Archive for the ‘political corruption’ Category

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Post-Nixon, Obama lets loose IRS rattlesnakes

May 19, 2013

Any one who works for the IRS is predisposed to hate his neighbors, to relish invading individual privacy, and to pleasure himself through harassing threats and audit interrogations. Why else would he join the agency? ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you?’ No way!

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Given the modern Imperial Presidency, it takes a truly great man to withstand the temptation. Barack Obama is weak and dysfunctional as a consequence of a disturbed childhood, essentially orphaned by two utterly selfish and dysfunctional parents.

But Barack Obama is not entirely clueless. He remembers the fate of Richard Nixon, and does not relish the prospect of an aborted second term. All those golf treats with Tiger Woods and all those basketball treats with Michael Jordan! So this president is more tricky than Tricky Dick when he sets loose his IRS rattlesnakes on his political opponents.

The right-wing media may be sleuthing for some hint that Obama picked up the phone and sicced his tax snakes on his enemies. But that is not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. All that he needed to do was exactly what he did, in full view, throughout his three-year campaign for the 2012 elections: publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious activities, publicly call out by name political opponents whom he wanted to be harassed,and publicly encourage his party to pressure for IRS investigations. Even in his 2010 State of the Union address, this paranoid president cast aspersions on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, claiming that it opened the floodgates to conservative special interests. Well guess which party expended most on the 2012 elections?

The president publicly derided ‘tea-baggers’. Vice President Joe Biden compared them to terrorists. In case the IRS missed the point, Obama publicly raised the threat of illegality: ‘All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates…And they don’t say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign corporation.’

How much more prodding do you think was necessary to set loose the IRS snakes on the names that Obama listed? Does this paranoid man think that Americans are completely stupid? Does he truly believe that Americans- independent of his left-leaning ideology – will ever believe that he played no role whatsoever in this disgusting partisan episode?

I’m from the government, and I’m here to take you down’.

Hat Tip: Kimberley A. Strassel, ‘The IRS Scandal Started at the Top’, The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

IRS targets Obama’s enemies in extraordinary scandal

May 18, 2013

“We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department’s assault on the associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, possibly irretrievably damaged….Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.” Peggy Noonan, ‘This Is No Ordinary Scandal’, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2013

President Obama, albeit sheepishly, acts as though these scandals are unconnected to the White House.Like the chief of police in Casablanca he is shocked, shocked, to discover in the newspapers what has happened! President Obama, however, is deeply connected to these scandals. He is not a bystander, like you and I. This happens to be his administration. The Justice Department and the IRS are his executive agencies. He runs and oversees them.

In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.

Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.

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Posted in economics and public choice, nature of an autocracy, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

The IRS is a criminal agency for corrupt presidents

May 15, 2013

The Internal Revenue Service, with a few lapses – Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, and Bush Junior – has been a criminal agent for corrupt presidents beginning with the reign of FDR. Throughout the presidencies of FDR, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton and Obama, the IRS has been manipulated malevolently by the Oval Office explicitly for political purposes.

A sequence of weak and corrupt agency beads has pursued audits and harassment against named individuals and organizations – left and right depending on the politics of the president – deemed to be dangerously critical of White House activities. A few examples will suffice to tell the story.

FDR used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal. Those so attacked included William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on Democratic Party political rivals, such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin as well as on such prominent Republicans as Andrew Mellon. In 1944, he reached out to spike an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s political career would have justifiably ended in 1944, but for that illegal intervention.

JFK was a quick learner from FDR. Within days of capturing the presidency, King Arthur of Camelot launched the Ideological Organization Audit Project. This targeted right-leaning groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the Foundation for Economic Education. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for IRS audits.

Richard Nixon was determined to take Republican revenge. He created the Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called ‘all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical and similar type organizations. More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973.

There followed a lull in IRS political harassment until Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993. In 1995, The Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled ‘Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce’ that attacked magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized the president. More than twenty organizations identified in that document – including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute – and almost a dozen high-profile individuals, including Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.

So now that a truly third rate president occupies the White House, it is not at all surprising to find that low-grade harassment has been meted out by the IRS against organizations that have such epithets as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their nomenclotures. No doubt the epithet ‘Christian’ or even ‘true American’ will have elicited White House rage from the current occupant.

What manner of men and women are attracted to senior positions in the IRS? Evidently, not individuals with any regard for the rule of law or the First Amendment to the Constitution. History suggests that many IRS appointees stem from the dregs of society, no doubt from the Mafia gangs that extract protection monies from hard-working businessmen in the big cities, and from the crooked police forces that protect the guilty and harass the innocent.

Hat Tip: James Bovard, ‘A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting’, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Obama White House is corrupted by Chicago machine-politics

May 11, 2013

Just about any one who has followed this week’s discussion of the Benghazi terrorist attack knows that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Rice repeatedly lied about the nature of the event and why American government officials were not protected by F-16s and SAS forces.

A not-uncommon response to the sequence of lies exposed by Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom before the House oversight committee this week is ‘who cares?’ The dead are long buried, other events now dominate public discussion, and come 2016, Hillary Clinton will be on her way to the White House. The victors get to write the history.

Now all this may be true. It is an old adage that a democracy gets the government it deserves. And the present government is showing itself to be about as despicable as one could ever imagine. So that pretty much sums up the moral and intellectual caliber of the electoral majority that currently controls the United States political market-place.

However, I beg to differ with this dismissive view of Benghazi. What Benghazi told a watching world is that the President and the Secretary of State of the United States both care more for their political prospects than for the honor of their country. Both are prepared to lie, not just to the world at large, but to the families of the fallen, about the reason for their murders and the retribution that will be exacted. For an al Qaeda attack on U.S. property and personnel, a crackpot California video-maker will be wrongly jailed. Some honor regained, some retribution extracted!

“From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they saiud it was too far in the past: ‘Benghazi happened a long time ago’, Jay Carney, The White House press secretary, really said that. Think of that. They can’t give answers when the story’s fresh because it just happened, they’re looking into it. Eight months later they don’t have anything to say because it all happened so long ago. Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.” Peggy Noonan, ‘The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi’, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013

Well, not the entire American people. Just those who sheepishly voted a Chicago-machine politician back into office in the teeth of one of the worst first-term records in the history of the Republic. These voters truly got what they expected and what they deserved. Their children and their grandchildren may well live to despise them for their failure of good judgment if, that is, they are not wiped out by a nuclear terrorist attack on their undefended homeland.

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Posted in economics and public choice, media rhetoric, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

Obama-Clinton BS on Benghazi

May 9, 2013

In pursuit of two presidential victories – Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 – President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton manipulated their puppet-on-a-string, Susan Rice to spread a false message to the American public following the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

U.N. Ambassador Rice blanketed the Sunday talk shows to deny that a terrorist attack had occurred. Rather, what happened on September 11, she span, was a spontaneous protest in response to a video insulting Islam. Well, there are lies, damned lies and Benghazi lies, and there can be few superiors to Susan Rice in the relaying of White House and State Department whoppers. Susan Rice looks like a witch, walks like a witch and sounds like a witch. Pretty much, that identifies her as an apparition that would not relish a bucketful of water.

At yesterday’s hearing before the House oversight committee, three witnesses – Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom – corrected the lies that emanated from the twisted lips of Witch Rice. Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens who told him: ‘Greg, we’re under attack’. At that moment Mr. Hicks knew that Islamic terrorists were behind the assault. Mr Hicks personally briefed Hillary Clinton that night on the nature of the attack. Yet Clinton advised the father of Tyrone Woods much later that the YouTube video maker ‘would be prosecuted and arrested’. Trustworthy couple, those Clintons over matters appertaining to their political futures.

After Stevens and an aide were killed at the mission, the terrorists turned on the CIA annex nearby. On the advice of the military attache in Tripoli, Mr. Hicks asked for U.S. fighter planes to fly over the complex in an attempt to scare the attackers away. He was advised that no fighter planes were available. Early the following morning, two Americans died in a mortar attack on the CIA compound.

The Pentagon says that no F-16s were on call that night. Why not? Had Hillary Clinton gone to bed without requesting them? Was she asleep in bed instead of on alert for that crucial 3 am call?

The saddest part of yesterday’s hearing was the warning that had to be repeatedly administered by Republican members of the oversight committee against any attempt by the administration to seek career-damaging revenge against the three brave whistle-blowers who exposed the lies of Obama, Clinton and Rice on the eve of the 2012 elections. What kind of country is the U.S. when such warnings are required? And what kind of country is it when Democratic Party members worked not to reveal the truth but rather to protect Obama and Clinton from the cleansing power of the truth?

Hat Tip: Elliott Abrams, ‘Benghazi Truths vs. Washington Politics’, The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013

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Posted in do well while doing good, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

President and Attorney General subvert FBI interrogation of Chechen terrorist

April 25, 2013

The Obama administration was provided with two alternative routes to grilling the Boston Marathon terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, without reading him his Miranda rights. The first route, rejected outright by Barack Obama and Eric Holder, was to treat the suspect as an enemy combatant and to interrogate him and try him by military tribunal. The second route was to rely on the public safety exception clause to allow the FBI to interrogate him for up to 48 hours prior to issuing a Miranda warning.

The FBI secured the hospital ward and began its interrogation of Tsarnaev with spectacular early results during the first 16 hours. No doubt panicking lest the FBI completely wrapped up the case, and identified a wider network of U.S. Islamic cells, Obama and Holder then authorized a federal magistrate to pierce the FBI shield and to issue the Miranda warning after only 16 hours of interrogation.

Not surprisingly, the suspect immediately clammed up, and the opportunity evaporated. Such a political intervention can be explained only in terms of extreme incompetence on the part of President and Attorney General or in terms of their covert desire to protect Islamic terrorist cells within the United States from exposure and eradication.

Take your pick!

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized, war and peace | 5 Comments »

Who allowed Chechen vermin to immigrate into the United States?

April 19, 2013

Some populations are so evil that they should be cordoned off from the rest of mankind. Chechens arguably rank high among such vermin. History, genes and culture have all contributed to such an evolution.

In October 2003, fifty Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theater during the performance of the musical Nord Ost, and 120 out of the 800 people taken hostage died. This event first brought the attention of the outside world to Chechnya and its problems. The Chechen dysfunction, however, had its roots in the Second World War.

Accused by Josef Stalin of welcoming the German invaders during World War II, the entire Chechen nation of 489,000 people was deported to Soviet Central Asia in 1944, An estimated 200,000 died of hunger and disease. Nikita Krustchev allowed the remaining Chechens to return to their motherland in 1956. In November 1961, Chechnya’s newly elected president, Dzhokhar Dudaev, declared independence. This declaration was rejected not only by the USSR, but by the rest of the world.

In the spring of 1963, Dudaev dissolved his parliament and ordered the killing of scores of protesters in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny. Thereafter, he ruled as a brutal erratic, paranoid dictator, with an army of bodyguards that murdered all his enemies, real or imagined. Soon Chechnya became a lawless enclave, bristling with weapons purchased from corrupt Russian generals and paid for with the profits from the oil field close to Grozny. Trains passing through Chechnya were routinely robbed, and wanted criminals from Russia flocked to the mountain republic. An illicit drug and arms trade flourished, as did the counterfeiting of rubles.The Chechnya Mafia became one of the largest and most violent segments of the all-Russian criminal underworld.

Between 1994 and 1996, the Soviet Union invaded Chechnya in a bloody war designed to reclaim what was considered to be Russian territory. Despite indiscriminate air bombing and widespread slaughter, the remaining Chechens, now severely brutalized, regrouped and imposed severe losses on poorly-trained Russian infantry. In 1996, confronting war-weariness of the Russian nation, Boris Yeltzin signed a ceasefire agreement. Chechnya became de facto independent.

However, Chechnya quickly collapsed into anarchy as clan-based loyalties overwhelmed allegiance to the central authorities in Grozny.Warlords and heavily armed gangs turned the country into a Somalia of the Caucasus, using kidnappings for ransom as a major source of income.Slavery became widespread, and mutilation of victims commonplace. Only Taliban-controlled Afghanistan recognized Chechnya as an independent nation. Chechnya became yet another branch of Muslim fundamentalism.

All this was well-known to the United States government by 2003 as a result of the Nord Ost outrage.

So just why did U.S. immigration officials grant the families of the two vermin who promoted the Boston massacre, immigration status into the United States? Those individuals should be identified and their names made public across the Republic. It is high time that such terrorist-loving government officials were fired for malfeasance. It is high time that all potential immigrants from known sources of terrorism should be denied access to the Land of the Free. Vermin unwelcome, should be a codicil attached to the Statue of Liberty.

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Posted in do well while doing good, political corruption, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

Jon S. Corzine blasted for MF Global collapse

April 5, 2013

Because Jon S. Corzine is a Mister Big in the Democratic Party, he has been treated with kid gloves by the left-leaning Obama administration, by the Democratic Party-controlled financial oversight commissions, and by the mainstream media since the collapse of MF Global in 2011. Any Republican in his situation would have been languishing in jail some 18 months ago.

Fortunately, the person leading the investigation into the failure of MF Global is Louis J. Freeh, former Director of the FBI, and a judge, and surely no sychophant to the Obama administration.

According to the bankruptcy trustee’s report, released on April 4, 2013, Jon S. Corzine, former Governor of New Jersey and U.S. senator, deserves much of the blame for the firm’s demise. Indeed, the report mentions Corzine by name a total of 284 times, more than once per page. and concludes that he and his management team engaged in ‘negligent conduct’

Mr. Corzine, ran MF Global from March 2010 until its failure in October 2011 – ran it into the ground one might say. He embarked on a ‘risky business strategy’ of betting the wrong way on European government debt and ignored ‘glaring deficiencies’ in controls. Unusually for a chief executive, Corzine executed some of the trades personally ‘even placing trades in the middle of meetings’. As a consequence of such negligence – and who knows maybe malfeasance – about $1 billion of customers’ money went missing. Mr Corzine has made no attempt to replenish those monies from his personal assets, though we may expect private negligence suits to place him into bankruptcy unless he makes a run for it to a non-extraditable safe haven.

As the European debt crisis systematically worsened, MF Global started to receive margin calls that threatened its liquidity. At one point, Corzine even debated how aggressively the broker-dealer, on an intraday basis, could borrow customer funds from its futures brokerage arm, totally ignoring the requirement that the two accounts must be kept segregated and secured.

A more disgusting specimen of the human race than Jon Corzine would be difficult to find. He is right down there with the sewer rats. Yet, he is unlikely to serve any time in jail. His Democratic Party friends at the SEC and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and his good friend, Barack Obama, will make sure that good ole’ Jon Corzine avoids any criminal charges.

Such is the nature of crony-capitalism in the United States.
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Posted in Bank Regulation, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, redistributive politics, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Stockton, CA declares bankruptcy in order to stiff bondholders

April 2, 2013

On Monday April 1, 2013 federal bankruptcy judge, Christopher Klein allowed Stockton, California to proceed with Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The profligate San Joaquin Valley city of 300,000 is the largest city in the United States ever to declare itself bankrupt.

Stockton is a union-controlled city, whose largest single creditor is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers). The city intends to deploy Chapter 9 bankruptcy to stiff capital market creditors in order to protect its workers’ over-generous pensions. Assured Guaranty and National Public Finance Guarantee, which insure about $260 million of the city’s bond debt, pulled out of negotiations after the city council refused to haircut the city’s single largest creditor,Calpers.

Meanwhile, Stockton was proposing to hair-cut, by 80 per cent, the $125 million in principal on pension obligation bonds that it had issued in 2007 to pay an overdue bill to Calpers. The city claims that its workers and residents have already paid their ‘fair share’ (note how these Obama weasel-words are now entering the nation’s lexicon) and that the time has come for capital creditors to cough up.

In reality, the most significant ‘concessions’ from big labor involved the cutting of bonus pay for things like handling a canine. Many of these fringe benefits had never been formally approved by the city council. Pensions for new workers were modestly trimmed and ‘Lamborghini’ retiree benefits entitling workers who had been employed for only six months to free lifetime medical care, were to be phased out.

In truth, the only way Stockton can solve its self-induced financial problems – in or out of bankruptcy – is to haircut its $147 million unfunded pension liability. Pensions account for 40 per cent of its annual payroll costs. The average firefighter can retire at age 50 with an annuity equal to 90 per cent of his highest year’s salary, including various bonus pay categories.

Stockton cut its workforce by one-third but still ran up a $25 million deficit in 2012. Even if it completely defaults on the $200 million it owes in principal and interest on its pension obligations, it still projects a $100 million deficit over the coming decade.

Calpers threatens to tie Stockton up in court forever and a day if it even attempts to cut pensions. The city is terrified of upsetting this big labor 600 pound gorilla. All of which leaves the city’s bondholders as the likeliest target. Unions have the power, and their view is that their benefits are forever and everyone else’s contract is negotiable.

There is a silver lining in such clouds. How many profligate, union-controlled cities like Stockton will ever be able to make bond issues to cover future debts? Cash flow will control, as it always does, once the California dirty-tricks bankruptcy process is finally over.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!

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Posted in budget deficits, economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Joe Biden: Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the power of 10

March 27, 2013

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was criticized in May 2010 for partying in a swanky New York hotel to the tune of $3,500 per night. At that time, DSK was a presidential candidate in upcoming French elections. He was widely recognized as an insightful economist who had earned a reputation at the IMF for helping to steer Western economies through the 2008 financial crisis.He was expected to win the presidential elections.

In February 2013, Joe Biden, an equally aging Vice President, known primarily for his ability to plagiarize the speeches of others and for a younger second wife who hikes her skirts as she walks in the Inaugural Parade, spent one night at a swanky London hotel, racking up a bill of $485,000 followed by a one night at a swanky Paris hotel, racking up a bill of $585,000. Some night, one might think, some one night stand!

At a time when so many American families are struggling in an economy slowed down by the poor economic management of Obama and Biden, it is disgusting to discover that an aging, second-rate nobody can spend taxpayer monies so extravagantly on one night stands, living it up as though there is no tomorrow.

‘Hey big spender, come spend a little time with me!’

Tell me it ain’t so, Joe

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Posted in Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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