First thoughts

On the SCOTUS decision today I only have a few thoughts.   The decision is here, and I did a quick scan of it to see what the actual decision was... again this was a comment at Hot Air and for now that is it.  I'm seeing what others have to say, of course, and take my own council not that of fear.

With no other fanfare -

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From p.32 of the decision:

Under the mandate, if an individual does not maintain health insurance, the only consequence is that he must make an additional payment to the IRS when he pays his taxes. See §5000A(b). That, according to the Government,means the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition—not owning health insurance—that triggers a tax—the required payment to the IRS. Under that theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance.Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. And if the mandate is in effect just a tax hike on certain taxpayers who do not have health insurance, it may be within Congress’s constitutional power to tax.

It MAY be within Congress’s power. MAY?

Oh, and you must take a positive action to purchase said goods he uses as examples. You do not pay a penalty for not purchasing gasoline, or for earning no income. Although if he is making THAT connection then welcome to the mandated penalty for gasoline purchase and to the penalty for not earning income. Won’t those be swell brand, spanking new taxes in the future?

And then this following:

The question is not whether that is the most natural interpretation of the mandate, but only whether it is a “fairly possible” one. Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932). As we have explained, “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality.” Hooper v. California, 155 U. S. 648, 657 (1895). The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution. Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can be so read, for the reasons set forth below.

Roberts then repeats this pattern at each instance showing that there is a similarity between a power to tax purchases and the power to tax inactivity.

He looks at the Child Labor Collection Tax which is a tax on those using child labor. An activity. For licensing taxes that is a fee given to those asking for the license to do certain regulated business. It is an activity. Nuclear waste surcharges is for an activity of shipping nuclear waste.

He then goes on to those tax incentives used to encourage conduct, and yet there is a stark difference between conducting such conduct to get a tax break, and not doing something and getting penalized for it. In the former if you do not purchase a home you are not penalized for it, you just do not get the incentives… but I’m sure that under some future Congress not owning a home can be assessed as a tax, so all you renters out there can look forward to that in the future. He also cites taxes on cigarettes, but you pay no taxes on them if you do not purchase them, so I guess we can all start to pony up for cigarettes we don’t buy as future Congress can do that, as well. Won’t that be swell?

By p. 40 we come to this lovely passage looking at the arguments against the tax:

A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax. It is not a capitation. Capitations are taxes paid by every person, “without regard to property, profession, or any other circumstance.” Hylton, supra, at 175 (opinion of Chase, J.) (emphasis altered). The whole point of the shared responsibility payment is that it is triggered by specific circumstances—earning a certain amount of income but not obtaining health insurance. The payment is also plainly not a tax on the ownership of land or personal property. The shared responsibility payment is thus not a direct tax that must be apportioned among the several States.
There may, however, be a more fundamental objection to a tax on those who lack health insurance. Even if only a tax, the payment under §5000A(b) remains a burden that the Federal Government imposes for an omission, not an act. If it is troubling to interpret the Commerce Clause as authorizing Congress to regulate those who abstain from commerce, perhaps it should be similarly troubling to permit Congress to impose a tax for not doing something.

And now you want to know WHY Congress can do this? This follows the above:

Three considerations allay this concern. First, and most importantly, it is abundantly clear the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity. A capitation, after all, is a tax that everyone must pay simply for existing, and capitations are expressly contemplated by the Constitution. The Court today holds that our Constitution protects us from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause so long as we abstain from the regulated activity. But from its creation, the Constitution has made no such promise with respect to taxes. See Letter from Benjamin Franklin to M. Le Roy (Nov. 13, 1789) (“Our new Constitution is now established . . . but in this world nothing can be said to be certain,except death and taxes”).

Is this a direct power GRANTED to the United States government by its people? If not it is in Amendments IX and X. Nice job on forgetting that little bit of the Constitution while doing contortions on tax powers to let Congress tax an inactivity that the Chief Justice cannot find a precedent for. Not one thing he cites is a tax power over inactivity and there is no cost for inactivity in any other tax by the federal government.

Don’t let that stop you from inventing one.

ajacksonian on June 28, 2012 at 12:03 PM

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So limiting the Commerce Clause and the  Necessary and Proper Clause.

What was put in its place is the wide-open field of giving Congress the ability to tax ANYTHING YOU DO including doing NOTHING.

Don't earn any income?  They can tax you for that.

Don't have a Volt? They can tax you for that.

No home? They can tax you for that.

Say! No firearms?  They can tax you for that.

This is the power of tyrannical, compulsory taxation and this decision just gave the green light for that.

The state of World War IV

WWI – 1914 to 1918

WWII – 1931 to 1945

WWIII – 1946 to 1991

WWIV – 2010 to ????

There were some premonitions of WWI before 1914, in that era of the Imperial Powers painting as much of the map their color until the tensions in Europe grew so great as to create a tinderbox waiting for a spark.  That spark could have come from nearly anywhere, but was at Sarajevo with Arch-Duke Ferdinand.

WWII properly starts with Imperial Japan seeking to extend its power into Manchuria from the holdings it had garnered from previous conflicts with Russia.  That invasion and subsequent warfare is not considered by those in the West to have been part of WWII until Pearl Harbor, yet Japan had set its goals to hold off the USSR, capture foreign held overseas territories of other powers (UK, France, Holland) and generally expand its power in that region. That started in Manchuria in 1931 and would only end with the defeat of Japan in 1945.

The Cold War was global in scope, had many small wars contained within its context (Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan) and would eat up much in the way of productivity from the US and USSR that, while not all-out total war, was one of an earlier age of proxy wars.  These proxy fights were in all hemispheres and nearly every continent and would move the world from nuclear weapons delivered by aircraft to thermonuclear devices delivered by missiles to tactical nuclear devices delivered on foot with, thankfully, none of those devices being used as anything other than status symbols.  No one can rightly tally the death toll of all the proxy conflicts, those egged on by the two sides, and those taking advantage of Super Power stalemates to inflict their own brand of horror that no one would stop lest it turn into a mass conflagration.

World War IV starts out with a rising of tensions between Nations, mostly via 'terrorism' or the rise of Private War returning on land and at sea.  Unlike WWII we see no movement of armies to conflict for resources but, instead, see Private organizations using non-National systems to attack Nation States.  That is the fallout of the Super Powers doing nothing to stem the rise of such organizations and even fostering them for their own political reasons.  This has started the wholesale change-over of governments in North Africa spreading across venues in the region in what was called the 'Arab Spring' , starting with Tunisia.  From there came Egypt overthrowing its dictator and protests spreading to such places as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Oman and Lebanon. 

The private organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood had been around since after WWI and had gained support in the post-WWII era from Saudi Arabia.  As an organization the Muslim Brotherhood espouses a radical form of Islam that is very repressive and does not respect civil rights as known in the West.  Over their time they have spun off multiple terrorist organizations like HAMAS and al Qaeda from its membership, and HAMAS is directly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood via their charter.  From that time when Super Powers ignored terrorist organizations, unless they backed them, of course, the earliest organizations were the PLO, FARC and HAMAS.  Of these the PLO is now nearly gone as it has turned into a kleptocratic organization in the Palestinian Territories, FARC has long since stopped being about spreading Marxism and is now just a large narco-terrorist organization that is being reduced year on year and forced out of its home base in Colombia, and it is only HAMAS that has been able to adhere strictly to their blood-drenched ways as they have firm ideological backing from members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Iran changing from a Cold War satellite Nation to an Islamic one was of little benefit to the USSR when it happened but a global body blow to the US, the Super Power Iran was aligned with.  Iran has spawned its own terrorist organizations, the best known of which is Hezbollah, which acts as a puppet overseas para-military force for it, helping to spread its own version of Islamic fundamentalism in the doing.  Iran has allies in its conflict with the West and they include Syria and now the semi-Communist Venezuela.  They are aided, to a degree at least, by Russia and China who see Iran as a foil to the US but may not really be enamored of the idea of an Iran with nuclear tipped ballistic missiles.  It is thought that Iran may have gotten its hands on an old USSR era nuclear warhead but lacks the necessary codes to use it and, thusly, examine its technology.  Of course the blueprints for a nuclear device can be had on the black market courtesy of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan the 'Father of the Islamic Bomb'.

Military venues are not the only ones for this conflict which is global.  Other venues include economics, sociology and criminal corruption.  These play out in the now imploding Western Socialist regimes that put into place taxation and power schemes that now have bankrupted Nations (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland), are leading others into societal collapse (France, UK, Germany), both of which foster the spread of virulent Islam via the importation of radicalized workers from overseas and speed the decay of the local societies as they offer no incentives to be self-reliant and breed State dependence.  The question is which is collapsing faster: the societies or the States?  In truth they go hand-in-hand as dependence based social structures do not reward innovation, do not reward ingenuity and, instead, reward leisure time and pointless non-productive activities.  If the Roman Empire had debauchery to go with its Breads & Circuses, modern Europe has self-indulgence to go with its socialized medicine and retirements.

Other Nations in Africa, South America, Asia as well as large parts of the US and Canada see versions of this.  Russia has a lack of birth rate, relatively low productivity and an economy controlled by Oligarchs who are not bolstering the infrastructure of the Nation or its society but looking out for themselves.  In China an authoritarian regime imposes a non-economical birth rate, no controls over pollution, backwards agrarian systems and exploitation of its mobile youth (now growing older) to create vacant cities, vast power projects and gets rampant inflation, unrest and and internal social decohesion as its rewards.  No one will live in the make-work cities and if a few more bad years of Dust Bowl crop years hit, that will couple with a dying out agrarian culture and lead to mass upheaval within China, itself.  Marxism in South America is applauded until an economic crisis puts the currency and population at risk as happened decades before in Argentina, this is being done in Venezuela and Brazil can only stop this with its massive oil production until the Marxists there, too, decide to grab the golden ring and find that it is Fool's Gold only.

This societal collapse of Enlightened Western Ideology to the Marxist form of ideology has been an ongoing attack on the Enlightenment for nearly 150 years and more if the French Revolution is included  as a predecessor to it.  If this form of societal attack is included in the World War IV timeline, then the measurement of the start of WW IV gets pushed back a few years further to the 2007-08 global economic crisis.  That crisis was a culmination of decades of Progressive and Marxist policies pushing unsustainable 'entitlements' out of government's doors and onto populations.  This form of attack is a slow one, attacking not just the economy of a Nation but the moral support for the work ethic and achievement of individuals.  The greatest boom and expansion of liberty by the removal of manual toil happened with the Industrial Revolution and in the over 250 years since it began the greatest expansion of wealth, health and movement away from back crushing work has been witnessed.  Marxism offers all of the rewards, none of the pain and offers no way to sustain an economy to gain such ends: it is as much a religion as it is an ideology, as it only has a basis in faith within its environs of thought not with the actual world around it.

There has been some speculation of an economic Pearl Harbor on the US in the 2007-08 timeframe, that could only have happened with a highly centralized set of government programs in the housing industry.  Those programs set up the removal of local oversight of loan guarantees via the creation of GNMA, and that allowed government programs to go through quasi-governmental organizations (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) via such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and its follow-ons.  This produced a 'bubble' in the US economy that would only be the first to show up due to government intervention in areas where governments have little understanding, knowledge or capacity to learn.  The 'Housing Crisis' of the 2007-08 timeframe brought on extra-constitutional measures to combat it, in the form of bailouts that were misrepresented when asked for, and direct payments to failing banks that had been forced into giving ever larger loans for houses that had very little extra real value to them.  Those nasty gears to ruin the economy are still in place in the US, but it is only the first and smallest of bubbles coming along through the economy.  It is to be followed by a higher education bubble that already is seen and dwarfs the housing bubble, and then a medical and retirement set of bubbles that have been decades in the making.  The shock of each of these on the US economy will be  huge, the ripples throughout the globe will be catastrophic.  It didn't really take a genius to stage an economic Pearl Harbor in the US as it was already headed for a major banking disaster due to government policy: it may have come a few months sooner due to outside actors wishing ill intent, but they could only precipitate what was going to happen, not cause it in the first place.

From the size, scope and scale of the events in WW IV, we can discern that this is a war without borders, without boundaries, where there is no respect for the non-violent nor the neutral, and everyone is at risk from those wishing to exert power over others.  It did not start with vast armies, navies and air forces attacking factories and then cities because the weapons being utilized play on something far more powerful than any bomb, any weapon: human nature.

The target is Nations but only in the understood context of what the basis for the Nation actually is.  A Nation is not a State, per se, although once it gets to a certain size it gains such apparatus.  The State is just the way to run a Nation, but the Nation basis goes further back than that in depth.  A Nation is only society when writ large, amongst multiple communities, but they are not needed to actual create that society as society begins further back and down than merely a collection of neighborhoods or cities.  A Nation is not any single city nor town, either, nor just a neighborhood although one gets closer to the actual scale with that last part, it is also a larger structure built upon something smaller.  Once one breaks a neighborhood down, street by street and block by block, we get to individual structures and within them reside families.  Pushing down to the family we get to see the beginning of the Nation State and, as said before, the State is only the apparatus to run a Nation.  Thus the Nation begins with marriage and those first bonds upon which we agree to set aside our negative liberties with respect to each other and not exercise them to the detriment of either.  With that bond the Nation is formed and it is a necessary prerequisite to the family and it is here that the attacks of World War IV are aimed.

It is aimed at you and your loved ones.

It is aimed to get you to act in an uncivilized manner towards your fellow man at all levels, to remove the patina of civilization from your spirit and put you back into a barbaric, animalistic state of being.  This is outlined in al Qaeda's playbook The Management of Savagery, which I looked at a bit previously a few years ago.  It is a system of wide-ranging attacks ranging from terrorism to internal societal corrosion to allow al Qaeda to influence the direction of that society toward decay and into a state of savagery which would then leave it open to control.  This is what worried the 18th and 19th century Great Powers and caused them to foreswear using Privateers because of the risk of them going Pirate.  In the 20th century that foreswearing meant going directly to funding Pirates, which we call 'terrorists' who were extra-National actors with no controls upon them whatsoever.  It turns out the worries of the old Great Powers was correct, but that the 'cure' turned out to allow a worse disease by going directly to unaccountable actors in the first place.  Perhaps a bit neater in its directivity, yes, but far, far worse in long-term results.

By the confluence of stupidity that allowed such non-National actors to rise up during the Cold War, by seeking to corrode societies via Marxist pay-off schemes, and through insane allocation of local power to the most distant form of government (that of the Nation State) the results upon individuals is one that requires much in the way of moral fiber and certitude to even stand up against this torrent of abuse.  The decay of civilized norms as seen in neglecting to address 'terrorists' in the Cold War or WW III, was just an artifact of the larger 'Politically Correct' movement in the West by Leftists.  This is coupled with the Leftist 'march through the institutions' of education, unions and government (if they were not already compromised to begin with) to consolidate a repressive mode of approaching speech, determining what topics were 'sensitive' (and thus to be avoided or papered over with a form of Newspeak), and determining who was and was not 'fit' for society.  In the institution of the press, the Left has wielded inordinate power by acting as a gatekeeper for decades on news, commentary and in those individuals they hold up for applause and those they just never mentioned.  Taken together, PC speech codes have infested multiple societies and have acted to repress freedom to discuss topics as wide ranging as 'how do we confront terrorism?' to 'how many teachers does it require to teach a class?' to  the use of the term 'racism' when it is applied to non-racially defined groups and organizations (like Hispanics or Muslims).  By conflating ethnicity with race, the modern Left has done a grave disservice to Western society and has acted as an internally corrosive force that has set aside topics of vital interest to the citizenry that cannot even be mentioned lest one be seen as 'racist'.  In fact doing that dilutes the term of 'racism' when it is applied to multiracial ethnic groups, which also dilutes the power of its use when further conflations are included with it: the Left not only destroys the language of their opposition but also the one of their own making.

Standing up against such PC concepts which bombard you on a constant basis, and often is used in the absence of ever talking about a subject, means that the general citizenry is left unprepared for the problems that they as individuals and members of society will have to face.  It doesn't take a direct attack on religion or marriage to do this, although those are signposts on this road of disestablishing cultural norms, just simply making topics of wide ranging concern being beyond the pale to talk about in any meaningful way.  As Orwell pointed out, the end of Newspeak is Duckspeak, and if much of the repetition of magical phrases deploying racism, sexism, class warfare and other such items to denigrate anyone speaking about problems in those realms start to sound like quacking, it is because that is what it is.  Quacking.  Not coherent speech but the attempt to stop others from speaking coherently on a topic.  This, too, is a part of WW IV being waged upon you.

Attacks upon citizenry used to happen by foreign governments waging war upon Nations, this is now being done by governments upon the governed or by private organizations centered around tyrannical ends upon everyone.  Together the Left and Islamic organizations (Nation and non-Nation) seek a downfall of the Enlightenment Western Ideology based on Christianity and Individualism, and the attack is quite direct and blatant in these opening years of WW IV.  With that said those who are non-Western and non-Christian are also targets in a more active way as seen in places like Syria, Iran, Egypt, and India.

While this all sounds very bleak, I have also pointed out that the countervailing, indeed civilization enhancing forces, are already in play as seen in Dawn of a New Era.  That you are reading this is done due to multiple parts of this countervailing set of forces that are, in themselves, neutral tools but have civilization enhancing effects.  Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law both push power up in scale for the individual via the cost per circuit on a printed circuit board and the power scaling of networks and intnernetworking. The proportion of civilized and skilled users of these tools tend to drive them in a certain direction, while those using them for ill and with malicious outlook are few.  Yet these tools of computer and network technology can be directly targeted via manmade weapons that cause an EMP and by natural sources like a CME.  The former would move WW IV into the 'bombs and guns of Nations' phase which would tend to be thermonuclear and swift, while the latter would level all of civilization on a rather deep basis.  The former would yield mere hundreds of millions dead within a year or two, while the latter would yield billions dead and perhaps as much as 2/3 of humanity in a year.  Hostile forces, in going after the infrastructure of modern civilization can bring modern civilization crashing down with rather serious effects upon those doing the acting.  Nature can do that to all with no malice at all.  Those waging such war do not think through its effects or may feel immune to it due to magical thinking processes dealing with religion and faith.

By using these tools, however, a number of effects are noticed, some of which appear to pre-date the widespread use of computers and networks and were built upon older and more centralized systems.  Concepts of Accelerating Change, Feiler Faster Theses and Disintermediation all started in the pre-Internet era and were noticed of effects of mass communication and dissemination of knowledge.  In a cumulative fashion they are representative of another concept I examined in Persuasion and Marketing called the Noosphere.  This was presented by by Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin as the 'sphere of human thought' and it bears a striking resemblance to the World Wide Web save that it is something that has no physical existence.  The World Wide Web and Internet can be seen, conversely, as a physical manifestation of the Noosphere, not the cause of it. 

As an individual you take part in the Noosphere by being human and alive and the Noosphere serves as a non-substantial repository of human process knowledge available to all mankind.  It does have physical manifestations in such things as learning new tasks or in how fast you, as an individual, have adapted to a constantly ON information stream by processing information to knowledge faster than you did just a year ago.  The amount of information you can process through to end conclusions is, today, a huge factor more than you could a decade ago due to the nature of the medium involved and its interconnectivity.  If you were relegated to just a limited means of processing it, however, you would be swamped with information and be unable to make heads or tails of it.  Instead you have changed how you think very rapidly in the past decade and now conceptualize change of information in a very different way than a decade ago or just a bit before that in the hardcopy only era.  No one taught you how to do this.  No one gave you the set of mental tools to do this.  You found them on your own and did so faster than the group just before you did.

You would think that Progressives would laud such rapidly evolving and changing increase in capacity to understand the world around you and yet, instead, they do their best to utilize older means and methods of thinking that are not well adapted or even suited to the modern era.  And while Islamists do utilize this media and set of systems, adapting a rigid ideology and religious viewpoint to it... just like their Marxist and Progressive counterparts.  If they adapted they would lose their rigidity, their assurance of superiority and be required to rethink their approach to the world.  You do that constantly as it is a part of your natural born liberty and freedom to do so and you embrace it to partake of this rapidly expanding body of knowledge and process thought.  To do that requires a sense that tyranny isn't something that solely comes from outside of yourself, but from inside, as well.  Those who seek to utilize this new set of media and thinking process to ill ends find themselves confronted faster and deeper by those rejecting such tyrannical thinking modes and preferring, quite openly, freedom and liberty for mankind.

Because that is the path to victory.

Moral assurance within yourself when coupled with a highly ethical set of self-restraints upon your negative liberties then garners you the freedom to create a Nation and, within that, a greater society for all.  Nations and individualism do not go away in this, as the Progressives and Radical Islamists seek via their ancient negative bent,  but we come to a greater understanding of each other and then refuse to paper over the differences, avoid the hard topics and, most importantly, seek to live within our means while still offering charity to all in need.  If this is, indeed, a war being waged for your very spirit, your very soul, across all levels of culture, society, technology and governance, then it is you who must wield those might tools of liberty that are born within you.  While bombs, bullets, and tyrannically asinine ideologies are involved, they are the reactionaries to liberty and freedom seeking to crush your spirit and, when they can't do that, to take your life, instead.  This is a form of total war that doesn't involve mass production of war materiel, nor vast armies sent across the landscape to deal with enemies but is, instead, centered on you and your ability to adapt and renew your spirit constantly.  As your enemies are grimly remorseless in their backwards views, so you must be the smiling beacon of remorseless freedom and liberty and confront the clenched fist with an open hand.

While I am frustrated with these enemies at all levels, I do not hate them as they are so close-minded that they refuse to think that others can govern themselves.  In that doing they show themselves to be the ones lacking self-governance and want to hide that through power over others.  Some of these enemies are horrible, yes, but all of them are pitiful and to be pitied for their lack of civilized understanding that no government can make men good and that no religion can force you to be moral.  By seeing the world in those ways these enemies of mankind show themselves again for what they are: barbarians, tyrants and despots.  They seek your fear.  They seek your submission in silence.  I give them pity and openly for they could be much better people if only they learned how to control themselves and saw that this is the greatest way to create the greatest good for all mankind.

This World War will have an end date.

Either with the end of mankind.

Or with our venture beyond our home into that unforgiving wilderness that requires you to be civilized or it kills you most quickly.

I will be the good soldier in this war and defend myself so I can help others with an open hand.  The racking of the bolt is to remind the uncivilized that there are penalties to be paid, and it is best not to incur them in the first place.

Identity Politics Calculus

President Obama has put Identity Politics on display with his attempt to put forward an immigration policy (and having that being questioned by Neil Munro from the Daily Caller) that would selectively not enforce immigration law upon certain categories of illegal aliens.  Unfortunately as Congress has already debated and not passed versions of such laws, President Obama has forgotten that his duty is to uphold the laws set by Congress as this is an Article I power given to Congress and not delegated as a policy issue to the President.  Presidents can have 'feelings' about laws, but the job of the President is to enforce the laws of Congress and to let Congress know when he thinks such laws have problems and work with Congress to get such laws amended.  That is the job of President as Head of Government: execute the laws set by Congress.

Now, beyond the fact there is no Constitutional standing for a President to set such a policy, this move can also be seen in the Identity Politics prism as a crass play (and one known by President Obama as not being able to stand a legal challenge, but that would take time) to pander to Hispanic voters.  When playing the Identity Politics game, however, an action to try and get support from one group can often show insight into how a politician views other groups within his or her support domain.  In other words, such a policy direction will give an insight into how other groups that traditionally support the Democratic Party are being viewed by President Obama.

A few groups come to mind for this:

1) Big Labor – In theory the Labor Unions would love to have new, young Hispanics as part of the dues paying membership.  Unfortunately the timing of events is such that with the defeat of the Big Labor led recall vote in WI of Gov. Scott Walker, and by the direction of Public Employee Unions (and general labor law) amongst other States such as IN, IL, NY, CA... note that these are not typical 'Red' States... and having asked for and not gotten President Obama to show up on their behalf in WI, Big Labor is getting a message from President Obama: Nice knowing you, send cash!

Unfortunately no matter how many new, young Hispanics come in, the general tenor of the population towards Unionization (not just PEUs but all Unions) is in the decline and in the modern era of being able to compare job offers, individuals can often find a better job without Union overhead than one with Union overhead.  Putting in a raft of new, young illegal aliens and helping them to find work in preference to Citizens also means that these individuals will tend to be at the lowest end of the pay scale and not readily amenable to Unionization.  Plus in shops where low skills and low costs are needed, these individuals will be in direct competition with Unionized labor.  While there are pipe dreams from Big Labor on getting a perennial raft of new union members, the fact is that unions are being side-lined to a very small part of the work force over the last 5 decades and are now in single digits for percentage of the overall workforce.

2) Hispanics – Even with a naked pander, this is something that if the Democratic Party wanted to get done in 2009-2010 it could have done so as it had majorities in both Houses of Congress.  Any promises made by Democrats are, thusly, coming with a built-in discount on future expectations: if you can't pass this as law when you have both Houses and the Presidency, then what good are you?  Naked pandering can back-fire if it is seen as an insult to the intelligence of those being pandered to, and that is the risk of this piece of political calculus by President Obama.

The other factor that plays into the identity politics game is that Hispanics are in the majority Roman Catholic.  In passing Obamacare and then setting it up as part of a 'War on Women' on mandatory payment for contraceptive services, the process of Obamacare is running straight into a 1st Amendment clash with religious organizations that provide health care, and the main point on this pushback is... the Roman Catholic Church.  It is a piece of political calculus to try and bring religious implementation of moral doctrine into secular domains, against all the protections against such in the US Constitution, and by taking on the RCC the Obama Administration also ends up taking on Hispanics.  As this is an ongoing set of legal battles, they do not fade from the view of the devout, and President Obama can be seen as giving the back of his hand to religious moral teachings while trying to offer a carrot on immigration policy.  Being coerced and cajoled to just 'play along with the man' is not a good recipe for success especially when you have railed about the excesses of the power structure when out of office.  By taking up such means beyond what is given as law, President Obama also then brings into play another splinter of Identity Politics.

3) Legal Immigrants – Play by the rules and uphold the systems.  Those who apply to become citizens, learn civics and then demonstrate what they know to get citizenship are having their hard work demeaned by President Obama who is offering goodies to those who refuse (for whatever reason) to join the legal system and play by the rules.  It doesn't matter how long they have been in the US, who brought them, or any other thing: once they are adults they are given adult decisions to make and must act as a good citizen of their Nation of origin.  Legal immigrants do this, they uphold the Law of Nations and domestic law by doing this.  Illegal aliens do not do this and erode the Law of Nations and domestic law of the US and any Nation that has treaty obligations with the US on immigration.  No matter how 'nice' someone is, there is a difference between upholding the law and not upholding it, and special favors are not to be given to those who do not uphold the law as a matter of policy.

Since a large number of Hispanic families are first or second generation of legal immigrants, they have a large stake in upholding the legal process and are demeaned by being told that now they shouldn't have done the right thing and followed the law and that those not following the law will be granted special protection from the law by not having it applied equally to them.  If a President is short of funds and personnel to uphold the laws set by Congress he needs to say so and send the ball back into Congress' court to either find more funds, amend the law or change the enforcement of it to fit the will of Congress.

4) Poor Working Citizens – If you are poor and still have a job in this economic climate, you are in a select class of people that are doing the hard scrabble work of providing for your family to keep their heads above water.  Now with a change of enforcement policy, you will be competing against illegal aliens who can undercut your pay (albeit under the table, but that is a problem of getting employers to follow the law) and take your job while being protected from deportation by the federal government.  The working poor are on the front lines of this problem and if citizenship is demeaned for them, and special favors and protections are given to those who do not follow the system, then those putting such policy in place can only be seen as hostile to the working poor.

This is a demographic that votes in preponderance for Democrats historically, although some of that has been eroding the last 20 years.  The Democratic Party was once the standard bearer for the poor in America: the citizens who vote who have been given support by Democratic politicians and institutions to continue voting in the goodies from government.  Government is, however, now broke, by and large, due to the giveaways and wealth transfer from working rich to working and non-working poor.  When nearly half of the population pays no income taxes (yes they do pay into SSA, but that is not investment, just a tax) and when half of all households get some form of government support (local, State, federal) then there is a class that is expected to show gratitude by voting for those giving them the handouts.  Those handouts are not economically based and breaking apart the budget of not just the US, but all of Europe and other Nations that have embarked on this foolhardy scheme of over-taxing the rich to give goodies to the poor.  Now the door of participation in the economy can be seen only as being undermined by protecting illegal aliens and the working poor American Citizen is being told that they will be forever in the working poor to non-working poor by government fiat of unconstitutional policy.  You aren't just being told the game is rigged against you, those doing that telling are now doing the rigging right before your very eyes and they want to shut the door on the pathway towards the middle class and achievement... as the goodies system collapses and soon won't be there for you, your children or any other of your friends who are also part of the poor in America.

5) Black Americans – This demographic represents 10% of the electorate (give or take and it varies by State) and voted in the 90% range for President Obama.  President Obama has done nothing to help out African-Americans in the US and is actively trying to hurt the working poor Black American Citizen who partake of being part of the working poor Citizenry.  All of the problems seen for the working poor, in general, are double for the Black community which has had its once coherent neighborhoods broken up through 'Urban Renewal' (started by President Truman), and then put into government supplied housing (as part of the 'Great Society' under Johnson): all large scale policies meant to impoverish Black Americans, take them out of being home owners, and then break up the multi-generational culture by putting housing in place that barely catered to a two parent family.  Putting in 'activists' and race baiters, and then adding in goodies through the CRA for home loans (after destroying the community based S&L system via 'securitization' ushered in by Nixon), the Black community has been pushed around, broken up and had its once vibrant culture eroded and corroded to the point where being young and black in America corresponds to being unemployed, single and often with a rap sheet added on.

At some point the African-American community will start to walk away from identity politics as it has now made the poor, poorer and the rich aren't even being brought down into the middle class, and yet the government coffers are running on red ink and soon won't be able to provide any support that was promised to the neediest by politicians.  If the Democratically backed 'Jim Crow' laws of the South weren't just plain awful, then the plight of Black America would be seen as the true tragedy it really is.  In many ways those who did the abusing of Black America under 'Jim Crow' then changed over to the goodie providing culture that did even worse than just killing you: it impoverished you, took your property under legal fiat, densified your population into government housing that would have made the USSR cringe, cut off pathways to excellence by degrading Public School performance by softening the rigor of education (this is the tragedy of lowered expectations), and now seeks to lock a large percentage of the Black Community into poverty by depriving yet another generation of opportunity by protecting another identity politics splinter: Hispanics.  This is pitting the legal poor against the illegal alien, and raising tensions between Black and Hispanic communities.

All in one policy presentation.

This is the problem with 'identity politics': no one is just one thing.  And when you promise new goodies and protections at the expense of other parts of the splinters that are at the root of 'identity politics', the end state is not a coherent group voting for you and, in fact, the likelihood of chaos increases no end as faction is set against faction on the most personal of scales possible: within families and communities.  At that point government is seen as the causer of the problem, not the upholder of equality of application of the law.  Chaos is what happens when you don't apply the law equally to all: it makes the system one of favors, not of process.

That is why we have a Constitution guaranteeing equal application of the law and protecting the rights of all Citizens.

When you announce you are no longer doing that, you are announcing that your will is above that of the elected representatives of the People.

That never ends well.

Lack of doctrine, secrecy and the "kill list"

For a rarity the NY Times actually has a piece that will stimulate some discussion and it involves the "kill list" of President Obama.  This is the list of overseas terrorists that deserve to get attacked by our UCAVs (or drones in less precise terminology) and to get sudden death out of the skies.  This list was criticized by the Left during the term of President Bush (43) and then dropped off of the grievance list for the Left with the election of Obama.  Thus it is indicative of being a purely political grievance based who is in office and what their party affiliation is.

The way that President Obama makes this "kill list" up is that he is presented with baseball card sized pictures of individuals and their terror resume on the back and he gives a yea or nay on each one.  This is done in secret, so the actual methodology may vary, but that is the gist of it.  There is discussion about how much power a President has as Executive and what Constitutional protections one gets as a citizen working with terrorists while overseas.  Will Cain, talking on Real News from The Blaze (on GBTV) worried about the powers of a President in a war on terror that has no definitive end point to it (aka 'perpetual war' is the idea).

What has been missed is not is this doctrine effective (or short term effective but long term counter-productive as Buck Sexton puts it), which is to say is the 'targeted killing' doing 'the job', but is that a proper doctrine or just a tactic in this war?  Again as the Left loves to point out 'terrorism is just a tactic and you can't wage war on a tactic'.  That is, however, incorrect as terrorism is a methodology in search of founding principle and it is different than war fought with some terror techniques used by accountable actors: terrorists who fight under no flag are not accountable.  Will Cain has problems with al Qaeda in Yemen morphing into some anti-regime force that even has ideas of putting together some sort of government, and is it right to go after them in this process?

Thus we have a doctrine that may be a tactic, a tactic which is a methodology and soldiers who aren't.

This is what you get after a century of twisting words and concepts around to fit political expediency: duckspeak.

From this you get the idea that both the Left and the Right have not one bit of a clue as to what they are talking about.

I cannot set matters straight on a large scale but can discuss what the actual principles are behind all of this (not the political twisting which is pure Progressivism/Liberalism/Socialism/Communism at work, and plain to see) but these matters of soldiers, war, methodology and tactics.  Those are dead simple to figure out, if you bother to study warfare.  What I will lay out is just practice of what I've written about before and following the path of what Nations are and what war is, and how it is waged, one can also discern powers granted to Nations via their citizens to conduct Public War both against Public and Private enemies of the Nation.

Lets start with the enemies since they are the simplest part to tease out.  Public Enemies to a Nation are other Nations and those working for them with the assent of that Nation.  They aren't gangsters roaming around with Tommyguns, by and large, although if they are funded by another Nation to do so, then they are Public Enemies.  Criminals are an enemy to the private peace by disrespecting internal law and may be a threat to the public writ small, not the Nation writ large, and are thusly civil criminals.  A Public Enemy is a Nation that is waging war against our Nation and a Private Enemy is a citizen or group of citizens who act on their own accord against one Nation which is a threat to all Nations by trying to overturn the order of Nations.  Public Enemies you can make a peace treaty with and expect to have that respected.  Private Enemies you can deprive of property and their lives, no peace can be made with them as they respect no international law amongst Nations nor do they abide by the most primal of civilized behavior to set aside our ability to make Private War to have society and a Nation.

Pirates, terrorists, brigands and those who just seize power and consider themselves accountable to no one and to be a law unto themselves, those are Private Enemies and they make Private War.  What they cause is terror, and they are terrorists, and that is a part of what they are, not just what they do: it isn't a tactic but is a characteristic trait of waging Private War that is unaccountable.  These ones are not soldiers as soldiers are part of an accountable military that has a structure, that has published codes and laws they adhere to and can be punished under, they wear uniforms, they do not wantonly attack civilians and other non-combatants and they adhere to standards set by a government of some sort.

The preceding paragraph answers the question of those who espouse wanting to overthrow a Nation: they can say as they wish, but do they actually put forth the accountability system by uniform, published codes and laws, people who publicly run them to be held accountable... that sort of thing makes them soldiers to a government that is trying to gain power by force of arms in a civil war.  They must do all of those things to get that status.  Even further their nascent government must be recognized as legitimate somewhere not just inside their country but by another Nation: they are seen as a legitimate brother Nation by some existing and established Nation.  Without these things you can talk about overthrowing regimes as much as you like, but you aren't a soldier, just one causing terror on their own with no accountability, no cause and nothing you will adhere to so as to justify your activities.

As a recent example, the rebels in Libya at least managed to hint at putting some sort of governing board together along with some written rules, and even tried to form up into semi-discernable ranks.  They actually failed miserably at doing any of these things, but it was enough to garner support from other Nations (mostly in Europe) who were willing to back their cause (which they couldn't figure out beyond 'kill Gaddaffy').  In a place like Syria, say, the population that has been going through an uprising really hasn't gotten its act together, mostly because they have been killed by the regime, threatened by both al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and generally are coming to realize that this major struggle for power between these terror organizations is just getting a lot of people killed.  If you want to go after Asad for his murderous directions, then do not miss the other actors also doing a bit of murdering of civilians on their own in the coercive direction.  As one local in Homs said to the leaving Blue Helmets: while you are here no one is fighting.  Getting Asad is not really an end goal if you want to stop the fighting, as the terror organizations will then be left to do as they will in the power vacuum.  With no one to support there, you will get chaos and a possibly fracturing Nation State along ethnic and religious lines (which could become a reality if the Kurds decide to secede and join their cousins in Iraq and petition for that).  If you want to save the civil population in that scenario, then you are chasing a fairy tale unless you are looking at a major declaration of war against Syria for... no real reason at all as it is only a murderous regime without much in the way of natural resources beyond those phosphate mines that provide it with the basis for chem/bio/nuclear devices.

OK, maybe that is a good reason.  But someone at the National level must make it, tell why it is important and then be willing to send a few tens of thousands of troops in.  Russia already has a few thousand boots on the ground and they are doing doodly there.  Guess they go into the 'well armed non-combatant category': cowards with guns.  Lots of threats, no action.  Loverly.

Now to get back on course, it would seem, on its face, that President Obama is acting in a kinda-sorta terrorist way with those "kill list" things he plays solitaire with.  Should Deuce of Clubs Ahmed 'The Weasel' Mohammed be put on it?  *flip* Oooooo... Ace of Spades 'Killer' Karzawi shows up, so 'The Weasel' gets saved by bigger fish!  Perhaps it is done in a game of poker with each chip representing a UCAV and the ten spots being Hellfires.  I'm sure they have some logical way to do this involving a high degree of chance and waffling.  Be that as it may, the President is the head of a Nation and, thusly, accountable internally and externally to other Nations for his actions.  The people he is going after are terrorists making Private War (not that Public sort) and fall within the Executive power to defend the Nation (all enemies foreign an domestic).  Should American Citizens helping terrorists be put on cards to play with?  Maybe the next round will be Pinochle....

What the card game represents is not doctrine, but methodology and piss poor methodology at that.  A doctrine is a stated and set way of doing things to reach an objective, and drone strikes are just a means to that end, not an end in and of itself.  Apparently we have had a couple of Presidents treating it as an end in itself that churns out dead terrorists.  That isn't good because you have no idea what it takes to make the card list.  And because no doctrine has been set by the President, the decision falls into his lap.  He shouldn't have to figure it out on a case by case basis, just have the one or two iffy decisions cross his desk.  In other words: doctrine is the means to delegate authority and set up the goals and objectives and the objective qualifications for making the "kill list".  Without a set criteria you are just playing cards.

This card playing isn't disturbing because it is done in secret, per se, but that it has to be done at all by the President.  If there was a set doctrine with criteria that gets you on the list, then that would be PUBLIC and you wouldn't need the secret card game.  Period.

That is what a President is supposed to do.

Are there objective things that can be cited that can get you on the "kill list"?

There sure are!

The State Dept. has a list of known terrorists.  Let them know they are all on the list and can be vaporized without notice any time, any where, by anyone the United States authorizes to do so.  That doesn't matter if you are eating humus at your local falafel shop, spelunking in outer Uzbekistan, doing the disco in on vacay in Juarez.  You are a Private Enemy of the United States, you have caused us harm to get on that list and if we can get you we will.  Even better as you have caused monetary harm, we will seize your property as it is forfeit to the damages you have caused and since you aren't going to pay up, your stuff will be taken to help defray the cost of damages you have inflicted upon the Nation.  That is called 'taking' and Congress can authorize that to civilians to do for it, or the President can have soldiers seize it from those we are at Private War with.

Who are those individuals?

They are on the Terror Watch List.

You make the list, your stuff can start vanishing around you.  Hope you didn't like that BMW too much... its been airlifted to a US run chop-shop in LA.  Or Bengal, or wherever we want to run it.  Or it was sold at auction to the highest bidder in Moscow.  Good luck getting it back from the Red Mafia, you know?  Or do you want to be in debt to them?  Sucks being a terrorist, huh?  You could always turn yourself in, you know?

That last part is important as it helps to define just what other sort of people get to make that list.  Anyone who makes Private War on the United States, citizen or non-citizen.  You are no longer abiding by the Law of Nations, you are no longer considering yourself to be under any law, you are waging war on your lonesome and you only get Constitutional protection when you turn yourself in to the proper authorities.

There, that is two ways to do things and get the President less involved and the people who are much (much, much, much) better at making decisions into the loop.  These are called 'subordinates'.  You delegate duty to them.  You give them well defined and set orders and they snap to attention and carry them out... sort of like what Valerie Jarrett expects of the Obamas.

To make it perfectly clear: it doesn't matter where you come from, the moment you decide to wage war on your lonesome against the Nation, you have declared yourself to be its enemy.  Want your name cleared?  Turn yourself in.  Mind you where you end up next is under a court martial, not a civil trial, so the military can determine if you are a legal or illegal combatant or a civilian (that is the grand Choice #3 that they get in case you aren't actually a bomb throwing nut, and by deciding that your chance of a civil trial is essentially nil).  Too bad that President Obama was so hot on closing Gitmo that he forgot (or never learned) that military law is its own beast and quite something different from civil law.  Sucks when you are a Progressive/Socialist/New Party/Democrat who can't be bothered to learn the Constitution or history, isn't it?

What is even better about such things defining a "kill list"?  You can put those who give material aid to terrorists on it, as well.  Or at least their material aid and point out that if good old Ahmed 'The Weasel' is having roast goat and rice over at your house, you can be summarily vaporized with him.  Oh, if he is going for a spin in Rolls Royce, it could also disappear into some lovely auction house in Singapore, too.  Sucks that.  Maybe you can authorize someone to get that sweet Beemer in Moscow for you, huh?

Such a list is self-delimiting: it has a limiting principle to it and requires next to no Presidential overhead beyond thinking up the criteria for the "kill list".  Even that can be delegated to someone who knows what the hell they are doing... I would NOT suggest Eric Holder, as he is clueless and playing far too Fast & Loose with Fast & Furious.  Get someone who actually knows the Constitution and a bit of military history, who isn't politicized to hell and gone, you know like the JCS, to do that thinking up for you.  Sign off on it.  Then you get an extra round of golf in every few weeks!  What a sweet deal!  You would get Transparency and the appearance of semi-competence or at least the ability to sign your name on a couple of things here and there and far less overhead to boot.  Boy, wouldn't it be grand to have a semi-competent President?  I'm not holding my breath for one, btw.

Setting doctrine is public.

The decisions get delegated to competent subordinates.

They do their duty knowing they have a good and objective "kill list" and are allowed to go after targets of opportunity.

The troops can do a bit of taking, get it signed off and get a few sweet cars to drive around and maybe a villa or two to sell off.  Along with those crates of AKs and RPG rounds.  The $300 Nikes are just gravy.

See, all those dusty tomes and tracts I've gone on about, de Vattel, Grotius, Pufendorf, those guys we can't bother to read any more, they actually told you what to do, why to do it, when to do it and how to do it, and left up methodology to operational concerns as they would vary over time.  What you do to get those put against you, that is invariant as it is all about human nature.  That hasn't changed any from the beginning of time.  Remembering that it hasn't... that's the hard part.

The state of al Qaeda

Is al Qaeda about to go extinct?

The problem to answering this is multi-fold, in that we don't have enough real information about al Qaeda to make that pronouncement.  Until recently, that is.

In yet another piece of commentary at Hot Air that I recycle into a post, I'll use this morning's bit to give an outlay to the problems that al Qaeda is having.  I've talked about this before elsewhere, but here it starts to show up from the OBL raid.  As always with such commentary, it is posted 'as-is' with all spelling, grammatical and other errors for the amusement of any reader:

The general feel-good program that Discovery Channel had about the captured material on the OBL raid was saying something other than what it wanted to say. The key graph they showed was how much OBL’s records show the pay breakout within the organization. Something a bit over 60% is dedicated to… payroll.

Yup, paying the people running al Qaeda.

A mere 10% is spent on terror operations, which includes supplies, travel, and doing such lovely things as accounting for car repairs of operatives. And the car repairs are done by make of vehicle, as well.

Now I do have some problems with releasing just how much data and how much detail it has as a National Security problem. With that said the outside analyst can see exactly why al Qaeda is failing.

aQ needs grand terror missions to do better recruitment. Apparently the stuff the West does that ‘infuriates’ the ‘Arab Street’ is more PR than actual recruitment material. OBL understood that getting a good PR battle was important, but sees declining recruiting numbers after aQ can’t pull off a spectacular raid.

So with money being eaten up by personnel, the overhead of the cell system plus the non-operational cells (those made to do INTEL, surveillance and clean-up post mission) what does aQ do to try and get better operational capability? Nothing. Stay the course and add more overhead to the organization while seeing personnel costs skyrocket and the major recruitment tool of terrorism decline.

Here is where a Western education in actual economics would have provided the answer on changing that around inside aQ. It is a very simple one for an all volunteer organization that is accumulating excess staff while putting its main mission into jeopardy: enforce a pay cut and cut staff.

Now cutting staff will have to be permanent, as in fatal, since you don’t want INTEL walking out the door, so it isn’t really an option.

After that, is a pay cut really so hard to do in a terrorist organization? And since you are getting so much free media from the West, why are you trying to put more into that? All the talk and lack of action at a large scale is showing you up to not just be liars but incompetent liars, at that. Very bad for PR to boast of what you will do and then be unable to do it. Might need some staff cutting there, you know?

Basically by getting in Marxist trained help from Leftist organizations, aQ is no longer the nimble, tactical heavy with grand strategic goal organization it started out to be. It is now a hide-bound, bureaucratic organization, wanting to track every expenditure (no matter how small) with high overhead and that eats up budget for terror ops… and some of that moves into medical expenses which, yes, aQ also pays for.

Yes it is a vicious terror organization, but it is a very organized organization to such a degree that it is losing its goal to become so well organized. It worked better as a loose, cross-supporting terror organization than a centralized, top-down organization. Basically it is mimicking its enemy, operationally, and finding that Western leftist economics and organizational systems are top heavy, overly bureaucratic, inefficient, put a great gloss on a decaying message, and otherwise trade sit-down PR for stand up operations.

If aQ doesn’t watch out it will factionate and that will spread into the rest of the radicalized Arab world and that will be the cause of a major internal conflict unlike any other we have seen because they are vying for the same population. And as OBL said, the people will know the difference between a strong horse and a weak horse…

Getting rid of such an overly organized organization is a very hard thing to do. Luckily, it starts to implode along the way and all that is required to eliminate it is continued pressure. The belief that organization is all that you need is a fatal flaw for aQ. And for OWS as well. And the Left as a whole. The more you attempt to organize, to control via power, the less and less capable you become until your system cracks apart. When power to control is the only ends, then the problems start to show up with those wanting to control as they ask for ever more, and can provide less and less in that doing.

ajacksonian on May 2, 2012 at 7:06 AM

Basically to get a jihadi of any sort to do a mission you have to: recruit them, train them, familiarize them with their operation, feed them or hand them a stipend, check up on them, and on and on and on.

When you have a small, compact and highly committed organization, this is easy to do.  Once you get past a thousand or so individuals on a global scale, you need infrastructure.  Utilizing sharia based economics and concepts, adulterated by their Western Marxist allies, al Qaeda may have some great technical expertise in bomb making, INTEL, etc. but their whole basis for economics is backwards.

Beyond that, and it is a multi-faceted affair, coming from a background of having grown up in a socialist leaning household, studying socialism and its various attempts at power, actually bothering to study warfare from our deep history all the way through the present (meaning I go beyond just the 20th or even mid-19th century forms of it), and then doing a review of what terrorism is and what sort of war it inculcates, I can look at this phenomena in a number of ways.  One of the defining characteristics of this small group to power organizations is that at some point they will face a factionation event.  Mostly this is over ideology, although in places like the USSR and China it was (and is in many ways) about pure power.  Having started out with a franchise style system, al Qaeda sought to centralize it and bring it under control.  That meant that INTEL could be easily gathered on aQ from a few key points instead of trying to do that at the franchise level.  For more control and power over this network, however, came centralized overhead and bureaucracy.

It may seem strange to talk about bureaucracy in a terror organization, but without it the organization can deviate from its original ideology and become just another criminal organization.  FARC, as an example, started out as a Marxist/Communist terror group in Colombia and is one of the oldest terror organizations around.  In the 1980's it started picking up the Enforcer role for some of the drug cartels to ensure supply via terrorism applied to local communities, and when the cartels started to crumble FARC picked up on narco-terrorism as its main methodology.  Unfortunately that is no longer even close to being in the Marxist/Communist realm and FARC graduated from ideologically based terrorism to become a narco-terrorist organization which was also capitalist in its means.  FARC stopped being about anything, save for money and power.  The secretive Shining Path, on the other hand, continues its smoldering and pretty useless terror campaign by remaining ideologically pure.  The various Red organizations of the 1970's that dabbled in terror started out from a few, central terror organizations, but then had internal ideological disputes so that Red factions and Red groups and militant interior designers all started to show up on the terror landscape.  Hezbollah remains largely an arm of the Iranian regime, but now has large external support bases so that it can work in ways that can often be at cross-purposes to Iran.  The PLO factionated when it sought to become semi-legitimate and some of its virulent off-shoots went out on their own and some allied with HAMAS, the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Muslim Brotherhood solves this, to a degree, by spinning off new terror organization (Tunisia, Algeria, HAMAS, al Qaeda) but finds that some of these don't really work to the overall benefit of the MB.  They give up control and get negative feedback.

To stem this bureaucracy is essential in that it tries to establish a system of accountability within an organization.  Yet that organization has overhead that is non-productive and only serves to keep actors inside the organization from being counter-productive.  This is the problem with any centralized system because it removes responsibility from lower levels and concentrates it distantly in a larger mechanism which isn't all too efficient.  For examples of that just look at any program that has 'socialized' as part of its nomenclature and you will see a top-heavy bureaucracy unable to be flexible and only having a few negative things it can do to keep the worst stuff down. 

As I went over in looking at Creating an Army, al Qaeda has a problem in that it operates as it trains when not in combat.  Although having a number of low-level operational capabilities that are on-going, al Qaeda can't really expect to see much of a return on suicide bombers: you can't get a veteran corps of suicide bombers to make them more effective.  Because it now practices a high form of bureaucracy much of the time, its terror functions must reflect this as is seen in the minutia that is tracked at the highest levels.  If this is how you recruit, train, and then put operatives into place for long term missions, you have the problem of those operatives knowing no other way of doing things.  Getting skilled field operatives is essential and al Qaeda started out with a small cadre of that which is now down to Zawahiri, the Egyptian Doctor.  It must be noted that Zawahiri does not have skills in economics, he never was much of a 'boots on the ground' terrorist and is more a spiritual head than administrative head of aQ.  At this point the winning times in Afghanistan that he was not a part of are only a distant memory for the organization as the rest of the original cadre have been killed out.  There is no historical memory of those good times left in al Qaeda.

Functionally al Qaeda draws most of its operatives from the Arab world (although it has connections to many organizations globally) which means that the bulk of the sociology within al Qaeda is Arab.  In the Arabic world the top-down mentality has been present from its inception in the ancient hydraulic empires which inculcates a 'yes-man' mentality and one that seeks to shift blame from oneself to others.  As described in the program on the Discovery Channel, OBL demanded the absolute truth from his operatives because he wanted a clear idea of just what was going on out there.  That went against the grain of Arab culture and you do have to wonder just how much self-censorship and blame shifting was going on to distort OBL's views of his own organization.  The US military relies more on its Non-Commissioned Officers to keep things running than its generals, as it is a distributed responsibility system that puts lower level responsibility at the lower levels.  al Qaeda did and continues to do just the opposite.

This sort of mentality and outlook has visible effects in how things work when such a terror organization hits a rough opponent.  There are tell-tale signs of an inefficient organization that is sacrificing boots on the ground for overhead.  I will return to my first internal link and pull this out from my 2006 article:

4) The entire insurgency is turning into a high-cost, low personnel affair. When you have lots of extra weapons, often 2:1 or 3:1 per individuals captured, and so much damn ammo, what you are seeing is pre-preparation in *hopes* of doing something to get lots more recruits. If any of these groups could get a major foothold in Iraq to do *that* the Nation *would* descend into chaos. And this is at a time when the new Iraqi Army has *proven* itself capable of independent operations and is capable of handling tricky situations on their own. That said that is only their battle-tested groups. Green troops probably are getting rotated through Baghdad and a couple of other hot spots and then rotated *out* to the provinces they control for more normal patrol duties. But with their skill, they are now catching the individuals that are acting like insurgents. After first-hand experience they are seeing things that untrained troops would overlook.

What do you spend your money on when personnel are expensive for operations?  Equipment.

What happens when you don't have enough experienced personnel to watch over the equipment?  It is found.

Why does this happen?  People are the most expensive part of any organization, right up until you get to a nuclear aircraft carrier with all of its aircraft and equipment, and even then the long life utilization of such a vessel means that at some point the people that have been through it will represent a larger capital investment than the vessel itself.

If you are a terror organization having problems recruiting and training personnel and yet still have a budget line for terror expenditures, what do you buy?  Equipment.

To track all that equipment what do you need?  Bureaucrats.

Sociologically this then has a power described in Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Do note that this is for any organization of any sort that has a bureaucracy.  When your organization has no set org chart or it is set just as boxes and not as absolute numbers of personnel, the bureaucracy will expand.  An unbounded bureaucracy is the kiss of death to any organization as it will lose the goal of that organization and soon be run for the bureaucrats, alone.

The state of al Qaeda is that of a loosely run terror organization that tried to pull in and centralize its operations for some efficiencies but was unable to bounds on that overhead.  It isn't that it will become a nice, bureaucratic organization: it won't.  It is on the path towards increasing ineffectiveness, however, because of its bureaucracy.  The twin sociologies involved or Arabic culture and the culture of bureaucracy has been the downfall of every large scale organization in the Middle East.  That is because of the way that Arabs view their own people, their own culture and the requirement to keep both under control from any organization that starts up, large or small.

The final part of this is from the revolutionary side of things and is the axiom of such conflicts and their outcomes:

As they come to power, so shall they rule.

That one was much discussed in classes on socialist organizations, and it is also true for other conflicts from civil wars to revolutionary overthrows to such things as simple elections.  There is a deep and virulent strain of Islam that has never been tempered by a conflict that has so sickened its participants that they swear away from marrying the Mosque and State together.  That has helped such organizations to at least retain some cohesive internal system, but that system cannot address the myriads of bureaucrats necessary to run it.  If al Qaeda has had the bureaucratic disease spread to them, then they had to have it from somewhere else.  Many of the examples of Western Communist terror organizations points to a good set of roots in that culture.  Another set is put in place by the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliation with the NSDAP of Germany in the 1930's which brought its own brand of efficient bureaucracy with it to emulate.  That system can be one of heartless and inhuman efficiency, to say the least.  And when the bureaucracy begins to re-order an organization to fit its desires and it is heartless, then the original causes the organization held begin to wane as the bureaucracy takes over to its own ends.  For now those ends still include the terrorist vision of OBL and the other founders of the organization, but at some point the last link to that past will be lost in the form of Zawahiri, and then the organization will be run by its bureaucrats.  So long as external operational pressure is kept up, al Qaeda is in a death spiral of bureaucracy: we won't destroy it, as such, so much as it will run out of funds to keep the bureaucrats paid.

Only then will there be no al Qaeda.

You can't kill them all out, but you can make them run out of funds because they spend them on the wrong objective.

Gold into Lead

The concept of Law of Nations is descriptive in form, no proscriptive in type, which is to say it describes the powers of a Nation and which domains they fall under.  Law of Nations does not tell of how to make a Nation, it does not decree what a Nation shall and shall not have as powers, and, instead, merely describes the powers that all Nations have by being a Nation.  From this comes the concept of 'sovereign powers', which are those powers that accrue to a Nation's government and are those things which all citizens agree are necessary to have as the formulation of that government.

A republican government is one of distributed and de-centralized powers within a Nation State, and any Nation utilizing a republican form of government can determine which bodies within a government get which powers and how they are assembled.  In general this has meant executive powers (those things like external relations with other governments, running the government bureaucracy, and administering law) has been placed into a branch separated from legislative powers (drafting internal laws, by and large) and judicial powers (the review of cases to determine them in fact and in law).  These are in no way 'co-equal' powers as they each have their own domain in which they are sovereign exercises of a Nation via Law of Nations. 

The Treaty of Westphalia came about to end the 30 Years War, which had been pitting Catholic Nations against Protestant Nations to the tune of 15% to 20% of the population in those areas ravaged by war being killed, and that is outside the plagues and other artifacts that attend war when it destroys infrastructure and leaves famine in its wake.  During the 30 Years War Nations would change sides due to the religious affiliation of their leaders as those changed from generation to generation and the religious beliefs of the population were expected to change to that of the sole sovereign.  The end of the 30 Years War saw the general agreement that amongst the three main sects of Christianity (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism) that there would be tolerance at the Nation State level for these sects and no attempts to change the existing religious beliefs of individuals due to a change at the top of the power structure.  Church was not separated from State by this, but the State agreed that to have a civil population that is not put at strife nor forced migration to the deep sorrow of all, there must be the removal of religious bias by the Nation State for its own people amongst the three sects of Christianity.  Post-Westphalian Law of Nations reads with that firmly in place, and by the time of the Founding of the United States this conceptual doctrine had undergone expansion to all believers in the realm of the citizenry.  The National government could not dictate which church or sect one should belong and held power to ensure that all laws would be administered equally and without bias to all religious communities.

The United States, itself, started out the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation which is a form of republican government.  By forming from British Colonies the United States gains the Treaty of Westphalia due to the Restoration of the Monarchy as that family was covered under the Great Peace by name and all are to continue on its establishment forever after as part of the Eternal Treaty.  Thus these new States that formed under the Articles of Confederation are Westphalian States and they exercise powers as part of a joint agreement of association under the Articles of Confederation.  States are, thusly, the powers behind the United States under the Articles, and keep that Confederal government under a tight leash as it has only a narrow range of diplomatic and trade powers assigned to it by the States.  The Confederal government had no broad taxation powers to pay off the Revolutionary War debt and no military organization held separately from the States.  What it could do was assign a portion of the National Debt to each State to figure out how to pay off, and that it did by population.  This meant that the Southern States, rich with trade and agriculture, were able to handle their debt burden while the Northeastern States, without bountiful trade, were finding that the taxes were rising on the population and impoverishing the very farmers that should be the fount of agricultural trade.  This came to a boiling point as a Revolutionary slogan of 'no taxation without representation' was now finding that highly populated cities like Boston and Hartford could administer higher taxes on rural settlements to the benefit of the larger trading houses in those cities.  By 1786 this had come to a boiling point in MA where ex-Revolutionary War soldiers were not getting their benefits for having served in the war, had not gotten back pay, and were now finding their farms being taxed into non-existence. From this the Shayesites manifested as one in a long string of local uprisings and was the closest to getting to the arms and supplies of a local State arsenal and turning into a second Revolutionary War.

There are many reasons for having a federal government that has powers to tax member States and centralize debt burdens with the foremost being that a Confederal System wasn't working.  Many proposals for redrafting the Articles had happened and the Annapolis Convention in 1786 recommended another Convention for 1787 to try and iron out these problems.  What was needed was a system that got larger State buy-in for a National government, with powers of taxation across all States.  Any stronger and more centralized government is a threat to individual liberty and freedom and to keep this new federal government from overstepping its bounds there must be a system of checks and balances of that government.  This is achieved in multiple ways via a system of sovereign power checks and balances within the government and, more importantly, it puts the taxation and budgetary power in a part of a bicameral legislative body and it is that part which is directly tied to the Revolutionary goals of being represented for taxation.  The States are the bodies that must sign off on this new form of government and they are given a say in the other part of the bicameral legislative body as a form of check and balance within the legislative branch, itself. 

While the internal checks and balances are most lauded by schoolteachers, the external checks and balances held by the States and the people are often overlooked or omitted entirely.  The States were given the tax collection power for the federal government because of the good reason that they had some veto in legislation coming from the House and could seek a politically satisfactory revenue stream that met National obligations without impoverishing local communities.  Further the people had a say through their representatives of what should and should not be in a federal government under the Constitutional form agreed to by their States. 

The primary mover of the sovereign powers is that they are enumerated and restricted in scope via a charter of negative powers derived from individual negative liberties.  By enumerating these powers they are, at the same time, restricted to that enumeration just by being put in place.  This schema is bolstered by the Amendments IX and X, which puts all other rights, liberties and powers to the States and the people as the people are the source of all such things and the creators of society and its organ called government.  There are other checks on federal tyranny, such as the freedom of speech, assembly and utilization of arms which are also upheld under the Bill of Rights, which forms along the older tradition of the Magna Carta as absolute guarantees beyond all other statements and verbiage, laws and decisions: the Bill of Rights exactingly tells that the enumerated powers are restricted and that it is the people that hold all the power in this Nation.

This concept of following the actual text of the Constitution to find out how it works in multiple places is structuralism.  I have gone over this conception put forward by Nicholas Rosenkranz in two prior posts centering on the subjects and objects of the Constitution.  English as a language has an SVO system which is: Subject, Verb, Object.  Objects are acted upon by Subjects and that action is the Verb in the sentence.  Structuralism is not Original Intent doctrine nor is it Strict Constructionism doctrine, as the first looks outside the Constitution for intent and the latter examines power outlays, checks and balances.  Strict Constructionism, coming first, does not rely on the utilization of English sentence structure nor does it seek the reinforcing language within the Constitution that clearly defines words and their meanings contextually.  If there is primary intent for the Constitution it must be reflected in the actual sentences and clauses within the document, and if there is a construction to those outlays then that derives from the actual structural integrity of the written sentences and clauses.  By knowing Law of Nations, English Common Law and having a good biblical foundation for individuals being directly granted rights and liberty, the US Constitution reflects a deep rooted understanding in human nature and the things that humans do on this Earth.

When understood in a structuralist context, the power grants contained in the Constitution are pretty clear on what they do in this complex system because of the way they are stated.

Article I, Section 8, US Constitution, the 'Commerce Clause':

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

That seems pretty simple, right?  Look at the entities involved and you see a continuity: foreign Nations, the several States and Indian Tribes.  This is a clause that deals with sovereign entities and it is not differentiating between foreign Nations, the several States and Indian Tribes, thus the power domain is the same for all three of them.  Do 'the several States' mean the entire Nation, as a whole?  Utilizing structuralism it is necessary to find out how the States are dealt with elsewhere in the Constitution and what the meaning of those clauses and phrases are in regards to their approach to States and in the type of qualifications being applied.

The United States is in the Preamble and it applies to all of the States in the Nation as a whole, without regard to any State or sub-set of States.  Thus the United States is a whole entity, indivisible and complete made up of all of the States that are United together.

In Article I, Section 1 this is also how Congress is labeled: Congress of the United States.

The first appearance of 'the several States' is in Article I, Section 2 with regards to the House:

Section. 2.

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

Here there is a recognition that each State has a different form of government (albeit republican in form) and that there are variations between States in how their legislative bodies work.  In this 'the several States' refers to the differences between States and among States and such differences are recognized and respected.  Further in Section 2 there is addressing of representation and taxation, and do note that the language of the first sentence is changed by following Amendment(s):

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

Here there is recognition that 'the several States' are of those in the Union, but does not include Indians who are not taxed nor 3/5ths of all other people.  The latter portion refers to non-free people and the former to Indians living in tribal territories recognized later as having sovereign domains within any State.  Indians living within State domains would not fall under that auspice and would be held in the enumeration to be represented as part of the population of the State, not of some other entity.

At this point there is a difference between the United States as a whole entity and the several States, which recognizes the individual States as separate entities within the larger Union.  Is this applied elsewhere with other powers?  Going back to Article I, Section 8 and before the 'Commerce Clause' is the first clause which is the 'General Welfare Clause':

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Here are two instances that bolster the Preamble and Article I Sections 1 and 2, in which the United States is treated as a whole.  Most particularly telling is that the second part of the clause specifically enumerates that Duties, Imposts and Excises are uniform throughout the United States.  There is no exception in that, no mention of 'the several States,' and no power grant for the federal government to differentiate between the States with this power.  From that the United States must mean the entire Nation, as a whole, not as divisions nor parts and this power cannot be subdivided beneath the level of the entire Nation, as a whole.

The next clause again follows in the structural framework already laid out:

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

This is where our National Debt comes from: the federal government borrowing in the name of the entire Nation.

After that is the Commerce Clause which is then followed by this clause:

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

Here is where those wishing to emigrate to the United States are regulated by sovereign power delegated to Congress for external affairs.  For sovereign power over Bankruptcies, that is set at the National level by Congress and is applied to the United States as a whole, equally.  In one clause two forms of sovereign power under Law of Nations are delegated to Congress.

Now skipping down a bit, there is in Article I, Section 9, another and different look at the States:

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another; nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.

That first clause is interesting as it is a passive voice clause, which is to say it is not specifically enumerating a power (the Congress shall have power to...) or restricting a part of any government from doing something (like in Amendment I, Congress shall pass no law...).  Because it is passive and has no direct indication of who it is being applied to, the examination is then one of who gets the positive powers of duties and taxation?  In the federal government that is Congress which gets the positive power for this, thus the restriction is on the States and that branch of State government that normally applies taxes and duties.  Thus this a prohibition on the States from imposing a duty or tax upon goods exported from other States.  This is carried through in the next clause, which also prohibits the free movement of vessels between States and is a further stoppage of getting payment to enter a State from another State.  As payments are usually a function of an executive power, this is a prohibition on the exercise of a power which is in addition to the prior prohibition which is usually from a legislative branch.  In these two clauses are prohibitions of State power both on both legislative and executive branches of government, although those powers may end up anywhere and these clauses stop all use of them by the States.

This is the third way that the Constitution address States, and that is in powers States cede to the federal government or are prohibited from exercising on their own in regards to other States.

Now what is very interesting is that the power restrictions have relaxation points to them, which is to say areas in which they can be utilized given certain conditions.  Article 10 establishes those conditions and they are the 'escape hatches' of the power restrictions:

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Escape hatch one is for things that cannot be foreseen, like Gypsy Moth or Med Fly spread in which pests that are harmful to the agricultural system of a State need to be eradicated and re-importation of such pests stopped.  Also this covers such things as inspection of vehicles for safety reasons, or to establish the amount of wear and tear on infrastructure so that certain vehicles must pay for special passage: that money goes not to the State but the federal government.

The third clause of Article I, Section 10 is one that I think of as the State Self-Preservation Clause in that all the normal martial restrictions and foreign policy restrictions laid upon the powers of a State are removed for invasion or imminent Danger which will not admit delay.  Got an invasion by a foreign power via sneak attack?  The States do not have to wait for the federal government to respond.  Have an insurrection that is threatening the tranquility of the State?  Again the State is not barred from action by having to wait for the federal government to respond.  Have an earthquake, pirates rampaging through the streets, or UFO's landing to mutilate livestock and abduct citizens?  Hey!  That is the sort of thing that cannot be written into a Constitution, so the States get wide leeway in dealing with sudden threats to their very existence: they do NOT have to wait for permission to act as the State IS a sovereign power that is RESTRICTED by the Constitution ONLY.  The US Constitution is not a suicide pact, in other words.

From this the third addressing of the States is one that also is qualified and recognizes the sovereign nature of the States.  Without such restrictions, the States would have those powers if the State constitution allowed it to the government of that State.

Yet another way the States are addressed is as single States.  This is seen in Article I, Section 8 dealing with areas under direct Congressional authority for lawmaking:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;

Individual States are addressed in the granting of land to the federal government for the District and for other forts, magazines, etc. dealing with necessary functions of the federal government in particular the military.  Note that Congress must ask for such land and the Legislature of the State must grant the federal government use of that land.  These are not permanent land grants, however, as the retrocession of the part of DC in VA and the various returning of old bases and such to States have happened, as well.  The grant of the use of land is a voluntary one and EITHER side may pull out of that grant, which also recognizes that the power over the land in question belongs to the States, not the federal government.

Four ways to address the States: as part of the whole of the US, in the several as sovereign entities making up the US, in the restriction of power by these sovereign entities with exemptions, and as single States for the use of land.

Now fast-forward to the present day.

What is the US federal government in that it is not given to be in?

Land and property via the FHA, Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie: the federal government should have no say over the mortgage system of the United States, as a whole, nor amongst the several States as land is not part of inter-State commerce.  The federal government 'created' a 'national market' through GNMA via the bundling and securitizing of loans (which is to say the US government determined if loans were good or not) and allowed cross-State banks to go into residential and other property systems.  To be clear the federal government in picking up the backing of loans is not starting such loans... that is done by applying regulations to the banking industry via things like the Community Reinvestment Act... and utilizes intermediaries which wanted into this new 'market' and put the government on the hook for the 'secured' value of those loans.

This is how the FHA builds up control over a portfolio of property: by being the backer of organizations that hold them.  As a 'quasi-governmental agency', Fannie and Freddie are the conduits for this FHA control, and yet nowhere is any federal involvement in holding State lands granted save by permission of the State involved for each and every property as passed by Legislative acts.  For 'quasi-governmental agencies' Fannie and Freddie have open pipelines into the Treasury and that other 'quasi-governmental agency' the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve acts as the intermediary for US borrowing and holds a good portion of the US debt.  It was created and designed by the banks, themselves, and pushed through Congress and put into power and given shielding from oversight by Congress.  To this day it is hard to say exactly which banks are in the Federal Reserve Board and how they conduct their operations.

How has this worked out?  First it killed the S&Ls, and that was by design, not bad luck.  Savings & Loans had restricted, local portfolios which gave them insight into the local community and how it works.  S&L's worked to foster local businesses, make sure families had stable employers and generally had a pretty low return on investment and pretty high overhead.  Yet they were extremely conservative on lending so that bad loans did not flow out into their communities as these institutions rested on local solvency.  Larger, national banks could under-cut and outperform these institutions, which they did, to the detriment of local economies but to the great benefit of inter-State banking regulation at the federal level which now had a say in local property transactions.  The S&L was something that grew up within States for local markets and were regulated as such and given protection from national banking and lending institutions that catered more towards commercial and industrial lending.  When that guarantee of a local market was broken by federal law, the structure that allowed the S&L structure to exist for low profit and conservative lending and borrowing practices went with it.

Yet the federal government is granted no power in this sector.

The Commerce Clause recognizes the States as separate entities and the ones that are the backers of the federal government. To regulate banking amongst the several States the federal government must actually work with the individual States to set up such an arrangement that would then be run by the States.  The role of the federal government in the Commerce Clause is to regularize commerce amongst the several States and to help States put organizations in place via assent between them as the federal government does via Treaties with foreign Nations and Indian tribes.

It does not get this power from the coinage and currency power, either:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

Coinage and regulation of value is linked to the value of foreign Coin and to a fixed set of standards to measure them by.  It is not creating a fiat currency but one that has measured value that can be affixed to coins which are traditionally of a metal.  Yes paper currency is a nice and handy way to move value around, and when it is backed by measured and standards of metal with value then it represents that value and can be exchanged for it.  Do note that it is only after the establishment of the Federal Reserve by the Wilson Administration that the sequestration of valuable metals by the FDR Administration then move the Nation from a coinage and paper currency with value to one with only representative value that you couldn't get.  With the Nixon Administration that final link is broken and the coin of the United States is now fixed only to relative value, not absolute value.  Yet the power of the Coin, the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause, taken together, do not allow the creation of the Federal Reserve, the outlawing of holding precious metals, nor the creation of an entity or entities to go into the local markets of States and 'regulate' them.

What that took was the Wickard v. Filburn case of 1942 in which a farmer grew beyond the quota of grain to feed cattle on his farm and otherwise utilize home grown foodstuffs.  That was seen by the SCOTUS as involving a 'national market' as the farmer didn't have to buy grain and that grain was sold on commodity exchanges as part of a national market.  By not participating in a market the farmer had a negative impact on the market by not taking part in commerce in it.  The idea of a 'national market' for such regulation had already been started with the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and yet each of those rested on the shaky ground of the federal government getting oversight of 'national markets'.  To do that both the Commerce Clause and General Welfare Clause were deployed, and yet each has specific ways of addressing the States that are at odds with each other.

The General Welfare Clause addresses the whole of the United States which is all the States and all the parts of the United States as a unitary whole.  That is the way 'the United States' is utilize throughout the rest of the Constitution and it has a specific and structural meaning to it: the whole of the United States as a Nation.

The Commerce Clause addresses the several States and recognizes their sovereignty by addressing them in that way.  This is how 'the several States' is used elsewhere in the Constitution and it has a specific meaning: the States as sovereign actors as part of the United States with independent authority within the Nation.

Neither of these Clauses actually allows for rationing of wheat or being able to tell farmers how much they can and cannot grow, and the FDR Administration was doing that work even before the onset of WWII.  None of the clauses actually allows for a Federal Reserve to act as the intermediary for US debt nor to regulate its currency as that is a direct function of the federal government and cannot be passed off to any other organization but one directly controlled by the federal government.  Only by intentionally expanding federal power by misconstruing the actual words can the federal power expand and it does so at the expense of the sovereignty of the States and the rights of the people.

The Wickard case allowed for the navigation of waterways to become yet another 'National market' in the sense that navigable waterways are a necessity to the States and that all States are effected by them.  Yet the Clean Air and Water Act moves far beyond that, and the navigable airways, and puts federal power in where it does not have such power.  Setting navigation standards for the air and waterways is one thing, seeing them as part of an larger 'environment' that requires protection is something else again and not handed to the federal government as the unitary whole power does not grant authority over the several States where actual navigation, work, mining, and industry takes place.  Again if the federal government felt there was a need for such work the way to get that organized is not in the federal government, which doesn't have the sovereign power over these things, but to get the States to work out a system to yield cleaner air and water as implemented by each State as part of that framework.

That is how it is addressed for the vital functions of elections, so one would think that minor process procedures which are also addressed in the exact, same way should be handled that way as well.

Moving on to the 'entitlements': you aren't entitled to them because Congress isn't given the power to make them.

That is the actual rendering of Social Security via the SCOTUS as I went over previously, as two cases establish that you do not have an 'account' with the federal government.  You have, from the Helvering v. Davis decision in 1937, a tax imposed by Congress and such funds are not earmarked in any way for anything, but put into the general funds.  Congress does fun things with bonds and funding the government to give appearances that there was a 'lock box' but even by the Johnson Administration getting ability to openly raid SSA it was pretty well known that SSA tax funds weren't, actually, directed at SSA.  Johnson ended the charade, not change what was actually going on.  On the outward side you have whatever Congress wishes to pay out, you have no 'account' to draw upon, no actual property in the US government.  That was ruled on in the Flemming v. Nestor case in 1960.

Congress did the same with Medicare and got the States on the hook for some fund matching with Medicaid.  Neither are an 'entitlement', both are paid out of current revenue and there is no 'account' set up for you with any value in it.  Any value you perceive is in political wishing, the actual value is the cost of postage, paper and ink to get that paper to you to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling that the federal government can actually 'help'.  Currently these three entitlements are in the red, and for SSA it is so far in the red that it is cashing out future securities and adding to the current debt by doing so.  They had to be paid sometime and that sometime started a couple of years ago.  In the realm of private businesses this condition is known as 'bankrupt' and 'insolvent', and for SSA it is liquidating solvent assets to gain liquidity as a temporary holding measure.

Yet in no place in the US Constitution is giving 'entitlements' actually allowed to the federal government via its enumerated powers.  Again the General Welfare Clause addresses the United States as a unitary whole and that is the clause most often addressed for handing out these goodies.  If the federal government wanted to address the poor and needy, the sick and infirm, the method is to work with the several States to create ways so that they can manage such problems if they want to and do so in a regularized way that is suited to each State.  And if the States didn't want to form up such a thing, then it wouldn't be formed.  If a few wanted to do it and could find a way to do so that was agreeable to them and didn't infringe on the commerce of other States, then they would be welcome to do so.

So much current federal power rests upon the Wickard case that it isn't funny any more.  The absolute expenditure of money to fund 'good things', which means taking money from taxpayers to assuage the consciences of those who do not like finding themselves as the center of providing charity which is part and parcel of our responsibilities for our positivee and negative liberties, starts a corrosive effect on the general population in morals and ethics.  When our governmental institutions, which are only organs of society, take power from society itself in the positive realm of building ties and private institutions to care for the sick and needy, society as a whole (not in its parts) is lessened.  Each individual has liberty robbed from them in both the taking of such 'entitlements' because you have the obligation to care for yourself and sustain yourself with your fellow man removed from you as an individual, and from those who are on the giving end, which are the taxpayers, as the government is the least efficient, most authoritarian way to provide any service ever devised by man.  That sort of system is wonderful for protecting borders, sustaining a military and protecting commerce from pirates, but is less well suited, indeed generally ill-suited, to doing such things as providing health care or even 'managing' energy on a National scale.

A purposeful intent that can be read from the structure of the US Constitution is that the people are to be left to their own resources outside of the few and necessary functions of government so as to provide for themselves, each other and create a diverse and robust system amongst themselves.  The people are capable, government is seen as a negative weight on individuals, society and the Nation which makes it only a necessary evil that can serve a few useful functions.  To get a strong and diverse energy sector or health care sector, say, requires no government intervention at all at the federal level not just because it isn't granted power to do so, but because it is a centralized system that is then a single point of failure.  When an individual fails in their duties to their fellow man, that is a minor happening and the individual can right his or her ways to do better.  When government fails in carrying out its powers it puts the wealth of the Nation, the rights of the citizenry and, indeed, the very existence of the Nation at risk.  This doesn't just go to not enforcing our borders and seeing international scofflaws go unaccountable, but goes to the root of deficit spending which now threatens to impoverish ourselves, our posterity and snuff out the light of liberty on Earth, possibly forever.

When the Framers put the Constitution together they were mindful of past successful Nations and their fate in history: they turned into Empires, became decadent and then debauched (in turn) and then either imploded or were invaded to lose the cultural identity that had been present before the Empire existed.  Not so bad for the 'Great Man Empires' of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great as their lives demarcated the extent of the cultural effect they had and while you can still hear about Alexander's exploits sung about in Afghanistani villages today, they are not speaking Greek when they do so.  Rome, on the other hand, lost its republican structure years if not decades before Julius Caesar and it was only at the end of his life that Octavian realized that his debauched life had proven to be the final corruption to kill republican spirit in the population once and for all.  Clearly large scale republics have problems, and ours is one of them.  Yet ours rests on a foundation of not just republicanism but in the understanding that our self-evident and unalienable rights to act upon this Earth are held by each of us.  It is this understanding that is hard to corrupt and snuff out that offers the promise of renewal, rebirth and a final conquering of authoritarian and totalitarian ideas of government as being useful or even good ways to govern amongst men.

Yet we have a class of politicians and elites in the world who still think they know how to run your life better than you do.

They wish to transmute the gold of our understanding into lead, and then into iron chains with chaos, blood and ruin.

You cannot depend on government to stop this for you, that lesson is drawn by seeing how far restricted government can turn evil in a mere three generations.  No matter what the intent of those who started this process of spinning the anti-alchemical dream into being, that process is now running its course and now comes back to you.  Only you can be a positive actor in creating society, and government only be a useful function by removing those that would be toxic to such society from society and when government fails at that prime task the task of renewal begins not at the top, but the bottom.

Always remember the credo of The Prisoner, played by Patrick McGoohan:

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.  I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN."

When the time comes will you be numbered amongst the free or merely numbered?

Are you willing to spin gold, with all the difficulties of that, or accept lead attached to your limbs?

Can you tell the difference between who is spinning gold and who is turning gold into lead?

Would you dare to spin gold when lead is all around you?

Because it all comes down to you.