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Passport

Getting Out:Taxes Prompt More Americans to Renounce Citizenship


Reuters
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:23 UTC
passport taxes
© C. Sherburne | Photodisc | Getty Images
A year ago, in Action Comics, Superman declared plans to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

"'Truth, justice, and the American way' - it's not enough anymore," the comic book superhero said, after both the Iranian and American governments criticized him for joining a peaceful anti-government protest in Tehran.

Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman's lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That's a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It's also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.

But not everyone's motivations are as lofty as Superman's. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.

The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they're living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April - this year, the deadline is Tuesday - an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.
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Calculator

Common Sense! What a Fair Tax System Looks Like

Jared Bernstein
Rolling Stone Magazone
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:36 UTC
This being tax day, "What's fair?" seems like an excellent question, especially given how often the concept of "fairness" has been thrown around in discussions of Obama's proposed "Buffett rule." (The president says it's unfair that some millionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than middle-class Americans, as they currently do; Republicans, that it's unfair to burden the rich with higher taxes.)

tax form
© Getty Images
I've got five answers. A fair tax system is:
  1. Progressive: those with more income pay a larger share of it in taxes;
  2. One that doesn't worsen inequality by giving preferential treatment to the wealthy (e.g., by favoring capital over labor income);
  3. One that doesn't disproportionately benefit those who are already doing the best at the expense of the rest;
  4. One that raises enough revenue from those with lots of resources to provide a leg up for those at a disadvantage;
  5. One that does not rearrange the pretax income distribution, as in a confiscatory, highly redistributive system that turns the poor into the rich and visa versa;
Conservatives invariably counter that it's not fair that almost half of American households, because their income is too low, pay zero federal income tax. (And not just conservatives--I got a pretty moving note from a guy who said he didn't think it was fair that, because he didn't make enough money, he didn't get to pay federal taxes. He wanted to contribute!)
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Penis Pump

Matthis Chiroux: Secret Service Sex Scandal Not an Isolated Incident

Matthis Chiroux
Huffington Post
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:23 UTC
Matthis Chiroux
© UnknownMatthis Chiroux
As the Secret Service sex scandal continues to unfold, and implicates active duty military personnel, what comes as a surprise to me is not the details of the sex or the drunkenness, but that the American public would expect anything different from our men in uniform!

Having been in the Army for five years, and having spent more than four of them overseas, I can personally attest to how widespread the practice of soliciting prostitution was and certainly still is for U.S. Servicemembers. The fact that it seems many citizens seem not aware of this defies common sense to me.

My first night outside of the U.S. was spent in Okinawa, Japan. It will forever be marked by the memory of my unit taking me to the "Banana Show" to "break me in." The Banana Show was an elderly Japanese woman who would strip naked and insert objects into her vagina. She inserted stacks of coins and gave "exact change," she masturbated using the body of a large serpent, but the highlight of her act was considered her ability to project peeled bananas from between her legs.
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Family

Startling new statistics reveal more baby boomers facing old age alone

Jen Sobolewski
Bowling Green State University
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:09 UTC
old age pensioner
Startling new statistics from Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) paint a bleak future for the largest generation in history, the baby boomers, as they cross into old age.

Using data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses and the 2009 round of the American Community Survey, Dr. I-Fen Lin, an associate professor of sociology, and Dr. Susan Brown, a professor of sociology and co-director of the NCFMR, found one-third of adults aged 45-63 are unmarried. This represents a more than 50 percent increase since 1980, when just 20 percent of middle-aged Americans were unmarried.
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Cult

Student Boycotts Graduation - to be Held in Pervert's Church

Simon Brown
Opposing Views
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:55 UTC
The graduation is going to be held in New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, which is home to a pastor who, in the kindest of terms, is controversial. ... Pastor Eddie Long was accused by four male members of his church of sexual misconduct.

New Birth Missionary Baptist Church
When Southwest Dekalb High School (Decatur, Ga.) holds its graduation next month, one of the school's top students won't attend because the ceremony is being held in a church.

Nahkoura Mahnassi, 16, has a 3.8 GPA and is in the top 10 percent of her class. Apparently her smarts go well beyond books, because she feels strongly that her commencement should be held at a neutral site, like the Georgia Dome, rather than a Christian church.

Why? Because not all graduating students are Christian, she told WSBTV, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta.
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Handcuffs

Angola 2 mark forty years solitary in Louisiana prison for crime they didn't commit

Ed Pilkington
TheGuardian
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:28 UTC
They've spent 23 hours of each day in the last 40 years in a 9ft-by-6ft cell. Now, as human rights groups intensify calls for their release, a documentary provides insight into an isolated life.
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox
Herman Wallace, left, and Albert Woodfox in Angola prison in Louisiana. Robert King, the third member of the Angola 2, had his conviction overturned and was released in 2001.
Herman Wallace describes the cell in which he has spent 40 years in an audio file here.

"I can make about four steps forward before I touch the door," Herman Wallace says as he describes the cell in which he has lived for the past 40 years. "If I turn an about-face, I'm going to bump into something. I'm used to it, and that's one of the bad things about it."

On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.
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Handcuffs

The Case of the Angola 3: Silenced for trying to expose segregation, corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US.


Angola3.org
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:45 UTC
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox
Herman Wallace, left, and Albert Woodfox in Angola prison in Louisiana. Robert King, the third member of the Angola 2, had his conviction overturned and was released in 2001.
40 years ago, deep in rural Louisiana, three young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000 acre former slave plantation called Angola.

Peaceful, non-violent protest in the form of hunger and work strikes organized by inmates caught the attention of Louisiana's elected leaders and local media in the early 1970s. They soon called for investigations into a host of unconstitutional and extraordinarily inhumane practices commonplace in what was then the "bloodiest prison in the South." Eager to put an end to outside scrutiny, prison officials began punishing inmates they saw as troublemakers.

At the height of this unprecedented institutional chaos, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King were charged with murders they did not commit and thrown into 6x9 foot solitary cells.

Robert was released in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain in solitary, continuing to fight for their freedom.
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Video

Film Review: Owned and Operated

Gregory James
Surpremeboundlessway.com
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:56 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Owned & Operated is a new documentary about the struggles we are facing as a global humanity. For the most part, it's a decent film - especially the first hour. The way it incorporates hundreds of different sources to corroborate the overall feelings sweeping the globe is certainly nice and refreshingly unique. And the tone of the film in general is appropriately forceful and motivating. I agree with many of the points made (but certainly not all) and suggest it's viewing with your critical-thinking cap on.

Unfortunately, like most all films of this type today, Owned & Operated overlooks a great opportunity to assert some very key points. Most especially, it expresses nothing about the vital importance of Self-Work as individuals - of coming into an applicable Realization of the Authentic Self - which is tantamount to the discovery of a healthy society. Nor does it discuss the FACT that problems with our governments stem most-principally from an affliction of psychopathy (marked by character traits of insatiable avarice and total lack of empathy) in key players of the ruling elite - not just ordinary greed and corruption.
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Attention

Humans Still Eating Humans

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:19 UTC
Meat Pies
© Daniel Korzeniewski | ShutterstockThe suspects confessed to murdering at least two women, eating parts of their bodies, and using the rest to make meat pies sold in the town of Garanhuns near Sao Paulo.
The recent arrest of three people in Brazil suspected of making empanadas out of human flesh (and then selling them) reminds us that though human cannibalism is rare in the modern world, it still persists.

Brazil, in particular, has been linked to cannibalism in recent years. The Lancet journal reported in 1994 "that eating human remains" was common among 250 people who lived in an Olinda slum. "Poverty and a lack of compliance with laws" were blamed, since the starving individuals were eating human body parts that they found in the Brazilian city's garbage dump.

"Cannibalism is an ethologic behavior widespread among human primates and non-human primates," Isabel Cáceres, a paleoecologist at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, told Discovery News. Cáceres has studied the phenomenon -- going back up to 780,000 years ago in our ancestors.

"Probably, the practice of cannibalism in the genus Homo appears due to lack of resources and competition for territory in critical moments," she added.

The recent case was apparently a cruel twist on that strategy. The suspects confessed to murdering at least two women, eating parts of their bodies, and using the rest to make meat pies sold in the town of Garanhuns near Sao Paulo.

One quote from one of the suspects also points to other factors. Fifty-one-year old Jorge Beltrao Negroponte told SBT Television, "I did certain things for purification, to protect people and deliver them to God."
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Newspaper

Judge in Breivik Trial Replaced

Kjetil Malkenes Hovland and Niclas Rolander
The Wall Street Journal
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:36 UTC
Image
© ReutersNorwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik smiles at his defence lawyer Vibeke Hein Baera in courtroom 250 during the second day of his terrorism and murder trial, in Oslo, on Tuesday.
Oslo - One of the lay judges in the trial against Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has been replaced after it was revealed that he made a comment on the Internet saying the death penalty would be the only appropriate punishment for Mr. Breivik.

As the second day of the trial against Mr. Breivik began presiding judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen said it has come to the knowledge of the court that lay judge Thomas Indrebo had made a comment which may compromise his impartiality.

Ms. Arntzen said Mr. Indrebo had admitted to the comment, which according to reports were made on Facebook, the day after Mr. Breivik's twin attacks which killed 77 people and injured hundreds in government buildings in central Oslo and at a Labor party youth camp on July 22 last year.

Prosecutor Svein Holden and Mr. Breivik's defense lawyer Geir Lippestad agreed that the lay judge should withdraw. The trial will continue after the judge is replaced by the reserve judge who has followed all court proceedings.
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