December, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Hope For The Future Down, Drone Civilian Deaths Up, Household Incomes Down, And More

This is our fourth post this month on the latest lunacy, idiocy and wasteful ways of the American political class. We do this series at the beginning of every month in order to keep track of how screwed up the current set of Americans politicians have become along with the many ways they destroy our wealth, our economy, our freedom, and in the case of Obama Care, our health and very lives. 

We currently leave the Obama Care insanity to a separate set of posts each month since the wreckage that piece of legislation is raining down on the country is too much to include in our regular insanity reviews. This week and last we have dealt with the normal set of ineptness of our politicians, in Washington and elsewhere throughout the land.

Today, will mostly be a quick hit type of post where we do a quick review of many pieces of insanity that speak for themselves, requiring no further explanation or discussion on our part.

1) According to an article from www.Qz.com, that was summarized in the September 17, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, the median income for U.S. households was $51,017 in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This is down a whopping 8.3% from 2007. From previous posts that this is a downward trend, it was not happening only during the Great Recession.

Thus, despite the claims of the Obama administration that the economy is improving, you cannot tell it from how much money an average household is bringing in, the only true measure of how healthy an economy is.

2) According to a recent article from Forbes magazine that was summarized in the November 22, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, between 1995 and 2012, 50 billionaires collected an estimated $11.3 million in Federal government farm subsidies, according to the Enviornmental Working Group. However, very few of them even live on a farm, never mind working on a farm.

This free money comes out to about $226,000 per billionaire, more than the median annual household income of more than four average U.S. households. Now ask yourself: is this the best way to spend over $11 million of taxpayer wealth, giving it to billionaires, or would it have better spent on feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, helping the addicted, or just plain giving it back to the American taxpayer?

3) According to a recent Gallup poll that was reported on by the November 8, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, 52% of Americans believe there is “plenty of opportunity” to get ahead in America. 15 years ago in 1998, that same question found that 81% of Americans believed there was “plenty of opportunity” to get ahead. What a difference in fifteen short years, an almost 36% drop off.

When a country loses hope for the future, than there is no hope for the future. We are getting dangerously close to that tipping point in the history of our country, no thanks to the ineptness of the leadership in the political class.

4) According to the New York Times, as reported in the November 8, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, over the past 10 years, 94% of the large Federal government information technology projects that were undertaken failed miserably, the Standish Group research firm reported. Standish found that more than half of the projects were either delayed, ran over budget, or fell short of user expectations or needs. A whopping 41% failed completely.

The real question is why any American still thinks that the whole Obama Care information systems and website effort will ever work, given this horrid track record of the political class in Washington to accomplish hardly any other substantial Federal government information technology effort. A 6% success rate, a 94% failure rate cannot be viewed in any profession, any human endeavor as something to be proud of.

5) Although Obama may be claiming that the economy is getting better, we already know that is a bogus claim, given how we just discussed the fact that household incomes continue to plummet. We also know that there are over 23 million Americans that are either unemployed or underemployed. Almost 50 million Americans require government food assistance.

Add to those dire numbers the reality, as documented in a recent Business Week article, that in August the U.S. ran a still embarrassingly large monthly total trade deficit of just under $39 billion in August, 2013. One month, we as a country imported about $39 billion more goods and services than we exported. You cannot say the economy is getting healthy when the trade deficits remain so high month over month.

6) The Washington political class has led the country into three military conflicts in the past ten years or so. What has that gotten us besides trillions of dollars in debt, thousands of our military personnel killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands civilians killed or wounded, according to Steve Chapman writing in the Chicago tribune:

• A reinvigorated Al Qaida in Iraq is resulting in 20 Iraqis being killed EVERY DAY.
• In Afghanistan, we are still fighting a fruitless battle against jihadists, the government we support is riddled with corruption, and the Taliban are more than likely to take over again once the western powers withdrawal their military forces in 2014.
• Libya has become a “lawless haven for terrorists," e.g. Benghazi murders.

Senseless waste, useless waste, and inhuman waste.

7) Speaking of waste, consider the damage and wasting of innocent lives that our government’s drone warfare against terrorists has resulted in, according to a report in the May 20, 2013 article in The Week magazine:

• The London based Bureau of Investigative journalism claims its research estimates that U.S. drone attacks have killed more than 800 civilians and nearly 200 children in Pakistan since 2004.
• McClatchy News investigators found that the U.S. claim that it is attacking and killing only Al Qaida fighters and leaders is not true since it found that 482 people killed by U.S. drone attacks in a recent 12 month period were not Al Qaida fighters.
• People in many countries in the Middle East live in daily fear that some unknown, far off American military operator of a dangerous bomb laden drone will unexpectedly wipe out themselves or their friends and family, heightening the stress of just living a normal day and the hatred they have for America.
• They saddest part of this whole killing effort is that even if the Federal government takes out a high profile terror target, that dead target is quickly replaced with another terrorist nut case but the hatred of America has been increased.

Typical government effort: lots of expense, in both blood and money, random successes but systematic failures, and humanity and our homeland defense are worse off.

8) One last bit of insanity for today, an item that proves American politicians are not the only inept rulers in the world. According to a short article in the November, 2013 issue of Reason magazine, government officials in Gothenburg, Sweden have ordered a local nightclub to reduce the volume of music played in the club since the volume was not healthy for the fish kept in the aquarium in the club.

Makes you wonder what the job description read like for the government bureaucrat who actually researched the volume of the nightclub music in order to write the order. If that is what those local taxpayers are spending their taxpayer money on, I would ask for a refund.

That’s it for today. Unfortunately, we are going to need one more day to get all of this month’s insanity covered, it is that bad, thanks to the American 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:

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

Another Lost Week In The Failed "War On Drugs"

More bad news this week in our failed "war on drugs" and with it, increasing danger to our safety and stability as a nation. Today's reports come from both Mexico, the scene of horrific violence and killings over the past few years, and across the ocean to Afghanistan:

- An April 12, 2011 Associated Press report described how 116 bodies were found in a pit in northern Mexico.  All of the dead are believed to have been kidnapped off of buses while traveling on a main highway by drug cartels, murdered and dumped in this mass pit or grave.

A number of distressing things about this incident besides the unnecessary killing of  116 human beings. First, this highway is regularly patrolled by Mexican military forces, just another indication of how brazen the major drug cartels have become in Mexico. Second, one of the captured suspects in this mass killing confessed to witnessing or participating in the killings of over 200 other human beings. Third, Mexican authorities believe that this is a new way for the cartels to forcibly recruit young men into their ranks. Those that refuse to join up are murdered. Finally, this incident took place only 90 miles from the border with Texas.

- An article in the March 18, 2011 issue of The Week magazine reported that Mexican citizen  Marisol Valles Garcia is seeking asylum in the United States. Why is this important? At 20 years old, Ms. Garcia had become the youngest police chief in Mexico when she accepted the post in a border town. This police chief position that had been vacant for over a year since no one was willing to confront the drug cartels that were battling each other and the Mexican authorities for control of the town. After receiving death threats for months after her appointment, she took a five day leave of absence to care for her baby son but rather than return to her job, she crossed the border into the U.S. at El Paso.

- An Associated Press article from April 18, 2011 reported that Afghanistan poppy production was likely to be down slightly this year because of the fighting between NATO and Afghan government forces against the Taliban in the southern part of the country. Poppy production, the basis for heroin, was up in the northern part of the country to partially offset the loss from the south.

As a result of reading this article, I checked some reliable sources on the Web to see if Afghanistan was still the world leader in poppy production, which it apparently is. I was also surprised and a little shocked to find out that about a year ago, according to a Reuters news article, the country was also the top producer of marijuana in the world.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the profit from trafficking in these illicit drugs is used to fund the resources of the Taliban and other terrorists, the very people that are attacking and killing our armed forces personnel. And Afghanistan has attained this leadership position in poppy, heroin, and marijuana in the midst of a raging war. Imagine how much more production be done if the war was not going on and how much more money would go to fund terrorists?

Nasty, nasty stuff. The human toll on this issue is horrific, Murders, kidnappings, intimidation of law enforcement, forced conscription of young Mexican men, addiction, etc. But by not having a sane, compassionate, and effective strategy to dealing with this problem since Nixon declared "war" in the late 1960s, we have now endangered our national security. Well armed and well financed gangs roaming well within range of our borders. Law enforcement officers from Mexico fleeing for their lives. Our armed forces killed with weapons purchased as a result of selling marijuana and heroin to our own citizens.

These disparate events are all tightly related to each other: the thirst for illegal drugs in this country, the source of those drugs in Mexico, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the profits that are used to destabilize Central and South American countries besides Mexico and the profits that are used to kill our soldiers. And the latest wrinkle comes from an article in the March 18, 2011, "Triple Frontier, Brazil - Hotbed of Islamic Militancy."

According to the article, Islamic al-Qaida extremists and other terror groups have set up camp in a remote part of the Brazilian jungle. The article cited Brazilian and U.S. intelligence sources and Wikileaks documents as the basis for the reporting. The article detailed how there were at least 20 high ranking members of al Qaida, Hamas, and Hezbollah at the camp where they are busy raising money and planning attacks on high profile Western targets. The article named the leader of the group, who is originally from Lebanon, is currently a Brazilian citizen, and who is responsible for terror activities in more than twelve countries.

The immediate concerns in Brazil are the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, both of which will be hosted by Brazil. However, the larger, more strategic concern should be our safety here in the United States. Foreign terrorists are no longer separated by the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans from our shores. They now have a foothold in South America and a land bridge from their foothold up through Central America and Mexico to our borders, which we know are still very porous. The sad part is that the drug profits that are funding the weapons that kill our soldiers may eventually fund the weapons that kill our civilians.

And we are supposed to believe that our political class will be able to protect us from this multi-faceted threat? The same political class that could not even develop an one year budget on time? The same political class that allowed SEC employees to search for porn all day on their government job and government computers? The same political class that cannot keep its air traffic controllers awake during an eight hour shift of duty? The same political class that would rather posture and campaign for their re-election than solve any issue facing America? The same political class whose second in command, Vice President Biden, cannot even stay awake during a critical budget summit?

We are in trouble. Doing things they way we always have done them in this area is not going to work, the threats and danger keep growing. That is why Step 26 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so critical to implement. Step 26 would establish a blue ribbon panel of smart Americans, exclusive of the political class and their lobbyist friends, to once and for all accurately address this issue of illegal drugs and put together a strategic plan to address the underlying root causes before it is too late.

Members of this panel would include law enforcement experts from many different agencies, both local, and Federal, military personnel, economists, sociologists, drug treatment experts, medical experts, and others. Others would include experts form other countries who may have tried other approaches to their nation's drug addiction problem. For example, apparently Portugal decriminalized illegal drugs a little while ago which actually resulted in lower illegal drug usage.

One option that must be on the table, an option that the political class would never consider, is the complete legalization or decriminalization of illegal drugs. Americans have proven over the past forty or so years, since Nixon's time, that they will indulge in illegal drug usage. The illegality of this usage has resulted in record profits for drug cartels and foreign terrorists as the "war on drugs" drove up the price of delivering illegal drugs that Americans and others continue to use.

I am not endorsing legalization or decriminalization, I am not an expert in this area, the panel would be. However, the results are clear. Usage of illegal drugs, both in this country and around the world, is unrelenting. The production of the illegal drugs is unrelenting. The distribution of the illegal drugs is unrelenting. Unfortunately, the ever rising record profits from illegal drugs is now a national security issue.

Somebody needs to step up and develop a coherent plan before lost weeks become lost years which eventually become lost freedom from this farce known as the "war on drugs."



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 http://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.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com