September, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 7: Clintons Get Rich Mafia Style and Social Security Still Giving Out Free Money

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is in free fall.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 46 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets
• A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing.

1) Back in the 2012 Presidential elections, Democrats made a big deal out of the reality that Mitt Romney was quite wealthy. Romney had earned his money the hard way via smarts, hard work, and business skill. Despite his honest accrual of millions and millions of dollars, the Democrats and liberals branded him as out of touch and unworthy of being President, simply because he was wealthy.

Which is interesting since the leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, at least for today, given how much she is slipping in the polls, is Hillary Clinton. According to Vox.com, since 2007, Hillary and Bill Clinton have earned $141 million, mostly by running a racketeering operation that involved Hillary dispensing State Department favors at the expense of the American taxpayer and the recipients of those favors paying Bill hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single speech. These earnings had nothing to do with creating value for society and creating jobs for Americans in the process, something Romney did in the course of getting wealthy.

In fact, according to Vox, the Clintons have paid more in taxes since 2007, a period of eight short years, than Republican candidate Jeb Bush made in total income from 1981 to 2013, a period of 32 years. Wonder if the liberals and Democrats will be consistent with Hillary and do what they did to Romney in 2012, assuming that Hillary is still around by election time.

2) We could talk about political class insanity related to the illegal and often unethical dealings of Hillary Clinton but that would probably take weeks and weeks to cover, given that it seems everyday we find that she broke laws and government rules and guidelines in many important ways and areas. But today, let’s just cover a tiny example of the shenanigans and self enrichment that went on while she was in her position as Secretary of State for all it is worth.

The following shenanigans were documented in a Briefing Article in the July 3, 2015 article of The Week magazine:

• In 2005, Bill Clinton and mining powerhouse Frank Giustra took a trip together to the country of Kazakhstan.
• There, the two dined with that country’s dictator President, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
• Within days of that dinner, Giustra acquired uranium mining rights in that country that resulted in a financial windfall for himself.
• In 2006, he donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation.
• Eventually, he sold off his interests in the uranium mines to Russia’s nuclear agency.
• Since the interests included some U.S. uranium mines, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had to sign off and approve the sale, after Giustra had donated $31 million to her foundation, a serious conflict of interest. 
• Although not mentioned in the article, I would bet that somewhere along the line of these transactions Bill Clinton gave a speech for a few hundred thousand dollars.
• In another case of shady dealings, the government of Algeria gave the foundation $500,000. Two serious problems arose as a result of this dealing. First, the donation was never reported which was a condition of Hillary being Obama's Secretary of State. Second, surprise, surprise, shortly after the donation, Algeria was cleared by Hillary’s State Department to receive a 70% boost in U.S. military export authorizations which now included chemical and biological agents.
• And finally, while Secretary of State, Clinton oversaw the approval of $376 BILLION in weapons sales to 20 countries who had donated to her foundation (again, no article mentions of how many speeches Bill gave and was paid for by those twenty donors but odds are it was a lot of them). 
• This level of weapons approvals was 100% higher than what happened during the entire Bush administration.

Shady dealings with shady characters, spreading hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons and likely violence around the world, massive conflicts of interest, faulty bookkeeping, and in general, running a racketeering operation that the Mafia would admire. And she wants to be the next President of the United States. Insane.

3) Ali Meyer, writing for the Free Beacon on August 4, 2015, reported that one of our most inept Federal agencies, the Social Security Administration (SSA), had overpaid some Americans a total of $371.5 million in disability benefits from 2009 through 213, as reported by a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report. Besides being wasteful and unfair to taxpayers, it is especially bad news given the reality that the disability fund is expected to go broke sometime in 2016.

The GAO found that: “During a time of growing concern about the solvency of the DI trust fund, it is important for SSA to take every opportunity to help improve the financial status of the program.”  To do their analysis, the GAO randomly selected 20 disability beneficiaries for review and found that:

• In all 20 cases, SSA’s internal accounting controls and processes failed to detect and prevent over payments. 
• In seven of those 20 cases, SSA did not detect over payments for more than a decade, and each of these individuals received $100,000 in overpaid benefits.
• And for the final insult to taxpayers, one of these seven individuals received benefits in the 1980s and was approved for disability benefits 14 years later in 1994. The GAO found that this individual received $200,000 in over payments for more than 20 years.
• And finally from the “you cannot make this stuff up category," the SSA’s “internal controls” rely on beneficiaries themselves to self-report over payments. In other words, the SSA relies on those bilking they system to tell the SSA that they are bilking the system since the SSA has no clue when it is wrong.

Since the disability insurance program is the nation’s largest cash assistance program for workers with disabilities, the $142 billion it paid out in 2014 makes you wonder how many of those billions and billions of dollars were incorrectly paid out if the small sample of 20 in the GAO study showed EVERY beneficiary was overpaid. 

That will do it for today: billions and billions of dollars lost every year due to the ineptness of the SSA, the Clinton racketeering project, and Hillary making Romney like money with no societal benefit in return. 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