August, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 6: Hillary The Hoarder, 25 Year Old Pentagon Waste, Dodd-Frank and More

At the beginning of each month we take a week or so to review the latest insanity from the American political class. Insanity from them includes a wide range of very depressing actions which can include wasteful spending, idiotic quotes, an inefficient and ineffective government bureaucracy, failed economic policies, etc. Every month we continue to prove that we are being served by the worst set of politicians ever.

And as you will see, this month’s review and discussions do nothing to prove that this thesis is wrong in any way:

1) Hillary Clinton has popped up a number of times in the past few days of political class insanity so let’s add another piece of insanity to her pile. Consider a recent quote of hers that was printed in the July, 2015 issue of Reason magazine: “I don’t throw anything away. I’m like two steps short of a hoarder.” 

Which is interesting since she has deleted about 30,000 emails from her private computer server in her home so that Congressional investigators could not get access to which were likely embarrassing or criminal emails and documentation. Hoarders do not throw out anything, criminals throw out everything, be it incriminating evidence or incriminating emails.

2) According to an article in the September, 2015 issue of Reason magazine, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 1990 did a study of the armed forces operations. The study concluded that the Department of Defense suffers from “ineffective and inefficient inventory management practices and procedures [and]weaknesses in accurately forecasting the demand for spare parts.” Such ineptness “contributed to the accumulation of billions of dollars in spare parts that are excess to current needs.”

Great, identify a problem and go find a solution that will remedy the problem and save billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer wealth in the process. Simple, right? Twenty five years later, in April, 2015, the GAO went back to the Department of Defense to find out how the solutions they had proposed way back in 1990 were working out. What they found is that there were no solutions and that armed forces inventory management practices are just as bad and just as costly as they were when identified as deficient twenty five years ago.

The 2015 GAO study found that the Air Force alone had “identified about $2.6 billion in inventory that that was retained without proper economic justification and plans to retain it until late 2016.” The Army and Navy had not done any better in the GAO’s analysis. Thus, even when the problem is defined, outlined and solutions recommended, twenty five years later the Washington political class and the government operations it oversees is still unable to function efficiently and effectively, wasting untold tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. 

3) Speaking of incompetence over time, five years ago this past July, the massive Dodd-Frank financial industries reform legislation was passed. It was supposed to stop bad financial services practices in order to prevent another Great Recession from occurring.

Has it worked? Well, we have not had another Great Recession since the legislation was passed so I guess an optimist would say it works. But a realist I think would say we have no idea since according to an article in the July 31, 2015 issue of The Week magazine, at least 20% of the regulations and rules that should have been written to support the legislation have not yet been even written, a whopping five years after the legislation was passed. 

You cannot say you are operating an efficient government entity when five years after the fact you still have not made a law operational. Insanely incompetent.

4) But politicians being insanely incompetent is a genetic trait across the world, not just in the U.S. Consider the sad story of the newly constructed Berlin Brandenburg International airport in Germany, as reported in a recent Business Week Article. The airport was supposed to open in 2012 but three years later:

• It is still not operating.
• The cost of construction has tripled from the original cost estimate.
• Two airport directors, three technical chiefs, architects, and many others have been fired or quit in disgust.
• Even though it is not operational, the German government is spending 16 million Euros a month to keep the facility from falling into disrepair which would cost even more to rehab it in the future.
• Three years ago when they first attempted to open the airport, it failed its fire safety procedures and tests. There was actually a plan, an idiotic plan, to station 800 employees around the airport to sit around all day to smell for fire and smoke. This was their fire safety backup plan. If one of these 800 thought they smelled smoke, they would use their cell phone to notify the authorities that maybe, somewhere there was a fire. You cannot make up this insanity.

Thus, politicians, wherever they are, seem to be just as incompetent but just as adept at wasting taxpayer wealth regardless of the country or project.

5) Democrat Alan Grayson is currently a Florida Congressman. He would like to run for the Senate from Florida in the next election even though the national Democratic Party bosses are supporting another candidate and basically ignoring Grayson. And this is where it gets nutty and insane, considering the recent Grayson quote on why he would be the better candidate: “Frankly, one reason why Democrats are willing to crawl over hot coals naked to vote for me is because I’m willing to tell the truth.”

Again, you cannot make this stuff up. Trust me, nobody is going to crawl over hot coals for any American politician, never mind one from a Florida district. If that was the case, he would not have lost an election a few years ago in his home Congressional district, apparently not enough naked Democrats crawled over hot coals for him in that election. 

Trust me, Mr.Grayson, given the record low approval ratings of Congress, no citizen is crawling over anything for any of you, given the pathetic job of governing you have ALL been doing in Washington. We might want to throw many of you onto the hot coals but we are not crossing them for you. Insanely conceited or pathetically delusional, you decide.

6) Last piece of insanity for today. As most people know, an Islamic domestic terrorist opened fire in Tennessee several weeks ago in an attack on armed forces recruiting locations in Tennessee. This terrorist attack resulted in the deaths of five members of our armed forces. Apparently, two members of our armed forces who were on location, one of whom died in the attack, returned fire on the terrorist in an attempt to protect themselves, their comrades, and others in the line of fire, a perfectly human response.

Which is where the insanity begins, according to a report on the Western Journalism website:

A Navy officer and Marine reportedly returned fire at the shooter who killed five service members in Chattanooga, Tenn., even though current policy does not permit military members to carry firearms on facilities such as those where the attack occurred.

…

The center's commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Timothy White, used his personal firearm to engage the shooter during the attack, according to sources quoted in the Navy Times. A report from the Washington Post said that one of the Marines killed in the shooting might have been carrying a 9 mm Glock and possibly returned fire on Abdulazeez. The Navy officer could face disciplinary action for violating policy about possessing a weapon on the facility that was supposed a gun-free zone.

Are you kidding me? The officer “could face disciplinary action” for protecting himself and others? Maybe if the Department of Defense and Homeland Security were actually doing their jobs and protecting their people properly this officer would not have to do what was necessary to protect himself and others. Insanity.

That will do it for today’s insanity. Gets depressing after a while, doesn’t it? Inept politicians running inept government functions in a wasteful and idiotic manner. And even worse? We are still days away from finishing up this month’s review of political class insanity.

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