (LIA), between the 1640s and the 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough to qualify as a change in climate, correlated so strongly with political upheavals as to constitute causation....

More Evidence Of Climate Data Tampering By NOAA?
When Dr. Roy Spencer looked up summer temperature data for the U.S. Corn Belt, it showed no warming trend for over a century. But that was before temperatures were “adjusted” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists. Now the same data shows a significant warming trend.

Spencer, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the National Climatic Data Center made large adjustments to past summer temperatures for the U.S. Corn Belt, lowering past temperatures to make them cooler. Adjusting past temperatures downward creates a significant warming trend in the data that didn’t exist before.

“I was updating a U.S. Corn Belt summer temperature and precipitation dataset from the NCDC website, and all of a sudden the no-warming-trend-since-1900 turned into a significant warming trend,” Spencer wrote on his blog, adding that NCDC’s “adjustments” made the warming trend for the region increase from just 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per century to 0.6 degrees per century....

...“But a variety of errors in data measurement and collection would typically have both positive and negative signs,” Spencer noted, adding that he corrects for such errors when calculating satellite temperature data even if they tend to cancel each other out.

“In contrast, the thermometer data apparently need to be adjusted in such a way that almost always leads to greater and greater warming trends,” he added....

Ooops. NASA now “38% sure” 2014 was warmest year on record
...The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true…

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much....
Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons?
...It’s easy to enforce the law on people who are inclined to be law-abiding, which means those of us in the middle, mainly: We have enough to lose that there’s a real cost to breaking the rules, but we don’t have so much that we can conduct our personal and professional lives as though we had sovereign immunity. The people in the middle cannot go about their ordinary business — working at a job, driving a car, renting or owning a home, traveling — without preemptively complying with all manner of government mandates. But millions of illegals can flout the law with impunity — and their well-off enablers in Washington can flout the law with impunity, too. When the law does not apply to the lawmakers and law-enforcers, you are not being governed: You are being ruled. And we are ruled by criminals.

If you treat IRS rules the way the IRS treats IRS rules, you go to prison; if you treat federal law the way the secretary of state does, you go to prison. If you treat immigration controls the way our immigration authorities do, you go to prison. If you’re as careless in your handling of firearms as the ATF is, you go to prison. You cook your business’s books the way the federal government cooks its books, you go to prison.

Hillary Clinton is not going to prison. She’s going to release whatever emails she feels like releasing and dare any of you peons or your elected representatives to try to make her do otherwise. You’ll take what she offers, and you’ll like it....

Bribes Disguised As Charitable Gifts: Hillary Clinton’s Possible Legal Trouble
...Other anti-corruption practitioners note that it’s a major red flag when you see a single, isolated charitable donation of the size that Algeria gave to the Clinton Foundation. Such investigators say the first thing you look for is whether the giver had any business before the government official, which clearly was the case with Algeria, which was lobbying at the time for more favorable foreign policy treatment.

If these facts were in the private sector, the Department of Justice would be all over the matter. The Clintons have had previous problems with raising funds from foreign entities seeking to influence domestic policy....

The World Fails to Follow Hillary’s Careful Script
...The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation unveiled a big foofaraw over Hillary’s “No Ceilings” campaign. What a wonderfully convenient theme for Mrs. Clinton’s massive and mysterious foundation, given that smashing the “highest glass ceiling” — i.e., the presidency — is the central rationale of her planned presidential bid. It was just a coincidence that the tax-exempt foundation with her name on it happened to be rolling out a big light show on that very subject during the rollout of her presidential campaign....
Climate Change Is "My Religion and My Dharma."
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has stepped down amidst a sexual harassment scandal. In his letter of resignation to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Pachauri declared:

"For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma."

In Hinduism dharma is the path of righteousness....

What Would a Bad Job Look Like?
...Let us travel back to 2009. The individuals who would write the upcoming climate report hadn’t yet been selected (that didn’t happen until the following year). They hadn’t yet attended any IPCC meetings. Much of the research it would be their duty to evaluate hadn’t yet been published.

Nevertheless, the IPCC chairman knew – all those years in advance – what their conclusions would be. In September 2009, he told religious leaders in New York:

When the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say, ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’

Not only did Pachauri know the nature and direction of the IPCC report’s conclusions, he knew these conclusions would be alarming and dramatic.

This is not how a scientific body operates. This is the mark of a political organization, established to serve political ends....
Delayed divorce battle: Ecotricity founder Dale Vince's New Age traveller ex-wife wins cash fight
During the subsequent years they met up at Stonehenge, Glastonbury and elsewhere but eventually divorced in 1992. He was not required to pay maintenance because it was agreed he had no money.

But his experience of rigging up an old pylon into a wind-powered telephone at the Glastonbury Festival shortly afterwards paved the way for founding, in 1996 of his wind energy firm. It is now worth an estimated £57 million.

It was not until 2011 that Ms Wyatt lodged a claim for financial support, arguing that he had failed to provide for their son, and her daughter, whom he had effectively accepted into the family....

..."The case underlines how there is no limit on when someone can make a claim,” he said.

"It doesn't matter whether you divorce in your twenties and return with a claim when you're 80."...

Judge ‘Outraged’ At Man Ordered To Pay $30,000 For A Kid That’s Not His
...But Alexander says he was only first made aware of the false paternity claim during a 1991 traffic stop when the arresting officer told Alexander he was a “deadbeat dad.”

That came as a shock to Alexander, who knew he was not the father of anyone’s child.

Alexander’s case was bungled even further when a court document process server falsified a document showing that he refused to sign a court summons pertaining to the child support case. But Alexander was in jail at the time the document was served. (RELATED: Man Ordered To Pay Back $30,000 For Kid That Isn’t His, Or Else)

Since then, Alexander’s ex-girlfriend has admitted she lied on the welfare form in order to get benefits. And besides the DNA test, the actual father of the boy is in his life....

Sunday, March 01, 2015

Whistleblower: Pelosi Covered Up Role In Crisis
...In 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her California pal Phil Angelides, a long-time Democrat operative, to lead the commission. The fix seemed to be in, and Wallison's account of the inner workings of the 10-member body confirms it. Here's what took place during the FCIC's 18-month, $10 million probe:

• Angelides provided no staff to help Wallison and other Republicans interview witnesses, conduct research or draft the report. But commission Democrats were assigned almost 80 staffers to help formulate their single theory that bank risk-taking and greed unleashed by deregulation caused the crisis.

• Angelides never notified Wallison or other commissioners about the hundreds of witnesses he called to testify in closed-door interviews with his staff, denying them the chance to cross-examine the witnesses.

• Staffers failed to put these private witnesses under oath, even though the final report was based almost exclusively on their testimony with little or no documents or data to back up their statements, which simply validated the Democrat narrative.

• Angelides buried evidence revealing that by 2008, three in four high-risk mortgages wound up on the books of HUD-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration. A data-rich memo by former Fannie Mae chief credit officer Ed Pinto proved that government, not the private sector, drove risky lending. But Pinto's research "was never formally made available by the chair or staff to the other members of the FCIC," Wallison writes.

• Angelides withheld the final draft of the report from Wallison and other commissioners until eight days before sending it to the printer, never giving them the time they needed to go over the wording or content of the almost 900-page draft.
George Will: The harm incurred by a mushrooming welfare state
...Transfers of benefits to individuals through social welfare programs have increased from less than 1 federal dollar in 4 (24 percent) in 1963 to almost 3 out of 5 (59 percent) in 2013. In that half-century, entitlement payments were, Eberstadt says, America’s “fastest growing source of personal income,” growing twice as fast as all other real per capita personal income. It is probable that this year a majority of Americans will seek and receive payments.

This is not primarily because of Social Security and Medicare transfers to an aging population. Rather, the growth is overwhelmingly in means-tested entitlements. More than twice as many households receive “anti-poverty” benefits than receive Social Security or Medicare....

...What has changed? Not the portion of the estimated population below the poverty line (15.2 percent in 1983; 15 percent in 2012). Rather, poverty programs have become untethered from the official designation of poverty: In 2012, more than half the recipients were not classified as poor but accepted being treated as needy. Expanding dependency requires erasing Americans’ traditional distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. This distinction was rooted in this nation’s exceptional sense that poverty is not the unalterable accident of birth and is related to traditions of generosity arising from immigrant and settler experiences....

...Causation works both ways between the rapid increase in family disintegration (from 1964 to 2012, the percentage of children born to unmarried women increased from 7 to 41) and the fact that, Eberstadt says, for many women, children and even working-age men, “the entitlement state is now the breadwinner of the household.” In the past 50 years, the fraction of civilian men ages 25 to 34 who were neither working nor looking for work approximately quadrupled....

Mother and daughter weigh a total of 43 stone and get £34k a year handouts, but refuse to diet
...A mother and daughter who get £34,000 a year in handouts because they are too fat to work say they'd rather be happy and on benefits than depressed and thin Janice and Amber Manzur weigh a total of 43 stone and are so overweight they have to use mobility scooters to get around.

But both women refuse to diet and mother-of-two Ms Manzur, 44, insists: "I'd rather my daughter live life on benefits being fat and happy than depressed and thin."

Ms Manzur lives in a three-bedroom house that has been customised by the council to accommodate her disability and drives a Fiat Quibo disability car worth around £15,000....
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
-- Theodore Dalrymple