Waiver Welfare

Real people are individually and totally accountable for themselves and their actions.  This means in matters of choice, such as belief and, most especially, voluntary behavior.  The current US administration has invented waiver welfare to avoid being held to the same standards that it wants to apply to others.  Some of the first recipients were White House appointees.

ABC News’s Jake Tapper revealed that in Obama’s first year in office he issued waivers to his highly touted and stringent ethics requirements.  One of the President’s first acts upon taking office was to sign the ethics executive order establishing some of the toughest ethics rules ever imposed on executive branch appointees.  He once claimed piously that lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.  What he meant is that all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others. 

However, the rising number of waivers to O-buma’s WelfareHealthCare has drawn some attention.  According to Matt Cover at CNS News, as of June 16, 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services has granted…1372 waivers from ObamaCare insurance mandates since the law’s enactment, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. 

Of course, none of the individuals or groups involved in financially aggrandizing the O-buma re-election campaign are benefitting in any way from these waivers.  It is certainly not a quid pro quo arrangement that the United Auto Workers and their retirees were prevented from losing their Cadillac health benefits through O-buma-issued waivers.  You remember the UAW; they are the folks who walked away with a 40% ownership share of Government Motors after the O-bumites stole it from GM shareholders and bondholders.

One of O-buma’s waivers was for lobbyist Cecilia Munoz, former senior vice president of the National Council of La Raza.  They are supporters of racial segregation and anarchy, as well as recipients of an $11 million 2010 federal gift of taxpayers' money.  The President appointed her Director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs in 2009.  The primary responsibility of the OIA is to award and direct federal funding toward state, tribal, and local community organizers to support illegal immigration and open borders policies.

Now, O-buma wants media to issue him a Welfare Waiver so that he can weasel out of being responsible for his actions.  First, he sent Little Timmy Geithner out holding a trial balloon to test the waters about raising taxes on small businesses.  O-buma's unvarnished lust to bankrupt the nation makes him a national embarrassment.  The Wall Street Journal points out that even orthodox Keynesian policy doesn't recommend a tax increase with growth under 2% and the jobless rate at 9.1%. 

After the obedient lapdog media failed to jump on him with both feet for trying to raise taxes during a recession—the one that no longer exists—he claimed that what he really wants is revenue enhancement, not tax increases.  Progressives remain notably silent about how to increase revenue without increasing taxes.

Waiver Welfare comes into play here when the legacy media refuse to acknowledge that the federal revenue shortfall is the direct result of O-buma’s policies that have larded public spending and prevented sufficient economic growth to end the current recession.  The Theftocrats exacerbated the crash that they created with their welfare housing scheme, worsened matters by squandering trillions of borrowed dollars, and hamstrung the very industries that could have righted our economic ship.

Sheer coincidence, you say?

May your gods be with you.

Is Capitalism Rationing?

It is necessary for people to intervene, sometimes collectively, in order to circumvent the laws of inertia and change the existing order.  Whether causing such change is warranted, appropriate, or even desirable is the source of much political debate.  Changing the fundamental structure of the US health care delivery system is one example.

If the infinitive to ration means to limit individual availability of a commodity to a fixed portion, and some force external to the dynamics of supply and demand within a given market effects that limiting, enforcing that rationing becomes an issue.  Only government has the power to enforce arbitrary rules that run counter to the interactions driven by internal forces in unfettered markets.

Since the production of commodities is finite, there can only be so many available doctors’ appointments, flu shots, and replacement livers available at any given moment.  In both free and managed economies, dollars compete for goods and services, and in the process, their prices escalate proportionate to demand.  Inevitably, some bidders lack the needed resources to stay in the contest and fall by the wayside.

This is where the mommy staters enter the fray.  Only the productivity of the governed limits government’s resources, meaning that the state’s purchasing power greatly exceeds that of any individual.  Through regulatory and economic pressure, governments control industries to determine price and availability.

The issue of rationing health care—forget for the moment what health care means this week—brings baggage with it.  How best to cut up the pie that the state has confiscated becomes a related matter.  At this point, progressives trot out their smoke-and-mirrors campaign concerning fairness.  They severely and arbitrarily euphemize the term fair. 

Rather than an even handed, laissez-faire approach in which each one of us bids for commodities, mommy staters want government intervention to insure that all outcomes are equal regardless of individual input.  To them, taxpayers should pay for an illegal alien receiving, on the basis of a demographically determined quota system, the next available kidney rather than allowing an entrepreneur whose efforts employ 500 people to buy it with private resources.

Rationing is an act of government; under capitalism, individual buying power determines commodity distribution.  A free market has no human characteristics.  It is not fair nor cruel, not just or callous.  It is merely the collective actions of people exchanging goods and services in competition with others.  In such a market, fluctuations in supply and demand are not rationing per se any more than one can blame people for coastal flooding because they allowed the tides to rise.

May your gods be with you.     

The Recession that Wasn't

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Robb, consumer spending adjusted for inflation declined 0.1% for the second straight month in May.  This could be the first concrete indication that we are entering a much anticipated double-dip recession.  Consumer spending drives the US economy, and if it continues to decline, we will be back to double-digit unemployment quicker than a lion can spot a limping wildebeest.

In another article by Robb that is less than a month old, he reported that housing is already in a double dip recession.  U.S. home prices fell in March for the eighth straight month, confirming the beleaguered housing market has entered a double-dip recession, according to a closely followed index released Tuesday.  Prices fell in 18 of 20 cities in March on a monthly basis.  Only Washington, D.C., and Seattle showed advances. 

The Atlantic’s Daniel Indiviglio’s article points out that consumer spending generally makes up around 70% of the nation's GDP.  So when spending grows, the nation grows.  But when spending slows, so does overall growth.  That is right; it is 70% of the US Gross Domestic Product.  The economy had been limping along at an inadequate 1.8% already, and now there have been two consecutive months of decreased consumer spending.

If GDP growth is insufficient to offset population increases, unemployment will rise, and this will exert downward pressure on consumer spending because fewer people will be working.  Referencing the chart above, Indiviglio observes that at no point over this six-year period has consumer spending fallen without GDP also falling.  So as consumer spending growth slows, there's reason to worry about overall GDP.  If weakening economic confidence is causing Americans to grip their wallets a little more tightly, then GDP growth will likely begin to contract.

If GDP contracts, unemployment increases, and consumer spending plummets, and all do so simultaneously, it could signal a downward economic spiral worse and longer lasting than the one that the National Bureau of Economic Research alleged had ended in August of 2010.  The NBER sounds impressive until one learns that its members share a preference for Keynesian economic theory and that some of its prominent members are former economic advisors for Team Obama. 

The combination of high unemployment, shrinking GDP, eroding consumer confidence, and declining consumer spending generally combine into an event known as a recession.  However, the mainstream media claim that things are just peachy.  It seems as though these events are only an economic recession when there is a Republican in the White House.     


May your gods be with you.

Wake Up America!

Little Timmy Geithner has come full circle and become a full-time Theftocrat party hack.  Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and he is fully aware of it.  He also knows that  federal regulations are disproportionately burdensome on those firms.  Although armed with this knowledge, he and the other traitors Washington, DC are busy destroying small businesses.  Appearances to the contrary, they—at least many of them—are not blinded by vapidity.

Rather, it is their resolute desire to make America pay for being the most successful nation in history, to pay reparations for what they term cultural arrogance.  In this contrived and affected sense, cultural arrogance means the intellectual acuity necessary to recognize that the American way works better than any stand-alone model that has yet been practiced.

O-buma and company’s lies about creating jobs have been little more than subterfuge used to buy them time to dissolve the US economic engine.  While spouting hopey-changey noises about the paramount importance of creating jobs—in fact government cannot create private sector jobs—they are busy preventing job creation.

It is axiomatic that the more a product is taxed and regulated, the less there is of it; conversely, subsidies create surpluses.  Little Timmy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to ‘shrink the overall size of government programs.’  Shrinking the size of government would shrink the amount of tax dollars available to purchase votes from permanent entitlement constituents.

This reveals the heart of progressive O-buma’s plans for the US.  He wants to strangle the country’s most effective means of business expansion and job creation by increasing taxes and regulations on small businesses under the guise of maintaining the unsustainable mommy state.  Still, he knows that doing so will make the theft-welfare state increasingly more unsupportable until the US finally collapses economically.  Remember, the goal is to de-develop the US. 

The pattern is clear; he and his lackeys’ schemes do not augur well for America.  These include

•    Creating job loss with skyrocketing energy prices
•    Squandering $1T on 450K bureaucratic jobs while losing 1M private sector jobs
•    Throttling the Internet with taxes, regulation, and government competition
•    Implementing monetary policies that make the dollar worthless
•    Increasing dependence on foreign oil by reducing domestic production
•    Appointing a global redistributionist to the Commerce Department

 
It is appalling to see US tax dollars used to dismantle the nation.  However, there is help for small businesses.  Bank of America provides it, and it is paid for by shareholders in the organization.  Private enterprise made America, and entrepreneurs know what they need to be successful.  Bureaucrats' first allegiance is to increasing the size of the fiefdom.

May your gods be with you.

Redistribution Through Inflation

Too many dollars competing for a finite amount of products causes inflation, resulting in a loss of confidence in that currency which, in turn, fuels the fires of inflation.  Until recently, local governments enjoyed windfall revenues as property values skyrocketed.  When salaries increase due to cost of living increases, the tax collected increases too.  If workers’ wages move them into higher tax brackets, the percentage of tax taken from them increases also.

Taxing officials love inflation.  Hyperinflations are caused by extremely rapid growth in the supply of ‘paper’ money.  They occur when the monetary and fiscal authorities of a nation regularly issue large quantities of money to pay for a large stream of government expenditures.  In effect, inflation is a form of taxation in which the government gains at the expense of those who hold money while its value is declining.  Hyperinflations are very large taxation schemes.

The US Federal Reserve has been creating inflation through its QE1 and QE2 printing press extravaganza.  This has bloated the amount of fiat currency in the nation.  In Bottom Line Personal, author Irwin Kellner writes in his article “The Inflation Time Bomb Is Ticking” that our own government has set the stage for higher prices.  Since 2008, the [Fed] has kept short-term interest rates near zero and purchased hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of US Treasury bonds, flooding the economy with money.

Kellner points out that in the past year, the cost of sugar has increased by 60%, wheat by 55%, silver by 50%, and copper by 36%.  Gasoline prices have risen steadily since Obama took office.  Nonetheless, the Fed claims that inflation is under control and sky-high commodity prices won’t derail the economic recovery. 

This claim seems improbable; in February and March of this year, energy prices rose 6.9%.  Wholesale food prices have risen more than at any time in the last 36 years, yet the federal government’s Consumer Price Index as of June 15, 2011, shows a 3.6% rate of inflation, just over the historical average of 3.4%.  This is largely because the CPI does not include prices of food and energy.

Unfortunately, food and energy costs severely affect households.  We may be facing hyperinflation levels exceeding those of the Jimmy Carter era.  Simultaneous double-digit inflation and unemployment during the 1970s should have driven the final nail into economists' use of the Keynesian economic theory, but it persists due to a short public memory and O-bumites’ desperation to buy votes with deficit spending.

Hyperinflation is nearly always caused by governments spending far beyond their ability to tax, coupled with an inevitable loss of confidence in the currency.  The national debt is nearly $14.5 trillion and mounting, and it is the result of federal deficit spending.  Whoever prints the money determines the rate of inflation.  Lenders become reluctant to lend because they are repaid in dollars that are worth much less than those that they lent.  This stagnates real economic growth.

If we continue our rampant printing of valueless dollars, more homes will be lost to foreclosure, gasoline prices will hit $5 a gallon, beans will replace pork and chicken on our dinner tables, the cost of heating and cooling homes will become prohibitive, and the number of families on welfare will increase exponentially.  Thus is the progressives’ wealth redistribution scheme.

May your gods be with you.

What We Get for Our Money

Theftocrats have moved to nationalize one industry after another.  However, there has been no need to nationalize the abortion industry because it sprang into existence, fully formed, as a Government Sponsored Entity named Planned Parenthood.  To attach the word parenthood to this operation is on the order of calling the Nazi guards at Auschwitz ‘life coaches.’

Neologisms and euphemisms are intrinsic elements of Big Abortion’s rhetoric.  They have tried to de-humanize unborn babies with the term fetuses.  They call euthanizing viable children late term abortions.  They like to refer to abortion as health care; unfortunately, it is most unhealthy for children.  Planned Parenthood should be renamed Avoiding Consequences.

This article exposes former Kansas Attorney General Stephen Six as someone who is unworthy of his nomination to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.  He has been a lackey for death merchants.  As such, his dubious integrity calls into question whether he is fit to judge legal arguments based on the principle of the rule of law. 

Six’s track record and the specious reasoning he employed in his Senate hearings has resulted in a delay of his nomination and the opposition of his two home state Senators — a rare occurrence in the Kansas world of politics.

Six was state attorney general when Kathleen Sebelius was governor of Kansas.  She is both an abortion industry supporter and a recipient of abortion’s generosity.  In apparent gratitude, she vetoed a law passed by the Kansas legislature that regulated late term and partial-birth abortion, procedures that end the lives of viable children. 

Another article observes of Sebelius that her record tells us that she will consistently support the abortion industry, even if it means abandoning the needs of women, and apparently those of children as well.

Partial-birth abortion is a particularly grisly business.  The child is delivered in the breach position except for the top of the skull.  The abortionist punctures the skull with a scalpel, scrambles the brains, and suctions the brain out of the cranial cavity.  The dead child is placed back into the mother, delivered in the customary manner, and discarded as medical waste.

Another article—anyone who is even slightly uncomfortable with abortion ought to read it—deeply explores Sebelius’s mindset and tactics.  Facilitating these practices has been the business of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, former Attorney General Steven Six, who acted as de facto defense counsel for the abortion industry while still attorney general, and abortionists-for-hire Planned Parenthood.

In a criminal prosecution brought against Planned Parenthood and abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, Attorney General Stephen Six offered the legal claim that only those who can't prosecute can have the evidence — while those who can prosecute cannot have the evidence, Catch-22.

Some of the speciously reasoned medical justifications for late term and partial-birth abortions sanctioned by Six, Sebelius et al were so that the child’s mother could compete in a rodeo, to avoid hiring a babysitter while she attended rock concerts, and to attend a prom.  Actually, the abortion industry seems more about the money than anything else.

The taxpayers’ annual burden for Planned Parenthood is $350 million.  To understand the mercenary aspect of this business, consider the case of one individual, Kristin Neuhaus.  Kansas law requires two doctors to confirm that each abortion performed is necessary. 

Neuhaus was Tiller’s second ‘confirming’ doctor...a laser hair technician in north central Kansas.  Dr. Neuhaus rarely saw Dr. Tiller's patients.  She would periodically drive to Tiller's clinic to sign form letters designed by Tiller's lawyers, which stated 'I find the mother will suffer substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.  In testimony, she could not recall her individual diagnoses, nor could she name any single patient she rejected for an abortion.  Tiller paid her $300 a letter.    

Tiller’s abortion factory had little regard for the well-being of children or the sanctity of life.  The investigation further revealed that during a time period when 166 abortions in Kansas were performed on underage children (10-14 years old), that Dr. Tiller and Planned Parenthood each only reported one case of child rape.  That girls aged 10-14 were pregnant is prima facie evidence of child rape.

Hiding evidence that young girls have been raped is tacit approval of inexcusable acts.  This is only additional evidence that there is nothing so cruel, immoral, selfish, or greedy that the O-bumites will not stoop to it in their quest to buy votes from their amoral constituents.

May your gods be with you.

Cubans Deserve Freedom Too!

US concern, or even interest, about communist activities has fallen to an all-time low with the current administration; presumably, this is because communism is an essential element of the president’s preferred brand of totalitarian government, progressivism.  Just 90 miles from our shores lies a perfect example of what the O-bumites would love to do to America.  The Castro brothers control, even micro-manage, virtually every aspect of Cubans’ lives.

Schools indoctrinate children in the benefits of communism and preach the glories of the revolution.  Overwhelmingly, government collectives run agriculture.  The small amount of private transportation that exists is comprised mainly of circa 1950 American relics held together with baling wire and prayers.  Health care is free but Spartan.  The media are state run, and Internet access is generally unavailable and censored.  Agents of the state arrest, beat, starve, and imprison political dissidents.

After losing a $1 million a day subsidy when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba allowed a small amount of state sponsored capitalism to flourish to help combat malnutrition that was spreading through the population.  Elections are one-party events; essentially, Cubans are slaves who cannot immigrate to find better lives.  It is cruelly inconsistent that the first African American US president is coldly unconcerned with freeing these slaves.

We could help bring freedom there at a minimum cost.  James Glanz and John Markoff write in The New York Times that the Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks, so far, not in Cuba.

Entrepreneurs in Washington, DC, have created what can best be described as an Internet in a suitcase.  One group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of 'mesh network' technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub.  In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell 'tower' and phone — and bypass the official network.

In 2011, the State Department plans to spend about $70 million to finance and develop circumvention and similar related technologies, arguing that it has long been American policy to support and advance free speech and human rights.  To further this cause, the US is installing a shadow cell phone network, code named Palisades, at protected US bases in Afghanistan.  The Taliban had been shutting down domestic cell phone towers from 6PM until 6AM to operate under a communication blackout.  This expeditionary cellular communication service is being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to ‘restore 24/7 cellular access.’

Similar efforts are ongoing in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea.  Admittedly, there are potential problems for those freedom fighters who have to dodge government agents to engage in these activities.  They are likely to be punished severely when caught.  However, people whose desire for freedom is so great that they will lash together a few inner tubes and try to paddle 90 miles to Key West are unlikely to be deterred by an oppressive state.

Sadly, for Cubans yearning for freedom, Obama is willing to spend millions to bring freedom to the Middle East, but he is uninterested in freeing millions of Cuban slaves.  Go figure.

May your gods be with you.

Sparking Global Conflict to Win a Second Term

The president burst upon the world scene fresh faced and naïve.  Believing that sincerity and I’d-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing good intentions would convince enemies of the West to end hostilities, he berated America.  Those enemies viewed his sincere good intentions as weakness, and discrediting the nation he represents revealed that he is willing to be compliant to their demands.  O-buma’s kow towing to hostile foreign leaders did no more to enhance American prestige and influence than Bill Clinton’s serial apology tours.

O-buma is seen both at home and abroad as a weak president.  That it is easy to pierce his ponderously large ego exposes his weakness; he is dangerous because his ego requires constant gratification.  This president mirrors predecessors who were also weak, vain, and dangerous.  JFK and Jimmy Carter seem to be O-buma’s models.

Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev lectured and bullied Kennedy at their summit in Vienna in June of 1961; that August, the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall.  Kennedy desperately wanted to have US power, and by extension his own, taken seriously.  This article references William Manchester’s book A World Lit Only by Fire; it quotes JFK, we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place. 

Kennedy tripled American troop levels in Vietnam in 1961 and again in 1962.  With Kennedy still smarting from his Vienna embarrassment, an emboldened USSR installed missile systems in Cuba with enough range to hit US cities.  The Cuban missile crisis followed shortly afterward in 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  A weak, egotistical US president invites disaster.

A feckless, inept, and naïve Jimmy Carter believed Leonid Brezhnev’s assurances of a peaceful outcome in Afghanistan, that is until the USSR invaded.  Jimmy’s response to Soviet aggression and treachery was to punish US amateur athletes by boycotting the 1980 Olympics.  That Soviet offensive was stopped in its tracks with significant American support for the Mujahideen.

The USSR was forced to turn tail and hustle back home during our militarily robust and globally influential Ronald Reagan era.  It was also Reagan who convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall—the one that was built in the Kennedy era.  The O-buma era is increasingly resembling Kennedy’s impotent attempts to compensate for weakness by projecting US power and by Carter’s feckless ineptitude.

Shortly after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama sent an additional 30K troops to Afghanistan following campaign promises to end American involvement there almost immediately after taking office.  Now he has unilaterally initiated talks with the Taliban that seem likely to produce dividends as disastrous as those resulting from the Paris Peace Accord.  Expect that the Taliban and Al Qaeda will, soon after our departure, occupy all of Afghanistan and threaten Pakistan.

O-buma has sufficiently alienated Pakistan that they are now embracing a China that is increasingly belligerent toward the US.  Pakistan is currently seeking to buy weapons from them.  We are countering by courting India with arms deals of our own.  Disengaged by the US, an American power vacuum in Afghanistan/Pakistan leaves Al Qaeda to threaten Russia with jihadist violence, inviting yet another Russian invasion.

As though the US were not stretched thinly enough, NATO member and American ally Turkey is threatening to invade Syria in order to create a buffer zone inside Syria for refugees from their civil war.  Syria is a former Soviet Union client and current Russian ally, and Moscow has been warning the US to stay out of Syria.  If the US helps Turkey in Syria, will Russia help Iran move against Israel?  Would the US use its significant military assets in Iraq to protect Israel from Iran?  If not, could the prospect of an unwinnable two-front war make Israel go nuclear?

Has O-buma’s constant embarrassment of Pakistan goaded them not only into the Chinese camp but encouraged them to save face and, with Chinese help, move against India in the Kashmir region to avenge past losses?  Significant Pakistani losses could invite direct Chinese intervention, and this could trigger US action.  Four nuclear powers at war in such a densely populated and strategically vital area is a recipe for global nuclear extinction.

O-buma’s poll numbers spiked with the death of bin Laden.  He seems willing to sacrifice short-term leftist support knowing that they will return to the fold by November 2012.  The president seems to be prematurely and unilaterally starting troop withdrawal from Afghanistan; perhaps he has ulterior motives and wants to send seasoned combat forces elsewhere.

At 17 months out, the time would be just about right to begin moving military assets to a staging area, somewhere such as Iraq, from which to launch a major offensive against a contrived enemy.  Liberal icon David Broder almost advocated it.  This gambit could help O-buma acquire significant support from badly alienated political moderates, and even some conservatives, in the run-up to the 2012 election.

It is [in] foreign affairs where we have the most to fear. Vietnam, of course, was not JFK’s only foreign policy adventure.  He called Khrushchev’s nuclear bluff in Cuba, and got lucky.  Let’s hope Obama doesn’t take his fawning lackeys too seriously as he searches for foreign distractions.  The Soviets were absolutely rational compared to the crazed North Korean and Iranians, who would love to be provoked by the president who bows to all. 

This could be a win-win situation for the O-bumites.  Even a devastating US military loss would re-vitalize progressive support for this administration and possibly win some moderate support among those weary of our protracted wars.  Does O-buma have the temerity to take such a gamble?  Maybe he believes that he is protected by a divinely ordained right to a second term.

May your gods be with you.

Change--The Irresistible Force

Government validates inertia’s principle that objects at rest tend to stay that way.  The philosophies of the political parties that dominate the government workforce remain relatively static.  The few changes in government that have occurred have been superficial—they have been mostly changes in scope and breadth—the essential precepts have endured since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Welfare Society.  Government’s tendency is to beget more government.

Today, nearly half of Americans pay no personal income tax, and the Food Stamp President represents the country.  The president and his bureaucratic cronies are as comfortable with the current theft-welfare state as pigs wallowing in mud.  Rather than to decrease the scope, breadth, and expense of the out of control federal government, O-buma has appointed a cadre of czars to expand the regulatory burden to crisis proportions.

Nothing is too good for the One and his minions, especially when others are paying for it. 

State governors have set examples of what needs to be done about government.  Chris Christie in New Jersey, Rick Scott in Florida, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and John Kasich in Ohio are prime examples.  This article describes what John Fortuno, Puerto Rico’s governor, did there.  Two years ago, he fired 17,000 government workers…thousands of union members demonstrated against Fortuno for days.  They clashed with police.

The governor explained, we didn't have enough money to meet our first payroll.  His predecessors had grown Puerto Rico's government to the point that the state employed one out of every three workers.  Fortuno reduced corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent.  He reduced individual income taxes.  He privatized entire government agencies.  Puerto Ricans are better off for it.

Canada’s liberals used similar measures.  Those in charge shrank the government.  In 1995 they ended several wasteful programs.  The country’s debt stopped increasing, the country began to run surpluses, and the debt began to decrease.  Economist David Henderson argues that government wastes most of what it spends, and so just cutting government and having that money in the hands of people means it's going to be used more valuably. 

Canada fired government workers, but unemployment didn't increase.  In fact, it fell from 12 percent to 6 percent.  Canadian unemployment is still well below ours.  And the Canadian dollar rose from just 72 American cents to $1.02 today.  Canada also raised some taxes.  But the spending cuts were much bigger, six to one.

So why can we not do this here?  For the O-buma administration, the situation is not that they cannot, they simply will not.  The current government does not represent the best interests of the people.  It represents this diaper-wearing slug and the rest of the advocates for and participants in the taxpayer funded mommy state.

Perhaps the state of California is the best example of progressives’ end game.  In this article in Forbes, William Baldwin asks the question "What’s Your State’s Deadweight Ratio?"  The author argues that government has too many mouths to feed.  He has established a Deadweight Ratio.  It tells you how many beneficiaries of government spending there are for every private sector job.

California is in deep kimchee; for every 100 private sector workers, there 113 people drawing benefits.  Each worker pays for himself as well as one other person.  Business are relocating to other states or countries.  The state is on the verge of collapse.  California, like the federal government, is subjecting its people to confiscatory taxation without providing responsible and effective representation.  A war was fought somewhere over taxation without representation.

When the government thumbs its nose at the governed, the people take umbrage.  That is what happened with the Boston Tea Party.  Taking away a government’s revenue can effect change.  What would happen if everyone, businesses and individuals alike, refused to hand over another dime to revenue collectors?  This purely hypothetical conjecture advocates no illegal activity of any kind.

Still, there are people who seem to have cut government out of its role of middleman in economic transactions.  In Wired, Adrian Chen describes an underground and anonymous exchange system that uses electronic currency known as Bitcoins.  Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other Bitcoin holders’ computers.  Some feel that this is a Libertarian economic alternative.

Chen’s example is a company named Silk Road that sells contraband drugs; however, it could well be the purveyor of almost any form of goods and services.  Accessing the company is only possible through the anonymizing network Tor.  Any company could create a similar enterprise.  Silk Road’s site administrator urges people to stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market, but the effort need not be illegal. 

What sort of changes might one make by using this sort of system, without selling illegal products, but through legal civil disobedience against a government believed to be oppressive and out of touch.  If this could be done lawfully, a more perfect form of democracy could result.  When the people get mad as hell, things change.  Perhaps a new form of Hopenchange is coming.

May your gods be with you.          

A Man with a Plan

Candidates are jockeying for position in the presidential primaries, so the time for political action has come.  The incumbent is a Marxist mommy stater who is fully engaged in progressives’ plans to dismantle America and turn the nation into a second-rate, third world country. 

His failed Keynesian economic policies reflect the philosophies and hopes of George Soros and others who want to bankrupt the US with overwhelming debt and unsustainable entitlement programs.  Claims that he would create jobs proved blatant lies; he and his cronies benefit most from increasing the welfare rolls.

Although the former Soviet Union’s demise is documentary evidence that centrally planned economies are destined to fail, this is their model.  He and his lackeys have nationalized the health care, financial, and banking industries and effectively ended domestic oil exploration.  They have the FCC attacking the communication industry; simultaneously, they are trying to create a government financed and operated communication business to compete with private companies.

Obama has alienated our most reliable allies and embraced our enemies.  He has groveled and kow towed to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.  He is a close friend and ideological soul mate of Hugo Chavez.  He wants Israel to withdraw unilaterally to indefensible borders to facilitate the dissolution of that state.  His open immigration policy has created a nonexistent border with Mexico, and his ICE appointees have created an organization that resembles the Keystone Kops as potential terrorists flood into the country. 

The president’s Federal Reserve has printed so much valueless money that nations are starting to reject the dollar as the world’s default currency.  We endured our worst environmental disaster in history after his Department of Interior inadequately inspected oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and gasoline prices have skyrocketed.  The Justice Department is only committed to prosecuting white people.  His Education Department is exposing children to lewdness and subjecting them to political indoctrination.

Obama’s reign has been a contrived and intentional disaster.  His gang of Van Jones, Cass Sunstein, Carol Browner, Steven Chu, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, et al is enthusiastically shoving us down the slippery slope to ruin.

There is a viable alternative to Obama’s treason.  That alternative is Texas Governor Rick Perry.  Recently, and with Perry at the helm, 37% of all jobs created nationwide have been in Texas.  It’s the economy, and it will not recover without a massive increase in private sector jobs.  Businesses are only going to expand and hire additional workers in a favorable regulatory climate with relatively low rates of taxation, just like in Texas.

Education is another aspect of Texas government that is appealing.  Progressives there are now fighting an uphill battle.  Schools are emphasizing math, science, and reading and ending political indoctrination, nonfactual historical revisionism, socially constructed reality, teaching inexact math, and issuing diplomas that graduates cannot read.

Putting Americans back to work should be the top priority for the next president.  The current one has no interest in righting our ship; Obama and his cronies have it tilting heavily to the left.  They want a nation that is economically broke, morally dissolute, and a society Balkanized into demographically defined and mutually hostile groups at war with one another.  Rick Perry is a man with a plan.

May your gods be with you.   

O-bumites Creating an American Tass

Make no mistake about it.  Regulation is taxation.  Agents of the state are not volunteers.  Their compensation packages are larded with health and retirement benefits that private sector workers can only envy—as well as to resent and regret having to pony up for the cost.  Now, the Corruptocrats are back with a new round of tax and regulate schemes for the Internet. 

They actually believe that they have a divinely endowed right to take a piece of the action when they find someone who is hardworking and successful.  Theirs is a Tony Soprano type of extortion.  If we refuse to offer up the pound of flesh that they demand, they will wreck the entire operation and insure that no one succeeds. 

The Investors.com editorial “Always More Taxes” exposes some of the latest chicanery by Senator Dick Durbin, Theftocrat, Illinois.  Durbin sponsored a bill that would levy a sales tax to collect revenues on Web sales even when the seller has no physical presence in the buyer's state.  To date, e-commerce has been treated in the same way catalog sales were handled in the days when Americans shopped at Sears and J.C. Penney via the U.S. Postal Service.

Thanks to tax collectors, Amazon.com is closing a Dallas area fulfillment center and canceling a planned expansion of its operations in Texas after the online retailer failed to reach an agreement with the state over taxes.  Dave Clark, who runs the company's operations in North America, said the state's "unfavorable regulatory climate" prompted the decision.

Amazon’s move will cost Texas more than 1000 jobs and tens of millions of dollars in investment.  This is but one consequence of greedily coveting other people’s privately held resources.  Private companies acting as Internet service providers facilitate access to the Web.  The Internet itself is a global network of interconnected computer systems that is not owned by any one entity.  The ISPs are regulated by national, state, and local government agencies.

Since politicians and bureaucrats have largely been prevented from getting their grabby little hands on the Internet, and ISPs are still in private hands, the O-bumatrons want to pull an end run and create a parallel universe-type Internet of their own.  The administration’s brave new Internet is intended to be used for emergencies, health care, education, and energy as though the existing Web cannot provide these services.

Upon closer examination, this federal expansion into the private sector is neither innocuous nor benevolent.  Theodore Forstmann once observed that the gentle government that promises to hold your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side.  Much as they did with the healthcare industry, the O-bumites have been practicing their theft-by-regulation tactics against AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner.

The Prowler’s article “National Public Internet,” exposes Theftocrats’ real intentions.  They have been taking steps to create a taxpayer-financed, government-run broadband network that while ostensibly deployed for use by public safety officials, would compete for business against the current wireless broadband companies. 

We have one of the most advanced and competitive wireless networks on the planet, and true to form, O-buma wants to punish success.  When government competes against private enterprise, industries die.  One White House representative said that we're talking about a network that could also be used for commercial purposes…as the government, we'd be able to offer those services at considerably cheaper prices.

Progressives continue to advance White House and Cabinet-level department policies that essentially further 'socialize' our economy, says a senior Republican Commerce Committee aide.  You saw it with net neutrality, you've seen it with health care and the environment and now you're seeing it with wireless communications.  Taking from others against their wishes is still theft.

May your gods be with you.

Education's Sleight of Hand

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or No Child Left Behind, is flawed; however, its purpose was to make educational policies and practices more transparent and to make educators accountable to taxpayers for their performance.  There’s the rub.  The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are aghast at the prospect of transparency.  Apparently, they have much to fear if taxpayers learn what they are getting for their money.  As for accountability, they cower like Dracula threatened with a cross at the very thought of it.  Don’t even mention standards or competition.

NCLB was up for re-authorization when Theftocrats controlled the House, Senate, and the White house.  They did nothing, and the flaws in it remain uncorrected, despite objections from Democrats.  This article in The Christian Science Monitor reveals that Arne Duncan, head of the federal Department of Indoctrination, plans to take matters into his own hands by issuing waivers to it.  Of paramount concern to Arne and the Educrats is that NCLB requires 

all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, among other things. 

As that deadline approaches with no sign of the benchmark being met – and as more and more schools are labeled as failing as a result – many states and districts have been clamoring for relief from the sanctions imposed by NCLB for schools that fail to meet their targets.

Duncan advocates accountability—for the term to be meaningful, it must require comparison to a standard—then, he advocates flexibility in meeting those standards.  This fraud is equivalent to Bill Clinton’s flexible ethics.  The atomic weight of gold is a standard; maybe, sort of, and nearly are weaseling.

Author Amanda Paulson speculates that one part of NCLB that Duncan is almost certain to waive is the requirement that failing schools offer school choice options to students.  What a shock; he opposes provisions that would lessen educrats’ stranglehold on education by forcing competition with private education opportunities.

Duncan claimed that 80% of schools will be judged failures if the NCLB standard remains in effect; therefore, he wants to hide the measuring stick.  His desperation to bury the problem reveals that education is a mess.  In “Different Decisions,” Thomas Sowell compares public and private sector methods and results of producing products for consumers.

Sowell points out that when banks foreclose on property, they sell it for whatever they can manage and get out from under it quickly.  They do this because their expertise is banking, not real estate.  Public schools offer a stark contrast.  The author ponders why schools are using their time to indoctrinate kindergartners and fourth graders with politically correct attitudes about sex. 

Anyone familiar with the low standards and mushy notions in the schools and departments of education that turn out our public school teachers might think that these teachers would have all they can do to make American children competent in reading, writing and math.  Anyone familiar with how our children stack up with children from other countries in basic education would be painfully aware that American children lag behind children in countries that spend far less per pupil than we do.  In other words, teachers and schools that are failing to provide the basics of education are branching out into all sorts of other areas, where they have even less competence.

If bankers lose money by dabbling in areas outside their expertise, stockholders fire them.  Teachers do not face commensurate consequences in return for ineptitude.  Only Florida and Alaska have meaningful performance appraisals for teachers.

Schools are just one government institution that takes on tasks for which they have no expertise or even competence.  Congress is the most egregious example.  Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care.

Government schools operate in the model of the former Soviet Union, and like the USSR, it is a failed experiment whose effectiveness has ended. 

May your gods be with you.     

Problems are Caused by Racial Separatism, not Immigration

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.  For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children's futures.  And we are all mortal.

President John F. Kennedy, June 1963

The fundamentalist Muslim bombers who perpetrated 9-11 in the name of their god and the fundamentalist Christians who bombed abortion clinics in the name of their god are moral twins.  These were acts of political ideology, not religion.  Both groups oppose cultural assimilation into the larger social group and reject pluralistic inclusion in favor of multiculturalist balkanizing of society.

One such anti-assimilation group in the US is La Raza, or The Race.  Its members prefer separatism of the radical Muslim sort.  La Raza and the gangs that support them demand, among other perversions, violently enforced segregation.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Los Angeles Times, some of La Raza’s ideological soul mates in the Latino Azusa Gang have been ethnically cleansing Azusa, CA, of native-born African Americans.

That is right, a Mexican racial supremacist group significantly comprised of illegal aliens has been systematically intimidating, harassing, and murdering Americans because they object to their culture, customs, and most important, their skin color; apparently, it is the wrong shade of brown.  The progressives-invented stereotype of shoeless peasants escaping oppressive poverty to fill low-paying jobs picking crops, as restaurant workers, and as nannies is clearly propaganda.

A federal grand jury…indicted 51 people allegedly associated with the Azusa 13 gang in what prosecutors described as actions “terrorizing” blacks.  The 24-count indictment is just the latest in a string of prosecutions [alleging] Latino gangs were attacking blacks to push them out of their neighborhoods.  Separatism is inherent to multiculturalism, as is cultural relativism’s all-cultures-are-equal mantra.

This mantra requires that we turn a blind eye toward cultural practices that offend Western sensibilities.  When it comes to supporting the progressive’s New World Order, feminists in general become self-censoring eunuchs rather than to rise up en mass against the African Muslim practice of female genital mutilation.  The subcultures that comprise the progressive scourge have in common one allegiance from which none breaks ranks, destroying Western Civilization.  Europeans reveal that many who oppose this destruction have hobbled themselves by embracing the enemy through multiculturalism.

This enemy has been waging a war against Scandinavian women.  A report in New American quotes a broadcast from a Swedish television station that all assault rapes in the country during the past five years were committed by “non-Western” men, a clear euphemism for Muslims either from Africa, the Middle East, or Asia given the identity of most rapists in Scandinavia.  Additionally, from 2005-2010, a total of 86 sexual assaults involving rape was reported in 83 cases the man was described as having ‘non-western appearance.’

According to this article, a reporter interviewed a Norwegian girl who was raped by an immigrant.  That immigrant said he had the right to do exactly as he wanted to a woman...because that is how it was in his religion. Women did not have rights or opinions; he was in charge.  How very convenient; the way that they invent and interpret their god gives them the moral imperative to rape and murder non-believers.

Anyone who believes that such practices have not reached US shores should read this article about a 20-year-old Michigan woman whose stepfather murdered her because she rejected Islamic Sharia Law.  Similar events took place in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and New York.  The brutality of these events is nearly unspeakable; however, it should act as a clarion call to everyone who is willing to take an ethical stand against progressives’ pogrom against Western women.  Imagine if we treated Jihadists as they treat Westerners.  Assimilated or assassinated, you choose!  Just kidding.

May your gods be with you.