April, 2015, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Bad Congressional Parking Skills, Spending Money For Nohting, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that has cropped up over the past 30 days or so. As regular readers of this blog know, political class insanity comes in many different forms including, but not limited to, the following craziness:

• Spending taxpayer wealth on idiotic programs and projects.
• Wasting taxpayer wealth on their own selfish financial and political needs.
• Implementing legislation to resolve problems that make the original problems worse or which created unintended bad consequences as a result of their legislation.
• Implementing legislation that supports their political donors and financial backers rather than the typical American citizen.
• Issuing idiotic and stupid comments.
• Overseeing government organizations that are incompetent, inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful of taxpayer wealth.

As always, it is highly likely we will identify new forms of insanity over the next few days as we review the past ineptness coming out of Washington and other bastions of American politicians.

1) Let’s start today with a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. According to various news reports including Howie Carr from the Boston Herald:

• The Edward Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate is about to open in his home state of Massachusetts.
• Carr specifically wrote that the Institute was supposed to be paid for with private funds and donations.
• But the political class in Washington decided that Federal government taxpayers across the country should chip in $38 million to help built the Institute which was also helped along with a $5 million contribution by the state of Massachusetts.
• Fortunately, when then Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts tried to stick the American taxpayer with another $28.9 million to subsidize the Institute his efforts failed.

Sad and pathetic and insane. I do not remember being asked if I wanted some of my tax money to be used to fund a grandiose tribute to a Senator that had so many scandals in his career in a state far away that I will likely never visit, never mind visiting the Institute.

And it is not as if this effort needed my tax dollars. First, I am sure the Kennedy clan could have financed the whole effort out of their checking accounts without taxpayer support. Second, at the grand opening, the Institute charged people $250,000 who wanted to be members of the “chairman’s circle” and charged thousands of dollars to attend the opening, the cheapest ticket of which was $2,500.

Just this single fund raising event gathered in a whopping $50 million for the endowment of the Institute. If there was justice in this world and people of integrity and dignity serving in Washington, part of that $50 million would be used to repay the $38 million that American taxpayers were held up for to fund the Institute. 

That $38 million could be refunded to the taxpayers or could be used to serve the ailing veterans that the Federal government under serves today, train the long term unemployed, treat the drug addicted in our society, train and deploy more teachers, etc. Instead, we are stuck with a $38 million expense to glorify a politician. Pathetic.

2) We are supposed to be government of the people, by the people, and for the people. However, very few would probably disagree that today we are government of the political donations, by the political donations and for the political donations. We still vote but more and more those that pay the political class and political machine in this country get the benefits.

Consider the case of Google, one of the biggest and richest companies in the world and how they work the political process, according to recent reporting by NewsMax:

• Google was the second largest donor to Obama’s political campaigns.
• Obama’s technology advisor is Megan Smith who used to be a Google executive.
• Google lobbyists have officially visited the White House 230 times despite the President’s promise that the role of lobbyists would be minimized in his administration.
• A major business rival of Google, Comcast, registered only 20 official White House visits by its lobbyists.
• Google employees gave the most money to Obama’s re-election campaign than any other set of employees except Microsoft’s.
• Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, was in Obama's Chicago campaign office on election day 2012 working on a voter turnout system for Obama’s campaign.

All of this is perfectly legal, if repugnant to those who think that crony capitalism trumps the needs of American citizens. But Google executives are not stupid people. What did the Obama administration do for Google over the past few years:

• Although the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had accused Google of abusive trade practices by burying the results for competitors' websites in search results, in 2012 the FTC ignored its own staff's recommendation of a lawsuit, and dropped its investigation.
• Google apparently also made out well on the recent FCC net neutrality rules even though Chairman Tom Wheeler opposed the "Title II" rules that benefit Google but he was overruled by the White House.
• The FCC also pulled out 15 pages from its net neutrality report that Google didn't like.
• Google recently announced that its page rankings in the future will be based on how “truthful” the site is. 

Two main problems here. First, as we have often said, political cronies pay out millions to government entities and politicians in order to get billions back in value, whether it is favorable legislation or favorable regulation. It is a deal that cannot be beat, financially, market wise, or personal wealth wise, get the American taxpayer to fund your needs via blackmailing politicians with political advice and money.

Second, even more troubling, is the last point above. Who is to decide what “truthful” is? Will an unbiased third party decide what truthful is or does truthful depend on who is holding political office? Given the whole crony capitalism cancer that exists in Washington today, unbiased does not stand a chance. If we are not careful, Google could become the new Pravda for the American political class.

3) Nothing says I am an American politician and I am above law than not caring what you do to other ordinary people. Consider the pathetic car parking job Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton recently did in Washington, a parking hatchet job that was caught on video. 

Not only does the Congresswoman leave her car in an idiotically parked position, she apparently has already struck the car properly parked next to her number of times and than has left the scene without notifying authorities or leaving a note. If you or I did that, we could be fined, arrested, and jailed for leaving the scene of an accident. Want to bet there were no repercussion from her behavior? And to think that this person votes on legislation that affects us all when she has no compassion or integrity for everyday life. Pathetic.

The parking job can be viewed at:

http://joeforamerica.com/2015/03/ttv-congressional-parking/#

4) Wasting money is often an art form for Washington. One common way to waste taxpayer money is to have a government entity purchase something and then never use it. Our most popular blog post ever described how the Navy had spent $300 million to build two ships almost to completion and then decided to junk them for $10 million while never using them.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent $40 million building a consulate building in the Afghanistan countryside and then abandoned it before ever using it when the found out it could not be defended in case of a Taliban attack. The TSA spent millions of dollars on airport security equipment that was never taken out of its packing material before it was stored in a warehouse, never to be used. 

According to Sarah Westwood, recently writing for the Washington Examiner, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) recently continued this horrid tradition of spending taxpayer wealth on things that are never used, this time with a costly twist. Days after one part of ATF had dumped $600,000 worth of aerial drones that it had never flown or used, another part of ATF spent another $15,000 on more aerial drones that have also remained grounded and unused.

Excuses for the dumping included:

• One of the drones had a battery that lasted just 20 minutes, making it "unsuitable for surveillance." 
• Another of the drones model, costing taxpayers $315,000, "was never operable due to multiple technical defects."
• A $90,000 drone was deemed "too difficult to use reliably in operations" after testing.
• ATF suspended its drone program and donated all six of its drones to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service free of charge in June 2014.

There are two obvious questions here:

1. Before purchasing the drones, shouldn’t someone at ATF have checked out the specs on these machines before wasting so much taxpayer money on a drone fleet that was so obviously doomed from the start?
2. And if the drones did not work according to the specs agreed to, shouldn’t ATF demanded and received their money back from the drone sellers for deceptive sales?

Most consumers would have taken these simple steps to guarantee they protected their money and wealth before finalizing major purchases like these. But obviously ATF did neither of these two steps to get taxpayer money back in return for non-performance.

The organization then repeated the same mistake when less than a week after the first drone fleet was given away, ATF's National Response Team bought five more drones for $15,000 "to help document fire and explosion crime scenes." But ATF officials told their inspector general that besides a single short flight in July 2014 to survey the aftermath of a Louisiana apartment fire, the rest of the drones were never used again after discovering they needed certifications to legally operate the drones. Maybe someone should have investigated this requirement problem BEFORE the new drones were purchased.

In an understatement, the inspector general said he was "troubled" by the contracting process that allowed ATF to spend more than half a million dollars on three different types of drones without realizing that none of them could be used for the intended purposes.

That will do it for now. Taxpayers paying for tributes to passed away politicians, Google spending a lot of time and money influencing policies rather focusing on the market needs of its customers, politicians who cannot even park a car or take responsibility for their errant driving skills, and spending money on purchases that are never used. Sounds about right for one day of political class insanity. More insanity tomorrow.

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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w