In Focus: Diane Feinstein's End Game

We all know what enhanced interrogation really means, we all know that it isn’t something to be exactly happy about doing. No one wants to have to water board another person after all. But it is ahistorical if she’s trying to say the CIA and Military acted without the people’s approval to do these things. I can say they had mine; my perspective was and is that those individuals lost the right not to be interrogated the way they were when they sided with the people who took away the right of 3000 people to have a peaceful life on 9/11. But where is this woman going with this? What’s her end game?

Feinstein is dangerously close to being at Henry Kissinger level, Kissinger in my eyes is a scavenger picking the carrion of our dead soldiers and quenching his thirst on our living American warriors’ blood and sweat. When people say things like what Diane did it’s to put people on the defensive, that’s the whole goal but when I see things like this on instinct as a gut reaction I go on the offense but before I speak I do my research and in this case what I found was motive and precedence that could explain Diane’s possibly ill guised actions. And I say ill guised because after you consider another event that happened this week then you realize what is really going on here.

Immediately if you are a conservative you’re thinking well this is supposed to distract from the Gruber case, no it isn’t that’s not the point. Everyone is still watching that and nothing will change regardless what Diane says. While it may work as a boon for her party with a niche group of the population the average American is more interested in what’s in their wallet and Gruber’s case has been explained enough for us to not care what Congress says to him, we expected the government to take action on the AHCA repeal with or without Gruber, if they don’t there will be a constitutional crisis at a level not seen since the years before the civil war.

But I digress Feinstein has a special interest and as I mentioned before about bad policy crafting the second person needed to craft a bad policy about what she intends is a useful idiot aka the person who wants to do the right thing. The special interest is vested in her husband who is heavily invested in Chinese firms and has scored in the past hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts in part thanks to the hard work of his Mrs. Feinstein and the tax payer to fund legislation that funnels money to those Chinese firms.

The event that happened this week was that Congress completed a 1.1 Trillion dollar spending bill… The bill will be hated for now and rightfully so because concessions were made after the voter had established a mandate on Congress to act in reversal of the Democrats and Presidents agenda. However it will be later lauded for having been fiscally responsible, that’s just the ebb and flow of the news cycle. The issue for Diane and the reason for her release is that the bill did not have a resolution in favor of China with regards to IMF control.  What the Chinese wanted from the spending bill was for America to allow a governing board change from 5 to 10 positions, presently there are 24 total so this would allow for stronger representation by China and Russia in the IMF.  The new top positions would then be appointed by the current members and China, Russia and the olive branch Korea. -The focus is on China reader, stay focused, Korea doesn’t matter because the Chinese can exert military pressure on them to make favorable appointments- It wouldn’t be the Chinese without a second distraction from the point of this power play and the second distraction is that there would be a quota increase from developing countries into the fund by 6% and a decrease 6% from the largest contributors. The numbers stay around the same but the end result is China asserts an incredible amount of control over the value of goods in America.

Either with forethought or out of sheer ignorance of the depth of passing a spending bill with those concessions Republicans dodged the bullet that would have sent and rightfully so every sensible American to grab their fire arms once the fact that they essentially sold America sunk in.

Now I understand that this post has been rife with mention of armed rebellion, but such is the state of the union. Diane Feinstein owes Americans an apology for her inconsiderate march to profit.  But I can’t hold it against her though, she’s a politician, she isn’t interested in the truth; she’s interested in legacy and wealth.  

Al Sharpton in Focus

The sinister Al Sharpton is a little man with a simple ambition so this will be brief:

Martin Luther King did the most damage to those of a darker complexion in America than three hundred years of slavery ever could have done. King died a martyr and either he created for himself or had created for him an elevated status to where he can only be accountable to god. This means criticism of King has been subverted by faith and as a result King in death achieved the status of a Monarch... a King. And when criticism and rational argumentation is by and a large no longer considered seriously anything becomes possible. Even something like Al Sharpton who is a phoney, a con artist, a scammer, a liar, a charlatan, a smile in a cheap suit and a really bad person  who can accumulate credibility by putting actions, words and ideals in mouths of an entire demographic in the name of a dead man... if this sounds familiar reader then we probably agree.


We live in America we have no national 'community leaders' that are not in Congress or in the White House.

Vetting Obamagration

I could simply say that Barack Obama has broken the law by unilaterally taking an action outside of crisis that will have long term implications on three hundred million American citizens. However the reason my posts are at length is because I hope for my readers that whatever I type isn't enough detail; skepticism till it hurts is my motto and I want to give as much of the context and my argument as possible with each word.

I covered wage stagnation before and the effect this will have in raising the minimum wage argument in the coming years. In short raising the minimum wage on a national level is the most damning thing that could happen to Americas global competitiveness, more businesses will flee this country because the incentive will be to go to where opportunity is and it wont be here. There are varying data points that could change this though but the end result are determined by one thing and one thing only: the consumer. If the consumer can shoulder the burden without inflation then we will be fine however you don't have to be a cynical thinker know that isn't a trend when these sequence of events start to roll.

Let's throw away the constitution for a second, and look at the common sense solutions using history as a back drop. I think this is the problem for most Americans that support the argument that the President was right to act alone and that it was legal, the problem is that those Americans may not have historical context... the further problem may be that they have no respect for the context. The boogie man of all rationality is that even if you are right the other side has faith in their position. Historically and as a consequence the moment one man tells a thousand others what to do with force to ensure his dictate is done that man has become a tyrant, this is simple definition. The natural state of men has two fronts we will seek to do things that advance us and what advances us has values assigned to them that are unique to the individual. Becoming a slave for instance is not something people normally want, enslaving others is something some people could want. How we rationalize that situation is to say that the want not to be a slave ought to be considered when willfully attempting to enslave someone else.

Since no force is used to back that consideration up a person can get away with enslaving others, in the case of those in positions of legislative and executive powers the temptation is always present. However we have laws already established that prohibits slavery in the United States so no matter what is done to enslave people it must not be called enslavement.

In the end the President of the United States broke the law intentionally and with premeditation. He also aided and abetted people who trespassed into the United States which makes him an accessory to a crime. Since any American who stands up and acts against his executive action would lose their job or face other punitive measures then by definition he is a tyrant.

Wagging the Dog

The President must have it out for me, I mean I can’t speak for the American people but I sure don’t like the idea of wage stagnation for the next twenty years. In twenty years that the average American will be making exactly what their grandparents made. For those who don’t know the average American now is making as much as the average American made in 1988. Oh and the average was getting better because policies enacted back then stymied government growth to a pace so that it didn’t impede with private growth. This policy of an economic parallax where government was in the background but always present made for what can only be called the roaring 90’s. What ended that was when government no longer recognized how easily it could derail the American financial train and then individuals convinced others of their wonderful ideas.

Milton Friedman observed of the individuals behind how bad policy comes into play that there are two kinds; the kind who has noble intentions and the kind who has a special interest in policy. For the layman I’ll put it like this respectively you have the useful idiot and the bad guy aka the conman in a cheap suit. Many people in congress bought into the idea that every American should have a home of their own; the sweet language was more precisely that all Americans should be able to pursue the American Dream. The one who used the line was Bill Clinton and for that he became the darling of the little guy, he could do no wrong. The Congress was convinced by other Congressmen that were of the special interest group and while few did object the end results speak for themselves in 2008.

Now let’s not fool ourselves, everyone knew the housing bubble was going to happen from as early as 2003, and it was very clear to even the average Joe like me by 2005 sadly  no one in government had the courage to raise the issue. And here we come to it, why didn’t Bush do something, anything, an executive action let’s say? The answer is because he couldn’t so my eyes my scrutiny falls the failure of the Republican and Democrat Congress since both had their shot to stop it between the Clinton and Bush administrations.  2008 was caused by Clinton and his special interest cronies like Andrew Cuomo, Fanny and Freddie and so on as well as senators and congressmen but not by the President Bush, the law was passed all he could do was enforce it, Clinton was the one who could have vetoed it.

Bush doesn’t get off scot-free here though, he could have taken the law to the courts, maybe they could have issued an injunction until they reviewed the constitutionality of taking tax dollars to pay for mortgages by giving tax dollars to private companies: there is a constitutional issue there.

Now we look at the modern day President and I’m certain he has it out for me, where Clinton at least pretended that he wanted to help me but was really just lining his pocket and securing his families future at my expense it felt alright because I knew I was conned, I could look out for that next time. Bush I hold no grudge against because he was just doing his job but he didn’t try hard enough in my opinion to do the right thing. Now we have a President that wants to hurt me maybe worse than Clinton has since he is responsible for the average wages falling back to 1988 levels. This President who has two years left in office and has just signed a piece of fiat that says essentially American Citizens are not even worth the 1988 values of what we are being paid. There is a federal minimum wage though and that’s where this is going, because the only thing that can offset minimum wage increases is inflation and inflation makes the point moot. I’m sorry I skipped a step, by making legal so many people over night the President has created an issue for the minimum wage since average wages for the common man are about to take a nice dip. He will then be able to blame Republicans for it for the next two years because anyone with common sense knows money doesn’t grow on trees and printing money will only result in a Weimar Republic repeat with the American Republic… just so we are all on the same page, after that there was another world war.

Constitutionally there needs to be an office of the President, but I have concluded that that office holds much too much power for one man; this isn’t a particular problem with the constitution because the amount of power the President’s office has vacuumed is unconstitutional. The issue is that historically Congress when met with a President of the Jacksonian or Lincoln-ian type is supposed to reassert itself. Grave things happen when Presidents run amuck, for example reader, grant me an open mind with regards to that history is written by the victor and so when I say that the Civil War was a result of executive overreach your sensibilities should flare but I beg you to hold  off on your first reaction… You know what; I’ll do a throat clearing: I do not agree with any form of enslavement and I also don’t distinguish between individuals based on race, I do however generalize individuals based on culture, and that is surmised usually based on nationality, history and actions.

There are news agencies that will say well past precedence shows that the President is within his power to do rewrite law for a crisis like immigration. Some of the issues this brings up are then what isn’t a crisis, something is always a crisis to someone somewhere and another issue is of course he has past precedence to do a lot of things but that doesn’t mean it’s constitutional. If we ran society that way then all someone would have to do is murder someone in a new way then get away with it then the next time someone murders someone that way it’s okay because the last guy got away with it.

Back to the point if Congress had intervened on constitutional grounds in Lincoln’s time then an argument could be made that there would never have been a civil war, instead the majority went along with it. There are just too many angles to show here; the whites of the south that wanted no war the whites in the north that were worse than slavers and vice versa are just examples of the contextual complexity here. But in the end there was war because Congress failed to represent the people. The thing about megalomaniacs and dictator types is that they really don’t recognize that they are megalomaniacs and can rationalize dictator like actions. Lincoln for example gave the game away in his Gettysburg address when he said that government was “of the people, for the people and by the people.” If that were true then why was there a Civil War, it was a demagogues line; it’s as the saying goes the tail is wagging the dog.

To me these are truths about Lincoln but people tend to remember him better, I don’t know why, oh wait that’s right, he was a champion of the little guy so he could do no wrong. In the end Lincoln created a vacuum a hundred times greater than anything Jackson attempted and he killed over five hundred thousand people to make it happen. The thing is unlike with Jackson Congress never moved to plug the vacuum and a now seven score and nine years later we have a President that not only is wagging us but is taking us for a long walk off a short pier. My opponents on these issues spend so much time rooting for the underdog, I think it’s time they realize there is no audience in life and they need to start rooting for themselves.

  

Building Bridges

It must have been three or four years ago I saw this wonderful video Keynes vs Hayek the second round. You can YouTube it its very good stuff, if I figure it out I’ll embed it below. Anyway the video works well to describe part of something I really have no love for; economics. I don’t hate the researching of how human nature and finances nor the moshing of them together works, what gets me uncomfortable about economics is that it incorporates so many schools of thought that it can never be right or wrong on its face, there is just always something that wasn’t accounted for. Don’t get me wrong people can be wrong however no one can turn around and say economics as a whole needs to be thought about differently. For instance we can say Christianity or Islam or Business and so on even Philosophy can be approached from new ways but such a paradigm shift has to my knowledge never happened in economics.

The damage of zero accountability is made manifest in today’s age with the teachings of two dead men. One was John Maynard Keynes who observed that society was interconnected; his idea was a work on how the revenue habits of the wealthy ultimately spread across the field. To back track a little, I will be measuring success and failures based on freedom; the more freedom the less historical evidence shows either such ideas leading to totalitarianism and massive death tolls and the less freedom the more historical evidence shows such ideas lead to totalitarianism and massive death tolls. For clarity sake my position is that all things ultimately lead to totalitarianism and that is because there are always opportunists, it is up to the vigilance of free folk to sustain their freedom but there are certain ideologies that not only instigate but promote and propagates totalitarian means and ends. To wrap up the point Maynard identified and encourages the idea that an elite class is needed to maintain a free society. Maynard was wrong but his ideology was based on economics and economics can never be wrong only that something wasn’t accounted for. In this case why Maynard was wrong and what he never accounted for was the previous observations of Adam Smith that wealth can be created by individuals at any level of society.

   

The other is Fredrik Von Hayek who came from the Mises School of economics which means that a default position for him was free markets. He also believed that while growth was production to satisfy demand you needed demand. This for me is where economics stops short and business explains the rest. Demand makes the world grow, without demand there would be no need for invention or innovation. Commodities do the things that people would do in a less convenient way, the effort to satisfy demand is called business but from the economic perspective it’s also entrepreneurship. When people talk about business and say “the consumer or the market” what they are saying is “you and me”. From the Mises school came a “what to do” about Adam Smith’s observations of how people deal with exchange. The answer was less than nothing; we just let the market do what it pleases. Of course there are criminal elements so we need government, but the role of government is always to be a counter balance to criminality, not as incentive against criminals but as a punitive force in other words the thoughts of government should be about what it ought not to do.

Before I go further I feel this area is always glossed over so I’ll elaborate on it: Criminal behavior is not a business trait, if it was then it wouldn’t be criminal. Capitalism is about voluntary exchange, if I hold a gun to someone’s head and say give me your money, that exchange is not voluntary. It is possible for someone to play a word game here to confuse people who haven’t learned the contextual history of the phrase “voluntary exchange.” Some politicians like Michael Steele who is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee believes that in the above scenario the person who gives their money doesn’t have to and that the exchange is voluntary.  Partially he is correct since a person may then put a price tag on their life as worth more than what is on them at that time and give up their money. However there is in lays the partiality; if such people as Mr. Steele thought that logic through, a person who didn’t hand over their goods would possibly lose their life and if not they could have seen harm to themselves done. A person who walks into an electronics store should not have to give up their money or else they get electronics. If that last supposition seemed absurd then you’re still sane and the Michael Steele’s of the world are well… politicians.

Today we have an America where members of both political parties act out legislation that supports the Keynesian views of economics, despite Keynes’ himself retracting those views the views themselves are convenient to politicians for many reasons. We the people demand our politicians take actions that best suit out demands; this creates incentive for law makers to craft laws that give them more tools to do the things we demand. This isn’t a one dimensional thing, law makers rely heavily on polling to stay in office and for good reason. You see Keynesian economics is from the perspective of government a method of taking money and giving it to government, because the economics is broken the government applied a patch job to it, that patch job is called income tax, corporate tax, excise tax and we can’t forget regulations and anti-trust laws. Each one of those systems had been in place before Keynes but after Keynes they all have been employed with a ridiculous level of animosity towards the general public’s personal wealth.

Income taxes and regulations respectively for example were made for government to do things with our money that only government can do and regulations were made to prevent people from doing harmful things. The thing about Income tax and regulations is that they place glass ceilings over the average man. The normal person who wants to start a business has to add a third or more time to build a capital and the risk is greater. The government now has subsidies to help small businesses, but that really amounts to government giving you back a portion of what you already had paid and if not then it gets even more insidious as that means they are taking money from consumers to pay for your business.  Regulations are in most cases legislative overkill, individuals have civil courts where the burden on the plaintiff is much lower than in criminal court. Pursuing each case individually has always been more effective in resolving an issue, but excessive all reaching regulations came about because other companies were being disrupted by smaller companies and so the larger companies hire lawyers and lobbyists to win legislation in their own favor. In a previous post I mentioned the Marketplace Fairness Act, this is one such legislation with broad range that hits all fifty states and can in effect end online sales for small businesses. This limits competition for people like Amazon who won’t be affected by the legislation in any meaningful way.

How this election goes could decide if and how the Marketplace Fairness Act will be carried out but it’s too late now for a repeal since the bill received little uproar from the average American and as a result has bipartisan support (meaning Keynesian Republicans are no longer afraid to support the bill because they see no reprisal for enacting it.) I would prefer a third party honestly, but not enough Americans want small government for varying reasons but ultimately it boils down to a lack of faith in “other people” to do the right thing that cultivates the belief that government can do things individuals cannot.

And there we have it, the root of the problem with younger American’s, we were taught that cynicism was a lens that displays reality and somewhere along the road to objectivity we lost a few of the things that helped create modern society and one of them was; solidarity.

Each political member party isn't solid left or solid right, for example a Neocon can be considered either a Republican or a Democrat, the Neocon can have progressive ideals but share ideals that Neocons do. At the same time a conservative can and usually are anti-war which has been a moniker perhaps unfairly monopolized by the Progressives. But in modern day America the way to identify how politicians view out fiscal policy and what they ideology is-is to understand either Hayek's or Keynes' economics.

Do the Hypocrite.

Why the bother about Israel?

I actually drew an agreeable thing from Hilary Clinton this week, it’s that anyone who is against what the Jews are doing in Gaza are racist and either unwittingly or maliciously are propagating the argument of the race bating demagogues they adhere to.  It’s downright disgusting, I mean if people are going to be hooting and hollering about Israel why aren’t these same people going nuts about Tibet? Wait forget Tibet, one of the major lawyers of Hamas are the Turks so why don’t those people first ask the Turkish people to stop being hypocrites and get out of Cyprus! I know a Greek guy who served back then before coming to the US and if you even mention a Turk to him he gets visibly tense. So I think at least for some Greeks the resentment is still strong.  How many more years must go by before we see the outrage by activists in flotillas trying to keep the Turks out of Cyprus? And don’t give me crap about that being too long ago; it was only the 80’s! This shit with Israel has been going on since the end of World War 2!

This kind of thing almost blows my mind but what brought me over the edge is that Hilary Clinton agrees with me. GTFO? What will happen next? Will she suddenly find the records that were subpoenaed from her back when her husband was President and she was a high powered lawyer? Will she stand up and acknowledge how she cost 300 Marines their lives? Will she confess to the conspiring of the murders of several of her once close friends? I doubt it, but Hilary Clinton agrees with me or rather sounds agreeable even if the only reason is because she’s a Liberal that’s been smitten by reality.

There is no better way to say this than to say a norm in all dialog of policy is to speak from ideal. I prefer to think that like me most know when they speak of ideals and so can also speak in a realistic tone. However it gets complex and this is the only complexity of politics: That people start to believe their ideals for good or bad are real enough, for example; one person sees their own ideal as being possible and altruistic and then they logically follow that someone else’s ideal if it poses a direct refutability must then by virtue not be altruistic. Bear in mind altruism in democratic political dialog is Spanish gold; it’s like a diamond in the rough that simply needs more attention until it can properly shine. This means anything that counters a belief that aims to shine that diamond and provide more light through its refraction through altruism is thus poor of altruism and if followed will lead to political bankruptcy.

To be absolutely clear here political bankruptcy isn’t even recognized as that, it is more naturally referred to as moral bankruptcy. But in reality words are like a placebo and in the case of Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, North Korea, Cyprus and so many other instances, placebos are not better than either a cure or preventing the problem.

That above paragraph is politics in a nutshell if you understand it then you understand why the world is the way it is. This is why I don’t see someone being a neoconservative as a negative; it means they are moving closer to my position. So I'll chant the old definition that a neocon is simply a liberal that has been struck with reality. 

The Clinton's are habitual liars and part of the way to identify either a politician, especially a liberal one is to look for the politician with a freshly licked index finger in the air.