Archive for the ‘American News’ Category
Monika Graff / Getty Images
Vendors offer organically grown produce at the Union Square farmers market in New York City.
Renate Raymond has encountered her fair share of organic food snobs, but a recent trip to a Seattle market left her feeling like she’d stumbled onto the set of “Portlandia.“
“I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn’t find one so I asked the produce guy,” says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “And he was like, ‘If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We’re organic.’ I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like ‘You didn’t bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn’t bring your own bag.’ It was like a ‘Portlandia skit.’ They were so snotty and arrogant.”
As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.
“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if they would be more altruistic or not.”
To find out, Eskine and his team divided 60 people into three groups. One group was shown pictures of clearly labeled organic food, like apples and spinach. Another group was shown comfort foods such as brownies and cookies. And a third group — the controls — were shown non-organic, non-comfort foods like rice, mustard and oatmeal. After viewing the pictures, each person was then asked to read a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions.
“One vignette was about second cousins having sex,” says Eskine. “Another was about a lawyer on the prowl in an ER trying to get people to sue for their injuries. Then the groups made moral judgments on a scale from one to seven.”
In another phase of the study, the three groups were asked to volunteer for a (fictitious) study, with each person writing down the amount of time — from zero to 30 minutes — that they would be willing to volunteer.
The results did not bode well for the organic folks.
“We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups,” says Eskine. “On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89.”
When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).
“There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves,” says Eskine. “And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.”
Why does eating better make us act worse? Eskine says it probably has to do with what he calls “moral licensing.”
“People may feel like they’ve done their good deed,” he says. “That they have permission, or license, to act unethically later on. It’s like when you go to the gym and run a few miles and you feel good about yourself, so you eat a candy bar.”
Eskine says he was surprised by the findings (“You’d think eating organic would make you feel elevated and want to pay it forward,” he says) and hopes to do additional studies that look at conditions that might prompt people to act differently.
Until then, organic eaters may want to rein in those self-righteous stink-eyes.
“At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling,” says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. “So I’ll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up.”
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Article source: http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11737146-does-organic-food-turn-people-into-jerks?lite
Wilderness Comittee
Torrance Coste, an activist with the Wilderness Committee on Canada’s Vancouver Island, surveys the stump of an 800-year-old red cedar that poachers cut up and hauled out of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park.
The death of an ancient cedar tree inside a remote park on Canada’s Vancouver Island is being showcased by an environmental group seeking more protection against illegal loggers.
The 800-year-old tree was attacked by poachers with power saws over time at Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, the Wilderness Committee reported Thursday. Cedar is valuable as material for roofing shingles.
The poachers, still at large, were able to cut through 80 percent of the base of the tree — which had a diameter of nine feet — before park staff finally noticed what was going on, Wilderness Committee campaigner Torrance Coste told msnbc.com. The damage was so severe that park staff had to fell the entire tree for safety reasons.
The park left the fallen tree at the site so that it could decompose, returning nutrients to the soil, Coste said, but since then poachers “have returned at their leisure without fear of consequence and cut up, hauled out, and taken away the tree in sections.
“This has required seriously heavy equipment,” he added. “The area has been trashed, and there are huge steel cables lying around all over the place … sections of the trunk have been removed up until as recently as two weeks ago.”
The Wilderness Committee urged British Columbia, which incorporates Vancouver Island, to beef up funding for park rangers.
Wilderness Committee
The cedar was left by park staff to decompose at the site, but only this section and a few pieces are still there after poachers got to the tree.
“While the poachers themselves have obviously committed a terrible crime, fault for this incident should also lay with the Ministry of Environment and their long-time negligence of our parks,” Coste said.
The controversy has reached British Columbia’s government, with the opposition New Democrat Party criticizing the Liberal Party government, The Canadian Press reported.
“To suggest that anyone is able to protect all of those areas to the level that the member suggests is fiscally irresponsible,” responded Environment Minister Terry Lake.
“I’ll tell you what irresponsible is,” countered New Democrat Scott Fraser, “10 years ago there were 194 park rangers in British Columbia, there’s under 100 now.”
The Wilderness Committee, for its part, also fears illegal logging of cedar might be happening elsewhere on Vancouver Island.
“What we need to know” from the environment ministry “is if cedar poaching is happening anywhere else,” Coste said.
A parks official said investigators have little information to work with.
“We have no eyewitnesses or license plates,” Don Closson told the Canadian Press.
A police officer echoed the lack of evidence, adding that the poachers were likely after the cedar for roofing shingles.
“It’s obviously much more gain than going out and taking a whole pile of firewood,” Sgt. Dave Voller told the Canadian Press. “A logging truck loaded with cedar would be worth thousands and thousands of dollars.”
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Article source: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11756204-800-year-old-tree-at-vancouver-island-park-falls-to-illegal-loggers?lite
“People with a shared worldview basically came together and created their own set of experts to offer alternative policy views,” said Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist in New York and co-author of “Ex-Gay Research: Analyzing the Spitzer Study and Its Relation to Science, Religion, Politics, and Culture.”
To Dr. Spitzer, the scientific question was at least worth asking: What was the effect of the therapy, if any? Previous studies had been biased and inconclusive. “People at the time did say to me, ‘Bob, you’re messing with your career, don’t do it,’ ” Dr. Spitzer said. “But I just didn’t feel vulnerable.”
He recruited 200 men and women, from the centers that were performing the therapy, including Exodus International, based in Florida, and Narth. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviors before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale.
He then compared the scores on this questionnaire, before and after therapy. “The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year,” his paper concluded.
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The study — presented at a psychiatry meeting in 2001, before publication — immediately created a sensation, and ex-gay groups seized on it as solid evidence for their case. This was Dr. Spitzer, after all, the man who single-handedly removed homosexuality from the manual of mental disorders. No one could accuse him of bias.
But gay leaders accused him of betrayal, and they had their reasons.
The study had serious problems. It was based on what people remembered feeling years before — an often fuzzy record. It included some ex-gay advocates, who were politically active. And it didn’t test any particular therapy; only half of the participants engaged with a therapist at all, while the others worked with pastoral counselors, or in independent Bible study.
Several colleagues tried to stop the study in its tracks, and urged him not to publish it, Dr. Spitzer said.
Yet, heavily invested after all the work, he turned to a friend and former collaborator, Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, psychologist in chief at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, another influential journal.
“I knew Bob and the quality of his work, and I agreed to publish it,” Dr. Zucker said in an interview last week. The paper did not go through the usual peer-review process, in which unnamed experts critique a manuscript before publication. “But I told him I would do it only if I also published commentaries” of response from other scientists to accompany the study, Dr. Zucker said.
Those commentaries, with a few exceptions, were merciless. One cited the Nuremberg Code of ethics to denounce the study as not only flawed but morally wrong. “We fear the repercussions of this study, including an increase in suffering, prejudice, and discrimination,” concluded a group of 15 researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Dr. Spitzer was affiliated.
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Dr. Spitzer in no way implied in the study that being gay was a choice, or that it was possible for anyone who wanted to change to do so in therapy. But that didn’t stop socially conservative groups from citing the paper in support of just those points, according to Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit that fights antigay bias.
On one occasion, a politician in Finland held up the study in Parliament to argue against civil unions, according to Dr. Drescher.
“It needs to be said that when this study was misused for political purposes to say that gays should be cured — as it was, many times — Bob responded immediately, to correct misperceptions,” said Dr. Drescher, who is gay.
But Dr. Spitzer couldn’t control how his study was interpreted by everyone, and he could not erase the biggest scientific flaw of them all, roundly attacked in many of the commentaries: Simply asking people whether they’ve changed is no evidence at all of real change. People lie, to themselves and others. They continually change their stories, to suit their needs and moods.
By almost any measure, in short, the study failed the test of scientific rigor that Dr. Spitzer himself was so instrumental in enforcing for so many years.
“As I read these commentaries, I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn’t answer,” Dr. Spitzer said. “How do you know someone has really changed?”
Letting go
It took eleven years for him to admit it publicly.
At first he clung to the idea that the study was exploratory, an attempt to prompt scientists to think twice about dismissing the therapy outright. Then he took refuge in the position that the study was focused less on the effectiveness of the therapy and more on how people engaging in it described changes in sexual orientation.
“Not a very interesting question,” he said. “But for a long time I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to face the bigger problem, about measuring change.”
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After retiring in 2003, he remained active on many fronts, but the reparative study remained a staple of the culture wars and a personal regret that wouldn’t leave him be. The Parkinson’s symptoms have worsened in the past year, exhausting him mentally as well physically, making it still harder to fight back pangs of remorse.
And one day in March, Dr. Spitzer entertained a visitor. Gabriel Arana, a journalist at the magazine The American Prospect, interviewed Dr. Spitzer about the reparative therapy study. This wasn’t just any interview; Mr. Arana went through reparative therapy himself as a teenager, and his therapist had recruited the young man for Dr. Spitzer’s study (Mr. Arana did not participate).
“I asked him about all his critics, and he just came out and said, ‘I think they’re largely correct,’ ” said Mr. Arana, who wrote about his own experience last month. Mr. Arana said that reparative therapy ultimately delayed his self-acceptance and induced thoughts of suicide. “But at the time I was recruited for the Spitzer study, I was referred as a success story. I would have said I was making progress.”
That did it. The study that seemed at the time a mere footnote to a large life was growing into a chapter. And it needed a proper ending — a strong correction, directly from its author, not a journalist or colleague.
A draft of the letter has already leaked online and has been reported.
“You know, it’s the only regret I have; the only professional one,” Dr. Spitzer said of the study, near the end of a long interview. “And I think, in the history of psychiatry, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a scientist write a letter saying that the data were all there but were totally misinterpreted. Who admitted that and who apologized to his readers.”
He looked away and back again, his big eyes blurring with emotion. “That’s something, don’t you think?”
This article, “Leading Psychiatrist Apologizes for Study Supporting Gay ‘Cure,’” first appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2012 The New York Times
Article source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47476378/ns/health-mental_health/
State Attorney’s Office via AP
Newly released details about the night Florida teenager Trayvon Martin died at the hands of a volunteer watchman named George Zimmerman are largely consistent with Mr. Zimmerman’s self-defense claims, with one hitch: The shooter could have avoided the fight that led to the Feb. 26 killing in Sanford, Fla.
The trove of evidence, some of which has been redacted to give anonymity to witnesses, sets up the prospect of a difficult trial in which forensic evidence will rub up against questions about Zimmerman’s state of mind, his views on race, and whether the 28-year-old aspiring police officer’s sense of civic duty morphed into reckless malice.
Evidence that Zimmerman was injured after confronting someone he believed to be suspicious, the close proximity of the gun shot to the victim, and eyewitness accounts that had Zimmerman on his back, screaming for help for several seconds before firing, have prompted some critics to suggest that special prosecutor Angela Corey overcharged Zimmerman to quell public unrest over the case – a notion she has denied.
To some legal experts, the new evidence backs up Zimmerman’s original story – that he followed Trayvon, lost him, and was then attacked with “mixed martial arts” blows to a point where he feared for his life. A medical report that was not referenced in the state’s charging affidavit states that Zimmerman sustained a broken nose, two black eyes, and two cuts on the back of his head.
The new forensic facts challenge the second-degree murder charge, which, to stick, requires a jury to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman acted with malicious recklessness in causing Trayvon’s death, says Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor whose criticisms of the prosecution stepped up as the state’s evidence was revealed.
Given the new evidence, “the prosecutor is at least guilty of willful blindness,” says Mr. Dershowitz in a phone interview.
The 200-plus pages of new documents also give more insight into the prosecution’s contention that Zimmerman may have profiled Trayvon in part because of his views of young black men. As one investigator writes, the whole fight could have been avoided if Zimmerman had afforded Trayvon, a fellow citizen who was doing nothing wrong in a place where he had the right to be, some respect.
“The encounter between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was ultimately avoidable by Zimmerman, if Zimmerman had remained in his vehicle and awaited the arrival of law enforcement, or conversely if he had identified himself to Martin as a concerned citizen and initiated dialog in an effort to dispel each party’s concern,” the report said. “There is no indication that Trayvon Martin was involved in any criminal activity at the time of the encounter.”
“The police concluded that none of this would have happened if George Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his car,” Martin family attorney Ben Crump told the Associated Press on Thursday. “If George Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his car, they say it was completely avoidable. That is the headline.”
An anonymous police tipster, meanwhile, suggested that Zimmerman could be confrontational, especially against black people. Zimmerman, who is part-Hispanic, has been described by family members as a social activist who cared about minorities and the downtrodden.
“I don’t at all know who this kid was or anything else,” the unnamed caller called told police shortly after the shooting. “But I know George, and I know that he does not like black people. He would start something. He’s very confrontational. It’s in his blood. We’ll just say that.”
theGrio: Trayvon Martin shooting: New evidence in case released
Moreover, one woman told police she heard no fighting before the gun shot rang out. At that point, she went outside and saw a man, Zimmerman, standing over Martin’s prone, face-down body. “Just call the police,” Zimmerman said, according to the witness.
Another witness told a different tale. According to the report, “He witnessed a black male, wearing a dark colored ‘hoodie’ on top of a white or Hispanic male who was yelling for help. He elaborated by stating the black male was mounted on the white or Hispanic male and throwing punches ‘MMA [mixed martial arts] style.’ He stated he yelled out to the two individuals that he was going to call the police. He then heard a ‘pop.’ He stated that after hearing the ‘pop,’ he observed the person he had previously observed on top of the other person (the black male wearing the ‘hoodie’) laid out on the grass.”
“Based on this description, it doesn’t appear that Zimmerman ‘executed’ Martin, as some of the inflammatory rhetoric claims,” writes law professor William Jacobson at the Legal Insurrection blog. “It’s legally irrelevant that the encounter could have been avoided.”
Autopsy: Trayvon Martin shot from ‘intermediate range’
After the shooting, Sanford police recommended that Zimmerman be charged with negligent manslaughter, but a state prosecutor instead accepted Zimmerman’s invocation of the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows a person to defend himself with deadly force in public areas, if he believes his life is in danger.
The failure to charge Zimmerman led to protests in Sanford and around the country, the stepping down of the local police chief, and allegations of racial injustice, causing Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) to appoint a special prosecutor to take another look at the case.
In April, six weeks after the shooting, that prosecutor, Ms. Corey, reversed the earlier decision, charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder. He’s currently out on a $150,000 bond and in hiding.
Trove of evidence released in Trayvon Martin shooting
While many of the details of the shooting have already been publicized, the evidence released Thursday revealed new details likely to shade the as-yet-unscheduled trial.
Medical examiners found that Trayvon had THC, the euphoria-inducing compound found in marijuana, in his blood – a potentially salient fact given that Zimmerman told a dispatcher he thought the man he had spotted “was on drugs or something.”
Trayvon, who lived in Miami, was in Sanford with his dad to serve out a 10-day school suspension for possessing a baggie with marijuana residue. He was returning from buying an iced tea and some Skittles from a local convenience store when Zimmerman spotted him, called a nonemergency police dispatcher, and then followed him on foot.
Forensics also found that Trayvon was shot at extremely close range with a single shot, which entered his chest and perforated his heart.
The report also revealed the FBI findings from one of the most controversial tenets of the case: whether a voice that can be heard screaming for help during a 911 recording was Trayvon or Zimmerman. The FBI was unable to conclusively determine whom the voice belonged to, and was also unable to corroborate suggestions that, at one point, Zimmerman uttered a racial slur.
According to police, Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s dad, said he didn’t believe the voice crying for help belonged to his son. When asked, Officer Chris Serino wrote: “Mr. Martin, clearly emotionally impacted by the recording, quietly responded ‘no.’ “
The stakes in the case are high. It set off national introspection over so-called Stand Your Ground laws, which critics call “shoot first” laws. Zimmerman is likely to argue his use of that law in a special “mini-trial” to precede a jury trial, in which a judge can dismiss the case outright and shield Zimmerman from civil liability.
George Zimmerman photos released from night of Trayvon Martin shooting
Article source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47476961/ns/us_news-christian_science_monitor/
Tannen Maury / EPA
Members of National Nurses United rally in Daley Plaza on Friday, ahead of the NATO Summit in Chicago.
A coalition of nurses’ unions is calling for a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street, which they say could generate up to $350 billion a year, in the first major protest ahead of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago.
Their pitch: impose a tax of 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, dividends and other financial transactions, which are not currently taxed. The U.S. would join more than a dozen other nations that already have a financial transaction tax, according to National Nurses United (NNU).
“I’ve been asked many, many times … ‘What are you doing here as nurses? … What do you have to do with the economy?’” Karen Higgins, a registered nurse and co-president of NNU, said to the crowd in Chicago’s Daley Plaza.
“We’re watching this every day. We’re watching patients suffer,” she said, noting that nurses were seeing people without insurance or others who can’t afford their co-pays, as well as a spike in the number of children with adult diseases due to eating poorly because their parents can’t afford healthy food. “This is serious and in some cases it is actually deadly.”
“We know the solution .. we are watching and seeing Wall Street throwing our money away as we see people suffer and die. It will not continue,” she said. “We pay sales tax. It is time for Wall Street to start paying back what they owe the rest of the country and they need to pay sales tax.”
The nurses’ call echoes last fall’s outcry by the Occupy Wall Street protesters over income equality, corruption and corporate greed. Proceeds from the Wall Street tax would support social services, education and healthcare.
The financial transaction tax is not a new concept. The U.S. had one from 1914 to 1966, and several politicians called for another one after the Wall Street crash in 1987, National Nurses United said.
Supporters include Nobel Laureate economists Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, and Joseph Stiglitz, the former World Bank chief economist — both of whom have spoken out in favor of such a tax in the past.
A bill introduced last November by two U.S. Democratic lawmakers, Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio, calls for a tax of up to 0.25 percent – or 25 cents on every $100 – on the value of stock trades in addition to taxing transactions in other financial instruments.
Others, however, are against what has been called a “sin” tax on Wall Street.
“Our research shows unambiguously that higher trading costs depress the prices of stocks and bonds,” business school professors Yakov Amihud and Haim Mendelson wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “A transactions tax will end up punishing Main Street, hurting the economy and reducing U.S. Treasury revenues in the next few years. It will thus exacerbate the effects of the financial crisis.”
The nurses are involved because they have seen the impact on health, with a growing number of uninsured and impoverished Americans, Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, wrote in an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times.
The tax proposal protesters were initially targeting the G8 summit of global financial leaders that starts today. But when that meeting was moved from Chicago to Camp David in Maryland, they opted to carry on their demonstrations here anyway to take advantage of the large number of protesters converging on the city for the NATO summit.
Mary O’Sullivan, 72, came to the protest with her husband Chris Fogarty, 77. The retired married couple each held a sign, one reading “Honk To Indict Banksters” and the other “Stop Gov’t Crimes.”
“We’re hoping that even at this late date the government will recognize that there is so much pain and suffering amongst the people that they will at least start paying attention,” O’Sullivan said, noting she had recently spoken with a woman at a city mental health care facility that’s being closed down. “She has no idea where she is going to go or how she is going to get there, and in the meantime, we’re spending millions of dollars on drones to kill people.”
Earlier this week, protesters demonstrated against the shuttering of local schools and mental health clinics, the loss of homes through foreclosures, and environmental issues surrounding the controversial “Tar Sands” pipeline, and they stormed the building that houses the headquarters of President Obama’s campaign.
Nam Y. Huh / AP
Demonstrators rally against the Keystone Pipeline and the Alberta Tar Sands outside of the Canadian Consulate in downtown Chicago on Thursday.
The city has assigned 3,100 officers plus hundreds from other cities to guard against the kind of violence that broke out in the streets of Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999, NBCChicago.com reported, and officials have warned of massive travel disruptions.
They’ve also imposed limits on how close the protesters, which include dozens of unions and anti-war, environmental, education, healthcare and civil liberties’ groups, can get to the convention center where the summit is being held — within “sight and sound” of it, according to the Chicago Tribune — raising the ire of the demonstrators.
The National Lawyers Guild, which is sending out legal observers to the demonstrations and aiding those who are detained, said late Thursday that at least 20 people have been arrested so far this week. Occupy Chicago said 11 arrests occurred Wednesday night at an area home – though it’s not clear if those 11 were included in the guild’s tally.
Organizers expect the biggest crowds at a rally led by anti-war activists on Sunday, in which a group of 9/11-era veterans plan to return their service medals to protest the “war on terror.”
Todd Gitlin, a former leader of the 1960s-era group Students for a Democratic Society and a Columbia University sociology and journalism professor, said the Wall Street tax was an obvious focus for protesters.
“It’s concrete. It might be winnable. It has global resonance because you’ve got … several national governments in Europe that support it,” he said, noting that it clearly distinguishes between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and had an “intrinsic fairness” about it. “It’s a reform that rings sensible to large numbers of people but a lot of work has to be done… . Most people right now I think don’t get it.”
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Results with 183 short comments
Why not, every other transaction is taxed.
Odd that poor people paying taxes is OK but billionaires paying taxes is bad? We’re an insane nation.
Of course the “haves” will spin this and shoot it down but people have to keep trying to do something so save our society. Well done!!!
This would be a tax on ordinary people with a 401k – not ‘fat cats’. Change the “carried interest” rules for hedge fund managers instead.
Yes, but make sure it goes to social services and education, not defense. Or payoff SS IOUs.
Yes! Financial planners charge clients a fee to make trades anyway, doesn’t slow anyone down, and brings in healthy revenue.
Without physical proof from Wall Street that there will be a negative impact to the market, their version of the tax does not hold true.
The irony of course being that Robin Hood robbed from a government which was taxing the people unfairly.
It would be a good way to raise revenue and stock trading does not actually have that much effect on prices.
The idea that such a small tax would cripple the economy is absurd. Time for Wall Street to pay it’s share.
Pay off the debt, tax Wall Street!
But I wouldn’t call it a sin tax. Investing is not like smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol
The 1% are uniquely positioned to pay for their dabbling that costs the rest of us.
No because that tax money would just be wasted or more pet projects for Politicians….
Wall Street is not only the 1% anymore. Middle America is heavily invested through 401K’s and IRA’s. Get 1%’s money through income taxes.
They are for it because ultimately it will go towards funding raises for them. They are self serving and digging in the pockets of others.
Read Louis Sullivan’s report of disparity of care
Look at dr Sylvia flacks work regarding the lack of care for the poor and the cost
These tools have gotten away with pillaging the economy for far too long. I’d tax them until their butts bleed!
25 cents on $100 is manageable by anyone and a lot of quarters will add up.
The only thing these people understand is hitting them in their pocketbooks!
Yes. It’s income, so it should be taxed.
Hey…sure…I’m not even in the frickin’ “Con Game” stock market anymore! lol
Do people know how many transactions the mutual funds in the average persons 401K does a year? This hurts the middle more than the rich.
No taxes to my meager 401k. This is all I have for my retirement!!!
0.5% tax is entirely reasonable, and it’s one that won’t hurt the middle and lower classes as much as the other proposals people have made.
Article source: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11757222-nurses-yes-nurses-lead-charge-for-wall-street-sin-tax?lite
Mitt Romney has outlined a bold agenda to spur economic growth and create jobs. On his first day in office, he will approve the Keystone pipeline, introduce pro-growth tax reforms, and repeal Obamacare.
Forget a president’s first 100 days. Mitt Romney’s first television ad of the general election, “Day One,” comes as close as anything in describing the most urgent priorities of a President Romney upon taking office.
The ad is running in five swing states, and the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign is putting $1.3 million behind it; a Spanish-language analog is running in North Carolina, with a much smaller ad buy behind it.
Nonetheless, Romney’s ad is meant to drive a three-point plan: 1. Approve the Keystone Pipeline, 2. Introduce tax reform, and 3. Begin dismantling and replacing President Obama’s health care law.
In short, Romney’s message is about jobs, taxes, energy and health care.
So what do we know about the specifics of Romney’s three-point plan?
Keystone -
Republicans, including Romney, have vocally criticized President Obama for rejecting an initial proposal by the TransCanada Corporation to build an oil pipeline through the central United States. The administration rejected the project out of environmental concerns and because it felt Republicans were rushing its approval of the project, at the expense of due diligence. (TransCanada has subsequently re-applied for a permit to build a pipeline along new routes.)
Romney invoking the example is meant to address the issues of jobs and energy.
TransCanada and supporters of the pipeline — who range from Republicans in Congress to the organized labor community — contend the project would create at least 20,000 jobs. The project’s most ardent supporters claim these, in turn, would lead to additional job creation.
As for energy, it’s much more difficult to say what the effect of building the Keystone Pipeline would have on the price of oil. Its mere approval could conceivably diminish speculation that drives up oil prices, but gauging the direct impact is difficult. Moreover, the pipeline would take years to become fully operational and deliver excess supply to gas stations in the U.S.
“Taking advantage of our energy resources is one of my priorities,” Romney said Friday in a conference call with supporters. Among his other plans for his first day in office, Romney said he would also allow expanded permits for oil and gas exploration on federal lands. Romney said, for instance, he would authorize drilling on the East Coast’s Outer Continental Shelf.
Tax reform -
The centerpiece of Romney’s plan would include a permanent, across-the-board reduction of 20 percent for all income tax brackets.
He’s also on the record supporting a number of other tax cuts, including maintaining current tax rates on investment income, eliminating the taxes on estates, cutting the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, and repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, among other reforms.
The impact of these reforms on the rising national debt — something Romney routinely decries — is much more opaque, though.
Romney has said eliminating some tax deductions, combined with economic growth and cuts in spending would make the impact of his tax plan deficit-neutral at a minimum.
“One thing I’m also going to to do is work with Congress to limit the deductions and exemptions and special deals that are in our tax code,” Romney said on the conference call.
But the former Massachusetts governor hasn’t specified the exemptions or deductions he would eliminate beyond a select few (for instance, the mortgage deductions associated with a second home). Romney has previously said that the wealthy might shoulder a greater tax burden under his reforms, though he hasn’t said how. (An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has suggested that might not be the case.) The Romney campaign also hasn’t provided a detailed enough tax plan in order to subject it to static or dynamic scoring of its impact on the deficit and debt.
As for the spending side, Romney’s website offers some additional details, but not enough to necessarily account for the total impact of his plan — either on jobs, or the deficit.
The “issues” section of Romney’s website includes an additional “Day One” promise: to send Congress a bill slashing non-defense discretionary spending by five percent across-the-board.
Other parts of Romney’s site detail areas he would cut, and the savings associated with each of those cuts. Those savings include the elimination of subsidies to programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, and cuts in subsidies to Amtrak or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“There are items that I like that I will stop funding,” Romney explained during the call.
Health reform -
Romney’s new ad calls for not just the repeal of “ObamaCare,” but its replacement, as well.
If part or all of the law were allowed to stand following the Supreme Court’s ruling next month, Romney would have some options to undo the law on his first day in office, but they would be limited.
The former Massachusetts governor has said his ultimate goal is to return health care decisions to individual states, and create incentives for more efficient health care delivery.
Romney repeated his promise to issue a waiver to states, allowing them to duck some of the requirements of health care reform that conservatives find most onerous. But many other parts of the law would remain in effect, and would require legislative action to both enact a repeal of ObamaCare and a subsequent replacement. That could conceivably pass the House if it were to remain in Republican control, but unless Republicans were to somehow win a 60-seat majority in the Senate this fall, the GOP would need to attract Democratic support for Romney’s alternative.
* * *
There are other things Romney said he would do on his first day, among them labeling China a currency manipulator and putting a hold on regulations enacted by the Obama administration.
Democrats have contested Romney’s ad, with the Obama campaign labeling it as full of “empty promises.”
“We know why Mitt Romney didn’t keep his promises- his business experience wasn’t in strengthening companies and creating jobs for long-term economic growth. It was in reaping quick profits for himself and his investors at the expense of workers and communities,” said Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for the president’s re-election. “These are the values that he wants to bring to the White House by giving more budget-busting tax cuts to the wealthy and letting Wall Street write its own rules—the same formula that benefited a few, but crashed our economy and punished the middle class.”
A Democratic super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century, also produced a parody ad concluding of Romney’s first-day plans: “We’ll pass.”
Article source: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11757714-romneys-day-one-what-do-we-know-about-his-plan?lite
OKLAHOMA CITY — The Humane Society of the United States is accusing an Oklahoma exotic animal park of allowing children to handle and pose for photographs with juvenile tigers in what they called “a petting zoo for carnivores.”
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Joe Schreibvogel, owner of the G.W. Exotic Animal Park, 65 miles south of Oklahoma City, denies the allegations, and he said on Thursday that the humane society simply wants to bankrupt him.
Wayne Pacelle, head of the animal rights organization, contends that allowing visitors to handle the unpredictable felines placed the visitors at risk.
The Humane Society sent an undercover operative to work at the park last year to videotape what he saw, including children mingling with exotic cats that are too old to be safe playmates. The investigator witnessed or heard about six incidents in which tiger cubs bit or scratched park visitors, Pacelle said.
Schreibvogel said he plans to file animal cruelty charges against the humane society’s undercover operative for failing to correct the alleged deficiencies in animal care described in his report, including an allegation that a bear had no water on a hot day last year.
“That was what he was trained and paid to do,” Schreibvogel said. “We are on our way to the sheriff’s office as soon as I hang this phone up.”
Pacelle said he fears a disaster similar to one in Zanesville, Ohio, last year, when the owner of a private collection of 56 tigers, bears and other wild animals freed them from their cages and then shot himself to death. Authorities killed 49 of the beasts as they ran wild through the area.
U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman David Sacks said an investigation is being conducted into the deaths of 23 tiger cubs at the Oklahoma park in 2009 and 2010.
This is the fourth time the agency has investigated the park and its owner for violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which protects warm-blooded animals that are displayed to the public for compensation, Sacks said.
In a 2006 agreed decision, Schreibvogel was fined $25,000 and had his exhibitor’s license suspended for two weeks for deficiencies at his park.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
Article source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47470903/ns/us_news-life/
UNITED NATIONS — Ten thousand rolls of tobacco, 12 bottles of Sake, and a handful of second-hand Mercedes-Benz cars are among the latest reported breaches by North Korea of a U.N. ban on luxury goods sales to the reclusive state, according to a confidential draft U.N. report.
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Japan told a U.N. panel of experts that Pyongyang also imported thousands of computers and thousands of dollars worth of cosmetics and that almost all the goods were shipped through China, it was reported in the draft seen by Reuters on Thursday.
The five North Korean violations reported to the panel by Japan during the past year took place between 2008 and 2010. The panel was also informed of another two potential violations, but they have not yet been officially reported by Japan.
Video: Failed rocket? North Koreans celebrate anyway (on this page)
Two rounds of U.N. sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for its 2006 and 2009 nuclear tests ban the sale of luxury items to the state’s government. It was also hit with an arms embargo and is forbidden from trading in nuclear and missile technology.
The panel also said it was investigating reports of possible North Korean weapons-related sales to Syria and Myanmar, as well as other reports of arms-related violations.
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The report, which was submitted to the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions committee this week, said implementation of the luxury goods ban was “deeply problematic” because it was up to each country to create a blacklist and not all had done so.
What are luxury goods?
“Also the DPRK (North Korea) is able to exploit differences between such lists, where they exist, to avoid bans in one member state by shopping in another – and the panel sees little evidence of information sharing between member states on what might be included on these lists,” the report said.
Slideshow: Journey into North Korea (on this page)
“Definitions of luxury goods by member states are not consistent. Chinese customs officials told the panel that most of the above mentioned goods were not considered as luxury goods by China,” it said.
The panel of experts wrote that Pyongyang residents and visitors said luxury cars were seen in the city and that luxury goods – both authentic and forgeries and including expensive liquors and cosmetics – were widely and openly available.
“All this indicates that the ban on luxury goods has not yet disrupted effectively the supply of such goods either to the DPRK elite or to the rising Pyongyang middle class,” it noted.
The U.N. panel also said it was collecting more information about media reports that the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization may have violated the sanctions by shipping computers and computer servers to North Korea.
The panel visited Italy to obtain documents on several cases of previously reported violations, including a foiled attempt by North Korea to import high quality U.S.-made tap-dancing shoes valued at almost $200 a pair.
Video: Richard Engel inside North Korea (on this page)
The experts also traveled to Switzerland to investigate sales of Swiss luxury watches to Pyongyang.
“The panel learned that hardly any watch sales to DPRK are in the luxury category,” the report said.
“The panel concluded that any luxury watches sold in the DPRK most likely are sourced elsewhere. Industry officials pointed out that manufacturers had little control over who purchased their watches once globally distributed,” it wrote.
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Article source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47472534/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/
Miguel Villagran / Getty Images, file
Lady Gaga shows off her tattoo of a Rilke poem in Braunschweig, Germany, on November 7, 2009.
TOKYO — Even Hollywood stars Johnny Depp and Lady Gaga would not be welcome to work for the Japanese city of Osaka because of their tattoos, its mayor said amid a backlash over his stance against body art.
Mayor Toru Hashimoto this week said that public employees “should go to the private sector” if they want to keep their tattoos.
City authorities carried out a survey of their staff to ask whether they had any, whether they were normally concealed by clothing or not. More than 100 sanitation, public transport and other workers admitted they had tattoos.
But about 800 of the city’s 30,000 employees refused to answer the survey and a lawyer is now on the case.
“Whether one has a tattoo or not has nothing to do with their competence or skills,” said Sayuri Ohashi, a lawyer who represents Osaka workers.
“There are different types of tattoos, there are those that are indeed linked to organized crime and others who have etchings on their bodies as mementos, such as for their lost child,” he added.
‘Breach of labor law’
He added that getting employees to reveal information about their body was “a complete infringement of their rights.”
“And if they try to pressure them into quitting by transferring them to another work, that’s a breach of the labor law,” Ohashi said.
Bryan Bedder / Getty Images
Movie stars, rockers and reality wannabes are among those who’ve made a permanent mark.
The controversy started earlier this year when a city employee at a childcare facility was accused of intimidating a child by revealing his tattoo.
Tattoos still carry a strong cultural association with the Japanese underworld and the yakuza crime gangs.
City workers in Japan to be fired for having tattoos?
Jae C. Hong / AP
Trying to erase his past and start a new life, Bryon Widner underwent 25 painful surgeries to remove hate tattoos on his face, neck and hands.
Japan’s aversion to tattoos can be found at swimming pools and public bath houses where there are often signs banning those with them.
Hashimoto insisted being a public employee meant making some sacrifices.
“Before I became governor, I had my hair dyed brown,” he said. “I don’t mean to be self-righteous … However, when you become governor or mayor you have to change it back to black. You’re a public servant.”
Thousands gather at a temple in Thailand to honor a tattoo master and have their body art recharged by monks. Msnbc.com’s Dara Brown reports.
Asked by a reporter about Hollywood stars with tattoos, the mayor responded, “If Johnny Depp or Lady Gaga asked to become Osaka city employees, I would just say ‘no’.”
At the moment the city is not considering firing workers with tattoos, but Hiroshi Kotawa, from the city’s personnel section, said they would be asked to cover them. “And if they still refuse, then we will consider transferring them to other jobs which will not require interaction with the public.”
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Article source: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11753886-japan-mayor-i-wouldnt-hire-tattooed-stars-johnny-depp-lady-gaga?lite
