The following was pasted on Facebook by a friend of mine who does very good research:

Just the Facts:
Before you attack anything in this post please understand that I did research at the Smithsonian Institute and the US Census Bureau. I also researched from several historical publications, Harvard university, Oxford university, the transatlantic slave trade database, slavevoyages-org, and a few others.
Information regarding the current slave trade came from the US Department of Defense, the US State Department, the united nations, amnesty international, and a confidential paper on Russian mining.
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History:
The historical African slave trade operated from the discovery of the New World until 1808 with a recorded exception being the slave ship “Clotilda” in 1860. There were more than 32,000 voyages that delivered more than 10 million captive slaves to the Americas.
Of the more than 10 million captive African slaves, less than 310,000 were brought to North America in what is now the USA and Canada. The vast majority went to South America and the Caribbean. More than 900,000 went to Jamaica. The first delivery of captive slaves in North America was in 1619 but slaves had been brought to the Caribbean for about 100 years before that time.
The largest slave importer in Jamaica was an ancestor of Senator Kamala Harris. Ms. Harris, contrary to her claims, does not have any verified American slaves in her ancestry. But she has at least five slaveowners in her ancestry.
Of all the Black people living in America who were born here, less than 6% can document their ancestry to people who were slaves in the United States. That is less than 1% of the current US population.
More than half of black Americans claiming to be descendants of slaves trace their slave history back to the Caribbean, including to Kamala Harris’s Jamaica.
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In today’s world the countries exporting the most slaves are North Korea and China. North Korea sends about 20,000 people to Russia every year to work in the Russian mines. China sends about double that amount. Of all of the people sent every year to Russia from North Korea and China the only documentation I could find showed less than 10 people (eight) ever returned to China.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

America is a very generous country. We feed people all over the world and do everything we can to make sure that people in this country do not go hungry. However, sometimes the controls on our generosity are not what they should be.

On Sunday, the New York Post reported that many of the people receiving food stamps in New York are using them to buy food to ship to relatives in their home countries.

The article reports:

Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.

The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.

The feds say the moveable feasts go against the intent of the $86 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans.

No kidding. I don’t want to see anyone starve anywhere. However, we have programs that ship dollars and food overseas. In many cases, the politics of the receiving country prevent the food and aid from going to the people who need it most. That is something that needs to be dealt with, but it is a separate issue. Why are American taxpayers paying for people to ship food out of the country?

The article reports:

The United States spent $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, government data show.

Still, New Yorkers say they ship the food because staples available in the States are superior and less costly than what their families can get abroad.

“Everybody does it,” said a worker at an Associated Supermarket in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. “They pay for it any way they can. A lot of people pay with EBT.”

Customers pay cash for the barrels, usually about $40, and typically ship them filled with $500 to $2,000 worth of rice, beans, pasta, canned milk and sausages.

Workers at the Pioneer Supermarket on Parkside Avenue and the Key Food on Flatbush Avenue confirmed the practice.

If Congress were actually looking for places to cut the federal budget, they might want to take a look at the food stamp program.

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Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

National Review‘s The Corner posted an article yesterday about Gawker Media, a website that has been very free with its criticism of Mitt Romney‘s financial dealings.

The article reports:

The gossip site also has released some 950 pages of material related to Mitt Romney’s investments, mostly having to do with Bain Capital. In Gawker’s own words: “Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his $250 million fortune.”

There was nothing illegal (or even interesting) in the material released, but there is more to the story.

In December 2010, the New Yorker reported:

Gawker is organized like an international money-laundering operation. Much of its international revenues are directed through Hungary, where Denton’s mother hails from, and where some of the firm’s techies are located. But that is only part of it. Recently, Salmon reports, the various Gawker operations—Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, Gawker Sales LLC—have been restructured to bring them under control of a shell company based in the Cayman Islands, Gawker Media Group Inc.

Why would a relatively small media outfit based in Soho choose to incorporate itself in a Caribbean locale long favored by insider dealers, drug cartels, hedge funds, and other entities with lots of cash they don’t want to advertise? The question virtually answers itself, but for those unversed in the intricacies of international tax avoidance Salmon spells it out: “The result is a company where 130 U.S. employees eat up the lion’s share of the the U.S. revenues, resulting in little if any taxable income, while the international income, the franchise value of the brands, and the value of the technology all stays permanently overseas, untouched by the I.R.S.”

Maybe the real villain in this story is the IRS.
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