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Banned
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Originally Posted by desal75
If we are currently locked in a life or death struggle, where are the deaths? I see life all around me. True, I do see high taxes. I live in New York State where we have it worse than most. But I do not see millions and millions of people starving to death in the streets.
Some of you are asking a population to revolt against the rich. A population which spends more time watching the antics of Paris Hilton than reading a news paper.
Most of us are happy, even though over taxed and over worked. People in this country have an inherent hope and optimism for many reasons. Some real, some imagined.
If wealth should be more redistributed than start the process. Some of you probably have money in the bank your not using. Share it.
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Is your "happiness" enhanced by what your website link in your profile indicates.....offering a deadly, addictive product for sale, "tax free", to those unlucky enough to crave it? Isn't that addiction, for those folks, a "life or death" situation, if they continue to consume the product you offer at such a compelling price?
How do you think that you acquired the ability to profit from avoiding paying NY state taxes on tobacco that afford you an opportunity to undercut the price of the product that you sell on the internet, vs, the price that mom and pop convenience store owners all over NY state are required to charge?
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...A00894DC404482
Indian Web Sales Of Taxless Tobacco Face New Pressure
Eduardo Porter. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Sep 26, 2004. pg. 1.1
Many people would love to put Larry Ballagh out of business. All antismoking groups, for instance. The National Association of Convenience Stores, too.
New York lawmakers would happily close him down. So would the attorneys general of most states.
The reason for all this animosity is that Mr. Ballagh, a hefty 65-year-old of half-Irish, half-Seneca American Indian stock, sells cigarettes nationwide over the Internet, free of state excise and sales taxes that can add as much $3 a pack to the cost of smoking.
The bustle in his offices on the Cattaraugus territory of the Seneca reservation here attests to the brisk growth of his business. There's the new extension to the warehouse, the high stacks of cigarette cartons, the huge piles of empty ''Priority Mail'' boxes waiting to be loaded and dispatched.
But as his venture has grown, so has the opposition to his trade. Fast-growing online sales of untaxed cigarettes -- available for less than $25 a carton over the Internet compared with about $65 in New York City -- are provoking a stampede of protests from a disparate collection of antitobacco groups, cash-strapped state governments and local retailers. These groups are hard at work in the courts, legislatures and in Washington to try to end the practice.
Earlier this year, the New York state legislature passed a law intended to force collection of excise taxes on tobacco and fuel sold by Native Americans to non-Indians. New York City, which estimates it loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year from untaxed cigarettes, is cobbling together a legal strategy that it could use against Indian tribes by characterizing the Internet sales as mail fraud. The revenue department of Washington State -- which has successfully sued nontribal online vendors -- is mulling lawsuits against Indian retailers.
The campaign has marshaled forces on Capitol Hill as well. Last December, the Senate passed a bill to stamp out untaxed cigarette sales over the Internet, and the organization representing state attorneys general is urging the House to do the same.
The trade group for convenience stores, meanwhile, has been lobbying intently for a different House bill that would take a harsher stance, explicitly allowing states to take Indian nations to court.
The widespread government hostility, however, has not dented the Ballagh family business. ''We are adding about 80 to 100 new customers a month,'' said Charles Ballagh, Larry Ballagh's son and partner. At that rate, their venture would double in size in about two years.
Larry Ballagh's business remains hard to crack because it operates behind tribal sovereignty. States are generally barred by treaties from taxing Indian tribes or enforcing other laws against their activities. Businesses operated by American Indians have long taken advantage of this protection to sell tax-free tobacco products in reservation shops to non-Indians.
But the Internet has allowed the Seneca entrepreneurs to take their business to a new level. That has intensified the debate over the legality of such commerce, which has taken off in recent years as many states have sharply increased taxes on cigarettes.
Today, Mr. Ballagh regularly advertises in ''Pennysaver'' shopping sheets in states with high excise taxes. From Web sites like Mr. Ballaghs's travelingsmoke.com, and others like Senecahawk.com and Senecatabacco.com, smokers can buy cartons of Marlboro and Camel for as little as $24.25, compared to about $58 in a Hoboken, N.J., convenience store and $49 at a supermarket in Seattle.
At least a decade worth of rulings, ranging up to the Supreme Court, have determined that while states cannot tax Indian commerce, they can collect taxes on purchases by non-Indians from Native American businesses. States have limited power to enforce these decisions, however. Some tribes in other parts of the country defused the issue by negotiating deals with state governments to collect tribal taxes and eliminate their retailers' competitive advantage.
By contrast, the 7,500 Seneca, most of them living on the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations in western New York, have dug in their heels. ''Cigarettes have raised our standard of living,'' said Rickey Armstrong Sr., the president of the Seneca nation......
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You mock and twist my premise here. The holders of capital have kept my family "on the move" for the last 5 generations, they've taken over the government, "of the people" that my revolutionary ancestors fought and sacrificed, to establish, and now they are honing in on the remnants of the bill of rights that we specifically reserved for ourselves, not the government that they've bought away from us.
You sell your tax free cigarettes because western NY state native Americans fought a long, sometimes violent fight for your right to do so.
....and for the masses in the US, it has historically been a "life or death" struggle that has won worker protections by government, that Bush's intentional destruction of the NLRB is intended to reverse:
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...5257-2,00.html
From the Magazine | National Affairs
<b>Model T Tycoon</b>
Posted Monday, Mar. 17, 1941
.......Until recently Ford has paid and publicized the highest wage, and the Ford method of keeping organizers out of the plants has been simple and direct: hit them first. Keeping organizers out has been the job of Harry Bennett's "service department," whose personnel is far-from-prissy.
Bennett got a cracked head in a fight outside the Rouge plant in 1932, in which four jobless marchers were killed. Brutally beaten by Ford agents were two other men who are now in the very front rank of U. A. W.—Richard Frankensteen and Walter Reuther (whose plan for making airplane parts in auto factories was projected last winter). Brutal beatings took place in Dallas, Tex. ........
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Far from eliminating government, I am calling for competing against the rich who have taken it over, and getting it to work for the rest of us, as I see that it does in Canada, Italy, France, and in Germany.
Is it only coincidental that the owners of the corporations who contributed to Bush's campaigns and paid lobbyists to actually draft the legislation that was taken up in the congress in the last six years, gain from taking over this regulatory agency that enforced the rights of workers?:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Aug14.html
Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust
OSHA Made More Business-Friendly
By Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A01
First of three articles
Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers -- all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths.
By the time President Bush moved into the White House, the tuberculosis rules, first envisioned in 1993, were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years.
Assistant Secretary of Labor John L. Henshaw said "writing another standard" is not the answer to occupational safety. (Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary.
The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan .......
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Quote:
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/arti...ersion=enabled
Bush vs. Working People
By Joel Wendland
Archives - Dates and Topics Online Edition Archive March – April 2006 Mar. 20 - Mar. 26 click here for related stories: Labor movement
3-20-06, 8:53 am
"The Bush administration continued to demonstrate its strong bias against workers' rights in 2005," states a report put out earlier this month by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). ICFTU is one of the world's largest federations of labor unions and represents 155 million workers across the globe.
The report cataloged numerous breaches of international standards concerning freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, and child labor. It also highlighted a clear trend towards lower standards under the Bush administration.
"The credibility of the US, which takes a strong international stand on human rights issues, is severely damaged by the lack of protection for working people, especially the most vulnerable, within its own borders," said Guy Ryder, ICFTU General Secretary, adding that "this only encourages other governments to seek competitive advantage in global markets by violating fundamental workers' rights."
The report noted that while US law protects the right to organize unions, in practice, private employers are allowed to use a number of coercive tactics that "chill the right of association."
The report found that 30% of employers illegally fire workers for union-related activity. More than 9 in 10 employers faced with union activity hold closed-door "captive audience" meetings that push anti-union propaganda and pressure employees not to join. And 70% of employers in the manufacturing sector threaten to close the workplace or move it overseas if a union is organized.
Despite laws guaranteeing the right to join or organize unions, about 25 million private industry workers have been denied this basic right.
When workers file grievances with federal regulatory bodies designed to prevent employer abuses, they wait a median of 690 days for a hearing. Currently, more than 16,000 grievances are on file since 2004 waiting to be heard.
When they do finally get a hearing, working people rarely see justice. "Many employers who violate labor laws are never punished," the report found. "Even when they are, the penalties are too weak to deter them from doing it again."
Even worse, since Bush has been in office and has appointed anti-union Republicans to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency created to mediate labor disputes and prevent abuses, its rulings on labor grievances have more often gone against workers, even when clear violations of law occurred.
The report noted some key examples. When pro-union workers at Stanadyne Automotive charged the managers with implicitly threatening to close the plant by stating that other plants owned by the company had closed in retaliation against unions, the right-wing dominated NLRB ruled that such phrasing did not constitute a threat.
When workers at Flying Foods complained that their employer showed new hires an anti-union film, despite the fact the union had already won a negotiated contract, the NLRB dismissed their complaint.
The NLRB also seems poised to weaken rules governing the status of unions that were voluntarily recognized by the employer without a vote. Auto parts manufacturers Dana Corp. and Teledyne want to weaken these rules in order to decertify existing unions at their plants.
Numerous other examples of violations of workers' rights are noted. The report concludes that under lax enforcement, and even outright hostility by Bush administration officials, employers have become more aggressive in their anti-union activities without fear of punishment, even when they break the law.
The Bush administration and the NLRB have also blocked or overturned the rights of federal and other public workers to collectively bargain contracts. The report found that as many as 40% of public workers currently have no say in their wages, work conditions, health benefits, safety regulations or other aspects of their work.
"An entire industry," the report states, "exists in the United States to defeat union organizing drives through coercion and intimidation." Anti-union campaigns are widely used by employers in the case of organizing, and 82% of the employers hire union-busting consultants to stop workers from joining unions. .......
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