February, 2019, Part 12, Political Class Insanity: Corruption In Washington, Corruption and Financial Ruin In Illinois, and Public Defecations Throughout The West

It is 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.

This will be the 12th and last post this month for political class insanity. Trust me, we could have done more. It seems the idiocy, insanity, and ignorance of the American political class at all levels of government is on an upwards trend over the past several months. We could probably rename this blog to “political Class Insanity” and have enough material to support for a long time. But after today, let’s move onto to a few different themes before we return to the insanity early next month.

Let’s get started:

1) We have often made the strong case that at least one state government will go belly up financially in a short time. Usually due to high pension and retirement costs, these states have far more unfunded liabilities looking at them in the coming years than resources and reserves to service those liabilities. The top candidates for bankruptcy look to be California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. 

However, given the following information, I would put Illinois in the lead for this dubious award of being the first state to go bankrupt:

• According to a recent Bloomberg article, the new Illinois governor is supporting the selling of bonds and raising the tax rate to service the state's debt and unfunded liabilities.
• Governor J.B.Pritzker would sell $2 billion in state bonds, change the state’s flat tax income tax structure to a progressive tax rate structure and leverage government assets (e.g.roads, bridges, etc.) to feed needed financial resources into the state government retirement system.
• The hilarious part of this plan is that the state has $134 billion in unfunded liabilities in its pension system and his plan is to sell $2 billion bonds to help offset this deficit, i.e. the bond sale would cover a measly 1.5% of the shortfall.
• The change in the income tax structure would be even more lame, raising about $200 million a year.
• According to the article: “The shortfall built up from years of failing to set aside enough money to cover all the promised benefits, leaving the government facing escalating annual contribution payments. That has left Illinois’s credit rating dangling just one step above junk, lower than any other state, and caused investors to demand large penalties on its bonds.”
• The governor’s plan calls for the money raised to go directly into the pension system for long term use and not be used for short term payouts of the pension liabilities or used for other government purposes as what has happened in the past.

Too little too late, it appears. First of all, the amount of money that could be raised is a fraction of the unfunded liabilities. The cost of issuing bonds that are hovering new junk bond status will be very high given that the investors will want high returns for a risky venture. And raising taxes that are already very high usually results in people leaving a high tax state for a lower taxed state so that raising the income tax rates will likely suppress, not increase, tax revenues.

The cure obviously was not to offer such lucrative pensions and retirement benefits to begin with. But that is how politicians buy votes, offer freebies and worry about paying for those rich benefits down the road. But it looks like Illinois's road is going to end pretty soon, $134 billion in unfunded liabilities will do that to your financial bottom line.

2) Let’s move from financial mismanagement to a more serious topic, treason. It is no secret that many long time government employees, politicians, and operatives were not happy that Donald Trump was elected president. They had a cozy, enriching deal going and they were not happy that an outsider had a high potential of disrupting their cozy arrangements.

Which brings us to a recent NewsMax article:

• Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, was fired by Trump for his shady dealings while the acting director.
• Now McCabe has written a book and is asserting that high ranking officials at the Justice Department had at least discussed removing a legally elected President from office by conspiring with Cabinet officials to invoke the 25th Amendment.
• The 25th Amendment’s intention was to remove a President for not being able to do the job, e.g. for health reasons, not to remove a sitting President because you did not like his policies, policies that would disrupt the corruption and self serving culture that Washington insiders had cultivated over the years.
• Highly respect lawyer and Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, called this effort, if true, a “coup d’etat” and a “grievous offense against the Constitution: ”The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a President being shot and not being able to perform his office. It’s not about the most fundamental disagreements. It’s not about impeachable offenses."
• He went on to say: "That's why you need two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate agreeing, and it has to be on the basis of medical or psychological incapacity, and not on the basis of even the most extreme crimes which there is no evidence were committed. But even if they were, that would not be a basis for invoking the 25th Amendment."

Serious, scary stuff. Washington bureaucrats plotting to overthrow a sitting President who was legally elected because their lives were disrupted. Scary, scary stuff from a freedom and democracy perspective.

3) Okay, back to Illinois, specifically Chicago. Not surprisingly, according to a recent Godfather Politics website story:

• Chicago was recently named the most corrupt city in the country.
• The University of Illinois at Chicago made the pronouncement.
• It gained this dubious title by having the highest number of Federal corruption convictions from 1976 through 2017, 1,731 convictions.
• It beat out LA (1,534 convictions), Manhattan (1,327 convictions), Miami (1,165 convictions), and D.C. (1,159).
• More than 30 Chicago City council members have been linked to corruption cases over this period of time.
• On a statewide basis, the state of Illinois was the third most corrupt state on a per capita basis.

So, Illinois is a state that is not financially corrupted but morally and legally corrupted also.

4) Speaking of corruption, it appears that abusing the 25th Amendment to depose Trump was not the only corruption going on within the FBI over the past couple of years. Newly obtained government documents by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information effort, revealed that the FBI had been in negotiations with the Hillary Clinton campaign to suppress criminality as it related to the misuse to classified information in return for favorable treatment from Clinton's State Department.

Specifically, according to the Daily Wire article on the subject: “The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid pro quo between the State Department and the FBI -- in which the FBI would agree to effectively hide the fact that a Clinton email was classified in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the FBI abroad, and allow them to send more agents to countries where the FBI's access is ordinarily restricted.” In other words, the FBI would cover up Clinton's law breaking if it could get favorable treatment from Clinton’s State Department."

In a specific email exchange disgraced Justice Department Lisa Page, someone who was active with her FBI lover Peter Strzok in trying to discredit Trump, outlined the deal: "As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else."

So corruption at the highest levels of the state government in Illinois and the highest levels of the Federal government in Washington.

5) One last piece of insanity for today and this month. A basic function of government is to protect the welfare, assets, and lives of its citizens. If government did nothing more than that they would be successful and fulfill a basic tenet of government. But apparently that is not happening in some major cities out west:

• According to the Freedom Outpost website, in an article by Michael Snyder, many major western U.S. cities are becoming major health safety hellholes.
• The Los Angeles city hall may have to have all of this carpets ripped out as rats and fleas are running wild in the building.
• The cause of the infestation is believed to be the major homelessness problem that infects the city.
• We have already reported how the infestation is causing a rise in the Medieval disease, typhus.
• The number of homeless people living in LA has been rising about 20% a year, drug abuse is everywhere on the streets, and mountains of trash pervade many city streets, giving rats a fertile breeding ground.
• In Salem, Oregon, officials shut down a disgusting homeless encampment that was a rat breeding ground.
• The city government of Denver just made public defecation and urination legal so that is probably the next city to face a major public health issue.
• Denver also made camping on public and private land without permission legal, panhandling is now legal, and lying across public right of ways like sidewalks is not illegal.
• The most infuriating aspect of the whole Denver debacle is that the mayor explicitly said that these new laws and rules were to protect immigrants from “unintended consequences.” 
• Seriously, what about the “unintended consequences” of the disease and pest infestation that could occur to non-immigrants from these public health hazards that the local politicians have made legal?
• But Denver has a ways to go when it comes to public defecation since in a recent seven day period, the city government of San Francisco received 16.000 complaints about piles of human feces, 16,000 instances in seven days.
• In 2015, there were 60,491 official complaints about public defecation, about 170 companions a day.
• Besides public defecation, you can also legally shoot up drugs in the streets without ramifications, with the city government actually handing out free drug syringes to the tune of 5.8 million in 2018.
• Which has resulted in million of used drug syringes hanging out on the city streets somewhere.
• A visitor recently described what the local politicians in San Francisco had turned the city into: “I found it quite shocking the number of folk sleeping rough on the sidewalks, the smell of weed and drug impedimenta everywhere, the filth, mental illness and degradation on view just a few meters from the financial centre driving Silicon Valley. It’s a city where the destitute seem to have become invisible to the Uber hailing elites. We found ourselves hopping on one of the beautiful F-Route Trolley Buses to find nearly every seat occupied by someone lugging around their worldly possessions around in a plastic bag. It was desperately sad.”

And American politicians have managed to screw things up this badly from a health and homeless perspective in the bright light of a great economy. Can you imagine how bad things will get once the next recession hits?

Sorry the post ran a little long but we wanted to get in the last bits of political class insanity today: politicians destroying the health and wealth of great American cities, Illinois trying hard to be the poster child for economic and financial mismanagement, and corruption at the highest levels of Washington. Lord help us, save us from those that populate an ineffective and vindictive political class.

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