AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

http://law.jrank.org/pages/7563/Income-Tax-History.html
Income tax first appeared in the United States in 1862, during the Civil War. At that time only about one percent of the population was required to pay the tax. A flat-rate income tax was imposed in 1867. The income tax was repealed in its entirety in 1872.
Income tax was a rallying point for the Populist party in 1892, and had enough support two years later that Congress passed the Income Tax Act of 1894. The tax at that time was two percent on individual incomes in excess of $4,000, which meant that it reached only the wealthiest members of the population. The Supreme Court struck down the tax, holding that it violated the constitutional requirement that direct taxes be apportioned among the states by population (POLLOCK V. FARMERS' LOAN & TRUST, 158 U.S. 601, 15 S. Ct. 912, 39 L. Ed. 1108 [1895]). After many years of debate and compromise, the SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution was ratified in 1913, providing Congress with the power to lay and collect taxes on income without apportionment among the states. The objectives of the income tax were the equitable distribution of the tax burden and the raising of revenue.

Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About 'Global Governance'
Climate Depot Exclusive

Friday, July 10, 2009By Marc Morano " Climate Depot
Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”

“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times.

“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth's temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.

Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming.

“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.” (Editor's Note: Gore makes the “global governance” comment at the 1min. 10 sec. mark in this UK Times video.)

Gore's call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac's call in 2000.

On November 20, 2000, then French President Chirac said during a speech at The Hague that the UN's Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance."

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Former EU Environment Minister Margot Wallstrom said, "Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide." Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper once dismissed UN's Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist scheme.”

'Global Carbon Tax' Urged at UN Meeting

In addition, calls for a global carbon tax have been urged at recent UN global warming conferences. In December 2007, the UN climate conference in Bali, urged the adoption of a global carbon tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, said at the 2007 UN conference after a panel titled “A Global CO2 Tax.”

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1893/Gore-US-Climate-Bill-Will-Help-Bring-About-Global-Governance

Honduras' non-coup
Under the country's Constitution, the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya was legal.
By Miguel A. Estrada
July 10, 2009

Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this "coup."

Something clearly has gone awry with the rule of law in Honduras -- but it is not necessarily what you think. Begin with Zelaya's arrest. The Supreme Court of Honduras, as it turns out, had ordered the military to arrest Zelaya two days earlier. A second order (issued on the same day) authorized the military to enter Zelaya's home to execute the arrest. These orders were issued at the urgent request of the country's attorney general. All the relevant legal documents can be accessed (in Spanish) on the Supreme Court's website. They make for interesting reading.

What you'll learn is that the Honduran Constitution may be amended in any way except three. No amendment can ever change (1) the country's borders, (2) the rules that limit a president to a single four-year term and (3) the requirement that presidential administrations must "succeed one another" in a "republican form of government."

In addition, Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession. Not unlike what Zelaya's close ally, Hugo Chavez, had done in Venezuela. . . . .

MORE HERE:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-estrada10-2009jul10,0,1570598.story

realistically, any democratic country (and a few who are not) has to respond in the negative to a coup, i agree however that the circumstances of the leaders removal do appear to be above board and legal under the honduran constitution

That's what I think too, at least if Estrada is correct and I would bet somebody a really good hamburger that he is. But the U.S. Mainstream Media is still mostly projecting it as a coup or an illegal deposing of a lawfully elected leader. Estrada says no--not a coup, and not unlawful.

And since I don't think this would generate enough interest to merit its own thread, I am posting it here. It isn't entirely off topic as it does relate to Constitutional integrity as well as providing an illustration of how a rogue President can be removed--something Ican has been addressing.

Foxie, What do you mean by "rogue president?" Does that fall under impeachment?

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/
Part II, Chapter IX
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.

That's nice ican but an incorrect and vague reading of Pollock.

Pollock only ruled that the income tax on rents from land would be direct taxes. It never stated all income taxes were direct taxes. You seem to not know the details of Pollock.

Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About 'Global Governance'

We knew this all along, did we not, ican?

Yeah fox. Agenda exposed. Gore wants to use AGW policies to rule the earth! Then the GALAXY!!!
Are you daft?

A tax on the rents or income of real estate is a direct tax within the meaning of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States.

First. That the law in question, in imposing a tax on the income or rents of real estate, imposes a tax upon the real estate itself; and in imposing a tax on the interest or other income of bonds or other personal property, held for the purposes of income or ordinarily yielding income, imposes a tax upon the personal estate itself; that such tax is a direct tax, and void because imposed without regard to the rule of apportionment; and that by reason thereof the whole law is invalidated.

Second. That the law is invalid, because imposing indirect taxes in violation of the constitutional requirement of uniformity, and therein also in violation of the implied limitation upon taxation that all tax laws must apply equally, impartially, and uniformly to all similarly situated. Under the second head, it is contended that the rule of uniformity is violated, in that the law taxes the income of certain corporations, companies, and associations, no matter how created or organized, at a higher rate than the incomes of individuals or partnerships derived from precisely similar property or business; in that it exempts from the operation of the act and from the burden of taxation numerous corporations, companies, and associations having similar property and carrying on similar business to those expressly taxed; in that it denies to individuals deriving their income from shares in certain corporations, companies, and associations the benefit of the exemption of $ 4,000 granted to other persons interested in similar property and business; in the exemption of $4,000; in the exemption of building and loan associations, savings banks, mutual life, fire, marine, and accident insurance companies, existing solely for the pecuniary profit of their members,-these and other exemptions being alleged to be purely arbitrary and capricious, justified by no public purpose, and of such magnitude as to ina lidate the entire enactment; and in other particulars.

The uniformity thus required is the uniformity throughout the United States of the duty, impost, and excise levied; that is, the tax levied cannot be one sum upon an article at one [157 U.S. 429, 593] place, and a different sum upon the same article at another place.