Wealth Redistribution Hugo Chavez Style

According to Guillermo Chochez, a former Panamanian Ambassador to OAS, Chavez has been dead for at least 7 days after he was disconnected from respirators. Chochez cites Venezuelan government sources, which he said he could not reveal because he gave his word as a journalist that he would not.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 5, 2013

According to all Socialists, Marxists and Communists, their ideology is better than others because what it was at its core is the proper redistribution of wealth. They explain that the rich must pay their share in taxes to support the poorest and that the government must be the sole giver and taker to promote social justice.

Hugo Chavez’ death is certainly not news now. But perhaps the news is the way he went about redistributing Venezuelan wealth to himself and his family. That’s right, if corporate Fascism is well-known by its goal of amassing power and stealing everything else later in back door, under the table, secret dealings, Marxists, Socialists and Communists are easily identified with hoarding resources for themselves.

As it turns out, Hugo Chavez’ death leaves Venezuela worse than it was back in 1999, when Chavez came into public light. The country is more divided than ever, and current vice-president Nicolas Maduro has deployed police and military to the streets as a preventive measure in case riots break out. But behind all the spectacle composed by social network reactions from friends and foes, people lose the opportunity to know another side of the Bolivarian Revolutionary’s way to do business.

Much like the Castro family in Cuba, the Chavez family managed to accumulate billions of dollars in cash that Chavez diverted while in power. According to Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), Hugo Chavez stole and redistributed about $2 billion from the country’s oil trade and has left it as an inheritance to his family. CJIA estimates that Venezuela’s former leader amassed a fortune just as oligarchs amass power and control through their monopoly oriented business model.

“The personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion,” says Jerry Brewer, President of CJIA. “The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” he added. His assessment is part of a complete report published by CJIA on its website.

Besides stealing $2 billion from the Venezuelan people, Chavez also made sure that his dear friend Fidel Castro and his family received a nice chunk from Venezuela’s oil sales. Brewer estimates that Castro’s loyalty cost Venezuelan’s around $5 billion per year, which includes oil shipments and other resources. That my friends is wealth redistribution Chavez style.

The CJIA President went even further to say that behind the transfer of Venezuelan funds to Cuba and other Chavez’ allies, there is an organized mafia composed by criminal groups which have defrauded Venezuela of about $100 billion in the last 12 years.

The $100 billion extracted by Chavez and his cabal of thugs from the pockets of the Venezuelan people is, however, a penny in the bucket compared to what Republicans and Democrats steal from the American people, for example, or how many millions of dollars in taxes are not paid by international corporations who close back room deals with governments to evade the payment of taxes.

Facebook recently got a tax exemption from the American government that amounts to $429 million. Other powerful political donors to both parties like Google, Apple and Microsoft are also allowed to send their profits abroad, which enables them to evade tax collection. Google alone cut its tax payments by $3.1 billion between 2007 and 2010. Meanwhile, Apple hides $1 billion a week in profits the company should pay taxes on. According to a U.S. Congressional memo, Microsoft uses subsidiaries in places like Bermuda, Singapore and Puerto Rico to save itself some $6.5 billion in taxes.

As it is abundantly clear, neither the Socialist nor the crony Capitalist wealth redistribution style is ‘just’ as supporters blindly believe them to be. While Chavez’ detractors celebrate in his death in abundance, his supporters are surely mourning his departure in equal or worse social and economic condition than they were before Chavez came into power.

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Conservatives celebrate first anniversary of Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | DECEMBER 18, 2012

The Canadian government confirmed today with a one sentence declaration that the country is no longer part of the Kyoto Protocol, a move labeled by the opposition as a “disgrace”.

Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol took place on Saturday, December 15th, just one year after Canada communicated its decision to the United Nations.

But the Canadian government did not issue a press release or statement confirming its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol even though it is the first time that Canada withdraws from an international agreement.

Peter Kent, a spokesman for the Environment Minister of Canada, confirmed that “Canada has pulled out of Kyoto”. No further details were provided about the reasons why the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, decided to be the first country to withdraw from the treaty after ratification, or whether the measure will damage the international image of Canada.

But the Green Party of Canada told issued a statement condemning the withdrawal as an “embarrassment” to the country. Stéphane Vigneault, communications coordinator for the Green Party, stressed that it is the first time in Canadian history that Canada ratifies and then rejects an international treaty.

The leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, said in a statement that the measure is a “black eye” on Canada’s international reputation. “This decision threatens Canada’s image in the world and, more importantly, the future of our children,” said May. Statements condemning the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol also came from the the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), that expressed bewilderment by the withdrawal of Canada from Kyoto.

“Unfortunately, one year ago Canada became the first party to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol,” said the statement issued by the NPD. “While the rest of the world is making progress in the fight against climate change, Canada is falling behind”.

A year ago, Kent said during a press conference in which he announced the withdrawal from Kyoto, that the treaty was not working. Kyoto is the past for Canada. That is why we “invoke the legal right to withdraw from it.” Kent added that since Canada was not going to meet its Kyoto commitments, which were imposed not by the government itself, but from the United Nations, the North American country would have had to “transfer 14,000 million dollars of Canadian taxpayers money to other countries; the Canadian equivalent of $ 1,600 per family.”

This is the concept of “transfer of wealth” supported by the United Nations, where money from the poor and middle classes in developed countries is transferred to the rich and powerful in third world nations. The transfer of wealth that has at its core the goal to make most people equally poor, while the elite becomes wealthier and stronger was admitted by a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. During an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online Sunday, UN official  Ottmar Edenhofer declared, “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

In 2002, when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance, Harper wrote in a letter that the Kyoto Protocol “is a socialist conspiracy to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” Harper’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto has a lot of supporters in Canada.

Today Stephen Taylor, a member of the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative organization of which harper was President, created a Facebook page to celebrate the first “Kyoto Independence Day in Canada.”

“A year ago, Canada stated that it was out of the Kyoto Protocol. We are starting our first year out of this money sinkhole. Today we complete our first year of freedom from Kyoto,” said Taylor.

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U.S. Government wants to Redistribute people’s Retirement money

By MAC SLAVO | SHTF.com | NOVEMBER 21, 2012

A new effort by the Obama administration, Congress, the Treasury Department and labor unions aims to fundamentally alter how Americans plan and save for retirement.

Warnings have been popping up over the last several years about the possibility of re-appropriating the $3.5 Trillion sitting in private retirement and spreading those funds around to Americans who are deemed less fortunate.

This couldn’t possibly happen in America, right? At one time, most Americans also believed heath care mandates that force Americans at the barrel of a gun to surrender portions of their earnings into a universal system for all would never happen. Well, it did.

And now, those who would control and regulate every aspect of our lives are making a new push; one whose efforts will ultimately end in the seizure and redistribution the personal retirement savings of every American who has ever put money into a 401(k) or IRA.

This is no longer in the realm of conspiracy, but rather, public record.

A recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRA’s and 401k plans, NSC is warning.

The hearing, held in the Labor Department’s main auditorium, was monitored by NSC staff and featured a line up of left-wing activists including one representative of the AFL-CIO who advocated for more government regulation over private retirement accounts and even the establishment of government-sponsored annuities that would take the place of 401k plans.

“This hearing was set up to explore why Americans are not saving as much for their retirement as they could,” explains National Seniors Council National Director Robert Crone, “However, it is clear that this is the first step towards a government takeover. It feels just like the beginning of the debate over health care and we all know how that ended up.”

…

A representative of the liberal Pension Rights Center, Rebecca Davis, testified that the government needs to get involved because 401k plans and IRAs are unfair to poor people. She demanded the Obama administration set up a “government-sponsored program administered by the PBGC (the governments’ Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation).”

…

Such “reforms” would effectively end private retirement accounts in America, Crone warns.

“These people want the government to require that ultimately all Americans buy these government annuities instead of saving or investing on their own. The Government could then take these trillions of dollars and redistribute it through this new national retirement system.”

…

“This effort ultimately is designed to grab the retirement nest eggs of America’s senior citizens. This new government annuity scheme, even if it is at first optional, will turn into a giant effort to redistribute the wealth of America’s older citizens,” explains Crone. “This scheme mirrors what I expect the President will try to do with Social Security. He wants to turn that program into a welfare program, too.”

Via: National Seniors Council

With the re-election of President Obama, a majority Democrat Senate and powerful organization and lobbying from labor unions, we can fully expect legislation that will shift private accounts into the public coffers  to become reality in the not too distant future.

In fact, the push to mold the perceptions surrounding this issue is already on, as highlighted in a recent Market Watch article which claims to explain the 10 Things 401(k) Plans Won’t Tell You.

Did you know, for example, that 401(k) plans aren’t supposed to provide you with full retirement benefits, and that they were originally intended to be “mere supplements” to other plans, and that they only “benefit the rich?” Not only that, but according to the article, no one can really tell you how much money you’re going to need; all of those math formulas and expert calculations were all wrong. Additionally, there are so many hidden fees that you’re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Wall Street (most of us knew that one).

And all this time, the millions of Americans who contributed their money to these accounts over the last three decades were under the impression that their accounts would one day grow into a retirement nest egg from which retirees could spend their days in comfort and relaxation.

Nope. We had it all wrong. Private retirement accounts were never actually designed to make sure that you could retire! Only a government managed retirement plan can ensure that you will have the money you need when you turn 59 1/2. Only they will be able to ensure you don’t pay excessive, hidden fees (even though they could have created legislation to require firms to overtly disclose this information int he first place). And, only the government can provide 100% full retirement coverage, not just supplemental funds. Oh, and they also know WHEN you should retire, currently 65 years of age.

It’s on folks. They are going to hit Americans from all angles on this one.

First, the political hearings that will claim only the rich are benefiting from private retirement accounts.

Then they’ll point out how stock market crashes and volatility put your money at risk. In fact, if we do have another market crash, look for this to be a key reverberation.

Then they put the spin machine into action, so that you think you’re getting unbiased analysis and truth.

Then they open the guilt spigot and make those who have personal retirement savings wonder if they are being greedy, and those who don’t have savings will direct their anger not just at the rich, but anyone who has put any money away.

Finally, they will pass a bill, which we have to pass first in order to know what’s in it, and it’ll be a done deal.

The government of this country is coming for everything they can get their hands on.

Did Obama just threaten to overturn a Supreme Court Decision?

By LUIS R. MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | APRIL 3, 2012

U.S. President Barack Obama publicly challenged the Supreme Court Justices on Monday, reminding them that they are not elected officials. This action comes in light of what could be a declaration by the Supreme Court of the United States, that Obamacare is indeed unconstitutional. Last week, during the hearing sessions, defenders of the government controlled health care program were continuously grilled by conservative and liberal Justices, who defied Obama administration spokespeople to explain why should the government have the power to obligate individuals to buy a product they did not want or did not need.

On Monday, Obama said the Justices had to be very careful with their decision, and that if they declared the law unconstitutional, such decision would impact the government’s capacity to provide healthcare to a portion of the population. “The president challenged the “unelected” Supreme Court not to take the “extraordinary” and “unprecedented” step of overturning his landmark health reform law,” reports the news agency AFP. Will the “unelected” adjective be Barack Obama’s next move to save his healthcare bill which for now seems to have strong opposition among the Supreme Court Justices? Will he claim that due to the unelected nature of the Justices’ position their decision can be overturned by the president? This is not a far fetched scenario for a man who has said that he does not need Congress’ approval to send US troops to war because he has a mandate from the United Nations to carry out military strikes anywhere in the world.

“Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” said Obama. The U.S. president added that even Republicans rejected Supreme Court decisions that according to them were made based on activism as supposed to on objective interpretation of the laws. Obama intends to shield his healthcare law against a Court decision that may have a tight vote. Instead of focusing on whether there is a constitutional power for the president or the central federal government to mandate that citizens buy insurance, or broccoli, for that matter, Obama is trying to distract the public with his assertion that if Obamacare is thrown out, such a decision might be invalid because the Supreme Court Justices are not directly appointed by the people of the United States.Mr. Obama forgets that it is the president who decides who to recommend for a seat at the Supreme Court and that all presidents have done so in the past.

“I am pretty confident that this court will recognize its duty and not take that step,” Obama said while speaking in the Rose Garden.Mr. Obama’s comments outside the White House are seen as a warning to the Supreme Court, one of the three branches of government that Barack Obama has forcefully tried to turn into one during his first term in the highest office. Besides the fact that the Justices are not directly elected by the people, Obama also argued that there is a “human element” to his law and that this is one of the strongest reasons for the Justices to vote Yes on Obamacare. In the past, Obama has questioned and dismissed Congress’ powers and independence to carry out the people’s business and has said that he will make decisions unilaterally should Congress refuse to pass any legislation that he deems necessary. This is a surprising statement if it is taken into account that this Congress has approved laws such as the National Defense Authorization Act, that allows the president to kidnap, torture and kill any individual, American or otherwise, within the United States territory or elsewhere, if he or she is considered a suspect of aiding terrorists groups.

Many Republicans and independents who oppose Obamacare argue that the passage of this law provides the government with powers that go beyond the real conceded by the U.S. Constitution. Forcing individuals to buy a product, in this case healthcare, is an unprecedented action; perhaps even more than the Supreme Court ruling Obamacare unconstitutional or even what Obama called “judicial activism”. “It’s not that common for presidents to get into direct verbal confrontations with the Supreme Court,” said Georgetown University law professor Louis Michael Seidman to Reuters. “But it’s also not that common for the Supreme Court to threaten to override one of the president’s central legislative accomplishments.” In the meantime, Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney said through his spokesperson Andrea Saul, that “What was ‘unprecedented’ was the partisan process President Obama used to shove this unconstitutional bill through.” Ms. Saul added that Mitt Romney plans to repeal Obamacare if he is elected the next president of the United States.

The most challenged aspect of Obamacare is the individual mandate, which obligates people to buy healthcare from the Federal government, even if they don’t want it or don’t need it. A decision by the Supreme Court to uphold Obamacare but to throw out the individual mandate, wouldn’t be good news for Obama either. It is through the mandatory payment made by all citizens that the government will collect money to pay for the socialist leaning healthcare package. “I think the justices should understand that in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with preexisting conditions can actually get health care,” Obama said. What Obama meant is that without forcing people to pay their share, Obamacare would not have the necessary funding to give free healthcare to everyone Obama promised to give it to during his political campaign. Of course, Obamacare has nothing to do with bringing healthcare to more people. It has everything to do with having an all mighty government that tells people what they can and can’t do, or what they must and mustn’t do. It is not necessary to force anyone to buy healthcare from the government in order to allow people with pre-existing conditions, for example to have care, as Obama wants everyone to believe. All he has to do is send a law to Congress that mandates that insurance corporations allow coverage for those people with pre-existing conditions. But is not going to happen, because it was precisely the insurance industry the one that wrote Obamacare.

As many critics of Obamacare have mentioned, this is another tool for wealth redistribution born inside an administration that believes that the government is responsible for taking care of everyone and everything and that has been aided by the insurance industry to give more power to themselves.

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U.N. Official: Climate Issue is for Wealth Redistribution

by Raven Clabough

Assertions made by climate-change skeptics that there are ulterior motives behind climate-change legislation were confirmed by a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

During an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online Sunday, UN official Ottmar Edenhofer declared, “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

The interview went as follows:

(NZZ AM SONNTAG): The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

(OTTMAR EDENHOFER, UN IPCC OFFICIAL): That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capital basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

(NZZ): That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

(EDENHOFER): Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet — and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11,000 to 400 — there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

(NZZ): De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

(EDENHOFER): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

The Media Research Center reports that Edenhofer was “co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, and a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007 which controversially concluded, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Edenhofer confirmed what many Americans have asserted all along: cap and trade will penalize Americans and American industry. The American Chronicle article entitled “Cap-and-Trade Energy Tax will Cause Redistribution of Wealth Among States and Working Families” cites the Congressional Budget Office as stating that cap and trade would cost the average American household an extra $1,600 per year. It would increase the price for a gallon of gasoline between $0.61 to $2.53, and would increase electricity costs anywhere from 44 percent to 129 percent.

In 2009, Our Changing Globe wrote of cap and trade: “The intention is that the industrial world would pay the underdeveloped world huge sums of money for doing nothing at all, and you can easily imagine the bureaucracy and corruption that would occur if this nonsense were ever to come into being.”

It added, “The flawed idea behind Cap and Trade is that companies that were penalized would work hard to reduce their pollution, and even though the technology is presently not available and won’t be in the foreseeable future, Obama is promising that the U.S. will reduce its pollution by 80 percent, which would take it back to levels that existed before the industrial revolution.”

Evidence of this plot for the world’s wealth redistribution dates back as far as 1990, when Maurice Strong, head of the United Nations Environmental Program, suggested this scenario: “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle [sic] risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t it the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” Strong allegedly posed this scenario as a speculative plot for a novel that he considered writing, though he has never penned a novel in his life, either before or after 1990.

Today, progressives and Marxists have seized upon claims that the planet is in peril in order to negotiate cap-and-trade and climate change policies. Through the formation of the Chicago Climate Exchange, coupled with the potential passage of the cap-and-trade bill, innocuously named the “American Power Act,” industrialized “wealthy” nations, such as the U.S., are forced to pay for carbon credits. The process takes American wealth and redistributes it to the rest of the world.

Ironically, confirmation that cap and trade is in fact a scheme comes in the same week that “marks the one year anniversary since the ‘Climategate’ scandal erupted,” as noted by The Blaze.