June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Bain Capital Is Now Obama's Golf Buddy, The President Gets His Briefings From the Evening news and More

This is our third post this month that looks at the insanity, lunacy, wasteful spending, and pure idiocy of the American political class that has erupted in just the past month or so. The ability of our politicians to come up with ineffective and inefficient programs and policies and to waste away our wealth and our freedoms should never be underestimated. 

The first post in this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-political-class-insanity-part_4.html

1) Although just about every Federal program wastes money, the way that Washington accounts for their spending of that wasted money even manages to undercount the true costs to taxpayers. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, a number of government programs actually cost taxpayers far more than what is shown in official budget figures and results.

For example of how this charade works, consider the skyrocketing student loan aid problem in this country. Some Washington Democrats have introduced legislation to reduce costs for student borrowers. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others, she seems to believe that the Federal government makes a profit from managing its transactions with student borrowers. Thus, student loan rates can be reduced to ease the debt problem without costing taxpayers any money. 

However, the CBO's analysis, using the correct accounting procedures, shows that Federal student loan programs represent subsidies to borrowers and COSTS to taxpayers, not PROFITS as Warren claims under her use of a bogus accounting approach. Applying fair-value accounting acid test to other government programs yields similar results:

• The six largest programs of the Export-Import Bank, which provides loans and loan guarantees to U.S. exporters, create $14 billion in savings under normal terms, but in the fair-value analysis, they cost $2 billion. Thus, the cost to taxpayers looks eight times better when the wrong accounting procedures are used.
• The Federal Housing Administration's single-family mortgage guarantee program for low-income families is credited with budgetary savings of $63 billion, but it really costs taxpayers $30 billion when accounted for properly.

Thus, even when they, our politicians, are costing us billions and billions of dollars for faulty and inefficient programs, they are undercounting the losses. Good rule of thumb: Never believe what a politician or government bureaucrat tells you when discussing costs and budgets unless you truly know the right way to do accounting for the program. It is a pretty safe bet that those responsible for their pet government programs are going to skew the accounting results to their benefit, not the taxpayer’s reality.

2) While recently appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” conservative columnist George Will discussed why the current government is so difficult to manage, namely it is “too big for meaningful oversight and effective management.” The lack of efficiency shouldn’t shock Americans:

But why are we surprised the government that runs the Post Office badly and runs Amtrak badly can’t run a health care system? Delivering a postcard from A to B or a passenger from point A to point B is a lot simpler than delivering health care. So, we shouldn’t be surprised by this.

We totally agree with Mr. Will regarding the obesity of the Federal government, with our comparison of likening the overgrown and obese Federal government bureaucracy to Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies: an overblown, overweight behemoth that is slow, mean, and a hoarder of resources but providing nothing positive to society in return.

You’d think the government would be able to handle something so easy as the postal system or a train network, but it has proven time and again that it cannot do either efficiently or effectively despite having been at those tasks for centuries or decades. Why should we trust a government like that with something so precious as our health care?

3) Hypocrisy alert. Back in the 2012 Presidential election campaign, Obama, Harry Reid, and other Democrats tried to demonize Mitt Romney and his association with Bain Capital, a financial firm that Romney used to run. Seems that Bain had the audacity to give money to Democratic political opponents and thus, incur the wrath and venom of election year politics and being depicted as the worse aspect of Republicans and our election system.

Fast forward to the last weekend in May, 2014: guess who Barack Obama played golf with over the last May weekend? Not only did Obama play golf at an exclusive Robert Trent Golf Club over the weekend, one of the people in his foursome was none other than a lobbyist for Bain Capital named Joe O’Neil. Those people at Bain that were so evail less than two years ago are now golf partners with the President, a President who falsely promised to stay clear of all lobbyists in his ill-fated “most transparent administration of all time” campaign promise.

As with government budget numbers, trust no one who has the word “politician” on their resume.

4) Getting back to the Post Office and its inefficiencies, consider a recent Inspector General report on the Post Offic. The report found that while the Postal Service pays its hauling contractors and truckers for fuel based on the miles they must drive to deliver the mail, the contractors' trucks are actually more fuel-efficient than what the Postal Service calculates the fuel payments for.

According to the Inspector General report, when estimating vehicle miles-per-gallon, the Postal Service uses a rate as much as 2.2 miles lower than the industry hauling and trucking average. This results in the Postal Service paying for more fuel than what the hauling contractors actually use, to the tune of almost $100 million a year. According to the Inspector General's report: "This can create an environment for fraud, waste, and abuse. The risk is that suppliers may use excess gallons for non-Postal Service operations, which is prohibited." 

Again, the Post Office has been around for a long time. Wouldn’t one think that it would know how to run an efficient and cost effective operation by now and not have to have its failures identified in a separate Inspector General report? If they do not know the reality of their own industry, it is no wonder that they are on target to lose almost $2 billion this year alone, a loss that will somehow be eventually dumped onto the American taxpayer. 

That lost of $2 billion could have been easily reduced by 5% if they just knew the reality of their trucking and hauling processes. But knowing reality has never been a strong suit of the Federal government or the politicians that run it.

5) You know we are really in bad shape as a country when we have to ask the question: relative to the major scandals of this Presidential administration, is the President ignorant of life and reality or is he a liar? We make this discouraging type of statement since it appears that this President finds out about the major issues and scandals of our time by watching the evening news on television. 

Is he really that out of touc and ignorant that television news is his primary source of what is happening around the country and the world? Or is he so incompetent and unable to address those issues and scandals that he disavows any knowledge of them, lying, until they explode into the national view? 

Are we to believe that with the large and well paid (or overpaid) staff at the White House that no one had the guts, the ability, or the face time to maybe give the President a heads up on such major issues as Fast and Furious, the IRS shredding the First Amendment rights of Obama’s political adversaries, the NSA spying, the disgraceful treatment of our veterans, etc.?

Consider the following set of video clips which seem to prove that we are living through the most disconnected, oblivious Presidential administration of all time:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/president-nothing-phony-anger-act/

If the President does not take the time to understand or does not have the ability to comprehend these major issues until he watches television, then it would be impossible for him to understand and take action to reform the workings of the Federal government. This is a government that probably wastes more than a TRILLION dollars a year through duplication, ineffectiveness, and outright criminal fraud. 

Or maybe those issues have not yet come to his attention because CNN has not had a news story on them yet. Lying or ignorant, you decide, but either option is certainly an embarrassing trait for the President of the United States.

So what did we learn today? We learned that the government uses faulty accounting, it operates a faulty train system, it operates a faulty postal system, if operates a faulty Presidential briefing system, relying instead on the evening news to brief the President, and Bain Capital and its lobbying money is back in good graces with this administration. 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Government Out Of Control, Democracy in Free Fall

Okay, you may have thought that the past six posts were the end of the bad news coming out of the Federal government and the American political class. After all, after four days of reviewing the idiocy and insanity from our politicians and following that up with two posts reviewing the dire economic condition the political class has led us into would seem to cover all of the insanity.

However, that is an erroneous assumption. Today, we will be covering the distressing trend of government getting totally out of control, so large and cumbersome that it is endangering our democracy and freedoms. Rather than a supportive government that protects and serves citizens, we have a government structure that is evolving, rather quickly, into an oppressive, unaccountable, overbearing bureaucracy that makes Jabba the Hutt look efficient and benevolent.

But before we examine this loss of liberty let’s review how a democracy is supposed to work:

• Citizens elect politicians that are supposed to go to Washington to look after our interests and wealth that we pass to them as taxes.
• They develop laws and legislation to implement procedures and programs for the good of the people.
• Staff and organizations in the executive wing of the Federal government then implement the wishes and output of Congress and the President.
• Those staffs, organizations, and their actions should be accountable to sitting politicians who are accountable to the citizens.

This simple concept was illustrated pictorially in the following blog post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-freedom-pyramid-where-it-is-and.html

But this concept of liberty, elections, and most importantly, accountability, has been perverted and undermined in so many ways:

1) A recent Congressional meeting was held by the Subcommittee on Aviation, which is a part of the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (TIC). Obviously, they have some responsibility for aviation in this country, a responsibility that would logically put them in partnership with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The subcommittee extended an open invitation to the head of the TSA to attend the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how best to improve the nation’s airport passenger security system through common sense solutions:

The purpose of this hearing is to examine the impact that the regulations and policies of the Transportation Security Administration have on aviation passenger experience and the free flow of aviation commerce. The subcommittee will hear from government, industry, and labor witnesses on their observations and suggestions on TSA’s policies.

Sounds like a good idea, Congress trying to make informed decisions on how to better protect and serve the American traveling public. And it is certainly needed since the history of the TSA serving American citizens has been one of incompetence and violations of Americans’ personal space and bodies.

This does not appear to be a confrontational Congressional hearing. There does not appear like it was a political witch hunt. It was for information gathering purposes. But the head of the TSA that received the invitation told the Congressional subcommittee to take a hike. This is a Congressional transportation committee asking for the help of a major government transportation entity to help Americans and the head of that entity said no way:

By U.S. House of Representatives rules which state that the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has no jurisdiction over the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), no representative from TSA will be present at the Subcommittee on Aviation hearing scheduled for Nov. 29.

When a government bureaucrat can tell an elected representative, who is only looking for that bureaucrat’s help and insights to serve America, then we see our first example of government out of control and running wild.

2) One of the most frightening aspects of Obama Care is the implementation of a new Federal government panel of unelected fifteen people that will decide the who, what, and when of medical care in this country. The Independent Payment Advisory Board of Obama Care, or IPAB, has the task of achieving specified savings in Medicare without, theoretically, affecting coverage or quality.

Under current laws, changes to Medicare payment rates and program rules are recommended by MedPac, a current advisory board, but require an act of Congress to take effect. The new system grants IPAB the authority to make changes to the Medicare program with Congress being given the power to overrule the agency's decisions through supermajority vote.

If at any time the head actuary of Medicare estimates that a preset Medicare budget target will be missed, this IPAB board of fifteen then puts together a plan so that the financial targets are actually met by lower Medicare spending processes. If the actuary decides that this plan does not meet the financial targets, the Health and Human Services department of the Federal government then steps in and makes the necessary Medicare expense, and service cuts. Congress, our elected representatives get involved only if they can put together a supermajority of votes to override the IPAB or Health and Human Services.

Given that the U.S. Senate is so incompetent that it has not even figured out how to pass a simple budget over the past three years, it is highly, highly unlikely that Congress would ever get its act together to accurately manage Medicare costs. Which leaves the decisions on who, when, and where Americans do or do not get Medicare funding for their aliments to 15 faceless bureaucrats or the faceless hulking bureaucracy known as Health and Human Services.

When the precursor to Obama Care was implemented in Massachusetts, very quickly it became apparent that financial budgets and targets were not going to be hit. At that point, the people responsible for the program’s financials in Massachusetts starting cutting services and coverages, e.g. taking dental care out of the program.

You can safely bet the same thing will happen with Obama Care since this inadequate piece of legislation never addressed the underlying root causes of high health care costs. Congress will never get its act together and at some point, fifteen people you will never likely meet or possibly never know their names will decide whether you will get funding for your health problems, hardly a way to run a democracy.

3) Many times in this blog we have already covered the fact that Obama’s financial industry reform legislation, the Dodd-Frank Act, has already proven to be a failure and will continue to be a failure going forward. The legislation failed to identify the collapse of the financial firm, MF Global, like it was supposed to do, and does nothing relative to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two main culprits in the Great Recession.

And according to a recent article by George Will in the Washington Post, that was summarized in the November 30, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, the third component of failure and overreaching government power is about to crash down on us. According to Mr. Will, the Dodd-Frank law created a monster bureaucracy called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): “ (the CFPB) is a dangerous new bureaucracy answerable to no one” and “makes a mockery of Congress’s Constitutional powers by being unfettered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789.”

This bureau will be embedded inside the Federal Reserve Board’s organization, which will provide the funding for its existence. Thus, much like its larger home organization, the budget and workings of this new bureaucracy will be clouded in secrecy and darkness, two aspects that should never be allowed to happen in a democracy. Will makes the following cogent, and chilling, points in his article:

• The 2012 official budget for the organization contained a request for $130 million for unspecified “other services,” a huge chunk of money that could easily be abused and wasted or used as a slush fund.
• The new bureau can arbitrarily impose new rules and regulations on the banking and financial industry without public hearings, debate, and Congressional action or legal recourse by the firms and citizens affected.
• The original law creating the bureau enables unspecified, unnamed, and “unaccountable experts” to develop these new protection laws and regulations but the law provides minimal guidance and restrictions on what these experts can arbitrarily pronounce and implement.
• According to Will: “By creating a CFPB that floats above the Constitution’s tripartite design of government, Congress did not merely degrade itself, it injured all Americans.”

More secrecy, more bureaucracy, and more unaccountability as faceless government workers decree what they want done without discussion, debate, and representation of Americans’ interests at the negotiation table. That is not democracy, that is dictatorship.

4) In these first three examples of government gone wild we can relatively easy see that our elected representatives, namely Congress, are directly being cut out of government actions and decisions, which means we are being cut out of government actions and decisions.

In this next example, we see a massive government bureaucracy at work but in extreme secrecy, even more secret than the previous examples above. In a recent interview by William Binney, a whistleblower of the National Security Agency (NSA), EVERY citizen in the country probably is having their digital life being tracked in detail by the Federal government:

• Mr. Binney asserts in the interview, (http://www.westernjournalism.com/nsa-whistleblower-everyone-in-u-s-under-virtual-surveillance/), that the FBI and NSA are already recording and storing the emails of nearly all U.S. citizens, without warrants or permission.
• This information is being stored in massive, multibillion dollar data centers and can be retrieved at any time regarding any specified citizen.
• While much of this NSA and government data collection and privacy invasion was started during the Bush administration, it is Mr. Binney’s opinion that it has gotten worst and more secretive under the Obama administration.
• From a credibility perspective, the video mentions that Mr. Binney has received the Callaway Award for Civic Courage for his whistleblowing of this privacy invasion by the NSA.

Mr. Binney is not alone at pointing out how mysterious government secrecy organizations are trampling on our privacy, often without us even knowing that the Feds are watching us, and reading our digital communications. Reason magazine reported on some of the same encroachments of freedom in January, 2013 issue:

• U.S law enforcement agencies made 1.5 million requests of citizens’ cell phones records in 2011, or about 4100 requests every day of the year.
• For the most part, under current law, the citizens who had their cell phone records turned over to the government will never know their records were passed along.
• Without warrants, law enforcement and government agencies can now pinpoint your location within several feet using your own cell phone, any time, any day, for any reason.
• Law enforcement is very secretive about these invasions of privacy; the Irvine, California police department guide on these activities state: “never disclose to the media these techniques (tracking people) - especially cell tower tracking.”
• The Iowa fusion center, one of 72 nationwide government intelligence gathering centers, states in its manual: “Do not mention to the public or media the use of cellphone technology or equipment to locate targeted subject.”
• The ACLU interprets these warnings as the following: “We would hate for the public to know how easy it is for us to obtain their personal information. It would be inconvenient if they asked for privacy protections.”

The article goes on with other chilling statistics and trends relative to unfettered government operatives having unfettered access to our digital, and real lives. The article is completely compatible with the accusations made by Mr. Binney.

Very scary stuff. Faceless government employees who can violate our privacy virtually any time they want. Government employees determining what they can do rather than citizens determining what we want to allow government employees to do and to access.

So what did we learn today:

1. At least one government agency, the TSA, can tell our elected representatives in Congress to pound sand and not help them do their jobs.
2. 15 bureaucrats will have final say in your retirement whether or not they will pay for a specific ailment you have, depending on whether the government is hitting a budget number.
3. A new government bureau can decide in secret what fees, rules, and regulations it wants to implement, without oversight from citizens or Congress, on your bank, your credit card provider, etc.
4. And probably worst of all, the government can, and does, snoop and intrude on your privacy, essentially assuming you are guilty until proven innocent, usually without your knowledge and permission.

Yes, we are truly living through a reality where government is out of control, financially, Constitutionally, medically, and secretly, and democracy is in free fall.

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