An Open Letter To President Obama: Why Syrian Refugees Over Struggling Americans?

Dear Mr President:

Obviously, the topic of Syria is on everyone’s mind these days including yours. This conflict has caused an unprecedented refugee problem and crisis as untold thousands of people flee the civil war and fighting in Syria.

You have made a commitment of bringing at least 10,000 of these refugees into the United States for settlement. Your passion for doing this deed has led you to insult millions of Americans who are insisting, through their elected officials, that this resettlement be delayed only until America can be convinced that no ISIS terrorists will be embedded in the refugee stream. 

Estimates have been published that the American taxpayer will have to put forth billions of dollars to accomplish this resettlement because of the associated housing, feeding, transportation and other costs of the refugees. You are obviously passionate about this issue. But do you mind if I ask you why you are not as passionate about Americans that are in need and why you are willing to spend billions of dollars for 10,000 foreign strangers while:

• More than 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness each year.
• On a typical night in 2014, more than 578,000 Americans were homeless.
• Nearly 2.3 million American children experienced homelessness in 2013.
• One out of every 30 American children experienced homelessness in 2013.

http://www.studentsagainsthunger.org/page/hhp/overview-homelessness-america

• Between 130,000 and 200,000 armed forces American veterans are homeless at any time.

http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/veterans.html

• The Department of Veterans Affair’s inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records backlogged in the agency's system for managing veterans’ health care needs, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to American veterans who had died months or years in the past before their health care needs were addressed. 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/02/politics/va-inspector-general-report/

• 397,122 orphaned American children are living without permanent families in the U.S. foster care system. 
• 101,666 of these American children are eligible for adoption.
• Nearly 32% of these American children will wait over three years in foster care before being adopted.

http://ccainstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=25&layout=blog&Itemid=43

• According National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System data, 50 States reported a total of 1,484 American children abuse fatalities in 2013.
• This translates to a rate of 2.04 American children per 100,000 children in the general population and an average of four children dying every day from abuse or neglect.

https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/fatality.pdf

• About 45 million Americans are receiving Federal food assistance every month.

http://frac.org/reports-and-resources/snapfood-stamp-monthly-participation-data/#aug

• 2 million injuries and 1,300 American deaths are caused each year as a result of domestic violence.

http://www.clicktoempower.org/domestic-violence-facts

• Over 40,000 Americans die from a drug overdose every year

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.kPd7mzR6.dpbs

• Almost 14 million Americans are currently unemployed because they cannot find a job or are forced to work part time because they cannot find a full time job.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Where was your passion when these millions of Americans were suffering from homelessness, food shortage, domestic violence, and other dangers? How are you able to find money in the Federal budget for 10,000 foreigners and not for these Americans?

And for once, please do not blame someone else for this suffering within our borders. During your administration, easily hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted every year due to government redundancies, wasteful government spending and inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud of government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Maybe if you had spent less time on over 200 golf outings, over 700 political fund raisers and many, many vacations, you could have found the time to tighten up government functions, spending, and operations, and had enough money not only for these refugees but for the rest of those in America that need a helping hand.

Senator Ted Cruz has dared you to return to this country and debate him face-to-face on the issue of increasing security scrutiny and screening. I dare you to look a hungry American child in the face, the widow of a veteran who died waiting for healthcare in the face, a homeless American family in the face and tell them why 10,000 foreigners get more attention, compassion, and monetary support  from you than these struggling Americans do. I dare you.

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

It's Now Official, Part 2: Political Donors More Important Than Constituents

Yesterday we discussed the travesty and disgrace inherent in our political process where Congressional members are spending far more time trying to raise election campaign funds then they are spending on supporting their constituents and doing valid legislative work. The basis of our discussion, a recent Huffington Post article, revealed the formal process that all Congressional members are held to, down to the details of how many hours every day each member is to spend on fund raising (a lot) and non-fund raising activities (not so much).

One would have hoped that members of Congress were dedicating the vast amount of their time and energy to resolving the major issues of our times. That hope, obviously, would be incorrect. Which explains why our lost war on drugs, our failing public schools, our skyrocketing deficit, and other major issues never get resolved.

The article went beyond this exposure of showing that Congressional members are more focused on their political donors than their constituents. When it comes down to Congressional committee and subcommittee posts, one would have hoped that the politicians staffing those positions would be the most qualified and have the most expertise for each committee’s duties.

For example, one would hope that politicians serving on veterans’ affairs committees had some understanding or experience with veterans and the problems they face. Those that sit on banking committees have some kind of finance or banking experience in their background. Same with highway committees, housing committees, etc.

But again, that hope would be dashed. According to the article, the best members matched to the appropriate committees is farthest from the reality of what goes on in Washington. Consider the following insightful quote from the article

“The quality of a committee assignment is directly related to the amount of dues owed, as black-and-white an admission of the connection between fundraising and policy outcomes as can be found.”

This quote and Huffington Post article introduce a process that I was not aware of. They called it a "dues process" and apparently all members of Congress, from both parties, are given monetary targets that they have to hit and raise money that is funneled to the national Republican and Democratic political organizations.

Apparently, making or missing your dues target determines the quality and quantity of Congressional committee assignments a member of Congress can land. It has little to do with someone’s skills, experiences, or education, it all has to do with raising money to meet your dues target.

And these dues target are not trivial. In fact, they are obscenely high, which probably requires sitting politicians to do much more fund raising and hitting up political donors than actually doing their jobs and serving their hometown citizens. A March 11, 2012 Politico article highlighted how obscene these dues targets were for Democrats in 2011 (as you read them, ask yourself how much energy is diverted to these activities vs. problem solving activities):

• Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer - $800,000 each.
• Pelosi was given the additional assignment of raising another $25 million for the party and Hoyer had to find another $2.5 million.
• Assistant Leader Jim Clyburn was to raise $1.5 million.
• John Larson and Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), Xavier Becerra and George Miller (Calif.), and Steve Israel (N.Y.) were expected to give $450,000 apiece OF THEIR OWN MONEY. Which raises the issue of why anyone would want to be a Congressman for an annual salary of $170,00 when in the case of these sitting politicians, according to Politico, they have to put up $450,000 of their own money for dues. Something like corruption smells here in this math.
• DeLauro and Miller were told to raise another $500,000 for the national Democratic Party while Israel has to raise an additional $10 million.
• Vice chairs Joe Crowley (N.Y.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Pedro Pierluisi (P.R.) and Allyson Schwartz (Pa.) were to transfer $300,000 apiece (which I am assuming is also their own money), and their goals for raising money ranged from $300,000 for the latter three to $4 million for Wasserman Schultz and $6 million for Crowley.The lists goes on but you get the idea.

These people are expected to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money and then go out and raise tens of millions of other dollars for their mother ship’s political activities. If successful, they apparently get the plum committee assignments, regardless of their abilities and expertise.

This obviously suboptimal process results in suboptimal legislating. The Huffington Post article discusses this disgrace in detail:

One member of Congress said that the fundraising takes up so much time that members don't even have time to become experts on bills they sponsor. "One thing that's always been striking to me is even the members playing a leading role on specific issues actually could not talk about the issues," said the member, who didn't want to be quoted by name. "They didn't have enough knowledge on their own issues to talk about them at length. I'm probably guilty of that." He recalled one meeting early in his career, where he brought several members together to try to hash out a compromise, just as he had done earlier as a state legislator.

"Staff members were all twitching at the discussion, because their principals were saying things that were just flat-wrong or uninformed or wondering aloud about what the industry practices really were," he recalled. "The staff members of course had a pretty good idea. ... The members were sitting around the table having a remarkably uninformed and unproductive discussion."

Pretty scary stuff that a member of the process thinks that the process results in a remarkably uninformed and unproductive discussion. Which probably led to a remarkably uninformed and unproductive piece of legislation that never resolved the war on drugs failure, the high national debt problem, the lack of a national energy program and strategy, etc.

Members of Congress are so distracted into raising ungodly sums of money that pervert our democracy that they themselves end up being unremarkable, uninformed, and unproductive. When a Democratic Congressman confronted Pelosi in a meeting, stating that the dues process and levels were unreasonable, she simply replied that they were not doing enough to raise money. Never mind that not only are the dues levels unreasonable, the whole process and focus on raising money to the detriment of everything else is an abomination.

As a closing to the today’s and yesterday’s exposure of what really goes on in Washington, think about the image the following describes, in the words of a current Washington politician:

 U.S. Senators do not bother going to their party’s headquarters or the rowhouses near the Capital building to make fund raising calls since it is against the law to make fundraising calls from their offices: “But they [U.S. Senators] go outside and sit in their cars and make calls.

Yes, your U.S. Senators, some of the most powerful people in the country and the world, go sit in their cars and grovel for money from political donors over their cell phones. What an obscene and disgraceful image. Paying dues, raising money. Making calls, raising money. Attending fundraisers, making money. With a little bit of uninformed legislating thrown in. No wonder we are in such sad shape as a country.

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