“Beliefs” columnist for The New York Times , Mark Oppenheimer, wrote at Time.com, “that churches should have their tax-exempt statuses ripped away for opposing same-sex marriage.”
Felix Salmon at Fusion wrote the same thing :
[T]he US government subsidizes churches to the tune of many billions of dollars per year by giving them tax-exempt status. … The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, but that’s free as in love, not free as in beer. Taxation is a purely secular affair, and by default it applies to everyone equally, whether they’re a religious institution or not.
The left wishes for a nation where same-sex couples are given tax benefits for participation in a homosexual lifestyle, but where churches are punished for rejecting that lifestyle.
And it won’t stop with churches.
The Christian Science Monitor asks whether conservative religious colleges will lose their tax-exempt statuses. Professor Michael Olivas of the Institute for Higher Education Law & Governance at the University of Houston said, “I don’t think that a number of these religious schools can reasonably hope to adhere to principles that are clearly in violation of public policy, a la
Bob Jones.” As I wrote years ago, the Bob Jones University case, in which the IRS removed non-profit status from the university over its rules on interracial dating, will now be used as precedent by the IRS to go after non-profit institutions over same-sex marriage.
The crusade against religious churches and schools amounts to bigotry against religious believers
– a bigotry clearly expressed by University of Virginia law Professor Douglas Laycock, who told The Washington Post
, “The gay rights side keeps escalating its demands and public opinion keeps shifting in their favor. … Conservative believers are their own worst enemies and lead people to think they are hateful morons, so they’re not getting much sympathy.”
And this is the point: when public consternation governs the regulations on churches, we have violated the purpose of the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to tax exempt status, but as the Supreme Court wrote in Walz v. Tax Commission of City of New York (1970), the leading case on tax exemptions for religious institutions:
Grants of exemption historically reflect the concern of authors of constitutions and statutes as to the latent dangers inherent in the imposition of property taxes; exemption constitutes a reasonable and balanced attempt to guard against those dangers. … Elimination of exemption would tend to expand the involvement of government by giving rise to tax valuation of church property, tax liens, tax foreclosures, and the direct confrontations and conflicts that follow in the train of those legal processes. … The grant of a tax exemption is not sponsorship, since the government does not transfer part of its revenue to churches, but simply abstains from demanding that the church support the state.
The Court summed up that tax exemption for religious institutions “covers our entire national existence and indeed predates it.”

This, historically speaking, is true. As religious regulation expert Richard Couser wrote
, “The notion of exempting churches from taxation did not begin in the United States. Medieval Europe, the Roman Empire under Constantine, and even Egypt in Joseph’s time exempted church property from taxation.” Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, explained
, “The unassailable fact remains that, for as long as anyone can remember, churches have always been tax-exempt or enjoyed favorable tax treatment.”
In the United States, tax exemption served the purpose of not excessively entangling the government with religious institutions, given that most civilized countries of Europe had established state churches sponsored by the government itself. The Founders – and most legislators and regulators throughout the history of the United States – understood that using the government to discriminate against particular churches would act as an abridgement of religious freedom. And the Founders would have been appalled by the federal regulations currently in place that crack down on pastors’ ability to speak politically from the pulpit.
Such regulations began in 1934 with a congressional amendment to the tax code, as Stanley points out. That amendment attempted to reject tax exemption for a church if a “substantial part of … [its] activities … is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation.” That amendment came after one legislator got upset with a church for campaigning against him based on veteran benefits. In 1954, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson sponsored the
Johnson Amendment, which labeled tax-exempt organizations those that did not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” He sponsored the legislation because a rival secular non-profit opposed his candidacy. Now the IRS has expanded the regulations to include a bevy of possible violations in order to quash religious speech.
In short, politicians, given power over churches, would move to destroy those who oppose them.
That is why tax exemption is an important aspect of protection for churches: the government’s attempts to smack down particular churches smacks of First Amendment-violating viewpoint discrimination. Either all churches should receive tax exempt status – which they should to prevent government specifically targeting religion, since the “power to tax involves the power to destroy,” as Chief Justice John Marshall put it in 1819 – or they should not. But the idea that government will selectively benefit those churches it approves makes religion an arm of the state, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
This is a letter that was written and mailed to the president by an Iranian journalism student who was imprisoned in Iran for speaking out. I doubt the president will read it, because some mail opener in another building actually gets the mail and disposes of it before the president ever sees it. There was a copy sent to Glenn Beck. He read it Thursday morning on his radio program, and I want to share it with you, because this is the true testament of who has infiltrated our white house.
“Dear Mr. President:

Without human rights and democracy there will never be a lasting peace and security in the world. Please allow me to speak as a prisoner of conscious and a journalist opposed to the
Islamic religion cleric’s rule over my homeland Iran.
I was one of the student leaders who was considered to be an architect of a student uprising on
July 9, 1999 by the regime. That was an uprising that was a true turning point in the movement for democracy. We wanted change of regime because our calls for reform had proven ineffective. And so I spent six years in the notorious Evin prison. Two of those years were in solitary confinement. I was freed but rearrested and imprisoned again.
Over five years ago when the people of Iran were asking you to support them against the tyranny of the Shia clerics, you, as president of the most powerful country on earth, were secretly writing letters to the dictator of Iran.
In 2009 while Khamenei was ordering the suppression of the people to his paramilitary forces, killing the people on the streets and the university campuses, imprisoning and torturing journalists, intellectuals, the young and the old mercilessly, your friendly communications to the tyrant of Iran continued in the name of the people of the United States, ignoring the human rights of the people of Iran. You helped Khamenei to continue his Islamic tyranny in the name of
Allah and Islam.
During our 2009 uprising, I saw untold crimes against humanity committed against the people of
Iran. I saw a woman in her late 20’s get kicked so hard in her spine that she flew through the air.
On Ghods Street, near Tehran University, I saw another young woman as her head was pounded into a car by the basif paramilitary forces. All the while, they screamed disgusting epithets like
“whore” and worse.
Mr. President, the people of Iran are not backward fascists nor fanatic religionists as the ruling
Islamic clergies are. When the day comes that the boots of tyranny is lifted off our neck, it will be proven that Iranians are capable of handling democracy, secularism and social justice.
Mr. President, all we want is to be a part of the international community,we want to be free democratic people, master of our own destiny, live in Peace and prosperity, and be the decision makers for our homeland. We oppose nuclear bomb and the militaristic arrogance of the ruling cleric regime. If the international community wants peace in the Middle East, support the People of Iran not the tyrants.
The Islamic clerics have taken our nation hostage to their fanatical Islamic tyranny. In 2009 when the people of Iran loudly and clearly asked for your support for their freedom and sovereignty, you ignored us and empowered the tyrants to imprison, torture and kill us.
Mr. President, I have the honor of being the cellmate of a good American, Pastor Saeed Abedini.
I heard that you met with the wife and children of my cellmate, that his son, little Jacob asked you to help release his father for his birthday, however, you have refused to demand the release of the hostage Abedini from the old tyrant Khamenei.

You claim that the only choice that you have is either make a deal with Khamenei, may I say, “to surrender to him or war.” May I dare to say that this Claim is a form of misinformation, and intimidation of the people of America?
Mr. President, we Iranian people submit to you and the people of the world that there is another way. Please Sanction and weaken the illegal regime of Khamenei, and empower the people to overthrow the tyranny. You know that you can support the people in many ways such as giving us internet communications access that the Khamenei regime cannot police and allow us to organize and rise up against these godless tyrants.
No tyranny will last forever, but the nations will always be there and history will judge. Help us to overthrow this tyranny and become a free and democratic member of the international community and a friend to the United States.
With Respect,
Heshmatollah Tabarzadi
Journalist, prisoner of conscious”
I have made the case for years on this program and in written articles about this subject. I have asked that the United States not be judged by the tyranny of its leaders. I have also pleaded with the world in print and by my own voice not to judge Iran, let us call it Persia, by its leaders either. Persia was renamed in 1939 to Iran, which was to show support and solidarity with Nazi
Germany. Iran mean Arian. I think it is time for a new Iran. Or should I say, it is time for the ancient Iran to put on her original name of Persia. Remove Islam as the government of Persia, and let a representative Republic be born.
Persia has over 79 million people, and there are fewer than 200 thousand that rule her with a bloody iron fist. Like the tyrannical agencies that rule America with laws they write devoid of any representation of the people, these rulers must be removed from their thrones. America is a concept that is the first of its kind on Earth. This concept is given by God in heaven to man, and it must not be allowed to be destroyed by 6 Supreme Court Justices, one egomaniacal president, or 2 million members of the D.C. Crime Syndicate.
The Persian people are no more soldiers in support of the tyrannical clerics any more than the people of America are soldiers for the tyrant in the White House. It is time for the Republic to use Article 5 in the Constitution to remove the power of the agencies, departments, bureaus, and administrations to rule. We must return the control of our State militaries to the people of those
States. We must end our current system of taxation, and replace it with a federal sales tax. We must clarify the role of the Supreme Court and rebalance the Powers of government of the people, buy the people, and for the people. We must modernize the terms of our
These things can be done in one week. If these things are not done as soon as possible, the world may be plunged into a war from which there will emerge no winners. Everyone will lose. If you think for one moment that your life and the lives of your grandchildren will not be harmed by this war, you are deluded.

We are in the most empowered position of any people that ever lived. You and I, free
Americans, can demand and receive this peaceful event that will be shown in history as the greatest path to a lasting world peace without the possibility of war between humans forever. Let us declare independence not just from the crown, but from the tyranny of non-representation for all peoples on Earth.
13 States risked the lives and their livelihood to declare independence from the royal crown in
1776. The preamble says enough by itself:
“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights , that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed , That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it , and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism , it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government , and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of
Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws , the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the
Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the
Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners ; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing
Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power .
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution , and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury :
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province , establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these states
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their
Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their
Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms:
Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress,
Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as
Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract
Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred
Honor.
The original 13 Colonies each had leaders who were expressing the same sentiments in writing as much as a year before the actual Jeffersonian declaration. According to North Carolinian folklore , citizens of Mecklenburg County assembled in Charlotte on May 20, 1775, and wrote a declaration of independence from Britain, known as the "Mecklenburg Declaration of
Independence". Some claim it to be the first 'declaration of independence' in America.
[4]
Such a declaration would have antedated the less freedom-seeking Resolves by eleven days (a contradiction in logic); and would have preceded the Declaration of Independence by over a year.
As the new nation began to become more and more Federalized, the central governing community, as I hesitate to call it a federal government yet, by nature began to assert its budgetary needs onto the several States. Less than 40 years after the British won the War of
1812 by torching the White House and forcing Congress to approve the First National Bank charter. Congress had denied the bank charter the year before, so one major driving force was to secure control over America’s money supply.
The next 4 decades would see the tyrannical head of taxation without representation and oppressive tariffs placed against the Southern States. In addition, the federal government had ruled that colored people each counted for three fifths of a citizen. Benjamin Lundy, an outspoken abolitionist wrote in The Liberator of May 1844 with his "Address to the Friends of
Freedom and Emancipation in the United States," William Lloyd Garrison called for disunion
(secession). Garrison wrote: the Constitution was created "at the expense of the colored population of the country"; southerners were dominating the nation—especially representation in
Congress—because of the Three-Fifths Compromise ; now it was time "to set the captive free by the potency of truth" and to "secede from the government".
[53]
Coincidentally, the New England
Anti-Slavery Convention endorsed the principles of disunion by a vote of 250–24.
After years of argument on the House floor for relief from Federal Tyranny, oppressive taxation, and selective tariffs which acted like sanctions against the South in favor of Northern industrialism, the South began to assert the rights as States participating in the Union. South
Carolina was not only one of the original 13 States, but has dozens of major battlefields and even more cemeteries filled with their dead soldiers who fought against Britain in two wars. They know the cost of freedom better than any State in history. They know securing it is never cheap.

They spoke officially in November of 1860, a little over one month after Lincoln was elected.
“We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the Ordinance adopted by us in
Convention, on the twenty-third day of May in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven hundred and eighty eight, whereby the Constitution of the United State of America was ratified, and also all Acts and parts of Acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendment of the said Constitution, are here by repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of “The United
States of America,” is hereby dissolved”
Their grievances were the same as before, when they fell by the thousands dressed in Blue in the fields, forests and orchards of South Carolina against the British armies. This time, there was no effort of force other than an eviction notice served on Fort Sumpter, where not a single man lost his life, except for one soldier during a cannon mishap. No invasion. No war. No threats of violence. “Don’t tread on me,” was a resounding voice to be left alone by the federal brutes starving their people to death.
10 more States joined her, and later 2 more making it 13 stars on the flag. The same number of
States went to war with Britain over America’s original secession.
Within a few months, the federal government illegally invaded those States and were defeated in every single battle, until Gettysburg. A charge by the South attempted at the wrong moment, breached the defense of the Confederation and ended in the slaughter of tens of thousands of
Americans. Lincoln, emboldened by this first victory, erected a stage, thousands of white headstones in rows, and performed what may be the first federal photo-op to convince investors to back his war on the South.
The shift to a new battle strategy of scorched earth, raping, pillaging, burning, and murdering civilians in a campaign to demoralize the South ended in the decimation of villages, towns, and even the capitol city of Atlanta.
Those 13 Stars flew proudly over the capitol of South Carolina in memory of the price that State three times paid for America with its blood. Obama forced them to take the flag down this week, signifying the final defeat of the States of America by the federal oligarchs that now rule us all.
There is no more government. There are only rulers now. And of course, there are we the subjects of America.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese stocks tumbled again on Friday, taking the week's losses to more than 10 percent, as the securities regulator said it was investigating suspected market manipulation and announced a slew of measures aimed at heading off a full-blown crash.

After a slump of nearly 30 percent in Chinese stocks since mid-June, the China Securities
Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has set up a team to look at "clues of illegal manipulation across markets".
After market close, a CSRC spokesman said China would cut initial public offerings and capital raisings and support long-term investors entering the market to help stabilize prices.
It also said China's official margin lender for brokerages, which makes loans available for stock market investment, would boost its capital base to 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) from 24 billion yuan to expand its business.
A flurry of policy moves over the past week, including an interest rate cut and a relaxation of margin lending rules, had failed to arrest the sell-off.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC) also rolled over 250 billion yuan of medium-term loans to banks late on Friday to ensure adequate liquidity in the system.
"The government must rescue the market, not with empty words, but with real silver and gold," said Fu Xuejun, strategist at Huarong Securities Co, before the CSRC and PBOC announcements, adding that a market crash would hurt banks, consumption, companies and even trigger social instability. "It's a disaster. If it's not, what is it?"
The CSI300 index <.CSI300> of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen dropped
5.4 percent to close at 3,885.92, while the Shanghai Composite Index <.SSEC> shed 5.8 percent to 3,686.92 points.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index <.HSI> fell 0.8 percent to 26,064.11.
For the week, the CSI300 lost 10.4 percent and the SSEC fell 12.1 percent.
The rout in China's highly leveraged stock market has become a major worry for global investors, who fear a meltdown could destabilize the world's second-largest economy at a time when growth is already slowing.
Chinese stocks had more than doubled between November and mid-June, fueled largely by retail investors using borrowed money.
"This is happening against an (economic) growth backdrop that continues to look soft, as illustrated by the flat manufacturing survey this week," noted analysts at Barclays.
"With growth data still soft, China remains a key uncertainty for the global outlook."
SHORT SELLERS TARGETED
The China Daily newspaper said on Friday that the CSRC was probing investors who used stock index futures to "short" the market - or bet on prices falling.

Sources with direct knowledge told Reuters that the China Financial Futures Exchange (CFFEX) had suspended 19 accounts from short-selling for a month.
After market close, CFFEX said it was introducing transaction fees on futures contracts on three indexes and strengthening the market to combat short-selling activities.
Guotai Junan Securities <601211.SS>, one of China's top brokerages, said it would suspend lending securities to clients for short-selling and step up monitoring of abnormal trading behavior by short-sellers.
Much of the selling of Chinese stocks has been driven by "margin calls", when a brokerage that has extended credit to an investor to buy stocks demands more cash or collateral because prices have fallen.
If those margin calls continue, it also could affect other markets as investors need to raise cash.
"Some funds have closed their copper positions to send funds back to China, in order to meet their margin payments on stock indexes," said one metals broker in Hong Kong.
Herald van der Linde, Asia equity strategist at HSBC, said there were signs that some money being pulled out of stocks was going into other assets, with a pick-up in physical property transactions.
"It could go to Hong Kong, it could go to property, it could go to cash," he said. "But if they have to repay debt, it's basically deleveraging, as well."
This is very similar to what happens during a market crash. People tend to pull their money out of speculative investments, and they place it into hard assets that are immune to inflation like silver or gold. This got so bad in the 1930’s that Roosevelt outlawed the private ownership of gold. Like that made a difference. People hoarded it away from the government, hoping they would outlast the DC Crime Syndicate’s lust for cash. Beijing has been struggling since the weekend to find a policy formula to restore confidence in its stock markets and get people to jump back in. Sometimes, profit taking can look like a market crash, but when the slide flattens out, these same investors jump back in because they know what happens.
The fact that they are getting back into the market makes the prices go back up. If they make the jump at the right time, they can ride the buying frenzy and make 10-20 times their money in some cases. This oscillation is a phenomenon driven by program traders. It is primarily used in currency trades, but it can be enormously profitable in stocks as well. That is, to say, if there is real value in the market to begin with. If it is all air, like the NASDAQ, then sooner or later the truth will come out, and so will all of the investors.
So far, rapid-fire steps including easing monetary policy, encouraging more pension funds to invest in stocks and cutting transaction costs have failed to stem the slump.

The CSRC has relaxed rules on using borrowed money to speculate on stocks, letting brokerages set their own tolerance level on margin calls and allowing the rollover of margin lending contracts.
It shouldn’t have gotten this far.
That’s the view of equity managers overseeing more than $3.7 trillion, who say the game of chicken between Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and creditors threatens lasting damage to a European stock rally that earlier in 2015 added as much as $2.17 trillion to share prices.
“The market right now hasn’t priced in a potential ‘no’ vote,” said David Joy, the Boston-based chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial Inc., which oversees $815 billion. “If we get one, we’re going to see another round of downside volatility in excess of what we saw on Monday.
The move would be more violent.”
The Euro Stoxx 50 Index tumbled 4.2 percent on June 29 and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index had its biggest plunge in more than a year after Tsipras unexpectedly called for a referendum on austerity measures proposed by Greece’s creditors. Concern the vote may bring the nation one step closer to an exit from the euro pushed equity volatility to a three-year high.
A poll commissioned by Bloomberg News showed Friday that 43 percent of Greek citizens intend to vote against accepting austerity conditions and 42.5 percent to back a “yes.” While support for the rejection declined from 52 percent a week ago, the crisis in Greece underscores the limitations of the European Central Bank’s efforts to shore up confidence in the currency union and contain the risk of contagion to other countries in the region.
Credit Suisse Group AG estimated that the probability of Greece leaving the euro would be 75 percent with a “no” vote, according to a note on Friday.
“It would raise the question of the solidarity of the European Monetary Union,” Joy said. “If all of a sudden one member leaves, it does creates a precedent, and maybe suddenly casts some doubt on the long-term future of the monetary union.”
Stocks in Spain and Italy took the biggest hits in the week following the referendum announcement, dropping the most among developed markets with losses of more than 5 percent.
A measure of stock swings for the region jumped 21 percent in five days. The Euro Stoxx 50 is now down 10 percent from a seven-year high in April.
So far, the market reaction hasn’t been as bad as in 2010, when Greece received its first bailout.
That year, the gauge tracking 50 blue-chip companies in the euro area tumbled as much as 17

percent in less than six weeks. The crisis contributed to an 11 percent drop in the S&P 500 and a
16 percent plunge in the MSCI All-Country World Index.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a July 2 report that equity volatility caused by a rejection of the bailout terms will be short-lived as the ECB intervenes, allowing investors to refocus on
Europe’s economic fundamentals.
A “no,” which Syriza’s leader has been campaigning for, could trigger a decline in the Euro
Stoxx 50 to 3,150, or 8.5 percent below where it closed Friday, strategists at the New York-based bank wrote. That’s a scenario that should spur investors to buy Italian, Spanish and German equities, they said. Acceptance could send the gauge back up to 3,830, near where it traded at the
April peak, according to the note.
A rejection of the bailout may not help Tsipras’s hand in negotiations, said Asoka Woehrmann of
Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management Investment in Luxembourg.
“No one knows how to interpret a ‘no’ vote,” said Woehrmann, chief investment officer at
Deutsche Asset & Wealth, which manages about $1.25 trillion. “I doubt that a ‘no’ vote will soften the institutions’ tone,” he said of creditors. “This was the very last trump card Syriza could play.”
It’s because of mistakes from both sides that the situation spiraled into such a deadlock, according to David Kelly of JPMorgan Funds, which oversees $800 billion.
“Europeans are very unfair and unkind to Greek people by forcing them to a level of austerity where they really couldn’t manage,” said Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds in
New York. “Having said that, the way that Syriza has negotiated with Europe leaves European governments very distrustful of Syriza.”
If voters turn down the bailout terms, Greece wouldn’t leave the euro immediately but may begin to print its own currency to keep its financial system afloat. The country might soon run out of cash and be unable to make a 3.5 billion euro ($3.9 billion) bond payment to the ECB due on
July 20. The central bank would then withdraw emergency liquidity to Greek lenders, and the probability of the country leaving the euro would climb even higher, Credit Suisse said.
“There is no blueprint for how a country exits the euro and redenominates,'' said David Lafferty, chief market strategist at Natixis Global Asset Management in Boston. The firm oversees $900 billion. ``That’s going to create all kinds of uncertainty in Europe.”

“Financial Times report of a Greek Bank Bail-In is a malicious rumour that the Head of the
Greek Banks Association denied this morning,” he tweeted.
The British business daily, quoting unidentified quoting bankers and businessmen close to negotiations, had reported that Greek depositors with over 8,000 euros ($8,900) in an account may be made to take a “haircut” similar to those taken by Cypriot account holders in 2013, when uninsured funds were seized to stabilize the financial sector. The IMF and the ECB lured Greece into loans they knew they could not repay without recovering the overdue reparations Germany owes to Greece. Of course, Germany’s leader and lead negotiator, Merkel, refused to pay a dime, making the Greek bank failure a certainty.
“It would take place in the context of an overall restructuring of the bank sector once Greece is back in a bailout program,” said one of the sources.
Greek banks have been shut since Monday, and the system faces collapse if the European Central
Bank (ECB) declares them insolvent should Greece refuse to pay back its debts. Greek citizens knew this was coming, so they did the only prudent thing. They got their money out of the bank.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called a referendum for Sunday to asks Greeks whether they are willing to swallow tougher austerity measures in return for bail-out funds from its creditors, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the ECB. Such measures would include unbearable things like a 60 year retirement age instead of 50, stop giving free medical care to medical tourists, and trimming the social programs that have bought
Greek votes for more than 40 years.
KARITAINA, Greece (AP) -- Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.
If Greece's financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the
Arcadia Peloponnese.
"I have my lettuce, my onions, I have my hens, my birds, I will manage," he said, even though he can no longer access his full pension payment because of government controls imposed six days ago. "We will manage for a period of time, I don't know, two months, maybe three months, because I also want to give to our relatives. If they are suffering, I cannot leave them like this, isn't that so?"
The production of food and milk gives villagers in many parts of Greece a small measure of confidence - and a valuable buffer. But that doesn't mean the financial cut-off doesn't cause headaches. Some in Karitaina have to pay 40 euros in taxi fares to get to and from the nearest banks just to withdraw 60 euros, the maximum daily amount for those with bank cards.
The bus to Megalopoli, the town with the bank, was shut down - a victim of austerity. Many of those who used to drive are now too unwell to do so. The majority who live here are retirees, shrouding the town in eerie quiet broken only by the constant birdsong and the sporadic shouting of people arguing about the financial crisis at a vine-shaded café in the town square.

Despite the collective sense that a catastrophe of some type stares Greece in the face, the country's strong tradition of hospitality remains intact. Mathes won't let a visitor leave without a bundle of fresh vegetables and some "trachanas" and "chilopites," types of local pasta his family makes by hand.
Many believe the ability to help one another with food gives Karitaina, with about 30 year-round residents and 100 in the long, drowsy summer, a better chance of surviving than city dwellers coping with the same anxieties. Rural Greek communities have age-old survival tactics that allow them to weather storms such as World War II deprivation and natural disasters. They will need to draw on them deeply, as Greece's current problems are unlikely to go away soon - whatever the outcome of the referendum Sunday on whether to accept the latest bailout proposals, which call for more austerity cuts to already razor-thin public services.
"In the village it's easier to live," said Ionnis Psilas, who is saddled with debts he says he can never repay after the failure of his car import business. "You can get products from neighbors and give them some. In Athens you are strangers. But the crisis has affected the village very much. We are trying but there is no money here. I lived very well and now I have nothing."
He said he would like to vote "200 times no" against the proposed bailout deal, which would impose still more austerity measures on a country that has endured five years of dire cutbacks.
He admires Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for defying European leaders and the
International Monetary Fund by urging citizens to reject the deal, a course that could cause
Greece to tumble out of the eurozone.
The town, topped by the dramatic remains of a 13th Century castle, has played an important role in Greek history, with its residents among the first to rise up during the war for independence from the Ottoman Empire that began in 1821. Its distinctive Byzantine churches and stonewrought homes - and the magnificent view of the mountains, rivers and valleys - won it a place on the back of the 5,000 drachma bill before the Greek currency was phased out when the euro was introduced in 2002.
Some have high hopes of a return to the drachma if Greece abandons the euro.
Divisions in the village over whether to be in or out of the eurozone are so pronounced that those who back the bailout proposal sit at one table at a village café while those opposed sit at another, a gulf of empty tables separating them.
Anxiety is in the pine-scented mountain air. No one seems confident the banks will re-open anytime soon despite government assurances that their pensions and savings are secure.
It is a vital issue because one retiree's monthly pension commonly supports several generations, since so many adults cannot find work.
Some have decided to get by on what they have at home rather than spend a chunky amount to venture to Megalopoli, 17 kilometers (10 miles) away, to try to get more cash from the bank.
Pancyotis Theodoropoulos, 85, said he did not want to spend the 40 euro taxi fare to go the bank to withdraw 120 euros, an amount authorized by the government this week for emergency payments to pensioners like him who do not have bank cards.
"I'm living on the pension from last month," he said in a whisper-soft voice. "I'll try to go next week. Of course I'm upset. The government has swindled our pension funds." He doesn’t realize that the European Banks had gambled with and lost all of his pension funds. In Greece, citizens can retire and live off the government at age 50.

Some local taxi drivers have cut the price in half for Karitaina pensioners, reducing the transport bite. The cost was not nearly as big a factor before the capital controls came in because people could withdraw their entire pensions at once, usually taking home some 250 to 800 euros.
The retired farmers in this remote region have relatively low pensions compared to other workers, but many get their payments under a special system that allows the Hellenic Postal
Agency to deliver the cash directly to their homes. That has been a godsend since the bank closures, because armored trucks containing cash have delivered funds directly to the post office without going through the shuttered banks, said Keke Bakoyanni, a postal worker who distributes the pensions paid this way and also runs a shop in the village.
The system broke down early in the week when no payments were made - she had to come to
Karitaina empty-handed to tell villagers there was nothing for them - but then resumed, with amounts being paid in full, not limited by the controls of austerity. No one in the village of
Karitaina, or any of the other small villages around Greece, produce anything the rest of the country can utilize. They are all out of business, because very few people in Greece can afford to buy a car, a new home, or any of the fine products made in America.
"I was surprised," she said, sounding mystified by the unpredictability of the improvised system.
"People here were lucky, they are the only ones in Greece who got their full pension. This is the old traditional way of getting pensions, put in place by many presidents who gave the people money to do nothing but drink and dance in their old age."
But she said the controls imposed on most pensioners have stripped them of their pride: "Going to the bank every day for 60 euros makes people feel they have lost their integrity." The reality is that they lost their integrity when they shifted the responsibility for their own care and feeding to other Greeks.
Work on a parallel waterway to allow two-way traffic on Egypt's Suez Canal will be finished in time to allow ships to transit for a gala inauguration ceremony at the key trade route on Aug. 6, officials said Saturday.
Work has been 85 percent completed, with 43 dredging machines working round the clock to finish their excavation by July 15, canal authority chief Mohab Mameesh said. Electronic navigation systems have been installed and pilots are training on simulators equipped with maps of the new canal.
"People haven't slept... it's like a battle," he told reporters in the canal city of Ismailia, 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of Cairo. "It is boosting our self-confidence and we are hoping this project will return Egypt to the path for investment."
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi ordered the new waterway to be dug in a single year, saying that the urgency of Egypt's economic situation meant the project could not wait for an originally planned three-year timetable. Refusing the IMF temptation to sink Egypt into hopeless debt, el-

Sissi offered the financial investment opportunity only to Egyptians living in Egypt. Amid global naysayers that said he could not finance the massive venture in this manner, and that this was far too great a burden on the poor Egyptian people, el-Sissi raised the necessary $1 billion in less than a week with only Egyptians investing. The people of Egypt will share the profits from this canal for centuries to come, because of his wise leadership. He dodged the economic assassination that has been perpetrated by the World Bank and the IMF against so many nations around the world.
The government aims to more than double annual canal revenues to some $13 billion in less than a decade, although that ambitious goal depends largely on rapid growth in world trade. The canal drew in $5.5 billion in revenues last year, its most lucrative since it was first opened in 1869.
Authorities also plan to build an industrial and logistical zone along the canal over the next five years, hoping to draw investment on the vital shipping lane between Asia and Europe for companies eager to place operations along the route. Facilitating two-way traffic for even the largest container ships and supertankers, the canal was a brilliant and bold plan for Egypt’s growth.
On a tugboat tour of new canal sections, dozens of dredgers, ships and bulldozers were at work, spitting sand, pushing earth and reinforcing embankments with concrete and stone.
In a presentation, canal authorities gave few details about the inauguration ceremony, except that el-Sissi would be in attendance along with world leaders and some 200 celebrities to observe traffic flowing simultaneously north and south through the canal.
Mameesh said funding for the festivities will come from private companies and that it would not cost the state budget "a single penny."
The cost of building and maintaining a double set of steel fences along 700 miles of the U.S.-
Mexico border could be five to 25 times greater than congressional leaders forecast last year, or as much as $49 billion over the expected 25-year life span of the fence, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service .
A little-noticed study the research service released in December notes that even the $49 billion does not include the expense of acquiring private land along hundreds of miles of border or the cost of labor if the job is done by private contractors -- both of which could drive the price billions of dollars higher.
The Congressional Research Service also questioned the effectiveness of a fence in preventing people from crossing the border illegally, especially if it does not span the entire 1,952-mile border. Secure fencing of some kind already exists along 106 miles of border, mostly in short stretches around cities.

The findings did not deter Congressional backers of the border fence, including Rep. Duncan
Hunter , R-San Diego, the fence's principal proponent.
"Mr. Hunter firmly supports expanding the San Diego border fence across the U.S.-Mexico border," said spokesman Joe Kasper . "This doesn't have to be and should not be as costly an endeavor as some are suggesting."
Congress has so far provided the Department of Homeland Security with $1.5 billion for upgrading infrastructure and technology at the border this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. No money has been allocated specifically for the 700 miles of fence.
A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein , D-Calif., was circumspect as to how the money should be spent, given the report's findings.
"Sen. Feinstein has been supportive of the idea of a fence and thinks it has been effective in
California," said Feinstein spokesman Scott Gerber . "At the same time, we have to be realistic about the costs of both construction and maintenance. Priorities need to be made, estimates need to be made based on the real world, and as additional information comes forward, we'll take another look at it."
The fence would be built under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security , which oversees Customs and Border Protection . Boeing Co., under a September contract with
Homeland Security, already has begun constructing a "virtual fence" along all 6,000 miles of the
U.S. border, north and south, that is expected to run to $2.5 billion.
A state-of-the-art fence constructed on almost 10 miles of border in western San Diego County has reduced the number of Border Patrol arrests of illegal entrants there, the research service reported.
But "the flow of illegal immigration has adapted to this enforcement posture and has shifted to the more remote areas of the Arizona desert," the research service said. The number of arrests along the entire border in 2004 was 1.2 million, the same as in 1992, before the San Diego fence was built and other enforcement was increased.
"The main difference is that, while San Diego accounted for the majority of apprehensions in
1992, in 2004 (the) Tucson and Yuma sectors accounted for the majority of apprehensions," the study noted.
When the House of Representatives first approved a border security bill last winter, Hunter estimated it would cost $2.2 billion. The Congressional Budget Office echoed that figure in May with an estimate of $3 million per mile -- $2.1 billion for 700 miles.
But the Congressional Research Service noted that the 14-mile San Diego fence is expected to cost $9 million per mile once it is finished. The research service also used a larger figure -- 850 miles -- for the length of the fence. Keep in mind that all government funded projects burden the contractor with mountains of paperwork, slow payments, and the requirement to pay a prevailing

wage. A prevailing union wage. You will pay about $100 a yard for poured concrete. The government regulations boost that price to nearly $500 a yard or more.
Recent fences along the border have been constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for
Customs and Border Protection. The Corps has obtained the land, drafted the environmental protection plan, designed the project and overseen construction. Labor has been provided by
National Guard and military units on loan from the Department of Defense .
The Dec. 12, 2006, nonpartisan congressional report said the corps predicted that the combined cost of building and maintaining the fence over a 25-year life cycle would range from $16.4 million to $70 million per mile, depending on how heavily and how often the fence is damaged by would-be border jumpers. At $70 million per mile, a 700-mile fence would cost $49 billion.
The fence might as well be made of steel reinforced concrete 20 feet tall to avoid the maintenance. If Donald Trump would build this wall, no one would easily get over it.
Though much land on the border in California and Arizona already belongs to the federal government, most of the Texas and New Mexico borderlands are privately held. And 70 miles of
Arizona border lie along the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, whose leaders have vowed to fight the fence, a stance that could lead the government into a protracted legal battle. All that would have to be done s to put a border station at that location, check ID’s and iris scans to make sure only Americans can get into the country.
Douglas Massey , a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the border and illegal immigration, said the government should spend its money differently.
"It's a waste of money," he said. "If you want to increase security, better to use some of that money for ports and transportation systems. If you want to lower the rate of Mexican immigration to the U.S., I would spend it on development assistance for Mexico." In my opinion, this assistance should be kind, instead of nice. The only way this tactic will work is to get
Americans to stop doing drugs. Like that is ever going to happen. Step one is to build that wall or annex the country as the 51 st State and shut up about it.
A guest worker program is a disaster before it starts. This has been in place for 50 years, and it has turned into the largest invasion of a country by another in history.
Rep. Tom Tancredo , R-Colo., who has spoken adamantly in favor of restricting both legal and illegal immigration, remains a supporter of the fence for security reasons as well.
"It's simple: What did 9/11 cost us versus what would it cost to maintain a fence to help prevent that?" said Carlos Espinosa , a Tancredo spokesman. "If we could prevent another terrorist attack, then absolutely it's worth it. If we prevent the murder of someone by a thug who has been deported 5 times, then it is worth it. If we stop a ISIS cell from forming up after simply walking across the open border, then it is worth it. Fence it like you mean it.

Migrants working in the United States sent a staggering $120 billion back to their families last year, it was revealed today.
The amount of money being sent by migrants across the entire world reached
$530 billion last year, making it a larger economy than Iran or Argentina, the data from the World Bank showed. It is Mexico’s second largest contributor to the GDP behind State owned Pemix Oil. Combined with the $2 trillion annually extracted from the American economy by the Transatlantic Banks, it is virtually impossible for American small business to have access to capital.
This worldwide figure has tripled in the last ten years and is now three times bigger than the total aid budgets given by countries around the world. It has sparked debate whether this so-called remittance money could be a viable alternative to relying on help from other governments.
In the United States last year, more than $120 billion was sent by workers to families abroad - making it the largest sender of remittances in the world. More than $23 billion went to Mexico, $13.45 billion to China, $10.84 billion to India and $10 billion to the Philippines, among other recipients.
By contrast, 2.4 million Americans live oversees, with largest populations in
Mexico, Canada and Puerto Rico, and just $5.1 billion sent back in to the country, data shared on
showed.
World Bank officials believe the amount they donate could be billions more because not all cash is sent through banks and money transfer companies on which the figures are based. WalMart alone sends more than $10 million a week through a system that works even simpler than Western Union. No ID is required. WalMart skims 10% off the top at the time of purchase. The recipient only needs the code number to collect the money within one hour of its deposit into the system.

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has once again come in for a barrage of criticism as a result of his comments about immigration into the United States. This time, Trump has latched onto the tragic murder of tourist Kate Steinle who was shot and killed Wednesday at Pier 14 in San
Francisco. Trump used the announcement of his presidential campaign to brand Mexican immigrants as “Criminals, drug runners and rapists.” Trump’s comments have been widely criticized as xenophobic and have led to his being dropped by NBC and Nascar amongst others.
On the day America celebrates its independence, Trump has once again hit the headlines. On this occasion, Trump has used the murder of Kate Steinle to call, once again, for tighter border controls. Trump has gone so far as to call for the U.S. to build a wall between the U.S. and
Mexico to prevent illegal immigrants crossing the border. Trump took to Twitter to say that a wall was needed and that he is “the only candidate who would build it.” east one high profile supporter. Senator Ted Cruz, another presidential hopeful, has spoken out to defend Trump . Cruz made his comments in an interview due to be broadcast tomorrow.
“I salute Donald Trump for focusing on the need to address illegal immigration. When it comes to Donald Trump, I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific.”
Up to now, it seems that Trump’s comments have hurt him more commercially than politically as the Guardian reports that “Comcast Corp’s NBC network cut ties with Trump and the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, and Spanish-language network Univision pulled the July 12 Miss
USA pageant.” Department store Macy’s has said it will phase out it’s Trump menswear collection and the city of New York is reviewing development contracts with Trump.
On the day that the U.S. celebrated its independence, many will believe that Trump and Cruz have forgotten the foundations that the nation was built upon.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty says “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The Invasion has Already Happened
TUCSON — The unforgiving terrain of the Sonoran Desert, south of here, whose searing summers and frigid winters claim hundreds of lives each year, has long been a favored avenue of entry for illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. But in the last year, the authorities say, smugglers have increasingly capitalized on a much more lucrative business — trafficking Chinese citizens into the United States.
The number of Chinese immigrants arrested while illegally crossing the border into Arizona through the busiest smuggling corridor in the United States increased tenfold in the last fiscal year, according to the United States Border Patrol in Tucson.
In fiscal 2009, 332 Chinese immigrants were caught in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, up from 30 the previous year, Border Patrol figures showed. And in what could be a sign of a

record-breaking pace for this year, agents in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector arrested 281
Chinese immigrants from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, the first quarter of the current fiscal year.
The reason is simple: dollars and cents.
As record quantities of illegal drugs are being intercepted in Arizona, those involved in taking people and drugs across the border are increasingly concentrating on the more rewarding smuggling of Chinese immigrants, said David Jimarez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol.
Chinese immigrants commonly pay smugglers upward of $40,000 each to lead them from their homeland to the United States, Mr. Jimarez said. In comparison, he said, illegal immigrants from
Mexico commonly pay $1,500 to $3,000.
“The price far exceeds other nationalities, mainly due to the elaborate nature of the trip from
China to Mexico,” said Vincent Picard, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement .
Peter Chan, a Tucson businessman who works as an interpreter at the federal courthouse in
Tucson, said some immigrants had told him that they had paid a deposit of $5,000 to $10,000 to
Chinese smugglers before leaving China.
If the immigrants make it to America, Mr. Chan said, they begin paying the smugglers the remainder of the cost. He said some immigrants had said they had been promised a refund if they were sent back to China.
Border officials said they suspected that the smuggling of non-Mexicans into the United States was a transcontinental operation because it is so intricate.
“We believe that there is coordination between Chinese organized crime groups and Mexican smuggling organizations,” Mr. Picard said.
Chinese smugglers have traditionally used shipping containers to take immigrants through
American ports, but that has subsided as container inspections have increased, Mr. Picard said.
He said that several new tactics had emerged.
In the most common one, immigrants fly from Beijing to Rome, board a plane to Caracas,
Venezuela, fly to Mexico City and work their way up to the northern border and into the United
States. In another, they travel to Cuba, fly to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and travel north into the United States.
“Smuggling activity shifts with enforcement,” Mr. Picard said. “It’s like a chess game, with criminal organizations on one end and us on the other.”
Once immigrants are in Mexico, crossing into the Tucson area is the route of choice because the smuggling infrastructure is already in place, he said.

The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector does not normally track arrests of illegal immigrants by country because of the disparity of the figures between Mexico and other nations. Typically, Mr.
Jimarez said, immigrants from other countries account for 2 percent to 5 percent of the total.
In 2009, 11,628 of the Tucson sector’s 241,673 arrests were non-Mexican — nearly 5 percent,
Mr. Jimarez said. Only when the sector noticed the influx did it tally the number of Chinese entering in recent years.
Like others who entered the country illegally, most of the Chinese were fleeing dire situations in their homeland, said Mr. Chan, the federal court interpreter.
He said most of those immigrants he spoke with were from Fujian Province, in southeast China, and had traveled across the globe to enter the United States because of a lack of education and employment opportunities back home.
“They left even though they were very scared of leading a totally different life in a very different country,” he said.
Patsy Lee, president of the Tucson Chinese Association, said that young Chinese want to reach
“gold mountain,” a phrase coined for California by those who came to work during the gold rush in the 1800s.
While the circumstances have changed, she said, the motivation for the new wave of Chinese entering the country illegally is rooted in the same ideal.
“The Chinese youth love the freedom Americans have,” Ms. Lee said. “They still see America as the land of promise.”
The Great Southern Wall will end 99% of illegal immigration. Legal immigration is the symbol of the Statue of Liberty and the function of Ellis Island. This will never cease. But the massive presidential invitation for immigrants to walk across our open border with Mexico is decimating the security of our nation. Hardly a day goes by the people are not murdered, raped, or diseased by a person who walked across our southern border. Even if the wall costs $50 billion to build right, it will pay for itself in less than 1 year. If we could make the fee for sending money back to their families still in Mexico go toward paying for it, perhaps Trump is right.
David Hastings is a rare American. This long-time hybrid car owner from Oregon wants to pay higher taxes for roads and bridges and says the current 30 cents per gallon state gas tax barely affects him.
"I've been free-loading on the highways for 20 years driving electric cars or hybrid cars, getting at least 40 miles to the gallon. So I haven't been paying my share," Hastings said.
Now, Hastings will pay more thanks to OReGO -- the first pay-by-the-mile program in the U.S.

Oregon’s Department of Transportation has been working on it for 15 years as a way to eventually replace the gas tax, which has been flat due to an influx of high mileage vehicles and people driving less.
Right now the program is voluntary and being capped at 5,000 participants, but an ODOT official told Fox News the ultimate goal is to make it mandatory and change the way states pay for roads -- forever.
"We're trying to make up for a growing deficit, really, because inflation's eating away at our ability to buy asphalt and rebar and the things we need to maintain the roads," said Tom Fuller of the Oregon Department of Transportation.
According to a national usage fee alliance, 28 states are in various stages of following down the same road. However, there are also privacy concerns. Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car’s every move.
"To put a GPS monitor in everybody's car, the government already knows too much about us as it is," Jeff Kruse, a Republican lawmaker told Fox News.
Others are raising questions about the cost. Getting the gas tax is cheap, but OReGO vendors will eat up 40 cents of every dollar collected, and for those not used to paying any gas tax, it could be a whole new sticker shock – every month
Jeff Allen, of “Drive Oregon,” supports the one and a half cent per mile usage fee -- to a point.
"We need to be subsidizing and incentivizing electric cars and not putting more taxes or fees on them, not discouraging people from buying them in any way," Allen said.
Following the influx of illegal immigrant minors from Central America, an official at the federal agency charged with protecting public health describes Barack Obama as “the worst pres we have ever had,” an “amateur” and “Marxist,” according to internal emails obtained by Judicial
Watch.
JW got the records as part of an investigation into the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) activation of an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to deal with the barrage of illegal alien minors last summer. Tens of thousands of Central Americans came into the United States through the Mexican border and contagious diseases—many considered to be eradicated in the
U.S.—became a tremendous concern. The CDC, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), responded by opening an emergency facility designed to monitor and coordinate response activities to eminent public health threats.
This special emergency division was created after the 2001 terrorist attacks and has responded to more than 50 public health threats, including hurricanes, food borne disease outbreaks, the 2009
H1N1 influenza pandemic and the Haiti cholera outbreak. Scientists from across the CDC are brought together to analyze, validate, and efficiently exchange information during a public health emergency and connect with response partners. The EOC also coordinates the deployment of
CDC staff and the procurement and management of all equipment and supplies that agency responders may need during their deployment.

It’s a major and costly operation that can stick American taxpayers with a huge tab. That’s why
JW launched a probe when the Obama administration took in the illegal immigrants, initially coined Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), with open arms last summer. JW has sued the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for planning records involving the border crisis as well as information relating to the solicitation of
“on-demand escort services”
for the 65,000 UACs that remain in the U.S. Last year JW also reported that the illegal immigrant minors have brought in serious diseases, including swine flu, dengue fever, possibly Ebola virus and tuberculosis.
The CDC records obtained by JW this week include email exchanges between agency officials directly involved in the activation of the EOC to handle the health threats created by the influx of illegal alien minors last summer. In an email dated June 9, 2014, CDC Logistics Management
Specialist George Roark wrote to CDC Public Health Advisor William Adams that “no country in the world would allow” the influx. Adams replies that “in ten years or less, they’ll all be voting…Commander’s intent…” Roark fires back by describing Obama as “the worst pres we have ever had…he truly is ‘the amateur’ but a Marxist too.”
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) —Wea re beginning to see the revolt against Federal tyranny State by
State. Indiana makes the tenth State that has drawn a line at their border stating it will not comply with President Barack Obama’s plan to battle climate change by requiring reductions in emissions from coal-fired power plants, Republican Gov. Mike Pence said Wednesday.
The proposal as currently written, known as the Clean Power Plan , will make Indiana electricity more expensive and less reliable and hurt economic growth in Indiana and across the nation,
Pence wrote in a letter to Obama.
The plan targets pollution from the coal-fired power plants that Indiana relies on. Pence said the
Indiana coal industry employs more than 26,000 people.
“If your administration proceeds to finalize the Clean Power Plan, and the final rule has not demonstrably and significantly improved from the proposed rule, Indiana will not comply. Our state will also reserve the right to use any legal means available to block the rule from being implemented,” Pence wrote.
Indiana is not the only state to defy the president on the issue. Oklahoma’s Republican
Gov.
Mary Fallin issued an executive order in April prohibiting her state from developing a plan to reduce its carbon dioxide emission from power plants.
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release the final rule in August. As proposed by the EPA last year, the plan would require Indiana to reduce its 2005 level of carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2030. Each state is responsible for drawing up an effective plan to meet its goal.
"Our nation needs an 'all of the above' energy strategy that relies on a variety of different energy sources," Pence wrote to Obama. "Energy policy should promote the safe, environmentally responsible stewardship of our natural resources with the goal of reliable, affordable energy.
Your approach to energy policy places environmental concerns above all others."

By not complying with the rule, Indiana would refuse to file a state plan to meet its carbon emissions goal. As a result, the EPA would impose a federal plan on Indiana, which the state then would likely challenge in court.
EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison issued a statement saying the draft final rule that "will deliver a clean, affordable and reliable electricity supply, drive American innovation and
American jobs, and that will demonstrate U.S. leadership within the international community."
"In the EPA's nearly 45-year history, emissions from power plant pollution have decreased dramatically, improving public health protection for all Americans, while the economy has grown. EPA's plan will not change that," Harrison said.
Pence's letter was praised by the coal industry and investor-owned utilities but panned by an environmentalist.
"Governor Pence has shown repeatedly that his allegiance lies not with protecting our families, but with protecting the profits of Big Coal and dirty fossil fuels. We deserve better," said a statement issued by Jodi Perras, Indiana representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.
The Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement that Indiana can meet its 2030 goal by reinstating an energy efficiency standard that it repealed last year, encouraging greater use of renewable energy, and creating a regional program that allows Midwest states to work together to reduce emissions.
Mark Maassel, president of the Indiana Energy Association, which represents the state's investorowned utilities, said the group believes "the Clean Power Plan will be extremely costly for
Indiana customers, which also means it's also bad for the economy. It's very questionable whether it will be supported in the courts."
A federal appeals court earlier this month threw out a lawsuit from a coalition of Indiana and 14 other states that claimed the EPA exceeded its authority last year when it proposed climate change plan .

Southern Company's Plant Bowen in Cartersville, Georgia, is seen in this aerial photograph on
Sept. 4, 2007. Reuters/Chris Baltimore
Dealing a blow to the White House's efforts to curb pollution, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
Monday the Obama administration acted improperly when it decided to regulate power plant emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants. The court’s 5-4 decision will require the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency to review and reanalyze landmark standards , which took effect in April, and consider the costs the regulations will impose on power producers.
At issue in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA is whether the environmental agency properly considered industry-compliance costs when deciding to adopt the rules -- or if regulators instead unfairly emphasized the public health benefits. The EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxic Standards , adopted in 2012, aim to curb power-plant pollution by 75 percent by forcing utilities to install and operate equipment that removes mercury and fine particulate matter.
"The Agency must consider cost—including, most importantly, cost of compliance—before deciding whether regulation is appropriate and necessary," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority.
Across the county, hundreds of power plants spew toxic pollutants into the air, which settle on soil and in lakes and streams, gradually rising through the food chain. Mercury is particularly dangerous to pregnant or nursing women -- who can pass the toxin on to their unborn and newborn babies -- and to young children whose brains are still developing. Coal-burning plants account for about one-half of all U.S. mercury emissions, the EPA estimates.
The EPA estimated the rules would force companies to spend about $9.6 billion a year to comply with the measures. But regulators said the costs would pale in comparison to the benefits, and therefore public health should be the main consideration in issuing the rules, not compliance costs. Regulators say the rules could save Americans between $37 billion and $90 billion annually, mostly through avoiding premature deaths and reducing health complications.

An
EPA map shows the roughly 600 power plants that must comply with the agency's Mercury and
Air Toxics Standards, which took effect in April. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The Supreme Court verdict reverses an earlier decision by a federal appeals court.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2014 rejected a challenge to the rule, saying it found the EPA’s designation of mercury emissions from power plants as a “threat to the public and the environment” substantially and procedurally valid. The Utility Air Regulatory Group, the
National Mining Association and 21 U.S. states appealed that ruling, arguing the EPA should have considered the cost of regulations.
Opponents of the court’s decision lamented the loss of environmental protection standards. “The court's decision to let polluters off the hook is a huge setback for our kids' health,” said
Environment America’s Anna Aurilio. "But we'll keep fighting for clean air and a healthier future. Polluters' days of dumping unlimited deadly toxins into our air are numbered."
About 600 power plants are affected by the EPA’s mercury rules -- many of which have already made the necessary changes and upgrades to comply with the standards. Other operators have found that shuttering coal-fired power units is cheaper than installing the necessary equipment, especially given the fierce competition from cheaper natural gas in recent years.
While shuttered plants will remain retired, some of the 173 units that applied for an extension from the EPA until next April may be allowed to operate longer, experts say . The court reversed the D.C. Circuit court decision and sent the case back to the lower court to be redecided. This will give the EPA a chance to evaluate the decision and rework the rules.
Some legal experts say the Supreme Court’s decision could set a precedent for any future case over the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, another hotly contested environmental policy that would force states to reduce carbon dioxide emission from existing facilities.
The Obama administration is expected to finalize the standards this summer, after which major
U.S. coal companies and coal-producing states are expected to file a lawsuit. Coal mining giant
Murray Energy and 14 states sued the EPA last year after the agency proposed the rules, but the

D.C. Circuit appeals court tossed out the challenge, saying it was unprecedented for a court to review a draft rule.
But Brendan Collins, a law partner at Ballard Spahr LLD and lead environmental litigator, said he doesn’t think the Supreme Court’s decision on mercury rules will have much bearing on the
Clean Power Plan’s legal standing. Collins represents a group of power companies that intervened in the Supreme Court case in support of EPA’s mercury rules.
“The [mercury] decision will leave tea leaves in the bottom of the cup that people will try to read,” he said. But the mercury rule is about whether EPA properly considered costs and used appropriate decision-making criteria. Opponents of the EPA’s carbon rules will likely raise questions the agency’s authority to impose the measures in the first place. The mercury case “is not at all about the scope of EPA’s authority,” he said.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out a pair of high-profile lawsuits challenging the
Obama administration's sweeping plan to address climate change, saying it's too early to challenge a proposed rule that isn't yet final.
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is a temporary setback to opponents of the plan who are expected to renew their legal attack once the regulation is finalized later this year.
The lawsuits from a coalition of 15 states and the nation's largest privately held coal mining company claim the EPA exceeded its authority last year when it proposed the far-reaching plan to curb pollution from the nation's coal-fired power plants.
Opponents had argued that even though the rule is not yet final, they are already facing steep costs to get ready for it. But the appeals court said that has never before been a justification for a court to examine a proposed rule that could still be changed before it becomes a final regulation.
"They want us to do something that they candidly acknowledge we have never done before," wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh. "We do not have authority to review proposed agency rules."
The court also said public statements by EPA officials about what the rule will do are not considered final agency action.
The rule the EPA proposed last year would require states to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Each state has a customized target and is responsible for drawing up an effective plan to meet its goal. One lawsuit was filed by a coalition of 15 coal-reliant states. The second was from
Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., the nation's largest privately held coal mining company.
Opponents of the plan say it will force coal companies to shut down plants, shed thousands of jobs and drive up electricity prices. They argue that the plan is illegal because the EPA already regulates other power plant pollutants under a different section of the Clean Air Act. They say the law prohibits "double regulation."

The EPA, however, says it has authority for the plan under the Clean Air Act. At issue are dueling provisions added by the House and Senate to the Clean Air Act in 1990. The EPA says it wins under the Senate language, but opponents argue that the House version should prevail.
Thirteen states and the District of Columbia are backing the Obama administration plan.
The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. Beer required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery.
That's how villages were formed. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These two were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups: 1. Liberals. 2. Conservatives.
Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement. Other men who were less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hairdressing. This was the beginning of the
Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men evolved into women. Others became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.
Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass for obvious reasons. Modern
Liberals like lite beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water.
They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard Liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: many Liberal women have higher testosterone levels than their men.
Most college professors, social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, film makers in
Hollywood , group therapists and community organizers are Liberals. Liberals meddled in our national pastime and invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat. Conservatives drink real beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women.
Conservatives are big game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, engineers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.
Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the Liberals remained in Europe when Conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today's lesson in world history. It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to this post.
A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be shared immediately to other true believers and to just piss off more liberals
We already knew about Venus. We had our suspicions about Mars. Now we’re sure.
Our two closest solar system neighbors once had oceans – planet-encircling, globe-girdling,
Earth-like oceans. But waterbearing planets are fragile. Venus didn’t have the right stuff and lost her oceans to space. We have the smoking gun. And now we know that Mars, also, poor Mars, couldn’t hold on. Mars has lost to space at least 80% of all the water it once had.
Et tu , Earth? What about you? More to the point, what about us? Despite water’s apparent abundance, what does the future hold for the most precious material on our planet? Will we find a way to mistreat our reserve of irreplaceable water and turn our planet into a planetary desert, like our neighbors Venus and Mars? Kick the temperature up a few more notches, thanks to a runaway greenhouse effect , and the ultimate consequence of global warming could be ejecting the water from our planet.
Let’s try our hand at interplanetary forensics. First, let me introduce you to the atomic constituents of that substance chemists call H2O, which most of us more commonly know as water. The H represents the atom hydrogen. The O represents the atom oxygen. The number two after the letter H tells us that a single molecule of water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
In order to enter the world of CSI: Solar System, we need to understand the structure of atoms in a bit more detail. Hydrogen is hydrogen because its nucleus has one positively charged proton, which is orbited by one negatively charged electron. The nucleus, however, can also include one neutron, which lacks a charge. Even with one neutron, the atom still has a positive charge in the nucleus of +1. It’s therefore still hydrogen, but with one critical difference: it is much heavier, about twice as heavy, in fact, thanks to the additional neutron.
Chemists call this kind of heavy hydrogen deuterium. Deuterium behaves identically in chemical reactions to regular hydrogen; it’s just heavier. Remember that H2O molecule? When made with a deuterium atom, it’s an HDO molecule. It would taste the same, and it would provide the same sustenance to your flowers and gerbils, but it would weigh more.
That extra weight makes all the difference, because Isaac Newton’s and Albert Einstein’s unavoidable law of gravity says that deuterium is pulled downward toward the surface of a

planet much more strongly than is regular hydrogen. When deuterium and regular hydrogen are both free to bounce around in a planet’s atmosphere, the regular hydrogen will bounce much higher. And if the planet’s gravity is weak enough – which is the case for Earth, Venus and Mars
– regular hydrogen can bounce so high that it can escape into space, whereas the deuterium remains forever bound by gravity to the planet.
In 1995, NASA’s
Galileo probe measured the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in the atmosphere of the giant planet Jupiter and found that ratio to be about 40,000-to-1 .
Jupiter is such a massive planet that neither hydrogen nor deuterium can escape. Consequently, planetary scientists are quite certain that all the materials involved in the mixture of gases and dust that formed the sun and all the planets in our solar system formed with the same ratio of hydrogen to deuterium as the Galileo probe found for Jupiter’s atmosphere. We take it as a given that all the water originally deposited on Venus, on Earth, and on Mars also had that same ratio of hydrogen to deuterium.
Now let’s do some chemistry. If I wanted to make 20,000 water molecules, I would need a total of 40,000 hydrogen (H) and deuterium (D) atoms (of which 39,999 would be H and 1 would be
D), plus, of course, 20,000 oxygen (O) atoms. In my mixture of 20,000 water molecules, I would be able to make 19,999 H2O molecules and one HDO molecule, given my initial ratio of hydrogen to deuterium atoms.
In a cup of water scooped from any part of any of Earth’s oceans, in any local freshwater pond from any continent, in any cup of tea in any city, in an Alpine glacier or a hot spring in
Yellowstone, the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio is 6,250-to-1, not 40,000-to-1.
Why so low? The evidence suggests that early in Earth’s history, our planet lost a great deal of hydrogen (but not deuterium). As the hydrogen atoms escaped to space, the H-to-D ratio would have dropped from 40,000-to-1 to only 6,250-to-1. In fact, the Earth may have lost as much as
80% of its original population of hydrogen atoms, and since, on Earth, most hydrogen atoms are bound into water molecules, the loss of hydrogen atoms is likely equivalent to the loss of water.

An atmospheric probe descends through the Venusian cloud deck.
Credit: Ames Research Center and Hughes Aircraft Company, CC BY
View full size image
NASA’s
Pioneer Venus spacecraft, way back in 1978, dropped a probe that parachuted into and measured the properties of Venus’ atmosphere. One of its shocking discoveries was that the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio on Venus is only 62-to-1 , fully 100 times smaller than the ratio on
Earth.
The clear implication of this discovery is that Venus was once wet but is now bone-dry. Venus, as we now know, has a surface temperature of 867 Fahrenheit (463 Celsius). Venus once had oceans, but Venus warmed up and the oceans boiled off the surface. Then ultraviolet light from the sun split the water molecules apart into their constituent atoms. As a result, the lighter hydrogen atoms bubbled up to the top of the atmosphere and escaped into space, while the heavier deuterium atoms were trapped by Venus’ gravitational pull. The hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio in Venus' atmosphere is the crucial clue that provides the evidence for what happened a billion or more years ago on Venus.
Now, in research just published in Science this spring, a team of scientists led by G L Villanueva of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has used powerful telescopes on Earth to map water
(H2O) and its deuterated form (HDO) across the surface of Mars. They’ve confirmed the results obtained by NASA’s
Curiosity/Mars Science Laboratory in 2013 that the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio on Mars is smaller by a factor of about 7 compared to that on Earth. This measurement tells us that Mars, like Venus, has lost lots of hydrogen, which means Mars, like Venus, has lost lots of its water.
The total amount of water identified in all currently existing water reservoirs on Mars (the ice caps – which have some water but are mostly frozen carbon dioxide; atmospheric water; ice-rich regolith layer; near-surface deposits) would generate a global ocean about 21 meters (68 feet) deep. The deuterium measurements tell us that Mars once had about seven times more water, enough water to create an ocean that would have covered the entire planet to a depth of at least
137 meters (445 feet). The evidence is now clear: Mars has lost at least 85% of the water it once had. (And that estimate assumes the Earth has not lost any of its water; if the Earth also has lost
80% of its original water reservoir, then Mars has lost 97% of its original water reservoir.)

Venus and Mars. Mars and Venus. Planetary scientists know that both planets were wet and
Earth-like in the beginning; they also know that neither Venus nor Mars could hold onto their water for long enough to nurture advanced life forms until they could flourish. The lessons from
Venus and Mars are clear and simple: water worlds are delicate and fragile. Water worlds that can survive the ravages of aging, whether natural or inflicted by their inhabitants – and can nurture and sustain life over the long term – are rare and precious.
If we allow the temperature of our planet to rise a degree or two, we may survive it as a minor environmental catastrophe. But beyond a few degrees, do we know the point at which global warming sends our atmosphere into a runaway death spiral, turning Earth into Venus? We know what the endgame looks like.
David A Weintraub is Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University .