Tag Archives: Big Government

News

Norwegian authorities seize Indian couple’s children for feeding them by hand

10 Comments

From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

An Indian couple have had their children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them.

Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya lost custody of their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter eight months ago after authorities branded their behaviour inappropriate.

[…]Norwegian Child Protection Services removed the youngsters from their home in May, 2011, leaving their parents horrified with the outcome of the report.

Father Anurup told Indian television channel NDTV: ‘They told me ‘why are you sleeping with the children in the same bed?’.

‘(I told them) this is also a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them.’

Anurup added: ‘Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child.

‘They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences.’

[…]The parents have been told that they can only see their children twice a year, for an hour during each visit until the kids turn 18 when they will no longer be bound by the current restrictions under current Norwegian law.

Norway’s Child Protective Service has come under much scrutiny in the past for excessive behaviour in their handling of child cruelty.

Lawyer Svein Kjetil Lode Svendsen said: ‘There has been a report in UN in 2005 which criticized Norway for taking too many children in public care.

‘The amount was 12,500 children and Norway is a small country.’

With the Bhattacharyas’ visas set to expire in March, they have revealed that they will be forced to stay against their will until the return of their infants.

Norway is a welfare state with a big intrusive government and small citizens. But Norway isn’t the only European country that likes to seize children from their families.

This article about homeschooling in Sweden was just posted this week.

Excerpt:

A leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party last week called for a change in the country’s social services law so that the government can take children away from home-schooling families more easily by allowing social workers to do so.

The call for the change comes amidst already stringent penalties in Sweden for home schooling. The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000 U.S..

Liberal Party politician Lotta Edholm called for the change to the country’s social services law in a Jan. 10 column in Aftonbladet, a prominent Swedish newspaper. Edholm then wrote on her blog: “Today I write with Ann-Katrin Aslund on Aftonbladet’s debate page that the social services law should be amended so that social services are able to intervene when children are kept away from school by their parents—often for religious or ideological reasons.”

This kind of thing happens all the time in Europe. It happens in Germany. It happens in France. It happens in the UK. This is what secular leftists believe – that children are the property of the state, citizens of the world, and they should not be overly influenced by their parents. It’s the government’s job to decide what children will believe, not the parents. The parents are just there to work to pay the taxes for the public day cares, public schools and social workers.

News

The top 10 worst federal rules of 2011

Leave a comment

From the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s the one that I disliked the most:

6. The Bring on the Blackouts Rule. The EPA is proposing to force power plants to reduce mercury by 90 percent within three years—at an estimated cost of $11 billion annually. A significant number of coal-fired plants will actually exceed the standard—by shutting down altogether. Indeed, grid operators, along with 27 states, are warning that the overly stringent regulations will threaten the reliability of the electricity system and dramatically increase power costs. Just like candidate Obama promised.

Oh, one more:

9. The Chill the Economy Regulation. The EPA issued four interrelated rules governing emissions from some 200,000 boilers nationwide at an estimated capital cost of $9.5 billion. These boilers burn natural gas, fuel oil, coal, biomass (e.g., wood), refinery gas, or other gas to produce steam, which is used to generate electricity or provide heat for factories and other industrial and institutional facilities. Under the so-called Boiler MACT, factories, restaurants, schools, churches, and even farms would be required to conduct emissions testing and comply with standards of control that vary by boiler size, feedstock, and available technologies. The stringency and cost of the new regulations provoked an outpouring of protest, including 21 governors and more than 100 Members of Congress. On May 18, the EPA published a notice of postponement in the Federal Register, but the regulations remain on the books.

If I were President, then the first thing that I would do is abolish the EPA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. We have too much government!

News

Obama-connected General Electric paid no taxes on $14 billion profit

3 Comments

From the Weekly Standard, a possible explanation of why GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is tightly linked to Barack Obama.

Excerpt:

General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. “GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions–it’s legal,” Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE’s profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn’t taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.

“I asked the GE tax officer, ‘How long was your tax form?'” Ryan said. “He said, ‘Well, we file electronically, we don’t measure in pages.'” Ryan asked for an estimate, which came back at a stunning 57,000 pages. When Ryan relayed the story at the townhall meeting in Janesville, there were audible gasps from the crowd.

Meanwhile, Obama’s General Motors bailout is going to cost taxpayers at least $23.6 billion dollars.

Excerpt:

The Treasury Department dramatically boosted its estimate of losses from its $85 billion auto industry bailout by more than $9 billion in the face of General Motors Co.’s steep stock decline.

In its monthly report to Congress, the Treasury Department now says it expects to lose $23.6 billion, up from its previous estimate of $14.33 billion.

The Treasury now pegs the cost of the bailout of GM, Chrysler Group LLC and the auto finance companies at $79.6 billion. It no longer includes $5 billion it set aside to guarantee payments to auto suppliers in 2009.

Obama’s millionaires and billionaires get another bailout and taxpayers get the bill.

Related posts