The IRS Mafia: Hush Money and Politics

By Jeffrey Lord 

Ex-IRS Employee: IRS targeting of Christine O’Donnell “not an aberration.”

It wasn’t an accident.
And the IRS has used hush money.
A former IRS employee — that would be IRS employee-turned-whistle blower Stanley Welli — tells The American Spectator that the IRS targeting of Delaware Republican U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party favorite, was neither “isolated” nor “an aberration.”
O’Donnell was recently notified by the IRS that the agency had “received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual…”
Well, a 34-year IRS employee who ran afoul of the IRS culture way back in 1983 and continued to fight it all the way through his retirement in 1996, also accuses the IRS of offering him $15,000 in hush money if Welli would drop an internal grievance filing that came about after Welli and two fellow IRS managers “reported that the executive to whom we reported was associating with organized crime-linked individuals in Chicago and Milwaukee.”
In short, Welli and his two colleagues believed the IRS had in its midst a mobbed-up IRS supervisor. As it were, the Mafia had infiltrated the IRS.
The O’Donnell targeting, says Welli today, “well illustrates the corrupt mentality that has been so prevalent in the IRS.” Welli adds:
 “Some may say that the tax snooping on Christine O’Donnell is isolated, an aberration. Not so! With the IRS, all the rules go out the window ‘when necessary.’ Anything and anyone is fair game.”
Welli contacted The American Spectator after reading a number of articles in this space about the internal culture of the IRS, the role of its powerful liberal union — the National Treasury Employees Union — as well as the role of the current IRS Chief Counsel, William Wilkins. Wilkins is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.
The targeting of Christine O’Donnell specifically caught Welli’s eye. Why? Because Welli says that when he came forward to report corruption in the agency in the 1980s and 1990s, the agency’s career bureaucracy promptly threatened him by “tax browsing,” an IRS term of art that meant the agency was “snooping in my tax files.” Tax browsing, Welli notes, was enough of a problem within the IRS that Congress finally banned it in 1997.
Which would make the snooping into O’Donnell’s taxes a federal crime.
Of particular note here is that Welli, a 34-year career IRS employee who worked as an internal IRS inspector, had his run-in with the IRS bureaucracy — of which he was a part — in the 1980s and a second-time in the 1990s. So appalled was he at the arrogance of the IRS bureaucracy, that in addition to testifying before Congress he wrote about his experience in 1997 for Insight, a magazine published by the Washington Times. Welli has sent the article to The American Spectator, pointing out that the charges he made against the IRS in 1997 are essentially the same charges that are surfacing in 2013 as a result of House investigations. Which is to say — the agency bureaucracy is both heavily politicized and incurably arrogant.
Welli in 1997  began his tale in The Washington Times this way:

In late 1983, two coworkers and I learned that an individual to whom we reported was being “cultivated” by the Chicago mob. We discovered this while working with a criminal investigator who was one of the best ever to serve in federal law enforcement. Among other things, we had evidence that our superior was accepting gratuities from, and doing tax favors for, individuals linked to organized-crime families. In this situation, we had a legal duty to report what we knew.

As this startling event proceeded, unwinding over a period of twelve years from 1984-1996 with what Welli describes as “varying intensity,” Welli and his fellow IRS whistleblowers George Ecola and Ron Koperniak were “harassed, ostracized, scorned and threatened” by their IRS colleagues.

 

The episode launched Welli on an endless professional journey inside the IRS, ending at Welli’s retirement when he described the IRS as:

….an arrogant and self-protecting bureaucracy. I observed misuse of power, abuse of authority, fraud, lies, cover-ups, payoffs, hush money, spying on, whistle-blowers, punitive tax reviews, whitewashed grievance complaints, trumped-up criminal charges, retaliatory investigations, happy-face congressional testimony designed to deflect reform — and systematic denial.

When Welli and his two colleagues reported the misdeeds of the allegedly mobbed-up IRS employee, an IRS colleague snarled: “The organization will get you, you whores.”
The “organization” being the IRS. Welli notes that when his accusations proved true, “We also were given a clue as to how the land lay when several of the executives above us took up a collection for the superior we had reported, to reduce the impact of the brief suspension imposed on him when our allegations proved true.”
Prophetically, Welli was writing in 1997, a year after his retirement, of exactly what House investigators have had to deal with in 2013.

There are certain classic IRS responses to criticism — it practices outright denial, it belittles the problems with misleading statistics and it glosses over executive-level misconduct with elaborate announcements about how many working-level employees receive ethics training. The IRS repeatedly has dealt with congressional scrutiny by saying, in effect: “We’re really much better than our critics paint us. Besides, we have a five-year plan to make us even better. That plan is included with our written statement for the record.”

Adds Welli today: “After watching the recent hearings it’s obvious that there’s been no improvement in the agency’s willingness to accept criticism — they still play dirty.”
Welli notes that he read the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report when it was issued earlier this year. Explains Welli:

In going through it I found myself wondering whatever happened to Condition, Criteria, Cause and Effect? Under the government auditing standards (prescribed by GAO) these are key elements of proper audit reporting.
Condition — What is.
Criteria — What should be, as prescribed by law, regulation or written procedures.
Cause — What was the cause of the problem? (This is critical in order to develop meaningful corrective action in order to prevent reoccurrences of problems.)
Effect — The adverse results of the problem, for example: out-raged taxpayers, loss of tax revenue, waste of staff time, etc.
In the TIGTA report there’s precious little meaningful detail on Condition and ZERO information on Cause. It reads like a report of an audit done by conversation in which no effort was made to verify what the auditor(s) were told.
As you point out in your May 16 article, the TIGTA report has nothing regarding the NTEU influence. It’s also void of any information regarding management oversight reviews and other actions by Sara Hall Ingram or Lois Lerner. Information on these topics would be critical in showing the cause of the problems.

What Welli is describing in acute detail is an IRS that operates in an almost incestuously politicized culture. A culture designed first and foremost to protect itself, but, as we have discussed in this space previously, a culture that is highly attuned to seeking out conservatives that actively oppose the agenda of the IRS union — the NTEU — that represents all those IRS employees.
As a prominent Tea Party leader and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Christine O’Donnell was a highly visible, and in retrospect, an inevitable target in this environment.
And now that the news is out that she was in fact targeted by the IRS? With an official in the Delaware Revenue agency confessing that he was called into the office on a Saturday by his boss — for the specific purpose of accessing Ms. O’Donnell’s IRS tax records?
You guessed it.
Senator Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee who is investigating the O’Donnell case, says that he has been informed the records of that “tax browsing,” tax snooping, have — wait for it — disappeared.
Vanished.
Reports the Washington Times:

Delaware state officials have told Congress that they likely destroyed the computer records that would show when and how often they accessed Christine O’Donnell’s personal tax records and acknowledged that a newspaper article was used as the sole justification for snooping into the former GOP Senate candidate’s tax history.
The revelations to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office came Tuesday as the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, the government’s chief watchdog for the Internal Revenue Service, formally reopened its investigation into the matter by re-interviewing Ms. O’Donnell.

At this point, is there anyone out there who doesn’t understand that this incredibly powerful agency — an agency that Congress has decided to involve in the intricacies of managing of Obamacare — has no business coming even close to the medical records of millions of Americans?
Well, yes.
Yesterday President Obama hit the trail to accuse Republicans of ginning up “phony scandals.” Picking up the line from his press secretary Jay Carney.
But fear not.
Also yesterday, Texas Senator John Cornyn and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson began the process of getting the IRS out of Obamacare by that most simple of methods: cutting off the money.
Politico wrote it up this way:

Republican senators are pushing separate amendments on a spending bill this week that would choke off funding to the IRS to implement Obamacare and suggests that President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, White House staff and others participate in the insurance exchanges.
The IRS amendment to the transportation appropriations bill comes from Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who say that IRS targeting of conservative groups could affect the organization’s impartiality in implementing the healthcare law. Their amendment would deny any money to the Treasury to implement the health law.
Denying funding to Obamacare as part of a government funding bill expected in September has become a new rallying cry for Senate conservatives such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida.

What we have here is best summed up by 34-year IRS employee Stan Welli.
Let’s end where we began, with Welli’s assessment of the IRS. What the American people have on their hands, what Congressman Darrell Issa and his colleagues have been investigating, is:

….an arrogant and self-protecting bureaucracy. I observed misuse of power, abuse of authority, fraud, lies, cover-ups, payoffs, hush money, spying on, whistle-blowers, punitive tax reviews, whitewashed grievance complaints, trumped-up criminal charges, retaliatory investigations, happy-face congressional testimony designed to deflect reform — and systematic denial.

And this is an agency — an agency that longtime IRS inspector Stan Welli believed had been infiltrated by the mob — the Mafia — that is to be entrusted with enforcing ObamaCare? An agency that in its treatment of Welli as well as in this current scandal acts not unlike the Mafia itself?
It doesn’t take a wizard to realize that when some future Tea Party candidate — a future Christine O’Donnell — runs for office and is opposed by the IRS union and the employees they represent that the next step in this sordid agency’s history is inevitable.
As sure as God makes little green apples, that candidate will wake up one fine morning to read their confidential medical history on every liberal blog in America.
Courtesy of the IRS.
Unless, of course, they paid the hush money.

Economic Malpractice and Political Slander

By Ross Kaminsky 

The good news: he’s not running for a third term.

It’s difficult to listen to a Barack Obama speech when it would be easier, faster, and less painful to write one.
So it was with as much a sense of impending boredom and déjà pivot as concern about predictable content that I embarked on listening to President Obama’s speech on “the economy” delivered on Wednesday at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
If you’ve heard any of the many other “pivots” to jobs and the economy, always when the stuff Obama actually cares about somehow fails to support his poll numbers, you won’t be surprised that I can (and therefore shall) summarize his economic points in brief…which is to say in 45 minutes less than he did:

• Foreign competition and the greedy rich have hurt the middle class and (most importantly) the power of labor unions.
• Evil banks and credit card companies and health insurers destroyed the economy before he took office, so nothing that’s happened since, at least nothing bad, is his responsibility.
• He remains strangely proud of the auto bailout, Obamacare, and spending billions of taxpayer dollars on renewable energy boondoggles, at least two of which I would avoid reminding the public of were I in his shoes.
• He is equally proud of Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and raising the highest marginal tax rates, even though one of those things has not yet done anything and the other three are obviously harmful to economic growth.
• The president complained about inequality increasing, money distorting politics, and, remarkably, predicted that “Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they have…” As a friend remarked to me: No, Barack, that’s the America we already have…the one you helped create, and the one you exploited to get re-elected.
• It takes quite a pair of cojones for the man who blew up the federal deficit to previously unimaginably high levels to then crow about how fast the deficit is now falling. But then, this man is a narcissist’s narcissist, which explains why he somehow missed the irony of his own complaint, mere moments later, about “political posturing… and stale debates.”
• Staleness on parade: We need to “rebuild our manufacturing base,” “educate our workforce,” and “make the investments necessary to promote long-term growth and shared prosperity.” I could go on, but you’ve heard them all a dozen times before.
• And in a repeat of his usual threat, which he probably views as a helpful promise, Obama offered to disrupt the nation’s traffic repeatedly: “Over the next several weeks, in towns across this country, I will engage the American people in this debate.”

Given the yawn-inducing leftist pabulum of the five-point economic plan (which I won’t offend your intellect by repeating) offered by our never-had-a-real-job president, the interesting part of Wednesday’s speech was political.
Obama characterized Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives, as harming the poor and “vulnerable” children. He blamed the GOP for the “meat cleaver” nature of the sequester despite the fact that he rejected being given the authority to turn it into a scalpel, that is the ability to allow federal departments to more carefully allocate spending cuts as long as the amount spent was not lessened. As always, he wanted the issue more than the solution.
The president said he will “work with Republicans…wherever I can” but that is a promise he has made and broken so many times in the past that it is unlikely anyone but John McCain believes him.
After a brief sop to moderates, suggesting that “Democrats need to question old assumptions…and embrace changes to cherished priorities so that they work better in this new age,” Obama went on to attack and insult Republicans…garnering the biggest cheers of the afternoon from his hand-picked audience.
He claimed that “there are Republicans in Congress right now who privately agree with me on many of the ideas I’ll be proposing, but worry they’ll face swift political retaliation for saying so.” Perhaps there are such Republicans, a small-and-shrinking number, but they are far too few to overcome the broader GOP opposition — opposition which is wise on both policy and political grounds.
In one of his most egregious combinations of slander and straw man, Obama continued on to say that other Republicans “will dismiss every idea I put forward either because they’re playing to their most strident supporters, or because they have a fundamentally different vision for America — one that says inequality is both inevitable and just; one that says an unfettered free market without any restraints inevitably produces the best outcomes, regardless of the pain and uncertainty imposed on ordinary families.”
This demands more than a sentence in response. There is not a single Republican in Congress who utters the words, or secretly believes, the selfish, cruel caricature painted in pale watercolors by the president.
It is true that inequality is inevitable in a free society but that doesn’t mean that conservatives think of it as “just.” Eliminating inequality is a fine goal to the extent that it can be done without what Frederic Bastiat called “legalized plunder,” which is to say to a limited but still real extent, such as through allowing school choice and competition, policies angrily opposed by Democrats who prefer union dollars to getting poor children out of poverty. (See, Barack, two can play at that game!)
No Republican I know argues for a completely “unfettered free market.” After all, capitalism is not a synonym for anarchy, but rather a system that has definite rules to prevent fraud and theft; there are legitimate restraints on a “free market,” though far fewer than we already have, and far far fewer than this president wants.
And no Republican says that capitalism must inevitably produce the best outcomes in every individual case. There are losers in a free market. With good policy, many can be retrained with new skills and re-enter the workforce. And of course it is offensive and outrageous to suggest that Republican legislators are numb to the “pain and uncertainty” of those who lose jobs due to the creative destruction that embodies economic liberty.
Obama went on to accuse Republicans of blindly opposing him while not offering ideas of their own: “You can’t just be against something; you gotta be for something.” This is a bald-faced lie, of course, with the Ryan budget as a well-known case in point of a detailed, serious plan to address some of the nation’s most pressing concerns. Of course, Obama’s reaction to that was to invite House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (aka Jack) to a speech and then insult him in front of the gathered crowd. A truly classless man, our president.
So, let’s get this straight: Obama first says he wants to work with Republicans. Within minutes, he lies about what Republicans believe and claim that they have not offered constructive, substantive policy ideas. He followed up that warm welcome to Republican cooperation by saying that he will “not accept deals that do not meet the test of strengthening the prospects of hard-working families,” which is Obama code for high-taxing, big-spending, union-boosting budget busting which no Republican should support.
Obama concluded his barrage with a frequent refrain, suggesting that if Congress will not bend to his will, then he will proceed (the rule of law be damned) to implement his vision (his word, not mine) of transforming the nation into a European-style social-welfare state: “Yes, Congress is tough right now but that’s not going to stop me. We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress, to make things happen.”
Interestingly, this particular threat was not in the pre-released speech transcript, showing that — as is typical of this president — his true nature comes out in his ad-libbed petty-tyrannical rhetoric.
And when he’s not side-stepping Congress, he’ll be continuing the transparent cronyism and arm-twisting which has been a defining trait of this administration: “Where I can’t act on my own and Congress isn’t cooperating, I’ll pick up the phone, I’ll call CEOs, I’ll call philanthropists, I’ll call college presidents, I’ll call labor leaders — I’ll call anybody who can help — and enlist them in our efforts.” Again, with ad-libbing being this president’s truth serum, the part about calling labor leaders was not in the pre-released transcript.
He went on to give an example, positively mentioning Costco and the Container Store (one wonders whether those companies smiled or cringed at the mention), but leaving the distinct impression that he would be more than willing to use his bully pulpit as a hammer rather than for gentle praise.
Also of note, and raising questions about the competency of his messaging team, the president referenced, as Press Secretary Jay Carney has repeatedly as well, “phony scandals” — having the primary effect of causing Americans to remember the very real scandals of the IRS targeting, Benghazi, and Fast and Furious, just to name the most famous few.
Just before closing his speech with a shout-out to Galesburg’s most famous son, author Carl Sandburg, himself, a century ago, a member of Wisconsin’s arm of the Socialist Party, President Obama offered the most frightening sentence I have heard in a long time: “I care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again.”
Coming from a man who has not the first clue how to achieve such a goal, a man who engages in economic malpractice at every turn, a man who neither likes nor understands the nation he nominally leads, our best hope is that those intransigent House Republicans keep on doing exactly what they’re doing.

America’s Detroit Future

By Peter Ferrara

Obama’s politics and policies promise nothing less.

In the 1950s, Detroit was the fourth largest city in America, with a population of nearly 2 million. It was also a middle class paradise, with the highest median family income of all major cities in the entire country. The last Republican mayor of Detroit was elected in the 1950s.
Then the 1960s happened, and Detroit became a socialist one party state. And you know what that one party was. Over the next half century, city politics in Detroit was a battle between Left and Lefter, or socialism versus communism. Let’s face reality and speak the truth. We see there the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, what comes out when the party is left undisturbed, and is free to be what it wants to be.
As a result, taxes, government spending, and disabling regulation of evil profit-making activity (business) boomed. Detroit residents came to pay the highest income and property taxes in the state, and Michigan is not known as a low tax state. Businesses within the state became a target for tax plunder. Last year, financially desperate Detroit doubled its business tax, administering one last lash to the golden goose before going down, as that counterproductively only made the problem worse rather than better.
Government employee unions and their self-interested political activism took over the city, with the support of the city’s population thinking that whatever the unions wanted had to be good for working people and the middle class. Taxes, of course, are mother’s milk for government employee unions, who literally eat and live off of taxes.
The city took on massive effective government debt in the form of unfunded liabilities for government employee pension and health care promises. Detroit came to be the cutting edge for overpaid government employees, with excessive benefits and promises of ever more. That cutting edge has blossomed today into state and local government workers nationally paid on average 45% more than the private sector workers who must pay the taxes to support them. Government pay and benefits for state and local workers nationally now totals $80,000 per year on average.
Those government bureaucrats, after a career of back breaking work in their offices driving businesses out of the city, if not out of business altogether, generally feel they have to retire at age 55. Studies show that, realistically evaluated, unfunded liabilities for state and local public employee pension and promised retirement health benefits total $5.2 trillion, effectively adding about a third to the national debt burden on taxpayers. In Detroit, retirement benefits and debt eat up about 40% of revenue, effectively consuming nearly every dollar of city property taxes, which so heavily burden private sector retirees.
Moreover, Detroit’s bloated, overstaffed bureaucracy today employs one worker for every 50 city residents remaining. Indianapolis provides much better services, with one worker for every 223 residents. But Indianapolis has remained a Republican town.
For all of Detroit’s runaway government spending, government services in the city became pitiful. The high school drop out rate in Detroit reached as high as 76 percent in recent years. Yet per pupil spending in Detroit public schools is higher than in rich and prosperous Marin County, California, where the high school graduation rate is 97%. Maybe that is because in return for the non-education of the young in Detroit, public school teachers there enjoy the highest pay in the country among major metropolitan areas, at nearly $50 an hour.
For all the taxes and spending in Detroit, the city slashed its police force by 40% over the past decade. (Cops are not the foot soldiers of socialism.) Maybe that is why the average wait for police response to an emergency phone call is 58 minutes in Detroit, five times the national average. Maybe that has something to do with Detroit suffering one of the highest violent crime rates in the country as well.
That crime is effectively yet another tax driving businesses out of the city, or out of business altogether. Who is going to invest in Detroit to create jobs and increase wages when that investment is subject to plunder by criminals, and whatever survives is subject to plunder by taxes and hostile bureaucrats? No wonder one-third of Detroit residents live in poverty.
The city’s own bankruptcy filing reports that nearly 70% of city parks have closed in the past five years. Four in ten street lights do not work, further promoting crime.
Business and investment has consequently fled the city. The largest employer in Detroit is the public schools. The second largest is the city government. The city economy cannot function with everyone getting a check from the government, either for a government job or for welfare. Detroit’s unemployment rate is nearly 30%. The city now ranks 66th in the nation among major cities for median household income, a long climb down from number one half a century ago.
The middle class has followed business and the jobs in fleeing the former middle class paradise. The city’s population is now down to around 800,000, less than half what it was in the 1950s. As a result, more than half the residences in the city are now vacant, with the only response being a government demolition program. Consequently, after half a century of municipal socialism, the city is literally disappearing under the feet of loud mouth left-wing demagogues. It is like people fleeing East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell.
Detroit’s middle class paradise has been turned into the Third World hell that suits its economic policies. Detroit is bankrupt today because as Margaret Thatcher famously recognized, the fundamental problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
The same cancer has been spreading from Philadelphia to Chicago to Oakland, and California more generally. New Yorkers made of sterner stuff have so far avoided the same fate by voting in Republican mayors for the last 20 years. But New York City is still not too far behind the same result. Ditto that for other cities from Los Angeles, to St. Louis, to Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Buffalo, Newark, and elsewhere.
Churchill is said to have recognized that if you are not a socialist when you are 20 you have no heart, and if you’re still a socialist at 40 you have no brains. But young adults in the nation’s urban areas have to start thinking about their futures, if there are to be any. Single women, your real threat is not Republican men taking away your contraceptives, but Democrats stealing away any prosperous future family life.
Blacks and Hispanics, maybe you should start voting for jobs and rising real wages, rather than welfare and government benefits, and the higher taxes on job creators and employers to fund them. You will never reach the prosperity, nice houses, nice cars, and nice neighborhoods you desire from government handouts. Asians, are the Democrats for your future prosperity, or are they just after  for your votes, at least until you wake up. Jewish voters, hello, is anyone awake there?
But the much bigger problem facing America is that the policies of Detroit have now gone national at the federal level. What day has Barack Obama talked about the economy when he has not talked about increasing taxes, federal spending, deficits and debt, regulation, and other anti-growth policies that worked their devastation in Detroit? What has President Obama ever stood for that is pro-economic growth, jobs, rising wages and incomes, and prosperity? Climate change? Gun control? Gay marriage? Stand Your Ground? The Keystone Pipeline? America’s low cost energy revolution, which proceeds only because he hasn’t stopped it yet?
Obama and the other Washington Che Guevara Democrats seem to be a self-parody of President Reagan’s joke regarding stupid economic policy: if you find something moving, tax it, if it keeps moving, regulate it, if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Tax rates for virtually every major federal tax were increased in January, except for the corporate income tax, which even so is now the highest in the industrialized world. Obama’s proposed 2013 budget called for spending nearly $50 trillion over the next 10 years, which would be the biggest government spending in world history. The national debt is now at $17 trillion, and rocketing towards $30 trillion over the next 10 years, while the entire economy is only $16 trillion, and barely growing at all over the last 5 years. The nation faces $100 trillion to $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs, and the only changes Obama and his Democrats have favored are to add trillions more through Obamacare, explode welfare dependency, and extend unemployment benefits, which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks is the best pro-growth program possible. (Next to her Sarah Palin is a rocket scientist.)
What Obama is really doing is taking the Democrat urban political machine of Chicago/Detroit national. He is exploding welfare dependency, thinking as Saul Alinsky taught him that a government check means an almost certain Democrat voter. And he is plundering anyone financially independent with high taxes, thinking financial independence means political independence. Following Alinsky, he talks a good line about the middle class. But he has done less than zero to promote the middle class jobs and incomes he keeps talking about. Instead, middle class incomes have declined continuously throughout his Presidency, with no relief in sight. America is on the exact same road as Detroit. “Spreading the wealth around” is a perfect, tried, and true way to make that wealth disappear.
Now Obama is finally going to address the economy in the next few weeks, peddling the same Detroit snake oil he has sold to America for more than five years now. The question before the nation today is: Is this generation of Americans capable of self-government?

We're Done, Mr. President

By Christopher Chantrill

It's pure coincidence, but in the week that the president's speechwriters were beavering away on his "35 years ago" soliloquy, Lady Marjorie and I watched a couple of DVDs with a racial subtext.
The better of the two was the Satyajit Ray movie Mahanagar, or "Big City," about a saintly Bengali wife and mother going out to work as a saleswoman. The movie turns on the unjust firing of a co-worker of the heroine, a young Anglo-Indian woman. The Bengali heroine is outraged by her Bengali boss's racism and quits her job on principle.
The term Anglo-Indian comes from the system of racial classification of the British Raj. On that system -- and system is domination -- our president would be considered a white Kenyan; so he would have a lot in common with George Zimmerman, classified by our mainstream media racial system as white Hispanic.
The movie was all very uplifting, but the president soon brought us back to earth.
Andrew C. McCarthy wants us to believe that the "35 years ago" line and the Department of Social Justice tip line for you to report Zimmerman civil-rights abuses is part of a desperation tactic for the 2014 midterms. Since ObamaCare and the numerous scandals spell disaster, the only thing left is to gin up the base with the race card.
But I think that the president and his execrable Attorney General are really just doing their part to make the U.S. into a post-racial society.
The great truth of the Obama phenomenon is that the president was elected by a white majority yearning to put race behind us. And the likeable young candidate Obama did his best to encourage us in our yearning. In reality, we discovered, the president does not adhere the Church of Let's All Just Get Along; he's a faithful member of the Church of Social Justice, Alinsky Tradition, and so is everyone else in the Obama administration.
In spite of the president trying to legislate the morality of his Alinskyite church, we are going to get to a post-racial society anyway, only not quite in the way we thought. We hoped, we naïve innocents, that the First Black President would declare racial politics over, and issue a blanket pardon to all white Americans as a reward for being teacher's pets and overcoming our institutional racism to elect the First Black President. But that's not the way it's going to work at all.
Instead all Americans except white liberals and black liberal plantation slaves are going to say to themselves: "I'm Done." As in, I've had it up to here with race politics and I'm not going to take it anymore. Call me a racist, call me a bigot. I don't give a damn.
And really, how else was race politics going to end? Race politics is like a rat punching a button to get a reward. Every time you hit the button you get a reward. Why would you stop?
You wouldn't stop punching the reward button until the rewards stopped coming. You wouldn't stop until long after the rewards stopped coming. You -- the rat -- would probably be nearly dead from starvation before you stopped punching that button and started to look around for something else to eat.
Why would liberals or blacks be any different? After all, to say that a liberal or a black is better than a rat is nothing more than rank speciesism, an attitude that all evolved people strongly deprecate.
But here is another angle. You know how our liberal friends keep telling us that war is not the answer and defense contractors are Merchants of Death? So why would an Obama-sponsored race war backed by the Reverends of Race be any different?
Does the president care that his race war is going to segregate African Americans even more from the mainstream of American life? And after the American people say "I'm done" the liberals' loyal African American rank-and-file will be left with their young men still in jail, their women still without husbands, their children still fatherless, still failing to learn cursive at lousy schools, and their young generation still unable to get decent jobs, let alone afford to buy their own homes.
At that point, what difference would it make?
There's a reason why the Bible goes on and on about living and dying by swords and plowshares, and not putting trust in princes. War is tremendous fun for the generals, but not so great for the front-line grunts. Same thing with politics. It's tremendous fun for the ruling class, but not so great for the subjects camping out in the ruins of Detroit or dodging bullets in the streets of Chicago.

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http://www.amazon.com/This-U-S-Citizen-Thoughts-Concerns/dp/1451509979/ 
 
This U.S. Citizen   
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Liberals to the Law: Get Lost!

By Christopher Chantrill

After eight years of listening to liberals hyperventilating about the illegalities of President George W. Bush, it is really annoying for conservatives to watch the utter disregard for the law coming from the Obama administration.
The jewel in the crown of this imperial presidency is of course the pre-holiday decision violate the text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and delay the employer mandate for Obamacare by a year.   

People have started arguing about whether or not Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution applies to the president: "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."  After all, the government has gotten so big and complex that the president can't hope to dot every "i" and cross every "t" in every law that gets passed.  He has to prioritize these things.

None of the above applies to Republican presidents, of course.  They must obey the letter of the law, or else.

The Obama administration's flight from the law was analyzed and predicted half a century ago by Friedrich Hayek.  The whole point of Hayek's thought, from The Road to Serfdom to the three volume Law, Legislation and Liberty was that big government had a fatal flaw in its heart.  He argued that the complex responsibilities of modern government could not possibly be defined by cut-and-dried law.  Big government necessarily required administrative flexibility if it was to work at all.  But then, of course, it would no longer be a government of laws.  That's why the welfare state was a road to serfdom, the feudal rule of the administrative bureaucrats.

To the young liberal like Ezra Klein, the extralegal antics of Obamacare are not a problem (H/T Reihan Salam).  Congress should just come back for another try.

Congress should use the next year to improve the employer mandate. There are plenty of better ideas out there: The Senate Health Committee's bill used [blah blah blah]. The House bill tied [blah blah]. We can do better, and we should.

You would think that Congress is just planning a wedding, not how to force the entire health care system under the liberal yoke.  The "we" in "can do better" has no place for anyone except liberals.

But there is another problem with the president ignoring the law as written.  It is the whole question of why we have law at all or any limits on the power of the government and the ruling class.

The reason we have laws and limits on government is not just an embarrassing holdover from the past.  It is not just to give Republicans a chance to obstruct the president's important initiatives.

The reason we require that the president "take Care that the Laws shall be faithfully executed" is that the governed in all places harbor a natural suspicion about their rulers.  They tend to worry that the government will abuse its powers.  Think liberal paranoia about Richard Nixon.  Think liberal paranoia about, oh, anything conservative or Republican.  The point of a government of laws is not so much to do the right thing.  The point of a government that obeys the law is that it helps keep the opposition from crawling over broken glass to get to the polling booth at the next election and change its ruling class for another one.

That is the central problem of "czars" in the White House, of EPA closing down coal-fired electric generation, or Obamacare waivers, or Obamacare voided deadlines.  It feeds the natural suspicion of any non-liberal American that their federal government is up to no good, and will make it difficult or impossible for the ordinary citizen to get a fair shake.

"Clanless, lawless, hearthless is he who is in love with civil war," says Homer.  And if we suggest that politics is civil war by other means, we can see that the lawless liberal is taking an oblivious first step to civil war. 

Liberals in the Obama administration and elsewhere are so convinced of the truth of their issues, from health care to climate change that any means to advance their progressive agenda seems justified to them.  The fact that they are forced to change a few deadlines, or push climate change through the EPA rather than Congress doesn't seem like anything to get worked up about.

Liberals are wrong about this, as about so many things on which they refuse to listen to other voices.

Liberals may think that politics is just about issues, but they are wrong.  Politics is about avoiding civil war; it is about calming the fears of the opposition. A ruling class that that doesn't faithfully execute the law is provoking the opposition into raising a head of rebellion.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us.  At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.