January, 2015, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Congressional Office Egotism, Defense Department Scamming, And More

It is the beginning of both another year and another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. For regular readers of this blog, you know that as 2014 progressed, the insanity, stupid quotes, ineffective governing and legislating, and general incompetence of our politicians seemed to accelerate as the year grinded on. No major issues got addressed, never mind resolved. Obama Care’s implications across the entire country and entire economy continued to unfold in disaster after disaster. Our foreign policy, or what was passed off as a foreign policy, was in tatters. Terrorism was on the march across the world. Veterans were dying because the Federal government could not fulfill the medical and health care promises those brave veterans were promised. The national debt has hit a mind boggling $18 TRILLION.

And our President continued to play golf and go on political campaign swings like no other President ever did. Congress narrowly missed becoming the least productive Congress of all time. Billions were spent and wasted on the November elections to elect people that did not deserve the time of day never mind billions of dollars. Racial division spread across the country, a division that was fomented and spread by those in office with something to gain.

And guess what? Over the next week or so, you will see nothing has changed except the calendar. The political class is still out of control, the government entities that they rule over are bloated and ineffective, and the quality of life and freedom in this country continues to deteriorate. Hang on, it is going to be a bumpy next seven days or so.

1) We have often reported on how the Defense Department is not only one of the Federal government’s largest expense line but also the most bloated and out of control. Government auditors have actually given up trying to audit how the Pentagon spends taxpayer money, the accounting systems and spending controls are that much of a mess.

As an example of this wasteful and disgraceful abuse of taxpayer wealth, consider a recent example of a rare instance when an abuser of Pentagon funds actually got caught:

• A former CEO of a defense contracting company (Protection Strategies, Inc.), Keith Hedman, is being forced to pay back $4.5 million as a result of his creating fake companies to take advantage of a special category of small business contracts.
• Apparently, he named an African-American female president as CEO in order for to qualify for contracts through the Small Business Administration's Section 8(a) program.
• When that person left the company in 20013, cancelling the access to the Section 8(a) funding, he created a brand new company called Security Assistance Corporation (SAC) and picked a female employee with a Portuguese background to lead the company in order to get him access to Section 8(a) funding again.
• Over the next eight years, Hedman illegally ran SAC behind the scenes and the company collected $31 million from the section 8(a) program.
• It is alleged that Hedman also bribed a regional director of the Federal Protective Service to keep the scam alive.
• Hedman was eventually sentenced to six years in jail in criminal proceedings and under a civil suit he has agreed to return $6.1 million from the illegally received contracts, pay a $15,000 find, and will face probation for two years after his sentence ends.

This is obviously a success story. The problem here is twofold: 1) why did it take eight years to finally figure out that Hedman was scamming the American taxpayer, and 2) how many thousands of other Hedman’s are out there running similar Defense Department scams that are likely never to be uncovered or the taxpayer wealth returned.

2) People elected to Congress are supposed to be public servants. They should be in office to serve and protect citizens and their freedom and wealth. They should not be in the business in order to enrich themselves or their egos while in D.C.

They should be all of these things but …they are not. Taxpayers are about to get hit with a very large bill just to shuffle the new members of Congress into ego driven bigger and/or better Congressional offices. According to an article written by Kate Scanlon on December 26, 2014 for the Heritage Foundation:

• “Your member of Congress might get a nicer office for the next session, but you will foot the bill for his or her move,” according to Ms. Scanlon.
• At the onset of each new Congressional session, newly elected politicians participate in a lottery for offices suites for themselves and their staff.
• Incumbent members often try to leave the offices they got in a previous lottery to get larger, nicer offices or locations closer to the House or Senate floor.
• Additionally, this year, with control of the Senate changing hands, Republican committee staffers and their Democratic counterparts are needlessly trading quarters as well.
• NBC Washington reports that in the 2012 Congressional office shuffle and swaps, an obscene 254 members of Congress moved into new office suites, costing taxpayers $1.5 million.
• The 2014 move, according to NBC Washington, “will require Capitol work crews to shift furniture, furnishings, boxes and electronics between hundreds of rooms and cubicles.”

Such egotism is obscene and disgusting. Being in a better or bigger office is certainly not going to make a politician more productive and more useful, it only feeds a self gratifying need to be important. This multi-million dollar, unnecessary expense does not feed or shelter the homeless, treat the drug addicted, retrain the unemployed, or treat the lagging medical needs of our veterans.

There should be a rule: once you are settled into a Congressional office in Washington, that office is yours until you are no longer in office. Moving to another office for the sake of moving another office is not a valid government expense.

If you do not like the size of your office, quit your Congressional position and go get a job where the office is what you want, do not make the taxpayers pay for your office ego. But we should not be surprised. The current members of the American political class are in it for themselves, this is just an example of their “me first” mentality, its only taxpayer money that is being wasted.

3) A December 19, 2014 article on the www.cnsnews.com website by Melanie Hunter discussed the fact that the Federal government had funded a research study to study transgender mortality. Details of this wasteful spending include the following:

• The study cost $189,186 and was given by the National Institutes of Health to Emory University.
• The purpose of the study is to research the mortality of transgendered people, using electronic medical records for people who receive care from the Veterans Affairs Administration.
• “The purpose of this study is to determine whether transgender persons defined as those who medically change the gender assigned to them at birth (male to female or female to male) have higher or lower risk of death and certain diseases than men and women that do not consider themselves transgender.”
• Additionally, the goal of the project is to “develop a longitudinal cohort study of the short- and long-term health outcomes among individuals who underwent hormonal and/or surgical gender reassignment interventions.”

Look, I have nothing against transgendered people but with an $18 TRILLION national debt, we as a nation really do not have enough money to spend on such narrowly focused (e.g. only transgendered people who are served by the veterans Administration), practically useless research programs when:

• Tens of millions of Americans will suffer through dementia and Alzheimer’s nightmares in the coming years, dwarfing the number of transgender people, and only those who end up in VA records, that might be served by this study.
• Tens of millions of Americans will suffer through various types of cancer in the coming years, dwarfing the number of transgender people, and only those who end up in VA records, that might be served by this study.
• Millions of American veterans will suffer health issues in the coming years that are not currently being served adequately by the federal government, dwarfing the number of transgender people that might be served by this study.

Now $189,186 is not going to cure dementia, cancer, or heal a lot of veterans. But the Federal government and many of its agencies including the National Institutes of Health, waste tens of billions of dollars every year on these narrow, near useless, and relatively unimportant studies. This type of research that will serve an extremely small percentage of Americans, if any.

Taking these billions of dollars and focusing only on those major ailments of society would be a far better payback for all Americans, including transgender Americans who would also suffer less cancer and dementia type aliments.

So what did we learn from today’s insanity:

1. There are a lot of creative ways to rip off the Defense Department including setting up fake companies with fake minority leadership.
2. Our politicians’ first order of business when a new Congress takes its seats is to ensure that they get the nicest, biggest, and best office space for their egos, the major issue of our times taking a back seat until their office situation is expensively settled.
3. The Federal government continues to waste taxpayer wealth on narrow and near useless health studies (e.g. transgendered people who are also veterans) and under fund and under emphasize health issues (e.g. cancer, dementia, etc.) that will affect tens of millions of Americans going forward.

Incompetence and bad priorities, just another month with the American political class. More insanity to ensue over the next week or so.

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

September, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 7: We Do Not Have A Strategy ...Or Any Competence For That Matter Either

This will be the seventh and final update to our monthly series of political class insanity for this month. Not because I have covered all of the insanity but because it is just too depressing to go on. The overwhelming incompetence and wasteful spending of these politicians can get you very depressed after a while.

Thus, we will finish this month’s update with the following nuggets of idiocy and move onto other topics starting tomorrow. 

1) The fine website, Against Crony Capitalism, had a nice review of how rich American companies are the happy receivers of outsized taxpayer funded subsidies every year. Their review asserts that, on average, each of the largest 100 companies in the country receives $200 million from the US taxpayer, each year. Some more than others of course.

Examples of this crony capitalism from the latest year of data include:

• General Electric - $380 million
• General Motors - $370 million (as if the American taxpayer has not already given this company enough money)
• Boeing -$264 million
• Archer Daniels Midland - $174 million
• United Technologies - $160 million
• Others who got free taxpayer money include John Deere, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Walmart, and American Express.

These are multi-billion dollar enterprises, their shareowners should be shouldering these expenses since they are the ones that benefit, not the American taxpayer. Unfortunately, these same companies and their executives contribute heavily to politicians’ election campaign funds so it is not a surprise that they get rewarded for such support.

2) The President stated this past week in a news conference that his administration did not have a strategy for dealing with the ISIS terror threat that is building up in Iraq and Syria. These terrorists are barbarians and a severe threat not only to the U.S. but also to humanity itself. 

According to recent news reports, this growing threat has been well known within this administration and this President for a few years. However, it has done nothing to combat it as the threat has gotten larger and more powerful. So little has been done that the President publicly admitted that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for defeating ISIS.

Despite this lack of focus and a strategy for dealing with this threat, the President did find time two weekends ago to attend multiple fundraisers in New York and Rhode Island and a wedding in that same area. Yes, possibly the biggest terror threat to the country can wait as this President attends what I believe to be the 401st through 403rd political fund raiser of his term in office, far exceeding the number of fund raisers attended by all previous Presidents. Since he has also played more golf while in office since Eisenhower, over fifty years ago, one has to really question the insane priorities of this President.

Since according to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 23% of the electorate think America is heading in the right direction, and 69% think it is on the wrong track, maybe Americans are finally actually questioning his priorities and his insanity.

3) According to a recent article on the Black Community News website, a Pew and USA Today opinion survey of 1,501 adults found that 69% say blacks and whites get along “very well” or “pretty well.” Apparently this finding represents a “modest” drop since 2009.

Thus, this President has failed so much as a leader that the first African American President has somehow managed to slightly degrade race relations in this country, not improve them as he promised. His administration has been divisive rather than inclusive, often using the “race card” for political benefit rather than racial and political harmony. The numbers prove it.

4) Staying with race for a while, according to a Wall Street Journal report that was summarized in the April 4, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, in 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, 8.2% of the Federal government’s Small Business Administration loans went to African-American business people. 

Since then, covering the first five years of the Obama administration, the first Presidential administration headed by an African-American, that percentage has dropped to only 1.7% of Small Business administration loans going to African-American business people in 2013. But the President’s supporters call people like me racist, who have an honestly different of opinion on policy, but ignore the fact that the support for African-American businesses is down almost 80% in just five years under this President. Insane.

5) Anemic economic growth, heavy fighting in the Ukraine, a large and growing terrorism threat from the Middle East, high unemployment, failing public schools, a failed war on drugs, a leaky border and associated illegal immigration crisis, etc. One would hope that all members of the Washington political class would be busting their tails to address and hopefully resolve at least some of these issues.

But seeking hope from these politicians is usually a fruitless search. According to a recent article in Business Week, once Congress returns from its five week summer vacation, The House of Representatives will be in session for only twelve days in September, twelve days in October, and then take off again, returning after the November elections to put in only fifteen more days until the end of the year.

If I counted correctly, over those four months there are 87 days on the calendar that are not weekends or holidays. Thus, despite the major issues facing this country, the House will only be working for 39 of those days or less than half of the working days most Americans will be working, assuming they are lucky enough to have a job. 

For this kind of pitiful dedication to their jobs, these people make more than three times the amount of money that the average household in American earns each year. They also have better benefits and working conditions and can obviously set their own schedules, which they obviously set very light. Pathetic excuse for public servants, no wonder nothing ever gets accomplished in D.C.

6) We will finish up this post and this monthly series update on political class insanity from the wonderful website, Bankrupting America: 

• According to the latest Congressional Budget Office analyses, Federal government debt hit a 64-year high this past fiscal year: “Federal debt held by the public will reach 74 percent of GDP at the end of this fiscal year—more than twice what it was at the end of 2007 and higher than in any year since 1950.” In addition, interest payments on the debt will total more than $799 billion in 2024 or almost $7,000 for every American household. Outrageous and dangerous debt numbers that may never be reached because the economy crashes far before these onerous levels of debt are attained.
• The Federal government announced that the U.S. economy grew at a 4.2% rate in the second quarter, which is good news. The bad news is that this follows a contraction of the economy in the first quarter, making the midyear to date economic growth only 1.05%, still leaving the Obama administration with the worst economic recovery record since World War II.
• In related news, the CBO has halved its 2014 national economic growth estimate down from 3.1% to 1.5%. These numbers continue to confirm that Obama and Congress still have no grasp of economic policy and theory and how to put forth economic polices that foster robust growth.
• Although the rollout of Obama Care was badly botched by both administration employees and contract employees, it turns out that the American taxpayer will be paying for their incompetence. The Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report showing that private contractors associated with and hired for the rollout of Obama Care exceeded their original estimated costs. The new report shows that one-third of the 60 Obama Care contractors examined are set to be overpaid, while seven companies are due to receive more than double their initial estimates.
• Sticking with Obama Care incompetence, Nevada insurance brokers are suing the Nevada Obama Care state health insurance exchange over unpaid Commissions. According to local news accounts: “Nevada’s health insurance exchange faces yet another big lawsuit. Six brokers filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Clark County District Court, seeking class-action status for their claim that the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange and its website contractor, Xerox, have failed to pay commissions on coverage they sold through the exchange’s Nevada Health Link website. Matt Callister, an attorney representing the brokers, said the six are collectively owed ‘a very significant amount well in excess of $200,000.’”

So many failures in so many ways. Crony capitalism, lack of a strategy or ability to think strategically, making race relations worse rather than better, the never ending disasters from Obama Care, skyrocketing national debt, a Congress and White House that take more vacations than deserved, etc. It is insanity, the worst set of politicians operating a broken Federal government at a very high expense with little societal benefit in return. Pathetically insane.

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