PrisonPlanet – Further, many leaders from Third World nations became angered at the ‘Danish text leak’ revealing plans to burden lesser-developed nations with greater emissions cuts and plans to levy a proposed $100 Billion in ‘green’ debt upon poorer nations, to be paid back at interest, of course. George Soros has proved to be at the center of what has been critiqued as ‘Climate Colonialism’ and would prove deadly to populations at-risk for starvation in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, etc. Already, taking over farmlands for ethanol production in the place of food has been blamed for millions of deaths in the LDCs.
lex also breaks down revelations about the carbon trading and other green schemes. It’s not only players like Al Gore, the Rothschilds and George Soros who stand to make a killing. President Barack Obama– with a great conflict of interest– was a founding investment partner in the Chicago Climate Exchange alongside Maurice Strong, a top Rockefeller agent and leading climate change schemer. Chicago Climate Exchange is written into the architecture of many of the proposals for alternative energy credits, carbon derivatives and other green financial products and stands to provide a worthwhile return on investment.
In the end, the forced-incrementalism towards total world government, with complete dominance over money, debt, food, energy and resources, paid a price in exposure at COP15. Many politicians, journalists and people in general are now well aware that a scam has been forced down upon them– and both their freedom and sovereignty are certainly at stake.
Copenhagen Accord Establishes Global Government Framework
Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and avid Obama supporter, wants to deny health care to old folks. They’re too expensive. He also told an audience in 2007 that most people will not live longer than their parents. Again, too expensive. He wants to force medical technology corporations to stop developing new life-saving technology.
Reich, of course, supports the so-called “public option,” the government’s take-over of the health care industry. In order to push the Obamacare scam, Reich proposed a march on Washington by the liberals to demand the public option. He wanted to do this on Grandparents Day, September 13.
Reich wanted people to march in favor of a plan that would mandate old people die on a day set aside for old people. You can’t make this stuff up.
Mr. Reich’s pronouncement is yet another confirmation that the government wants to kill old people who are after all — according to our eugenicist rulers — nothing if not useless eaters.
Democrats and liberals went ballistic when Sarah Palin mentioned the fact that the government wants to use the “level of productivity in society” as the basis for determining access to medical care. This Darwinian and Malthusian concept is supported by Dr. Ezekial Emanuel, brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and White House health care policy adviser.
Emanuel does not use the term “death panels” and the term does not appear in the Obamacare bill. That would be political suicide. Instead he argues in favor of “The Complete Lives System,” a system that “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
In 1996, Emanuel said health care should be rationed for those who are not “participating citizens,” that is to say the old, the infirm, and those suffering from irreversible medical conditions.
As a good liberal, Emanuel would like to avoid the perception that he proposes killing old people simply because they are old — that would be “ageist” — and instead argues that they have used up their “life-years” and basically need to get out of the way and stop using up precious medical resources.
Robert Reich reduces the academic gobbledygook of Emanuel’s “Complete Lives System” down to language the average person can understand. In the above video, he spells it out — the government will intervene in medical decisions made by you and your family. Grand daddy is a burden on society and has nothing left to contribute because he no longer works and pays half or more of his income to the government in the form of confiscatory taxes.
The sad and frightening thing is, when Reich told the audience they will have to die, they applauded.
If you’re not more than a little disturbed by this, please go back and read your copy of the Constitution. If you don’t have one, call me and I’ll send you one. Why? Because nowhere in that document, or in its many amendments, will you find that the Federal government has been assigned the responsibility or power over public education. That, my friends, is one of the biggies that is left to the states under their original sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Comrade Obama is planning to beam into our public schools, on September 8, to all grades and all schools that receive public funding, a speech of content that is yet to be determined, but is pretty obvious. There is little doubt in my mind that, his “Town Hall” campaign having gone down in flames, Comrade Obama intends to push his government healthcare agenda by scaring the wits out of our kids, so they will go home and cry, “Mommy, Daddy, why don’t you support the President’s plan?” No doubt he will also try to convince the kids that he, and he alone, is the savior of America, and they need to listen to him about what to do to ensure their future
A study guide has been distributed for teachers’ use, which includes some of the following statements:
* Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?
* As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
* Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
I have heard several people say they are going to pull their children out of school September 8. If sufficient numbers do so, it will jeopardize school funding in the fractional increment represented by that day. On the other hand, I suspect that if schools choose to not run the speech, it could jeopardize some amount of Federal funding – the usual gun to the head approach our Federal government uses.
If this thing is going to happen, it is the responsibility of all Americans to become infinitely aware not only of the content of Comrade Obama’s speech, but of the in-class discussions held in conjunction with the speech. The subjects and content should be discussed with our children, and they must be disabused of any erroneous notions the Comrade dares to push on them. Best of all, our children need a strong lesson on the Constitution, and their duty as a member of a free society to not swallow whole what the government tells them, but to question authority with their minds, their mouths, their pens, and ultimately their money and their vote.
In the meantime, we have less than a 1 day to register our protest at this blatant end-run of state educational authority, and more particularly, parental authority by an Administration that is moving more rapidly toward socialism than any of us could have imagined.
A top White House adviser to President Barack Obama argued that mankind eventually must face up to the need for a “world of zero net physical growth” and “population limitation” in an essay he co-authored that was included in a 1995 book on environmentally “sustainable” economic activity published by the World Bank.
John P. Holdren, who is now director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, co-authored the essay with Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. Ehrlich has been a well-known population control advocate since he authored the 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” in which he advocated zero population growth. At the time the 1995 essay was published, Holdren was a professor at the University of California.
The essay—“The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects”—was published in the first chapter of “Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations,” a book published in 1995 by the World Bank. The book is available as a PDF on the World Bank’s Web site.
“We know for certain, for example, that: No form of material growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth, is sustainable,” wrote Holdren and his co-authors. “Many of the practices inadequately supporting today’s population of 5.5 billion people are unsustainable; and [a]t the sustainability limit, there will be a tradeoff between population and energy-matter throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person and well-being per person.
TV star and political commentator Chuck Norris points out in an editorial today that under the Obamacare legislation currently being vociferously opposed in town halls across the country, the government would empower itself to carry out home intrusions and state re-education of children under a Stalinist indoctrination program.
“Obamacare is about the government’s coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development,” writes Norris. “It’s outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading “home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills. The bill says that the government agents, “well-trained and competent staff,” would “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices,” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”
“Are you kidding me?! With whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts’? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques! Do we really believe they would contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education, or would they merely universally indoctrinate with their own?,” writes Norris, questioning what the government would teach children about religion, morals and basic values, as well as issues like abortion.
“Do you want government agents coming into your home and telling you how to parent your children? When did government health care turn into government child care?,” asks Norris, pointing out that the program has Stalinist overtones in that it gives government the power to shape the very minds of future generations by “seizing parental and educational power, legislating preferred educational methods and materials, and limiting private educational options.”
The program outlined in the Obama health care reform bill sounds almost identical to programs already under way in the United Kingdom where the government usurps parental rights and assumes a guardianship role over the child.
As we reported earlier this month, the UK Labour government announced its intention to fund an expansion of its Family Intervention Projects, a program which is centered around home visits by state social workers whereby agents enter the private homes of citizens to ensure that children go to bed on time, attend school and eat proper meals
Surveillance cameras are also installed in homes as well as state-run dormitories so government spies can keep an eye on whether parents are mistreating kids and whether the kids are fulfilling their obligations to the government under a pre-signed contract.
Another key aspect of the program is that parents deemed “responsible” by the government are handed the power to denounce and report bad parents who allow their children to engage in bad behavior. Such families are then targeted for “interventions”.
As Norris highlights in his editorial, under Obamacare, parents won’t be allowed to make a choice on whether they want government assistance in raising their children, they will be “targeted” by the state for home interventions, in exactly the same way the program works in the UK.
“One government rebuttal is that this program would be “voluntary.” Is that right?,” asks Norris. “Does that imply that this agency would just sit back passively until some parent needing parenting skills said, “I don’t think I’ll call my parents, priest or friends or read a plethora of books, but I’ll go down to the local government offices”? To the contrary, the bill points to specific targeted groups and problems, on Page 840: The state “shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families.”
Quoting Josef Stalin, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed,” Norris warns that universal health care could mean universal hell care if Obama’s health reform is allowed to proceed.
A columnist for the New York Times has publicly stated that he believes he was fired last week simply for criticizing president Obama and his policies.
Commentator Ben Stein writes in the American Spectator that the real reason for his dismissal was not, as the Times indicated, due to a conflict of interest arising from his role as a spokesperson for credit rating service FreeScore.com, nor for budgetary issues.
Rather, Stein states, he was “expelled from the New York Times” due to recent criticism of Obama.
“The two main things, as I see them, were that I started criticizing Mr. Obama quite sharply over his policies and practices.” Stein writes.
“I had tried to do this before over the firing of Rick Wagoner from the Chairmanship of GM. My column had questioned whether there was a legal basis for the firing by the government, what law allowed or authorized the federal government to fire the head of what was then a private company, and just where the Obama administration thought their limits were, if anywhere. This column was flat out nixed by my editors at the Times because in their opinion Mr. Obama inherently had such powers.” he explains.
Stein added, “By a total coincidence, I was tossed overboard immediately after my column attacking Obama. (You can attack Obama from the left at the Times but not from the right.)”
Stein is well known for his controversial 2008 film Expelled, in which he argued that the scientific theory of evolution has contributed to the rise of fascism, communism, atheism, abortion and eugenics.
Stein believes that his commitment to this project also contributed to his eventual dismissal, following a barrage of hate mail from those he describes as “neo-Darwinists”.
He also cites his questioning of Goldman Sachs’ activity as another reason for his firing.
“I made a new set of antagonists by repeatedly and in detail criticizing the real power in this country, the “investment bank” Goldman Sachs, for what seemed to me questionable behavior. This elicited a mountain of favorable mail but also some complaints by well-placed persons.” he writes
Stein was previously criticized in 2008 interview after comparing one of Obama’s major campaign rallies to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.
“Avenge me, boys!” Fiction becomes fact. In the film Red Dawn, Harry Dean Stanton is put in a communist re-education camp.
“As an Internment/Resettlement Specialist for the Army National Guard, you will ensure the smooth running of military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility, similar to those duties conducted by civilian Corrections Officers,” a classified ad posted on the web states. “This will require you to know proper procedures and military law; and have the ability to think quickly in high-stress situations. Specific duties may include assisting with supervision and management operations; providing facility security; providing custody, control, supervision, and escort; and counseling individual prisoners in rehabilitative programs.”
The term “rehabilitative programs” is key. In Mao’s China, the government established a sprawling system of concentration camps — known as Laogai — designed to re-educate falun-gong practitioners, dissidents and other social misfits through forced slave labor. To this day forced detention continues in China, there have been numerous reports of torture and rape in these labor camps. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, a network of gulags — a Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies — were established, primarily for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state.
Rex 84 was created in the United States for basically the same reason. “The Rex-84 Alpha Explan (Readiness Exercise 1984, Exercise Plan; otherwise known as a continuity of government plan), indicates that FEMA in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies, along with other NATO nations, conducted a civil readiness exercise during April 5-13, 1984. It was conducted in coordination and simultaneously with a Joint Chiefs exercise, Night Train 84, a worldwide military command post exercise (including Continental U.S. Forces or CONUS) based on multi-emergency scenarios operating both abroad and at home. In the combined exercise, Rex-84 Bravo, FEMA and DOD led the other federal agencies and departments, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Veterans Administration through a gaming exercise to test military assistance in civil defense,” writes Diana Reynolds. “The exercise anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial law.”
Rex 84 falls under master military contingency plan, Operation Garden Plot, allegedly developed in response to the civil disorders of the 1960s and now under the control of the U.S. Northern Command. Garden Plot was last activated as Noble Eagle following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Under National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20, or called simply “Executive Directive 51″ for short), signed by George W. Bush on May 4, 2007, the government has the authority to declare a national emergency and impose martial law. NSPD 51 grants extraordinary police state powers to the White House and Homeland Security, presumably including detention of a large number of people as established under Rex 84 and other military programs.
On July 30, CNN reported that the U.S. military is gearing up to get involved in the H1N1 swine flu outbreak promised to strike later this year. “The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials,” a proposal that is currently on the desk of Sec. Def. Robert Gates, according to CNN. “As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called ‘execution order’ that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.”
It looks like the Army National Guard is gearing up to staff camps and “execute the proposed plan” of forcibly vaccinating the public and rounding up and hauling off those who refuse to be injected with a soft kill eugenics weapon as dangerous enemies of the state who need to be interned in forced labor and re-education camps.
Military To Work With FEMA During Swine Flu Pandemic
The Obama White House is calling for informer-citizens to denounce opponents of the president’s health care plan. A post on the White House website posted today reads:
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
The post by Macon Phillips, the White House Director of New Media, does not indicate what the Obama White House will do with the information.
In the waning days of the election, St. Louis and Missouri sheriffs and top prosecutors announced a plan to arrest and prosecute Obama opponents. “A local television station’s coverage of a Missouri campaign ‘truth squad’ on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has touched off a national Internet frenzy,” the Detroit Free Press reported on September 30, 2008. “What has prompted all the furor is that several members of the Obama’s ‘truth squad’ in Missouri are prosecutors or members of law enforcement. They include St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch. All are Democrats.”
What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment,” Gov. Matt Blunt responded. “This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights.”
Although the Obama administration has yet to call for prosecuting Obamacare opponents, the fact they are compiling a list of suspects is seriously troubling and reveals the authoritarian mindset of the administration.
It also brings to mind Nixon’s enemies list compiled by convicted criminal Charles Colson. Nixon’s list of political opponents would eventually total of over 30,000 names.
Considering the large number of Americans opposed to Obamacare, it is possible Obama’s list of political enemies may exceed that number in short order.
Obama’s dissident database could be secret — and permanent
In Missouri, if you “lie” about Barack Obama the cops may arrest you. “The effort appeared to be part of a move by the Obama campaign to block advertisements to which it objects. The campaign also sent ‘threatening’ letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama’s gun stance, according to the National Rifle Association,” writes WorldNetDaily, never mind Obama is a gun-grabber who claims to support the Second Amendment.
Obama told ABC he supports the D.C. handgun ban. His campaign told the Chicago Tribune “Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, probably the largest private funder of anti-gun and pro-ban groups and research in the country. In addition, Obama voted for a bill that would “expand the definition of armor piercing ammunition” and “support[ed] banning the sale of ammunition for assault weapons,” including 223 and .308 caliber bullets, the most common rifle ammunition. He supported the Illinois Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) Card, mandatory for residents when they buy any firearm in the state. (For more information on Obama’s assault on the Second Amendment, see Analysis: Fact-Checkers Fall Short in Criticizing NRA’s Anti-Obama Ads.)
In other words, if you cite Obama’s voting record or his publicly stated opinions and this rubs his “truth squads” wrong, they will sic the cops on you. “We want to keep this campaign focused on issues,” Jennifer Joyce, a Missouri prosecutor, told told KMOV (see video). “We don’t want people to get distracted. Missourians don’t want to be distracted by the divisive character attacks,” that is to say she does not want the sheep distracted by the truth — Obama is a gun-grabber who pretends to respect the Second Amendment. In addition to Joyce’s warming, Obama lawyer Robert Bauer threatened Missouri television and radio station managers that he would rat them out to the Federal Communication Commission if they dared tell the truth.
This is precisely how political campaigns are run in despotic third world countries and dictatorships that pretend to be democracies. In Bolivia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Burma, Georgia, Haiti — there is no shortage of recent examples — the opposition is routinely arrested, even killed, but we are supposedly above such tactics here in America. Instead, we just fix the voting machines and nix thousands of voters from the rolls.
It appears all of this has changed under Obama. Isn’t this the sort of behavior Hitler’s goons engaged in before he swept into power and killed millions of people, beginning with his political opponents? Isn’t this the sort of thing Stalin and Mao did, eventually graduating to mass murder and genocide? Didn’t East Germany’s Stasi encourage people to turn in their neighbors, even their family and friends, for holding the wrong political opinions?
Of course, Obama is no Stalin and his opponents are not showing up dead on the side of the road. But with this effort to silence the critics through coordinated police action we can see such fascism in a germination stage. Remember, Hitler’s brownshirts started out by intimidating communists, anarchists, and Social Democrats and then graduated to beatings, murder, and finally death camps.
British Labour MP Mary Creagh has proposed forbidding school enrollment to children who have not received the full course of childhood vaccines, turning the current recommendations compulsory.
Writing in the magazine of the Fabian Society, Creagh said that the United Kingdom should use the same sanctions as the United States to make vaccines compulsory, and that schools should be required to verify that all children enrolled have been vaccinated.
In the same issue, public health expert Sir Sandy Macara said that children should not be allowed to receive health benefits unless they are vaccinated.
Vaccination rates have dropped in the United Kingdom recently, after research emerged suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) might be linked to autism. While below the government’s target level of 95 percent, 85 percent of children still receive the MMR vaccine.
Both Creagh and Macara said that compulsory vaccination would serve the public good, pushing the United Kingdom toward the 95 percent vaccinated threshold at which incidence of a virus drops so low that the general population acquires a “herd immunity.”
The chair of the British Medical Association, Dr. Hamish Meldrum, blasted the plan as “morally and ethically dubious.”
“A Stalinist approach like this would be likely to backfire on an unprecedented scale and increase opposition to vaccinations,” he said.
“It’s only six months since a big public consultation by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics which we contributed to and they concluded there was no reason to change the voluntary system,” said Jackie Fletcher of the organization Jabs.
“At the same time as this was published in the UK, there was a huge furor in the United States as parents were threatened with hefty fines and jail unless they vaccinated their children before entry into school,” she said. “Is this really the direction we want to go in?”
The government responded to Creagh and Macara’s articles by saying that it has no plans to make vaccination compulsory.
CNN is airing misleading footage of the war between Georgia and Russia, skewing public opinion in favor of the Georgians, according to a Russia Today cameraman interviewed this morning.
The Russia Today satellite TV company aired the interview on its English language news channel but the story is yet to appear on the Internet or in any other news outlet.
The Russian cameraman charged that CNN had used his footage of Georgian forces attacking Russian civilians in Tskhinvali, the provincial capital of South Ossetia, but then claimed it showed Russians attacking Georgians in the Georgian town of Gori.
The Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, described as an act of genocide and a war crime by Russian officials and other eyewitnesses, led to the slaughter of at least 2,000 civilians. The fact that Georgia, backed by the U.S. and Israel, were responsible for the provocation that led to the Russian response, has been buried by the majority of western corporate media.
Western media bias to skew popular opinion in favor of the U.S. and NATO client state Georgia was evident from the very start of the conflict.
As we reported yesterday, a prime example of media bias in shielding Georgia from responsibility for the carnage is the fact that news outlets like the BBC continue to report that thousands of civilians were killed in Georgia, ith the obvious inference being that these are victims of the Russian onslaught. But these victims were not killed in Georgia, they were killed in Ossetia – by Georgian forces.
As the Chimes of Freedom Blog elaborates, “While the Ossetians claimed over 1000 dead the BBC neither reported this or any newsreel coming out of Ossetia showing the destruction caused by the Georgian shelling of the breakaway republic. All we are getting is one-sided reports of the destruction being caused by the Russians.”
“The purpose of the operation has been achieved…. The security of our peacekeeping forces and the civilian population has been restored,” Interfax quoted him as saying.
The former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has called on the world community to isolate Russia in protest over its campaign in the Caucasus, likening its tactics to those of “Hitler or Stalin”.
Brzezinski, who was the national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, and is now an occasional adviser to the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, said the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was “following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s”.
He said that Putin’s “justification” for splitting up Georgia – because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia – could be compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.
In an interview with the conservative German daily Die Welt, he said even more striking were the parallels between Putin’s strategy against Georgia and Stalin’s invasion of Finland in 1939, describing both as “the undermining of the sovereignty of a small, democratic neighbouring state through the use of violence”. He added: “Georgia is to an extent the Finland of today, both morally and strategically.”
Polish-born Brezinski, 80, who earned a reputation as a hardliner due to his anti-Soviet politics, said the world was now being confronted with the question as to how it should react to Russia and what he saw as its efforts to “reincorporate old Soviet areas into the Kremlin’s sphere of control”. He said at the heart of the issue was access to oil and specifically who controlled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which runs through Georgia.
“If Georgia no longer has its sovereignty it means not only that the west is cut off from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, but we can also assume that Putin will exercise a similar strategy against Ukraine if he faces resistance. He’s already publicly voiced threats against Ukraine.”
America now has officially joined the ranks of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia by enacting its first-ever “exit tax.” President George W. Bush signed the legislation–passed unanimously last month by both the House and Senate–into law yesterday, June 17.
You must pay the exit tax within 90 days of “expatriation”–giving up your U.S. citizenship or (in some cases) long term residence in the United States. Only a few hundred people do this each year, but Congress didn’t like the fact that severing all ties to the United States allows wealthy people to legally avoid all U.S. tax. For my take on the exit tax, click here and here.
The news isn’t all bad, though, particularly if you’re not wealthy enough to trigger the tax. In that case, you can bypass some of the complexities and hassles of the law the exit tax replaced. If you are wealthy enough to trigger the tax, though, the new law will definitely make life more difficult if you ever decide you want to take the only legal path to permanently end all U.S. tax obligations.