It’s Official, Israel is not a Democracy

 

Israel, despite what most people believe, has ceased to be a democratic state. Israel has become a form of oligarchy. There exists a select group who have decided that their opinions are to be set as rulings by which everything else may proceed. These selected elite have decided that they are all-powerful. They are empowered to have the greatest say as to whom they will permit to become one of their anointed elites. They have the power to strike down any law or other decision by the elected of Israel, the Knesset. After forcing the Knesset to bow before their omnipotent powers, they then turned to the IDF. They tested the waters and found that their opinions outweighed the orders of commanders and before you know it, they were deciding every move of the Israeli military. There latest infraction was overruling the Election Commission and reversing virtually every decision they had debated and voted on concerning the next elections. The Election Commission is made up of elected members of the Knesset while these elites may never have been approved by more than one or at most two Knesset members and instead elected by an elite group of like-minded individuals of which three of the nine are amongst the sitting elites. Just in case you are still wondering of what we are referencing, the Israeli Supreme Court just decided that theirs is the last say in who may and may not be on the ballot in the upcoming Israeli April 9, 2019, elections.

 

They reached a decision which has great approval if your idea of great approval is the majority of those found sipping some exotic coffee along the beach in Tel Aviv thinking that spending seventy-five shekels for a cup of coffee is a bargain. The average Israel spends at most ten shekels for a cup of coffee, and that comes with a croissant. But who needs the input of those boors who cannot afford a decent cup of coffee. They need to be led and only provided wise choices as approved by their betters. Thus, the Israeli Supreme Court has taken up the arbitrator of who may and may not be permitted to run for the Knesset. Provided your party believes that Israel must be a multi-cultural state completely devoid of any reference to the Jews, then you are their kind of candidate. If, on the other hand, you have ever read or listened to anything by Rabbi Kahane, then you are to be stricken from the ballot as you are a murdering racist. There is that key word again, racist. Their favorite claim is that you have a picture of Baruch Goldstein hanging on the living room wall to which you face when you say your morning prayers. This is a trope with which they cast any religious-Zionist as revering the murderous, evil, and we will say it ourselves when it is required, racist maligner of all that is holy. Religious-Zionists and the vast majority of those who are cast as being of the boorish right, there is no other kind of right in their sight, are claimed to approve if not laud, what that murdering embarrassing miscreant who has provided so many with the perfect whip to try and beat any opposition into submission, his acts. That is as untrue as it could be as we treasure life, all life, as anybody who has taken actual account of Israeli actions even in time of war knows; religious Jews and Jews generally worship life and abhor death. Israel actually treasures the lives of their enemies often more so than do their enemies’ own leadership who readily sacrifice them for political expediency.

 

Those who follow, we would like to say understand but so few understand exactly how Israeli politics works, Israel and their governance realizes, ever since Chief Justice Aharon Barak who advanced a judicial activist approach ruling that everything is adjudicable. Using this crack in the door, the Israeli Supreme Court has literally blown the door right off of its hinges. The Supreme Court has gone well beyond simply striking down laws enacted by the elected Knesset, but has made law and then enforced same, overruled decisions by the Prime Minister, Knesset, Defense Minister, Field Commanders, all the way down to company commanders and anything else they saw and believed required their sagely intervention. When the selection process currently in place permits for the Supreme Court includes the Justice Minister who chairs the selection, one Cabinet Minister who is chosen by the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, two members of the Bar Association, two Knesset Members usually one member from the coalition and one from the opposition, the Chief Justice and two justices from the sitting Supreme Court. Any casual perusing of the selection committee will very quickly realize that the legal profession has a total lock on who is selected and the elected members on the committee are pretty much window dressing made to have it appear the people will have their will represented. If you take the three Supreme Court justices plus one Knesset member from either the coalition or the opposition, one of these is likely to accept a nominee while the other would not, and the two members of the Bar Association and you realize that no candidate will attain the seven votes necessary for elevation to the Supreme Court without the support of most of these individuals whose main criteria is to keep the court representative of far left, progressive policies. The Israeli Supreme Court has not seriously changes their political view or leanings since the early 1960’s, if ever. This has led to a Supreme Court which no longer represents the people of Israel. Where many in Europe and across this wide world will claim that anything which denies the average Israeli power over the actions of the nation is a good thing, such would not be approved of in any other nation. One can only wonder how long any sitting Supreme Court in the United States would remain if they were to decide that they were to be permitted final say over all decisions made by Congress, the President, the individual states and were to be allowed to review and countermand military orders to their forces. This is what the world claims is required in Israel only because the current Israeli Supreme Court is just as left as they tend to be.

 

Chief Justice Aharon Barak

 

There are claims that should members of some of the political parties be granted the position of Justice Minister, they will rein in the Supreme Court. Some claim they will make Supreme Court selection be made by the Prime Minister or Justice Minister and approved by the Knesset. We have heard this siren’s song before and have yet to see it come to fruition. There is a simple question which need be answered; who honestly believes that the Israeli Supreme Court, the arbiters of all that is considered holy, will allow any new means of selecting their successors which leaves them out of the loop instead of being the entire loop to stand and not simply declare such a law as void. With the Supreme Court presumably sitting in decision over everything emanating from the Knesset and the Prime Minister, Justice Minister, the rest of the cabinet and virtually everything else short of landing rights at Ben Gurion Airport (likely because they had not considered such before) would allow any law which changes their near god-like powers from continuing. If and when such a piece of legislation is passed by the Knesset, something which would require more intestinal fortitude than unfortunately is lacking in far too many Israeli politicians, and signed by the Prime Minister, another highly improbable occurrence, the Supreme Court would pounce upon it like a male guppy eating its offspring and that would be the end of that legislation. We would give odds that after such, the majority of Knesset Ministers would then claim that they had attempted to fulfill the desires of the people and were thwarted and thus there was nothing further they could do.

 

Wrong, and is wrong on so many levels. First, and equally obvious, they could continue to pass normal legislation demanding the changes they desire. But there is another step they could take which would potentially bring on what would be a constitutional crisis, if only Israel had a constitution. But Israel has what most consider the next best thing, Basic Laws. These Basic Laws are treated like the rough draft for a constitution. They are the only laws requiring that they receive sixty-one affirmative votes, a majority of the entire Knesset. Oh, regular laws only require that the Knesset be in session and then a majority of those casting votes. If you have a group of you and six (could be almost any number) of like minded members of the Knesset and a single official who is permitted to call the Knesset into session, then technically you could pass any legislation you desired, for a first vote. Every piece of legislation is required to pass three such votes and between the first and second, if not from the outset, must pass through at least one Knesset committee. This means that though you may have passed such legislation to get it on the books, if you do not have general agreement, then you legislation will fail on the subsequent votes. But a basic law requires a majority of the Knesset to pass, which is not an easy task, as we would rather have to herd a hundred kittens than herd together sixty-one Knesset members agreeing on anything including that the sky is blue and water is wet. To date, the Supreme Court has resisted vetoing any legislation which was passed as a Basic Law, but if how new Supreme Court Justices are chosen were to pass as a Basic Law, we might just see an exception and their intervening to cut it from the rule of law even as a Basic Law. This would be the declaration of war between the legislative and judicial branches of government and it would be an ugly and drawn out affair. Sure, we would have lots to write about, but who would want to read about such a bloodletting?

 

What we would wait for is when the other idea being put forth would become law, Basic Law preferably. That idea is that the Knesset could override the ruling of a law being unacceptable by the Supreme Court with a two-thirds vote of the entire Knesset, or simply with eighty votes out of the one-hundred-twenty Knesset members. Gathering such would be impossible, as it has been difficult enough to form a coalition which merely requires sixty-one members whose party leaders are willing to join the elected Prime Minister. Of course, one could claim that every Prime Minister of Israel was selected and not elected. The not elected is easy as no party in a very long time, nor is likely in the near or distant future, has received sixty-one mandates and thus able to form a coalition by themselves. This means that no head of a party received a majority of the vote, which is expected when you have at least a dozen parties. The way one becomes Prime Minister is that the President of Israel selects the party he feels is most capable of forming a coalition, and if they fail he may choose another party to give it a go, and eventually he will simply call for new elections as he would run out of leaders to choose. More often than not, the party chosen also is the party which received the most votes, though such was not the case not so long ago as a left-centrist party, Kadima, received twenty-eight mandates while the Likud received merely twenty-seven mandates, but the President chose the Likud to form a coalition first, which they were able to do easily, well, easily under Israeli guidelines. Yes, there was much caterwauling from the left claiming that Kadima could have easily formed a coalition though their arguments often only added up to fifty-seven mandates, if that, which would not be sufficient, but who needs reality when arguing politics, as many will claim, not us. In all honesty, we do attempt never to use our own facts unless we make sure to state it is conjecture, or it be obviously such.

 

Does Israel require some limitations being placed on the Supreme Court? The answer is most definitely. What Israel requires even more is an actual constitution which has been approved, even if it need be done in increments over a two-year period, by the majority of people voting on the actual wording. Having the constitution approved in its entirety would be preferable, but would also be so unlike the way things get done in Israel. The first thing which would need to be sorted out is that the Supreme Court would have absolutely no say beyond as an advisory group in the forming of said constitution. Further, the constitution would be required to address things beyond limitations on the Supreme Court or how Supreme Court and other justices are chosen. The constitution should also make a system by which the Prime Minister becomes directly elected by the people, some form of bicameral legislature and a means for amending the constitution which should include acceptance by the electorate by at a minimum, a majority and preferable sixty-percent. We even have ideas on how such could be accomplished.

 

Electing the Prime Minister would simply be convoluted, as is everything here in Israel, with each person casting three votes, a first choice weighing five points, a second choice receiving three points and a third choice receiving one point. The person with the most points wins. Perhaps that was not as painful as we thought. The bicameral legislature is going to be a bit more trouble. The lower house would be chosen exactly as is the current Knesset with the parties being the recipient of the votes and selecting their own lists. Without permitting the parties such power, no constitution could ever win approval of the Knesset. Next would be the upper house which would have anywhere from sixty to seventy-five members, we will not pick the exact number. These people would be directly elected with voters having five choices weighted as follows, ten for first, seven for second, five for third, three for fourth and finally one for fifth. The people who receive the highest number of points would make up the other house and as such would be selected directly by the people. Would such an idea ever be accepted is less the question than would such an idea ever be floated other than in an editorial. Such a constitution would not only limit the powers of the Supreme Court, it would undercut the current powers of the parties and the Knesset would share legislative power with a second body which was more responsive to the people. The Prime Minister would also now be directly elected. There would need be the allowing for parties whose members are selected for the other body to lift them from their Knesset list allowing the next person to fill the slot with a similar condition made for the Prime Minister. This is necessary simply because the individual parties would insist on placing their most popular people on their lists but would not stand losing their position if they also were selected by the popular vote. On the other side, many people would shy from seeking the directly elected position when they know they would have a safe position on their party list. The aim is to get the best people chosen by the people into the government giving the people and the parties each as much latitude as possible. Israelis deserve the best the parties have to offer and also the best individuals regardless of parties. The constitution also need make lists of those seeking office beyond the reach of the Supreme Court and possibly beyond the reach of an election commission and simply allow the people to decide. Of course, just allow the electorate to decide is an anathema to those who hold power simply because of their swelled self-worth. Personally, I would rather be ruled by five-hundred Israelis chosen completely at random than the selected candidates chosen by the parties, but that would never fly. Perhaps that could be a choice on the presented possibilities for a constitution and perhaps others will see the wisdom, if any, in that plan. At least everyone would have equal opportunity to be in the Knesset, which would make things interesting to say the least. The best we can hope for now is for integrity to slip into Israeli governance and thus the ability to form a constitution which empowers the people over the selected few who currently are placed in power. Eventually, the people will demand no less, eventually being the operative word.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

America and the World at Pivotal and Vital Crossroads

 

The direction and future of the United States of America will be decided in the next two decades with each election telling the direction the nation will choose. We have all heard that there are two Americas, one cosmopolitan in the major cities and the other a rural-religious sector. These two sectors are at odds with one another. The cosmopolitans of the cities favor a more nihilist view that everything is relative and no one culture is superior to any other. Through this view, they favor universalism and the eventual submission of the Constitution to world bodies and singular world governance. The rural religious have exactly the opposite view seeing the United States Constitution as the bedrock upon which the nation rests. They believe, as did the founding fathers, that the Judeo-Christian roots upon which the United States was built and became the powerful nation that she is are a necessary component through which the Constitution is supported. The divide between these two viewpoints was in full evidence in the last Presidential election in which one group swallowed their moral conviction as they found themselves looking at choosing the lesser of two evils. One candidate had a moral history, which was deplorable at best, and the other candidate had honesty issues and then, the main reason they rejected that candidate, there was the full support of the leftist, nihilist, anti-Judeo-Christian ethic and universalist views. One candidate was further rejected because of what many in their party supported while the other candidate had been rejected by much of their party, the elites, which the rural voters probably saw as advantageous.

 

This divide is only going to grow with the rural-religious losing eventually simply due to the population of the cities growing and rural regions slowly losing their small farmers who are being replaced by large industrial farming which can produce more food per acre and thus are better suited for survival while many farming families children are seeking higher education in order to take jobs in the cities. Within a century there will be virtually no rural-religious left except for what many will look down on referring to them as political Luddites. The eventual effect of this can be directly traced to the education system and the effect making it a national system under the control of the Deep State in Washington D.C. instructing every school what they must include in their educational curriculum. These requirements were items such as sex education, elimination of any references to religion (especially Judeo-Christian while exempting Islamic Quranic teachings), gender sensitivity, racial sensitivity, gender variations, acceptance of all forms of what had previously been considered sexual deviance, and including reading material such as “Heather Has Two Mommies” and similar material. But the curriculum of the public school system is benign when compared to the indoctrination offered as supposed higher education in the major colleges and universities. Here is where the future leaders are trained and here is where the New Age curriculum is taught with any student showing any signs of deviation from the approved teachings reprimanded and driven into compliance, silence or failed out of college or university.

 

Deep State

 

The major institutions no longer teach critical thinking or platonic rationality but instead teach compliance with the far leftist doctrine, universality, equality of all cultures, rejection of religious belief, nihilism and condemnation of the history of the United States as being too powerful and bullying the world. They are taught that the United States was not a force for good because good is relative and thus there can never be a force for good because good means different things to different people. This has an added instructional belief that what is considered to be moral and good by Judeo-Christian ethics is false because it has oppressed people in the past and the reality is that all the other belief systems in the world which were presumably oppressed by the United States really should be given equal treatment and placed before Judeo-Christianity as that has been the main force which has destroyed much of the world. They are taught that the advanced industrial nations are only wealthy because they stole the wealth of the poor nations. Thus, it is taught that the conclusion is that the industrial world owes the third world an equal share in the wealth produced. Further, the most primitive cultures are denoted as superior as they do less harm to Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, and that the developed world has caused most of the pollution and are still responsible for the destruction of the earth. Global warming and climate change being anthropomorphic is presented as established fact and some places use Al Gores’ book, Earth in the Balance, as a text and allowed to be set as validated truth despite almost every prediction in the book having been proven false.

 

The youth have no record in their short lives and are unaware of how far the United States and the developed world have come in cleaning the air, water and general environment. Fortunately, we are old enough to remember smog and air quality hazard warnings and some select rivers catching fire and lakes so choked with plant life that fish could not survive. All of these have become history because the people of America demanded this of industry and they complied. Much of what the youth are taught about pollution is complete fabrication. They are taught that it was because the government forced industry to comply with air quality and water quality standards that they cleaned up their act. The reality is these regulations came after much of the cleaning up had been done and were put in place more as campaign material than as effective restrictions on industry. Yes, there were the minority who had not caught up, but major industry such as most production and power companies had met or surpassed the required standards before the legislation had even been written and many believe that the standards were written such that the vast majority of industries were already meeting them. This was actually a means of forcing smaller competitors into financial difficulty making them more easily bought out by the larger conglomerates. But many of our higher educational institutions are beholden to those same conglomerates for a large share of their funding and thus remain relatively untouchable. This is why in an economics course the company one is supposed to make ‘widgets’ and not cars or furniture.

 

The future of the United States is going to be a slow but inexorable slide towards universalism and in favor of single world governance. This is what is being fed to the future leaders and the election of President Trump will likely be regarded in history as an unexplainable exception where the United States rebelled against the eventual unification of the world under one governance with one religion. What religion, you ask? Well, if you must know that has yet to be decided, but it will not be Judaism or any of the various Christian faiths, they will have been discarded for something more nuanced and accepting of the masses being governed by their intellectual elite, as they are better suited for knowing what is best. The future government will be an oligarchical plutocratic meritocracy where the world is governed by an extensive group of bureaucratic departments which are controlled loosely by the usual power brokers, the wealthy, the major corporations and a selection of self-appointed oligarchs. Elections will be meaningless as no matter who the people elect in their local elections, those elected leaders will be compelled to perform under strict guidance from those in the overriding international bureaucracy who have been determined to know what everyone needs and they will control production, distribution and all of the levers of power. Any local elected group who attempts to exercise independent rule will simply be starved into compliance by strictly regulating food, energy or any other vital necessity. This exercise of totalitarian control will not be intended to force these recalcitrant elected leaders to comply but to persuade the electorate that these people are unsuitable to hold elected office.

 

There will be a few select regions or even some nations, which will refuse to participate in this overarching governance and will demand their independence and self-reliance. They will have to give some power to the world governance in order to trade with them and thus receive those materials, be they raw material for production, produced material, foods that are not native to their region and other specifics. There may even be states which decide that they would be better off ruling themselves and since the United States Constitution will have become nothing more than a museum piece on display at the National Archives alongside Ross Perot’s copy of the Magna Carta which he will possibly leave them in his will, so there will be nothing preventing their secession. Truthfully, even under the Constitution a state is permitted to choose to secede from the United States as the states joined the nation voluntarily and are permitted to exit should they choose. The Civil War always comes up when this is taught. President Abraham Lincoln was very likely the most unconstitutional President the nation ever had as he all but threw the Constitution aside for the duration of the Civil War otherwise he would have had to allow the South to secede and be the Confederated States of America. If you were to ask us which state might choose to go their own way, we can name two, Alaska and Wyoming as both of these states have populations which are ferociously independent simply because of the conditions in these two states demands total-self-reliance. As for countries which will probably remain outside any world government, that is a far more difficult question. Possibly Israel might decide it would be better to go it alone for two basic reasons, first it would be impossible to remain the Jewish State and also be included in the world governance. The Vatican would also remain independent though they would probably demand a seat at the table. India and China have the populations and the ability to feed their own people such that they might demand some level of independence. Other than these, your guess would likely be better than ours.

 

The world religion would be required to allow for two things, a totalitarian style rule by the chosen elite and without any deistic or divine entity, as the all-powerful being will be the super-world-state governance which will be a bureaucratic nightmare yet will mange to function despite itself. If the framers of the system which will eventually be installed are intuitive and intelligent, they will make sure to allow for some amount of freedom at the more local levels. The problem is even if such is in the initial design, over time the bureaucracy at the top will usurp that power and steal any independence they originally maintained. Eventually this governance will fail and the world will break again into regional nations with the added change that there will be a trend towards greater cooperation as after the years under a single governance there will be less differences between the separate regions. Then again, the future could also hold a coming of World War III and we will all be thrown back to the Stone Age with small pockets of people surviving the conflagrations which will result. Either way, the freedoms which many currently enjoy is going to be taken from their children and their children one way or the other.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Trump Should Let the People Decide

 

We all know how President Trump loves poking Democrats whenever he has an opportunity. Some of us know he enjoys the same sport against certain Republicans. Further, it should be known that there is a group which President Trump trusts implicitly, the American People as a whole. These are the ones who placed him in the White House with hope that he would perform as advertised and not as his checkered past might indicate. Thus far, they have not been let down. That is why President Trump needs to trust this same group to end the witch trials going on in the United States Senate under the guise of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings where Advise and Consent has become Deride and Accuse. The drama, or caricature of a drama, has been playing out in the Senate chambers and across the front pages of numerous newspapers. In many instances, what has been written bore little in common with what was actually occurring. Topping this bill were the headlines touting the bravery of “Senator Booker Releases Secret Kavanaugh Emails In Defiance Of Senate Rules” when in reality those Emails were cleared for public release numerous hours before his defiant claims, but why let a few small facts get in the way of aggrandizing a potential 2020 Presidential nominee making hay while the sun shines. Every word uttered by a Democrat Senator was repeated breathlessly as if coming from Socrates or the Oracle at Delphi. The Republican Senators were either ignored or deemed inconsequential, which if by that they meant not critical enough, they got that one correct. But they had nothing to add to the broadsides launched by their Democrat colleagues. So, now the entire fight appears to be coming down to how a small number of wayward Republican and vulnerable Democrat Senators will vote on the Kavanaugh confirmation. What is a President with questionable influence to do?

 

Well, there is something President Trump could do which would have the Democrats and media, but we repeat ourselves, up in arms and crying foul. All President Trump needs do is ask Senator Graham to table the nomination until January and announce that he will meet the Democrat demand that he wait for the midterm election results before having Kavanaugh confirmed. He can state unequivocally that this election will be about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and other people whom he will nominate to judgeships in the future and their right to a fair and impartial hearing based on the facts and not last minute grandstanding and accusations which could have been aired early in the proceedings and been properly vetted instead of all the shrill partisanship we have seen in the past two weeks. President Trump can state that he will allow the people to decide and that he will stand by their decision. This would give President Trump two large pluses for his side. The first is that this would call the Democrats’ bluff and make the election all about Kavanaugh, something the Democrats actually fear despite grandstanding on the demand that the confirmation should be held after the midterm elections. Second, it takes the focal point of the election off of the President and places it instead on the Senate confirmation hearings which would permit both sides to use whatever snippets they believe best depict their side or most color the opposition in a bad light in their campaigns and takes away from what did President Trump Tweet today as the central point. Let’s face it, if you were President Trump and you were looking at a choice between him or Kavanaugh in campaigns about who would you trust, Kavanaugh wins hands down compared to Trump. Besides, it would show that the President trusts the people over the Swamp, as it has properly been labeled plus it would not only take the wind out of the Democrat’s sail, it would expose them further as rejectionist as we can be as sure as we are that the sun will rise tomorrow that there will be the same Democrats out in the media crying that Trump is trying to divert the election from himself onto Kavanaugh and how this is totally unfair as it denies the Democrats of their vote on this important position immediately, as the constitution demands.

 

Remember that these are the same people claiming that the Constitution would favor a longer deliberation even if it took the nomination to beyond the election granting the people a chance to vote on the nomination. Have the vote before the midterms and the Democrats claim that President Trump is rushing the vote due to the coming Blue Wave and push the vote till after the election and President Trump is trying to make the election all about Kavanaugh while ignoring all the other enormous issues which need to be discussed. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t; this is the perfect example of just such a situation. Calling the Democrats’ bluff is the surest means for exposing their duplicity and will be evidence that all they desire is to be seen opposing everything Trump. President Trump would be well served to make a habit out of granting the Democrats exactly what they demand whenever it is guaranteed to have them then take the opposite side and demand that the President not do as they had demanded. There will be numerous times this will present itself as one of the many options and this is one which will also assist with draining the Swamp. This is actually the greatest; some might say sole, saving grace and accomplishment of President Trump’s election thusfar. Trump has opened can after can and jar after jar and emptied the contents of worms and other unseemly things throughout government, the media and the numerous arms and appendages of the government and revealed to anyone paying the slightest attention exactly how rotted to the core the entirety of the Federal Government has become and how the people need to awaken and take back their control and put Washington on a strict diet until the power is back with the States and individual cities, counties and other local governances. This is something citizens of all stripes and parties should be able to agree upon, that the centralization of power in Washington D.C. is an abomination which threatens the freedoms and liberties which Americans have fought, bled and died to protect and are now slipping away with only the slightest amount of time remaining to start to reverse this deadly trend. Some call it the Swamp while others the Deep State, either way it is entrenched and its roots have grown deep.

 

Deep State

 

This should be a people issue where it is favoring empowering each and every person and taking power away from what can only be classified as oligarchs ruling over their individual fiefdoms which has become what the individual Departments and even individual subcommittees which are assigned specific jobs which somehow never reach any conclusion other than their requiring additional funding the next year. This is how the Federal Government has mutated, as it was never intended to act and behave in this manner. The design under that document that many leftists declare old and no longer usable in this modern times, the Constitution, was constructed with care by some of the most progressive and intellectual political minds of the era in concert with, and here is where the critics hit the nail on the head, some rich, established, privileged, unelected, white men whose main objective was to empower the people and, if anything, handicap the central Federal Government such that it would remain a secondary power to the local governments when it came to the lives of the people within the borders of the United States. This concept has been given short shrift as elected officials continued to take power from the states and local governments and move it to Washington D.C. where the bureaucrats eventually got a taste for power and politicians grew lazy allowing the individual agencies to flesh out the applications and consequences of their ideas by passing legislation which assigned the application to render the desired, or undesired, results from a vague concept to various named agencies and too often added, “and any agency which finds applicable use,” to the legislation. This is what spawned a very aggressive growth industry, which found itself capable of taking a single piece of poorly defined legislation and generating hundreds if not thousands of regulations of which many were beyond even the wildest of applications never dreamed of by the Congressional legislators. This gave rise to special departmental groups within departments who were tasked with applying these regulations and who, some many years later, are still in the process of setting up the application and if only they would get a twenty percent increase in funding they might be able to next year only ask for fifteen percent increase with little if any progress to show for it. Here is a PDF file on Government Waste for your perusing pleasure. We could give additional links, but those should do quite well and we feel assured that most of you already have a decent idea of the problem.

 

What is difficult is the solution, something that Congress is want to take the necessary steps towards slimming down the various out of control agencies, which is all of them. The problem is these government projects become income streams to the State and local government through which campaign donors, relatives, friends and people of influence are provided with their payback or investment for their support. This is one of the reasons the same road is repaved every two years taking exactly two years to complete and the connecting roads where the potholes abound are basically ignored or patched on rare occasions after a car fell into a pothole which thought it was a sinkhole. That is simply the most obvious example that most of us have witnessed. Another item is they are always building new bridges or highways and seldom repairing the older ones allowing them to collapse such that a new bridge or roadway is required. There is a reason for this as well. Where you will always see signs dedicating the Senator or Governor What’s-his-face Bridge but never this Bridge Repaired by signs because people get upset when you mess with traffic to repair the bridge but are pleased when the new bridge or roadway is completed and can finally be utilized. Ending spending means people will lose their cozy little jobs somewhere down the line and this is never good for reelection. Reelection counts on additional spending for things which have already passed their use-by-date just because it employs, by then, a few hundred people, and that is worth ten times more votes than saving tax monies. When have you heard somebody campaign with a specific agenda of cutting twenty-five percent of the budget and getting elected? If such a person exists, we are willing to bet they did not deliver or even make a valiant attempt at fulfilling that promise. That is because as soon as they got to their newly elected position, they were taken aside and told how things work.

 

We bet many people would love to know why the government continues to throw good money after bad time and time again. Well, it is easy to find the reasoning. Imagine you had a job, say Congressperson or Senator, and you could invest your money, even up to ten thousand dollars you do not have on trust, into any stocks you desired. I know, so what? Now imagine that you knew that in six weeks Company X was going to receive a ten-billion dollar government contract. Now, you take this knowledge and buy as much of Company X stock as you are able and then one week later after the contract has been voted upon, passed and the public been told via the news, this was big news, the company that before this contract was worth maybe one-hundred-thousand dollars will now greatly expand. Their stock price quadrupled and now you sell your stock and take home a tidy profit. Now let us assume you can do this for a number of years. One would expect at some point you would be charged with insider trading. Well, that is where you would be wrong because the House and Senate saw their way to making the elected figures and the top people in their staff all immune to insider trading laws. That is how a Congresscritter is elected and goes to Washington with maybe a quarter of a million dollars (if that) and after two years is worth fifty million dollars despite their salary being a paltry $174,000. This is the reason that they spend millions of dollars to get elected to Washington D.C. and also why the swamp will be so difficult to drain, the Representatives, Senators, senior staff and friends use these offices as money making ventures at the peoples’ expense.

 

Hopefully, if you are an American, you are fairly upset with this lucrative set up used by your elected representatives to line their own and close by people’s pockets with your money. Well, the first step is to organize a nationwide project to change the way things are done. You first target will be that exemption from insider trading and the appointment of somebody to enforce insider trading laws against elected representatives and their close associates, staff and friends. This might be called the Insider Outing Group which would want 503 C3 tax-exempt non-profit status. Then you need to get 220 Representatives and 61 Senators to sign a pledge to end the insider trading exemption for all involved and currently covered and their dedication to making this stick permanently. Further, you might start petitions in every state to pass legislation calling to amend the Constitution making such acts by all elected representatives and those around them both illegal with Federal prison time and an impeachable offence. Once their money train has dried up, then and only then, they might be persuaded to act honorably and finally actually cut spending and not just cut the rate of increase of spending. That is another slight of hand used by politicians. They take what the budget as planned with a certain increase, often thirty percent, and then cut the increase in half making it fifteen percent and then claim they cut spending fifteen percent. This way they claim a fifteen percent cut in spending while actually increasing spending by fifteen percent. The really deceitful would claim they cut spending in half in that situation because as long as they can convince themselves what they say is true, that is half the battle, as they know the people will rarely check and call them on these lies. The only way to strip Washington D.C. of their free-spending addiction will be to take the personal profit production out of the equation and then one would still need to force discipline on the elected representatives or replace them regularly. There is some truth in the saying that, “elected representatives and diapers need regular changing and for the same reason.” President Trump took a step in the right direction, but may not have gone far enough, when he instituted a policy where for every new regulation instituted, that department was required to nullify two existing regulations.

 

It would have been more productive and might have mattered if he had made it five regulations out for every new one put in. Unfortunately, it will take a form of revolution from the people to bring the government under control. It really is a self-perpetuating and out of control monster and it will eat the country into the poor house. President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address about the need to watch over the Military-Industrial Complex, he should have said Government-Military-Industrial Complex. Just as President Washington warned of the evils of political parties in his prescient farewell address, so was Eisenhower and between them they may have targeted the two main problems the people will face against them taking back their nation. We can only hope that the people of America are capable and able of recovering their lost power and becoming the masters of their destiny as was the hope of the Founding Fathers. One thing we often hear in rumor is that there was a strong affiliation between Biblical Law and how the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with often reference to Deuteronomy limiting the wealth of kings in their possessions. We did run across something peculiar from Dr. Andrew Porwancher, a core faculty member of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the Oklahoma University who has researched Alexander Hamilton going back to his birth and other peculiarities and posits that Mr. Hamilton was Jewish. We will leave that as is and, along with this link, each can assign whatever value they care to on these items. Whatever the beginnings of the American adventure, it has taken ill and is in need of resuscitation and requires that its bleeding of treasure through the deficit spending have a tourniquet applied and have it stopped while there is still hope. The world would become a poorer place without the United States and it would be quite painful to watch as she committed suicide.

 

Beyond the Cusp