IRS Abuses: Relearning Our History

IRS Abuses: Relearning Our History

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Sixty years ago, the civil rights movement began in earnest an epic struggle to end legal discrimination.

That fight serves as an object lesson for those speaking out against the abuses of the IRS directed against our fellow citizens.

To set the record straight, I am not a member the Tea Party as I disagree with many of its policies, not the least of which is a sense that it stands for whatever any one of its proponents says on any given day, no matter how confusing or contradictory.

But the IRS targeting of the Tea Party is a moral wrong.

It is an abuse of power that every American, regardless of their political positions, should oppose. It is a threat to our political freedoms. History teaches why.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” laws enforced by the government were unconstitutional as they created an inferior class of citizens who were adversely discriminated against. That is exactly what the IRS is doing when it targets the Tea Party.

Let us take an example from Little Rock during the school desegregation struggles in 1957. The state government’s target then was the NAACP and here is what was done:

Legislation was enacted that “required organizations and individuals ‘challenging the authority’” of government officials [i.e. opposing segregation laws] “to register…and make regular reports of their budgets.” It further required the NAACP to reveal its members names.[1]

Back then, the purpose was to use government power to silence opposition to the state-sanctioned status quo of racial segregation and today, silencing the opposition is the aim of IRS Tea Party targeting.

In 1957, the government also tried to divide their opponents by “trying to get ‘good’ Negroes, and none of the ‘radicals’ who sued them” into the desegregated schools.[2] The goal was to punish those who spoke out against the status quo.

Now compare that to what the IRS is doing to Tea Party groups:

“The deal boiled down to this: We’ll do our job, the IRS said, if you give up your rights.”[3] When confronted with this government imposed inequality, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots stood her ground and refused to allow what the IRS apparently deemed ‘good’ organizations to be granted greater rights “than those of us who had been targeted.”[4]

As in the 1950s, the goal of the IRS is to use the law to create an inferior class of citizen as punishment for speaking out against the status quo.

Civil rights mean civil rights for all.

Free speech means free speech for all.

When the government targets American citizens and offers “separate but equal” rights to silence them then it has done a great injustice to our nation and its people.

It was wrong in the 1954 and it is wrong sixty years later.

---

[1] See Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, 25^th Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 96. This is a “must read” book for any serious student of American history.

[2] Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 97.

[3] Kimberley A. Strassel, “All the President’s IRS Agents,” The Wall Street Journal, dated 28 February 2014.

[4] Strassel, “IRS Agents,” dated 28 February 2014.

Whither goest Ukraine?

Whither goest Ukraine?

Mike walker, Col. USMC (Retired)

Courage is a hard and costly word.

It seems the world is once again at a crossroads where courage is demanded and the junction is called Ukraine.

The Unites States has sailed into the path of isolationism to a degree not seen since the 1930s.

This isolationism is a bipartisan consensus and not simply an American problem. Europe, for example, has been more feckless than the United States and like the 1930s, never has an appeal to brute force been better received in the darkest quarters of humanity.

The parallels to the 1930s are frightening.

As then, the world’s liberal democracies are going through trying economic times, authoritarian regimes are rising in number and seem to be embracing naked military aggression to achieve their aims.

The appeasers and apologist are many. We recently had a United States senator sing praises of the repressive Cuban Regime that beggared belief to an extent unheard since Lindberg’s praise of the Nazi Germany.

Do not the destabilizing and cynical acts of Putin, falling on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, bring to fore memories of Hitler after the Berlin Olympics?

Is today’s conflict in Syria any less brutal, less significant, than the Civil War in Spain?

Are North Korean labor camps that different than those of the Nazis in the 1930s?

And what are we to say to the Filipinos who recently vowed to protect their nation from rapacious ultranationalists that hold too great a sway in Beijing? One leader compared their “David versus Goliath” struggle against Chinese militarist with that that of Czechoslovakia when it faced Nazi Germany.

What are we to make of a China who this week officially referred to our outgoing ambassador as a “banana,” a base racial slur aimed at his Chinese ethnicity meaning “yellow” on the outside and “white” on the inside?

Just who are these men in charge in Beijing?

Just how wrong were the appeasers and apologists for Putin and his host of likeminded tyrants?

Do we have the courage to do the right thing? 

Are we fated to repeat the mistakes of the past?

Whither goest us?

Venezuelan Fascism

Venezuelan Fascism

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All, 

As Venezuela descends into economic failure and political authoritarianism, the young people are taking to the streets. As one youthful demonstrator recently told a reporter, “As long as there is repression, we will keep coming out.”

President Nicolas Maduro, the blow hard holding the reins of power in Caracas, is calling the people joining the student-led movement, “fascists.”

Really?

Let us take a closer look.

The founder of fascism was Benito Mussolini, a life-long socialist and nationalist.

He spent his early adulthood as an activist and leftist author becoming the editor of “Forward,” the official paper of the Italian Socialist Party. When the party split apart after the First World War, Mussolini took the expelled nationalist socialists and formed the National Fascist Party.

He believed in a one-party dictatorship and used the security services and his Black Shirts to intimidate and beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

Nicolas Maduro is also a life-long socialist and nationalist. He spent his early life as an activist and radical union leader. As Hugo Chavez rose to power, Maduro was a principal organizer within the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Maduro believes in a one-party dictatorship and uses the security services and his paramilitary colectivos to intimidate, beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

The fascists in Venezuela are not the protesters, they are Nicolas Maduro and the thugs who keep him in power.

Mike

Chicago Professionals

The mayor of Chicago… respect for the office.


CHICAGOLAND, PART TWO
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline


Arthur Bishop, the new director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), was convicted in the 1990s of bilking his employer, a substance abuse counseling center, out of money received from its clients. According to the center’s director at the time, Bishop created a bogus program for convicted drunk drivers. He took money from patients and provided them with forms they wrongly believed would allow them to get their driver’s licenses back.

Unfortunately for Bishop’s victims, the center wasn’t licensed by the state to provide that service at the time. Bishop pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, is standing by his decision to make Bishop the state’s top child-welfare official. He claims to see no connection between Bishop’s corruption and his ability to lead a department that has been plagued by charges of failure to keep track of its money. In December, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued a Chicago businessman and friend of a former DCFS director to recover millions of dollars in state grant money the businessman allegedly misspent.

If Quinn can’t see the connection between stealing and unfitness to run a large government agency, perhaps he can connect the dots on Bishop’s own “children and family” issues. Court records show that a paternity case was filed against Bishop in 2003, when he was a DCFS deputy director. DNA tests showed he was the father of Erica Bishop, then 17.

According to the child’s mother, Bishop, who was married to another woman when Erica was born, “denies his own daughter’s existence” even though “he visited us on numerous occasions at my parents’ house when she was a child.” The mother further alleged that Bishop “even asked me if he could live in with me if his wife put him out after she learned the truth.”

The mother obtained a $4,175 judgment against Bishop and health insurance coverage for Erica until she turned 18. But she was denied back child support after Bishop argued that she had never sought support of any kind from him and had concealed that he was Erica’s father.

A crook and deadbeat dad at the helm of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services. That, it seems, is the Chicago/Illinois way.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

 JOHN HINDERAKER IN SECOND AMENDMENT

Yesterday a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Peruta v. County of San Diego that the county’s broad prohibition against concealed carry violates the Second Amendment. The context was a California law that that generally bans both open and concealed carry, but allows individuals to apply to local authorities for a concealed carry permit. In San Diego County, an ordinary citizen could not get a concealed carry permit; rather, exceptional circumstances had to be demonstrated. Thus, as a practical matter the typical citizen couldn’t carry at all, either open or concealed. The court held that this scheme impermissibly infringes the constitutional right not just to keep arms, but to bear them. The court said that neither concealed carry nor open carry is constitutionally mandated, but some form of a right to carry must be broadly available to citizens. (“To be clear, we are not holding that the Second Amendment requires the states to permit concealed carry. But the Second Amendment does require that the states permit some form of carry for self-defense outside the home.”)

The court’s opinion is lengthy but well worth reading. It includes a historical survey of how the right to bear arms was understood at the time when the Second Amendment was adopted, and in the years thereafter. The court notes that there is a split among the circuits on this issue, which ultimately will have to be resolved by the Supreme Court. I don’t have any doubt that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would side with this 9th Circuit panel and uphold a right to carry arms as well as to bear them. The 9th Circuit opinion responds to and expressly rejects the reasoning that was used by the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits:

[T]he analysis in the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuit decisions is near-identical to the freestanding “interest-balancing inquiry” that Justice Breyer proposed—and that the majority explicitly rejected—in Heller. See Heller, 554 U.S. at 689–90 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (proposing that in Second Amendment cases the court should “ask[] whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other important governmental interests”); see also id. at 634–35 (majority opinion) (rejecting a “judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry’” as a test for the constitutionality of Second Amendment regulations because “no other enumerated constitutional right [had its] core protection . . . subjected to [such] a freestanding” inquiry).

That’s right: the courts would find absurd an argument that 98% of citizens should be deprived of their rights of free speech in order to serve some other governmental interest, but that same argument is still made with a straight face when the Second Amendment is at issue. The 9th Circuit opinion concludes by quoting the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald decisions:

We are well aware that, in the judgment of many governments, the safest sort of firearm-carrying regime is one which restricts the privilege to law enforcement with only narrow exceptions. Nonetheless, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. . . . Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court [or ours] to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” Id. at 636. Nor may we relegate the bearing of arms to a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.” McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3044.

For many years, of course, the right to keep and bear arms was a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees….” When Larry Tribe published the first edition of his treatise on Constitutional Law in 1978, he famously treated the Second Amendment in a single footnote. The amendment was more or less a dead letter. What changed? Several things: empirical research by John Lott and others showed that more guns do not mean more crime; legal scholars analyzed the genesis of the amendment and refuted the claim that it had no application outside of state-organized “militias,” and–most of all–a grass roots movement that ultimately encompassed millions of Americans promoted guns and gun safety, lobbied for modern carry legislation including “shall issue” requirements, and generally improved the image of guns and gun owners. The result of this grass roots movement is that at least 40 states now have “shall issue” laws.

My guess is that the legal revolution would not have happened without the grass roots movement. Scott has noted more than once that the image of the federal courts as bulwarks of civil rights, standing tall against the winds of prejudice to uphold unpopular freedoms, is almost entirely fictional. In reality, the courts have almost always bent with public opinion, as they did for a long time with regard to the Second Amendment.

That doesn’t mean that gun rights advocates can rest. While I think there is little doubt that the present court would agree with the reasoning in Peruta, that could easily change: Heller was decided 5-4. Liberals are revanchists on all issues. They do not accept that the flow of history can move in any direction but theirs, and they won’t give up. This is just one more reminder than any conservative who sits out an election is foolish.

Not Even a Smidgen?

Why So Much Anarchy?

Stratfor Global Intelligence

By Robert D. Kaplan

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.

However, what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.

The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though -- roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:

The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire -- whose whole identity was infused with Christianity -- had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.

Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after my article was published -- like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through foreign peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of efficient and responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.

The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.

The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.

Read more: Why So Much Anarchy? | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
"Why So Much Anarchy? is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Oh Henry!

The church bells will ring across the land.

Maybe Henry will take up residence somewhere besides the Los Angeles area.

Grey Lady Down!

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Grey Lady Down!

Now we know why the NYT got it so wrong with its Benghazi story.

On 24 January, NYT executive editor Jill Abramson admitted the self-professed "most transparent" administration in history is in reality the most secretive White House in history.

That goes a long way in explaining why the incredulous NYT story on Benghazi mirrored the Administration mythology that a video protest inspired the attack while al Qaeda had no influence over the murderers.

What the NYT is realizing is that there is no way to independently verify facts in Washington DC as almost all the “important” information comes from folks vetted by the White House.

The bottom line is that there are no significant independent sources in this administration. You repeat the White House line, take it or leave it.

I guess reality sucks sometimes on Eighth Avenue.

Mike

Government conspiracy theories aren't crazy

Government conspiracy theories aren't crazy
Glenn Harlan Reynolds

From the IRS to the NSA, Americans have reasons not to trust the Obama Administration.

At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, "On a scale of 1-10 ... how damaging is the current IRS scandal?"

His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it "awful," and said that it has done "tremendous damage."

I think that's right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn't the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it's much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.

As I warned President Obama back in 2009 after he "joked" about having his enemies audited, the IRS depends on trust:

Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn't possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can't audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.

Since then, of course, the new "weaponized IRS" has, in fact, come to be seen as illegitimate by many more Americans. I suspect that, over time, this loss of moral legitimacy will cause many to base their tax strategies on what they think they can get away with, not on what they're entitled to. And when they hear of someone being audited, many Americans will ask not "what did he do wrong?" but "who in government did he offend?"
This is particularly true since the Obama administration is currently changing IRS rules to muzzle Tea Partiers.

As Kimberley Strassel reports in the Wall Street Journal, Obama's negotiating strategy on the omnibus spending bill that just passed revolved around using the IRS to keep Tea Party groups silenced:

One of the biggest fights was over GOP efforts to include language to stop the IRS from instituting a new round of 501(c)(4) targeting. The White House is so counting on the tax agency to muzzle its political opponents that it willingly sacrificed any manner of its own priorities to keep the muzzle in place. ... It's IRS targeting all over again, only this time by administration design and with the raw political goal — as House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) notes — of putting 'Tea Party groups out of business.'
Meanwhile, the person chosen to "investigate" the IRS's targeting of Tea Party groups in 2010-2012 is Barbara Bosserman, a "long-time Obama campaign donor." So the IRS's credibility is in no danger of being rebuilt any time soon.

Now comes the poor NSA. With the ongoing revelations that it has been vacuuming up telephone conversations from, basically, every American, the thing it needs most is for people to trust that it wouldn't abuse these huge powers. The problem is, if the IRS can be weaponized — and it clearly has been — how confident can we be that the NSA won't be? How confident, for that matter, can we be that it hasn't been politically weaponized already?

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

The problem with government is that to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy. And the problem with the Obama administration is that, to a greater extent than any since Nixon's, it is not. Do not be surprised if the result is that people mistrust those in authority, and order their lives accordingly. Such an outcome is bad for America, but bad governance has its consequences.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

A long road...

Remember Dinkins, the mayor before Rudy…. he was like Blasio, a member of the New Party. Under Dinkins the murder rate in NYC streaked beyond 2200 a year…. along came the adult Rudy Guliani,  he forced the murder rate down to 400, filled-in the potholes, managed a resurrection of NYC growth and actually picked up the trash. You know,  did the adult things. Now we have a New Party man back in the commander's seat of NYC, decrying the gap between the rich and poor, never saying anything about the growing high school drop-out rate, growing number of unwed mothers that buddy Bloomberg left… Can you hear it? Another slooooooow but unstoppable train wreck.

American Insanity: Calculating Poverty

American Insanity: Calculating Poverty

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Let us begin the unpleasantness.

PART I: WHAT WE DO NOT WANT TO KNOW

Outside a few extreme cases, real poverty does not exist in the United States. Having seen real poverty overseas, I know of what I write.

According to the US Census Department, the world’s population is about 7.1 billion people.

According to the World Bank, beyond the shores of rich countries like the United States, some 1.5 billion people live on $1.25 a day or less, that is less than $460 per year.

Another 900 million live on between $1.25 and $2.00 a day or less than $750 a year. The majority of the world’s population lives on $5 a day or less and the overwhelming majority of the people on planet earth live on $10 a day or less, that is under $3,700 a year.

After learning this, some American smart aleck always points out that the cost of living is a lot cheaper over there.

True, life is a lot cheaper over there because really living in poverty on this planet means no plumbing (no running water, no shower or bath or sink or toilet). You build your own oven from bricks and mud and it burns on wood. There is little or no furniture and, if you are lucky, the floor is not pressed dirt but a concrete slab or mat you weaved out of dried grass. 

There is no electricity and that means no radio, TV, cable/satellite package, or DVD player. There is no microwave, computer, or phone and when the sun goes down it gets dark, as many cannot even afford a lantern or the fuel.

So yes, Mr. Smart Aleck, your rent and utility bills are very small indeed. And do not even think about ever owning a car. You hit the nail on the head, Mr. Smart Aleck, life is very cheap over there.

That leads us to the harsh truth: When people talk about the American poverty level, they are talking about living as one of the wealthiest top 10-20% of the people on the planet.

Most of us have no idea of how lucky we are to live in the United States. That is a TRAGEDY, but what is INSANE is how we Americans count people living in poverty.

PART II: CALCULATED TO FAIL

When it comes measuring income for the neediest Americans, i.e. identifying those living at or below the poverty level, the system is PLAIN AND SIMPLY BROKEN.

Allow me to explain.

The only thing that the bean counters count is earned wages. While that is THE critical statistic, stopping there is STUPID!

We have spent over $20,000,000,000,000.00 on the “War on Poverty” that began fifty years ago and as far as the poverty bean counters are concerned, almost all of that is worth $0, nada, nothing, zip, the big goose egg. 

Think about how incredibly irrational that is.

Let us take a family of three that has no income and use my home state of California as an example.

1.     The family will receive free health care through MediCal, the state component of the larger federal Medicaid program. Based on the IRS estimate of $333 per person per month, that is a $12,000 benefit.

2.      Based on reporting from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the family will also qualify for just under $1,800 in food stamps and the child will receive free meals at school.

3.     The family will also qualify for housing support, to include utility bills, either through Public Housing or Section 8 funding. This will vary due to location and associated costs up to maximum of $2,200 per month. If we take the middle figure of $1,100 per month, this is a $13,200 benefit.

4.     Finally, and again based on Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, the family will receive $7,756 in cash grants as part of the California TANF program.

5.     All told, this represents $34,756 in support.

6.     According to Families USA, the 2013 U.S. poverty level for a family of three was set at $19, 530 in annual earning and please do not forget that over a billion people exist on less than $460 per year.

It also needs to be added that this aid does not include private charitable organizations and dozens of smaller federal, state, and local programs that provide additional help to the family.

Clearly, the American social safety net is doing good work. That is something we should be proud of, right?

WRONG!

To the poverty bean counters, it is all money flushed down the proverbial toilet.

To those bright guys and gals in Washington D.C., our family of three has $0 in income and everything described above did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO REMOVE THEM FROM THE POVERTY STATISTICS.

Is that CRAZY OR WHAT???

Here is stunning idea for the fools in Washington, how about reporting TWO (2) numbers:

Keep reporting the poverty number based entirely on earned income.

AND…

Report a second number showing how many millions of people were moved above the poverty level through these programs.

Gee, people might actually consider the programs as a social good! I know it is a scary concept, but some people might see that Washington actually makes a difference for the BETTER in lives of our most needy citizens.

Nah!

Lets continue to play dirty inside-the-beltway politics as usual and continuously bad mouth the people we disagree with.

I mean, who really wants to make things better anyway if you can’t vilify your opponents?

Mike

The Wars of Robert Gates

The Wars of Robert Gates

On Afghanistan, Obama was caught between his generals' advice and his advisers' political worries

By Robert M. Gates, author of "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War", Wall Street Journal

I had been the secretary of defense for just over two years on Jan. 21, 2009, but on that day I again became the outsider. The Obama administration housed a web of long-standing relationships—from Democratic Party politics and the Clinton administration—about which I was clueless. I was also a geezer in the new administration. Many influential appointees below the top level, especially in the White House, had been undergraduates—or even in high school—when I had been CIA director. No wonder my nickname in the White House soon was Yoda, the ancient Jedi teacher in "Star Wars."

For the first several months, it took a lot of discipline to sit quietly at the table as everyone from President Obama on down took shots at President Bush and his team. Sitting there, I would often think to myself, Am I invisible?

During these excoriations, there was never any acknowledgment that I had been an integral part of that earlier team. Discussions in the Situation Room allowed no room for discriminating analysis: Everything was awful, and Obama and his team had arrived just in time to save the day.

Our discussions soon turned to the war in Afghanistan. My years in the Bush administration had convinced me that creating a strong, democratic, and more or less honest and competent central government in Afghanistan was a fantasy. Our goal, I thought, should be limited to hammering the Taliban and other extremists and to building up the Afghan security forces so they could control the extremists and deny al Qaeda another safe haven in Afghanistan.

At the Obama administration's first National Security Council meeting on Afghanistan on Jan. 23, 2009, there was much discussion of the lack of a coherent strategy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had previously asked to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan to deal with the Taliban's expected summer offensive and the country's upcoming presidential elections—a request eventually pared back to about 17,000 troops and an additional 4,000 "enablers," troops for countering roadside bombs, ordnance disposal, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and medics.

This pressure for an early decision on a troop increase had the unfortunate and lasting effect of creating suspicion in the White House that Obama was getting the "bum's rush" from senior military officers—especially the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Michael Mullen, and Gen. David Petraeus, who was then running the U.S. Central Command—to make a big decision prematurely. I believed then—and now—that this distrust was stoked by Vice President Joe Biden, with Deputy National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and some of Obama's other White House advisers joining the chorus.

A March report on the Afghanistan situation by Bruce Riedel, a seasoned and very capable Middle East expert who had advised the Obama campaign, proved breathtaking in its ambition. It recommended disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, promoting a more effective Afghan government, ending Pakistan's support for terrorist groups and working to reduce enmity between Pakistan and India. Most significantly for the conflicts to come between the White House and the U.S. military, the report called for a "fully-resourced counterinsurgency campaign" to let us "regain the initiative" from the Taliban.

All of Obama's national security principals—except Biden—agreed with Riedel's recommendations. But the vice president argued that the war was politically unsustainable at home. I thought he was wrong—and that if the president remained steadfast, he could sustain even an unpopular war, as President Bush had done with a far less popular war in Iraq. The key was showing that we were succeeding militarily and that an end was in sight.

The president embraced most of Riedel's recommendations and announced his new "Af-Pak" strategy in a televised speech on March 27, including 21,000 more soldiers to "take the fight to the Taliban." There would now be some 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

But within weeks, I began hearing from Mullen and other commanders about the need for more troops. I made clear that we could not go above the presidentially approved number of 68,000 without going back to the commander in chief. On June 8, I told our new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that I wanted him to do a 60-day review of the situation in Afghanistan, including personnel levels. It seemed a perfectly innocuous request. We needed to do the review before I approached the president about any more forces; I couldn't nickel-and-dime him to death.

The next day was my worst so far with the Obama administration. In a meeting with the president, I described my request to McChrystal for a new assessment, including a review of troop levels, and the urgent need to send more enablers. The room exploded. The president said testily there would be no political support for any further troop increase: Congressional Democrats didn't want one, and the Republicans would just play politics. Biden and Emanuel piled on. I had my own reservations about a big increase in troop numbers but didn't see why 2,000 to 4,000 more enablers should cause so much angst and hostility.

Many in the White House were increasingly suspicious that the commanders were trying to box the president in. In early August, I had a long, very direct conversation with Emanuel in the chief of staff's corner White House office. I told him that the president needed to "take ownership of the Afghan war." My principal concern wasn't with Obama's public comments on the need for an exit strategy from Afghanistan but with what he wasn't saying. He needed to acknowledge that the war could take years but that he was confident we would ultimately succeed. He needed to explain publicly why the troops' sacrifices were necessary.

I told Emanuel I would likely come to the president in mid-September for additional enablers. I said that the president didn't want to be in the position of turning down assets that had a direct role in protecting the troops' lives.

Emanuel sat quietly while I vented. I never raised my voice, but I think he could tell how angry I was—and chose to exercise uncharacteristic restraint. I would later hear that some White House politicos worried about my quitting.

In a June 24 videoconference, McChrystal told me for the first time that he had found the situation in Afghanistan much worse than he expected. In mid-July, Mullen returned from a trip to Afghanistan and told me that McChrystal might ask for as many as 40,000 additional troops. I nearly fell off my chair. I had no idea how I could get the president's approval of even a fraction of that number, and I saw a train wreck coming. The only time as secretary of defense that I was truly alarmed was when I heard what McChrystal intended.

On Aug. 4, Mullen and I briefed the president in the Oval Office. The president said that he wanted a choice of real options, not just a troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaign. Obama was thoughtful and balanced, sensible in his comments and questions. He was aware of the politics but, unlike Biden and Emanuel, not driven by them.

For 2½ years, I had warned about the risks of a significant increase in the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, and during that period we had increased from about 21,000 to 68,000 troops. I believed, with Mullen, that the war in Afghanistan had been neglected and under-resourced in the Bush administration. But I was torn between my historical perspective, which screamed for caution, and what my commanders insisted was needed to accomplish the mission they had been given.

McChrystal submitted his assessment on Aug. 31. Mullen and I met with the president in the Oval Office on Sept. 2 and gave him a copy. I told him it didn't represent a new strategy but focused on implementing what the president had approved in March. With IED attacks and casualties rising, I told the president I wanted to move quickly on the enablers, sending perhaps up to as many as 5,000.

To my astonishment and dismay, the president reacted angrily. Why do you need more enablers? he asked. Were they not anticipated as part of the 21,000? Is this mission creep?

Outside the Oval Office after the meeting, exasperated, I told Biden and Donilon that, with respect to the 5,000 enablers, "From a moral and political standpoint, we cannot fail to take action to protect the troops."

I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn't do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn't see how I could remain as secretary.

I shared Obama's concerns about an open-ended conflict in Afghanistan, but I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House's lack of appreciation—from the top down—of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. "They all seem to think it's a science," I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.

On Sept. 10, I gave the president a long "eyes only" memo on my own thinking. I wrote that, "as usual," all the options were unpalatable. I added, impertinently, that any new decision that abandoned Obama's decisions in March would be seen as a retreat from Afghanistan, sending a worrisome message to Afghanistan, Pakistan, our Arab and NATO allies, Iran, North Korea and others about U.S. will and staying power.

I ended on a very personal note. "Mr. President, you and I—more than any other civilians—bear the burden of responsibility for our men and women at war," I wrote. "But, I believe our troops are committed to this mission and want to be successful. Above all, they don't want to retreat, or to lose, or for their sacrifices—and those of their buddies—to be in vain."

On Sept. 15, at Mullen's Senate confirmation hearing for his second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he forcefully argued for more troops in Afghanistan. Six days later, McChrystal's assessment of the dire situation in Afghanistan leaked, and on Oct. 1, while answering a question at a speech in London, McChrystal dismissed out of hand the Afghan option the vice president had been pushing in our internal deliberations. All this ignited a firestorm as the president—and everyone else in the White House—angrily concluded that it constituted an orchestrated effort by the military to force the commander in chief's hand.

Mullen and I repeatedly discussed with the infuriated president what he regarded as military pressure on him. "Is it a lack of respect for me?" Obama asked us. "Are [Petraeus, McChrystal and Mullen] trying to box me in? I've tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate. I'm prepared to devote any amount of time to it—however many hours or days. What is wrong? Is it the process? Are they suspicious of my politics? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I'm young that I don't see what they're doing?"

By mid-October, some clarity was emerging on the key issues. The president called me one night while I was eating a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner at home. "I'm really looking to you for your views on the way forward in Afghanistan," he said. "I'm counting on you."

When I met privately with him in the Oval Office a week later, he grinned broadly, stuck out his hand to shake over the bowl of apples on his coffee table and said, "You have the solution?" I told him I had thought about his call a lot and had prepared a memo for him offering my thoughts. Ultimately, one of the pivotal decisions of Obama's presidency largely tracked the recommendations in that paper.

"We tried remote-control counterterrorism in the 1990s, and it brought us 9/11," I wrote. The core goals Obama had chosen the previous March remained valid—above all, defeating al Qaeda—but we had to narrow the Afghan mission and better communicate what we were trying to do.

We could not realistically expect to eliminate the Taliban; they were woven into Afghanistan's political fabric. But we could work to reverse their military momentum, deny them the ability to control major cities and pressure them along the Pakistani border. Our military efforts should aim to stabilize the situation and buy time to train the ragged but courageous Afghan security forces. We should "quietly shelve trying to develop a strong, effective central government in Afghanistan" and concentrate instead on building up a few key ministries. I supported McChrystal's request for 40,000 troops, but I offered an alternative of about 30,000 troops.

"In conclusion, Mr. President, this is a seminal moment in your presidency," I wrote. "If you elect not to agree to General McChrystal's recommendations (or my alternative), I urge you to make a tough-minded, dramatic change in mission [in] the other direction. Standing pat, middling options, muddling through, are not the right path forward and put our kids at risk for no good purpose."

The atmosphere at the White House was getting poisonous, especially on the part of Donilon, who had characterized Mullen and the military as "insubordinate" and "in revolt." It steamed me that someone who had never been in the military and had never even been to Afghanistan was second-guessing commanders in the field.

On Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving, the president called me at my home in the Pacific Northwest for a long talk. He was fine with the 30,000 troops, with flexibility "in the range of 10%" for additional enablers, but he wouldn't agree to the requests for 4,500 enablers unrelated to the new deployments that had been stacking up on my desk for more than two months. He said that pushed the total number to 37,000. The president asked me to return to Washington early for a meeting with him, Mullen and Petraeus to make sure they were on board. "I'm tired of negotiating with the military," he said.

That Sunday meeting was unlike any I ever attended in the Oval Office. Obama said he had gathered the group principally to go through his decisions one more time to determine whether Mullen and Petraeus were fully on board. The commanders said what he wanted to hear, and I was pleased to hear my proposal being adopted.

Then came an exchange that is seared into my memory. Biden said he was ready to move forward, but the military "should consider the president's decision as an order."

"I am giving an order," Obama quickly said.

I was shocked. I had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the U.S. military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an "order" to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Obama's "order," at Biden's urging, demonstrated the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture.

The president announced the troop surge at West Point on Dec. 1. In the end, this major national security debate had been driven more by the White House staff and domestic politics than any other in my entire experience. The president's political operatives wanted to make sure that everyone knew the Pentagon wouldn't get its way.

Obama, however, made the tough decision to go forward with the Afghan surge—a decision that was contrary to the advice of all his political advisers and almost certainly the least politically popular of his options.