October, 2015, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Epic Co-op Failures

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

A week ago or so we spend several days reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington. I had thought I would not do any more Obama Care stuff until next month but since last week a number disasters from the law have already popped so I decided to cover them today rather than wait until next month:

1) Benjamin Miller is an ordinary American who lives in Indiana. His plight and run-in with the IRA illustrates how inane and stupid the Obama Care legislation is relative to its personal insurance mandate. This part of the bill requires Americans to pay a fine via their IRS tax filings if they did not have health insurance coverage.

Before Obama Care was enacted, Mr. Miller was paying $398 a month for a health insurance plan that he was perfectly happy with. Once the legislation was enacted, the cost of his monthly health insurance premiums jumped over a thousand dollars to a whopping $1,400 month, a more than three fold increase. He decided that $1,400 was more than he could afford and thus, he dropped the insurance policy rather than pay an EXTRA $12,000 a year. 

So then the IRS got involved and send him a bill for $2,344 for not having health insurance coverage as required by Obama Care. He posted the IRS bill on Facebook to prove he was not being deceptive. Accompanying the Facebook post were his comments: “So I chose not to pay $1,400 a month so [I] got a nice little fine. Thanks Obama for the fine for not having insurance … Thanks for the Affordable Care Act. Thanks for making it so affordable!”

This insanity shows why the legislation is so horrible and so little thought was put into it. This American was going through life, very happy with an affordable health insurance plan that suited his needs. The Federal government comes along with Obama Care and says we know best, your insurance costs is going to go up three fold, increase more than a thousand dollars a month for basically the same coverage and if you do not do what we tell you, we will treat you as a criminal and fine you over $2,000, an number that will go up in the future if Mr. Miller does not get insurance coverage.

In either case, he pays an extra $12,000 a year for the same coverage or he pays over $2,000 for the Obama Care fine, that is thousands of dollars that are not being spent to grow the economy. Less dinners out, less movies, less disposable income. 

Is it any wonder the economic recovery that has transpired concurrently with the rollout of Obama Care is probably the weakest recovery ever? Mr. Miller’s saga is being repeated millions of times across the country as Obama Care has caused household insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to skyrocket, putting more money in the coffers of insurance companies and the U.S. Treasury and taking it out of the economy.

2) One reason for doing this bonus post on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care is that at the rate that Obama Care insurance co-ops are failing across the country, they might all be gone by next month. Recall what an Obama Care co-op is:

• A co-op is basically a state based, newly created private insurance company concept that was established via Obama Care.
• The legislation spent $2.4 billion to establish health insurance co-ops in 24 states across the country, supposedly offering affordable health insurance policies to those without insurance coverage.
• The purpose of the co-op was to provide a competitive market place in mostly rural areas where it was felt there would not be enough existing health insurance companies competing to drive down costs.

In our update last week we reported on how four of those co-ops, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, and New York had already gone bankrupt and out of business or had announced they were going out of business because of their failing financial situation.

Well, since then, according to writing by Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation, the number of failed co-ops is now up to six, more than 25% of all co-ops created with taxpayer money, with Kentucky and Tennessee joining the failure parade. Ms. Quinn’s article totalled up the damage and debris so far in Obama Care’s co-op world:

• Tennessee - $73,306,700 received from the American taxpayer, 31,109 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $2,356
• Iowa - $145,312,100 received from the American taxpayer, 91,477 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $1,588
• New York - $265,133,000 received from the American taxpayer, 209,136 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $1,268
• Kentucky - $146,494,772 received from the American taxpayer, 51,655 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $2,836
• Louisiana - $65,790,660 received from the American taxpayer, 16,322 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $4,031
• Iowa - $65,925,396 received from the American taxpayer, 20,578 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $3,204
• Total - $761,962,620 received from the American taxpayer, 420,277 people enrolled,cost per enrollment = $1,813

What a waste of money. Three quarters of a billion dollars wasted for no return. Pretty inefficient process when it costs about $2,000 to sign up a single customer on average. Pathetic execution.

Her article goes on to report more disturbing and depressing results about the co-ops, based on official government documents:

• More than 400,000 Americans now have to go out and somehow find new insurance coverage as a result of these six co-ops failing or face stiff fines like Mr. Miller got hit with.
• 23 out of the 24 original co-ops lost money in 2014.
• 13 of the co-ops signed up significantly fewer customers than forecasted.
• It is unknown if any of the Federal taxpayer money loaned to these failed co-ops would ever be recovered.

What an incredibly poorly thought through process. More than 25% failure rate already, over $700 million likely lost taxpayer wealth, and over 400,000 Americans having their lives inconvenienced and their health coverage endangered. Three disasters at one pop.

3) But since I came across the Heritage Foundation article above, I stumbled across even more bad news from the Obama Care co-op world. According to an article on the Daily Caller website on October 16, 2015, writer Richard Pollock reported that now seven of the co-ops have already closed or announced those closing in the near future. And more importantly, according to a recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, the remaining co-ops are in deep financial trouble and the inspector general expects more to go out of business soon.

But to show you how quickly things are falling apart, just three days later, October 19, 2015, Richard Pollock, also writing for the Daily Caller reported on some startling new developments:

• According to various news reports and Congressional members, the Obama administration is hiding a secret list of 11 Obama Care insurance co-ops that they fear could be the next co-ops to go out of business in addition to the others that have already failed.
• And despite the constantly broken promise of being the “most transparent administration ever,” the Obama administration refuses to release the names of those co-ops in financial trouble despite calls from Congress and news journalists to do so.
• Even worse, Mr. Pollock claims that the number of failed co-ops is already up to eight, with five having tanked in the past three weeks.
• If correct, than nineteen out of the 24 co-ops are either financially dead or about to be financially dead, likely taking with them much of the $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds that they were staked to.
• The defunct or soon to be defunct co-ops will force almost half a million Americans to find a new source for health insurance.
• The secret 11 co-ops are on so-called “enhanced oversight” by the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), which manages the Obama Care program. 
• The 11 received formal letters from CMS demanding that they take urgent actions to avoid closing.
• Aaron Albright, chief CMS spokesman, said 11 co-ops “are either on a corrective action plan or enhanced oversight. We have not released the letters or names.” He gave no grounds for withholding the information from either the public or Congress.
• The CMS has so far ignored a formal request from members of Congress investigating the failure of the co-op program.
• Senator Charles Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, is not happy with the CMS stonewalling situation: “Since the public’s business generally ought to be public, CMS should have a good reason for not disclosing which co-ops are troubled.” 
• He was joined in criticism of the CMS’s lack of transparency by Congressman Adrian Smith: “It’s time for CMS to stop shielding these failures from the public and start identifying faltering co-ops. Taxpayers deserve more accountability and consumers deserve to know whether the insurance they are forced to buy will still exist at the end of next year.”

You can now see why we did this bonus piece. At the current rate, if we had waited until next month for our usual Obama Care disaster review, the entire co-op infrastructure could be gone. Never has so much failed in any piece of Washington legislation that was ever passed. Costs go up, co-ops go down, the unfolding disasters that are Obama Care.

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

July, 2015, Bonus Post, By The Numbers: Illegal Immigrant Numbers and How Large They Actually Are

On a semi-regular basis we revisit the theme "by the numbers" just to check in on the state of the country and political class using actual realities and their underlying numbers, not the spin or lies from our politicians. You see, politicians usually have nothing to gain by looking at reality and the numbers since they are more than likely to have screwed up reality and our lives in the first place.

That is why they would rather lie and deceive than tell the truth. But that approach can be destroyed by looking at the hard numbers behind the mess they have created. I once worked for a boss whose favorite saying was: "There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the right number.” And that is what we try to do with this theme, devastate politicians’ opinions by looking at the right numbers.

So let’s take a look at the numbers that have recently cropped up and again prove that the political class in America continues to be one of the worst set of people to ever hold office, given the state of the country, the many ways they screw up our wealth and government functions, and their inability or non-desire to step up and tell the truth.

Today's bonus post has ended up focusing mostly on illegal immigrant numbers, not on purpose but because those numbers have recently cropped up in the news.

1) Wind power has been around for hundreds of years so calling it a “new technology” is really quite a stretch. But many in the political class have done just that in order to justify giving the wind industry billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. What does that generosity look like in the real world:

• Over the past thirty years, the wind industry has received $30 billion in in taxpayer subsidies.
• Unfortunately, despite getting $30 billion, the wind industry now accounts for a meager 5% of U.S. electricity demand.
• Congress passed an extension on wind subsidies in 2014 that will cost taxpayers another $6.4 billion over the next decade.
• In 2003, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, a primary sponsor of Federal wind subsidies, stated that the wind industry would need “maybe 10 years” more of subsidies.
• Thirteen years later, the Washington politicians are willing to give the wind industry another ten years, making it twelve years beyond what Grassley promised in 2003.
• After hundreds of years and tens of billions of dollars, maybe we should finally face the reality that wind power will never be the energy savior that many wanted it to be. The numbers, both financial and chronological, all point to that reality.

2) The IRS recently reported, as told in a recent edition of BusinessWeek, that it hung up on 8.8 million calls into its 800# help centers during 2014. This comes out to an average daily hang up rate of over 24,000 calls a DAY. Since I would assume that the majority of these calls came in the months leading up to tax filing day on April 15, I think we can safely assume that the hang up rate during those months was much, much higher than 24,000 a day.

Horrendous customer service even for this dysfunctional Federal entity. But possibly even worse than these pathetic metrics, the IRS calls these hang ups “courtesy disconnects.” Not even close. Nothing courteous about calling a Federal government hotline for help, probably waiting on hold for a long time, and then being hung up on. Certainly disrespectful to the taxpayer callers who pay the salaries of all IRS employees.

3) Paul Bedard, writing for the Washington Examiner on July 20, 2015, reported on estimates from from the Center for Immigration Studies and Pew Research that showed 2.5 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. during the Obama Presidency, about 400,000 a year, more than a thousand a DAY.

The only good news out of the study is that the annual flow into this country during the Bush administration years was probably in the 500,000 to 600,000 range, making the Obama administration king of the pigs when it comes to leaky borders. The only difference is that during the Bush administration, ISIS did not exist. During the Obama administration, ISIS does exist, is financially very well off, and would probably have little trouble sneaking its terrorists into this country via the leaky Mexican/U.S. border.

It is pretty clear, based on these numbers that both administrations have been absolute failures in securing our borders and protecting U.S.citizens from physical and financial harm.

4) The organization, Judicial Watch, does a wonderful job in prying documents out of the Federal government despite the Obama administration’s tendency to want to work in secrecy and non-transparency, often illegally or immorally. They recently obtained Federal immigration records that showed:

• The Department of Homeland security released over 250 illegal immigrants Arizona area detention centers during just the last week of February, 2015 and the first two weeks of March.
• The details in these documents show that the Obama administration lied again when it denied that mass releases of illegals had occurred.
• 40 of those released have a history of violent criminal behavior but yet were still released onto the streets of Arizona and around the country.
• Their criminal offenses included assault, domestic violence, weapons offenses, battery, and drunk driving: Drug Trafficking: 9 cases, Weapons Offense: 6 cases, Domestic Violence: 4 cases, Prostitution: 4 cases, Battery: 2 cases, Contributing to Delinquency of Minor: 2 cases, Robbery-Street Gun: 2 cases, Firing Weapon: 1 cases, Hit and Run: 1 case, Possession of a Weapon: 1 case, and dozens and dozens of lesser offenses.
• And these are just the crimes we know these people committed, the real number is probaly much higher.
• Despite the dozens of criminals who were freed, the Federal government has refused to tell local law enforcement authorities the names and locations of these criminals, making local law enforcement departments less capable of doing their jobs and protecting the public. 
• These findings go along with a 2014 Judicial Watch finding that showed the Obama administration had released a whopping 165,900 known criminal illegal immigrants onto the streets of America. including many convicted of such violent crimes as homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. 

As these numbers show, the Obama administration has done a pathetic job of following existing laws and protecting the American public from immigrant criminals, the numbers are too large to claim other wise.

5) What happens once these criminal illegal immigrants are released onto our streets? According to Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio, out of the 5,000 illegal immigrants turned over to the Federal government out of his jails, “2,000 have been coming back:”  “I have ICE agents in our jail. We check everybody that comes in, then detainers are placed for those here illegally on state charges, turn them over to ICE, and guess what? Out of 5,000, 2,000 have been coming back to my jails, all serious types of crime. One guy came back 20 times. So, evidently they keep crossing the border, or the ICE is letting them out on the streets.”

That will definitely do it for this month’s “by the numbers” review with today’s bonus post focusing on illegal immigrants. As the number of crimes committed by illegals on our streets increases, many of whom were put there by the Obama administration, the question of why Donald Trump has seen his rating climb becomes clear: the number of crimes committed by these known criminals is on the rise and it is the fault of this current administration, the numbers do not lie.

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

Hate Week, Part 4: Liars, Idiots, and All Men Should Die

Over the past week or so a number of potential Presidential candidates have come forward to throw their hats in the ring for the 2016 Presidential elections. Which means that the hateful hollering and yelling and name calling has started already, something that will go on for at least the next year and a half. And likely intensify and dehumanize as we get closer to the election.

Unfortunately, mature and adult political debate has disappeared a long time ago. Instead, we are stuck with a version of political divisiveness that was first explained by George Orwell in his novel, 1984: 

"This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious."

This was the original quote. It does not take too much imagination to get from this Orwell view of oppression to today's divisive political environment to get to the following edited version by simply changing just a few words:

"This is not to say that either the conduct of politics, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, politics is continuous and universal in all parts of the country, and such acts as name calling, personal degradation, accusations of unpatriotism, sexual degradation, verbal assaults, the reduction of whole groups of fellow citizens with opposing views to idiocy and reprisals against common Americans with opposing views, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious."

Rather than lead and fix the problems facing the country, today's politicians only know a scorched earth approach to life and serving the country, worried only about their own careers and self enrichment, the good of the country and the citizens be damned. It does not matter if you have good ideas and principles, the only thing that matters is to eviscerate your opponents with lies, deceptions, innuendos, and nasty trash talking.

As a result, we never resolve any of the major issues in this country. Political dialog is venomous and divides Americans into separate camps and tribes, shutting down all hope of compromise and progress. And this is exactly what the political class wants. We fight each other while they continue to enrich themselves and their political donors, destroying our economy, freedoms, and civility in the process. 

So for the past week or so we are calling out the haters, both the political ones and their respective allies in the media who are all too eager to join in the slander, mudslinging, and hate. Until we stop yelling at each other and start holding politicians accountable for adult behavior and adult leadership, we will continue to be stuck with the sad state of the nation that we have allowed the political class to create where it seems that they are the only ones who are doing well.

We started this "hate week" off  with two previous posts we have written in the past. Today and the previous two posts got into the most recent instances of hate and call out the haters for the divisions they have driven into Americans.

1) If you are going to stoop so low as to call someone a liar, you should have the facts straight on your side of the argument. Otherwise, you look like an idiot...or U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. The good Senator from Vermont recently spouted out a little hate relative to Social Security: “When people tell you Social Security is going broke, you look them in the eye and tell them they’re not telling you the truth. Today, the Social Security Trust Fund has a $2.8 trillion surplus,” Sanders said. “So when people tell you Social Security is going broke, you look them in the eye and tell them they're not telling you the truth.”

So if you do not believe the Senator, you are a liar. But his statement clearly shows his ignorance when it comes to basic accounting relative to Social Security. There is no pile of gold, Google stock shares, oil rigs, or pile of cash anywhere that is owned by the Social Security Administration that is worth $2.8 TRILLION. Does not exist, has not existed for about fifty years. 

Since the Johnson administration, the Federal government and the Washington politicians that operate it have taken the taxes paid under the Social Security laws and used it to pay for other government operations. After raiding that wealth, they left behind an IOU note saying that the Federal government owed the Social Security administration trillions of dollars. Trust me,those notes are not worth the paper they might have been written on, never mind being worth $2.8 TRILLION.

But the Federal government does not have a pile of gold, Google stocks, etc.since they spent that wealth long ago. Instead, they tax Americans more to make up for the robbery and transfer those additional taxes to pay social security benefits. It is a pay, and tax, as you go process, there is no surplus fund. In fact, the Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in taxes and paid out $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to published by Social Security Administration.

So you are a liar if you understand basic accounting and reality and you are a name calling Senator if you do not understand. 

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/sen-bernie-sanders-when-people-tell-you-social-security-going-broke-tell-them?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=marketing&utm_term=facebook&utm_content=facebook&utm_campaign=n-sanders-social-security

2) Josh Earnest is Obama’s press secretary. He even got into the hate act recently relative to the fight over whether to confirm Loretta Lynch as the new Attorney General.

Reacting to a comment by Iowa Senator Grassley, Earnest said: “That in my mind is an astounding display of duplicity. It’s possible that Senator Grassley has been in Washington too long.” Ah, the old hate argument that if you do not agree with me you are wrong and maybe you need to go home. Given that a lot of Americans voted for Senator Grassley to represent them in Washington, maybe Earnest is the one that needs to go home, no one voted for him. 

But it gets better. When asked if his condescending attitude was helpful to getting Lynch confirmed, he expanded his condescension to all Republicans: “I’ll just observe….that being nice has gotten us a 160 day delay. Maybe after they look up ‘duplicitous’ in the dictionary, we'll get a different result.” Did not know that Mr. Earnest was so much smarter than all Republicans, using big words that his political rivals have to reach for a dictionary to understand. Such condescension, such hate, such immature rhetoric from a press secretary no less, and not a good one at that.

3) One more piece of hate and venom for today. A Democrat activist who sits on two national Democratic party committees has been suspended from her regional party after a string of nasty sexist comments on social media. Sarah Noble made some pretty disgusting and multiple tweets on Twitter, including “kill all men”, “f**k men”, and “die cis[gendered] scum:”



Ms. Noble sits on the national committees of the LGBT Liberal Democrats and the Secular & Humanist Liberal Democrats. She has also been elected to the executive committee of the National Union of Students’ LGBT wing, which, like the LGBT Lib Dems, has a zero-tolerance attitude towards hate speech. Doe not seem like a good way to make friends and influence people relative to your issues and passions: kill, f**k, die. That will certainly make people sit up and take notice of what you are fighting for. Not. Pathetic.

That will do it for today. A U.S. Senator is not only too stupid to understand Social Security but goes out and calls those that disagree with his incorrect version of reality liars, a lowly press secretary calls the majority of U.S. Senators too stupid to understand a big word he used, and a Democratic activist that wants half of the world’s population to die or get f**ked.

Are we starting to see why nothing ever gets accomplished in American politics any more? Tough to sit down and have adult conversations when the person across the table calls you a liar, stupid or desires your death. 

That will do it for the hate examples that we have discussed over the past four days. We will summarize all of those posts tomorrow and provide a warning of what is really going on behind the hatred and why we are done as a democracy unless we change the habits, attitudes , and integrity of those that infest our political processes today.

Government Favors And Politicians For Sale! Election Year Specials! Act Now! - Basic Corruption

Many times we have covered the corruption and greed that, unfortunately, has become the trademark of our political class. A very small sample includes the following:

• A major fund raiser for President Obama was illegally moved ahead of the American taxpayer in the Solyndra bankruptcy proceedings, resulting in taxpayers receiving nothing for their doomed $529 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.
• Obama's Department of Energy approved a Federal government loan guarantee to a company that employs Nancy Pelosi's husband in an influential executive position.
• Nancy Pelosi received upwards of nine corporate IPO opportunities, including one for the VISA IPO. VISA was somehow able get revenue restriction legislation delayed in the House Of Representatives when Pelosi was the Speaker of the House until after the IPO happened, resulting in a $100,000 profit for Ms. Pelosi in just a few days.
• Congressman Spencer Bachus successfully shorted the financial sector of the stock market shortly after getting warnings of a financial meltdown from the Secretary Of Treasury and head of the Federal Reserve Board, days before the information became public.
• Congressman Barney Frank received substantial re-election campaign funding support from various banking institutions, the very institutions the Congressman was supposed to be overseeing as a past chairman and current member of the House banking committee.
• Congresswoman Ginny Waite-Brown invested in various banks based on non-public, secret information she received as a result of her membership on a House banking committee, the very committee that approved taxpayer bailout money for the very same banks the Congresswoman invested in.
• Congressional members hand out $16-$20 billion worth of earmarks each year, earmarks and funding favors which are no more than thinly disguised campaign financing efforts.
• The Fisker and Telsa auto companies received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Federal government loan guarantees despite the fact that multiple people in each company are major fund raisers for Obama and the Democratic party.
• Senator Harry Reid sold his oil company investments shortly before the oil industry took a major hit on price decreases and bought health care company stocks just before the health care reform legislation debate began in the Senate, making a tidy profit in the process. 
• Ex-Senator Obama, ex-Senator Dodd, and Congressman Frank successfully derailed the auditing and reformation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This derailing that has already cost the American taxpayers over one hundred billion dollars in bailout funds, possibly because Obama, Dodd, and Frank were the top recipients of political campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie.

The historic list goes on and on. And current day government/politician favors and corruption continue. In the November 18, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, a synopsis of a Washington Post article reported that the top Wall Street financial institutions earned $77 billion during the eight years of the Bush administration. 

However, in less than three years of the Obama administration, years that included the worse economic downturn and banking crisis since the Great Depression, these same financial and banking  institutions earned $83 billion in profits. A coincidence or political class favors/corruption? Based on the historical data, I doubt it was a coincidence.

Need more proof that the government favors and political class members are for sale in this upcoming election year? Consider a set of examples that have already and recently taken place with our politicians, as reported in a recent Business Week magazine article within their Spring, 2011 Government Insider Special report:

• New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez recently "championed" a plan to provide a temporary tax cut for small companies, a tax cut that would allow them to offset investments these companies might make in research on therapies to prevent and treat chronic diseases. Oh, by the way, the pharmaceutical industry in New Jersey just happened to contribute $434,043 to his 2010 reelection campaign and PAC.
• Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow sponsored a bill to give a tax rebate for consumers who purchase a gas/electric car or truck. The recently available Chevy Volt from General Motors certainly falls within this category. Oh, by the way, General Motors employees contributed $84,635 to Stabenow's reelection campaigns between 1995 and 2010.
• New York Senator Charles Schumer has been accused by other Congressional members of making a proposed tax on carried interest of private equity managers so difficult that the measure never was passed into law. Oh, by the way, Schumer has received $8.8 million from the security and investment industry since 1989, an industry that certainly includes private equity managers.
• Montana Senator Max Baucus obtained a provision in a recent farm bill "for tax exempt forestry conservation bonds to help purchase a 500 square mile patchwork of land owned by Plum Creek Timber." Oh, by the way, Plum Creek Timber has spent $3.7 million in lobbyists fees from 2006 to 2010 and its employees have contributed $19,100 to various Bachus reelection campaigns.
• Iowa Senator Charles Grassley has backed tax credits for domestic production of corn based ethanol and tariffs on imports of ethanol. It just so happens that his home state has 40 ethanol plants that generate 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol each year. Oh, by the way, Grassley received $290,250 in reelection campaign donations from agriculturally based PACs in his 2010 election run.
• Arizona Senator John Kyl is a major proponent of cutting taxes on inherited wealth, having been instrumental in the one year hiatus of the inheritance tax in 2010 and cutting a deal with Obama to keep the reinstatement of the tax at 35%. Oh, by the way, eliminating the estate tax is a major priority of the Club For Growth, which just has happened to donate $155,753 to the Senator's election campaigns since 1989.
• Texas Senator John Cornyn has opposed Obama's attempts to repeal oil and gas industry tax breaks besides opposing the President's ban on Gulf oil drilling. Oh, by the way, oil and gas industry components have given the Senator $1.7 million since 2001.

Corruption or coincidence? You decide, but here seems to be a lot of confidences going on if it is not corruption. Just these seven Senators with just these seven instances of political favors for campaign funding donations comes out to over $11 million.

Think about how much money is involved when you include the other 43 U.S. Senators and all 435 members of the House of Representatives. If these other 478 politicians trade at the same rate as the seven Senatorial examples listed above, we are looking at almost $800 million that our politicians have traded government favors for their campaign funding needs.

This volume of trading has to be sub-optimal for the rest of the country's citizens that do not partake in this corruption. Rather than doing what is best for the whole nation's interests, this type of basic corruption does what is best for the politicians' careers and the special interests that fund their careers.

Since most of these political favors occur between incumbent politicians and special interests, Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would go a long way to eliminating this type of corruption. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, "one and done." You get one term in office, either as a Senator, Congressman, or President, and then your Federal political career is over.

Maybe in such an environment, where a politician knows that they do not need to fund their perpetual reelection campaign since they only get one term, they would then make decisions that are right for the country, not what are optimal for their special interest campaign funding sources. Heaven knows that they are not doing that now, making the right choices for the country,  so how much worse could it get if they were "one and done?"

A political process that relies on special interests, cronyism, and trading government favors for campaign funding and other perks is not a democracy. It is a central American banana republic, it is Iraq under Hussein or Libya under Ghaddafi, or it is the mob under Don Corrleone. In any of those examples, freedom and liberty are subservient to corruption.

Ashleigh Brilliant once said: "I either want less corruption or more of a chance to participate in it." Under our current political set-up, neither situation is likely to occur for the vast majority of hard working, honest Americans who play by the rules and have some sense of integrity. Thus, let's try term limits and try to lessen the corruption and increase the chances of freedom and liberty.

Please note: we will not stop just with these basic types of political corruption listed above. Tomorrow we will cover institutional corruption, the rules that the political class exempt themselves from to make their lives easier, and on Friday we will look at the somewhat curious and incestuous relationship between the Federal government and Goldman Sachs.




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