The United States of SWAT?

Military-style units from government agencies are wreaking havoc on non-violent citizens.

By John Fund
Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch.
They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.
...The proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.
Take the case of Kenneth Wright of Stockton, Calif., who was “visited” by a SWAT team from the U.S. Department of Education in June 2011. Agents battered down the door of his home at 6 a.m., dragged him outside in his boxer shorts, and handcuffed him as they put his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a police car for two hours while they searched his home. The raid was allegedly intended to uncover information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who hadn’t been living with him and was suspected of college financial-aid fraud.
The year before the raid on Wright, a SWAT team from the Food and Drug Administration raided the farm of Dan Allgyer of Lancaster, Pa. His crime was shipping unpasteurized milk across state lines to a cooperative of young women with children in Washington, D.C., called Grass Fed on the Hill. Raw milk can be sold in Pennsylvania, but it is illegal to transport it across state lines. The raid forced Allgyer to close down his business.
Brian Walsh, a senior legal analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it is inexplicable why so many federal agencies need to be battle-ready: “If these agencies occasionally have a legitimate need for force to execute a warrant, they should be required to call a real law-enforcement agency, one that has a better sense of perspective. The FBI, for example, can draw upon its vast experience to determine whether there is an actual need for a dozen SWAT agents.”

The Zealots Win Again

When full disclosure becomes a cudgel, free expression is suppressed.

By Charles Krauthammer
The debate over campaign contributions is never-ending for a simple reason: Both sides of the argument have merit.
On the one hand, of course money is speech. For most citizens, contributing to politicians or causes is the most effective way to augment and amplify speech with which they agree. The most disdainful dismissers of this argument are editorialists and incumbent politicians who — surprise! — already enjoy access to vast audiences and don’t particularly like their monopoly being invaded by the unwashed masses or the self-made plutocrat.
On the other hand, of course money is corrupting. The nation’s jails are well stocked with mayors, legislators, judges, and the occasional governor who have exchanged favors for cash. However, there are lesser — and legal — forms of influence-peddling short of the outright quid pro quo. Campaign contributions are carefully calibrated to approach that line without crossing it. But money distorts. There is no denying the unfairness of big contributors’ buying access unavailable to the everyday citizen.
....For a long time, a simple finesse offered a rather elegant solution: no limits on giving — but with full disclosure.
Open the floodgates, and let the monies, big and small, check and balance each other. And let transparency be the safeguard against corruption. As long as you know who is giving what to whom, you can look for, find, and, if necessary, prosecute corrupt connections between donor and receiver.
This used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure.
It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists.
...The ultimate victim here is full disclosure itself. If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression.
Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots. What a pity.

Be of good cheer, subjects: An heir to the throne is due

I’d like to tell you that this doesn’t qualify as news beyond the confines of the Clinton family but the recent Jeb boomlet reminds us that America is sliding further towards monarchy as a symptom of late-stage imperial decadence. Looks like we’re on track for eight more years of a Clinton or Bush, then possibly a reprise of Michelle Obama, followed perhaps by a term or two of Biden. Then we’ll be ready for Bush/Clinton III between George P. and Chelsea (who’s now open to running for office, don’tcha know), and after that the law of averages suggests that the Kennedys will have once again produced a political talent who isn’t a total embarrassment.

Even Hillary Clinton Isn’t Sure What We Should Like About Hillary Clinton

By Stephen Kruiser
The first step is admitting…

It was a simple question to someone accustomed to much tougher ones: What was her proudest achievement as secretary of state? But for a moment, Hillary Rodham Clinton, appearing recently before a friendly audience at a women’s forum in Manhattan, seemed flustered.
Mrs. Clinton played an energetic role in virtually every foreign policy issue of President Obama’s first term, advocating generally hawkish views internally while using her celebrity to try to restore America’s global standing after the hit it took during the George W. Bush administration.
But her halting answer suggests a problem that Mrs. Clinton could confront as she recounts her record in Mr. Obama’s cabinet before a possible run for president in 2016: Much of what she labored over so conscientiously is either unfinished business or has gone awry in his second term.

So…no definitive successes and some clear-cut failures. And that’s the generous New York Times assessment.
The Democrat fantasy story about Mrs. Clinton paints her as strong and accomplished on her own. In reality, this is a woman who is professionally defined almost entirely by two men in her life, both of whom happen to have been two-term presidents. Throw into the mix the fact that her relationship with both is uneasy at best and some vulnerabilities which can be exploited by opponents begin to appear.
The Hillary that both Republicans and Democrats talk about as being dynamic, formidable and inevitable doesn’t really seem to exist in the real world under close examination. She got where she is seemingly by making some uncomfortable compromises with two men she doesn’t seem to like very much. Her greatest electoral victory came because her opponent got cancer.
This Times piece tries to portray her as rather hawkish. Where does that fit in with a constituency that twice propelled President Obama to victory? Does she get a gender free pass from the hopeychangeys?
I know that she is supposed to be a juggernaut because pretty much everyone who isn’t me says she is, but I still don’t see it.
Apparently, neither does she.

THE BIGGER THEY ARE

Column: Hillary Falls to Earth

By Matthew Continetti
Hillary Clinton may end up deciding she wants to spend the 935 days until election 2016 making corporate speeches and spoiling her grandchild. Recent events have exposed weaknesses in Clinton’s supposedly impregnable armor, gaps through which a Democratic or Republican challenger could damage, perhaps even defeat her. The bad headlines to which she has been subjected are enough to make anyone—anyone who isn’t a Clinton—think twice about running for president.
Look at the polls. This week’s Fox News poll has Clinton’s favorable rating at its lowest point in six years. She is at 49 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable—similar to her 47 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable rating when she ended her last presidential campaign.
...Already Clinton is finding it difficult to articulate a rationale for her presidency, to pronounce a record of achievement on which to base a campaign. In an appearance this month at the Women in the World Summit she had trouble naming her proudest accomplishment as secretary of state. It is a question that her strongest supporters, in her party and in the media, cannot answer. “Hillary Clinton Struggles to Define a Legacy in Progress,” read the headline in the Thursday New York Times. “Mrs. Clinton is striking a delicate balance,” the paper reports, “when discussing a job that would be a critical credential in a presidential race.” The last secretary of State to become president was James Buchanan. He gave us the Civil War.
Clinton, the Times goes on, wants “credit for the parts of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy that have worked,” while “subtly distancing herself from the things that have not worked out.” Imagine that. “The things that have not worked out” compose quite a list. What Hillary Clinton wants is to have it all, to enjoy the fading residual glow of President Obama’s halo without having to answer for all of the messes he will leave behind. Her friends tell the Times that her upcoming memoir, for which she was reportedly paid $14 million, will provide an opportunity to “provide her view of WikiLeaks, Benghazi, and smaller missteps like the Russia reset button.” It will provide an opportunity, in other words, to offer a generous helping of self-serving and exculpatory spin.

...A similar disconnect characterizes Clinton’s domestic policy—to the extent that she has one. She wants to fix Obamacare. She is for equal pay for women, for voting rights for minorities, for same-sex marriage. But she has yet to find a heroic cause, an issue around which to rally the youthful and diverse Democratic base. There is no war for her to run against. She is not about to go the full Snowden and argue, like Rand Paul, for the abolition of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program. On marijuana legalization, another issue dear to the coalition of the ascendant, she is circumspect. The banks? She’s taken $200,000 paydays from Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group. The One Percent? Her net worth is estimated at $21.5 million.
About the only constituency truly excited for a Clinton run is the class of wealthy donors to the Democratic Party and its pet causes, the power players and lobbyists and CEOs and film executives and trial lawyers and liberal bankers and green entrepreneurs who know that a Hillary Clinton White House would be a field day for special access, a celebration of cronyism, a flagrant and grotesque division of spoils.

Dem consultants telling candidates not to use the word 'recovery'

By Rick Moran

Some advice for Democratic candidates from consultants: Don't use the word "recovery" in your speeches.

Associated Press:

Election-year memo to Democratic candidates: Don't talk about the economic recovery. It's a political loser.

So say Democratic strategists in a blunt declaration that such talk skips over "how much trouble people are in, and doesn't convince them that policymakers really understand or are even focusing on the problems they continue to face."

In addition, Stan Greenberg, James Carville and others wrote that in head-to-head polling tests the mere mention of the word "recovery" is trumped by a Republican assertion that the Obama administration has had six years to get the economy moving and its policies haven't worked.

Coincidentally or not, Democrats have largely shelved the "R'' word.

Drudge supplies a few links to remind us why Democrats would be in trouble if they mention "recovery:"

FLASHBACK WHITE HOUSE: 'Summer of Recovery'... FLASHBACK TREASURY: 'Welcome to the recovery'... FLASHBACK HARRY REID: 'We are in a recovery'... FLASHBACK BIDEN: 'recovery.gov'...

You can't spin the failure of Obama's economic policies. Too many people are still hurting while a majority believe we're still in a recession. Since the Dems won't mention "recovery" it's up to Republican candidates to bring up the fact that there has been no recovery after 6 years - and bring it up often.

If the Dems can't talk about the economy or Obamacare, what will they have to say? You guessed it - minimum wage, income inequality, war on women, GOP are raaaaacists - you know, the usual.

New York the latest state to sign compact to end electoral college

By Rick Moran

Governor Cuomo has signed off on the National Popular Vote Compact, giving New York's 29 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

SILive:

Count New York in.

The Empire State has joined the National Popular Vote compact with legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

States that have signed on to the interstate agreement will award electoral votes for president to the candidate who receives the majority of the national popular vote.

...New York joins the District of Columbia and nine states in signing on to the compact -- including California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

The legislation utilizes New York state's right under the U.S. Constitution to award its 29 electoral votes in any manner it deems appropriate, in this case to the winner of the national popular vote.

However, it only takes effect once enough other states have signed on so the compact possesses a majority of the Electoral College's 538 votes.

The compact currently contains 165 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Notice anything strange about that list of states signed up for the compact? Gee - they're all blue states. That's because unless there is a sea change in attitudes toward the parties, the adoption of the compact will be the end of GOP competitiveness in national elections.

There is a massive difference between the GOP receiving 65% of the vote in Utah and Wyoming and the Democrats getting 65% of the vote in California and New York. The board will tilt decisively toward the big states. The population concentration in the big states will allow Democrats to maximize their spending per voter making it, by comparison, much less expensive than for Republicans who will have to scramble in the hinterlands to drum up votes. It will also make big cities far more important to the total vote - Democratic party territory.

The US is a federal republic. You lose some of that character if you ditch the electoral college.

The Once and Future Peasants

By Michael L Grable

Here's why you should worry about living in a country where increasing numbers of people can live without working.

Filing our tax returns last week, I deplored government having confiscated 29.7% (effective rate) of my and my wife's joint 2013 income (Federal, 21.7%; state and local, 8%). That seemed scarcely worse than medieval lords confiscating one-third of peasants' crops.

Speaking of lords, both the President of the United States and the Mayor of New York (et uxores) paid 2013 income taxes at lower effective rates than mine and my wife's (20.4% for the President and a measly 8.3% for the Mayor). Maybe there's a tax penalty for living in tract houses clad in middle-class vinyl and plywood instead of public mansions made of government granite and marble.

But here's the real rub: every governmental levy at every level functionally taxes our income. And, if you're anything like me and my wife, your functional rate of income taxation far exceeds the rate at which any 10^th-century lord ever confiscated his peasants' labor.

Consider these examples:

● Corporate and business income taxes. These tax your income because producers raise consumer prices to offset their business income taxes;

● Capital gains taxes. The income you use to buy capital assets has already been taxed once, but yet any asset gain is again taxed;

● Sales taxes. Likewise, the income you use to buy stuff has already been taxed once, but yet it's taxed again when you buy the stuff;

● Property taxes. These are also additional taxes on goods you've bought with already taxed income;

● Excise taxes (e.g., fuel, telephone, hotel, etc). These too are additional taxes on stuff you buy with already taxed income;

● Tariff taxes. Same as above, but only for imported stuff you buy;

● Inheritance taxes. The dead already paid taxes on the income which was the source of whatever they leave to the living;

● Payroll taxes. These still tax your income -- even if you might have someday gotten something back were your government not robbing the Social Security Trust Fund to blow your retirement "safety net" on things like paying people not to work, bailing out big banks, sending Michelle and the kids to Riverdance, buying booze for the State Department, and making lobbyists multimillionaires;

● Licenses, permits, tolls, transfer taxes, and all other user fees. These also reduce your income -- and for services you might have expected our government to have otherwise funded from the income taxes you've already paid;

● Regulatory tax. Regulation increases the cost of all goods and service you buy with income government has already taxed. Indeed, this increases the cost of the stuff we buy by about $1.9 trillion annually (or about $15,000 a year for each household); and

● Inflation tax. This reduces the purchasing power of any past income -- already taxed in the serial ways above -- which any of us might ever have managed to save. It's a consequence of the fiat money which allows government (let alone banks) to increase the means of exchanging production faster than production itself increases. Simplistically, you may regard governmental deficit spending (now close to $1 trillion in the Federal Government) as functionally taxing the purchasing power of all your past, present, and future income. This makes, for example, the stuff you could have bought for $100 in 1980 cost you almost $300 when you buy it now. And the cumulative inflation rate since 1913 (when the Federal Reserve System began) now approaches 2,300%.

However bureaucrats might define the term, "income" is functionally no more than what fiat money now allows your labor to buy. In Adam Smith's idiom, the value of what a brewer brews allows him to buy what a baker bakes or a butcher butchers; and when government (in whatever way) confiscates more of the value of what a brewer brews, the brewer can buy less of what a baker bakes or a butcher butchers.

Our standard of living exceeds a 10^th-century peasant's not because government now confiscates less of our labor than the peasants' lords did 1,100 years ago, but only because the industrial revolution so greatly increased our productivity during the interim. And every decrease in production today makes us all poorer tomorrow. Indeed, if government now confiscated the value of our labor at a rate no higher than a medieval lord once confiscated his peasants' labor, at lot more of us would be lords today.

Far from elevating us to lordship, however, the greater likelihood is the effect (already long and guilefully postponed) of government's ever accelerating confiscation may eventually reduce our children and our grandchildren to peasanthood.

Republicans Redistribute Wealth Better than Democrats

By Michael Bargo Jr

When President Obama ran for office in 2008 he mentioned that he intended to make income redistribution a major focus of his presidency.

Democrats claim that only their candidates are qualified to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. They characterize their adversaries, the Republican Party, as the party of the selfishly wealthy. Republican policies, Democrats say, are designed to seize wealth from the working class and poor and funnel it to the richest so the wealthiest few can hoard it. Consequently, they predict that under Republicans the working class and poor become worse off. In other words, Republican policies have the affect of allowing the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer.

An Obama supporter, on the other hand, would predict that Obama’s administration would improve the economic well-being of the middle class and poor. The rich would have less money under Obama, since he would redistribute it to the poor. Since Obama and his party dominated the Federal Government for two entire years and had the means, motive and opportunity to pass any bill to promote their redistribution goal, it is fair to say Obama’s tenure can be used to fairly appraise the efficacy of redistribution policies.

If wealth were seized by Obama and redistributed to the working class and poor, one could measure this redistribution through standard national measures including wage growth, median income, labor force participation, unemployment, and growth in wealth, and see improvement in all these measures. These measures can then be compared to the results of the policies of Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who allegedly acted to help the rich keep more of their money.

Reagan lowered the tax rate of the wealthiest Americans from 70% to a shameless 28%. Democrats predicted this tax cut would cause of loss of income tax revenue that would force drastic cuts in essential safety net programs.

Five years into Obama’s policies a comparison can be made between the effects of Obama’s and Reagan’s policies on income redistribution. First, we can consider wage growth. Social Security uses a standard measure called the national wage indexing series. Its data show that during the first four years of Reagan’s first term the national average wage index rose from 13,773 in 1981 to 16,135 in 1984, an increase of 17%. By comparison, during the first four years of the Obama’s first term the wage index went from 40,711 to 44,321 an increase of 9%. So it’s accurate to say that the national average wage increase rose almost twice as much under Reagan than under Obama.

Also, by the end of Reagan’s eight years it rose 46%. Since the median income of Americans has declined to where the average working family now earns as much as they did in 1996, it’s fairly safe to say we won’t see an increase of 46% by the end of Obama’s second term, largely because the Affordable Care Act will suppress salaries due to shorter work weeks and worker layoffs. This is happening already. This oversight by the architects of the Affordable Care Act is astonishing, since President Obama and his party perceive corporate greed as the most powerful motivator of the private economy. They should have predicted that if healthcare coverage is based on hours worked, employers would seek to reduce costs by lowering the number of hours their employees work.

Now look it labor force participation. In March of 2014 the LFPR was 63.2%, the lowest it has been since Jimmy Carter was president. Reagan’s policies increased Carter’s low LFPR to nearly 67% by 1989. But Obama reversed this improvement, and it has declined back to under 63.

A precipitous drop in the LFPR occurred in 2009 right when Obama took office. It could be argued that this was not Obama’s fault, that he inherited this situation. But Reagan inherited an LFPR that was even worse, and the data show that Obama’s policies did not improve the LFPR while Reagan’s policies did.

Take a look at take home pay: in 2002 under Republican President George W. Bush the lowest income tax rate was reduced one-third, from fifteen percent to ten percent. The second lowest rate was reduced from 27.5% to 15%. Democrats in Congress protested, and many voted against this income tax reduction. In other words, they wanted the lowest wage earners to take home less of their hard-earned money.

Another measure is job growth. Under Ronald Reagan’s policies 22 million net new jobs were created in eight years. This, after inheriting an economy that was in many measures far worse than that inherited by President Obama. Studies also predict that ObamaCare may cost the nation up to 2.6 million jobs.

Democrats love to preach that Republicans are the party of the rich, yet Obama’s own record shows that Democrats have far outperformed Republicans at widening the gap between the rich and poor. Under Obama’s policies this gap has moved in both directions: while he made the richer more wealthy he simultaneously lowered the wealth of the middle class and poor. In 2011 USA Today reported that the typical U.S. family got poorer in the past 10 years. A recent report by OXFAM found that since the recession of 2009 the gap between the rich and poor has grown faster in the U.S. than in any developed country of the world. The top one percent captured 95% of the post-recession growth in wealth, while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.

The wealthiest households are doing much better since they benefited from the boom in stock market values, thanks to President Obama’s insertion of four trillion dollars of money borrowed from future middle class and poor taxpayers.

And one must remember that more persons are in poverty today, food stamp use is at an all-time high, teenage unemployment is the highest since WWII, and black unemployment has risen. When Reagan lowered income taxes, one result was that in eight years the revenues going to Washington nearly doubled. This meant more money for people programs.

And while Reagan’s eight years were followed by prosperity and economic growth, the long-term effects of Obama’s policies are not promising. The unprecedented rise in the national debt will have to be serviced by annual interest payments that will take away money from safety net programs. The QE3 program, which has yet to be fully outlined in detail, created four trillion of more debt for the Treasury Dept. This is also unprecedented and was done without consent of Congress. Future generations will have to live with these burdens.

So not only are current citizens doing worse under Obama, but after he leaves they will continue to suffer.

The most astounding aspect of this analysis, from a campaign year perspective, is that the U.S. news media remain deaf and dumb to these facts.

That Republicans create jobs and elevate the working class is still being proven today. Of the U.S. states experiencing the most job growth in the Obama economy the great majority are run by Republican governors.