Why an investigation is necessary

I'm cribbing from some of my online commentary...

Just as investigating the cover-up of Watergate revealed what was being covered-up, so too it will be here.

And the best part is getting the people from the CIA Annex and asking them if they had to sign an NDA.

Really, the Administration forcing people to do that shows that there is something to cover-up. And that would be signed under duress, and thus null and void.

The President has responsibility for those that serve under him, especially a hand-picked Ambassador sent to a place undergoing a civil war with terrorist attacks on-going. That is HIS representative there, HIS Ambassador sent there by HIM to do this job.

Where were the assets to extract him and his team in case things went south? Where were the naval and air assets necessary to do that in a place that is undergoing such turmoil? Who sends an Ambassador and critical national security personnel to such a place WITHOUT AN EXTRACTION PLAN?

Why was Stevens and, indeed, all the personnel put in such a vulnerable situation with no way out?

Why?

That isn’t a political question. It is a question that involves the Head of State, Head of Government and CinC: that is his responsibility to make sure that those people are protected with all means necessary and NOT having a way to get them out is dereliction of duty of the highest order because it was done ON HIS ORDERS.

That is before you even get to the cover-up. Investigating the cover-up will shed light on these questions because they are integral to the cover-up, itself.

The power of the Legislative Branch is to check the power of the Executive via ensuring that the Executive is executing the laws properly and carrying out the duties of President.  Watergate was a cover-up for a burglary for political gain, and this investigation into Benghazi will have that as a side-show, as well as the lack of care shown to those under the President's direct guidance and protection was done in an attempt to win an election.  That is political in nature.  The acts of neglect are matters of State directly attributed to the Presidential duties and no President is beyond such review.  I cannot think of a case similar to this one in which a personally appointed Ambassador for a specific mission in such a dangerous area was left without adequate protection and ready forces to get him out if things went to pot.  That is because Presidents take their job seriously and don't do such things unless it is absolutely and positively vital to the US and he is ready to explain that vital interest if things go wrong.

To date we have not gotten that, which is, in itself, dereliction of duty as Head of State.  Blaming the exercise of First Amendment speech as the focal cause for the attack is a gross attack on the rights of American citizens which is beyond the pale for any politician of any party to perform, not to speak of the President doing so and having cabinet members back him up on that.  There was zero justification for that, but that, as awful as it is, is just part of the cover-up and meant to be inflammatory and distracting from the actual events they are meant to hide.

Anyone trying to paint this as merely politics is missing the actual job of the President that was not done on multiple counts.

Even President Carter tried to rescue the Embassy personnel in Iran.

President Obama couldn't even manage THAT.

Or ordering the military to sanitize the site where this took place so that the INTEL carried by the Ambassador on operations in-country and in-theater would not fall into the hands of our enemies.  That was never done and that is the job of the President as well.

Why wasn't any of this done?

What is being covered up is woven into the fabric of the lies told after it.  And the best place to start with any after-action investigation is with the survivors.

Morals and Ethics, Health Care and Government

The disaster that is Obamacare continues to point to the ever widening problems of having a government attempt to impose its own idealistic ideas of what the process is of providing health care, which is not the same as 'health insurance', runs into obstacles where simple ideology driven bureaucratic rules and regulations run up against the common man and his enterprises.  Of the most concerning is the attempt to impose regulations mandating coverage of abortion and 'birth control' upon diverse groups who have religious teachings that make those immoral practices.  They are not just immoral for oneself but, to hold true to their religious teachings, it is immoral to support these services in any real way.  Thus the first of many suits, and truly it should be a class action suit, is one by Hobby Lobby that refuses to obey the power of government over religious principles in their common enterprise Hobby Lobby.  I'll use a Hot Air article as it is where I left some commentary and I will give that to you in an unvarnished way:

Religion is the observation of holding oneself to account to set of beliefs that have real world practice attached to them. Corporeal individuals may not have that transgressed by mere human law as the observance and practice is to a higher moral authority than any government can ever hope to be. The corporate entity is a voluntary association of individuals under a set of agreements and, as such, may have religion as their basis in practice and observation which includes a moral code and doctrine behind it.

No one is forcing employees to work at a such a concern that has such requirements and performs such practices. Even if you disagree with them and sign up to the corporation, you are not allowed to enforce your belief system upon the others in the voluntary cooperation out of respect for their beliefs. If you want to be employed by a place that offers you services that don’t have such restrictions then go find them, you are not forced to work at a concern that does not share your practices nor your beliefs.

I have my own problem with corporate entities, but they tend to dwell in the realm of duration and lack of finality of them when they allow, abet and encourage criminal activities amongst its members to the benefit of the corporate entity. Three Strikes and you’re out would be a start to ending such abuse, but that is a far different thing than the internal practices that are not criminal in nature and adhere to a known set of moral standards that the company upholds for those voluntarily associating with it.

Where does the government get off telling a corporate or corporeal entity that they must support practices that are considered immoral by their belief system? Those who abjure such practices are not in any way, shape or form utilizing them and if others wish to do so then let them PAY FOR IT based on some other agreements but do not force those who hold a higher standard to paying for something which they consider to be immoral in the extreme.

This doesn’t stop at the corporate level and paying for abortion and contraceptive access is that camel’s nose under the tent sort of deal. What if some fine grandee of a bureaucrat gets through required euthanasia of the old, the sick or the mentally ill? Not just paying for ‘access’ to it, which in and of itself has extreme moral problems attached to it due to the way that bureaucrats are stretching ‘voluntary’ to become involuntary… if government becomes the arbiter of morality, then we have truly lost our way as it is only fit to punish things that are immoral that physically effect individuals and STOP THEM and PUNISH those who commit such acts. When you force individuals to support things they consider immoral, then where can it draw the line on ANY OTHER act? I have seen governments of men, not of law, and I want nothing, whatsoever, to do with them. And that is coming into sharp focus today more so than at any other time in our history.

ajacksonian on November 29, 2013 at 10:18 AM

All of Obamacare is about substituting the good sense of individuals in procuring methods of health care with that of government regulation, bureaucracy and punishment.  In the past century we have been witness to medical experimentation upon blacks without fully informing them of what they were signing up for, forced sterilization of the mentally ill at government institutions, and we currently have States that have regulations for euthanasia.  These are not questions of speculation but ones of fact done under government auspices, Federal and State, and at the behest of political doctrines and adherents who pushed for such things as eugenics, population control via abortion and sterilization, and having medical personnel 'assist' in suicide.  These are, one and all, moral wrongs in so many religions held by so many believers that it is not funny.  Yet that these things happened is a fact of our history in this Nation and demonstrates the evils of government willing to take expedient means towards ideological ends to the detriment of its citizens.

The Hobby Lobby case is not just about this one corporation, a collection of private citizens chartering a company to do certain legal activities in a voluntarily cooperative manner run by owners who have a belief system that requires their moral adherence to laws that come from a source other than Nature or mere civil government.  To have freedom of expression is not just in expressing oneself verbally but through activities and actions that follow in a given line of conscience that comes from no source under government or Nature's control.  Forming a company to serve the public in certain venues by believers and then running it in accordance with their belief system is freedom of expression and religion, both.

When government seeks to impose its power over the individual and begin to dictate practices that one holds as immoral, then ethics require that those mere civil laws not be followed so as to be true to eternal moral laws handed down from the highest power of God.  It matters not if God is the singular, the plural or a vague understanding of the morality behind the universe and life itself, that one believes in it and is true to it in their daily lives which hinders none, harms none and is widely understood puts this case into a full Amendment I application: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of free association amongst one's fellow citizens.

Civil Government is without wisdom and has problems even finding out what it did last week or last year, not to speak of what it has done decades ago.  It is not a thinking being but a freely made construct amongst the people of a Nation or State to do common activities for the defense and protection of all and, in the case of the US, to stay away from all matters of morals and ethics in following moral practices.  Government itself is a Punisher and necessary evil and not granted power to do good, but to punish the wicked and those who would disrupt society.  The good of society is from its citizens figuring out how to lead good, moral and ethical lives within mortal boundaries of income, savings, sustaining life, creating families, and creating communities in which we all seek to help each other and prosper in that doing. 

It is not immoral to seek to make a profit to sustain a company after paying one's workforce and providing them with agreed upon benefits.  It is not the icon of payment, not the coin or bill or credit exchange pieces, that are evil but only in the pursuit of same without thought to ensuring that it is gained via properly provisioned service or goods under payment contract.  In pursuit of money as its own end, there is no real good, but in pursuit of wealth which is accumulated by providing the best value at the lowest cost to one's fellow man and making a profit to expand such provisioning is true wealth beyond any dollar or penny hoarded.

Providing goods and services by individuals who hold a strict moral code and ethically abide by it is no sin and is not illegal.

Forcing such individuals to support immoral practices with forced payment into a system which requires such support: that is pure evil as it substitutes the power of government for the teachings of God.

And only death, destruction and chaos ever come from that.

Continuity or something else?

I watched a program last night on Discovery's Military Channel that  focused on the Continuity of Operations Plan or Continuity of Government Plan, which is something I came to know about working on the civilian side of an agency in DoD.  It is pretty serious stuff this trying to safeguard information and stand up some operations if the main sites of the agency get taken out.  This extends across the entire US federal government and all agencies have some variation of the COOP (as I came to know it).  It was an interesting program as it gave a couple of scenarios that would cause the COOP to be put into action and it pointed out that on 9/11 it actually was utilized and actually failed to keep the President informed during a crisis or re-establish communications between secure sites.  If this had been a more serious attack on the US, the COOP would have failed the federal government.

Although there are contingency plans in place for continuing government ever since this became a question and actually caused the creation of Amendment XXV which puts in an order of succession for the job of President in case the person occupying that job is incapacitated or dies.  That was ratified into being in 1967 during the Cold War when the possibility of having the entire top of government vaporized at one stroke was something to be considered.

Do we really need more than that?

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 USC 19) is the Public Law created by Congress to add depth to the existing schema of President and Vice-President set out in the US Constitution and in Amendments XII and XX to clear up issues on elections and Amendment XXV put in place in 1967.  This ability by Congress to do such work is generated through Art. II,  Sec. 1, Clause 6 which provides for the power of Congress to establish such a succession and amended by Amendment XXV Section 3.  The top four people are the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and then President pro tempore of the Senate.  This act has been amended to then start in on the Cabinet with the Secretary of State, Treasury, Defense, Attorney General, Interior, Agriculture,  Commerce, Labor, HHS,  HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veteran's Affairs and then DHS.  Would you consider a government headed up by, say, the Secretary of HUD to be legitimate?  How about Education?  Interior? 

I have problems with the Secretary of State but it is at least a major 'Hat' of the Presidential job requirements – foreign policy.  Actual those hats are Head of State, Head of Government, Commander in Chief of the Armies and the Navies, and Chief Pardoner, and if you went with just the 'Hats' then you would get State, Treasury, Defense and AG which is just about where it should end, as well.  Why?  Any government that has suffered the loss of the President, VP, Speaker and President pro tempore has failed in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine and, really, the actual legitimacy of the government falling into appointed and approved position holders is something that even in the Cold War was questionable.  You might get a 'continuity' of government, yes.  The legitimacy of that government, led by unelected officials is lost because this is a Nation that upholds a representative say in selecting our government.

Then there is the part that the program didn't get into: the States.  Each State has its own form of COOP in place and the actual legitimacy of the US federal government comes from the signatories to the US Constitution: the States.  The States had to get approval from their citizens to sign on to the Constitution, and it is those functional governments that are the actual ones who instituted the federal government to act as an arbiter amongst them.  If that arbiter and protector of all of the States cannot protect all of the States and actually has harm fall on to any State due to negligence, incapacity or inability to adequately supply protective measures to all of the States, then the federal government has failed in its main duty: protection of the States.  Each and every State gets a way out of this via the US Constitution and its something to consider at this point when we look at failure of the federal government to protect the States.  This is covered in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3:

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.

The Framers of the Constitution did not create a 'suicide pact' but put in this one vital clause which gives the State back its full Sovereign powers.  The ability to do these things, are indicative not of a State but of a Nation as they are the full foreign policy and military powers necessary for the backing of a Nation.  If the federal government cannot protect a number of States from, say, an EMP attack or, via neglect, allows a State or group of States to be invaded, then that State finds itself with its full powers returned to it.  All of the facets of what it takes to run and independent Nation re-appear for events that are so devastating to a State that any delay in response will mean disaster or that disaster has befallen a State and the federal government has proven and demonstrated its incompetence to the point where it can no longer be considered as the trusted arbiter of the powers granted to it.

With the three days to the return of barbarism seen after Super Storm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the general decay of infrastructure, the States and federal government must rely on having a population ready to respond to disasters.  A strong and prepared civil population is the greatest strength to the continuity of government, operations and the legitimacy of government.  Fly the elected and appointed officials around as much as you want, but it is the States that hold the cards in a disaster and the trump card is the return of the powers they granted to the federal government which is so concerned about keeping itself going that it has neglected its duties to protecting the States as entities.

Even the relatively lack-luster scenario of an eastern EMP attack shows that the amount of time it takes to get the COOP running is in the days to weeks category.  Talking about a President trying to impose martial law onto States that he or she has neglected, is no longer an act to restore civil order but an Act of War on those States.  A Governor is put into the foreign policy arena and while accepting help from such a COOP government may call for that, it is no longer in the capacity of a Governor of a State but a Head of State: that military arrangement is a treaty and should be treated as such.  At that point in time the Governor may already have had to call upon a civilian militia, utilize police forces and declare martial law, yes, but those are all internal and normal parts of a sovereign Nation to re-organize after a disaster. 

The reason and rationale for letting States retain this responsibility and the power to address it, is so that the federal government is not overburdened with a function it cannot fulfill in whole, in part or at all.  After no regular natural disaster has the US federal government proven to be prompt, efficient, or even capable of dealing with a catastrophe of wide ranging scope.  With FEMA the federal government insists it has a role.  With FEMA it is widening the scope of possibility for its own failure.  FEMA isn't capable of addressing disasters and may only serve as the nucleus for creating a disaster of federal legitimacy.  While it was created with good intentions during the Cold War, no one addressed the fact that the federal government doesn't have the power or capacity to actually deal with disasters, be they the nuclear one of that era or the wide-ranging problems of natural disasters and under-maintained infrastructure of the modern era along with man-made and natural disasters that can cause infrastructure to fail catastrophically.  That EMP burst has all sorts of protection for the military, President, various cabinet level officials, Congress, SCOTUS... you are left SOL and then are expected to go savage and have to be suppressed under martial law.

See how that works?

That is not a system to enhance liberty and freedom, but one created to maintain power over you, not look to you as the source of power and legitimacy.  The most chilling thing I heard was the director of FEMA saying it had the job of 'protecting our way of life'.  I'm sorry, but that is the job of the citizenry and the citizenry is the creator of a way of life, and when its government fails it then continuing on in the old way of life that led to disaster is a non-starter.  If the old way of life produces disaster, then any government seeking to sustain it is not legitimate and not dealing with realities and not seeking the assent of the people as the legitimizer of that power.  Stepping in after a wide-spread failure of government leading to disaster has one result: Sovereign States.  The legitimacy of government shifts to the more local government and if the State government fails then we are in Hamilton's Federalist No. 26:

Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger? If such presumptions can fairly be made, there ought at once to be an end of all delegated authority. The people should resolve to recall all the powers they have heretofore parted with out of their own hands, and to divide themselves into as many States as there are counties in order that they may be able to manage their own concerns in person.

You don't have to be a conspirator to create the conditions of an over-extended military or a government that seeks to impose its will into every facet of daily life.  In this case it is easy to substitute unbridled government in the place of the military and come up with the same formula and result and you don't even need a conspiracy to do it.  Indeed what you need is the belief that laws are forever, that government must continually grow and never recede, and that power devolves downward and is not granted upward.  All of this done out in the open, often with great fan-fare, claiming that government can take care of part of your retirement, or help you in finding that first house to buy, or watch over markets that you should be keeping an eagle's eye upon.   This claim can fairly be made and even demonstrated in our modern times.  Alexander Hamilton proposes that in the event of the disaster of government seeking to impose its will upon the people, that the power to deal with that is not at the State level, but at the county level, the local level.  The US Constitution holds the sweetened condensed version of this in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3, but here Alexander Hamilton points out that if the government failure is wide enough, deep enough and thorough enough, that the only answer is to end the delegation of authority upward and reclaim it at the most local of level possible.

Still, if something like the scenario of an EMP destroying the electronic infrastructure of the eastern US did happen... you have a large number of States involved, at least 23-24 and possibly up to as many as 26-28.  Out of 50.  The federal government, by not helping the States and citizenry to prepare, by not informing the citizenry of what necessary preparations would be and what the likelihood of such an attack would be, would be delinquent in its responsibilities to the States and the citizens.  By not having effective counter-measures, interceptors (and the scenario really does posit something an AEGIS vessel should be able to handle) nor even being able to identify the actor(s) involved, has failed in other, subsidiary duties and directly granted powers to it.

How much has the US government told you about EMP attacks?  How has it helped you to prepare for them? I can name a list of things that can and most likely will happen to North America that the US federal government can't handle and they are just natural disasters.  Yet FEMA isn't prepared for any of them.  It can't handle a good sized large hurricane, yet that is its supposed duty, at which it fails even with small events like tornadoes ruining small towns.  And yet its job is to 'protect our way of life' and that way of life is currently in a dark, dismal failure mode because it refuses to recognize that you are the greatest mover and protector of your own life and that self-government is the most secure and best of all governments as it requires self-restraint.  It has failed on that score and continues to fail on that, continuously.

It isn't the people who are endangering the legitimacy of government at this point, it is the government, itself.  A COOP plan to continue a failure is failure and the promotion of failure as a good thing.  It isn't.  It will kill you if you don't prepare for it.  And failure on such absolute terms delegitimizes the concept: if it was restricted to just protecting the physical US territory then, yes, the President needs to be safeguarded.  The rest?  Elected officials and then appointed officials with an unelected bureaucracy.  The COOP plan for that sort of thing is damned simple: help the States as they request it, ensure that free elections can be held and then find out what the NEW way of life is from people who have gone on a 'back to basics' course across a wide geographic area.  If you can't do that, then you are not backing legitimacy of citizenship and the citizenry to guide their own affairs but seeking to impose a 'way of life' on them that bears little or no relationship to the actual real world circumstances.  Those people in such a disaster-ridden State not only deserve to be free and independent, they have earned it via the lackluster federal system that hasn't supported them and treated them as subjects or slaves and failed in essential duties granted to it.  If we ever got a CONUS EMP or a global CME, then the US just might not be a single Nation any longer but something much closer to a league of confederacies of Free States.

You can have a republic if you can keep it.

Doing that requires paring down the federal government and picking up the slack on your end.  That is non-negotiable to retaining freedom and liberty as well.  Want a United States to be preserved?  Then prepare for disaster and hold government accountable to its misdeeds as no one can do this for you.

End Game Against Freedom

Note this is a cross-post.  I am looking to utilize some of this material for another post, but that is a look at what it takes to retain freedom (or gain it) when governments no longer respect freedom and liberty of the individual.  The post now follows.

What is the End Game of the global elites against freedom and liberty?  We can see its path by addicting populations to 'social' provisions such as 'retirement' and 'health care', which are different things than living a good life or providing good doctors and medicine.  This is the Redistributive State which seeks to undermine freedom by giving people material goods in return for those people relinquishing ever more control of their lives to the State.

This can be done by means of an Elite funding or promulgating a lower societal uprising so as to force society to be under enough pressure to call for a crackdown on those putting them at risk.  It is a mug's game, a violent game of 3 Card Monte in which those seeking to lead a normal life are The Mark.  When you agree to the 'good' that such government provided social programs can do at the cost of taking money from those who have rightfully earned it via their liberty, you agree to limit the liberty of all: of the rich to be rich, of the poor to realize that they are the source of their own problems, and of the middle class to purchase the passivity of the poor with the wealth of the rich and hoping for a few scraps for themselves.  When you wash, rinse and repeat this sort of thing you are in the  process of breaking the will of individuals to have a free society, to stand up for freedom and ridiculing them because they actually support the ability of people to get rich and of the poor to also have that same opportunity.  What is offered is the class system, at first, which turns into a self-fulfilling Caste System with those at the upper levels dictating to the rest of society how it shall act in its own terms.

The modern West is in one or more cycles of this, but it is interesting to look at one society where this has reached an end-game: there are no longer any illusions of providing social goods because they aren't necessary as the will of those to have a civil society have been broken.  In China there is so much autocratic control and police suppression that it is hard to get information out, but in another place there is just enough of a shame culture left and the attempts to have a veneer of civilization remaining that we can get a look at what this looks like.

I've reported on the Red Mafia before a number of times, and this time I'm coming at it not from the 'find all low level sources to piece together a framework' end, but at the other end of what happens when a very few who actually want to do their jobs in government AS jobs in government actually give the high level framework in stark detail.  I found this through Amazon Pime's service in  film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  I had looked at part of the aftermath of this assassination of Litvinenko, but the lead-up to it and the high levels of corruption and societal abuse it points at is telling.  It is a film I urge everyone to see since, if you want to see where a quasi-western State ends when its elites assume autocratic control, there is no better overview of just how this can come to be.

The events the film reviews are centered on the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990's where the productive capacity of the old Soviet industries came under the sway of two general classes of individuals: old Soviet elites and organized crime.  In some cases there is no differentiating between the two because they have a connecting link in the secret service, the FSB which used to be the KGB, and actually dates back to the Czar's Cheka.  At one point they are actually referred to in their modern FSB incarnation under that term: their name changes but their methodology of violence in service to State remains. 

From Litvinenko we hear about this directly:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

Normally a 'Police State' is something created by a dictator or tyrant as a means to control the population by deploying the police as parts of the government with the sole aim to keep the people controlled by police power.  In the case of Russia this has been flipped around where it is the Secret Police that now put forward their own minions into politics to give a veneer of choice but, in actuality, by their brutal and repressive methods that they keep secret but are whispered about, there is no choice at all.  Really if something is undertaken to sway the public via terrorist means promulgated by the Secret Police who, exactly, is going to investigate them?  Anyone seeking to do so can be intimidated via the system that is in place of informers, records, laws promulgated to help keep the police in power, and then enforced by a corrupt legal system upon those who try to bring the actual truth forward.

With tin-pot tyrants if you have a revolution to get rid of the tyrant, can you be sure that it wasn't the secret police that actually instigated the revolt to put themselves into power?  And when a society shucks off its old totalitarian State apparatus, what happens if it actually keeps the secret police around?  Unfortunately this last question is answered in Russia.

One of the men a special unit of the FSB was to frame a man or take him out of ciruclation , and that manwas Lt. Colonel Trepashkin who was starting to piece together just what was going on inside Russia.  He recounts his story:

My first conflict in the '90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.  I rounded up a gang that laundered money, murdered people, consisted of war lords.  At some point, I had finally managed to get them, but then the problems really started.  There was that classic chain of protection that gangsters always have whether in the FSB, the military intelligence, or in the police.  I was told to drop the case.  I said "Why, these are criminals, we have to indict them.  I won't drop it!"

The agent inside the FSB who was told to frame him so that Trepashkin would be stopped and was recorded on tape in case anything happened to any of the men from the special group in the FSB:

Trepashkin knew something, and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.  That was my first assignment in the new department that I found really suspicious.  We ended up avoiding it and never completed it.  At the concluding session of 1997 – [..] My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."

There is one relevant question that can be asked of Russian society, however, before going on to how the FSB got into power: were the Russian people ready for freedom from an autocratic, indeed, authoritarian State?  For that there is an answer from Boris Berezovsky:

Berezovsky -  So we can put forward – So a certain hypothesis can be put forward.  The better the opportunities a political system offers its members, the citizens, the more efficient the system is.  But the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations on free will.  A transition from a totalitarian system to a liberal one can only take place when enough of its citizens learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.

Nekrasov – Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.

B – Exactly!

N -  Inefficient systems force external limitations.

[..]

B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom.

N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?

B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.

One can see where Boris Berezovsky is a very dangerous man to the FSB and those that they support.  The betrayal of freedom in Russia post – USSR started at those places that were the worst off condition-wise.  This exploitation would not only put the criminal oligarchs in power, but they would do so with the help of the FSB and the new Duma which had barely gotten time to get itself together.   The film recounts a cover-up of this period in which Vladimir Putin was involved with a company he had going in Germany which was in contact with the Colombian Cartels and served as a money laundering outfit.  Putin was, at that point, head of the FSB while sitting on the board of that company.  This is recounted by Jürgen Roth, a German writer who has been tracking the Red Mafia's work:

Jurgen Roth - When the premesis of the SPAG here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunchtime – Well, the offices were searched all day.  But around lunchtime, the Chancellor's office was informed.  That same day, the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search, which is strange.  Even before the search took place, the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.  What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.  The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help. 

It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.  In this report the BND, the federal intelligence service, there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money for Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.  And so the Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.  Soon after that, it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place, that the Tambovskaya connection existed and that Putin might be involved. 

When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors for half a year in 1993.  After that he was on the advisory board until 2000.  During that time he was in St. Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.  So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was the director of the FSB. 

Now I am familiar with the workings of the FSB.  If someone somewhere so much as farted, he got a written report about it.  And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this, about what was going on with SPAG's money and that the people behind it were criminals, classic mafiosi.  He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,  which is undisputed.

N- That was ascertained?

R – It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.  You can also track his longtime intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden. I've got a list of all the intelligence officers from the GDR era, and Putin is on it.  Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community involved in dirty business.

N – The East German?

R – The GDR intelligence service.  Stasi.

N- Corruption and things?

R – Not only corruption.  Corruption – That's a matter of course.  No one even discusses that anymore.  It's more to do with spying and destruction.  How do I destroy a political opponent?

This is not the first instance that Putin was involved with underhanded dealing for personal gain via criminal means.  This starts with a lead that Litvinenko gives:

Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty, publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president.  Not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds in the early '90s in St. Petersburg.

To properly understand what Putin was doing in Leningrad it is important to hark back to what else was going on in the Non-Ferrous Metals outfits at the time, and here I wall draw on my prior piece A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, which goes over the process of 'tolling'.  With the Russian economy crippled by State facilities being unable to make any payroll at all, the workers were down to barter of goods their facilities produced in exchange for other goods from other workers in other facilities.  This was causing problems as stuff like food wasn't made locally and had to be brought into many regions and without a cash  based system to work with, there was no way to barter ovens, say, for eggs, cheese and milk.  Those who stepped in to put money into these facilities were generally of two major classes: rich elites of the former Soviet State, and organized crime.  Some facilities did try entrepreneurial capitalism, yes, but for large metal works, aluminum plants, steel foundries, titanium smelters... heavy industry in other words... you needed cash.  Lots of cash.  And these 'investors' wanted a 'sweet deal' from the new government and they insisted on 'tolling'.

This form of 'tolling' is unlike having to pay a certain charge on a toll-based road, however, as that is a government tax on use of that road by those who travel on it.  Here it is something else entirely: the agreement by the government not to put a tariff on goods that the producers get in exchange for their output.  What this put in place was a system whereby the workers actually got paid a pittance, almost all of what was produced went outside the country, what came back after sales had no tariff on them and were then sold at above market prices locally.  If you run this sort of system then those running the business get to keep their overseas money, put a small amount in goods to come back, garner a huge windfall of increased prices for those goods versus what a competitive market would garner and then pocket those profits, as well.  Because State power is used to enforce who gets market share and is able to exclude exterior competition and their better managed systems, what you get is a near monopoly on certain regions and markets by what is effectively monopolies run by organized crime.  Isn't it great when you get to write the bills to be passed like this?

From this the section of the film in which Leningrad (St. Petersburg) comes into clear focus because the situation was one in which Putin was part of a transactional scheme to exchange raw materials for food, or metals for food in 1991-92.  Any FSB agent who understands this sort of region and its criminal element is set to make out like a bandit which is, exactly, what Putin did and was written up and dismissed from the program by local officials about the external affairs office and has since been made to disappear as a document and is very difficult to find copies of it anywhere, even on the Internet.  The value of the amount embezzled was $11.5 million which meant that the citizens of St. Petersburg would go hungry and food would be rationed there for the first time since WWII.  That amount is a low-end figure as it doesn't go into specific foodstuff costs which were left out from the contracts.  From the report:

There are reasons to suggest that partners did not intend to import foodstuffs to St. Petersburg.

[..]

The recommendations to refer the case to the city prosecutor's office and to remove Mr. Putin from his position.

In 2000 another investigation clarified that because of what happened St. Petersburg did not receive foodstuffs in excess of $92 million, but the total cost left unjustified to the committee amounts to $850 million.  All from an organization that was being run by Mr. Putin.

And how did Vladimir Putin get into power?

If you are the head of a secret police organization using illegal means to enforce power, to work with organized crime, and to partake of such crimes as well, and you have the power and means to undercut the judiciary and subvert military officers, then you are left with very little to resist you.  With that said there is one pretext for a State assuming additional powers and that is war.  In this case the war in Chechnya and, most critically, the second phase of it that started with the bombing of a bridge and then an apartment complex in Moscow.

Those bombings had one strange artifact to them: in the case of the bridge bombing there was an FSB agent found dead at the site of it and in the apartment complex bombing an FSB agent was indicted for having supplied the necessary explosives.  Or should it be said that these were Special Agents, for they were.  The denial of the FSB is, ostensibly, 'we couldn't have done it'.  Even though agents of the FSB are implicated.  Indeed this brings into question why a tank column was stopped outside of Grozny for days and then bombed just before the other attacks.  Tank columns do not stop by roadsides for days at a time as that is wasteful in men and resources who can be better used for doing other things, like not needing field maintenance.  If you are trying to put together a meme of advancing terrorist attacks, would there be a better way to do it than just as it was done?  Because terrorists, you see, don't work on 'front lines' and don't need to 'advance' via announcing themselves with periodic attacks along a given axis of movement: they are not military units.

To get more State power over media, over the economy, over people, is there any means better than a war?

If the secret police of a State using illegal means put forward a program to require the current regime to delegitimize itself, would there be any better way than to start what is, essentially, a civil war and then assert 'special powers' in 'rooting out terrorists' by that self-same secret police?  And then, in the midst of awful, bloody fighting, wouldn't it be nice to have political backing, even if from extreme nationalists, for such activity?  Because that also came with the Chechen war and is one of the most startling visual artifacts of the documentary: skinheads chanting for Putin while waving a flag with a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red field.  The swastika replaced by the hammer and sickle.  And chants for killing them all, the Chechens and, although none had any involvement in this, the Jews.

With the election of Vladimir Putin also came the election of a high number of FSB agents and officials also 'winning' elections so that every organ of the State was soon in control of the government.  Some may remember the terrorist attack on the theater in Russia where patrons were held captive by 'terrorist' gunmen.  One of those was an FSB agent who was put into a high position by Putin some months after the 'terrorist attack'.

If China points to international socialism becoming a formulation of national socialism, which is to say fascism, then when genocidal war is mixed into that, as is the case in Russia, you get a form of fascism known as Nazism. Of course it will be denied up and down the line, yet the supporters of State power continue to show up with proper symbology be it that twisty, interlocking geometric design of the New Dawn party in Greece, or the swastika replaced hammer and sickle flag in Russia.  This, most virulent form of socialism at the nationalist scale, is a horror for mankind... although not a lesser horror than international socialist kind as both look to kill to get to and remain in power.  Often with tens of millions dead in that quest.

The true horror is the attitude taken by prosecutors and governments outside of Russia when companies started by FSB agents or organized crime in Russia, and it is hard to say which is worse at this point, are then suspected of criminal acts.  Money laundering, drug running, and, of course, murder using exotic means like a highly rare, short lived, radioactive metal like Polonium.  Litvinenko thought he was safe in Great Britain, but safety is only an illusion unless the State will actually do its job to keep you safe from exterior attack... not turn a blind eye towards it or refuse to ask hard questions or even seek to shut down inquests.  Yet, in the West, we see that in Great Britain and Germany, and if that sort of thing is going in those States, one with the longest history of people seeking democratic freedom and the other the one place that should have learned its lessons about the horrors of NOT investigating such things, then what does that say about the rest of Europe and the West as a whole?

In the US we have a man like Eric Holder who, it must be remembered, was involved in some very sorry episodes in the Clinton Administration, proving to be duplicitous in the Elian Gonzales affair, who also put forward a pardon for Marc Rich.  The same Marc Rich who would show up in post-Soviet Russia to bring 'tolling' as a concept with him to teach to the oligarchs.  It is certain Vladimir Putin knew of Marc Rich – as the head of the FSB that would not escape his notice.  And as Marc Rich had investments in operations going across Russia, east to west, it is very likely that Vladimir Putin had more than a nodding acquaintance of Marc Rich's tactics and techniques.  Did Putin actually know Marc Rich, a man then on the lam from the FBI for questioning with an international search warrant out for him prior to his pardon?  Especially as Putin used the methodologies that Rich brought with him to absolute perfection, can that be just chalked up to being a real good study of those techniques?  You don't use them by accident, that's for sure, but with criminal intent as the two commissions investigating the starving of St. Petersburg pointed out.  And as the courts in Liechtenstein also pointed to in the case of SPAG.  Makes you wonder where SPAG got its money, doesn't it? 

Back to Eric Holder, for a moment, how does such a man pushing for a known organized crime participant to get a pardon, which he must have known in his position at the FBI, get a 'pass' by any political establishment?  How does a duplicitous public official with policing powers entrusted to him violate that trust and, yet, get promoted?  How does criminal operations of running guns to Mexican Cartels, and to other non-State operators overseas, against the treaties we have signed with these Nations, actually get a yawn from the media?

What does the End Game Against Freedom look like?

Vladimir Putin had many contacts in the intelligence and police community overseas.

Here's a thought.

President Eric Holder.

But only after some suitable 'national emergency' has taken place in which 'extraordinary powers' need to be used to 'stop' advancing 'attacks' by organizations that don't do advancing 'attacks'.  That is the equivalent in the US.

The End Game Against Freedom is a Police State.

Run by the Secret Police, not a dictator creating one but a dictator put in power by one.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

Sen. Paul's filibuster and the question

Congratulations to Sen. Rand Paul for utilizing the filibuster on a question that he has been asking for nearly a month and asked of the head of DoJ, Eric Holder, and the White House during that period: in their opinion does the President have the power to order a drone attack against an American on American soil without due process of law procedures?

This is not the question: can the President order someone stopped when they are in the process of attacking the United States?  That is an in-process question where someone is armed, known, dangerous, affiliated with an organization that has already attacked the United States or has otherwise made clear their intention to attack the United States on their own or in affiliation with others.

That, incidentally, is called Treason and has its own due process procedure set by the US Constitution.

And a single penalty after trial and being found guilty of same.

The White House, Eric Holder and Mr. Brennan, the man who's nomination for head of CIA has caused all of this to come out, have all given a big, hearty waffle on this question.  Do note that if this was the previous Administration that the Left, the MFM and all sorts of others would be denouncing that President and calling attention to this question.  Their complicity in partisan, tyrannical ends is demonstrated by their lack of doing anything.  Save Code Pink and the ACLU, I will grant those organizations and any others that have stood up to join with Sen. Paul and his fellow Senators that assisted on this that they have followed on an ethical and moral line of reasoning.  No matter how much you may not like what some of these organizations do, and how insane their motivations may be at times, they are consistent in their insanity.

As for me the question should be self-evident: no, the President does not have that power nor authority to go outside due process.  Going after those actually wielding weapons, planting bombs or hacking into the infrastructure of, say, a major sewage system to put its contents into the drinking water of millions of people, those people should be stopped with whatever force is necessary short of an indiscriminant missile attack.  Anything that has a warhead measured in pounds of explosives, launched from any platform including a shoulder fired weapon from an individual, is a bit much to go after an individual who is not in a tank, not in an APC, not in a hijacked aircraft about to hit a building or other infrastructure component, or in a known and designated bunker or other fortified area.  The potential for the innocent getting hurt or killed in a non-war zone is far too high to be using explosives outside of a testing range  or other designated safe facility utilized for the training of same.

And as to the question of being on a 'kill list', I have addressed that previously as something that has a lack of stated doctrine and procedure with legal framework attached to it.  The Congress can and should play a part in this using their Article I, Section 8 powers under the Letters language as that is the power that is granted to Congress to address and deal with the Private Enemies of the United States and the language allowing Congress the power to set the means by which the military forces of the US operate.  This would allow Congress to name specific groups that have attacked the United States as Private Enemies of the Nation, and that joining such a group is treasonous as it is one that has waged Private War on the US as defined in the Law of Nations.  Further it could tell the President that individuals of that organization, foreign and domestic, are to be publicly put on a list of those individuals to be brought in by any means necessary, apprehended when feasible overseas, and that these individuals are admonished to turn themselves in to any US Embassy or any US military base or organization for proper tribunal or trial.  Congress could place the general activities of 'terrorism' as those of 'piracy' and put forward, via legislation, that all such individuals are engaged in Piracy when they attack the US on their own and not as part of a Nation.  This would actually allow the removal of the cumbersome terrorist statutes and embrace the pre-existing framework of Piracy trials which are also a known part of the international framework of understanding between Nations.

These things would then set a basis for doctrine of apprehension for the Executive Branch and also define when private individuals who are actively part of an organization attacking the US may be attacked, and that other individuals or organizations, public or private, that are aiding and abetting such hostile groups or individuals are to be put on a separate list so that proper legal proceedings can go forward to freeze their assets whenever possible and seize them once proper legal recognition and status is done via trial.

Thus I applaud Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster.

I also humbly suggest that he start legislation to finally get a hard and fast set of legal understandings put forward to properly define and scope out just what a President can and cannot do with drones and other unarmed vehicles in the pursuit of 'terror' groups overseas.  Congressional input and designation of groups is necessary, and the President will then have to ask Congress to add or remove organizations to such a list as this is a WAR POWER of the Congress at work.  That would then set a methodology that is public and well understood on who is on such a list, and what recourse they have to turn themselves in for proper legal procedures be they citizens or foreigners, at home or abroad.  This would then involve all three branches of government and could even set up an initial tribunal system to find out just who is and is not a 'combatant', with the military running such under the Geneva Conventions and defining that 'terrorism' falls under the 'Saboteurs and Espionage' trials for military affairs.  Those trials are well known and understood, and have a single outcome when guilty, and it is immediate and summary in nature.  That would also clear out Gitmo and allow the US to shut it down once the last of the detainees are processed.

These things are things that can be done by a Senator or Representative and work with others to put legislation forward and move it through Congress.

That is how the entire thing is supposed to work.

Best to remind everyone of that while there is still time.

The clothes have no emperor

In watching the first Presidential debate I came away with a few basic ideas and wrote those up at Hot Air, which appears to be my initial post point for ideas.  I slept on the ideas, and posted them the day after and will now put that out with all my standard provisos on WYSIWYG, no corrections for anything, just simple copy and past and then concentrate on one area:

So much good from last night it is hard to know where to begin.

Just in overview I noticed that Romney was transitioning between topics to keep up with the debate outlines, so that when Lehrer had to go to the next area it had been softened up by Romney ahead of time. Giving Obama the lead position meant a lot in that Romney could get the last word in which shifted Obama from offense to defense at a few points throughout the night. Together this effect was devastating.

On the major plus side Romney put out how an executive deals with problems in government: you lay out a policy and then have to adapt it to the legislative branch and what it is willing to do. This is what an executive DOES – lay out policy which then drives the argument and direction of legislation. You don’t need miniscule, point by point things to do if you give the overall direction and theme of what you want to accomplish. Those were laid out quite well in multiple instances.

Taxes would go down but exemptions would be eliminated meaning that the end marginal rate is a goal and it is a rate with few exemptions to it. This reduces overhead and makes understanding the code easier, not harder. It also is an aim to remove all the loopholes put in by the letter street cronies that the Left used to complain about. In the end more people pay taxes, but the rate is lower so that there is less taken out of the paycheck, meaning more take home pay. This was not lost on me and seems like a good way to start repealing the crony tax system to get to a flatter tax. A good start.

Thematically Romney laid out that all government expenditures must be balanced by asking: ‘Do we want to pay China for this by having them bankroll our deficit spending that our children and grandchildren MUST pay off for us?’ This is killer. If he really and for true means this, then the morality of spending has just been put into play in a big, big way and everyone wanting ‘entitlements’ is now on the defensive having to justify putting future generations in debt for current spending. That is a game changer if pressed home and to the hilt. Putting the spenders in the position of immorality (instead of the cloak of doing good) is killer: put the red letter D for DEBT around their necks and point out how wicked their spending is to future generations and how lacking we are in wanting to do that.

Just so many good points… Mitt Romney did the startling thing of knowing Obamacare AND Dodd-Frank better than Obama, inside and out, which is no mean feat. Dancing through the problems of the legislation and making it sensible was stunning as NO ONE on the Left or Right has done that to-date in such a thorough way going point-by-point. And that point-by-point way of addressing concerns is yet another executive trait, meaning that problems are assessed and prioritized before-hand. Just amazing.

In one night Mitt Romney has demonstrated that he at least gets the fundamentals of the Constitution and Declaration and why they are intertwined and what that means for policy. Giving an overview of the 10th Amendment, while short, means that he has another area to flesh out beyond just block granting stuff to the States. Combined with the morality, or lack thereof, of spending, he has a potent arsenal that can only be utilized if it is backed as POLICY. Not programmatics but that thing that drives programmatics. If done as POLICY then this is the beginning of a sea-change in politics.

His job would not be one of reaching across the aisle, however, as the Tea Party begins to dominate the Republican Party… if 1/3 or more of Congress is held by Tea Party members, then they become the drivers of legislation because of the two parties and the fights become one of the establishment against the Tea Party which is a whole other fight and unlike anything seen for over a century in America. If we put in the hard work, then we will give Romney a very, very hard job to do and require him to live up to what he has laid out for us tonight. It isn’t about an election, but changing the course of the Nation away from its current disastrous path. I do disagree with some programmatics from Romney, yes, but it is up to him to show that he really does understand his policy direction… and if he doesn’t live up to those themes, I will have no problem in 4 years voting for someone else. As of last night, however, it can be said that the direction of not just this race but the entire dialogue of what is moral and just in government has been put into play. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder and that loses out to equality for all and upholding a moral standard and good so that our children will have the chance to prosper without our debt loading them down.

Prepare for weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Left over this as the basis for politics is now changing beneath their feet.

ajacksonian on October 4, 2012 at 6:19 AM

Here I would like to concentrate not on the morality of debt or spending, although morality does come into play, but of taxes.  I know the morality of taxes is a dry subject that the Left figures it won somewhere around President Wilson, but lets start with the can opener and look at taxes, deductions and marginal tax rates.

For this exercise I will use totally made up numbers for a highly simplified tax system with some embedded carrots to get you, the taxpayer, to do what the government wants you to do.

In this case there will be two families, they will have definite similarities in that they will be a 4 person household with two parents and two children.  In this tax code they will each get 'benefits' of deducting $100 per person and an additional $500 per child per year.  Each family gets a 15% write-off on their home mortgage interest payments and a general write-off on all income of 5% which I'm tagging for medical expenses.

Family 1 has an aggregate income of $30,000 per year, a 25% tax rate, a home mortgage payment of $1000 per month and 95 percent of that is interest as they haven't been in the home long.

Family 2 has an aggregate income of $55,000 per year, a 30% tax rate, a home mortgage payment of $1500 per month and 90 percent of that is interest as they have been in a somewhat better home for just a bit longer.

Now let me break down the numbers a bit so you can get an idea of how this 'removing deductions and lowering rates' works.  These numbers just reflect this made-up tax code system with just a few simple parts to it, so no griping about how they don't reflect 'reality' or real numbers – they are just math.

	Family 1	Family 2
Federal Taxes	$7,500	$16,500
Standard deductions	-$400	-$400
Child tax credit	-$1,000	-$1,000
Mortgage interest deduction	-$1,710	-$2,754
Standard medical deduction	-$1,500	-$2,750
Net Taxes	$2,890	$9,596
Net tax rate	9.6%	17.4%

 

When it is pointed out that NO ONE pays the tax rate for their bracket, this is a truism as NO ONE  actually pays that load due to the loopholes, give-aways and write-offs in the tax code.

Is a tax code that rewards behavior by the power of government a moral one?

On the positive sides it does things that government in the form of Congress and bureaucrats want to see happen in the economy.  It is, in other words an enticement to you to do certain things even if they don't make any sense at all for you to do them.

Taking the deductions line by line:

1) Why should you have a deduction for being yourself?  And why do those who live with you who depend on you get a deduction?  You are a citizen, after all, and so (with a bit of luck) are the members of your family.  What is the earthly reason that you should be able to deduct anything on taxes for these people just as citizens?  And, really, isn't that a bit denigrating to say that you 'deserve' to write-off such individuals who are, after all, part of the whole of the people?  Why not lower the tax rate and just do away with that? If this is meant for 'the poor' then set a point of minimal, subsistence living under which no taxes can be paid and be done with it.  Be generous and peg that at 4x this deduction and you now have the ability of a family of 4 to earn just enough to feed themselves.  Putting this loophole in is condescending from government and treats you as a dependent of government... yet YOU are the one earning the income which government is trying to take away from you.

2) The child tax credit is a simple loophole to make children more 'affordable', sort of like that new home you wanted to buy at inflated prices, but with a higher cost of consumables over time.  This is treating children as a 'burden' to adults, not as new life to be cherished. It is also a very recent addition to the tax code (with the income tax, itself, being only 100 years old in the US) and much fought over for a few years until it got inserted due to 'family values'... of which are included kick-backs from the US government, apparently.  Isn't that a lovely 'conservative family value'?  Call it what it is, not what it is sold as, and that changes the entire view of the deductions and their purpose.  Plus it is small ball, stuff, meaning that you can be easily bribed to have a larger family.  Yet another 'family value' apparently.  Even better if you make so little in taxes that your marginal rate drops below zero, you get a bonus gift from the US government: a pay-off.  Kick-backs, pay-offs and bribes: all 'family values' via the tax code.  Just what you want children to learn about growing up, isn't it?  How to become a nice, subservient crony to the system taught right there at home with the tax code.  With the tax code as it is, why do we need a Dept. of Education?

3) Next up is the vaunted, much lusted after mortgage interest deduction, one of the two main ways to reduce your tax obligation!  Yes, say that you want to touch that and you get roasted over an open flame.  Yet what, exactly, is it?  You take out a mortgage based on a few things: you need a home, you seek to limit tax liability, you believe that you will make more in the future, you think the home will appreciate in value.   These are not the traditional things that people have thought about prior to Ginnie Mae and the 'securitizing' of debt vehicles in the home mortgage market by the federal government (done under the Nixon Administration at the suggestion of the Dept. of Labor, of all places), at least some of the latter – the need for a home and reducing tax liability were key before that era starting in 1970, and prior to the 1930's only the ability to actually pay for a home mattered due to lack of write-offs before then and the FHA.

What is this yet another side of kick-backs, pay-offs and bribes by the US federal government via the tax code?  Unfortunately, yes.

When the banks were left to their own devices they required some things of people purchasing a home: 20% down, a work history, a known business you worked for or (as an owner) a steady ownership record, and the ability to actually afford maintenance on your home (about 1% of its cost per year).  Back in that era the bank was local, the person who managed mortgages knew the area and neighborhoods, and your mortgage was kept locally as a part of a portfolio held by the bank.  You, as the lendee, were known and probably had a working relationship with that bank to start with, meaning they knew your family's situation and could give some leeway on paying back during hard times.  To achieve all of that you had to demonstrate the ability to work, to save, lead a thrifty life, manage your household expenses, be reliable and understand just what the burden of owning a home was.

Today we have the enticement to banks to lend to NINJAs, people with No Income, No Job or Assets.  Your mortgage interest deduction started as a way to 'ease the burden' of home ownership and to entice more people to purchase homes.  All well and good if you still had to place 20% down, I suppose, but it is a kick-back just the same.  Still the larger banks saw that there was an 'opportunity' in the mortgage market if only the pesky regulations could be changed to stop them from entering it and if they could get some assurance on the value of the debts in far off parts of the country.  Aren't you glad the US federal government got that done to destroy the Savings & Loan industry and press local banks out of the market and out of business?  Because of the S&L crash the opportunity to change regulations further to open up the spigots for the larger commercial banks was done through the crisis of that crash: never let a good crisis go to waste.  Through activists at the bottom, local banks were pressed into giving loans in bad neighborhoods where home values were at threat from local conditions, and then made to give loans to those with lesser work histories and less down on the mortgage.  Home values, with the entry of the commercial banks, started to rise far faster than their 1-2% appreciation that was historical to the late 1960's, and the idea of a home being an 'investment' safe from most of the problems of normal affairs took root.  Once a final safe haven of IRA's were put in, then homes just became another investment vehicle with an expectation of appreciation over much shorter periods of time.

That was achieved by the home mortgage interest deduction, the lowering of lending standards for commercial banks, and the forcing of loans into areas that were marginal and required some civic renewal (read: redevelopment and investment) to be worthy of having loans floated to them.  These conditions created a bubble in the home mortgage sector of the economy and it popped circa 2007-2008.  The regulations pushing all of this are still, to this day, in place.  Including the vaunted home mortgage interest deduction which makes it 'affordable' to own far too much home for a given income (because those restrictions were 'loosened' as part of all of this, too).

Doesn't that 'old fashioned', local and largely unregulated but highly protected banking system with stable neighborhoods and firms sound nice today?  Wouldn't it be nice to have people who actually were thrifty, were able to understand the value of a home as a place to live, and who didn't look for kick-backs and bribes (if not outright coercion) to banks to give loans?  The large commercial banks are only a part of this problem, albeit a large one with enormous long-term impact and structural degradation to local communities. Every individual who bought more than they could afford, purchased without income or assets, or who could only swing purchasing a home with the deduction or because of the deduction is part of the  problem.

Is this deduction a moral one?

Are the regulations that followed on to it, that inflated expectations, reduced valuations and were in search of more money flowing through the system to cause a large-scale systemic collapse moral?  For these regulations are the problem, not the solution.  In this imaginary system this line item accounts for 1/5 to 1/7 of the reduction in liability, but in the actual world people searching the quick flips, the quick turnarounds, the easy sale, the inflated home value up to as much as 10% per year allows for the exploitation of this write-off to reduce liability even further.  It was a tax dodge put in by cronyism with the willing assent of the bought off citizen who purchased a home.  It is the money-grubbing that was exploited by government and banks to utilize the home owner via pay-offs to inflate the system artificially to cause temporary 'prosperity' that then crashed hard and deep, and has a major crater still lingering  in the financial structure of the Nation that neither Democrats nor Republicans want to remove.

Are these the values you want to teach to your children: that pay-offs and kick-backs, cronyism and the expectation of getting ripped off are the norm for government regulations and that one should take part to make a quick buck while they can?  Is that the basis for a moral family arrangement when your children see YOU in that light?  And when you happily slap that bumper sticker on your RV that you are spending your children's inheritance then what, exactly, is the message that you are sending?  That you got yours?  Hurray for me and fuck you?  Because that is the message we get from such regulations and they do not bring about a stable nor just society, but just the opposite.

4) A standard deduction for medical expenses.  This, in various formulations, is currently in the modern tax code and became embedded in it during WWII as part of the enticement to get retirees, the unfit and those who were marginal in the workforce to join in the industrial war effort.  Women, midgets, the blind, those stricken with polio, the elderly... all of these people had to be enticed to work and the one easy way to do that was via what had been for decades, an executive 'perk': health care 'insurance'.  Prior to the war effort the idea of having health care 'insurance' was limited to the very upper class of society.  Why?  Because it is uneconomical to provide it, save as an enticement to a high experience, highly capable executive as part of a package of goodies to get them to work for a company.  To put it bluntly, that sort of coverage is too expensive to afford.  In fact companies couldn't afford it for their workers prior to WWII.  Luckily the crisis of necessary wartime production meant that businesses lobbied Congress to get a tax write-off put into the tax code so that a percentage of the cost wouldn't be taxed, which was about 40% if memory serves.  Why is this uneconomical?  And is it moral to have this in the tax code at all?

Health 'insurance' isn't real insurance where you are betting you will get sick and the insurance company is betting you won't.  The expansion to regular health visits, check-ups, tests, hospitalization and all of that has many features that are recurring on an annual basis, and often more frequently.  Covering medications also has a recurring and regular cost to it, and this is not a feature of any other type of 'insurance'.   Prior to this write-off individuals could get true insurance for forms of catastrophic care, accidental death and dismemberment, and even such things as investing in long-term care while young by having a stable family.  Thus this form of 'insurance' must have a high premium to it, because it is covering so many expenses for so many people that there is an overhead cost to it that is far beyond any other insurance around.  Instead of a secretary and a couple of actuarial people, these companies must employ a raft of experts, forms processors and other individuals that has grown larger over time.  Further they have taken on negotiating with hospitals, physicians and groups of same for reduced prices for the insurance members.  What used to be something that you paid directly and negotiated with the physician or hospital now had an intermediary involved, and whenever you get a middle-man, you get the cost of the middle-man as part of the system.  Without a write-off businesses could never afford that additional overhead cost for their workforce.  Period.  It costs too much.

When insurance companies put the screws on providers, by promising volume to make up for lower cost, any shortfall is passed on to other customers.  All well and good until you get to the Johnson Administration and the start of Medicare and Medicaid.  When the US federal government starts to tell what it will pay for procedures, and they are not the going market rates but below them, then the cost differential must be made up by physicians and hospitals to stay in business.  That is cost shifted to other patients, which means that insurance companies both inside and outside the M&Ms see the cost of care rising, which they must pass along via higher premiums only a portion of which can get a write-off.  Your cost of care rises.  The federal government only exacerbated a pre-existing problem that it caused in the first place, and neither Democrats nor Republicans removed the uneconomical tax write-off after WWII.  The very vocal minority that told of the problems of the 'Great Society' medical programs proved not only prescient but having too limited a vision of the actual rate of increase of costs involved.

Why is overhead cost important?

Overhead cost is a burden to whatever the transaction is that is going on: stores have square footage, personnel, record keeping, liability insurance, lighting, heating, janitorial work all of which are just part of overhead cost.  Insurance companies have this, as well, so that when a transaction takes place the cost of their negotiations is added into the fray, as well as the cost of making sure that charges passing through the system are not fraudulent: it is their money they are handing out, dues and such are only payments to them to do this job.  Thus whatever the actual cost of an item is, it must have the burden of overhead added on to it and medical care is no different from any other transactional service be it getting served dinner at a restaurant or purchasing a computer from an online store.  To put it simply, the cost of the system is increased with middle-men and their burden added to the system as a whole and YOU pay for it either directly or via cost shifting to others.  As with all other transactional systems, the fewer intermediaries that there are, the lower the end-user cost will be in the aggregate and often for each individual summed up for their entire usage of the system in their lives.

Today the system is so rigged, so encrusted with tax changes, with so many kick-backs at the federal and State level, with so many cronies and lobbyists seeking line items in the budget for themselves that NO ONE knows the true cost of medical care in America save that without all of this burdened overhead it would cost FAR LESS than it does now.  Coming from the federal government and seeing industrial and governmental non-productive time and generic overhead cost burdening that delta could be as small as 15% and as high as 65%: what you pay, overall, for all medical treatment and medications in your lifetime could drop by 15% to 65% overall, in aggregate without trying to make the damned system 'fair' to treat 'special cases' with high cost and even higher overhead differently from everyone else.  That delta is picked up by this thing known as 'charity' run by religious institutions, citizens dedicated to the cause of helping others, and special interest charities dedicated to single diseases and their medical costs.  By depending on insurance and government this charitable system is on the rocks and slowly being eroded away in its entirety as it doesn't have the lobbyists or the capability to write-off as much as larger institutions because they lack the scale to do so.  Once they are gone the lowest cost anchor of the system will go with it and the costs that had been merely way too expensive will go to impossible to pay because there is no way for charity to compete in a crony system dedicated to undercutting charity to the benefit of the cronies and politicians.

That is not only immoral it is reprehensible.  Yet you sustain it via tax write-offs for yourself in the tax code.

And all in search of the objective: lower taxes.

5) That bottom line is what we are all seeking via this system, and yet we achieve it in the very worst of all possible ways.  The income tax was promised as never going beyond 7% and that only for the fat cats, yet in 7 years its highest rate was 70%.  One of the interesting drivers for the tax code, beyond 'soaking the rich' was in the quest to get the US federal government another source of revenue beyond its main one: liquor taxes.  The hard drinking US had problems, which first brought about individual organizations seeking to reform drunkards (like the Washington Society) so that the familial problems of drinking could be alleviated by reforming those who drank too much liquor.  Yet most of the US government's income was on liquor and it sustained the Nation up to the Progressive era.  Temperance, sobriety and using government to enforce these things was a Progressive agenda item, backed by powerful lobbying organizations like the Anti-Saloon League.  Getting dry counties and dry States was not enough as people could go elsewhere to bring drink back home.  The idea was that if the US Constitution represented the moral fabric of the Nation, then amending the Constitution would change the people to a more sober and moral people.  Yet the only way to do this was to find an alternate revenue stream as liquor was very much the life-blood of government.  Thus the income tax, warned against and written against in the Constitution, had to be put into place before the political power of the Temperance Movement could come into play.  With an alternative revenue stream, Prohibition quickly passed and proved that human nature is stronger than the US Constitution.

We are left with the artifacts of a directly elected Senate system and an income tax system, both prohibited by the original Constitution of the Framers.  That system had everyone being assessed equally for the cost of the US government and then apportioning that to the States for getting the revenue.  The States figured out how to get the revenue: sales taxes, property taxes, direct levies, bake sales, it was left up to the more local to figure this out, not the National system.  That is both a moral system and a 'fair' system in that it adapts to local situations as dictated by the people at a much easier level to control.  Everyone gets a stake in the system.

Today the idea is to avoid taxes, have the rich pay the way of the poor and do everything in one's power to pay as little as possible to a government that must stand for all of the people.  Instead of passing the burden to States, we now have the problems of the States at the federal level and we are left with only the people as the means to address the ills of this system.  The failure of our government, our businesses and ourselves via human nature have now put us into a desperate situation.  To gain earthly goods we have accepted pay-offs to avoid questioning the moral cost of them.  For the pursuit of having someone else pay, we now pay in the dearest coin of all: our own self worth.

When Gov. Romney puts forward the morality test in spending, it must be something that is far beyond spending because spending requires a source of that revenue, and that can only be taken from the people of the Nation or borrowed from others.  We put ourselves and our future in the hands of others when we do that, and it matters not if it is other Nations or 'the rich': you dance to the tune of the piper and when you pay nothing you are obligated to dance to their tune.  It isn't immoral to hand our children and grandchildren our debt, it is immoral of us to incur it in the first place and shows our own lack of self worth and valuation to accept that cheating pays, that avoidance of paying taxes pays, and that instead of expecting all citizens to take up our common burden, we seek to shift it only in one direction: ever upwards to others.  To be a free people we must all pay our way, even the destitute as I am sure that we, as moral people, will form charities to help them pay for some small citizen so they can learn the value of being a citizen.  That is also an obligation to actually be productive, of course, and to care for not just oneself but one's fellow man.  If we do not expect it of ourselves, the non-rich but not destitute, either, then how can we expect it either of the rich or the destitute?

Once morality of government in its size, scope, power and cost are all brought into question, the very tax code we have then comes in for scrutiny.  In my fictional one for people of moderate means I get something between 10 and 17% as a net tax rate.  If we shear out the immorality of the system, get a flat tax of a given amount, and then say 'we must live within that', then we are on the path of being moral and righteous in our actions because we sustain ourselves and our society by swearing to pick up the burden for those who fare less well and to pay our own way to sustain us all.  No matter how much you may like the special treatment, the kick-backs, the pay-offs... they get you the cronyism, the complexity and the resulting immorality of treating people differently when we are all citizens and created equal.  To claim ownership of yourself you must be able to deny government the right to control you via economics and its own petite tyranny, which soon grows fat and becomes a true tyrant in its own right.  The tyrant of the bureaucrat.  The tyrant of the rules.  The tyrant of the cronies who seek to escape scrutiny by buying off government to get paid-off by you.

I am sure Gov. Romney hasn't gotten down this far in his thinking.  But that he has taken a step in this direction is not just unexpected but refreshing.  Because once you start to question the morality of borrowing and expecting your children to pay it off for you, then you must begin to question the taxation and just what it is you are seeking from it in the long run.  A Nation of free men must be able to admit the burden they bring, carry their own and help others less able and to do so openly, honestly, and not via subterfuge of collection via the shopkeeper or the ease of the transaction stealthily burdened by the politicians in the back room.  Force it into the open, force it to be discussed, and then come to an agreement in common and cement that baby down and make it toxic for any power hungry ideologue to even think of touching it.  You don't win your freedom and keep it by paying stealth taxes, but by putting the tax man out in front of all to see and saying: do your damn job and stop trying to steal us blind behind our backs.  For what they rob is far dearer than mere coin, and far harder to win back once lost.

Mine eyes have seen the glory...

Yes, yet another bit of commentary by me at Hot Air (on the Ted Cruz victory) that I'm recycling into a post.  More thoughts on this at some future time, but that will be more a summation of past posts and outlooks.  This is just a short, sweetened condensed version.  Anyone having read my works over the years will know exactly where I'm coming from and all standard non-fixing of spelling, syntax, etc. is in place:

Do note that Ted Cruz didn’t win because of MONEY.

He won because of commitment from individuals to support his campaign and to mail envelopes, place phone calls, and talk up his campaign with friends, co-workers and other like minded people. The stars of the Senate, Sarah Palin and the rest of the ‘leaders’ are only ‘leaders’ in the sense that the abolitionist movement had ‘leaders’: the movement set the tone, tenor and direction and a few were able to voice it better and help spur it on, but they in no way led the movement, itself.

This is the horrifying part to the two parties and the elite establishment. What the Tea Parties have done is coalesce, create leaderless organizations that are distributed, grass-roots and committed in a way that saves the most time to get the most results for the input given. Outspending a candidate isn’t going to change commitment for those who have had to go through the gauntlet of fire by the MFM and the simpatico elite establishment. You may not get a political ‘leader’ on the other side of that, but you do get an individual and a movement that is purified by fire in the crucible. Bring on more fire, pour it on, and the movement gets stronger as it winnows out the extras, those things that don’t fit and begins to concentrate on the pure beliefs of those involved. Then you reach out to those elements that remain unpurified, incorporate them and welcome THEM to the crucible. Not all will be allies, not all will be able to take the heat but the best from them will step forth to join with the larger movement.

In 2009 Statehouses started to change hands and not just into Republican hands but to those following the Tea Party – the beliefs of those elected were getting scrutiny and a number will be melted out by the fire.

By 2010 Scott Brown was a shot across the bow, followed up by many salvos against the elite establishment. This was not about winning elections, but to start the purification process on the elite politicians in the Republican party to start melting their power base away from the inside. You couldn’t win all those races, but you could win enough to prove the point and to establish the marker of the future.

In 2011 more Statehouses started to shift, and this was not just to Republicans but to an organized grass-roots that sought no leaders and, instead, welcomed spokesmen. By joining with other organizations and finding out what fit from them since the self-organization began, these other organizations found out that some of what is good from them gets incorporated into the larger movement, but that the movement is independent of them.

That gets you 2012 where a coalescing can get behind Ted Cruz and others, while Senators and Club for Growth now find itself against a FreedomWorks candidate in a run-off… spokesmen and ‘leaders’ are not blindly followed, and good citizens willing to risk the fire of derision and hatred spewed at them for their positions on smaller government and greater personal liberty get backed.

This is the horror to the elite establishment in both parties and the Left as a whole: the more they attack the more people come to understand those that they oppose and find them to be friends and neighbors with common-sense attitudes and simple involvement and understanding in politics that the complex fails on high, and the simple succeeds on low. Now Freedom Works reaches out to other Nations, Japan, Australia, Serbia, Israel, Italy, Greece, even into China to support those who see the rights of man as individual and personal liberty and freedom as the greatest force for good for all mankind. We will not always agree with our friends in other Nations and the venues they must choose for themselves: but we can reach out to support them in what they do.

This works.

Tyrants of the world, behold! The word of freedom and liberty with self-governance is now being whispered in the darkest corners of tyranny. And this time we vow never, ever, to forget these lessons and why freedom and liberty are the basis for the common good amongst men. The Tea Party was just the first ray of light on the horizon… soon the vast number of rays shall show the source of them and the powerful will tremble in fear.

ajacksonian on August 2, 2012 at 7:22 AM

Yes, there is something larger than just Ted Cruz, the Tea Parties and the other list of usual suspects trotted out by the MFM going on.  The establishment that they wished to yoke mankind to is falling apart because it just doesn't work.  Something that does work is already in place with each and every individual on the planet who comes to realize that they are the greatest moral actors on Earth because they are here, now, to exercise their free will to the betterment of themselves and their fellow man.

Tyrants shall tremble.

Dictators shall fall.

And the dross of tyranny will once again meet freedom and liberty unleashed not just in America, but everywhere as we uphold the promise and understanding of our Founders.  All men are, indeed, created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain, inalienable, rights – that amongst those are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which we call Fortune.

This is the job handed to you, to me, and to each and every person on the planet.