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The Ohio Estate Tax should not be repealed

Dear Editor :
Ending the Tax would do little to balance the State Budget or decrease the deficit since only 20% of the revenue goes to the Ohio Treasury. The remainder goes to townships, counties and municipalities. These sub state entities would lose $ 277 million each year. Local sales tax, property tax and/or flat income tax would have to make up the $227 million lost, or necessary services would have to be cut. The middle class and poor would pay most of these regressive taxes. Our regressive tax code is eliminating the middle class. Legislators voting to eliminate the Tax will lose votes in coming elections.

Only those with an estate above $ 338.333 after deductions, pay Ohio Estate Tax. The wealthy should be willing to pay their fair share of taxes. Although the Farm Bureau has a big campaign to end what they call the “Death Tax”, few farm families are affected.

Senator Bill Seitz proposes a modification of the Ohio Estate Tax would not be a hardship on poor townships, farmers or the wealthy who allegedly retire outside Ohio so their heirs avoid the Tax.

Sincerely,

Albert A. Gabel
Professor Emeritus

Is that even legal?

If the U.S. Constitution says one thing, a treaty ratified by the United States says another, a law passed by Congress yet another, and another law passed by Congress another thing still, while a signing statement radically changes that last law but itself differs with an executive order, all of which statements of law conflict with a number of memos drafted by the Office of Legal Council (some secret and some leaked), but a President has announced that the law is something completely different from all of this, and in practice the government defies all of the above including the presidential announcement . . . in such a case, the obvious but possibly pointless question arises: what's legal?

The above theoretical example of legal confusion sounds extreme, but it is not far off the actual situation with regard to some of our most important public policies. Take the example of U.S. warmaking in Libya. Is that legal?

In Memoriam: Gil Scot Heron

I just learned that one of my favorite musicians, Gil Scot Heron has died.
Gil. and his band performed on the 7th episode of Saturday Night Live ( the one with Richard Pryor), and their music so moved me that I ran out the next day and bought their album, "From South Africa to South Carolina" -- the first LP I ever owned. A student of African master drummer Babatunje Olatunde and a prodigy of the New Harlem Renaissance movement in music, Gil brought traditional African Rythms and instruments of a new contemporary style of soulful, folksy jazz, infused with both African and American history in a way that politically pulled no punches. Gil took a bold stand against Nuclear Power with his ("alternative") hit, "Shut 'em Down."

He performed at numerous political rallies and benefits and incorporated "spoken word" (political poetry) into his work, and he served as an inspiration to a generation of Afrocentric "guerilla poets." Gil contributed significantly to the Sun City project, a collaborative recording of American ad international musicians including Bruce Springstein, Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel.

Libertarians say restore freedom, repeal Patriot Act

WASHINGTON - Libertarian Party Chair Mark Hinkle issued the following statement today:
"Yesterday, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined hands to renew several provisions of the Patriot Act. These provisions are unconstitutional and violate our right to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

"These provisions should be repealed, and if they're not repealed, they ought to be ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

"Anyone who believes that Democrats care more about civil liberties than Republicans ought to be disillusioned by this renewal. It has become painfully clear that the Obama administration is indistinguishable from the George W. Bush administration.

"The plain injustice of these search provisions is compounded by the secrecy that surrounds them. In some cases, Americans -- even members of Congress -- aren't permitted to know the legal interpretations that govern how these searches may be implemented. And of course there is the infamous 'library records' provision, which prohibits targets from telling anyone that they were ordered to turn over records to the government.

Anatomy of a murder: How NATO killed Qaddafi family members

How many times must a parent bury a child?
Well, in the case of Muammar Qaddafi it's not only twice: once for his daughter, murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.

Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation's children gone too soon. I don't even want to imagine.

All my mother could say in astonishment was, "They killed the babies, they killed his grandbabies."

The news reports, however, didn't last more than one half of a news cycle because on 1 May, at a hastily assembled press conference, President Obama announced the murder of Osama bin Laden.

Ignorant certainty

Now that the end of the world didn’t happen, I can’t stop thinking about it. What chutzpah, what a diminished worldview, not simply to make such a prediction, but — even more incomprehensible, to my relentlessly self-questioning mind — to know you’ll be among the saved.

In 1011, a guy like Harold Camping would probably have been able to generate more panic than bemusement. A millennium later, with science taught in the public schools and all, we have a little more collective resistance to such thundering certainty leaping from highway billboards. I confess, however, to feeling a deep, reptilian tug last Friday morning, as I saw the sign — SAVE THIS DATE, MAY 21, 2011, CHRIST IS COMING — while driving through eastern Wisconsin. Yikes, that’s tomorrow.

What lingers for me in the aftermath of “life goes on (at least for a while)” is an alarmed sense of the power of ignorant certainty. Fanatical preachers are nothing more than the caricature of this power, which, in 2011, thrives like a virus in the American body politic.

Enlightening the president and press -- Cuba: Facts and realities

“No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver” – Spanish saying.
(There is no worse blind person than the one who does not wish to see.)
On May 13, Miami newspaper headlines and TV leads should have said: “Obama makes fool of himself.” The “leads” would have referred to his statement: “I would welcome real change from the Cuban government.”

Obama’s conditions? “For us to have the kind of normal relations we have with other countries, we've got to see significant changes from the Cuban government and we just have not seen that yet.”

A clever tabloid might have headlined, “Obama Goes Blind – Can’t See Changes Right in Front of His Eyes!”

If Granma had a sense of humor its editorial would have begun with: “President Obama stands for ‘Change we can believe in,’ but does not stand for change Cuba’s leaders believe in.”

Indeed, changes in Cuba have come fast and furious over recent months, but apparently Obama has his own definition of the word “insignificant.” Or, maybe his advisers did not inform him that Cuba has freed all the “political” prisoners it arrested in 2003 and some others as well.

The search for war

In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a gradual shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold -- war must go on, one way or another.

“I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace,” Lyndon Johnson said while escalating the Vietnam War. In early 1991, the first President Bush offered the public this convolution: “Even as planes of the multinational forces attack Iraq, I prefer to think of peace, not war.” More than a decade later, George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress: “We seek peace. We strive for peace.”

While absurdly hypocritical, such claims mouthed the idea that the USA need not be at war 24/7/365.

But these days, peace gets less oratorical juice. In this era, after all, the amorphous foe known as “terror” will never surrender.

There’s an intractable enemy for you; beatable but never quite defeatable. Terrorists are bound to keep popping up somewhere.

Secure our Nuclear Fuel

The nuclear crisis in Japan has raised alarming questions about the safety of nuclear power plants in our own backyard. There's good reason for all of us to be worried.

Reduce the Risks

U.S. policymakers must make securing spent fuel and eliminating crowded pools a top priority.

According to new analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Project On Government Oversight, our nation's stockpile of radioactive spent fuel is stored in such unsafe conditions that the lives of millions of people who live near nuclear reactors in this country are at risk.

Act now! Tell your member of congress to secure our nuclear fuel.

In a worst case scenario, a catastrophic fire at a nuclear plant could cause untold cancer deaths and render uninhabitable an area 60 times larger than the area affected by the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident of all time.

Cleaning up city squares in democratic Spain

On Friday the 27th of May, five days after an overwhelming victory by centre-right political parties in the local and regional elections across Spain, the country woke up to the bitter reality of how nonviolent movements calling for economic democracy, political justice and peace are going to be dealt with by the country’s police forces in this new era of right-wing political dominance.

Just twenty-four hours after Spain’s largest telecom company, Telefonica, announced a new round of layoffs affecting 8500 people, 25% of the work force, and as the G8 is meeting in Deauville, France, to discuss amongst other things the discontent sweeping across Europe, the Catalan police force – the Mossos d’Esquadra – following orders from the Town Hall’s new Catalan Nationalist Party (CiU) government, surrounded the nonviolent citizens camped at the Plaza Cataluña in Barcelona’s city centre. Armed with full riot gear, batons and machine-guns with rubber bullets, the police kettled in the protestors, making it impossible for them to leave or others to enter.

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