I know exactly where I will be on July 4th, 2015. I’ll be sitting on a grass-covered hill in a small town in Maine, applauding as fire trucks and floats roll by, watching my kids wave to the parade royalty and chase down candy thrown by the marchers, getting just a little teary as the war veterans ride by, and celebrating this unwieldy and flawed conglomeration of people and history and ideas called America.
It has taken me a while to understand why I like the Fourth of July so much. I don’t like government or politics. The onset of yet another round of presidential elections fills me with a vague dread and nausea. I don’t even like the Pledge of Allegiance.
If I have problems with all of these bastions of Americana, why bother celebrating this weekend? Why don’t I treat the Fourth of July with the same indifference I show Election Day?
For me, the Fourth of July is not a political celebration. I understand that it is for most people. And yes, I do see all those local politicians driving by in bunting-draped cars during that parade I’m so fond of. But for me, vaunting celebrations of contemporary political issues and personalities are not the point of the Fourth.
Mixed feelings may well be the only appropriate kind.
I’m not even there for the historical aspects of the celebrations. (Though, for the record, one of the most surprisingly moving things I have done on a past Fourth of July was to attend a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. I was brought to tears at many points, and to full-on rage at others. You could read it this weekend, if you wanted.) The June 17 tragedy in Charleston has reminded us, yet again, that history is never as uncomplicated as we would like it to be. Mixed feelings may well be the only appropriate kind. And so, as interested as I am in America’s founding, and as inspired as I am by so many aspects of it, that’s not why I’ll be sitting on the hill watching the parade go by.
I’ll be watching the parade because I can, and because no one is making me. I’ve long thought that the American freedom to assemble is a freedom we don’t celebrate enough. We’re allowed to get together — when we choose and where we choose — to celebrate or mourn or express our opinions. There’s value in having a parade just to appreciate the right to have a parade. And there’s value in having one just to appreciate that you don’t have to have one. I’ve written for Anything Peaceful about Soviet May Day parades. These were enforced “celebrations” where workers had to check in with their bosses to prove they had attended, had shown their loyalty, and had expressed sufficient delight over belonging to the Soviet Union. No one will check to see if I attended the parade this weekend. That’s a pretty good reason to go.
I’ll be watching the parade because in with all the fire trucks and the government agencies are the local businesses, the city orchestra, the Girl Scout troop, the school of martial arts, the CrossFit gym, and all the other voluntary associations that Tocqueville correctly observed are such an important part of American life. I’ll be there because I think those organizations are worth celebrating, not only for the specific activities they promote, but also because they remind us all that “if men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”
But mostly, I’ll be watching the parade because everyone will be there. We will line the streets and watch the floats go by. And even within my own small family, we don’t all vote the same way (We don’t all vote!); we don’t all worship the same way; we don’t all agree on anything. But we’re all there, cheering for the parts of the parade we like best, politely acknowledging the parts we don’t care for as much, and helping the kids catch candy.
That’s plenty for me to celebrate.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/red-white-and-blue-stars-e1436002662199.png317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-04 05:37:542015-07-04 05:37:54What Do We Celebrate on the Fourth of July? Independence Day Isn’t Just a Political Celebration by Sarah Skwire
As part of its special series titled Race Matters, an investigation by Miami’s CBS4 News this week, provides an opportunity to consider new ways to think about marijuana and racial imbalances in the way our laws are enforced.
CBS4 News gathered and analyzed police records of every misdemeanor marijuana case in Miami Dade County between 2010 and 2014. They found:
Misdemeanor marijuana arrests accounted for ten percent of all cases filed in the court system.
Of 44,860 closed cases, 55 percent had African-American defendants, even though the county is less than 20 percent black.
Just two percent of these cases resulted in a conviction.
Of these, 74 percent were black.
Prosecutors dismissed or dropped 49 percent of these cases.
Of these, 56 percent were white.
The other 49 percent of cases were settled by a “withhold of adjudication,” an admission of guilt but not a formal conviction. However, the admission stays in a person’s permanent record, hurts his or her ability to find work or housing, and can prevent the person from enlisting in the military, receiving student loans, or becoming a citizen.
65 percent of these were black.
CBS4 News writes, “Miami Dade Police Director JD Patterson and others in his department have argued police officers are not targeting blacks, they are merely making stops and arrests in neighborhoods with a high crime rate. And those neighborhoods just happen to be predominantly black.”
“Donald Jones, a constitutional and civil rights law professor at the University of Miami, says that may have been the initial intent of the police, but what has happened over time is that officers begin looking at everyone in those neighborhoods as a suspect and begin treating them differently as well. ‘It says to me that we’re profiling,’ Jones said. ‘We’ve gotten to a point where we criminalize whole communities. We see certain communities as being communities of criminals and we police them that way.’ Jones said it can have a chilling effect on the relationship between the police and the community. ‘It creates an atmosphere as if this is a different America,’ he said.”
We note that the 44,000-plus marijuana cases CBS4 News examined are only 10 percent of all cases that went through the Miami Dade County court system over the five-year period.
Proponents have built their case for marijuana legalization on racial inequities in the enforcement of marijuana laws like these in Miami Dade County, implying that legalizing pot will end unequal enforcement of the law. But the problem of racial disparities in the criminal justice system is much deeper than marijuana alone, as Professor Jones explains. Until we can see that, we won’t be able to change it effectively.
Few Americans believe that putting low-level marijuana offenders, black or white, in jail is appropriate. Few believe that straddling them with lifetime criminal records is fair or just. Judges in Miami Dade County hope the county commission will adopt a proposed civil citation ordinance that would give police the option of issuing a $100 ticket to marijuana offenders. This would keep them out of the criminal justice system and reduce costs to taxpayers.
We believe that is a good first step, but it does not go far enough. Despite denials from legalization proponents, marijuana is addictive. Some nine percent of people who try the drug will become addicted. The number rises to 17 percent if use begins in adolescence and to 25 percent to 50 percent for daily use. We would like to see a public health/social justice system replace the criminal justice system for low-level marijuana offenders. Its goal would be to provide public health and social services to them after they pay their fines. Such services would medically assess them to determine if they are addicted. Those who are would receive treatment. Those who aren’t would receive educational and social services to help them pursue more productive lives. Money saved from removing marijuana cases from the courts could be used to finance this system.
Or we could do away with the marijuana laws, legalize pot, and ignore the consequences. To do so would be to allow a commercial marijuana industry to emerge that will rival the tobacco and alcohol industries, as all three prey on children, the addicted, the poor and the vulnerable, while simply discarding the victims who can’t handle their products.
National Families in Action is a group of families, scientists, business leaders, physicians, addiction specialists, policymakers, and others committed to protecting children from addictive drugs. We advocate for:
Healthy, drug-free kids
Nurturing, addiction-free families
Scientifically accurate information and education
A nation free of Big Marijuana
Smart, safe, FDA-approved medicines developed from the cannabis plant (and other plants)
Expanded access to medicines in FDA clinical trials for children with epilepsy
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/marijuana-arrests-miami.jpg332604Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-03 07:03:042015-07-03 07:03:04Is There a Middle Road between Marijuana Incarceration and Marijuana Legalization?
It was clear on the morning of September 11, 2001, that the United States was at war with Islamic radicals, and while there may have been differences of opinion regarding strategy, there was no denying the need to defeat doctrinal terrorism. But as the U.S. became mired in foreign wars, critics questioned whether its actions were achieving the goal, and ultimately whether the goal was even justified. Voices on the left falsely claimed that Arab-Muslim extremism was an understandable response to western chauvinism, and instead of condemning terrorists for their actions, they started blaming the victims for allegedly insulting Islam.
We saw it with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when progressive pundits blamed free expression for inciting violence instead of the ideology that sanctified the killing of “infidels,” “heretics” and “blasphemers.” Such attitudes arise from a perverse political correctness that elevates radical sensitivities over western cultural values. But how can secular apologists defer to a doctrine that repudiates liberal democratic traditions? How can they dignify claims of blasphemy against those who criticize beliefs they don’t consider sacred?
These questions were discussed at a program in Massachusetts entitled, “Freedom Isn’t Free: From the Greatest Generation to the Challenges of Today,” featuring former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney, former CIA Operations Officer Clare Lopez and retired Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Jr., who provided insight into how such issues affect government policy.
Progressives who reflexively condemn religion in politics or any perceived trespass of faith into the affairs of state are strangely silent when the religion is Islam. Incongruously, they often discourage free speech to avoid insulting radical beliefs.
The panel agreed that such muddled thinking influences the Obama administration’s views regarding national security and foreign policy. Despite the global threat represented by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and regardless of the nuclear danger posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, the White House has taken the dangerous road of appeasing the unappeasable. Since his first days in office, President Obama has turned American foreign policy away from its traditional allies and towards an axis of regimes committed to doctrinal totalitarianism.
He seems driven by the progressive compulsion to validate claims of Arab-Muslim victimhood while denying the extremism and anti-Semitism so common in Islamic society. Secular liberals often misrepresent Islamist aspirations by claiming that jihad means “introspection” or “inner striving,” and by denying the history of Islamic conquest in the Mideast, Asia, North Africa and Europe. They also ignore the theological motivations for persecuting non-Arabic and non-Muslim indigenous peoples, such as Copts, Yazidis and Maronites.
Lenin described western leftists as “useful idiots” for supporting communism over their own national interests; the term applies to progressives today who defend or justify Islamism. Frank Gaffney described the left-wing’s relationship with radical Islam as a “red-green alliance.”
According to Gaffney, the term “jihad” has only one meaning under Sharia, and that meaning is holy war. He said it motivated the 9/11 attacks, the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, and the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish market in Paris earlier this year. While not all Muslims support jihad –indeed many come to the West specifically to escape doctrinal extremism – there is no definition of the concept that preaches respect for “infidels” or their beliefs.
Those unable to engage in violent jihad, says Gaffney, are exhorted to engage in “civilizational jihad” by transforming western society from within. The process includes disseminating propaganda in public schools, promoting sharia courts over civil courts, pursuing sharia-compliant financing requirements, and using societal institutions to assist in spreading the faith. Gaffney said the existence of the “Civilizational-Jihadist Process” was confirmed in a Muslim Brotherhood documententitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” which sets forth mission and strategy.
The success of this program in the West, said Gaffney, is reflected by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s pervasive influence in the United Nations and the establishment of Sharia compliant zones throughout Europe. This strategy is pursued in the U.S. through initiatives seeking civil recognition of sharia court jurisdiction, the circulation of educational materials produced by Islamist front organizations, legal and illegal immigration, and efforts to gain access to the White House and the security, defense and intelligence establishments.
Islamist intrusion in government (with the complicity of the left) affects national security through the adoption of policies contrary to American strategic interests, said former CIA officer Clare Lopez. Progressive-Islamist cooperation, she said, was instrumental in purging the FBI’s clandestine library of materials deemed offensive to Islam – though these materials were essential for teaching how to identify Islamist terrorists – and in depriving the military of the means to spot Islamist sympathizers within the ranks.
According to Lopez, the shielding of Islamists from scrutiny is not simply a case of political correctness run amok, but of government policy to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and support its ascendancy in the Mideast. She said this was the crux of Presidential Study Directive 11 (“PSD 11”), which reportedly called for backing the Brotherhood to force political change in the Mideast and North Africa. Leaks from this classifieddocument suggest the administration supported the Brotherhood and related groups when they toppled governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, she explained.
This policy produced disastrous consequences across the region, said Lopez, observing that “the outcomes [were] chaotic … shortsighted and ignorant.” These would have been egregious if only caused by negligence. However, the uprisings misleadingly dubbed the democratic “Arab Spring” were ignited by a strategy that in itself “wasn’t error [but] policy,” she said. These policy failures were especially glaring after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
Lopez and the panel believe the Benghazi attack resulted from the administration’s support of militias linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in their quest to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi (and also the governments in Egypt and Tunisia). Although Qaddafi had renounced terrorism, relinquished weapons of mass destruction, submitted to nuclear inspections, and jailed terrorists released from Gitmo, Islamist opposition militias in Libya were supported with arms funneled by the U.S. through Benghazi. After he was overthrown, she said, weapons from Benghazi were redirected to anti-government militias in Syria.
During this time the Ansar al-Sharia moved near the consulate and called for attacks on Americans. Lopez explained that when Ambassador Chris Stephens requested increased security, he was denied by Hillary Clinton’s State Department because of optics; with the 2012 election approaching, the administration wanted to continue claiming it had defeated al-Qaeda and won the war on terror. Thus, despite multiple warnings of impending attack, no reinforcements were provided, the consulate was overrun and four Americans were killed. According to Admiral Lyons, there were military assets in the region that could have been deployed, but which inexplicably were not.
The White House and State Department thereafter claimed the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a video critical of Islam – although information immediately available showed it was preplanned and unrelated to the video. The ruse continued for weeks and included Mr. Obama’s statement during a “60 Minutes” interview the next day that it was “too early to know exactly how it came about” and Susan Rice’s repetition of the false video narrative during multiple television appearances.
As the administration supported Sunni militias aligned with the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Syria and North Africa, it pandered to Iranian Shiites around the Persian Gulf. According to Lopez, Obama’s policy was to recognize Iran as the hegemonic power in the Mideast. He thus snubbed Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia and embraced a Shiite regime that threatens those allies, condemns America as the “Great Satan,” seeks Israel’s destruction, and exports international terrorism.
The courting of extremist Sunnis on one side of the Mideast and apocalyptic Shiites on the other might seem incongruous, but Admiral Lyons sees it as consistent with the goal of fundamentally changing America. “Never in my lifetime did I think I’d ever see America taken down by our own administration,” he said, observing that challenging U.S. influence is considered a progressive virtue. Admiral Lyons believes that President Obama always intended to restructure national policy according to progressive ideals that disparage America, Israel and the West, and instead validate Islamist, Iranian and anti-western interests.
He cites as evidence the President’s use of sequestration to cut defense spending and disarm unilaterally at a time when China and Russia are growing in influence, militant Islam is on the rise, and military reductions are viewed as weakness. “We’re headed for the smallest army since [before] World War II,” he said, noting that military experts are no longer certain the U.S. could prevail in a conventional regional conflict. The question is how such fundamental changes could have occurred without significant opposition.
The answer, said the panel, lies in the pervasive acquiescence to anti-American priorities and sensibilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the liberal affinity for anti-blasphemy laws that contravene free speech. The U.N. periodically entertains resolutions seeking to criminalize “slander” of Islam, and these are supported by progressive governments and NGOs. Moreover, a number of European nations have enacted laws banning criticism of Islam as hate speech.
Though such laws would violate the First Amendment, many American progressives favor them as a way of curtailing “hate-speech” and encouraging diversity. Even without such laws on the books, liberals often discourage free discourse by accusing those who criticize radical Islam of Islamophobia. This attitude seems to pervade Obama’s denial of the religious basis of Islamist terrorism, and much of his Mideast policy.
The panel concluded that Obama’s policies have compromised America’s ability to defend itself and lead the world. He has spurned Israel, appeased Islamists, reduced the military, enabled Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and refused to acknowledge the existential threat of ISIS. These acts and omissions are not hallmarks of effective leadership, but of submission to a feckless worldview that has damaged U.S. power and influence to a degree that may not be easily reparable.
For decades, idealistic twenty-somethings have shunned higher-paying and more permanent jobs for the altruism and adrenaline rush of working to get a candidate to the White House. But the staffers who have signed up for the Clinton campaign face a daunting obstacle: the New York City real estate market….
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign prides itself on living on the cheap and keeping salaries low, which is good for its own bottom line, but difficult for those who need to pay New York City rents….
When the campaign’s finance director, Dennis Cheng, reached out to New York donors [to put up staffers in their apartments], some of them seemed concerned with the prospective maze of campaign finance laws and with how providing upscale housing in New York City might be interpreted.
Here are some words that don’t appear in the article: rent control, regulation, zoning.
But those are among the reasons that housing is expensive in New York. As a Manhattan Institute report noted in 2002:
New York City and State have instituted policies that severely distort the dynamics of housing supply and demand. Only 30 percent of the city’s rental units, for instance, are subject to market prices.
These distortions — coupled with Rube-Goldbergian environmental and zoning regulations — have denied New York the kind of healthy housing market enjoyed by most other major cities.
And a report by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko for the Federal Reserve Board of New York Economic Policy Review suggests that “homes are expensive in high-cost areas primarily because of government regulation” that imposes “artificial limits on construction.”
As I’ve said in other contexts: This is the business you have chosen. If you want the government to control rents and impose regulatory costs on the building of housing, then you can expect to see less housing and thus more expensive housing. Welcome to your world, Hillary Clinton staffers.
Related: Jim Epstein notes that fully one third of Manhattan, and 33,000 buildings and 114 entire districts across the city, are “encased in a life-sized historical diorama,” unable to be modified or demolished thanks to the city’s “landmark preservation” law.
In the world of banking, a “holiday” means you can’t get your money. It’s been a few years since we’ve seen that happen in any developed world economy, but that is exactly what the Greek government is doing, starting now, to stop a massive bank run.
Greece owes the International Monetary Fund a payment of $1.5 billion, due tomorrow, from the last time the government was bailed out. But, of course, governments can’t make wealth, and the money didn’t just magically materialize. They have to beg, borrow, and steal to get it, and Greece has finally found those limits.
Athens had hoped that it could once against tap the European Commission. But drained and fed up, other governments refused to extend yet another loan to Greece unless they agreed to reform their bloated and corrupt welfare state.
Unfortunately for Greeks, the ruling coalition in Greece swept into power in January on the platform of stopping “austerity” and rolling back budget cuts. They balked at the EU’s (and especially Germany’s) conditions for the next round of bailout money.
As a result, Athens has really and truly run out of money, and they will default on their debts starting tomorrow — and the European Central Bank has said it will cut off emergency credit to Greek banks if the government fails to pay its debts.
The news that no deal would be reached sent bank depositors into a panic, and thousands have been lined up at ATMs all over the country since Friday.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that he was closing all banks for at least a week as a way to stem the tide. Many ATMs are empty; the rest, by government order, will only dispense €60 per person per day. The government is now imposing capital controls to stop cash from leaving the country.
One thing needs to be said about this frantic authoritarian approach: It never works. Bank closings add to the atmosphere of panic. They are often followed by an announcement that the government is going to devalue or outright steal people’s money. Whatever trust remains in the system is drained away along with the value of the currency.
But there’s another factor in play, for the first time. People are looking at Bitcoin as a way to store and move money.
There is now a Bitcoin ATM in Athens that is reportedly doing a brisk business. Redditors are sharing tips. And, of course, the exchange rate of Bitcoin is on the move again.
This past week, I was out of touch of the news entirely because I was at the New Hampshire liberty retreat, Porcfest. There you can buy almost anything with Bitcoin, so I was checking the price often. I noticed the upward price pressure, and I had an intuition that something serious was happening.
Sure enough, this morning I was awakened by a call from Russia Today. They wanted me on a two-hour segment today to talk about the meltdown in Greece. I turned them down because I haven’t followed it closely enough (though that doesn’t usually stop most commentators!).
But when I looked into it, I suddenly understood: Sure enough, Bitcoin is on the move for a reason.
Many price watchers are predicting another spike in the exchange rate if Greece actually defaults and leaves the euro. Maybe, maybe not. It actually doesn’t matter. The exchange rate can be anything; it doesn’t affect the utility of having access to a global currency and payment system that is outside regional banking systems — one that can’t be closed, controlled, confiscated, or devalued at the whim of desperate regimes.
Cryptocurrency is here to stay. It is the world’s new safe haven, displacing the role that gold once played. The reasons are rather obvious: Bitcoin is more liquid than gold. It takes up no space, weighs nothing, and is more secure. Once you are an owner, nothing can take away what you own — and you don’t have to rely on a third party such as a gold warehouse or a bank (or a government) to take care of your money.
Given all of this, there is supreme irony in the announcement made by the Greek central bank last year that consumers should be wary of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is vastly more safe and reliable than any national currency, including the euro and the dollar.
There is no government anywhere that would decline to shut the banks if their ruling class feared financial meltdown. That’s what’s happening in Greece. That could happen in any European country, and it could happen (and hashappened) in the United States, too.
In the end, government regards itself as the ultimate owner of all a nation’s currency and the wealth it carries.
It’s wise to have another option, and people have long known that. The question is: What is that option? Today, not for the first time, and not for the last, Bitcoin is here to save the day.
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/greeks-lined-up-at-bank-e1435691589423.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-06-30 15:14:562015-06-30 15:14:56Greeks Prepare to Be Pillaged by Jeffrey A. Tucker
When the government rules by illegitimate means, is it legitimate to peacefully stand in defiance and disobey? The answer to this question is a reluctant “yes.”
I have thought about this question for a long time and, as a former police officer and federal agent who pledged his life to upholding and enforcing the law, I take this call to action very seriously.
In a piece out yesterday by Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka Tea Party, a group victimized by the IRS targeting scandal, she summarizes the despicable behavior of IRS officials since the inception of the congressional inquiry into the targeting scandal. Did you know that the IRS destroyed the backup tapes containing emails written by Lois Lerner and others, seven months AFTER the order to preserve the tapes was given? My life is political activism but, after the torrent of news emanating from the Supreme Court and from the overseas terror attacks, I nearly missed this stunning piece of information. Is this the act of a government worthy of our respect?
Combine this outrageous development in the IRS scandal with the recent Supreme Court rulings declaring that the Court has the power to unilaterally rewrite and reinterpret laws to further a destructive political agenda, and we now have a government free from any constitutional restraint, and American citizens living under the yoke of it. Although none of this happened overnight, the pace by which the liberty train is speeding away from the station is rapidly accelerating.
Fighting back strictly through the political process has proven to be effective only in delaying the day of reckoning and it is now clear that we must take from the new political aristocracy what they crave most: legitimacy and acceptance. We must pursue parallel tracks for change to restrain this out-of-control government both through the formal political process and public action.
If the far Left and their political overseers deem it appropriate to weaponize the IRS to assault their political opponents – to attack Christians for the sincere exercise of their religious beliefs, to use the machine of government to force free American citizens, against their will, to spend their limited financial resources to purchase government sanctioned health insurance at the expense of the health of themselves and their families, and to bankrupt the nation through a mathematically certain tax-and-spend formula for misery – then it’s time to consider open defiance to take back what has been lost.
It is time to fully embrace an Article V Convention of the States to reestablish the powers of the states and re-impose clear limits on the growing federal monolith. Former Reagan administration official, conservative activist, and popular radio show host Mark Levin has been passionately advocating for this approach since the release of his bestselling book The Liberty Amendments.
The far Left worships at the altar of inescapable federal power because they fully understand that when states act as separate incubators of policy, that Americans will choose economic, healthcare, religious, and educational freedom. And the resulting exodus from deep blue states anchored to an anti-liberty approach will discredit their agenda and destroy the patina of a public imprimatur and their false air of legitimacy. Federal power prevents an easy escape from the far Left agenda and subjects all Americans to their destructive agenda, regardless of how much they resist. And, while I appreciate the passionate advocacy opposing a convention on the grounds that it could result in a “runaway convention,” I counter by asserting that we are already living with a government engaging in a de facto ongoing constitutional convention by ignoring the plain language of the law and the Constitution to impose an increasingly liberal agenda which is dissolving individual liberty and freedom.
Secondly, the likelihood of 38 states ratifying a radical amendment is low given the current political power of the Republican Party. As the Supreme Court made clear with their recent rulings on Obamacare, marriage, and housing, the country is already free from its constitutional moorings and is charting a dangerous new course towards rule by men, not law. History has proven, without question, that when government by discretion, rather than by law is allowed to continue unchallenged, that the result is a dangerous concentration of power in a zero sum battle for freedom.
In the short-run, now is the time for peaceful and responsible civil disobedience. The Obama administration has been engaging in non-civil, and constitutional disobedience for many years now through their usurpation of power and their weaponizing of the tools of government. And, with a largely feckless response from a frightened and shell-shocked Republican Congress, it is up to conservatives to blaze the trail forward. If our elected Republican leadership refuses to lead, then we will demonstrate to their timid souls what bravery and sacrifice look like.
It is now incumbent upon conservatives to take every opportunity to respectfully and peacefully protest the attacks on our liberty and freedom. When told to sit down at town hall meetings, refuse to do so until your questions are answered. Continue to boldly question the politicians supporting this new post-constitutional path forward even as you are dragged out in protest.
As a Secret Service agent I witnessed firsthand the power of a small group, unafraid of the legal consequences, to influence and change policy by refusing to be silenced. Pastors and spiritual leaders need to stand in defiance of the ongoing attacks on people of faith and speak boldly and proudly. Let the government further discredit itself by asking an already discredited IRS to silence the millions of American voices of faith crying out to be left alone by the power-hungry, Washington DC cocktail party crowd.
When I walked away from a position I loved as a special agent with the United States Secret Service I left behind a lifetime of financial security to fight back by running for office. I didn’t prevail but I never gave up that fight and when my wife and I, as a result of our decision to walk away, came across difficult financial times we knew the sacrifice was worth it.
Faith teaches us that sacrifice is the only ticket to the second creation and we are all going to have to sacrifice something. Small acts of disobedience in the face of the existential threats we face to our constitutional republic are a small price to pay to defend the most blessed and prosperous country in mankind’s history. We were gifted this country by prior generations who sacrificed their lives, limbs and treasures to ensure we remain that shining light on the hill. It’s up to us to ensure that the light never dims.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/MLKMontgomery-e1435662374769.jpg323640Dan Bonginohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDan Bongino2015-06-30 07:08:192015-06-30 07:08:19Is it Time for Civil Disobedience?
Once again, Republican presidential candidates are proving that they are either truly colorblind or just blind to people of color.
What is it that all these declared Republican presidential candidates all have in common: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal and Donald Trump?
The answer is none of them have any paid Black staffers or consultants. Let me be perfectly clear when I say staffers or consultants; I am referring to people who can get meetings on the calendar with the candidate, call the candidate on his private cell phone, or get the candidate to show up somewhere.
In other words, staffers or consultants who have power and influence to make things happen.
How can you run for president of the United States in the 21st century and have absolutely no diversity on your staff?
Lawdy, lawdy, I can hear their responses now. We are focusing on Iowa and New Hampshire; and then if we become the nominee we will look to hire Blacks they will say. So, in their minds, a Black staffer or consultant can only operate in states that have Blacks? Oh really?
To be a Black Republican, we must be able to operate in a White environment as well as a Black environment simultaneously.
Republicans have absolutely no understanding of this dynamic. So, if you are dealing with limited funds and you have to hire staffers or consultants; you are better off hiring a Black simply because you get a twofer.
You can’t take a White staffer and put him in the Black community and expect success because this staffer does not have an understanding of the various nuances within the Black community. Conversely, you can send a Black to deal with the White community if they have the right skill set.
For example, as a graduate of Oral Roberts University, I have deep relationships within the White Evangelical community second to none; but I also have deep personal ties with the heads of almost every major Black professional organization in the country (journalists, accountants, lawyers, physicians, M.B.A.s, etc.).
So, just on the fiscal issue alone, there is an immediate return on investment for having a policy of diversity at the highest levels of a presidential campaign since you get a twofer by hiring the “right” type of Black.
The other issue is that of optics. You have yet to see a Black person get off a plane or out of a car with any of these candidates. The sad part is the candidate nor his staff is even cognizant of this situation.
The candidate is ultimately to blame for this; but it is also the fault of their pollsters. I know most of the Republican pollsters very well, and with the exception of one, they all tell Republicans to ignore the Black vote.
On several occasions I have nearly come to blows with these pollsters over this issue. They are propagating this myth of the Hispanic voter and Republicans are buying into it. Blacks far outnumber Hispanics in voting age population (VAP); Blacks vote in far higher numbers than Hispanics; and Blacks have a far higher turnout percentage than Hispanics.
Isn’t it amazing that some of these candidates are courting Hispanics in Spanish; but refuse to speak to Blacks in a language that they understand?
Blacks understand the language of entrepreneurship. Under Obama, Black businesses have been decimated. Blacks have gone from receiving 8% of S.B.A. loans under Bush to 1.8% under Obama (their own numbers).
Blacks understand the language of education. Under Obama, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have been decimated because of the policies coming out of the Department of Education.
These are two issues that play to the Republican’s strength; but yet they refuse to go into the Black community with this message. Instead, they foolishly go into the Black community talking about prison reform issues. H-E-L-L-O! These are not major issues within the Black community.
This is a typical case of Republicans trying to do the right thing; but doing it the wrong way. Too many Republicans think they and their White staffers know more about the Black community than a Black person from the community.
Message to Republicans: you can’t run on a platform to represent all of America when America is not represented on your campaign staff.
As the old folks used to say, “Your actions speak so loud I can’t hear a damn thing you are saying.”
This video exposes the duplicity of Hassan Shibly, the Council on American Islamic Relation (CAIR), and most importantly the true insidious nature of Islamic apostasy laws.
Hassan Shibly after hearing the gut wrenching story of how a young Dr. Masood was nearly killed by his parents and neighbors for converting to Christianity was handed a softball question by Mr. Kornman.
Hassan Shibly had the opportunity to condemn the Islamic apostasy laws that have brought much pain and suffering to millions over the last 1400 years. Instead Mr. Shibly chose to imply that Dr. Masood was a liar and confirmed this by running away from Dr. Masood rather than engaging him in honest dialogue for the world to see.
I have heard Hassan Shibly and many other followers of Islam tell Western audiences that Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace because the Qur’an says there is no compulsion in religion.
Former Muslims around the world will tell real life stories much like Dr. Masood’s making people like Hassan Shibly and Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi uncomfortable to the core of their beings.
In an Egyptian TV interview Yusuf al-Qaradawi and one of the most respected leaders in Sunni Islam said, ” If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today. Islam would have ended since the death of the prophet, peace be upon him. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam to this day.”
Throughout the Islamic world and also here in America for a Muslim to leave Islam for another faith or no faith at all is a serious crime against Islam in both the religious and political sense.
It is these very same Islamic apostasy laws that hold Islam together through fear. For a Muslim to leave Islam has grave consequences for the apostate.
If the apostate is not killed for his apostasy it is likely his/her family will disown them severing every familial and business lifeline the individual has ever known inside their community.
The fear of death for apostasy is a very strong motivator to keep the Ummah in line to this day.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/shibly-masood-tuw.jpg360640Defend The Borderhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDefend The Border2015-06-29 08:09:292015-06-29 16:26:46CAIR Florida’s Hassan Shibly Supports Horrific Islamic Apostasy Laws
Do U.S. troops fast during Yom Kippur? Lent? No? Why not? “U.S. Troops Face Eating, Drinking Restrictions During Ramadan,” by Jeryl Bier, Weekly Standard, June 26, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
A top commander in southwest Asia reminded U.S military personnel stationed in Muslim countries in the Middle East of the restrictions placed on them during Ramadan. According to a report by the U.S. Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. John Quintas, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing commander in Southwest Asia, said that the U.S. is “committed to the concepts of tolerance, freedom and diversity.” But he added that soldiers should “become more informed and appreciative of the traditions and history of the people in this region of the world… [R]emember we are guests here and that the host nation is our shoulder-to-shoulder, brothers and sisters in arms, risking their lives for our common cause to defeat terrorism.”
During the 30-day religious celebration of Ramadan, even non-Muslims are expected to obey local laws regarding eating, drinking, and using tobacco in public. Violators can be fined up to $685 or receive two months in jail. A spokesperson for United States Central Command [CENTCOM] said that “we are not aware of any specific instances of anyone being arrested” for such violations.
\For [sic] military personnel outside of U.S.-controlled areas, the only exceptions for the rules are for those “performing strenuous labor.” Such personnel are “authorized to drink and consume as much food as they need to maintain proper hydration and energy.” It is unclear what constitutes “strenuous labor” or whether additional exceptions might be made during a heatwave affecting some areas of the region that has taken hundreds of lives.
When asked if the restrictions were new or simply a continuation of past policy, a CENTCOM spokesperson replied:
There has been no change in policy… [W]hile the US does not have a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the UAE, it is common practice to ensure all Soldiers, Sailors, Airman, and Marines deployed to Muslim countries are culturally aware that during the month of Ramadan, practicing Muslims do not consume anything from sunrise to sunset as a pillar of their faith. Commanders throughout the AOR create policies to ensure their subordinates respect the laws and culture of our hosts at all times….
Pope Francis recently released a new encyclical. Portions of it deal with environmentalism, global warming, and climate change. Naturally, this has prompted controversy.
It’s noteworthy that Francis didn’t merely make a passing comment on global warming during this or that sermon, but that he issued a papal encyclical on the matter. Encyclicals are much more formal and significant than remarks made during mass. They are letters written by a pope and sent to bishops all around the world. In turn, the bishops are meant to disseminate the encyclical’s ideas to all the priests and churches in their jurisdiction, so that the pope’s teaching reaches every church-attending Catholic.
All this leads to the following question: Where is Pope Francis’ encyclical concerning the rampant persecution that Christians—including many Catholics—are experiencing around the world in general, the Islamic world in particular?
To be sure, the pope has acknowledged it. On April 21, during mass held at Casa Santa Marta, Francis said that today’s church is a “church of martyrs.” He even referenced several of the recent attacks on Christians by Muslims (without of course mentioned the latter’s religious identity).
The pope is acquainted with the reality of Christian persecution around the world. So why isn’t he issuing an encyclical about it? Such an encyclical would be very useful.
The pope could instruct bishops to acknowledge the truth about Christian persecution and to have this news spread to every Catholic church. Perhaps a weekly prayer for the persecuted church could be institutionalized—keeping the plight of those hapless Christians in the spotlight, so Western Catholics and others always remember them, talk about them, and, perhaps most importantly, understand why they are being persecuted.
Whatever the effects of such an encyclical—and one can only surmise positive ones—at the very least, the pope would be addressing a topic entrusted to his care and requiring his attention.
As recent as 1958, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical that addressed the persecution of Christians. A portion follows:
We are aware—to the great sorrow of Our fatherly heart—that the Catholic Church, in both its Latin and Oriental rites, is beset in many lands by such persecutions that the clergy and faithful … are confronted with this dilemma: to give up public profession and propagation of their faith, or to suffer penalties, even very serious ones.
[…]
Missionaries who have left their homes and dear native lands and suffered many serious discomforts in order to bring the light and the strength of the gospel to others, have been driven from many regions as menaces and evil-doers…
Note that Pius does not mention the burning and bombing of churches, or the abduction, rape, enslavement, and slaughter of Christians. The reason is that Christians living outside the West in 1958 rarely experienced such persecution. In other words, today’s global persecution of Christians is exponentially worse than in 1958. Pius complained about how Christianity was being contained, not allowed to spread and win over converts…
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/POPE-FRANCIS-facebook-e1435395890664.jpg370640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2015-06-27 05:06:182015-06-27 05:06:18Where’s the Pope’s Encyclical on Christian Persecution? by Raymond Ibrahim
In the wake of two recessions following two fleeting, largely service-sector bubbles—the dot-com bubble and the housing/financial bubble—America’s intellectual and political leaders are championing the need for industrial progress.
The ubiquitous Thomas L. Friedman takes on the subject of industrial progress in his latest book, That Used to Be Us, coauthored by political scientist Michael Mandelbaum. The book begins by describing a China full of fast trains, stupendous buildings, and an aura of dynamism—and contrasting it to an America in which repairing a subway is a multi-year project. Such images resonate with readers and voters, who wonder with frustration why so much industrial innovation, production, and job-creation is happening overseas rather than in America.
In President Obama’s recent address on jobs, he angrily complained about the state of American industry:
Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage.
Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?
Obama is right about this much; the state of American industry is an outrage. America has enormous, incalculable, untapped potential to make industrial progress—to radically increase our standard of living through far greater productivity in energy production, in manufacturing, in construction, in mining, in transportation. Unfortunately, the statist philosophy of Obama, Friedman, et al leads them to speciously attribute the problem to lack of government—despite the unprecedented expansion of government over the last 50 years. They propose still more increases in government spending and controls, as if some magic manipulation is going to spark the next industrial revolution.
At the same time, they ignore the most blatant impediment to industrial progress—an impediment caused by policies they support. This impediment is an open secret readily discoverable by asking American industrialists what is holding them back.
When I do this, I hear one theme repeated over and over: it is ruinously difficult to start new industrial projects because of our anti-industrial, “green” policies.
Consider the plight of the modern industrialist. Whether he wishes to construct a new apartment complex, open a coal mine, site a nuclear power plant, build a new factory, drill for oil, he cannot count on clear, objective laws to protect his right to develop. Instead, he must deal with open-ended environmental laws and near-omnipotent regulatory agencies that can forbid any project that is regarded as insufficiently “green.”
The industrialist is virtually guaranteed to face a labyrinth of opposition by environmental bureaucrats, controls, lawsuits, NIMBYs, and activist groups. Every step of the labyrinth costs time and money, and there is no guarantee a project will emerge alive; vital industrial projects can and have been shut down to preserve the likes of kangaroo rats and two-toed sloths.
Given this industrial climate, it is a wonder that any industrial development occurs in this country. Ask any leader of an industrial project how much opposition he faces in refining the fuel we use to drive, in fracking for the gas that heats our homes, in building the coal or nuclear plants that keep the power on, and you will marvel at the inhuman endurance our industrialists possess—an endurance we can’t, and shouldn’t have to, count on.
The “green” labyrinth goes far beyond traditional environmentalist targets such as coal and oil. The DC Metro subway system that Friedman and Mandelbaum complain about has been enmeshed in controversy for years over adding a new “Purple Line” to its system, with rabid opposition. Any proposed new road in California, the home of some of the country’s worst traffic, faces an uphill, if not impossible, battle.
Even allegedly “green” solar and wind projects frequently face environmentalist opposition. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the biggest opponent of Cape Wind, a windmill project off the coast of Nantucket. Environmentalists were the first to object to a giant solar project in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California.
What is so remarkable about the “green” opposition to industrial projects is that Americans, who supposedly want industrial progress, are so accepting of it. Based on the “green” movement’s actions, one might expect its goals and policies to be viewed with suspicion if not derision.
Instead, the idea of “going green” has never been more popular, with practically every businessman, schoolteacher, and politician trying to prove his “green” chops, in his personal life or at the ballot box. And thus, countless industrial projects continue to be deferred and destroyed.
If we are to make industrial progress, we need to seriously question the idea of “going green,” and its role in our government.
The “Green” Ideal
What does “green” really mean? It is most commonly associated with a lack of pollution and other environmental health hazards, but this is both far too narrow and highly misleading. Consider the range of actions that fall under the banner of “green.” As industrialists experience, it is considered “green” to object to crucial industrial projects, from power plants to dams to apartment complexes, on the grounds that some plant or animal will be impacted—plants and animals that take precedence over the human animals who need or want the projects.
It is considered “green” to oppose not only fossil fuel plants (which produce 86% of the world’s energy), but hydroelectric plants and nuclear plants—which all told means 98% of the world’s energy production. It is considered “green” to turn off the heat or air-conditioning, even at the price of personal discomfort.
It is considered “green” to do less of anything industrial—from driving to flying to using a washing machine to using disposable diapers to consuming pretty much any modern product (there is now an attack on iPhones for being insufficiently “green” given the various materials that must be mined to make them).
Often the same activity will be characterized as both “green” and non-“green”—just ask the proponents and opponents of any given solar farm. The proponents will say that the installation is “green” because it doesn’t use fossil fuels (except, they evade, to mine, fabricate, transport and assemble it), it isn’t mining the earth’s precious “natural resources” (except, they evade, for enormous amounts of steel, concrete, and various rare and toxic elements), etc. The opponents will point to the fact that solar farms, because they use a diffuse, intermittent energy source, take up an enormous “footprint” on nature, that they require prominent, long-distance transmission lines to take to their customers, that they require large-“footprint” backup systems to store energy or fossil fuel plants to serve as backups, etc.
Clearly, “going green” is not primarily about human health—indeed, in its opposition to just about anything industrial, it threatens the industrial foundations of modern health and sanitation. The essence of “going green,” the common denominator in all its various iterations, is the belief that humans should minimize their impact on nature.
“Green” leaders and followers may disagree on how to implement this ideal, and they certainly do not follow it consistently, but nevertheless it is uncontroversial that minimizing impact is the ideal.
But if we take ideas seriously, then the “green” ideal should be more than controversial. It should be jettisoned, as it is squarely opposed to the requirements of human life, including the requirements of a healthy human environment.
The Industrial Ideal
Human beings survive by transforming nature to meet our needs. The higher our level of survival, the more we must transform nature. In other words, we survive to the extent we depart from the “green” ideal.
Nature does not provide us with the wealth or the environment we need to live long, healthy, happy lives; hence the historical life expectancy of 30. To live and thrive, we must create wealth and create a livable environment. And every new act of creation, from building a fire to building an air-conditioned home to building the Internet, requires additional impacting—transforming—nature.
The fundamental reason for today’s incredibly high standard of living is that thanks to industrialization—the pervasive use of man-made power to fuel industrial machines—human beings can do hundreds of times more work to transform nature than we could even 200 years ago. But if our ancestors had followed “green” strictures, industrialization would have never got off the ground.
When the early oil industry turned night into day by making cheap illumination available to millions, they did it by drilling thousands of deep holes in rural Pennsylvania, extracting the black gold beneath, refining it into various useful substances, burning kerosene to create light, and dealing with whatever waste products emerged. J. J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, a private transcontinental railroad that revolutionized American transportation and commerce, required men to mine iron ore from the ground, to combine it with carbon to make steel, to mine and use coal to power the steel furnace, to pour the mixture into molds, to use the molds to make railroad tracks, to lay the railroad tracks across patches of wilderness, to displace various plants and animals that stood in the way, and many more changes to the status quo.
Fast forwarding to today, the Chinese airports and buildings that many marvel at also transform nature on a massive scale—from the magnitude of the physical structures themselves to the coal plants, gas plants, factories, mining operations, oil rigs, oil refineries, and heavy machinery that went into building them, not to mention the industrial transportation system that keeps them maintained and stocked with supplies.
Industrial progress is not “green.” “Going industrial” requires a commitment to impacting nature as much as necessary to make it more hospitable to human life. And it is no accident that in generations past, Americans viewed industrial progress, not industrial abstention, as an ideal to strive for. Earlier generations took pride in transforming nature—in being a people that “tamed a continent,” that built new factories, that paved new roads, that drilled new wells, that mined the earth for resources. Whole towns would celebrate when a new bridge was built, when a factory was erected. They would proudly drive their automobiles, fly in planes, support new railroads, build new roads—without a shred of guilt over the fate of the two-toed sloth.
What about “green” support for “green energy” and a “green economy”? Is this not just a new, superior form of industry? Far from it. Any talk of green industry is ultimately contradictory, which is why such industries never materialize on a significant scale. All energy production requires an enormous amount of industrial development, both in its production and in its consumption.
Thus, environmentalists frequently oppose every power source, including solar and wind, for their various impacts. (They complain that solar and wind farms have the largest land “footprint” of any form of energy generation, which is true.) Similarly, for all the talk of “green construction,” “green building,” and “green jobs,” any activity with a major industrial presence will draw “green” opposition—as the valuable website www.projectnoproject.comaptly details.
The more consistent anti-industrialists are explicit about their goal, including its ultimate implication: de-development and depopulation. Stanford environmentalist celebrity Paul Ehrlich, who likens population growth to a “cancer,” “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” Billionaire Ted Turner, a “mainstream” figure, says: “A total [world] population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
The true nature of “green” emerged particularly clearly in a debate over nuclear fusion in the late 1980s. Some uninformed news reports announced that fusion—which, if it worked, would be the cheapest, cleanest, most plentiful source of energy every created—was on its way to commercial reality. Many expected environmentalists to embrace this development. They condemned it.
“It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet,” said leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin. Ehrlich memorably said that allowing human beings to use fusion was “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Environmentalist icon Amory Lovins stresses he would oppose any fusion-like energy breakthrough: “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
Do not make the mistake of writing off these anti-industrialists as “extremists” who don’t reflect on “moderate” greens. While the “extremists” are more consistent than the “moderates,” they share the same ideal—the anti-impact ideal that destroys industrial progress to whatever extent it is practiced.
But what about the “environmental impact” of industrial development? Isn’t the “green” movement providing a salutary influence us by helping us combat that problem? Again, no.
The idea of “environmental impact” is what philosopher Ayn Rand called an “intellectual package-deal.” Such a concept dishonestly packages together two very different things—the impact of development on the human environment and the impact of development on the non-human environment. Industrial development will certainly often harm various non-human environments—but it is a godsend to the human environment. By lumping together concern with the non-human environment (e.g., displacing some caribou to get billions of barrels of the lifeblood of civilization) and the human environment (e.g., air quality), anti-industrialists are able to dupe Americans into thinking that sacrificing to caribou somehow benefits them.
Historically, industrial progress brought with it a radical improvement of the human environment. Indeed, industrial progress essentially is the improvement of the human environment. The reason we develop is to make our surroundings better so that our lives are better, cleaner, healthier safer—in the face of a natural environment that is often hostile to human life.
Contrary to “green” mythology, man’s natural environment is neither clean nor safe. In a non- industrialized, “natural” state, men face all sorts of health dangers in the air and water, from the choking smoke of an open fire made using plant matter (a cause of over a million deaths a year to this day) to the feces-infested local brook that he must share with farm animals. Industrial development gives men the technology and tools to make their environment healthier—from sanitation systems to sturdier buildings to less onerous job conditions to comfortable furniture to having healthy, fresh food at one’s disposal year round, to the wealth and ability to preserve and travel to the most beautiful parts of nature. And so long as we embrace policies that protect property rights, including air and water rights, we protect industrial development and protect individuals from pollution.
As for the “sustainability” of industrial progress, an accusation that dates back to Marx, this fails to recognize the fact (elaborated on by Julian Simon and Ayn Rand) that man has an unlimited capacity to rearrange nature’s endless stockpile of raw materials into useful resources—which is why the more resources we use, the more resources we have.
Human life requires changing nature on a massive scale. Any cause that holds minimal impact as an ideal is anti-human and an enemy of the human environment.
Today’s anti-industrial movement is not new in this respect. Throughout history, there have been major, anti-industrial groups or movements. The basic premise they have in common is that it is arrogant and wrong for man to transform nature as he sees fit. Man, they believe, should not tame nature but exist in some sort of mystical “harmony” with it (how he is supposed to cope with nature’s dangers and a life expectancy of 30 is rarely specified). Perhaps the iconic anti-industrialist was the 18th Century’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who worshiped nature untouched by man and regarded the transformation of nature in his time (let alone the then-unimaginable transformation that is our modern world) as evil.
But the modern-day followers of Rousseau know they cannot succeed by being directly anti-industrial. So they create a false association between themselves and environmental progress, and a false opposition between industrial progress and environmental progress.
Part of this false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia.
Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty–and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism’s incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism’s destructive nature.
Environmentalists have done the equivalent to industrial progress. Instead of comparing the human environment pre-industrial and post-industrial, they compared the post-industrial environment to a non-existent pollution-free utopia achieved by man living in “harmony” with nature. They did this in spite of conclusive historical evidence that living in “harmony” with nature means living very briefly. Historically, to the extent humans didn’t mine, didn’t burn fuels, didn’t develop, and were unwilling or unable to control or displace other species where necessary, they died early and often. The modern standard of living is an unprecedented, singular achievement that continues only so long as men are free to command nature on a large scale.
Early environmentalists cursed the coal fumes of newly industrial cities, evading the wood fumes, dung fumes, and starvation coal had replaced–and the work-hours it saved and years of life it added to human life. They cursed smog, evading that it replaced rampant airborne disease from horse-drawn society. And when increased production of coal and oil and natural gas produced the energy and technology to develop ways to radically reduce their pollution, environmentalists took credit–as if laws against pollution weren’t essential to capitalism, the system where protection of all forms of property is sacrosanct.
Development, industrial progress, and capitalism promote a human environment. The anti-industrial “green” movement opposes it. This is a truth that Americans desperately need to understand. At present, the philosophical confusion caused by anti-industrialists causes Americans who are genuinely concerned about their health and well-being to embrace the ideas and policies of those who want to sacrifice that health and well-being to the non-human. We are taught to denigrate fossil fuels, which have doubled the human life expectancy, and to strive for a mythical “green energy” economy, powered by fuel sources that have failed for decades. We are not taught that industrialization has enabled man to be orders of magnitude less vulnerable to climate, but that a degree rise in temperature over 150 years portends catastrophe. With proposals on the table such as 80% cuts in CO2 emissions, “green” confusion could mean economic suicide.
Such is the power of moral idealism and philosophical corruption. The ideal—and the corruption—need to be replaced.
Industrial Progress: A New Cultural Ideal for America
The only solution to a false ideal put forward by philosophical corruption is a true ideal put forward with philosophical clarity.
We need to embrace, unambiguously, the never-ending project that is the industrial revolution: the transformation of nature on a massive scale, with the unlimited potential to produce more energy, create more wealth, create more productivity, increase leisure time, transport things more quickly, conduct more complex scientific experiments, build sturdier, more comfortable places to live. We can travel farther and faster. We can live longer and better.
For the same reasons, we need to embrace, unambiguously, the harmony of industrial progress and the human environment. Industrial progress should be celebrated in classrooms, on YouTube, on t-shirts. Americans should think of fracking with the same excitement they feel for iPhones.
It is a moral embarrassment that in today’s world, where billions die for lack of energy, where Americans still have so much untapped potential, that what passes for idealism is driving a battery-powered car or sorting through one’s trash to make sure everything is in its “proper” bin. What does it say about our cultural self-esteem when we believe it is wrong to do something as necessary as generate trash—which simply amounts to taking some matter from the earth, making profitable use of it, and putting its waste product in a safe place?
For too long, Americans have taken industrial progress for granted, and carelessly embraced “going green” as an ideal–expecting that the unprecedented standard of living we had would automatically continue, even though we permitted environmentalists to oppose new energy production and new development at every turn. Today, we are paying the price, with an economy whose productive fundamentals are less and less sound.
So long as the anti-industrialists have the moral high ground, they can inspire support for their suicidal “green economy,” and inspire guilt to gain power and thwart the opposition. Way too much of free-market criticism of environmentalism bends over backwards to declare itself “green” and mouth environmentalist terminology such as “protect the environment”—as if the kangaroo rat environment and the human environment are interchangeably valuable.
Thus, we must clearly identify and steadfastly reject any trace of the “green” ideal: to sacrifice the human environment to the non-human environment. And any trace of “green” must be removed from politics. The one and only industrial policy that is needed is the proper definition and protection of property rights for individuals and companies. Human ingenuity directed toward the improvement of human life, will do the rest.
In the past, Americans’ unprecedented industrial freedom and growth depended on a certain industrial philosophy. With industrial progress as our ideal, and with policies that fully respect property rights and fully allow free markets, the brilliantly talented individuals of this great country can lead us to the next industrial renaissance and an ever-improving environment.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) delivered a speech at The Heritage Foundation revealing the cronyism that runs deep in Washington, powered by the Washington Cartel of establishment politicians and corporate lobbyists who continue to benefit big government and big business at the expense of millions of Americans.
“Washington has done a great job of one thing – picking winners and losers, except it’s clear each time who the losers are: American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.”
“What’s happening in Washington is no accident,” Sen. Cruz said. “It is a concerted effort by corporate lobbyists and establishment politicians. Lobbyists and career politicians make up the Washington Cartel. Let me explain to you how it works: A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other, although you give the other a chance to outbid them. Or even worse, a very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.”
Sen. Cruz discussed four examples of the Washington Cartel at work:
Regarding the Export-Import Bank, Sen. Cruz said:
“It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank…. The Export-Import Bank kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment. It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records. In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors; $335 million to Argentina; $1 billion to Russian financiers; and $2.7 billion to communist China.”
Regarding renewable energy mandates, Sen. Cruz said:
“A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash. And the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.
“For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.”
Regarding sugar subsidies, Sen. Cruz said:
“This form of subsidy seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act came the Sugar Act in 1764… and it was then that the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ was widely voiced by the colonists. You know what, we do have representation, but our representatives are not representing us.
“The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market…. This price control increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households…. From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries.”
Regarding the Internet sales tax, Sen. Cruz said:
“The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas. It has been a haven for entrepreneurial opportunity. It has allowed millions of people to create small businesses…. Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button; a teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things were done; a mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy; with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.
“And yet Congress is talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy… [The Marketplace Fairness Act] would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect sales taxes for over 9,600 different tax jurisdictions all across the country.”
Sen. Cruz concluded, “How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’”
Here is the full speech by Senator Cruz at the Heritage Foundation:
Transcript of Sen. Cruz’s Remarks at the Heritage Foundation:
Thank you for the warm welcome. It is great to be with so many friends back at Heritage yet again. Today, what I want to address is the people versus the Washington Cartel. Restoring liberty in an age of cronyism. I want to start by thanking my friend Jim DeMint, who’s a big part of the reason that all of us are talking about Washington’s cronyism. Jim, when he was in the Senate, saw his colleagues eagerly packing pork into just about every bill. And he stood up and led a valiant fight against earmarks. When Jim started that fight, it was viewed as Don Quixote: tilting at windmills. And yet, today, thanks to his leadership, a Republican conference has officially sworn off earmarks.
But yet, that hasn’t solved the problem of cronyism in Washington. Indeed, just yesterday, the Senate voted for cloture for the Trade Promotion Authority Act. To leadership’s dismay, yesterday, I voted against it. Now I have always been for free trade, I campaigned on free trade. Free trade, I believe, creates more opportunities for Americans; when we open up foreign markets, it helps farmers, and ranchers, and manufacturers. And so I intended to support TPA. Indeed, when it first came up for a vote a couple of months ago, I did support TPA. But unfortunately when the package came back to the Senate floor, it had gone far beyond simply being about trade.
Once again, Congress has become enmeshed in backroom deals, and they were using TPA as an opportunity to promote, among other things, reauthorizing the Ex-Im bank and potentially even enabling President Obama’s illegal expansion of immigration.
And this seems to be an all-too-common trend in Washington. That whatever is happening, corrupt backroom deals dominate the end product.
When American families, when small businesses, and when the most vulnerable among us are hurting, Washington has a tendency to jump to action – but not to help those who need it the most. Washington is looking for solutions – for Washington. Not solutions that empower citizens across the nation to succeed.
Instead, Washington’s solutions invariably help the rich and well connected.
When the 2008 housing crisis hit millions of Americans leaving families with real estate at a fraction of the value, sunken savings accounts, and mortgages they couldn’t pay back, what did Congress do? Bail out big business. It handed out hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and institutions that were deemed “too big to fail.” Sadly the American workers is never deemed too big to fail.
This enabled the banks to concentrate even more power and, in fact, to buy out “weaker banks.” For example, PNC received $7.5 billion while National City didn’t receive anything, which then gave PNC the advantage, and then they turned around and bought out National City.
Since 2008, the big banks have only gotten bigger: As the Fed noted at the end of 2011, five banks held more than 8.5 trillion in assets… equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy and that’s up from 43 percent five years earlier. Remember, Dodd-Frank was sold to the American people as stopping “too big to fail”. What do we see today? The big banks are even bigger.
As car-owners struggled with high gas prices in 2009, the federal government responded by handing over $80 billion to GM and Chrysler and its suppliers.
In 2010, as many hard-working Americans crawled out from under the financial crisis to revive their communities and regain their financial footing, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, with 19,000 pages of regulations. No bill that large, no regulation that voluminous, could possibly be good for any small institutions. And since then, hundreds of community and regional banks have closed.
Now it’s important to understand, that was not an unintended consequence. That wasn’t, “oops, we didn’t know that was going to happen.” The lobbyists for big banks were sitting at the table when Dodd-Frank was written. It was designed by Washington to favor the big guys over the little guys. And I would note, the proponents of that regulations, inevitably, they claim they’re helping the little guy. Now, either they’re not telling the truth, or they’re really, really bad at what they do. Because every single time they jump in with massive regulations, it helps the giant corporations, and the people that get hammered are the little guys.
In 2013, When Obamacare went into effect it imposed huge burdens on small business owners and young people, union bosses and members of Congress received special favors and exemptions. The very people who wrote the law-Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats–they wanted out of it- and this administration was only too happy to oblige. Today, the taxpayers subsidize their platinum plans while millions of Americans across this country have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, are facing skyrocketing premiums. Members of Congress retain their illegal exemptions from Obamacare.
Washington’s favors have gone on for far too long.
If you take a look at a map of the U.S., our office took every county in the country and color coded it, for whether median income had gone up or gone down. It’s quite striking, that map looks almost exactly like a geological map of shale formations across this country. Indeed on the Senate floor, I put that map up with a clear plastic overlay of the shale formations. You can see up in the Bakken, North Dakota, the counties, all of those counties median income is static. You can see the Barnett shale, and the Permian and the Eagle Ford, median income has skyrocketed, you can see the Marcellus shale, median income has skyrocketed.
Although it’s interesting; Marcellus shale doesn’t end at the Pennsylvania border, the jobs do. Because the politicians in New York have decided, apparently, New Yorkers don’t want jobs, they don’t want to provide for their family; or their idiot politicians are going to stand in the way and prohibit them. So even though they have resources in New York, the very same resources that are in Pennsylvania, the line between the states is like the finger of God drew in on the ground. South of that line, there are jobs, median income has gone up. North of that line, not a single one of those counties’ median income has gone up.
You look at the Monterey shale in California-abundant resources. None of those counties have gone up because the California politicians, just like the New York politicians, think California men and women don’t want to provide for their families. But do you know the one notable exception to that rule? The counties in and around Washington, D.C. are bright, bright green. Six of the 10 most affluent counties in the country are located in the D.C. metropolis. Those who live off the federal government are getting fat and happy, and almost every other county in America, median income has stagnated.
Washington has done a great job of one thing: picking winners and losers. Except, it’s all too clear who the losers are each time; it’s American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The majority of Americans don’t have the time, don’t have the resources to lobby Washington politicians. They are too busy going about their daily lives, working hard to provide for their families and take care of their kids.
For example, when Tesla successfully lobbied Washington for a $1.3 billion taxpayer subsidy, average Americans were hard at work, and certainly weren’t spending their time thinking about the need to subsidize rich yuppies to spend $100,000 to buy an electric car. Look, If rich people want to buy an electric car, knock yourself out. But why should we be hammering hard working taxpayers to add another car to the 4-car garage? That doesn’t make any sense.
While big government looks out for the powerful and well-connected, average Americans, over and over again, get the short end of the stick. With a ruling expected any day now in King v. Burwell, the Obama Administration has already, at the behest of the insurance companies, crafted a contingency plan that allows insurers to cancel plans in the event that their subsidies go away. But the fat cat insurers are taken care of by big government. ‘You guys are fine, here’s the contingency plan.’ But the average American taxpayer? They don’t have a contingency plan. The Obama Administration has no credible claim whatsoever for the millions of Americans who will be left to pay the full price of Obamacare’s big-government mandates.
The rich and well-connected keep getting more and more favors at the behest of hard-working Americans. And we have got to stop this. Here is a very simple rule of thumb, and it is contrary to everything our friends in the media tell us. Big government benefits big business. Small government benefits small business and hard working men and women. You will never hear that on the nighttime news because the purveyors of big government always promise they’re helping the little guy, and yet they keep getting the fat cats richer and richer and richer.
Lobbyists and career politicians today make up what I call the Washington Cartel. And it operates very much like other cartels. It operates like OPEC. I don’t know, like sheikhs, if they actually wear robes. But they nonetheless, on a daily basis are conspiring against the American people. Let me explain to you how it works:
A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other–although you give the other a chance to outbid them–or even worse, a very, very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.
And those who don’t oblige, well, they are shunned by the Cartel – effectively locked out.
Just this week, we saw a shameful example of this as House leadership threw Representative Mark Meadows out of his chairmanship because of his principled objections to TPA. Just this morning, news broke that leadership is seeking to strip Ken Buck, another conservative in the House, of his leadership position. Why is it that Republican leadership always, always, always cuts deals with the Democrats, and with Washington, and throws overboard the conservatives that, come October and November in an election year, they are desperately asking to turn out at an election?
The Washington Cartel has amassed more and more power at the expense of the American taxpayer with the same recipe repeated over and over again.
So today, I want to look at four examples of the Washington Cartel at work. I want to talk about who their schemes are hurting. And how we can restore freedom, bring back jobs and growth and opportunity, and how we can defeat the Washington Cartel.
It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank.
The Export-Import Bank is essentially welfare for big corporations, both foreign and domestic.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as you all know is the source of much of progressivism, instituted the Bank.
What does the bank actually do? It provides loans and loan guarantees to hand-picked corporations. It’s one of the favored methods of cronyism: Washington handing out taxpayer money to selected giant corporations.
Now, on principle, there’s nothing wrong with loans being given except it’s not private investment. It’s not people actually risking their own capital and assessing the risk and reward. Rather, it’s funded on the taxpayer’s dime. Prior loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank have benefited such paragons of corporate virtue as Enron and Solyndra. As it stands now, taxpayers are currently on the hook for over $100 billion in loan guarantees. If the projects succeed, the giant corporations make a profit. If they fail, the taxpayers foot the bill. Now those are pretty good odds. In Vegas, that’s called playing with the house.
As it stands, today the Ex-Im Bank funds roughly 2 percent of American exports.
And yet, of that 2 percent, from 2007 to 2013, the majority of the benefits have gone to 10 select companies. It’s good to be the king and it’s good to be a major donor to the king and to be gathering billions of taxpayer dollars because of it. Along with subsidies that support foreign companies it’s not just domestic companies. Foreign companies do very well with the Ex-Im bank, at our expense.
For example: Air India, a state-owned company, that’s right now putting at risk approximately 7,500 American jobs with the help of Ex-Im. Or Australian Roy Hill mine, to the detriment of our manufacturers and ultimately resulting in an estimated loss of $1 billion of iron ore sales here in America. That’s the taxpayers funding the government, funding foreign corporations, to hurt American workers.
Ex-Im kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment.
It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records.
In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors, $335 million to Argentina, $1 billion to Russian financiers, and $2.7 billion to communist China. Mind you, this is at the same time Russia is invading Ukraine. We’re saying, “this is unacceptable, by the way, here’s a billion dollars.” That sort of makes the foreign policy protestations of the administration a little bit hollow.
Several companies that have received taxpayer-backed Ex-Im financing even admitted to previously doing business in Iran through their subsidiaries, undercutting efforts to sanction the Iranian regime. Moreover, the Justice Department recently indicted former Ex-Im loan officer Johnny Gutierez, with bribery chargers. More charges could be coming. And this very institution, Heritage Foundation, uncovered some 74 cases of fraud and corruption at the Ex-Im since 2009.
The Washington Cartel’s favoritism and cronyism inevitably breeds corruption. When you have government officials giving out billions of dollars of taxpayer money, suddenly the people who want that taxpayer money have every incentive in the world to further that corruption both latent and blatant.
And yet, the process of passing TPA, it appears that Senate and House leadership have made a deal to schedule a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import bank, that that was part of the price of TPA. That was a major reason why I voted, “No.” Now, in response to my criticism, leadership in both chambers have said, there is no deal. Excellent. If there is no deal, we should let Ex-Im expire and let it stay expired. For once, all Congress has to do is do nothing and if Congress is good at anything, it’s doing nothing. If leadership, as it says this week, “there is no deal on Ex-Im,” then simply do nothing, let it expire, and end the gravy train for Washington lobbyists on the Export-Import Bank.
A second example, renewable energy mandates are arbitrary government regulations that distort the free markets and artificially raise the cost for American families and job opportunities.
In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, and one of the provisions in it was the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires that renewable fuels be mixed into our gasoline supply.
Now, I support renewable fuels, I support biofuels, but I don’t support policies from Washington that pick winners and losers in the market.
One of the mandates included was the ethanol mandate. Over the years, it has been proven there is a demand for ethanol in the market, but ethanol should stand on its own, not atop the footstool of the government.
The ethanol mandate requires 16 billion gallons of biofuels, requiring a plot of farmland roughly equal to the size of the state of Kentucky, as a result, that has diverted corn from livestock and the food supply, and has contributed to increased food prices.
Several months ago, there was an agriculture summit in the state of Iowa. Most of the Republican candidates for president attended that summit. Every single candidate but one pledged his support for continuing the Iowa ethanol mandate. It’s very easy for conservative politicians to talk about ending cronyism, but when you’re standing in front of people who are the beneficiaries, that’s when you separate talk from action.
Big government energy mandates don’t stop with ethanol. There are tax credits for almost every form of energy. Each designed to give one industry a leg up over the other. There’s enhanced oil recovery credits for producing oil and gas from marginal wells. There’s an advanced nuclear power generation credit. Clean coal investment credits. And a credit for plugging electric and fuel cell vehicles. And of course the infamous wind energy credit.
Talking about wind: A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash, and the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.
For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.
My good friend, Senator Mike Lee, has taken the lead in previous Congresses to level the playing field, to end the special interest handouts, and stop the energy cronyism. How about instead of picking one industry after the other after the other, and benefitting them all to compete against each other, we take the taxpayer out of the game and let them fight it out on a fair field. Senator Lee has introduced the Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act-a bill designed to eliminate all energy tax credits, and a bill that Senator Jim DeMint championed before Mike took lead.
A third example: sugar subsidies that artificially drive prices higher for the benefit of the few.
It should come as no surprise that another poster child for big government picking winners and losers traces its origins back to the New Deal. The Sugar Act imposed quotas on U.S. sugar production and restrictions on imports of sugar all while subsidizing U.S. production.
Now, I will note, this form of cronyism seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act, came the Sugar Act in 1764. You’ll recall, we fought kind of a bloody revolution over that. And it was then that the cry of “no taxation without representation” was widely voiced by the colonists.
Well you know what, we, do have representation now, but our representatives aren’t representing us. They’re representing large corporations and lobbyists rather than the American people. And it’s the exact same circumstance of no taxation without representation. How about the representatives in Washington actually represent the men and women back home that we’re supposed to be working for?
The sugar program imposes restrictions on how much sugar can be sold-it provides a “benevolent” allotment for each processor and makes it illegal to sell more than the government’s designated amount.
Now, one could be forgiven for thinking this kind of centralized planning came from former Soviet apparatchiks: “You go sell that! You go sell that!” I mention the cartel. It’s what OPEC does every year. They sit around a table and say, “you go sell that. You go sell that, we’re going to conspire against the American taxpayers.” Both cartels, by the way, have the same principal victims.
Unfortunately, both Republican and Democrat administrations have kept this program essentially unchanged for eighty years-increasing the cost of sugar for Americans.
The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market. Why should Americans pay 58 percent more for sugar than people in the rest of the world? Only because the Washington cartel is taking that additional money and giving it to the select few favored lobbyists. And it’s not just sugar that you put into your coffee or your tea. Sugar is an ingredient in a great amount that we eat. From pastries to sodas-and as my two little girls will tell you, treats on a nightly basis.
And this price controlling increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households. If you’re a single mom struggling to make ends meet, if you see the food costs when you go to the grocery store and try to feed your kids, prices go up and up and up and your salary doesn’t seem to match it, part of the reason is that the Washington cartel isn’t listening to you, and they’re happy to take money from your paycheck and make fat cats even fatter. That’s the corrupt game that’s going on.
In fiscal year 2013, the average price for American raw sugar was 6 cents per pound higher than the average world price. As a result, Americans paid an unnecessary $1.4 billion extra for sugar. Now, there’s some Americans who don’t even make 1.4 billion in a year. That’s real money. And every time Washington picks winners and losers, the winners are concentrated, but the losers you could identify.
From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries. 127,000 jobs-think of the men and women who were working in chocolate factories, working in bakeries, working in soda factories, who now are unemployed, and one of the reasons is, the federal government is driving up the cost of their inputs, and valuing the interests of the lobbyist more that your job.
According to a 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, for every sugar-growing job that stems from artificially high sugar prices, approximately three manufacturing jobs are lost. Now that’s math that makes sense only in Washington, D.C.
And here’s the kicker – you want to understand the concentration: Sugar companies make up just 0.2 percent of the farms in America, anyone know what percentage of the crop industries total lobbying expenditures come from sugar? 40 percent. 0.2 percent of the farms generate 40 percent of the lobbying. Why?
Because if your lobbying is yielding 1.8 billion dollars, that’s good math. And the single mom who’s paying higher food prices, the chocolate factory owner who’s laying off, neither one of them have lobbyists. Neither one of them have a whole lot of representatives who are listing to them.
The fourth and final example: Internet sales tax.
We’ve looked at one example of how the Washington Cartel helps foreign nations and foreign investors, how it chooses winners and losers among American industries.
Now let’s look to an industry that’s been-blessedly-largely free from government regulators: the Internet. I want to turn to how it wants to make its network even broader and more intrusive – what’s the one thing that’s been left largely unmitigated by the government until now – the Internet.
The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas, it has been a haven for technological creativity. It is allowing millions of people to create small businesses. And by the way, the people who are the most freed up on the internet are the most vulnerable. It’s young people, Hispanics, African Americans, single moms, people who want a better life.
You know, it used to be, 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a business, you needed some capital. You needed to be able to buy an inventory. You needed a warehouse. You needed a distribution system. That took money. If you’re just getting started, if you’re a teenage immigrant, like my dad was in 1957, washing dishes, making 50 cents, an hour you’re not likely to have the capital to start a business. What does the internet do? It transform it. You have a good or service you want to sell– You can set up a website and suddenly you have a worldwide market. Someone clicks on the website says, “I want to buy your good or service, you can send it on Fed-Ex and boom, you can send it anywhere in the world, You know who that terrifies? Politicians in Washington. This freedom thing is very, very scary for politicians in Washington. Washington is all about power.
Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button. A teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things are done. A mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy. Or with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.
And by the way, the next time you take Uber-I’ll let you know, I don’t have a car in Washington. Uber is transformational. The next time you take an Uber, ask the Uber driver how he or she likes his job. I have yet to find an Uber driver who isn’t thrilled at the freedom of becoming a small business owner that the Internet has enabled.
And yet, what is Congress talking about doing ? It’s talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act. Now, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy. That’s very fair to lobbyists.
What would the Marketplace Fairness Act do? It would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect states taxes for over 9,600 taxing jurisdictions all across this country, in real time. I want you to think about it. Let’s suppose you’re that single mom who started the business you’re selling online. You’re supposed to collect the Albany school taxes. Now Bret, do you know what the Albany school tax is? Do you know there’s a hearing scheduled next week to try to change it? Well, if you decide to start a small business, you’re expected to know.
And you could face an audit from 9,600 jurisdictions across this country if you haven’t correctly collected the Albany school tax, and you don’t know that they raised it by a quarter point in their last vote., which I have no idea if they did or not.
Why does the Marketplace Fairness Act have support? It has support because it’s a perfect storm for lobbyists. Number one, the Big Box stores, a major bricks and mortar retailers, they want to hammer the heck out of these online retailers. But here’s the interesting thing that’s shifted, so do the big online retailers. Of the 20 largest online retailers, 19 of them have physical presences, and so collect sales taxes in each of the states that has sales taxes. So suddenly you have the big box stores, the brick and mortar retailers, the big guys, and the giant online retailers, joining forces and suddenly they have a common enemy: all of these pesky little startups that have the temerity to try to take their customers.
And in Washington, there’s nothing more beautiful than when the lobbyists all align. When all the money is pointing in the same direction. Suddenly you see Republicans, and Democrats saying, “that is an inspired policy.” And yet, all of the millions of young people, of entrepreneurs, of people with an idea that want to topple the next giant company, they don’t have a single lobbyist. The American people are with us on this. The 2013 Gallup poll showed 57 percent of likely voters opposed taxing the Internet. Among young people, the demographic that represents the future of this country, 73 percent oppose a tax on the Internet. We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.
We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.
Instead of cutting blue-collar jobs by investing millions in foreign mining corporations, we should welcome jobs and production here at home. Instead of giving ethanol producers an automatic check, we should let the market determine their viability, and stop hurting farms from Connecticut to California. Instead of forcing restaurants and bakers and families to pay more for sugar – and undercut competition – we should welcome lower prices. And instead of handing over more power to big corporations and regulators, let’s keep the Internet free and encourage young entrepreneurs to keep innovating and to keep government’s hands off the Internet.
How we beat back the Washington Cartel, how do we restore power to the people?
The answer is simple – Americans across the country rise up, they engage on the issues, and we bring back the voice of the people.
The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s nothing new under the sun. I think where we are today is very much like the late 1970s. I think the parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are uncanny: the same failed domestic policy, the same misery, stagnation, and malaise, and the same feckless and naiveté foreign policy. In fact, the very same countries, Russia and Iran, openly laughing at and mocking the President of the United States. The one person in America thrilled with the job Barack Obama’s doing is Jimmy Carter.
Why does that analogy give me so much hope? Because we know what comes next. The late ‘70s and 1980s, there was a grassroots movement of millions of men and women who rose up and became the Reagan revolution, and it didn’t come from Washington – Washington despised Ronald Reagan. If you see a candidate who Washington embraces, run and hide. And in 1980, Reagan rose up to break the Washington Cartel. How did he do it? He changed the rules: 1978, 1979, Reagan didn’t get on a plane and fly to Washington and sit down with the old bulls in Congress, sit down with Republicans and say, come on guys, you got to stand for something. He recognized that then and now they weren’t listening to the American people. Instead, he took the case to the American people. And it transformed this nation. How do you change, how do you break the Washington Cartel. You change the rules. You know, there’s an old saying that politics is Hollywood for ugly people.
But there is nothing that focuses the minds of elected politicians like the prospect that they might be voted out of office and have to find an honest job. How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the political price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’ It’s the only power strong enough. That’s what the Reagan revolution demonstrated. Washington despised Reagan until the revolution swept in, and suddenly a bunch of politicians said holy cow, ‘I’m not messing with that,’ and magically they supported lower taxes and lower regulations and stopped the favoritism and standing up and defeating the Soviet Union.
I think 2016 will be an election like 1980. As Reagan said, we win by painting in bold colors and not pale pastels.
I am going to close with a story.
We all know the story of the Wright brothers.
But a name we don’t as often hear is that of Samuel Langley. The Department of War gave him $50,000 to create a flying machine. Upon its launch, “it fell like a ton of mortar,” according to one reporter.
On December 17, 1903, only 9 days after Langley’s second experiment failed, two young Ohio boys with only $2,000 set out at Kitty Hawk, and to become the first men to sail in the air.
$50,000 on failed government programs picking winners and losers versus two entrepreneurs, two brothers with a vision and a dream and just $2,000. One a miserable failure; the other transformed the world.
That is power of American innovators free from the government. It’s the can-do spirit that has propelled scientists and entrepreneurs and immigrants who came with nothing, pioneers, and farmers to make this land the greatest nation on earth.
And it remains just that if we come together and break the Washington Cartel that is telling us far too much about what we can do and can’t do. And if we instead return the power to the people so they can do what they have always done best – achieve the unimaginable and leave a landscape of greater opportunities for generations to come.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/cruz-pointing-e1427227385287.jpg427640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-06-26 05:09:482015-06-26 05:46:34VIDEO: Senator Ted Cruz on Washington, Congress and “The Age of Cronyism”
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) released a major policy statement signed by a bi-partisan group of former nationally prominent legislators, Bush and Obama Administration national security, diplomatic officials and the former deputy of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency blasting the emerging P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, perhaps just days away from possibly being concluded on June 30th. The statement also condemned the Administration appeasement of Iran’s state-sponsored regional hegemony and the failure to develop a coherent strategy to combat the rise of Daesh, the Islamic State. The WINEP statement encompassed policy recommendations on these important national security issues. Among the signatories are former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), former California U.S. Representative Howard Berman (D-CA), former CIA Director Gen. David Petreaus, former special negotiator Ambassador Dennis Ross, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cavanaugh, Olli Heinonen, former Deputy Director of the IAEA, Stephen Hadley, former Bush Administration National Security Director, WINEP own experts and its executive director, Robert Satloff.
Among the key points in the WINEP-sponsored statement addressing the problems with the emerging P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran is the following:
Monitoring and Verification: The inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the “IAEA”) charged with monitoring compliance with the agreement must have timely and effective access to any sites in Iran they need to visit in order to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement. This must include military (including IRGC) and other sensitive facilities. Iran must not be able to deny or delay timely access to any site anywhere in the country that the inspectors need to visit in order to carry out their responsibilities.
Possible Military Dimensions: The IAEA inspectors must be able, in a timely and effective manner, to take samples, to interview scientists and government officials, to inspect sites, and to review and copy documents as required for their investigation of Iran’s past and any ongoing nuclear weaponization activities (“Possible Military Dimensions” or “PMD”). This work needs to be accomplished before any significant sanctions relief.
Advanced Centrifuges: The agreement must establish strict limits on advanced centrifuge R&D, testing, and deployment in the first ten years, and preclude the rapid technical upgrade and expansion of Iran’s enrichment capacity after the initial ten-year period. The goal is to push back Iran’s deployment of advanced centrifuges as long as possible, and ensure that any such deployment occurs at a measured, incremental pace consonant with a peaceful nuclear program.
Sanctions Relief: Relief must be based on Iran’s performance of its obligations. Suspension or lifting of the most significant sanctions must not occur until the IAEA confirms that Iran has taken the key steps required to come into compliance with the agreement. Non-nuclear sanctions (such as for terrorism) must remain in effect and be vigorously enforced.
Consequences of Violations: The agreement must include a timely and effective mechanism to re-impose sanctions automatically if Iran is found to be in violation of the agreement, including by denying or delaying IAEA access. In addition, the United States must itself articulate the serious consequences Iran will face in that event.
The group also addressed the inchoate Middle East strategy addressing Iran’s regional support for state terrorism and the failed strategy to combat the Islamic State:
In Iraq: Expand training and arming not only of Iraqi Security Forces but also Kurdish Peshmerga in the north and vetted Sunni forces in the West. Allow U.S. Special Forces to leave their bases and help coordinate air strikes and stiffen Iraqi units. Sideline Iranian-backed militia and separate them from Shiite units (“popular mobilization units”) that are not under Iranian control.
In Syria: Expand and accelerate the U.S. train and equip programs. Work with Turkey to create a safe haven in northern Syria where refugees can obtain humanitarian aid and vetted non-extremist opposition fighters can be trained and equipped. Capitalize on Bashar al-Assad’s increasing weakness to split off regime elements and seek to join them with U.S. trained opposition elements. Interdict the transshipment of Iranian weapons into Syria in coordination with the Kurds and Turkey, and consider designating as terrorist organizations Iranian-backed Shiite militias responsible for egregious atrocities.
In Yemen: Expand support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE in pressuring the warring parties to the negotiating table while seeking to split the Houthi elements away from Iran.
Regionally: Interdict Iranian arms bound for extremist groups and continue to counter its efforts to harass commercial shipping and our naval forces. Reaffirm U.S. policy to oppose Iran’s efforts to subvert local governments and project its power at the expense of our friends and allies.
The WINEP statement concludes:
Collectively, these steps also strengthen U.S. capability against Daesh (the misnamed “Islamic State”). Acting against both Iranian hegemony and Daesh’s caliphate will help reassure friends and allies of America’s continued commitment. And it will help address Israel’s legitimate concerns that a nuclear agreement will validate Iran’s nuclear program, further facilitate its destabilizing behavior, and encourage further proliferation at a time when Israel faces the possible erosion of its “qualitative military edge.” We urge the U.S. administration to create a discreet, high-level mechanism with the Israeli government to identify and implement responses to each of these concerns.
Taking the actions we propose while the nuclear negotiations continue will reinforce the message that Iran must comply with any agreement and will not be allowed to pursue a nuclear weapon. This will increase, not decrease, the chance that Iran will comply with the agreement and may ultimately adopt a more constructive role in the region. For the U.S. administration’s hopes in this respect have little chance so long as Iran’s current policy seems to be succeeding in expanding its influence.
The President’s ideological mindset regarding a rapprochement with an untrustworthy Islamic Regime in Tehran coupled with Secretary of State Kerry’s appeasement of the red-lines diktats issued by Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khamenei portend a disastrous emerging agreement, should one be concluded in its current form. We fully anticipate the Administration will issue its own statements rejecting these compelling and cogent recommendations contained in the WINEP statement signed off by a broad array of bi-partisan national security experts, diplomatic negotiators, former national legislators and international nuclear weapons inspectors. With the clock winding down on a final Joint Plan of Action, Americans of all political stripes and Members of Congress should heed the WINEP-sponsored recommendations concerning the emerging P5+1 agreement under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015. The Congress will have a daunting task to respond in less than 30 days under INARA with the President poised to veto any negative vote, not easily overridden.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/wash-inst-for-near-east-policy-logo.jpg325640Jerry Gordonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Gordon2015-06-25 08:36:572015-06-25 08:49:38Bi-Partisan Policy Group Blasts Obama Iran Nuclear Deal and Middle East Strategy
MERRIFIELD, Va., /PRNewswire/ — The 2016 Committee, a political action committee raising awareness and support for Dr. Ben Carson’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, today announced that Sam Pimm, an experienced campaign manager and expert political consultant, will serve as the Committee’s executive director.
“Sam brings over 30 years of high level campaign and political experience to our committee,” said John Philip Sousa IV, national chairman for The 2016 Committee. “He understands that in order to succeed you need a plan, a strategy, tactics and objectives. In coordination with National Director Vernon Robinson and our regional directors, Sam will immediately begin developing a tight business plan around our existing strategies to help ensure success.”
As executive director for the Committee, Pimm will report directly to the board and oversee all field activities in support of the 2016 Committee’s efforts to send Dr. Carson to the White House. He will be responsible for grassroots organization and provide oversight and strategy for state and regional directors across the country, including in early primary states.
Pimm is the owner and founder of Consultant in a Can, a firm that leverages Pimm’s 36 years of campaign experience to provide consulting services on an affordable basis for state and local Republican candidates. His extensive campaign experience includes hundreds of state legislature campaigns, as well as congressional, senate, and presidential campaigns including Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson, Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich.
“I’m excited to join the 2016 Committee and be part of its important mission because I know Dr. Ben Carson is the best hope we have for healing America’s deep economic and social wounds,” Pimm said. “I’m looking forward to working with John Sousa, Vernon Robinson, Chuck Muth, the Committee’s staff and our thousands of amazing grassroots volunteers across the country to win Dr. Carson the keys to the White House.”
Dr. Carson has repeatedly polled at or near the top of a crowded field of Republican candidates in presidential polls around the country. A recent Monmouth University poll showed Dr. Carson leading all other GOP candidates among Republican and Republican-leaning voters.
About the 2016 Committee
The 2016 Committee is a political action committee formed to draft Dr. Ben Carson into the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. It was founded in August 2013 by John Philip Sousa IV and Vernon Robinson as the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, and works to raise awareness of Dr. Carson’s qualifications and to engage grassroots conservative activists in clamoring for Dr. Carson to run for president. For more information, visit www.2016committee.org or connect on Twitter @DraftRunBenRun or Facebook/RunBenRun.org.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/140713-Ben-Carson-ftr-e1443173411664.jpg398388Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-06-25 06:16:072015-06-25 06:16:07Sam Pimm to Head Ben Carson for President Super PAC
Today is part 3 of a 5 part series on the absolute BAD deal that the United States of America is negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding the nuclear weapon capability of Iran. Our big idea is that the U.S. must get at least 9 minimum requirements from Iran in order to agree to this critical deal that determines the stability of the Middle East and indeed the complete world.
We feature a video from the Clarion Project that presents the “Neville Brothers,” (Chamberlain, Clinton and Obama) as “successful” world negotiators who got duped by Germany, North Korea and Iran.
In addition we feature retired Admiral “Ace” Lyons as he implicates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Benghazi disgrace, which furthered the growth of the Islamic State in the Middle East. Finally, we introduce a frightening survey conducted by the Center for Security Policy which reveals the level of violence that American Muslims are willing to advance in order to advance Islam in America.
As a result, Athens has really and truly run out of money, and they will default on their debts starting tomorrow — and the European Central Bank has said 
