Broke U.S. Postal Service paying $2M for conference, golf, party
Four hundred U.S. Postal Service executives are heading to San Francisco
next month for workshops, meetings — and a dance party.
And a golf tournament. And a dinner event.
That’s according to a report by KTVU, which found 400 USPS staffers, including the postmaster general, are set to attend the four-day National Postal Forum in March at the Moscone Center in California.
The
trip is expected to cost the flailing agency — which is pushing to stop
Saturday letter delivery due to revenue issues — more than $2 million,
KTVU reports. An estimated $220,000 is going to spent on exhibit space,
according to the news agency.
The event kicks off with a golf
outing at Harding Park in San Francisco, KTVU reports. Meetings and
workshops are part of the conference — but so are plenty of relaxing
events, like a dance party, according to KTVU. Moreover, area hotel costs hit at $300 a night, the station reports.
A spokesman for the USPS
said executives attending the conference would have to pay their own
golfing fees, as well as other costs, but did not specify in the KTVU
report what those other costs included.
“They need to be concerned
about the optics of this,” said Leslie Page, with Citizens Against
Government Waste, in the KTVU report. “They need to be concerned about
ratcheting back some of what could be perceived as luxurious
activities.”
PK'S NOTE: More bad news about potential new Labor Secretary:
Obama Appoints Radical Who Lied Under Oath About New Black Panther Party Case to Head Labor Department
President Obama is expected to nominate Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez Monday for Labor Secretary.
Seeking to fill yet another second-term Cabinet vacancy, President
Barack Obama is set to nominate Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney
general, to be the next secretary of labor, the White House says.
If confirmed by the Senate, Perez, who has been head of the Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division for 3½ years, would take over the
Labor Department as Obama undertakes several worker-oriented
initiatives, including an overhaul of immigration laws and an increase
in the minimum wage.
Before taking the job as assistant attorney general, Perez was
secretary of Maryland's Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation,
which enforces state consumer rights, workplace safety and wage and hour
laws.
Perez's nomination has been expected for weeks, and comes with vigorous support from labor unions and Latino groups.
When the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case was dismissed
by the Department of Justice, Perez said under oath that senior
officials were not involved in the decision to do so and not prosecute
Party members for wielding a night stick outside of a Philadelphia
polling place in 2008. Last week, a report from the DOJ Inspector
General contradicted this claim, proving Perez's testimony was false. In
addition, according to a ruling by a judge in a lawsuit about the case
last week, Perez's statement that DOJ senior officials weren't involved
in dismissing the case contradicts the evidence. Judicial Watch has more:
Here’s the key quote from Judge Walton’s ruling:
"The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were
conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther
Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that
case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General
Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that
decision. Surely the public has an interest in documents that cast doubt
on the accuracy of government officials’ representations regarding the
possible politicization of agency decision-making."
In short, this ruling is further confirmation that political
appointees at Justice did interfere in the Black Panther case. Assistant
AG Perez’s testimony was false. And the American people have a right to
documents related to the scandal. That’s pretty much a clear-cut
victory.
By way of review, this all started on Election Day 2008, when members
of the Black Panther Party stood guard at a polling station in
Philadelphia, PA brandishing weapons and threatening voters. A video of
the incident was widely distributed on the Internet. The Justice
Department filed a civil lawsuit against the Black Panthers, but
ultimately overruled members of its own staff and dismissed the majority
of the charges.
So what exactly did Perez say under oath that has now been proven false?
COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Was there any political leadership involved in
the decision not to pursue this particular case any further than it was?
ASST. ATTY. GEN. PEREZ: No. The decisions were made by Loretta King in
consultation with Steve Rosenbaum, who is the Acting Deputy Assistant
Attorney General.
And as usual per Obama administration coverup, nobody important knew anything about the dismissal of the case...meaning Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama were both involved.
The Black Panther scandal which, we were told, was managed by low
level Justice officials might just go all the way to the very top.
An email from former Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King,
dated May 12, 2009, was distributed directly to Attorney General Eric
Holder through Odgen and Perrelli. Entitled, “Weekly Report for the Week
Ending May 8, 2009,” the email “Identifies matters deemed significant
and highlights issues for the senior offices, including an update on a
planned course of action in the NBPP (New Black Panther Party)
litigation.”
Evidently Holder was in the loop as well. Okay, next question: What about the Obama White House?
Press reports reported at least nine meetings between Perrelli and
White House officials between March 25 and May 27, 2009, regarding the
Black Panther case. (JW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit to get to the truth in the matter but were unable to find
evidence of a direct White House link (not that Messrs Perrelli and
Hirsch needed to be told what to do).)
As Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said,
Perez is a far left radical with a corrupt record within the Department
of Justice and has no business being nominated as Labor Secretary.
Perez, who gave the false testimony, is a leading leftist at Justice
who has taken the lead in the attacks on Arizona’s immigration
enforcement measures, attacks on election integrity measures such as
voter ID, and the shakedown of financial institutions over dubious
discriminatory lending allegations.
Apparently lying under oath as a top Department of Justice official is standard procedure these days.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/03/18/obama-appoints-radical-who-lied-under-oath-about-new-black-panther-party-case-to-head-labor-department-n1537241
How the Fed is creating a new feudalism
Over a decade ago in 2001, the Federal Reserve
planted the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis by lowering its target
for the federal funds rate from 6.25 percent to 1.75 percent. Since this
interest rate is a benchmark number used throughout financial markets,
many first-time homebuyers were able to enter the housing market thanks
in part to both new looser lending standards and the record-low teaser
mortgage rates banks were offering.
The Fed then lowered the rate even further in
2002 and again in 2003, when it reached just 1 percent and stayed there
for more than a year. These easy money policies may have helped
temporarily decrease unemployment and drive homeownership rates to
record highs, but they also created a real estate bubble. When that
bubble popped in 2008, it precipitated the biggest recession since the
Great Depression more than 80 years ago.
But surely, the Federal Reserve has since
learned its lesson, right? It would never try to lower unemployment by
implementing easy money policies that would create another asset bubble.
Would it?
In fact, the Federal Reserve has learned
nothing. It is again implementing loose money policies, this time
through quantitative easing, and it is again creating artificial asset
inflation. Worse, this time the Fed's distortionary policies are
primarily benefiting the wealthiest Americans while making a nation of
serfs out of young families who are just trying to get their start.
Amidst the weakest economic recovery since
World War II, the Federal Reserve has lost the power to fight
unemployment by lowering the federal funds rate. It is already as low as
it can go.
Instead, the Fed is now implementing a
strategy called quantitative easing, which consists of purchasing $85
billion worth of assets, like mortgage-backed securities, every month.
The Fed pays for these assets by simply creating new money out of thin
air. By buying up safe assets, the Fed hopes to push investors into
riskier investments that offer higher returns.
And it's working.
Janet Yellen, who was appointed Federal
Reserve vice chairman by President Obama and is his likely choice as the
next Fed chair, recently admitted, "Even if the interest rate channel
is less powerful right now than it was before the crisis, asset
purchases still work to support economic growth through other channels,
including by boosting stock prices and house values."
Thanks to the Fed's printing press, the Dow
Jones recently hit an all-time high. And real estate prices are surging,
too. Which is all great news ... as long as you are already wealthy and
own assets. The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans own 82 percent of all
individually held stocks. And only they have the cash to turn a profit
in the real estate market. By buying foreclosed or otherwise distressed
properties on the cheap, repairing them and then renting them out,
wealthy investors are earning 8 to 12 percent returns on their
investments.
Without the Fed's involvement, this would be a
great capitalist success story in action. But thanks to the Fed's
asset-boosting policies, many middle-class families looking to purchase
their first homes are being priced out of the market.
In February, median home prices in Southern
California rose a mind-boggling 21 percent. Unfortunately, investors
accounted for a record high 31.4 percent of buyers. The number of buyers
paying with cash was 35.6 percent, also a near-record high.
Middle-class families, especially those trying to buy in California,
don't pay for their first homes with cash.
Besides creating a nation of renters who would
rather be landowners, what happens when the Fed stops artificially
juicing asset prices by $85 billion a month? What happens when all that
real estate stops producing an 8 to 12 percent return? Will investors
exit the market slowly? Or is another real estate bubble-burst just
around the corner?
I'm sure Yellen and the rest of the Fed have
the answers to all these questions. When have federal government experts
ever been wrong?
http://washingtonexaminer.com/conn-carroll-how-the-fed-is-creating-a-new-feudalism/article/2524523
The Other Drone Question: Is Obama Building A Federal Police Force?
Less
than two weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul's demanded to know whether the
president believed he had a right to kill an American citizen on
American soil with a drone, finally getting an answer that had to be
dragged out Attorney General Eric Holder. An equally important, but
still unasked question is whether the president intends to build a
federal, drone-based "public safety" force to police local communities.
Somebody
had better ask the president about this quickly, because it appears
that his administration intends to use drones to actively usurp what
were once local police and sheriff's department functions.
Put
it all together, and it sure looks like Obama is building the backbone
for that national police force he wanted the first time he ran for
office.
Worse
yet, both Democrats and Republicans are now openly discussing a plan to
put all the drones flown in America's skies, including those owned and
operated by local police departments, under the ultimate supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, consolidating the country's surveillance and law enforcement powers under one powerful federal police jurisdiction.
According to Wired.com, DHS is now experimenting with how its drones can be used in "first responder, law enforcement and border security scenarios."
The DHS's drones could also be used, Nextgov.com reported, "to support emergency and non-emergency incidents nationwide" and
to give the department "situational awareness" in public safety matters
or disasters, including forest fires. The department also plans to use
its drones, and their attached cameras to surveil and police sporting
events, political events and large public gatherings.
The
problem with DHS's plans is that many of the above functions used to be
handled by local law enforcement without any help from the federal
government.
DHS appears to be planning a vast surveillance network, and it is rapidly developing the technology to create it. Wired.com reports this about drone technology:
The Department of Homeland Security
is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four
square miles of (constitutionally protected) American territory for
long, long stretches of time.
Homeland Security
doesn't have a particular system in mind. Right now, it's just
soliciting "industry feedback" on what a formal call for such a "Wide Area Surveillance System"
might look like. But it's the latest indication of how powerful
military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents
and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.
The Department of Homeland Security
says it's interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square
kilometers - that's between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood
- in its "persistent mode." By "persistent," it means the cameras
should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours
to collect what the military likes to call "pattern of life" data - that
is, what "normal" activity looks like for a given area.
In
America, community policing has always been done at the local level. If
a police force engaged in corruption, abused people, or got out of
control, local voters could and likely would rapidly vote out the mayor
or council that controlled it. You could get a badge number. You could
file a report. You could call your local newspaper. This has always kept
police departments responsive to the will and the needs of local
communities - and firmly under their control.
But
drone technology is now allowing Washington's multitude of law
enforcement agencies to begin to compete for police powers and police
duties that have always fallen to local police departments.
Even more alarming, a subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security
is currently studying a plan to put all the drones flown in America's
airways under direct supervision of DHS and the Department of Justice.
After
a 2011 plot to use a drone to bomb the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol
was thwarted by the FBI, Congress began exploring the idea of putting
all drones - including those flown by local law enforcement agencies -
under federal control to protect citizens against rogue drone operators
with bad intentions.
The House Homeland Security
committee, which oversees these matters, also became concerned last
year that other federal government agencies were "borrowing DHS drones
or procuring their own for scouting populated areas - without the
department's supervision," Nextgov.com reported.
To deal with all of this, Committee on Homeland Security
subcommittee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, says the
committee will mandate that DHS, the Justice Department and the FAA
coordinate to oversee all drones that fly within the country, but has
said he prefers that the Obama administration do so without a
requirement from Congress.
While
the intentions here might not be totalitarian, the ultimate outcome
could be, especially as more federal and local law enforcement agencies
come to rely on drone technology and the federal government begins to
police the interior in ways that were unthinkable just 15 years ago,
before the Department of Homeland Security - and the use of drone technology -- even existed.
On
Washington's present track with this, in a decade it could be hard to
tell where your local police department ends and the federal government
begins.
PK'S NOTE: Unfortunately, we're all afraid of the IRS. It would have to be a coordinated, extremely large movement.
Is It Time To Starve The Beast?
The
exact time when the government ceased serving 'We the People' and
became our master is impossible to pinpoint. The best estimate coincides
with the beginnings of the progressive (isn't "regressive" a better
description?) movement and Theodore Roosevelt. What TR started, Woodrow
Wilson, president of the United States from 1913-1921, expanded
exponentially and the movement was on.
Those who believe in the complete
control of the masses by the state at the expense of individual
freedoms are statists or Leftists. The 'L' is capitalized to distinguish
the group as being its own religion, ideology, and entity. Leftists,
statists, and regressives are evolutions of the same beast and have no
political boundaries, Republican or Democrat. They obey only the rules
or laws that suit their own political ends. They are secular and against
anything associated with Judeo-Christian values, morals, or rules of
behavior. They disparage limited government and despise the Constitution
with its limits and enumerated powers. When these obvious
anti-America-as-founded zealots are out of power they spin, prevaricate,
and throw hissy fits like little children when they don't get their
way.
Usually
the tantrums are enough to get their way, because those who don't walk
the regressive line are often badgered into silence. The rare principled
conservatives who believe in limited government and the original intent
of the Constitution invariably get rolled because of their fear of
offending the Leftists and their media toadies. The media spews Leftism,
and that message affects many low-information voters who are more
interested in the Kardashians than what is happening with the sequester
or the budget process in Washington D.C.
After
100 years of varying degrees of oppressive rule by Leftists, America
has sealed its own fate by selecting the most radical Leftist in the
country's history to be its 44th president. Woodrow Wilson started it
all by expanding government and then getting us into World War I only
months after promising the opposite. Calvin Coolidge reversed the growth
of government and balanced the budget leading to the Roaring 20's.
After the disastrous administration of Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945, inherited the Great Depression.
FDR's New Deal statist agenda exposed the sophistry of socialism and
prolonged the recovery. The decade-long depression ended only after the
unifying affect on the economy brought on by World War II. FDR
repudiated the Constitution and the rule of law by adapting a new Bill
of Rights and a stacked Supreme Court, not to benefit America, but
instead to promote his regressive statist ideology.
Government
moderation allowed the private sector to expand for twenty years until
Lyndon Baines Johnson reinstituted statist policies including civil
rights legislation, immigration, the Vietnam War, and the government
expansion of welfare included in his Great Society. LBJ's
unconstitutional (not enumerated) welfare and redistribution policies
have destroyed more that $15 Trillion (approximately the size of the
massive federal debt as of 2012) in wealth and prosperity, while increasing poverty levels and unemployment,
shrinking the middle class, and reducing opportunities for a better
life. One hundred percent of the blame can be put on secular regressive
government policies.
Ronald Reagan temporarily reversed the trend of government intervention by conquering 'stagflation' (double-digit inflation and unemployment)
caused by the economic slowdown of the Carter-era 1970's. The 'Gipper'
explained government was not the solution to the problem, but rather the
cause of the problem. Capitalism flourished for 25 years, finally
ending with the housing bust after the post-9/11 boom of George W. Bush.
The primary cause of the banking scare, the housing bubble, and the
deleterious effects on the economy was none other than overreach by the
federal government. Are you beginning to notice a trend here?
Ayn Rand nailed it more than 55 years ago with her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged.
The author, who spent the first 21 years of her life under oppressive
communist rule in Vladimir Lenin's U.S.S.R., understood the dilatory
effects of statist control and regressive policies. Rand, who lived from
1905-1982, seemed prescient when she spoke these words more than 30
years ago:
"We
are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage
where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the
citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest
periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
Albert
Einstein is attributed with defining insanity as doing the same things
over and over and expecting different results. Doesn't that exactly
match the solutions secular regressives have for government and
governing? We have reached societal insanity by re-electing the most
radical Leftist of all, Barack Obama. The country is doomed to collapse,
not if, but when. It is inevitable, and the time frame is in months,
not years. It cannot be sustained by more government, more debt, and
more destruction of the Constitution and rule of law.
What
can God-fearing, law-abiding citizens do to survive the usurpation of
power and control by radical Marxist revolutionaries? What happens when
Americans are disarmed and helpless before enemies bent on replacing
Judeo-Christian values and principles with secular totalitarian rule?
The United States is not repairable at this point. The dark, dirty
secret is everyone in every branch of the federal government knows what
is happening. Unfortunately, those who still have principles either feel
they can't, won't, or don't dare speak out. Economic and systemic
destruction of the government is imminent. The can has been kicked to
the end of the road.
Ayn
Rand's work of fiction describes producers disappearing as the economy
collapses from the weight of excessive statism and control. Rather than
succumb to having their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and
property stolen and confiscated by the moochers and looters, the
producers quietly disengage from society and disappear. A 'Tax Strike'
similar to Rand's fictional tome may be the best way to reject the
illegitimate and oppressive control demonstrated by government today. It
can range from a conscious reduction in self-employment
(semi-retirement) to a flat refusal to fund the illegitimate leviathan
by refusing to file tax returns until the criminal regime is thrown off.
While this act of civil disobedience may be considered extreme, is it
going too far to draw a line in the sand like our founders did with the
Declaration of Independence in 1776? In Thomas Jefferson's own words:
Prudence,
indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be
changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience
[has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are
sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which
they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the
people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future
security.
Aren't Jefferson's words as timely today as they were in 1776?
Isn't it time to starve the beast, throw it off, and start over?
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