A New York Times story about a “modest” global tax mentions some of those supporting the idea but forgets an important one—the United Nations. I attended a November 30 U.N.-sponsored conference in Washington, D.C., where officials of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) appeared on a panel endorsing the idea.

The UNDP is supported by about $100 million in U.S. taxpayer money annually. The U.N. as a whole received $7.7 billion from American taxpayers last year.

Elizabeth Shogren of National Public Radio was the moderator of the discussion, which carried the title, “Sustainability & Equity: A Better Future for All.”

Olav Kjorven, Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Bureau of Development Policy at UNDP, said that while U.S. taxpayers may not support the global tax idea, the French do. Indeed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have proposed a financial transaction tax on the European Union in order to generate more bailout money for bankrupt European states.

A former UNDP official in the audience by the name of Fred Tipson said it was crazy for the U.N. to be promoting the raising of taxes to an American audience and that the world body should instead adopt the lingo of Occupy Wall Street and emphasize the problem of “social inequality.”

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 Read More at Accuracy in Media By Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy In Media

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

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Read More at frontpagemag.com By Kenneth R. Timmerman, frontpagemag.com

On Tuesday, Barack Obama gave a speech (stop the presses!) of dubious veracity in the small town of Osawatomie, Kansas, in a desperate attempt to wrap himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt. But one wonders whether anyone in the Obama campaign read Roosevelt’s original speech before choosing it as a template for the two parties to follow, since it contradicts Obama’s most fundamental beliefs and defining policies on class warfare, cradle-to-grave welfare, wealth redistribution, crony capitalism, equality of opportunity, and endorsing politically violent movements like Occupy Wall Street. And the nation’s youngest president has yet more to teach his immature successor.

Obama wished to conjure up memories of a groundbreaking speech Teddy delivered in the city in 1910 entitled, “The New Nationalism.” Selecting Roosevelt as the model Republican seems odd, since the founder of the (real) Progressive movement stood closer to liberal hero Woodrow Wilson than Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. But it is clear which part of the speech appealed to Obama. Teddy said he favored “far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country,” that “each nation must do its own part in international police work,” and that “the executive power as the steward of the public welfare.” The government, he said, may “take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.” Yet Obama overlooked significant lessons TR would want him to learn.

No Violence

Obama has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members have committed numerous felonies and misdemeanors against one another and left their hosts with a hefty bill and a huge mess to clean up, when they leave at all. Would the advocate of “The New Nationalism” hail a movement whose members sang, “F— the USA”? Would the hero of San Juan Hill stand with the rabble of Zuccotti Park?

In the speech Obama cited, TR warned against political “excess,” saying, “I do not want to see our people, for lack of proper leadership, compelled to follow men whose intentions are excellent, but whose eyes are a little too wild to make it really safe to trust them.”

Like whom? Teddy told the Kansas crowd, “in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers.”

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 Read More at Floyd Reports By Ben Johnson, Floyd Reports

Election ’12: One thing is certainly true about President Obama — no matter how many times people point out the falsehoods in his speeches, he just keeps making them. Case in point: his latest “economic fairness” address.

In that speech Tuesday, Obama once again tried to build a case for his liberal, big-spending, tax-hiking, regulatory agenda. But as with so many of his past appeals, Obama’s argument rests on a pile of untruths. Among the most glaring:

• Tax cuts and deregulation have “never worked” to grow the economy. There’s so much evidence to disprove this claim, it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin with the fact that countries with greater economic freedom — lower taxes, less government, sound money, free trade — consistently produce greater overall prosperity.

Here at home, President Reagan’s program of lower taxes and deregulation led to an historic two-decade economic boom. Plus, states with lower taxes and less regulation do better than those that follow Obama’s prescription.

Obama also claimed the economic booms in the ’50s and ’60s somehow support his argument. This is utter nonsense. Taxes at the time averaged just 17% of the economy. And there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Departments of Transportation, Energy or Education, and no EPA. Had Obama been around then, he would have decried it all as un-American.

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 Read More at investors.com