Miami-Dade Schools: Whistleblower Won’t Back Down

We have been covering the ongoing struggle between whistle-blowers and the Miami-Dade school system. A prime example is Trevor Colestock, who did the right thing in August of 2013 by reporting test cheating at Miami Norland Senior High School. Since that time the district has created an atmosphere where teachers, like Colestock, who report cheating are harassed and treated as malcontents, and those found to have cheated, in some cases, have been returned to the classroom.

The most recent of many incidents involves citizen journalist and whistle-blowing school librarian Trevor Colestock, who refuses to back down and cower to fear and bullying by district staff.

Colestock, an ongoing and current litigant against Miami-Dade County Public Schools, has been retaliated against and harassed on and off ever since the test cheating he reported at Miami Norland Senior High School was validated by the Miami-Dade Office of Inspector General and he published it in August 2013.

Due to harassing observations and a threat of future retaliation and harassment, Colestock submitted a complaint to his principal, Sabrina Montilla.

“Like my brother, I do not give in to fear and bullying. UTD officials and fellow teachers may shrink and cower, as they have, but I will not,” said Colestock. Bullying has become the tactic to keep teachers towing the district line.

As George Orwell wrote, “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

U.S. Senate Investigating Administration Funding of anti-Netanyahu V15 Campaign

As the Israeli Knesset election looms on March 17th Fox News reported that the bi-partisan U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs  may be engaged in investigating Administration funding of  OneVoice. It is an NGO linked to the Israel-based V15 anti-Netanyahu field effort headed by veteran Obama Campaign official Jeremy Bird.  The Fox report noted:

A powerful U.S. Senate investigatory committee has launched a bipartisan probe into an American nonprofit’s funding of efforts to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Obama administration’s State Department gave the nonprofit taxpayer-funded grants, a source with knowledge of the panel’s activities told FoxNews.com.

The fact that both Democratic and Republican sides of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have signed off on the probe could be seen as a rebuke to President Obama, who has had a well-documented adversarial relationship with the Israeli leader.

The development comes as Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel Two television station this week that there were “governments” that wanted to help with the “Just Not Bibi” campaigning — Bibi being the Israeli leader’s nickname.

It also follows a FoxNews.com report on claims the Obama administration has been meddling in the Israeli election on behalf of groups hostile to Netanyahu. A spokesperson for Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican and chairman of the committee, declined comment, and aides to ranking Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, did not immediately return calls.

The Senate subcommittee, which has subpoena power, is the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ chief investigative body with jurisdiction over all branches of government operations and compliance with laws.

[…]

 “It’s confirmed that there is a bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee inquiry into OneVoice’s funding of V15,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity about the American group, which bills itself as working for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the [Fox]source, the probe is looking into “funding” by OneVoice Movement – a Washington-based group that has received $350,000 in recent State Department grants and until last November was headed by a veteran diplomat from the Clinton administrations, [former Carter Administration Advisor on Middle East Policy and Clinton Ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsburg].

Ginsberg, who has described the administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “window of opportunity,” is now serving OneVoice as “special advisor” after resigning as CEO at a time that turned out to be just ahead of the early December announcement of the Israeli election.

“I resigned on November 11, 2014, because I had only committed to serve as CEO for one year and my resignation was effective December 19, 2014,” he wrote in an email to FoxNews.com. “I agreed to be available after that as a Senior Adviser on an occasional basis to the organization…along with many others, but have had ZERO decision-making authority over personnel, budgets, programs, etc. That responsibility was transferred to the Executive Director of the OneVoice Europe organization after I resigned.”

Frank Curtis, a New English Review contributing editor and colleague  had  more about OneVoice and Bird’s connections with the Israel based V15 (“Victory”) “anyone but Bibi” support group  in a Feb 2, 2015, The Commentator article “Netanyahu should be shown respect by the White House”:

Bird has begun advising V15 on its Tel Aviv campaign, with the intent to recruit thousands of volunteers to go door to door canvassing for anti-Netanyahu parties. V15’s collaborator OneVoice is a group that describes itself as an international grassroots movement that amplifies the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians. OneVoice claims to have 600,000 Palestinian, Israeli, and international signatories. Its president is Daniel Lubetzky, son of a Holocaust survivor, who was born in Mexico City in 1968, and is now a wealthy businessman based in the U.S. He apparently has funded the activity of Israeli peace groups, and is actually the founder of one of them, PeaceWorks. V15 and OneVoice are active in the attempt to defeat Netanyahu.”

Aaron Klein, veteran Israel-based investigative reporter has interviewed the head of the OneVoice offices in Tel Aviv and filed several reports on both Klein On-line and the WorldNetDaily.  He reported the February 1st, 2015 injunctions claims by Likud officials raised by Prime Minister Netanyahu and filed with the Israel Election Commission:

“Accus[ing] V15 and other related nonprofits of being supported “through millions of dollars funneled from Europe, the U.S., the New Israel Fund and international factors interested in bringing down Prime Minister Netanyahu” who think “that all means are appropriate.”

The Likud further called for Israel’s Central Elections Committee to outlaw V15′s activities to “ensure the integrity of the election.” The party today will be filing an official complaint with the Committee seeking an injunction against V15.”

Klein reported OneVoice spokesman in Israel saying:

Uri Wollman, V15′s spokesman, said  his organization will not stop its campaign to ensure a center-left coalition forms the next government in Israel.

Wollman accused Netanyahu and the Likud of “fabricating” a relationship between V15 and the Obama administration.

“We have no relation to any U.S. political party, the White House or the State Department,” Wollman told [Klein].

However, Wollman revealed to Klein that in addition to OneVoice Movement  founder Lubetzky, the grass roots efforts  were being funded by two other philanthropists: “S. Daniel Abraham, the Palm Beach based billionaire founder of the Slim Fast food line. Abraham is a major donor to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Foundation and [Israeli ]Alon Kastiel, a Tel Aviv-based businessman and owner of multiple local venues, including bars, clubs and hotels.”

 Klein’s  further investigations uncovered another  possible get out the Anti-Netanyahu vote effort directed at Israeli Arab voters by The Abraham Fund. Like OneVoice, The Abraham Fund had been given a three year grant  by the  U.S. State Department of nearly $1 million to improve Jewish Arab relations in Israel. Klein noted an Abraham Fund news release on January 21, 2015 announcing the launch of a non-partisan turnout the vote campaign to increase participation in the upcoming Knesset elections with a focus on conferences at colleges and in media and advertising to enhance Arab integration in the election process.

Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reported on January 27th, Christina Taler, State Department Grant officer for OneVoice saying:

“ We’ve formed a partnership with [V15], but it’s important to know we’re absolutely nonpartisan,” “Our biggest emphasis and focus right now is just getting people out to vote.”

When Klein asked Nimrod Dweck,  Founder  of V-15 in OneVoice’s Tel Aviv office about why Bird and the 270 Strategies team of Obama Campaign operatives were hired to ‘get out the vote’, Dweck responded:

Israelis don’t know how to run field (operations) as Americans [do], and that was the major contribution of Jeremy’s team. Bird provided very professional help about how to organize, manage people, how to go door-to-door, how to talk to people on the street. It’s a matter of finding the right professionals. And if I need to pick the best professional in the world for the job, [Bird] knows what he is doing. 270 [Strategies] is a great company.

State Department funding of both the OneVoice/V-15 and the Abraham Fund  is potentially  aiding  the anti-Netanyahu Arab and leftist Jewish vote in the “anyone but Bibi” campaign.   V-15 has hired the Jeremy Byrd of 270 Strategies, former Obama campaign field organizer coupled with funding by wealthy U.S. Democratic contributors and Israeli Zionist Union supporters fueling the tight race for control of the 33rd Israeli government on March 17th.  Given today’s Fox News report it has also led the U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee to address  complaints by  Senate colleagues and Prime Minister Netanyahu of U.S. Administration interference in these critical elections, the results of  which will be the basis of coalition negotiations to  form the next government.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

The EPA Thinks You’re Stupid

The folks at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a long line of its administrators that now includes Gina McCarthy, think you and the Congress of the United States are stupid. They have been telling lies for so long they can’t imagine that their chokehold on the American economy will ever end.

EPA Director - Gina McCarthy

EPA Director Gina McCarthy

It is, however, coming to an end and the reason is a Republican-controlled Congress responding to the countless businesses and individuals being ravaged by a ruthless bureaucracy driven by an environmental agenda determined to deprive America of the energy sources vital to our lives and the nation’s existence.

This was on display in early March when Gina McCarthy testified to the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, asking for a nearly $500 million increase in its 2016 budget. The total discretionary budget request would have topped out at $8.6 billion and would reward states nearly $4 billion to go along with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

The problem is that the Clean Power Plan is really about no power or far more costly power in those states where the EPA has been shutting down coal-fired plants that not long ago provided fifty percent of all the electricity in the nation.

In February 2014, the Institute for Energy Research reported:

“More than 72 gigawatts (GW) of electrical generating capacity have already, or are now set to retire because of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulations. The regulations causing these closures include the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (colloquially called MATS, or Utility MACT), proposed Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), and the proposed regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

To put 72 GW in perspective, that is enough electrical generation capacity to reliably power 44.7 million homes—or every home in every state west of the Mississippi River, excluding Texas. In other words, EPA is shutting down enough generating capacity to power every home in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

EPA - Shutdown of Electricity

Plants closed or soon to be closed. For a larger view click on the map.

Over 94 percent these retirements will come from generating units at coal-fired power plants, shuttering over one-fifth of the U.S.’s coal-fired generating capacity. While some of the effected units will be converted to use new fuels, American families and businesses will pay the price with higher utility bills and less reliability for their electricity.”

What nation would knowingly reduce its capacity to produce the electricity that everyone depends upon?

Answer: The United States of America.

Why? Because the EPA has been telling us that coal-fired plants produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and it is causing ours and the world’s temperature to increase to a point that threatens our lives. They have been claiming that everything from blizzards to droughts, hurricanes to forest fires, are the result of the CO2 that coal-fired plants produce.

That is a huge, stupendous lie.

In the Senate Committee meeting, McCarthy said, “Climate change is real. It is happening. It is a threat. Humans are causing the majority of that threat…the impacts are being felt. Climate change is not a religion. It is not a belief system. It’s a scientific fact. And our challenge is to move forward with the actions we need to protect future generations.”

Climate change is real. It’s been real for 4.5 billion years and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that humans do, least of all heating, cooling and lighting their homes, running their businesses, and everything else that requires electricity.

McCarthy said that the EPA’s overall goal was to save the planet from rising sea levels, massive storms, and other climate events that impact our lives. No, that’s not why the EPA was created in 1970. Its job was to clean the water and the air. It has done a relatively good job, but its mandate had nothing to do with the climate, nor does the provision of energy have any impact on the climate.

The reverse is true. The climate has a lot of impact on us.

Regarding the “science” McCarthy referred to, according to a 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there were record low tornadoes, record low hurricanes, record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice, no change in the rate of sea levels, and there had been NO WARMING at that point for 17—now 19—years.

When Sen. Jeff Sessions asked McCarthy a number of questions about droughts and hurricanes, she either dodged providing a specific answer or claimed, as with hurricanes, that “I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”

Asked about the computer models on which the EPA makes its regulatory decisions, McCarthy replied, “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to.” Sen. Sessions said that it was incredible that the Administrator of the EPA “doesn’t know whether their predictions have been right or wrong.”

As for any “science” the EPA may be using, much of it is SECRET.

Heartland - Climate News (1)H. Sterling Burnett, the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, reported on The Secret Science Reform Act (HR 4012) introduced by the House Science Committee late last year. The bill would “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based on science that is not transparent or reproducible.”

The House passed the Act on November 20, 2014 and it has been received in the Senate, read twice, and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. If it passes the Senate, that will be a giant leap forward in gaining oversight and control of the EPA.

Until then, the EPA’s administrator and staff will continue to work their mischief in the belief that both Congress and the rest of us are stupid. We’re not.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

RELATED ARTICLE: “Once-in-a-Generation Event”: Icebergs Wash Ashore at Cape Cod as Thoughts of Global Warming Evaporate

The Word from Brazil — Petrobras Scandal

The carnival in Rio de Janeiro from February 13th through the 17th was one heck of a party. It was celebrated by the locals, plus an estimated one million visitors, complete with fabulous parades, street parties and balls. Brazil is blessed with some great beaches, the most famous of which is Ipanema, thanks to the 1962 bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema”.

Brazil shares borders every other nation in South America except Ecuador and Chile, and has a range of geographic features from the Amazon rain forest to jungles, towering mountains, rivers and rolling plains. In 2016 Brazil will host the Summer Olympics.

I suspect that’s about the only knowledge of Brazil that most Americans have. Brazil is the largest nation in South America. Its most densely populated parts are in the south-central regions that include major cities like San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The only Portuguese-speaking nation in both North and South America, it has enjoyed economic growth, but that has slowed.

Petrobras scandal 2A friend from Brazil shared news that was not likely to show up except on the business pages because U.S. media tend to ignore Brazil and South America unless its bad news. Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, has been caught up in a huge scandal that will lead to criminal proceedings. In early February, its CEO, Gracas Foster, and five other top executives resigned.

It’s a kickback scandal and what makes Brazil a place to watch is the fact that its president, Dilma Rousseff, served on Petrobras board of directors from 2003 to 2010 when the prosecutors allege that the kickbacks were occurring. Her political party is alleged to have received billions in money skimmed from the company.

In October 2014, she was reelected in what The Telegraph described as a “dramatic run-off and a tense campaign” which she won “by a whisker”, just 51.6% of the vote. She was the candidate of the Worker’s Party. The months leading up to the election included mass protests, the corruption scandal, and a stalling economy, slipping back into recession for the first time in five years.

Petrobras is the perfect example of why a government-run enterprise, socialism, is never a good idea. Worth $310 billion in 2008 and valued as the world’s fifth-largest company, today it is worth just $48 billion. There is a definite sense of crisis in Brazil as its government is posting record budget deficits after a collapse in prices for the soy, oil, and iron that the country exports. Its currency, the real, has seen a drop in value for the past six months.

One observer suggests a possible military intervention to remove the president and others involved in the Petrobras scandal.

All that is bad news, but on top of it San Paulo, Brazil’s commercial capital, is running out of water as the reservoirs that supply the nearly twenty million people in the metropolitan area are close to running dry. The water literally goes off around 1 PM until the next day for a few hours but the state water utility denies it is rationing it. The water problem is estimated to last for four to five more years.

America has a long history of isolationism. Early Americans came here to get away from the problems in their home countries, but those problems have ways of affecting our lives as we have seen with the turmoil of Islamic fascism in the Middle East.

We would be well advised to keep an eye on Brazil (and Argentina and Venezuela) and hope it can resolve its current problems, but we can also give thanks that the U.S. is enjoying a boom in energy reserves, particularly oil and natural gas, that protects us against potential upheaval elsewhere in the world.

If we replace the current U.S. administration with one that understands and supports the growth of our energy sector, we will be on our way to a brighter future.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Too Many Lies, Too Much of the Time

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.” — THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 19, 1785

I am beginning to wonder if Americans have grown so accustomed to the lies told by the President, his administration, and others said to be highly regarded, that we are losing a sense of outrage?

Hillary & Brian WilliamsTo the degree that Brian Williams’ serial lies have evoked a national discussion, it’s good to know that most people think he has lost credibility to the point of not being a news anchor, but one still has to wonder what NBC will do at the end of the six month suspension it has imposed on him. I am cynical enough to think he may be offered a job at MSNBC.

It is far more significant that, regarding the leading candidate to be the Democratic Party’s choice to run for President in 2016, we know she engaged in similar lies of having been “under fire.”

It’s one thing to expect politicians to lie, but the nation’s future is at stake when we still do not know the truth of Hillary Clinton’s full role in the Benghazi attack that left a U.S. ambassador and three others dead. She was the Secretary of State at the time and we watched her stand at his side as the President attributed the attack to a video no one had ever seen. The fact that the attack occurred on the anniversary of 9/11 was conveniently ignored.

The refusal to identify the Islamic State (ISIS) as an enemy representative of the global jihad is not just politics. It is a lie on the order of the President’s assertion that “The Islamic State is not Islamic.” As we are repeatedly reminded, if you cannot or will not identify an enemy, you are leaving yourself and, in this case, the nation open to attack.

Indeed, many elements of the Obama administration have engaged in lying on a level that goes beyond “politics.” It is a deliberate attack on science itself when the EPA, NOAA and NASA actively engage in distorting data to say that the Earth is warming when it has been in a well-established cooling cycle for 19 years at this point.

How are we expected to maintain any confidence in an administration that lies about employment statistics and other critical data we need to know regarding the economy?

The lie about “income inequality” is the core rational for Communism. There is no such thing as equality when it comes to income because some people enjoy higher pay for higher skills, higher productivity, and higher responsibility. We don’t pay “sanitation engineers” the same as we pay real engineers. And you don’t create new jobs by raising the minimum wage when it will reduce existing and potential new jobs.

Most dramatically, it was a series of lies told by the President that led to the passage of ObamaCare. Its two thousand-plus pages were not read by the exclusively Democratic members of Congress who passed it and, today, we learn that it is a major contributor to the nation’s deficit which is the result of the government spending more than it takes in. For the past six years Obama’s policies have added trillions to our national debt, now $18 trillion and growing. It is going to be a burden on generations to come.

There is no evidence of the tax reforms that Congress knows are needed, nor reforms to the entitlement programs that are just years from becoming insolvent.

Whether it is domestic or foreign affairs, Americans have been at a loss to expect the national press to address the lies because they would have to abandon the protection they have afforded the President for the past six years. Only one news service, Fox News, is credited with providing the truth. Fortunately the Internet has provided access to many other outlets where the truth can be found. And, yes, many that maintain the lies.

It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration wants to regulate the Internet with a program that call “Net neutrality”, but there is nothing neutral about it. The freedom the Internet enjoys is the best example of the value Americans put on an uncensored source of information and communication. The Obama administration wants to control the Internet in the same way that despots around the world want to do.

There is always a far higher price to pay for believing lies than knowing the truth.

We expect our enemies to lie. We should not expect our government to do so in such a routine and obscene fashion.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Why do we hold our politicians to a lower standard of honesty than a news reporter?

Brian Williams the NBC news anchor has been forced to step down for 6 months because he lied about his experience during the Gulf war and the Katrina hurricane. These lies were in the nature of gross exaggerations which were improper but hurt no one. Shame on him.

However President Obama repeatedly lied when he told the American public in an effort to pass ObamaCare that you could keep your doctor and you can keep your insurance and no body can take it away from you.Obama also lied when he assured the public that their insurance premiums would be lower. He also lied when he assured the public in 2007 he was opposed to Gay Marriage when in actuality he was in favor of it.

Obama was involved in the Benghazi cover up which is tantamount to a lie. He also refuses to acknowledge most terrorist acts are committed by Radical Islamic terrorists or telling the American people the Fort Hood killings was work place violence. Such deception is tantamount to a lie.

Hillary Clinton lied when she said she was under sniper fire during her trip to Bosnia and repeated the lie on numerous occasions. She also lied numerous times in connection with the Benghazi attack and her involvement with the security arrangements. Bill Clinton lied when he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky and got away with it.

Why is it that Brian Williams a news anchor whose program is somewhat associated with the entertainment industry has been taken to the wood shed for somewhat innocuous exaggerations or lies while high level politicians repeatedly lie on important matters with impunity?

Obama’s Fingers in the Cookie Jar?

In an October 21, 2008 column, titled “Obama is Bought, but Who Owns Him?” I quoted the Obama campaign’s last pre-election financial report which showed that their contributor base had grown from 1.5 million to 2.5 million, and that the total amount raised was approximately $600 million… 25% of it ($150 million) from those contributing from $2,000-2,300.  If that was to be believed, that segment of his contributor base had grown from 37,000 to 71,400 in just over three months, leaving the remaining $450 million to be contributed by some 2.43 million people, each giving $5, $10, $20… or, as Obama assured us, “whatever they could afford.”

Of course, no one but a product of our public education system would be unable to calculate that $450 million cannot be contributed by 2.43 million people in $5, $10, or $20 amounts.  To create a pool of that magnitude, each of those 2.43 million people would have to contribute, on average, just over $185.  That simply does not happen.  It has never happened before, and anyone who believed that actually happened will believe almost anything.  So how were they doing it?

In a July 25, 2008 column we pointed out that UBS Americas, headed by Robert Wolf… along with George Soros, one of Obama’s top two money men… had been accused of highly unethical and illegal banking practices in six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI).  According to an article in The Nation magazine, UBS Americas, a subsidiary of UBS, of Zurich, Switzerland, “had advised wealthy Americans, including many of our worst villains, how to shelter funds from the IRS, as well as from prosecutors, creditors, disgruntled business associates, family members, etc.”

In a Statement of Facts in the criminal trial of former UBS executive Bradley Birkenfeld, it was alleged that UBS took extraordinary steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting federal authorities.   For example, UBS advised clients to avoid detection by using Swiss credit cards to withdraw funds, to destroy all existing off-shore banking records, and to misrepresent the receipt of funds from their Swiss accounts as loans from the Swiss bank.  According to The Nation, UBS established an elaborate training program which taught bank employees how to avoid surveillance by U.S. law enforcement, how to falsify visas, how to encrypt communications, and how to secretly move money into and out of the country…

It was the perfect instrument for funneling large sums of illegal campaign contributions into the coffers of an unscrupulous American politician.  Putting two and two together, I concluded that any number of foreign contributors, wishing to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections, could transfer unlimited sums of money through this device, using the Swiss bank accounts of unsuspecting American depositors as vehicles.  The owners of the Swiss accounts would receive periodic statements indicating: a) debits of varying amounts, up to $2,300 each, and b) offsetting credits provided by the cartel, or by a wealthy “international financier.”

For most of the super wealthy, especially those attempting to hide income and assets from U.S. authorities, an unexplained debit of $2,300, followed by a credit of the same amount, would not even raise an eyebrow.  So who would ever know the source of such contributions?  No one.

On the receiving end of the transactions, a U.S. recipient, such as the Obama campaign, could receive thousands of individual contributions via Swiss credit card transfers, with unsuspecting fictitious contributors… their names, addresses, and occupations “borrowed” from Obama’s extensive list of $10 and $20 contributors… being entered by teams of staffers working in a “boiler room” setting, preparing falsified reports for the Federal Election Commission.

A subsequent report by Newsmax, having studied thousands of pages of Obama’s FEC filings, found some66,383 highly suspicious contributions, not rounded to even dollar amounts, from 37,265 donors.  For example, an insurance agent from Burr Ridge, Illinois, reportedly gave a total of $8,724.26, more than $4,400 over his legal limit.  He gave in odd amounts such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.

A self-employed caregiver in Los Angeles made 36 separate contributions totaling $7,051.12… more than $2,450 over her legal limit.  Thirteen of those contributions were later refunded.  However, in an odd coincidence, those 13 refunds, in amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even $2,300, the maximum allowable in any one election.  Another contributor, a retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, is reported to have given $13,800… $9,200 over his limit.  However, when interviewed by Newsmax, that contributor could not remember giving that much money to Obama.

Lest anyone suggest that those 37,265 donors either emptied their piggy banks or emptied their pockets and purses periodically and just sent it all to Obama, pennies and all, allow me to suggest something a bit more sinister.  Those 66,383 contributions were the proceeds of foreign currency conversions, smuggled into the country in foreign credit card receipts, and deposited in Obama’s campaign coffers using the forged names of some of Obama’s $10 or $20 contributors.

But now it is alleged that Loretta Lynch, Obama’s choice to succeed Eric Holder, is up to her eyeballs in yet another Obama administration criminal enterprise in which the banking system was misused in much the same way as in the 2008 foreign currency smuggling operation.  According to a February 7, 2015 report in WorldNetDaily (WND), the Obama Department of Justice appears to be stonewalling the release of documents that could implicate Ms. Lynch in a massive cover-up of Obama administration involvement in the international money-laundering of Mexican drug cartel money.

WND reports that Lynch, while serving as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, “oversaw the investigation of drug-related international money-laundering allegations against London-based HSBC Holdings, LLC.”  WND had previously published a series of articles documenting charges that HSBC laundered billions of dollars that were traced back to Mexican drug cartels.  That investigation resulted in a $1.256 billion fine paid to the U.S. government, ending the investigation and avoiding the filing of criminal charges.

According to the WND report, the federal government’s unwillingness to prosecute HSBC was exposed by whistle blower John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president in New York, who called the bank a “criminal enterprise,” saying that the fine imposed by the Department of Justice was “a joke.”  After being forced out of HSBC, Cruz filed a $10 million lawsuit against HSBC, charging “retaliation and wrongful termination.”  At that point, whistle blowers in India and London joined Cruz in charging that the HSBC settlement amounted to a “massive cover-up.”

WND charged that, in retaliation for their reporting of Cruz’s evidence, “HSBC lodged a complaint that blocked Internet access to one of the WND stories, and WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi was fired by Gilford Securities, the New York City investment firm he had worked with for two years as a senior managing director.  However, the plot thickened when WND uncovered evidence suggesting that the Obama Justice Department failed to proceed with the investigation of money-laundering charges in deference to bank clients of the Washington-based law firm where Eric Holder served as a partner prior to becoming attorney general.

In a telephone interview on February 6th, Cruz told WND that the Obama administration “is continuing to cover up its role in the HSBC money laundering scandal.”  He went on to say that “the IRS has blocked every legal effort he has made to be credited as a whistleblower in the HSBC billion-dollar settlement.”  He said, “It is impossible that the Obama administration did not know HSBC was laundering drug money for the Mexican cartels, because the documentation I had showed the laundered money passed through the federal wire-transfer services.”

Cruz charged that the 1,000 pages of customer account information he provided show that HSBC’s money-laundering activities relied heavily on identity theft and purloined Social Security numbers that were “then used to create bogus retail and commercial bank accounts.”  Through those bogus accounts, HSBC employees systematically deposited and withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis, apparently without the knowledge of the identity-theft victims.  He explained that when a bogus bank loan was established under a stolen identity… causing much consternation among individuals who found they were the recipients of loans they knew nothing about… five percent of the loan proceeds went to the accounting firm that prepared the phony tax returns and the other 95 percent went to the HSBC managers.

Cruz explained that one manager was involved in the transaction, another manager was involved in notarizing the transaction, and senior management was involved when they approved the loans, even loans that had been rejected by underwriters.  In order to avoid prosecution for violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act, HSBC agreed to pay the $1.256 billion fine in a deferred prosecution agreement with Obama’s Justice Department.

With Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch having major roles in the cover-up, Ms. Lynch will have a great deal of explaining to do as her confirmation hearings continue.

In the meantime, it would be most interesting to study FEC contribution reports to learn how much HSBC money found its way into the hands of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and numerous Democratic candidates.

How Markets Tell the Truth and Politics Tells Lies

Or, how to get more trust in society by Gary M. Galles:

Have you ever tried to work with people you couldn’t depend on to tell you the truth? It isn’t pretty. Without the ability to rely on what you’ve been told (or the assurance that you’ve been told everything relevant), effective cooperation at almost every margin of choice is reduced. That’s because the foundation on which cooperation is built has been undermined.

As John Donne succinctly put it, “No man is an island.” In a modern economy, all of us are dependent on multitudes of strangers not just for our prospering, but for our survival. So the problem of effective cooperation increases exponentially when we expand our horizons to the countless areas in which people — the vast majority of whom don’t even know each other — interact.

People aren’t always truthful because being dishonest can serve one’s interests. Sometimes we perceive a strategic advantage in lying to gain at another’s expense. Our words are also often post-hoc rationalizations, both to ourselves and to others, for why whatever we said or did was a good idea.

But with time, that can make what people say a frail reed to hang upon. And when political power is involved, the incentives for such deception and self-delusion are put on steroids. The payoffs of deception are far greater when it comes to politics, because politics rarely rewards honesty. As the level of dishonesty goes up, the level of trust goes down. And in the absence of trust, information that is vital to cooperation becomes increasingly scarce.

Making matters worse, the amount of information out there is vast. No individual can possibly know the infinite permutations of who, what, when, where, why, and how. As Hayek famously reminds us, knowledge is mostly local, distributed among billions of people. But voluntary market arrangements, based on private property rights, provide a powerful mechanism for overcoming problems associated with our limited knowledge.

The price is right

Most of the time, we don’t really care to know all the details that might have affected our interactions with others. In commercial interaction, we mainly just want to know, “How much?” In that price, we get a glimpse of what trade-offs others are willing to make between goods and services, current versus future consumption, labor versus leisure, and so on. Regardless of the specific determinants from person to person, others’ trade-offs determine what is and isn’t possible for us in any society where people are free to choose.

By revealing more and more accurate information, more and more social coordination is possible. Mutually beneficial arrangements are expanded. Others, including all prospective central planners, don’t know the trade-offs each individual would make; only the individuals involved know for sure. Coordination requires a process that reveals accurate information to those who make choices. Otherwise, the information will be lost, along with any wealth creation that might have followed.

Undistorted market prices provide that information. While what people say may be misleading, people reveal many truths when they engage in market behavior. After all, what you do is often far more truthful than what you say. For example, if you buy a product for $10, you reveal that it is worth at least $10 to you; similarly, if you sell a product for $10, you reveal that what the money might purchase is worth more to you than the product. And those choices reveal valuable information about the real alternatives available to those who might deal with you in the future.

The mendacity of politics

In contrast, because politics is based more on what people say than on what they do, it often short-circuits the mechanisms for discovering the truth: prices, profit, and loss. Politics becomes less about cooperation and more about creating perceptions. In fact, government interference in people’s voluntary relationships substitutes lies for the very truths that might otherwise be revealed. And in a world where relative scarcities are generally what we really want to know the truth about, politics can be very damaging. Consider the following:

1. Price ceilings lie

Price ceilings, such as rent controls, lie about scarcity. In the absence of such controls (truth), market rents tell you the prices at which you can find apartments and reflect the opportunity costs landlords really face. But rent controls impose a price divorced from landlords’ opportunity costs, and a price at which many prospective tenants will be unable to rent an apartment. The price lies to people, telling them that the opportunity costs are cheaper than they really are. In the process, it distorts the terms at which apartments can generally be rented successfully.

2. Price floors lie

Price floors, such as minimum wages, act in a similar manner. In the absence of such controls (truth), market wages tell you the prices at which you can generally find jobs and hire employees. But a minimum wage dictates a price that is divorced from prospective workers’ opportunity costs, and at which many people will be unable to find jobs. Such wages misinform people that unskilled labor’s opportunity costs are higher than they really are. And in the process, minimum wages distort the terms at which jobs can be successfully gotten.

3. Taxes lie

Taxes, which are the price of an artificial input — “government permission to produce and sell” — reflect coercively imposed government burdens rather than opportunity costs of inherently scarce goods and services. Taxes tell buyers that products are scarcer than they really are.

The same is true of import restrictions such as tariffs and quotas, which raise prices above opportunity costs.

The burdens of government regulations and mandates also act like taxes. Government barriers to entry and operation in markets similarly raise prices above what relative scarcity would dictate. All of these interventions result in artificially high prices, underuse, and waste.

4. Subsidies lie

Subsidies act in a parallel manner to taxes, but in the other direction. They communicate to prospective buyers that products are more abundant than they really are, leading to artificially low prices, overuse, and waste.

Not only do voluntary market interactions better reveal the truth about relative scarcities through pricing; they also allow more accurate evaluation of other aspects of trading, such as product and service quality.

Reputation promotes honesty

The key (though often ignored) factor is repeat business. The usual scare stories to justify a “need” for government regulation involve one-time interactions in which others can gain by “cheating” on what they promise. The relevant question, however, is not whether they can cheat, but whether it is in their interest to do so.

We don’t need government protection against acts people will choose not to engage in. And since almost everyone we deal with economically wishes to continue in business, effects on future business act as a performance bond against misbehavior — both directly, as when current customers refuse to deal with such suppliers in the future, and indirectly, through reputation effects on other current and prospective trading partners.

Reputation leads to far better outcomes than scare stories imply. As students of game theory recognize, one-shot games and repeated games generate very different strategies.

Repeat business discourages cheating

Consider an example. Suppose I can cheat you today by providing lower-than-promised quality, and doing so would generate $1 million in increased profits. If it would leave my future business relationships unchanged, I have an incentive to cheat.

But what if I expect the resulting damage to my reputation to cost me $1 million or more in future discounted profits? I can cheat you, but I will not, because I have no incentive to.

The problem in this case is completely solved by markets’ reputation mechanisms. Even if the future losses don’t completely eliminate my incentives to cheat, they sharply reduce them, letting much of the air out of the “we need government regulation” balloon.

Ancient reputation markets

This mechanism, while ignored by ubiquitous state acolytes, is far from new. For instance, the famous 11th-century Maghribi traders of Northern Africa did not rely on government enforcement of international trade arrangements but on reputation-based self-regulation. In fact, a core role of Maghribi trader guilds was to protect themselves against government extortion by threatening them with the loss of future business relationships.

Modern technology has done nothing but improve voluntary reputational institutions. It allows people to detect “cheating” on quality more quickly, reducing the gains to be had from that misbehavior, as with the constantly improving transaction-by-transaction feedback from those on both sides of exchanges on eBay and other websites. Further, it spreads the word to other potential trading partners far faster and more broadly than was once the case, increasing the ability to punish, and thereby deter, such misbehavior.

Government promotes dishonesty

What has been the role of governments in all of this? They have been orders of magnitude behind markets in their creation and utilization of reputational mechanisms. In fact, their efforts have more frequently been turned against efforts to better serve customers, defending the old ways that governments have found to control and extort against potentially superior new options (for example, heavily regulated taxis versus Uber and heavily taxed hotels versus Airbnb) without such parasitic attachments.

This sort of intervention is not new, either. For example, it is striking how taxi regulations targeting Uber and Lyft, to benefit those enriched by government restrictions at the expense of consumers, mirror cities’ earlier strangulation of the jitney (unregulated cab) market, because jitneys were taking too much business from municipality-owned streetcar systems. Further, unlike those who have their own money at stake in preventing or solving abusive behavior in markets, government overseers have far worse incentives to watch as carefully or innovate as much.

Ask yourself if you get more, better, and quicker oversight from Airbnb or the hotel commission.

A great deal of social coordination is only achievable when based on the truth.

Not only does the truth set us free, but freedom in our cooperative endeavors reveals truths we have no other way of knowing.

ABOUT GARY M. GALLES

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013).

IRS Social Engineering Experiment Is Failing

The Government of the United States of America is not in the business of generating its own wealth to run day to day operations.  Without our hard earned federal tax dollars going into the Treasury, our government would not be able to function.

The US Tax Code has become such a complex and convoluted mess of social engineering the IRS is having problems doing its most basic function – collecting taxes.

irs regulations

For a larger view click on the chart. Courtesy of Family Security Matters.

The Problem

Our legislators have learned they can control people and corporations behavior by way of the tax code.  The Corporations have learned they can lobby legislators to make favorable changes in the tax code for their personal benefit. Legislators can be bought off  for pennies on the dollar to make favorable tax code changes no one will ever report on.  After all – taxes and accounting theory do not sell newspapers or burn up the blogosphere.

On the people side of the equation, our legislators can control large voting blocks of people by giving tax credits, exemptions, and in some cases unearned tax refunds assuring a large segment of the voting public will vote for one party or the other.

Our Legislators get rich by forcing Corporations to make all the right political donations in order to get the tax code provisions needed to stay competitive.

Our Legislators use the tax code to pay off segments the population to vote for or against a (D) or and (R) helping ensure a long and profitable career for our elected officials.

Solution

Listen to anyone who is serious about overhauling our current tax code.  These individuals understand our US Tax Code is the oil that keeps the engine of America running smoothly.

Any legislator who fights the overhaul of the US Tax Code has become corrupted by the system and lost sight of what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights for, we the people.

Kelly Phillips Erb, Contributor Forbes Magazine, exposes the symptoms of systemic problems hampering the IRS.  I encourage you all to follow the work of Kelly Phillips Erb.

IRS Warns Of Delayed Refunds, Long Waits For Taxpayers & Possible Shutdown

By Kelly Phillips Erb

Posted: 13 Jan 2015 05:17 PM PST

“With a week to go before tax season opens, taxpayers were already bracing for a potentially “miserable” filing season. It turns out that it could live up to the hype.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Koskinen has advised employees that the budget cuts will result in reduced services to taxpayers. In an email to employees sent earlier today, Commissioner Koskinen advised that “realistically we have no choice but to do less with less.”

What does that mean for taxpayers?

  • Identity theft could increase. Despite the need for increased taxpayer protections against identity theft, the implementation of additionalmeasures will be delayed. That’s bad news for taxpayers since, despite the efforts of IRS and other agencies to stem the tide of identity theft, scammers have grown more bold. TIGTA reported that telephone scammers, posing as IRS representatives, managed to steal more than $5 million from taxpayers last year. And as quickly as the scams are picked up, they change. IRS-Criminal Investigation has responded to what has been termed an “epidemic” of identity theft by ramping up investigations – but with wholesale cuts to IRS, expect those investigations to dip, too.
  • Refund delays. It turns out that satirical piece on tax refunds making the rounds might have had some merit after all. According to the Commissioner, taxpayers who file paper tax returns may have to wait an extra week or longer to see their refund. In the email, the Commissioner didn’t specifically address whether delays would affect refunds for taxpayers who e-file, though a few weeks again he refused to say that refunds would not be delayed.
  • Lags in correspondence. Those of us in the field have already become familiar with those letters from IRS that begin “We need more time…” It looks like those are about to kick up even more. With fewer employees on staff, IRS expects “lengthy delays” to answer correspondence.
  • Fewer resolutions.Those taxpayers who have legitimate gripes but can’t find a resolution will be out of luck. The Commissioner says that the Taxpayer Advocate Service, normally the next step when cases aren’t resolved through normal channels, won’t be able to obtain a new case management system to oversee taxpayer hardship cases.
  • Unanswered calls. Predictions weren’t terrific for answered call rates before. Now, the Commissioner is warning of “an even lower level of telephone service.” Specifically, he notes the “real possibility that fewer than half of taxpayers trying to call us will actually reach us.” Those calls that are answered, he says, “will face extended wait times that are unacceptable to all of us.”
  • Shutdowns. Although the Commissioner wavered on saying yes to furloughs last month, temporary shutdowns look to be the case after all. The Commissioner indicated that the agency is planning for at least one shutdown this fiscal year; he suggested there might betwo furlough days. There was no word on when those dates might be other than later in the fiscal year (read: not during tax season).
  • Fewer Audit Closures. The silver lining – if you can call it that – is that the reduction in staffing means fewer taxpayer audits will be closed in 2015 (no word on how that will affect selection of new matters). Collections case closures will also be reduced. That might be good news for those under the audit gun but not so great for the Treasury. Commissioner Koskinen estimates that the government will, as a result, lose at least $2 billion in revenue.

Quite frankly, none of this information is earth-shattering. I think many of us – tax professionals and taxpayers alike – have been hoping for the best but bracing for the worst this tax season. It looks like we’re getting the latter.

Tax season is still slated to open on January 20, 2015 (those pesky rumors suggesting the date has been pushed out further are just that: rumors). For the latest word on the 2015 tax season, keep checking back.”

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Family Security Matters.

2014 Project Veritas Action Year in Review

In October 2014 James O’Keefe started Project Veritas Action (PVA), a new group that allows his team to dig deeper into elections, campaigns and the legislation that impacts all Americans.

O’Keefe in an email notes, “As you can imagine, it’s tough getting a new organization off of the ground. It’s really no different from starting a small business. But only days after forming Project Veritas Action, we were generating real results.”

Here’s a six-minute video that recaps Project Veritas Action’s work for 2014:

The following are Project Veritas Action’s achievements:

  • In Texas, PVA uncovered violations of election laws by the group, Battleground Texas, which was founded by an Obama campaign operative.
  • Moving on to Kentucky, PVA exposed the hypocrisy of Senate Candidate Alison Grimes who appeared to cater to the coal industry but behind the scenes, left her top supporters with the clear impression that as soon as she was elected, she would be the working hard to shutdown the lifeblood of the state.
  • Next, PVA focused on the campaign of Mark Pryor who was running for Senate in Arkansas. One important issue to Arkansas votes was gay marriage, which we found Pryor, much like Grimes, presented multiple faces dependent upon the audience. Pryor’s hypocrisy was on display when the chairwoman of the state’s gay caucus disclosed his personal support for gay marriage with no ambiguity.
  • In Colorado, PVA found campaign operatives who enthusiastically pointed us in the right direction in committing massive vote fraud.
  • Heading down South, PVA focused heavily on North Carolina where multiple campaign workers were all too willing to help illegal immigrants cast a ballot in the election.
  • PVA’s final stop was Louisiana, a state whose government needs constant sunlight. There PVA uncovered the ties between corrupt government attorneys and the work they now do for Holder’s Justice Department. Bar complaints were filed and shocked a local democratic official who literally ran for cover.

O’Keefe states, “Conducting our investigations and delivering the results to the public is primarily what we do. It’s up to the media and governments to follow through on what we disclose. That’s the true impact of our work. We could conduct a thousand investigations a year, but if our work does not result in action, I would argue our work is in vain. Thankfully, that’s not the case.”

Here’s a short list of what happened after PVA’s investigations were released:

  • The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, pulled television spending for Senate Candidate Alison Grimes days after our report in Kentucky.
  • A Greenpeace official was terminated after she was caught on camera advising our undercover reporter on how to commit voter fraud.
  • Pryor polled behind by seven points. After PVA’s investigation in Arkansas, the candidate lost by 17 points.
  • Grimes went from a four-point lead to a 16-point loss!
  • After PVA’s report in Colorado, Udall polled behind before PVA’s investigation by two points but lost by four points.
  • And in North Carolina, Hagan went from a 2 point lead to a 2 point loss.

“I’ve done my best to launch Project Veritas Action as strongly as possible, and I hope you are impressed by the accomplishments of the last few months. But make no mistake, our brand new group will continue operations into 2015 . . . and our plans are big,” writes O’Keefe.

Does Government Spending Boost the Economy?

Stimulus boosters assume their conclusions – by Robert P. Murphy

A recent article in Business Insider by Jim Edwards offers putative “Proof That Government Spending Cuts Hurt Economic Growth.” He even goes so far as to claim that “war is good (economically).” In this article, I’ll explain what’s wrong with this popular and age-old fallacy.

First, I want to point out something quite amusing. Edwards relies on Financial Times story that presents a series of charts produced with data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Here is one of the charts, along with Edwards’s description:

This chart, from the FT’s Matthew Klein based on data from the BEA, seems to show that government has a pretty straightforward effect on GDP. When spending goes up, it adds to economic growth. When it goes down, it subtracts from it and hobbles the economy:

Edwards seems to think that the above chart shows at least a correlation between government spending and economic growth. After all, he wrote that the BEA chart “seems to show that government has a pretty straightforward effect on GDP.” But as Scott Sumner pointed out in amusement when he saw the article, the chart does nothing of the kind.

Look carefully at the legend. The various colored rectangles are different components of government spending. Specifically, the rectangles indicate how the change in each component — positive or negative — relates to the change in overall GDP. The black line is not GDP growth, but is instead the sum of the various components of government spending. In short, Matt Klein at the FT is telling us that if we take the BEA’s word for how much each component of government spending contributed to GDP growth in each quarter, then we can stack those numbers on top of each other and even add them up! Contrary to Edwards, the FT chart doesn’t “show” anything at all, except that the BEA each quarter announces how much various components of government spending contributed to, or subtracted from, GDP growth.

But let’s move past Edwards’s hilarious misinterpretation of the chart and get to the more fundamental issue. The problem with these ostensibly scientific and empirical measurements is that GDP itself is definedto include government spending. As they teach in any introductory macro class, the expenditure-based formula for GDP is

GDP = C + I + G + NX,

where C and I are private consumption and investment, G is government spending, and NX is net exports (gross exports minus gross imports).

Now we see the problem. Even if we set aside the serious theoretical and practical difficulties with the aggregation necessary to estimate these figures, we are still stuck with the fact that the above formula is an accounting tautology, not an economic theory. Yes, other things equal, an increase in government spendingon the right-hand side will make GDP on the left-hand side increase dollar for dollar. The whole argument, however, centers on whether other things will remain equal.

For example, in a depressed economy with excess capacity, the typical Keynesian will say that an increase inwill cause private consumption and investment to increase also, so that a dollar of extra government spending will cause GDP to rise by more than a dollar — the famous Keynesian multiplier.

In contrast, the typical Austrian- or Chicago-school economist will say that an increase in will tend to make private-sector spending fall by a greater amount, so that a dollar of extra government spending will cause GDP to fall. (We could get the confident support of free-market economists for this conclusion if we stipulate that the extra government spending is financed through higher taxes, which destroy more private after-tax income than they raise in extra revenue.)

Moreover, even if “total GDP” rises somewhat because of an increase in government spending, that wouldn’t be a good thing, because $10 million spent by politicians is not nearly as likely to channel resources to valuable uses as $10 million spent by private investors.

After this discussion, we can see why pretty charts from the FT showcasing government spending’s “contribution to GDP growth” quarter by quarter don’t really mean anything. It’s the same for the ex post “empirical” analyses that concluded that the Obama stimulus package “saved or created” such-and-such million jobs. The underlying models that generate these estimates assume a Keynesian world, and thus cannot test whether the Keynesian model is correct.

The critical yet missing piece of information in these analyses is the counterfactual, to know what the size of the economy and level of employment would have been in the alternate universe where government spending had taken a different course. From a naïve, “let the facts speak for themselves” perspective, the Obama stimulus package clearly hurt the economy. Remember that unemployment shot up higher with the stimulus than the Obama team warned people would occur without the stimulus.

The exact opposite happened with the so-called sequester. For example, the firm Macroeconomic Advisers, using a Keynesian model, predicted that the spending cuts would knock 1.3 percentage points off of second quarter 2013 growth, and 0.6 percentage points off of third quarter 2013 growth. Here’s what really happened:

It’s the mirror image of the Keynesians’ stimulus blunder. The economy grew faster with the sequester than the Keynesians said would occur without the “drag” of the spending cuts. In the case of the Obama stimulus, their excuse was, “Wow, the economy was worse than we realized, good thing we got that deficit spending in there, inadequate though it was.” In the case of the sequester, their response would have to be, “How about that, the economy was stronger than any of us realized. We dodged a bullet, since the sequester dragged down growth so much.”

In summary, we shouldn’t trust empirical “proof” that government spending boosts the economy, when the alleged evidence so often rests on a model that assumes as true the very issue under dispute. It is particularly absurd to argue that government spending on war makes us richer, because war doesn’t merely deploy scarce resources into unproductive lines — it actually destroys both equipment and workers.

ABOUT ROBERT P. MURPHY

Robert P. Murphy has a PhD in economics from NYU. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism and The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Great Depression and the New Deal. He is also the Senior Economist with the Institute for Energy Research and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. You can find him at http://consultingbyrpm.com/

We’re Number Two

The U.S. was the world’s number one economy prior to World War II, but it took off big-time after the war and there has not been a day of my long life in which we were not number one—until now.

The International Monetary Fund recently released its calculations regarding the world’s economy and concluded that China is the number one economy, producing $17.6 trillion in terms of goods and services, as compared with the U.S. producing $17.4 trillion. It’s not an overwhelming gap, but it is a warning that our economy is going in the wrong direction and has been before and since the financial crisis of 2008.

Writing in Market Watch, Brett Arends, put it succinctly. “As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.”

As discomforting as the IMF news is, the worst news has been significantly under-reported in the nation’s media. The U.S. is now $18 TRILLION in debt.

In February of 2014, CNS News reported that “The debt of the U.S. government has increased $6,666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.”

President Obama has been responsible for more debt over the course of his two terms to date than all previous U.S. Presidents in the first 227 years combined.

Writing in the Daily Caller, Tracy Miller, an associate professor at Grove City College, noted that “Over the first five years of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. economy grew more slowly than during any five-year period since just after the end of World War II, averaging less than 1.3 percent per year. If we leave out the sharp recession of 1945-46 following World War II, Obama looks even worse, ranking dead last among all Presidents since 1932.”

Why was this man reelected in 2012? One is inclined to find common ground with ObamaCare “architect”, Jonathan Gruber, who called voters “stupid.”

I prefer to believe, however, that the voters have been subjected to a non-stop campaign in the national media to get the first black American elected President and then to ignore some truly horrible facts about his two terms in office thus far.

The voters are not stupid, but they have been deliberately misled by the careful exclusion of news about the actual state of the economy.

Reality caught up with Obama in the two midterm elections of 2012 and 2014. The voters shifted power in Congress to the Republican Party. In the most recent midterms thirteen of the Senators who had voted for ObamaCare were defeated.

As December began, CNS News reported that “The labor force participation rate remained at a 36-year low of 62.8 percent in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

The BLS measures the percentage of “non-institutional population” in the labor force, those 16 years or older who were not in the military or working in a governmental job, i.e. the private sector. In September, the rate was the lowest since February 1978!

To put this in perspective, by November, the number of beneficiaries on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—food stamps—had topped 46,000,000 for 36 straight months according to data released by the Department of Agriculture. The Census Bureau reports that there are 115,048,000 households in the nation as of August 2014. That means the number of households on food stamps equaled 19.75% of all the households in the nation; one out of five. Those on this program outnumber the entire populations of nations such as Poland or Argentina.

It doesn’t stop there. On December 3 CNS News reported “The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,982,920 in November, up from the previous record set in May, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.”

How bad is the U.S. economy? In August, CNS News’ Terence P. Jeffrey reported that “109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded ‘means-tested programs’—also known as welfare—as of the fourth quarter of 2012.” The data came from the Census Bureau. That was the same year Obama was reelected and it represented 35.4% of the entire U.S. population at the time. By the end of 2012, it had increased to 49.5%!

Means-tested government programs include Social Security, Medicare, railroad retirement, unemployed compensation, worker’s compensation, Veteran’s compensation and Veteran’s educational assistance. The largest of these programs are Social Security and Medicare.

Why does the U.S. have an $18 TRILLION dollar debt?

Consider that, in fiscal year 2013, the federal government paid out more than $2 TRILLION in benefits and entitlements according to data from the Bureau of the Fiscal Services’ Monthly Treasury Statement. You don’t have to be a mathematician to conclude that, if more Americans were working, there would be less need for many of the benefits programs and the largest among them would be more financially sound.

News of new jobs is always welcome, but it hides the deeper problem of too many unemployed and while Congress continues to debate what to do about Obama’s effort to give work permits to illegal aliens and protect them from deportation, the Center for Immigration Studies announced in June that “Since the year 2000 all of the net increase in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).” Should the U.S. make five million or more illegal aliens eligible to compete for jobs with its native-born and naturalized population?

The U.S. must pay billions in interest on its debt. The failure of Congress to address the need to reform the tax code, reduce the deluge of regulations negatively affecting the business and industrial sector, and get control over spending has dug the nation a very deep and dangerous hole.

Statistics can be daunting, but we all can feel that something is terribly wrong with the economy despite the news about a vigorous Wall Street. The fact remains that Main Street is in trouble. The nation requires an economy in which new businesses are created and existing ones can afford to expand. That is not happening.

That is why we are Number Two.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Florida Common Core: If you’re not catching flak you’re not over the target!

It is often said, If you’re not catching flak you’re not over the target, so we must be mighty close in our battle against Common Core.

Jeb Bush decided he’s had quite enough, and has “lost patience” with Common Core opponents, he said in a December 2nd article.  What he means is we should stop upsetting his run for the Presidency in 2016 with the truth about his selling our kids down the river for campaign money from Pearson PLC, Bill Gates and the “one world government” cronies.  He would rather not hear about the kids who are suffering and permanently harmed by the propaganda and poor education pumped down their throats such as:

  • Thanksgiving is a hurtful holiday.
  • The Pilgrims were the first terrorists.
  • Gorbachev was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • The Constitution is a guideline and must change with new times.
  • America is an Imperialist nation.
  • Our Founding Fathers were prejudiced male chauvinist pigs.
  • “George Washington was anything BUT a man of the people.”
  • “Ronald Reagan was a charismatic leader who invented his own past and sometimes believed it.”

Just last week Nancy Graham, the Superintendent of Lee County Schools, the 34th largest district in the nation, decided at a statewide meeting of school board members, she would “tell all” about the famous school board vote to OPT OUT of high stakes testing which occurred August 27, 2014.

Using Saul Alinsky techniques to vilify and discredit those who disagree with her support of Common Core, she resorts to calling out a grandmother who supposedly started all this mess, claiming she misrepresented herself as having children in Lee Schools, and labelling this grandmother a “pretend” grandma to the laughter of the audience.  And frustrated, she embellishes, this “pretend” grandma keeps attending school board meetings.

I confess.  I AM the “pretend” Grandma. Anyone who knows me knows about my two, very real, and wonderful granddaughters I would give my life to protect.  When I confronted her, she claimed her staff told her I lied to them and told them that my granddaughter was in Lee Schools. I NEVER LIED or MISLED anyone.  I told them I paid to send my granddaughter in Lee County to a private school.  She seems to think schools don’t impact the entire community and if we don’t have children in them, we shouldn’t be involved.  If the schools were any good, I wouldn’t have to pay $8,000 a year to send the grandkids elsewhere.  At least 4 of the 5 board members don’t have children in Lee County Schools.  I guess they shouldn’t be involved either.

Superintendent Graham stated in her talk that the “silent majority” were more well informed than citizens who urged action against Common Core and High Stakes Testing.  After nearly two years of research, conferences all over the country and dozens of meetings with experts on standards, testing and child psychology, I take personal exception to that assertion.  The 400 people or so who attended the opt out meeting spoke clearly, eloquently and many had intimate knowledge to share on the crushing impact of high stakes testing and Common Core.

She talked about how she prevented us from talking to the head of curriculum about the books which violate state statute and our sensibilities to get another audience laugh.

She accuses all of us who complain, saying we are making a “calculated strategic attempt to move forward a personal agenda.”  She said we are making impassioned speeches and they are so earnest but nothing we say is true, mocking us once again.  She mocks “talk show hosts” specifically.

Even her own school board, her bosses, don’t escape her rebuke.  She said one board member claimed he was going to opt his children out. Then to her shock and horror, they voted to opt the district out.  The board asked her opinion and she made the audience laugh once again by saying she couldn’t possibly say what was really on her mind.  Then she stated that they promised never to make any vote that would surprise her.  REALLY?  She reveals there was a flurry of calls to the Department of Education and they to her, obviously plotting how to reverse the vote.

Superintendent Nancy Graham did NOT talk about the threatening call several board members received from the district’s bonding company representative, Jerry Ford, or others by state officials.  Two of the three members who voted to opt out, refused to be intimidated.  One succumbed.  Not so mysteriously, one board member, Mary Fisher, asked to call a special meeting at which she would rescind her vote.

Graham said she didn’t want to talk with reporters because they got the story wrong (mocking them).  She insisted instead on talking with the editors only in a private 1.5 hour meeting so SHE could set them straight.  Now their stories are accurate (according to her warped point of view.)  She says we are now “back on track” while absolutely NO changes requested by her Board or by the public have been made, whatsoever.

Opposition to her dictatorial and arrogant leadership is at a boiling point, and now she faces an investigation by outside counsel for financial mismanagement.

Jeb Bush is fighting to keep the lid on opposition as well, doing expensive national ads trying to portray Common Core as the friend to minorities, which is anything but the case.   Data now shows that they are the first to feel the lash of the testing and inappropriate standards.

In an article written by Tess Brennan, she estimated as many as 80% of minority students in Lee County might be expected to fail the new Florida State Assessment.

This is hardly “friendly” or helpful to minorities.  Many call it child abuse.  Bill Gates, himself, said this is an experiment and we won’t know the outcome for at least 10 years.  That is nearly an entire school experience for a child.  Are we really willing to experiment with an entire generation?  The empirical results after only a few years are eye popping, brain exploding, mind boggling failures.  What else do we need to make a sound decision?

Please call your legislators and tell them we have endured enough of the punitive high stakes testing and Common Core propaganda.  Let’s use a little logic of our own and make a decision to unleash the individual, God given potential of our children, not force them to be common with Common Core.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a B-24 Liberator of the 464th Bomb Group bracketed by flak bursts from German anti-aircraft guns, Nov 1944. Source: United States National Archives via D. Sheley.

Black and Blue: How the State Brings Order

We need rule of law, not law and order by Sandy Ikeda:

Today, the difference between law and order and rule of law is literally a matter of life and death. Rarely has that difference been illustrated so starkly as on the streets and inside the courtrooms of St. Louis County, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York. The tragedy is that too few can articulate it; the terror is that too many can’t even see it. At least, not yet.

Rule of law

The rule of law is often contrasted with the rule of man. According to the rule of law, law should lie as far as possible beyond the arbitrary, unpredictable choices of public authorities.

But the rule of law also contains the idea that the law should neither deliberately privilege nor harm any individual or group. Legislation that aims at a certain outcome for a specific person is contrary to the rule of law. An edict that intentionally takes property from persons in group A in order to benefit persons in group B also violates the rule of law. The law should apply equally to everyone regardless of their status. But as F.A. Hayek pointed out, when the state attempts to impose any large-scale plan on its citizens, its commands must necessarily discriminate against some and favor others.

At the same time, those who believe government (that is, a monopoly over force) is necessary for a free society — to provide national defense, for example — but who also believe in the rule of law tend to support aggression under certain circumstances. One is tax collection, so long as it doesn’t target particular individuals or groups, and so long as the persons or groups benefiting from the tax revenue can’t be identified beforehand. The rule of law is supposed to constrain political power.

The rule of law implies stability and predictability. It weighs against expediency and opportunism in legislation, shifting this way and that as circumstances change. And it weighs in favor of governing according to abstract principles that apply universally. Laws that avoid privilege and favoritism (“rent seeking” in modern terminology) tend to do just this.

When government is small and nonintrusive, the rule of law may, in fact, promote a peaceful kind of law and order. But today, when governments around the world are anything but small and nonintrusive, the difference between law and order and rule of law has never been so stark.

Law and order

No one disputes that a certain kind of social order is a good thing. In general, rioting and pillaging are wrong. But when oppression becomes intolerable and peaceful forms of protest have been ineffective, disorderly conduct and even the destruction of property can be positive forces for political and social change. Think of the Boston Tea Party.

I think it’s safe to say that behind that level of oppression is the authority’s fear that it is losing control, a fear sparked by significant acts of individual defiance against authority. That defiance is usually against the authority of police, the blue tip of the spear wielded by the State and aimed at the heart of the most vulnerable citizens.

Ironically, the very chaos governments fear is itself the consequence of too much “law and order,” and their response is then usually to try to impose even more oppressive and unequal “law and order.” Think of the American Revolution. Think of Tiananmen Square. Governments equate order with control. They view society not as what happens when people freely follow their own plans, but as a machine that they must consciously direct, maintain, and occasionally overhaul, lest the cogs freeze up and the wheels stop turning. For them, society cannot order itself, but must be deliberately ordered by law — the law and order of a police state.

In a police state, no one knows how many people the police kill every year. In a police state, the police are not accountable for the harm they do to the same degree that ordinary citizens are. In a police state, the police have extraordinary privileges under the law that the rest of us do not.

The “law and order” of a police state is the result of surveillance, discrimination, and aggression. The law and order that emerges from a minimal government under the rule of law derives from privacy, equality, and peaceful cooperation.

ABOUT SANDY IKEDA

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

The System Protects the System

The problem is not just benighted cops, but over criminalization by Michael Munger:

An interesting split has been developing in the reactions to the Ferguson and the Staten Island grand jury decisions. When you look closely, this is exactly the division that has for so long defined the American left and right and has kept libertarians on the sidelines.

The left is outraged that the state is not doing exactly what the left expects from an idealized, unicorn state. When they said they wanted a system where everything was controlled by the state, for the common good, they genuinely believed that all that is necessary for good results is good intentions. Any failure must be a problem with implementation.

But the real state is made up of human beings. People are deeply flawed. The left wants to rely on abstract systems, then be perpetually astonished when things go really wrong. It’s not bad people that are the problem. “The thingthe thing itself” is the abuse, folks.

The right? Well, the right is just denying that there is a problem. The system is working. The grand jury has spoken. The only problem is the protesters, who are law-breakers.

The problem with that view is that grand juries almost always indict — unless the case is being brought against a police officer. Then, they almost never indict. That’s not really a “system” at all. That’s a problem. Judge Scalia got this right, in a different context.

The libertarian middle (look, when the political system is a muddle, we’re the middle!) accepts parts of both arguments. The system is, in fact, working exactly as designed, so the right is correct in that sense. But this is a really bad outcome, and it hurts poor people the most — so the left is correct, too.

You can’t have all those laws, a strong presumption in favor of the state’s truthfulness, and expect to protect the poor.

As always, Bastiat said it best, and most succinctly, in The Law:

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

The system is not designed to help the poor. Of course police officers are going to use excessive force. Of course police officers are going to have and act on racial and class-based preferences. And then the system — in the courts, the prosecutor’s office, and the grand jury — is going to protect itself. That’s the system, unless you believe in unicorns. The system is designed to protect the system. And it does that very well, so it is well designed. If the left were really serious about helping the poor, they would recognize that the only answer is much less of the system.

We have criminalized so many behaviors (in the Staten Island case, selling packs of cigarettes!) that we have given the police enormous pressure to perform — and gigantic latitude to act on prejudice, bigotry, and simple anger. The police, in their defense, have an impossible job. They have come to see almost everyone around them, every day, as a lawbreaker and a danger to society. Harvey Silverglate has famously estimated that most of us commit at least three felonies per day. The only thing that prevents us from being jailed is the discretion and public spiritedness of the prosecutor.

Of course, I myself don’t really need to worry. I have creamy white skin and quite a bit of money in my bank account. White people are largely unaffected. The almost-but-not-funny hashtag #crimingwhilewhite shows the truth: rich white people can break the law, and they won’t get charged nearly as often.

Still, even I don’t want to have to rely on the discretion and public spiritedness of the prosecutor. I’d rather rely on the fact — and it is a fact — that I haven’t actually done anything wrong, and therefore the laws that could be used to charge me with felonies shouldn’t exist in the first place. More and more, our government’s motto when it comes to citizens is “trust but terrify.”

As long as overreaching laws effectively criminalize being black or poor, it’s not surprising that the police will continue to treat black people and poor people as criminals.

This kind of race-based law enforcement is given the stink eye by our friends on the left, but they can’t seem to draw the obvious inference: the answer is not better police or more enlightened officials. The answer is fewer laws. That’s the long division in our society, the most important difference that arises from class and social status.

Decriminalize normal nonviolent daily activity, and the police will have fewer excuses to harass people they don’t like — people who often can’t fight back.

ABOUT MICHAEL MUNGER

Michael Munger is the director of the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Duke University. He is a past president of the Public Choice Society.