January, 2017, Part 1, Political CLass Insanity: Our (Over) Regulated Nation, DEA Making Sick Americans, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us. 

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy." 

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) Neil W. McCabe, writing for Breitbart on December 20, 2016, talked about the launching of a new US Navy warship, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, which happens to be ninth type ship within the so-called Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) class of warships. But according to Mr. McCabe, calling it a combat ship or a warship might be giving it more credit than it deserves. We are likely looking at another costly and useless expenditure of taxpayer wealth much like the $13 billion aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford that some experts think should be scrapped despite the $13 billion price tag and the F-35 fighter jet that has likely already cost over a trillion dollars in development:

• While current Coast Guard cutters have deck guns with a maximum range of 20 miles, the brand new and expensive LCS ships have deck guns that have a range of only 10 miles.
• This limited gun power range makes them susceptible to attack before they are even in range of the enemy.
• In Congressional testimony, J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation, said that because of the ship’s speed and small size, “it could avoid combat and find a place to hide from the hostilities,” a trait that maybe you do not want in a “warship.”
• Furthermore he stated in testimony: “The Navy’s own requirements show that the only — the only thing the Navy expects, if it’s hit by one of those kinds of threats, is for it to be able to exit the battle area and or provide for an orderly abandon ship. A hit on one of these ships is going to be a real problem–if you can keep it out of harm’s way? OK.”
• “Keep it out of harm’s way,” again, not a trait you want in a warship.
• Senator John McCain summed up this Pentagon disaster nicely, referring to this class of Navy ships as an “alleged warship”: “For some reason, Navy leaders prioritized deploying a ship with no capability over completing necessary mission package testing. In other words, the taxpayers have paid for—and are still paying for—26 ships that have demonstrated next-to-no combat capability. This is unacceptable.”
• And as often the case with Pentagon spending, the cost of these almost useless ships is not close to being what was originally proposed since back in 2007 when each ship was supposed to cost $220 a piece but now each ship costs more than double that original estimate, coming in at about $480 million each, according to a recent General Accounting Office report.
• The GAO was also not complimentary of the whole class of ships: “Much of the LCS’s capabilities are yet to be demonstrated and the frigate’s design, cost, and capabilities are not well-defined.”

Typical Pentagon and government procurement: rosy promises, over budget, under performing.

2) Unfortunately, we continue to report on the insanity in Chicago as it relates to gang and gun violence in the city with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Despite these strict gun laws, the violence continues to grow with local, state, and Federal politicians having no solution in their little minds to put forth to stop the violence:

• Over the recent Christmas weekend, 30 people were wounded and 11 were killed by gun violence in Chicago.
• The Chicago Sun Times reported that it was the deadliest Christmas weekend in a long time.
• For the same holiday weekend in 2015, only 6 were killed.
• Over 700 people were killed in Chicago in 2016.

So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men, certainly not the spirit in Chicago, the city with possibly the strongest gun control laws and yet the most gun violence in the country with no politicians having an answer to the ever increasing violence.

3) We have often been critical of the so-called “war on drugs.” It has been going on since the Nixon administration, has probably cost over a trillion dollars, it has given us the highest prison population in the world by any measure, has created violent and wealthy drug cartels, and still has not prevented tens of thousands of Americans from dying from drug abuse every year.

According to a recent article on the Against Crony Capitalism website, the stupidity of the “war” continues today. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) recently classified a “therapeutic, non-psychoactive” substance, CBD oil, as a Schedule 1 drug, the highest and most dangerous drug classification that exists. Apparently, CBD has been used for a while to help Americans deal with epilepsy and other debilitating illnesses. It helps keep epilepsy sufferers and their seizures under control.

So while the Mexican drug cartels are flooding the country with cheap heroin creating a heroin addiction crisis, with opioids killing thousands of Americans every year, some bureaucrat in the DEA decided to focus on a substance that relieves the suffering of Americans. Insanely bad priorities.

4) Let’s move from a DEA bureaucrat that has too much time on his or her hands that they need to come up with stupid regulations and move to the larger Obama administration,which obviously has way too much time on their hands. Consider an article by Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner on December 30, 2016:

• The Obama administration has issued 3,853 Federal government regulations in 2016. 
• This means that for every day of 2015, the Obama administration issued more than ten regulations a day on average, seven days a week.
• This also comes out to 18 regulations for every law Congress passed this past year. 
• The Federal government regulation book, the Federal Register, is now over 97,000 pages long.
• This was the highest number of regulations passed in a year during the Obama Presidency.

As always, there are at least three really stupid aspects of this over regulation:

1. How is that the preceding 43 Presidents did not see the need for the thousands and thousands of regulations the Obama administration has put in place during its tenure, were those former Presidents that stupid while Obama is oh so smart?
2. I have always maintained that as government and the bureaucracy that accompanies it gets larger and grosser, those within the bureaucracy need to continually justify their existence and one way to do that is to constantly come up with new, useless, and stupid regulations.
3. I also maintain that the reasons the economy and Obama’s economic recovery have been so lousy is that businesses and business owners across the country have spent so much time, money, and resources trying to comply with these new, useless, and stupid regulations that they have had much less time to devote to growing their businesses which in turn would grow the economy.

Another problem with creating so many burdensome regulations is that the American people get virtually no say in the creation or to determine if these regulations are actually needed. The number of regulations is so much higher than the number of laws passed by Congress, the place where the American voters’ voices should be heard and taken into account. That voter accountability is absent when government regulators run wild.

This is lack of democracy is illustrated by an index developed by the Unconstitutional Index that is developed annually by Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It does a ratio analysis of the number of regulations put in place each year to the number of laws passed each year. The higher the number the more it means that unaccountable regulations are having more of an impact than elected representatives.

Consider an example from Mr. Crews chart that is listed below. In 2003, Federal government agencies put 4,148 regulations in place, Congress passed 198 laws which means that about there were about 21 regulations put in place for each law passed. Thus, the Index value of 21. During the Bush later years, that index never got above 25, usually never getting higher than 20.

However, if you look at the Obama years, we see the index get and stay quite high most years. In fact, the index averages almost 30 over the past eight years, 50% higher than the Bush years.

Just another example of government out of control. We are a nation of regulations now, most of which are likely unneeded except that they help an unneeded bureaucracy from becoming extinct. Unlike politicians, we never know the who, how, and why of these regulations but just know that they decrease our freedom while bogging down the economy. And the Obama administration did more bogging down than probably any Presidency in our history.

A good start to another month of bad political class insanity. Regulations out of control, the DEA making Americans suffer, unchecked violence continues in Chicago, and taxpayers pay for warships that cannot fight a war. More 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

August, 2015, Part 2,I Am A Global Warming Doubter and Believer In Science: More Arctic Ice, A Nobel Prize Winner Debunks Obama and More

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.”This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control on our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical post listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims

1) Yesterday we discussed the reality that the Arctic ice cap has been growing in size and volume over the past few years, dispelling any lingering doubts that global warming could reduce the ice cap to only water within five years. 

This reality was driven home again when a recent global warming research effort to the Arctic by the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Amundsen was terminated because the ice breaker had to be taken off of the study and sent to get several supply ships unfrozen from Arctic ice. Yes, there was too much ice up by the North Pole for freighters to navigate freely, hardly a sign of a disappearing ice cap that Al Gore predicted just six years ago.

According to Johnny Leclair, assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, ice conditions in this Arctic area are the worst he's seen in 20 years. This was apparently the first time ever that the Amundsen has had to be diverted away from a science mission to go break up ice. Those in charge of the scientific expedition announced that some of the planned experiments and measurements, four years in the planning, will be delayed or terminated altogether as a result of the delay.

The UK Register reported: “The Arctic ice cap has not, contrary to the predictions of climate alarmists, completely disappeared: in fact it has been growing rapidly, increasing by an entire third just in 2013 and more since.” The BBC has also recently published updated research which has confirmed the Arctic ice's remarkable comeback over the last couple of years.

But the growing ice situation must be really bad since news reports indicate that two more icebreakers are heading toward the upper Hudson Bay to relieve the Amundsen. 

2) Al Gore and Barack Obama like to degenerate any discussion of manmade global warming and climate change into a name calling, condescending, insult match between themselves, who fancy themselves as believers in science, and the heathens that dare to disagree with their position. Thus, it is always refreshing when we are able to present real scientists that agree it is perfectly logical to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science vs. politicians that parade around as if they are scientists.

Which is exactly what happened recently when a Nobel Prize laureate recently announced that global warming is non-existent. Dr. Ivar Giaever and more than 70 Nobel Science Laureates had actually endorsed Barack Obama for President back in 2008 but seven years later, he now stands against the Obama on the global warming issue. 

According to Giaever: “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.” Giaever, who won the Nobel for physics in 1973, told this to an audience at the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting earlier this month. He actually made fun of Obama’s statement that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” calling it a “ridiculous position” and claiming that Obama “gets bad advice” when it comes to global warming. Giaever went to to say: “I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

Giaever was once a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Engineering and School of Science and received the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on quantum tunneling. Giaever said he was “horrified” about the science surrounding global warming when he conducted research on the subject in 2012. Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society in 2011 when the Society stated that “the evidence is incontrovertible … [g]lobal warming is occurring.” 

At that time, Giaever opined that “Global warming really has become a new religion. Because you cannot discuss it. It’s not proper. It is like the Catholic Church.” Giaever based his views on his own knowledge and the reality that there’s been no global warming for the last 18 years or so, weather hasn’t gotten more extreme and that global temperature has only slightly risen, based on data being “fiddled” with by scientists, he said: “When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.” 

So who are you going to believe? A real scientist and Nobel winner like Giaever or Holiday Inn Express scientists like Gore and Obama?

3) We will finish up this month’s update on how it is logical to be a global warming doubter AND a believer in science with a little levity. Check out the following video clip and see how a comedian shows more logic, grasp of reality, and truth than Al Gore and all other global warming advocates combined:

http://www.youngcons.com/didnt-see-this-coming-comedian-goes-on-epic-rant-against-global-warming-and-alarmists-cant-stop-laughing/

I am assuming we will be back to this topic next month with more science, more data, and more realities to prove that Al Gore and Barack Obama are on the wrong side of science when it comes to man made global warming and climate change.

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

Wastebook 2015 - The Unrelenting Wasteful Spending of Washington

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has been one of the very few politicians in Washington who have taken the time to identify and document the incredible amount of taxpayer wealth that the government wastes every year. From funding stupid science projects to criminal fraud to inefficient and ineffective management of government operations, the incompetence of the Federal government and the politicians that oversee its operations is truly insulting to those of us that fund their ineptness and waste. Previous years' examples of wasteful spending as identified by senator Coburn can be accessed in this blog by entering either “coburn” or “wastebook” in the search box above. 

The Senator’s annual summary of wasteful spending is entitled Wastebook followed by the year of its publication. He has just releases “Wastebook 2015” and trust me, as you will see below, the wasteful spending on idiocy continues unabated under the Obama administration. Before we go into the latest Wastebook results, let’s do a quick review of the major wasteful spending examples that we have previously exposed in this blog: 

• Medicare and Medicaid likely lose over $100 billion a year to waste, fraud, and inefficiencies. 
• Social Security easily loses over $100 billion a year to waste and fraud. 
• The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year in taxes owed. 
• Obama’s debt reduction commission recommended that over $100 billion a year could be removed from the Pentagon’s budget without compromising national security; I contend that this is a substantially low ball figure. 
• The Navy recently spent almost $300 million to build two ships to near completion, decided that they were not needed, and then spent another $10 million to junk them. 
• The State Department spent $60 million to build a consulate in Afghanistan and then realized that it could not be defended against a terrorist attack and abandoned it without ever using it. 
• The National Science Foundation annually wastes billions of dollars on such inane projects as a video game that simulates prom week, determining when dogs became man’s best friend, and other such nonsense. 

 You get the idea. We have a Federal government bureaucracy that is out of control when it comes to smartly spending our tax dollars. And that out of control spending has resulted in about an $18 TRILLION national debt with nothing to show for it. And we got to $18 TRILLION by wasting money like the following “Wastebook 2015” items: 

 1) According to Coburn’s research, the National Institute of Health’s Center for Alternative and Complimentary Medicine spent $387,000 to study the effects of Swedish massages on rabbits. This is the same government organization that says it does not have a big enough budget for Ebola vaccines but apparently has enough for rabbit massages. 

 2) The Department of Interior spent $10,000 to monitor the growth rate of saltmarsh grass, i.e., the government is paying people to watch grass grow.

3) The National Science Foundation has granted more than $200,000 to a research project that is trying to determine how and why Wikipedia is sexist. 

 4) At a cost of $371,026 the National Institute of Health funded a study to see if mothers love dogs as much as they love kids. 

 5) The Federal government granted $804,254 for the development of a smartphone game called “Kiddio: Food Fight.” The game is intended to teach parents how to convince their children to try and eat new healthier food choices. I guess telling your kids you cannot leave the table until you eat your vegetables is no longer a valid way of child rearing like it was for my mother. 

6) The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided $47,000 for undergraduate classes that teach students about laughing and humor. 

 7) The National Science Foundation spent $856,000 to teach mountain lions how to walk on treadmills as part of a research project whose aim was to better understand mountain lions’ instincts. 

 8) A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that the Federal government has recently paid more $700,000,000 to over 57,000 government employees who have not shown up to work for a variety of reasons. In some cases, workers accused of serious misconduct are reportedly getting paid to stay home and do nothing. The Department of Defense (DOD) has the highest number of paid leaves on record. During the three years that ended in September 2013, DOD put 8,600 employees on leave for one to three months, close to 900 for three months to a full year and 123 employees for more than a year. 

 9) The country that put men on the moon, the United States, no longer has the capability of putting a man into orbit, relying on the Russians to put an American in orbit at the outrageous cost of $70 million per astronaut per trip. Once up in space at the International Space Station, more money is wasted on such idiotic projects as the design and creation of better golf clubs. 

 10) The Coast Guard has reduced its focus and resources on drug and migrant interdictions and but now offers free patrols for private yacht parties. 

 11) The IRS has mistakenly given over $4 billion to identity thieves across the country since it was too incompetent to identify thousands and thousands of bogus tax returns. 

 12) The Federal government spent $331,000 to see if people would stab voodoo dolls when angry and hungry at the same time. 

 13) That same government spent $171,000 to study the gambling habits of monkeys, finding out that monkeys share “our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks,” a completely useless finding for every single American. 

 14) Coburn said that the Defense Department has budgeted $80 million over four years to build a Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, and is spending some of that taxpayer money collaborating with Hollywood costume designers along the way. No use having a Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit if it does not look cool. As if $80 million was not enough to waste, Coburn’s research cited one industry source that estimates that $1 billion would eventually be needed to build just a single prototype. 

 15) The report estimated the annual level of waste related to food stamp fraud at about $3 billion. 

 16) In 2012, the State Department funded a gathering of world musicians from around the world in Florida, where they participated in a flash mob. 

 Unbelievable. Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted every year for nothing in return. Millions of Americans are homeless and hungry but the government spends money on rabbit massages. 

Thousands and thousands of veterans are not getting the medical care they need but the government spends money the gambling habits of monkeys. 

 Tens of millions of Americans cannot afford health insurance or health care but the government spends money on voodoo doll research. 

 Millions of Americans are fighting destructive addictions to tobacco, alcohol, and drugs but the government spends money on treadmill walking lions. 

 Pathetic leadership from the American political class. Especially from Obama who apparently has broken another campaign promise when he promised to go through the Federal government “line-by-line” to weed out waste. 

 So the next time a politician or a big government loving friend says that taxes need to be raised to fund essential government work, ask him how the massaged rabbits are making out. Until the Federal government and those that operate it stop the insanity of these types of spending, no American should pay one cent more in any kind of taxes. 

 Step 1 From “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” was custom made for this tragedy. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for fives years. This approach would bring the Federal government spending in line with its tax revenue stream, it would result in focusing the government on just essential projects since it would not have the budget to do these kinds of frivolous projects, and it would help out those in our society that really need the help vs. the well connected that really need nothing, including our tax dollars.

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

Part 2, Update On Our Lost War On Drugs: Corrupted Banks, Wisconsin Pot Fields, and More

Yesterday was the first of two posts on our update on the losing war on drugs that the Federal government has been fruitlessly waging since Nixon was in office. We reviewed how innocent Mexican citizens were being killed or their lives ruined by the powerful Mexican drug cartels along with the recent death of a U.S. Coast Guard sailor who was working on drug interdiction duty off the coast of California. We also reviewed how two former Presidents, Carter and Clinton, have come to the realization that our war on drugs has been a losing proposition, wasting trillions of dollars with minimal benefits.

So what did we not get to cover yesterday:

1) We promised to show how our failed war on drugs would impact our national security at some point in time. Consider the recent words publicly spoken by Hillary Clinton at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 30:

“We already know very well that the Iranian regime already exports terrorism, not only to Israel’s doorstep, but across the world. If we had a map I could put up there, I could show you what we track and plot on that map. The evidence of terrorism, mostly, thankfully, plots foiled or unsuccessful, unfortunately, as in Bulgaria, some that succeeded,. But those plots, those activities of Iran directly or through their agents, stretches from Mexico to Thailand.”

Mexico. Remember that we already have had a potential terror attack via Mexican drug cartels in the recent past when the Iranians tried to utilize the drug cartels’ network in the U.S. to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Given the power and reach of the cartels, the hatred the Iranians have for us, and the wealth the Iranians could probably put together for the cartels’ cooperation, the fact that our Secretary of State publicly acknowledges that the link exists between Mexico and Iran exists should scare all of us.

2) But the Secretary of State is not the only government official to worry about this potentially violent link. Congresswoman Sue Myrick, R-N.C., was interviewed on WABC Radio in New York City on November 29, 2012. In that interview she stated that she believes it’s possible that Hezbollah, the radical terrorist organization tied to Iran, may be working with Mexican cartels to funnel not only drugs, but also terrorist agents into the U.S.:

• “Former [Defense Intelligence Agency] people and others have told me what is going on, there have been a couple of arrests in this country relative to people who have had ties to Hezbollah or Iran, and my concern has been with the drug cartels and the gangs that are operating in Mexico. There is, what I have been told, a very strong presence there of coordination between the two.”
• She went on to state that she shared her concern with the Obama administration and wanted to know what was being done at the Mexican border to thwart such smuggling of terrorist agents. She came away with little confidence that anything was being done.

For more details on what is potentially happening relative to terrorists' links to the drug cartels, visit the following two websites:

http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/20/mexico-disputes-house-gop-report-alleging-terrorists-ties-with-drug-cartels/

http://cognitionemission.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/cartels-%E2%99%A5-terrorists/

The first site contains details of a House of Representatives investigative report that highlights the potential and dangerous relationship between the cartels and terrorism. The second site is an extensive historical review of Mexico's ties to terrorism entities. It is well sourced and if even ten percent of what it claims is true, the implications could be a disaster relative to the safety of Americans right here at homnd

3) HSBC is a British bank and one of the largest banks in the world. Which makes the following news really scary in that the cartels’ reach has gotten that deeply into the world of banking and high finance. A CBS News report from December 11, 2012, along with other credible news sources reported that:

• HSBC has admitted that it laundered more than $800 million for Mexican drug cartels, and covered up illegal transactions for Burma, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and Libya, all of whom were under international banking sanctions including terrorism.
• The bank will pay a $1.9 billion fine to the U.S. government.
• According to CBS News, in eighty pages of court documents, HSBC admits to sometimes going out of its way to act as a financial clearing house for drug dealers and cartels.
• One of the U.S. Attorneys working the case, Loretta Lynch, stated in the report that the government investigation revealed that staggering amounts of cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars were being deposited daily into HSBC Mexican bank locations using boxes specially made to fit through HSBC tellers' windows to speed the cartel transactions.
• While no one went to jail from HSBC for the money laundering, a fact that the bank admits to, they have cleaned house of many executives who should have been aware and stopped the laundering.
• HSBC will now be monitored by a Federal monitor to ensure this does not happen again.

This is not a two bit bank in the deserts of Mexico. This is a premier, major international banking company that should have known better. But given the wealth and reach of the drug cartels, based on their lucrative trade in illegal drugs, it should not come as any surprise that they were able to manipulate a major bank to launder their money.

This also brings up a related assertion that we have made many times in this blog. We have observed that very few in the U.S. banking industry have been arrested, prosecuted, or jailed as a result of the hanky-panky that went on and which contributed to the Great Recession, e.g. sub-prime lending.

Given that no one went to jail for causing the greatest economic meltdown in this country since the Depression, I guess it is not surprising that no banker went to jail for aiding and abetting the drug cartels and other rogue nations.

4) An article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that was reprinted in the November 18, 2012 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, showed how deeply the cartels have moved their production of marijuana into U.S. Borders.

According to the article:

• Heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers are using the only national forest in Wisconsin to grow thousands and thousands of marijuana plants.
• The value of their Wisconsin pot farms are in the millions of dollars.
• Once they harvest their crops they leave behind a blighted area of garbage, animal carcasses, and dangerous pesticides and herbicides.
• The police have made a number of arrests in this area with all of the arrested suspects being almost all Mexican citizens (far away from Mexico, in Wisconsin, close to the Canadian border) and have confiscated numerous weapons including handguns, AK 47s, and powerful rifles.
• Since 2008, Wisconsin authorities have found 11 major pot growing areas but believe this is just the tip of the iceberg relative to the total number of Mexican operated pot farms in Wisconsin.
• The ecologic damage has been extensive since the pot growers cut down hundreds of trees to provide sunlight to the pot plants, sunlight that damages the ecology of the fishing environment in the numerous Wisconsin streams.
• The cartels chose Wisconsin because of the remote areas for growing and the fact that the Wisconsin grown pot can be easily shipped to large Midwest cities like Chicago and Detroit, saving the cartels the transportation costs of ship Mexican grown pot all the way from Mexico to the upper Midwest.

Scary stuff. If the cartels can get workers and farmer implements up to Wisconsin to set up pot harvesting operations, you can see how easy it would be for them to sneak a fewer Islamic terrorists across the border and get them into any area of the United States.

The other scary aspect of this operation is the safety of Wisconsin citizens who are enjoying the outdoors. It is not too hard to imagine a hiker, a fisherman, or hunter stumbling across a pot farm in the Wisconsin wilderness. Combine their discovery with cartel employees armed with AK47s and the potential for death and injury of innocents is highly likely.

5) It certainly is a lost war. Big banks laundering cartel money, cartels possibly involved with terrorism entities, cartel’s invading areas deep in America’s heartland to operate multimillion dollar pot farms, cartels endangering the lives of innocent citizens, etc. The cartels have won the war on drugs so far. They have creatively fed a demand and became rich and very powerful in the process.

But there are a few hopeful signs around the country that promise to look at the lost war on drugs and take a different, more rational path. Washington state and Colorado voters recently passed referendums that relax the laws regarding marijuana and its legalization.

According to a Reason magazine article from November 14, 2012, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts politicians are in various stages of launching drives to relax or legalize the use of marijuana in their states also.

It seems that some sanity is prevailing at the state government levels where local politicians realize that 1) some Americans will continue to get high, regardless of who supplies them the illegal drugs, 2) continuing to focus anti-drug resources on enforcement and imprisonment is costly and has done nothing to reduce the demand and addiction levels, and 3) continuing to make the use of drugs illegal introduces all kinds of criminal elements into the community.

Unfortunately, this sanity has not reached the Federal government level where the Washington political class continues to wage a lost war, a war that wastes taxpayer wealth, does not help citizens with their addiction problems, does not keep our borders secure, does not protect us from foreign terrorism elements, and enriches the cartels while weakening governments.

It should be very interesting when state level sanity collides with Federal level insanity relative to the war on drugs. We would suggest that the Washington politicians read Step 26 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” Step 26 provides a rational and intelligent process for putting together a compassionate, effective, and less costly strategy when it comes to drug use and addiction.

If we do not eventually get this problem under control and move away from an ineffective and liberty reducing war on drugs, I fear the prediction of William Simpson will eventually come to past: “What are the politicians going to tell the people when the Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?”

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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Part 1: Update On Our Lost War On Drugs: Innocents Die, Presidents Admit The War is A Lost Cause, Trillions Of Dollars Wasted

On a regular basis we do a summary of the latest defeats in our nation’s never-ending, never winning, always expensive war on drugs. This ill fated government approach has been going on for over four decades and has done nothing but waste taxpayer wealth, ruined citizens lives by putting them in prison for petty law breaking of petty drug laws and by not providing enough addiction remedy support, enriched Mexican drug cartels, and encroached on our liberty and privacy.

And even scarier, as you will see, this lost effort may now be turning into a major national security issue. So, what has been going on since we last checked in:

1) A December 2, 2012 NewsMax article, reporting on a U.S. News and World Report article, discussed the lost war on drugs in light of a new documentary coming out soon, “Breaking The Taboo.” The documentary tries to make the case that we have tried to make many times in that the war on drugs has been a failure. The details of the article and the film trailer for the documentary can be found at:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/clinton-carter-war-drugs/2012/12/03/id/466311?s=al&promo_code=10F70-1

Information from the article and the trailer include the following:

• Since the U.S. government declared war on drugs during the Nixon administration, U.S. taxpayers has paid about $2.5 TRILLION of their wealth to lose this war.
• The worldwide market for illegal drugs, despite a forty year war and effort to stop illegal drug usage, is a whopping $320 billion a year.
• Over the past few years, tens of thousands of innocent Mexican citizens have been killed as a result of our war on drugs, caught in the cross fire of well armed, well financed drug cartels and Mexican anti-drug authorities.
• The trailer claims that after all of these war efforts, illegal drugs today are purer, cheaper, and more widely available than ever before.
• Even two Presidential supporters of the war on drugs, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, are quoted in the documentary that this effort is a failure.
• "If all you do is try to find a police or military solution to the problem, a lot of people die and it doesn't solve the problem, It hasn't worked," says Bill Clinton in the documentary.
• "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," as written by Jimmy Carter on the film's website.

Is there a way out of this mess, a lost war that has continued unabated under the Obama administration? One solution might be to examine what happened in Portugal when it decriminalized drug possession. Usage went down, treatment went up, and personal freedoms and privacy no longer got abused as much. Details on how and why their more humane approach and coherent approach to drug use and addiction can be found in many sources including the following Time magazine article:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

2) You probably have never heard of Eugenio Velazquez so let me give you some background on him, as described in a December 9, 2012 Associated press news article:

• He is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico, having been born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico.
• He lives in a modest, suburban San Diego neighborhood but travels frequently to the border town of Tijuana, Mexico.
• He has had an outstanding and famous career designing some of the Mexican border city's most prominent buildings over the past ten years or so including Tijuana’s new main cathedral, an expansion of the Tijuana Cultural Center, and the town’s police headquarters.
• He is also a college professor and a devoted Catholic who has designed more than 400 residential, commercial and religious projects during a 30-year career that includes a position as president of the Tijuana Architects Association.
• His works range from plain, functional industrial parks for multinational corporations to some of the city's most recognized landmarks.
• A Tijuana newspaper named him as its Cultural Person of the Year in 2008.
• That same year, the Tijuana Cultural Center opened "El Cubo," or "The Cube," his $9-million, burnt-sienna structure that stands next to a distinctive globe-shaped building and provides enough space for large art exhibitions.

Quite a resume but now he may be more well known for his impending prison sentence then his design work. According to the article, Velazquez, was to be sentenced to prison last month in San Diego for an attempt to smuggle 12.8 pounds of cocaine into the U.S. in a special traffic lane for prescreened, trusted motorists. A drug-sniffing dog alerted inspectors to five packages hidden in the battery of his 2004 Nissan Quest at San Diego's San Ysidro port of entry.

Why would such a distinguished trusted man do such a foolish thing for such a relatively small amount of illegal drugs? According to his defense attorney, he had to do it, smuggle drugs into the U.S. like a common drug mule, at the behest of local drug cartels or the cartels would have gone after his family. In fact, within hours after he was arrested at the border, death threats were telephoned to his home and his wife who fled for their lives to a relative’s house.

Another innocent victim of our failed war on drugs, another life destroyed. Our lost war on drugs has so enriched and empowered the drug cartels that innocent, ordinary citizens are at the mercy of the cartels, do their bidding or be killed or see their family members killed. Your fame, wealth, and previous good deeds cannot protect you from the war on drugs and its fallout.

3) But famous architects are not the only famous Mexican citizens to get caught up in the drug cartel violence. A November 27, 2012 Associated Press article reported a Mexican beauty queen was killed over the previous weekend in a shootout between suspected soldiers and drug traffickers who likely used the beauty queen as a human shield.

Maria Susana Flores Gamez was crowned 2012 Woman of Sinaloa in February. According to reports, she came out of a drug trafficker car first with a gun in her hands during the shootout, with the other gunmen hiding behind her, according to the official from the local Mexican attorney general's office. She died in a hail of bullets during the shootout. It was unknown when the article was written whether she was a member of the drug trafficker ring or a hostage taken captive by them and turned into a human shield.

Unimaginable horror and violence. A young lady, with probably a bright future ahead of her, dies at a young age, gunned down in the street, as a result of well armed drug cartels.

4) But it is not just innocent Mexican citizens and drug cartel members that get killed by our lost war on drugs. According to a December 4, 2012 Associated Press article, a U.S. Coast Guardsman was killed when a suspected drug cartel smuggling boat rammed a Coast Guard inflatable boat during an interdiction off the coast of California. The suspected cartel smuggling boat was tracked for several hours and eventually and successfully boarded, resulting in the arrest of two Mexicans after a brief struggle.

According to the reporting, the drug cartels have resorted to using smuggling boats to deliver their illegal drugs into the U.S. after it became much more difficult to do so over land at the California and Mexican border. Unfortunately, this new tactic resulted in the unnecessary death of a U.S. Coast Guard sailor, another unnecessary fatality in the war on drugs.

That’s enough for today. Innocent and unnecessary loss of life. Presidents admitting that the war on drugs, a war that they once championed, is a lost cause. Wasted lives and taxpayer wealth to no avail or advantage.

Yes, sounds like a typical Federal government operation. More on this ongoing fiasco tomorrow, with a focus on how this lost war on drugs is endangering our homeland security today in a very real way.

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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w