The Looting of America

Throughout her history, the political discussion in America has encompassed a very wide range of issues.  In the last two or three years, however, the discussion has focused on one thing-money.  Whether its the economy, taxes, debt, spending, waste or corruption, it all comes back to money.  One of the primary reasons for this is the unheard of scale of the spending and on what that money is being spent.  Waste measured in millions was bad enough.  Now the graft, corruption, kickbacks and favors are measured in hundreds of billions or even trillions.  We have allowed government to grow so large that the accompanying corruption has become too big to ignore.

     There are two seemingly unrelated stories that illustrate not only the corruption but the reasons for it.  The first is the case of Solyndra.  The basics of this case are as follows.  Solyndra was a solar panel manufacturer hyped by the President as part of his “green energy” initiative that declared bankruptcy earlier this month.  Normally, this wouldn’t have attracted attention beyond Wall Street but in this case, there was half a billion dollars of taxpayer money involved.  Money that is now gone.  Your money.  Five hundred million dollars doesn’t sound like much when we are accustomed to a government in which only amounts over one hundred billion count as real money.  However, what if you, personally, were on the hook for it?  How long would it take you to come up with half a billion dollars?  For the vast, vast majority of us-never.  For an individual in America, a worth of half a billion dollars puts one in the rarefied atmosphere of the “super-rich”.  In most cases, we would have to confiscate the money from all the citizens of whole towns to come up with that kind of money.  Howerver, because it is spread out among all of us, it “only” amounts to about $1.65 for every man, woman and child in America.  $1.65 of your money up in smoke.  Take a dollar out of your wallet and burn it, throw the change down the sewer.  Gone.  (In case that doesn’t get your dander up, “what’s a buck sixty and change?” your personal share of the first stimulus slush fund is over $2300.  Still want to stand there with your wallet and a lighter burning hundred dollar bills?)

    
Where did it go?  Ahh, that is the real rub.  The whole thing was a scam to begin with.  No businessman worthy of the name (unless they graduated from Harvard with the president) would look at a business model that manufactured an item for $6 and sold it for $3 as viable.  It is, however, just the sort of thing those brainwashed in government ideology would consider brilliant.  So a bunch of con men went to the administration, contributed the “pay to play” fee, capitalized on their fanatic ideological adherence to Al Gore’s hoax, and walked away with half a billion dollars of our hard earned money.  They looted the treasury.  Just like GE, GM, the unions, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and thousands of other businesses and organizations with personal or ideological connections.  Political contributions that ensure reelection paid back with taxpayer dollars.

     What makes Solyndra today’s poster child for corruption is the amount and the way it was publicized personally by the president.  That has people screaming for blood but I can practically guarantee that nothing is going to come of it.  The FBI raided the offices, carted away all the evidence and Eric Holder will make sure it is never seen again.  The executives called to testify but will say nothing.  No one’s going to jail, the money will never be recovered and soon there will be other things to worry about.  That is the way it works.

     The second story is the “Fast and Furious” or “Gun Walker” scandal.  In a nutshell, this was supposedly a “sting” run by ATF in which gun dealers in border states were pressured to allow the purchase of guns by criminals who would take them back to Mexico for the purpose of catching the gun dealers.  This proceeded over the objections of the dealers and ATF enforcement personnel until the guns started showing up at the murder scenes of border patrol agents and others.  

     The real reason for this was to create the illusion that lax American gun laws were responsible for the violence along the border.  It is an ideological outcome pushed by a president and administration that is rabidly anti-gun.  What does this have to do with money?  There is only one thing government looters fear and that is insurrection and insurrection is only effective with an armed populace, for an unarmed populace can be looted and enslaved with impunity.  The administration has already imposed greater restrictions on border state gun dealers as a result of this episode even though it was their policies that caused the violence.  The whole scandal was an attempt to justify greater restrictions on our right to “keep and bear arms.”  The looters know that when the exercise of our first amendment rights to protest the theft of our hard earned money is routinely ignored, the exercise of our second amendment rights to “throw off such Government, and provide new Guards for their future security” remains our last resort, fallback position.

  

     So what can we do?  .We need to change our attitude about the purpose of government.  Most Americans now believe the purpose of government is to meet individual needs and it does this by taking from one citizen and giving to another.  For the vast majority of Americas this means they receive a pittance in welfare, health benefits, pensions, FHA loans or educational assistance.  These benefits are measured in the tens of thousands of dollars at most.  For a select few, the benefits of this redistribution are measured in millions or billions.  That may anger those who receive little but the inequitable redistribution of stolen property is incidental to the fact that it is the redistribution of stolen property!  But the game will continue to be played as long as class warfare is effective as a political tactic and the looters can throw out enough pennies to keep us happy while they are getting rich from the treasury. 

      Not only does our attitude toward redistribution and the purpose of government need to change but our attitude toward government itself must change.  Government is not a beneficent entity populated by do-gooders with our best interests in mind.  It is, at best, a “necessary evil” with a monopoly on physical coercion and staffed by thieves and con men.  There are two reasons corruption is so rampant in government; endemic, in fact.  Number one is the obvious.  Government has a monopoly on the use of force to uphold the law.  It is the politicians and, too often, bureaucrats, who decide what the laws are and how to apply them.  They can, and often do, exempt themselves from laws that apply to the rest of us.  They have inside information we are not privy to that enables them to make fortunes or protect themselves from loss.  They are left to police themselves.  Congress, for example, has its own ethics committee staffed by its own members who are loathe to punish one of their own because so many of them are guilty of similar offences.  The congress is tasked with policing the presidency but regardless of how many laws he may break, how he endangers national security, how many people are killed, or if he impoverishes the nation while driving it into bankruptcy, if congress lacks the courage or political will to remove him, he can continue to do what may be irreparable harm to the country they are all supposed to be serving.

     What makes it even worse is the very size of the government; federal, state and increasingly, local.  As the

Solyndra scandal is proving, finding someone on whom to affix blame is nearly impossible.  If everyone engages in CYA it is rare to find an exposed butt to nail.  And on the off chance there is, it is usually some low level bureaucrat with no seniority or friends and they are rarely fired because they may blow the whistle.  No, they are simply moved, and often promoted.  This has been the case in the “Fast and Furious” gun walker case.  Finally, if the machinery of law enforcement and the courts become part of the corruption, those who engage in criminal activities will never be prosecuted.  The current justice department failed to prosecute the Black Panthers for obvious voter intimidation but will nail Gibson Guitar to the wall for its failure to donate to the right political campaign.  Put in the most simple terms, the reason corruption is so pervasive in our government is because its so easy to get away with.  Politicians and multitudes of bureaucrats make the rules, cover for each other, corrupt law enforcement and buy judges.  The higher you go, the more insulated from negative consequences you are. 

      The second reason corruption is so rampant in government is because of the people that inhabit the corridors of power.  Americans seem to have a schizophrenic belief about politicians.  On the one hand we distrust them, expect them to lie in their campaigns and in office and hold them in low esteem in general.  On the other hand, we think the person we specifically vote for is the exception to the rule of general stupidity, greed and corruption so we re-elect most of these people to office.  We have this mistaken belief that our politicians are just like us, basically good, decent people trying to do their best.  This is not the case and once upon a time we understood this.

     “There is a danger from all men.  The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty.”  John Adams.

     “If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and the Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves.  It seems the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”  Thomas Jefferson.

     “I do not believe...that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues.  I believe the great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty.  But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher orders for those, who rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the place of power and profit.  These rogues set out with stealing the people’s good opinion, and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it, contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves.”  Thomas Jefferson.

     The founders were smart and oracular men, were they not?!   In “Leave Me Alone: A Patriot’s Plan for Restoring Pride and Prosperity in America” ( www.leavemealonenow.webs.com ) I stated the following about the people in government.

    “One, the people in government, be they elected representatives or absolute monarchs, thirst for power and other people’s money, they are no more than thieves or bullies.  Or, they believe that they posses exceptional knowledge and wisdom that enable them to know what is best for their fellow man and that it is acceptable to use force to get people to do what is in their best interest according to these “superior” beings.”

     People in government are wolves, rogues, thieves and bullies for the simple reason that they want to take your wealth and freedom for the benefit of others.  They may want it for themselves or their friends.  They may profess lofty motives about helping the poor or disadvantaged.   The reason doesn’t matter because if they desire to do anything other than protect our rights to life, liberty and private property, they are thieves and bullies.  If they refuse to change the system of looting and plundering we have now, protecting the sacred cows of larceny like Social Security, food stamps or Medicare/Medicaid and refuse to hold the pillagers accountable, they are cowards and accessories to the crime.  I know it is hard to wrap your mind around the idea that not only are the politicians, their “contributors” and the friends they appoint to assist them robbers and thieves but all the low level bureaucrats who live off of and distribute these ill gotten gains and the beneficiaries who receive a pittance of the plunder are all guilty of receiving and distributing stolen goods.  

   

    It used to be that this corruption in attitude and action were of a small scale and relatively hidden.  But as government has exploded in size, so has the scale of the corruption.  Millions in waste, fraud, abuse and graft have become billions, hundreds of billions and now trillions.  Contracts worth billions, regulations or subsidies that can make or break businesses, tax policy than can mean the difference between profit and loss and legislation which can literally mean life and death have turned our government into a high stakes game in which the only way to survive is to appease the gods of government. 

    President Obama and his administration have boldly laid bare all the ugliness of government.  He and his cronies are brazen in their contempt for those he desires to punish and rob, he does not hide his racism, he attacks his perceived enemies with explicit and dangerous language and he continually pushes policies and an ideology that are culturally, economically and physically detrimental to our nation.  It is now obvious that we have a group of vindictive thugs running our government.  They are a super aggressive parasite that is sucking the blood out of its national host and destroying anyone or anything that tries to get in their way.  Our salvation will not come through half measures, parsed language or compromise with a system of piracy.  Only when we the people develop a “zero tolerance” policy for theft and corruption, stop electing the same rogues and wolves and no longer accept the ill gotten gains of these bandits will we save our country for ourselves and our children.  

Mike Calpino

www.leavemealonenow.webs.com