February, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Abusing Washington Interns. Playing With Nuclear Missiles, Giving Money To Aremenia, and More

This is the third post this month where we are looking at the insanity, idiocy, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Our politicians waste so much money in so many different and original ways that we need multiple posts every month just to stay on top of the incompetence they create. This month is no different.

1) According to the Federal government’s Agency for International Aid (USAID):

• The United States allocated and paid out $3.35 million to “improve the quality of media content and strengthen the media’s capacity to meet professional standards” in the country of Armenia.
• American media outlets are not eligible for the grant, just foreign media outlets and organizations.
• The grant is supposed to help Armenian citizens get access to reliable media sources for the next five years. 
• USAID said it hopes that the $3.35 million the grant will improve the quality of media within Armenia and develop stronger, more professional Armenian journalists.

So much wrong with this effort, the primary insanity being why are we giving a foreign country like Armenia, or any foreign country, millions of dollars to improve their media? What is in it for us since Armenia is a small country, a non-strategic country, and a country that is likely not a big trade partner with us? Why, why, why?

Wouldn’t this money be better spent trying to get good jobs or retraining opportunities for the 20 plus million Americans who are unemployed or under employed? Wouldn’t this money be better spent on our veterans who just got their pension benefits cut by the Washington political class? I can think of dozens of better uses for this money, including not spending it at all, rather then throwing it down the sinkhole in a stupid program thousands of miles away in a country that 99.9% of Americans could not locate on a map.

2) According to an article in the January 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, Michelle Obama celebrated her 50th birthday party with a star studded birthday party at the White House. The party included performances by Beyonce and Stevie Wonder and more than 300 guests were present including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Samuel L. Jackson, Smokey Robinson, Magic Johnson, Ashley Judd, and Paul McCartney. 

Any guesses on how much this party cost the American taxpayer, for someone that is not even an elected public servant? In my view, given the dire economic straits tens of millions of Americans find themselves in every day, this type of over-the-top “Hunger Games” celebration is a disgrace and an insult to every American who is not in the inner circle of the political class.

3) According to a Los Angeles Times article that was summarized in the January 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, the combined wealth of the world’s richest people is now a total of $1.7 TRILLION. That’s a lot of money and wealth. Or is it? Let’s do some simple math:

• If you could some how scoop up that $1.7 TRILLION and disburse 100% of it equally to every person living on the planet, every person would receive a grand total of….about $243. Hardly enough to lift anyone out of poverty, even assuming you could disburse the $1.7 TRILLION.
• Today, $1.7 TRILLION would only pay off 10% of this nation’s national debt. This gives you some frame of reference of how far into debt the American political class has taken us.
• The $1.7 TRILLION would not come close to even covering the first two years of the Obama Presidency’s deficit spending. In other words, decades of wealth accumulation by the richest people in the world would be wiped out in less than two years by the Obama Presidency’s wasteful and out-of-control spending.

And rather than come up with creative and real solutions to the nation’s and world’s poverty, this President continues to harp upon the empty concept of “income equality.” Unless he thinks $243 is income equality.

4) The Federal government has probably spent tens of TRILLIONS of dollars over the past decades for the Defense Department in order to keep us safe from foreign hostile forces. One would have thought that for tens of TRILLIONS of dollars, our defense would have been the absolute best possible.

However, that would have been an incorrect assumption in a very big and dangerous way. According to various news reports and an article in the January, 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• At least 34 Air Force officers who are responsible for the nation’s nuclear missile defense, have been relieved of duty.
• They face charges of cheating FOR YEARS on their monthly readiness tests.
• Some Air Force officers were charged with sharing answers to the tests which were designed to cover armed forces personnel proficiency at nuclear code handling, launch procedures, and missile safety.
• “Everybody cheats on every test they can, and have done so for decades,” according to a quoted former officer in the article.
• Two of the 34 people facing charges are also face charges for illegal drug use.

Still feeling safe now that you know that for decades the people responsible for the deadliest weapons known to mankind have been cheating on their proficiency tests? That some of those same people with their fingers dangerously close to our nuclear missiles have been abusing drugs? 

Tens of TRILLIONS of dollars spent and the political class and the Federal government it operates cannot run a safe operation relative to nuclear missiles. Imagine how much they screw up on minor defense issues if this is how nonchalantly they treat our nuclear missiles. Scary as heck from both a safety and financial perspective.

5) President Obama promised in his first Presidential campaign that 1) he would close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible and 2) he would operate the most transparent Presidential administration of all time. We know that that these were just two of the many lies and deceptions he has dropped on America over the past five years, utter failures in both respects; the detention center is still open and eating up hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year and this administration could really not be any less transparent.

However, according to the March, 2014 issue of Reason magazine, this administration has managed to combine both of these promises turned to lies into one bigger embarrassment. The Reason article described how the detention facility at Guantanamo had decided to not continue publishing the number of detainees that were in the midst of hunger strikes. Since 2005, many of the detainees have used hunger strikes as a way of protesting their detention without trial at the center. 

Up until December, 2013, the center had released the number of detainees currently on a hunger strike every day. That transparency ended with the announcement in December that the daily feed of hunger strike information would be suppressed and no longer published for the public. 

Which, given this administration’s penchant for lying, makes you wonder what is really going on at the detention center. Just saying. Seems this administration can find endless ways to renege on its past promises, in his case combining two promises together to break.

6) As we mentioned above, this President seems to be hell bent to raise the minimum wage, as if this action, that would affect less than 3% of all U.S. workers, will cure the dire strait’s the economy finds itself in, dire straits that this administration has probably made worse with its illogical and ineffective economic policies. Almost every economic study done by non-government experts show that raising the minimum wage, while providing a little bit of good for a few, results in many fewer job opportunities for a lot of others.

Which gets us to one of the larger hypocrisies coming out of the Washington political class today. The Employment Policies Institute has recently done some analysis and found that only 4% of all interns working for politicians and lawmakers in Washington who are advocating for a rise in the minimum wage receive a pay check. Only eight interns out of over 200 get paid for their contributions and work activities by the same people that are calling for businesses to pay more than the current minimum wage.

You cannot get much more hypocritical than that. Do as I say or demand rather than what I do. Do we think there would be a lot fewer interns in Washington if their bosses, elected officials, had to pay them for the interns’ contributions out of their own budget? 

Same thing happens in real life, basic economics. Raise the price of an item and fewer of those items were get utilized. In this case, raise the price of labor, and fewer units of labor get used, i.e. fewer intern jobs are created or maintained.

We can argument the merits of the minimum wage some other time, the real bugger is the hypocrisy of the political class and their economic abuse of interns.

That will do it for today. Financially abusing interns, fading transparency, nuclear defense that could have gone nuclear at anytime, partying with the First Lady on the taxpayer dime, and more, the ways and creativity that politicians come up with to make us insane are endless. Which means we will be back tomorrow with more political class insanity.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w