This Month's Books
Perfectly Legal ; Hope Heals
Perfectly Legal
The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich
What's really wrong with the American economy? For starters, says New York Times tax reporter Johnston, consider:
• The income gap is far greater than widely assumed or reported. In 2000, the top 36,000 Americans had as much income as the bottom 96 million Americans.
• The 400 richest Americans pay a smaller portion of their earnings in federal income taxes than the millions of families who make between $100,000 and $300,000.
• For almost three decades, corporate profits have been growing one-third faster than corporate income taxes.
Whether you make $30,000 or $500,000 a year, this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter shows how you are being robbed to subsidize people who make millions. And why it's perfectly legal. He reveals the blatant bipartisan biases toward the cream of the politically well-connected—in federal income tax, Social Security taxes, retirement shelters, and much more—and the financial and personal toll on the remaining 99% of America's taxpaying citizens. For example: in 2000, Americans making more than $200,000 saved $29,000 in federal income taxes for each dollar of tax savings going to those earning less than $10,000. Another example: in 2000, the working poor who applied for the Earned Income Tax Credit were three times more likely to have their returns audited than the affluent and rich.
“ Perfectly Legal will get you mad as hell,” says Greg Palast, author of the New York Times best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “Even if you suspected all along that the system favors the rich, you are going to be shocked to learn just how badly you're being screwed.”
“This is a book that will either shame us or prod us into taking back our tax system as if fairness, productivity, and authentic patriotism matter,” says Ralph Nader.
Is America destined to become a nation of promise and prosperity exclusively for the richest one percent? In Johnston's view, the unthinkable is possible unless America's leaders take immediate steps toward sweeping reform (as opposed to the farce we witnessed in the 1997-98 Senate Finance Committee hearings, which opened the door wide to increased fraud on the part of the very wealthy). Eye-opening and deeply unsettling, this book is essential reading for the overwhelming majority of American taxpayers being robbed by the system.
Hope Heals
All of his life, Carlsbad resident Bill Hansen had been athletic, healthy and successful. Then one day in June 1997, at age 68, his luck ran out as his hand began to shake violently, uncontrollably. The symptoms worsened, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
Today, however. Hansen is jubilant. “I'm dancing again,” he says with complete confidence. In Hope Heals, Hansen shares how the spirit, mind and body can work together to relieve the symptoms of this debilitating disease.
Telling him that the disease was incurable and would eventually kill him, his doctors prescribed conventional treatments that offered only short-term relief and no promise at all. Unable to walk with any confidence and barely able to turn over in bed, he immersed himself in discovering his own spiritual wholeness. After reading hundreds of books, he began studying the work of Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Candace Pert, Donald Epstein, and others.
“At some point,” he writes, “as I began having more faith in my own powers (spiritually, mentally, and physically), I also began experimenting with a resource I had completely dismissed—my own company, MJB Global.”
He began experimenting with a time-released oral spray of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, human growth hormone, and other natural elements, and developed remedies he calls Parkimin sprays, which contain, among other things, Co-enzyme Q-10, vitamins C, E, D. B6, B1, B3, B12, L-Dopa (an amino acid that converts into dopamine), and GABA (a potent message-altering neurotransmitter). His own regimen has included these sprays, the conventional drug Sinamet, and other natural products available on the market, bolstered by prayer, thought management, and his formula for hope: absolute belief + expectation + desire.
Hansen's company is hard at work developing formulas for ALS, MS, Alzheimer's disease, and other related syndromes. Hansen does not claim to have found a cure, but others have reported 90% of their symptoms relieved with his regimen.
Having lived with a victim of Parkinson's disease for a number of years, I feel a deep appreciation for what it would have meant to him to be “dancin' again.” If someone in your life is suffering from a debilitating disease, I recommend Hope Heals as an invaluable resource that could give them their life back for the rest of their years. — Chiwah
—Chiwah
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