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There was a short piece in the Wall Street Journal on July 7th in the “Notable and Quotable” section that should really be much more publicized. It documents how the FBI intentionally undermined the case against Senator Ted Stevens in 2008, thanks to a brave whistleblower.
The reason that this revelation is so incredulous is that the political aftermath of the case had long-lasting consequences on this nation, particularly through the passage of several controversial bills which may never have passed if the balance of power had not shifted in the Senate.
How did this happen? Prosecutors in the Department of Justice chose to indict Stevens on flimsy charges three months prior to the pivotal 2008 elections. Stevens himself pleaded not guilty and requested a swift trial in order to clear his name before the November elections:
“This case is about concealment,” the Department of Justice’s lead lawyer stated in her opening statement, claiming that the senator had concealed that he had not paid full value for renovations to his modest Alaska cabin. In fact, Ted Stevens and his wife had paid more than $160,000 for renovations that independent appraisers valued at less than $125,000 at the time.
But relying on false records and fueled by testimony from a richly rewarded “cooperating” witness that the senator was merely “covering his ass” when he wrote a note stating that his desire to comply with all Senate rules, government prosecutors convinced jurors to find the him guilty just eight days before the general election, which he lost by less than 2 percent of the vote. The cooperating witness, wealthy Alaska businessman Bill Allen, was testifying for his own freedom (he was guilty of unrelated crimes), that of his children (who received immunity from prosecution after the government apparently threatened them) and the ability to sell his company for hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The FBI failed to divulge that, during the initial interview with the contractor, he stated he was overpaid — then later changed his testimony to underpaid. Only because of a whistleblower did the knowledge come out that the FBI intentionally hid information that would have been damning to their case.
As a result of the FBI’s tactics, Ted Stevens was convicted of a crime. Stevens, at the time of his conviction, was the longest-serving Senate Republican in congressional history and the Senate at the time was evenly split. His defeat by a Democrat merely days after his conviction contributed to a multi-seat gain by the Democrats in the Senate.
The case was later invalidated and thrown out by another judge; however, the damage had been done. The loss of this seat changed the makeup of the Senate, meaning that a series of questionable Congressional decision were able to be passed at a later date. Now we have Dodd-Frank, we have Obamacare, and we have the worst recovery in the history of this country — all because the Department of Justice interfered with and ousted a sitting Senator that was perceived to be an impediment to “progress”.
Those at the FBI that withheld the evidence were punished, but not fired. But to add insult to injury, due to procedural error involving their disciplinary case, they “later had their review thrown out and punishment lifted. The board did not clear the attorneys of wrongdoing, it found that justice officials committed a “harmful procedural error that likely had a harmful effect on the outcome of the case before the agency,” according to the board’s 18-page decision.”
The Wall Street Journal had a fine summary of the whole sordid affair: “Did the government react in horror at having been caught with its hands in the cookie jar? Did Justice Department lawyers rend their garments and place ashes on their head to mourn this violation of their most fundamental duty of candor and fairness? No way, no how. Instead, the government argued strenuously that its ill-gotten conviction should stand because boys will be boys and the evidence wasn’t material to the case anyway. . . . Instead of contrition, what we have seen is Justice Department officials of the highest rank suffering torn glenoid labrums from furiously patting themselves on the back for having “done the right thing.”
The “right thing” in this case was removing a high ranking Republican Senator in order to help secure a Democrat majority and pave the way for transformative, unpalatable legislation to be passed in this country.
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Earlier this week, President Obama did an interview with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart pointed to a number of government agencies that have had various scandals under his watch — including the IRS, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Office of Personal Management — and inquired as to why his Administration has been plagued with so many problems.
As the Washington Times reported, “Mr. Obama said Congress ‘passed a crummy law’ that provided vague guidance to the people who worked at the IRS. And he said that employees implemented the law ‘poorly and stupidly.’
The president went on to say that the ‘real scandal around the IRS is that they have been so poorly funded that they cannot go after these folks who are deliberately avoiding tax payments.'”
Congress cut funding this past year as a response to the targeting scandal. The IRS’s “internal auditor concluded that the agency did, in fact, target conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny”; Obama’s Department of Justice has not finished its own investigation.
The allegation that the IRS is underfunded is absolutely ridiculous; what’s worse is that Obama has repeated tried to blame the funding cut this past year as the reason for reduced customer service. However, their customer service had already been worsening over the past year and was orchestrated by the IRS itself.
A recent House Ways and Means report showed that, “while congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities. In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.”
Just as Obama dared to close national parks and monuments and cut off treatment for cancer kids during the government shutdown, in order to inflict pain on ordinary citizens, the IRS decided follow the same tactic and abrogate its basic responsibility to help taxpayers with compliance. Reducing the ability to provide customer service is particularly shameless — and using it as a red herring to try to scoop up more funding to Congress is even more repugnant. Then to also blame funding on the reason why Congress wrote a “vague” law and therefore the IRS employees were helpless in implementing it, well, that is the worst excuse of all.
It just goes to show the Obama is still willing to deflect any blame he can for anything that reflects poorly on his abominable Administration and lack of leadership.
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If a higher minimum wage, higher regulations, the Jones Act, and other protectionist rules are actively destroying Puerto Rico’s economy, how can those same policies not also be harming the United States? Can Puerto Rico be considered the experiment proving this?
On June 28th, Puerto Rico announced that it was unable to pay back the $72 billion in public debt that it owed, money that was borrowed repeatedly to bolster an anemic economy for the last decade. Puerto Rico’s GDP has contracted an average of 1.7% yearly since 2005. Much of that can be attributed to the repeal of the IRS Code 936 which had encouraged specific industries to headquarter on Puerto Rico. The subsequent loss of business has resulted in tepid revenue collection which has not been enough to cover the government’s social programs and bloated government payroll. You can read the Puerto Rican Debt Report here.
In order to help Puerto Rico back on a path to economic recovery, it is imperative that more systemic changes are needed. The Manhattan Institute outlined some major ideas, such as repealing the Jones Act. For a more in-depth discussion on the Jones Act in relation to Puerto Rico, check out their article. Other suggestions include “offering Puerto Rico an exemption to the federal minimum wage, loosening territorial labor laws, and reducing benefits that disincentivize work.”
These very policies have impeded the economy’s ability to grow and recover from the fiscal woes that began last decade. When minimum wage requirements are high relative to the local average, employers hire less workers. And when receiving benefits can be more generous and lucrative than working full-time, less people participate in the workforce.
These types of policies have been shown to be extremely detrimental to Puerto Rico, and yet our country continues to expand them here. We see the effects in our own sluggish recovery, yet the Obama Administration ignores it, and then deflects the blame elsewhere. Puerto Rico should be a wake-up call for the U.S., but it’ll likely be ignored too.
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Bloomberg did a feature this week on the long-term outlook on pension funds for several major cities, and found that it is swiftly becoming a fiscal tsunami in several places. Part of this stems from severe under-funding of pension plans over many years, while the other part is accounting tricks.
As Bloomberg notes, “Moody’s, which in 2013 began using a lower rate than governments do to calculate future liabilities, has estimated that the 25 largest U.S. public pensions alone have $2 trillion less than they need.” This rate gimmick ultimately hides the true cost of retirement liabilities in municipalities. Additionally, “officials have been able to lower the size of the liability by counting on investment earnings of more than 7 percent a year, even after they expect to run out of cash. New rules from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board require a lower rate to be used after retirement plans go broke. Many reported shortfalls will grow as a result.”
Already, many U.S. cities each face billions in costs, resulting in trillions of dollars in municipal-bond market deficit. By now, many places have been downgraded — even down to junk — and thus face higher yield demands from investors.
For example:
Cincinnati and Minneapolis have already been lowered. Chicago was already downgraded to junk this past May as a result of a $20 billion pension deficit, and “was forced to pay yields of almost 8 percent on taxable bonds maturing in 2042, about twice what some homeowners can get on a 30-year mortgage.”
Houston was put on notice in early July by Moody’s that their bond rating was lowered to “negative” due to unfunded pensions costs. Houston’s revenue faces limitations from property tax caps, and thus funding the pension promises properly for three pension systems at this point has become increasingly difficult. It faces an unfunded liability of about $3.4 billion.
Likewise, in Dallas, the firefighters and police pension system deficit is poised to triple its shortfall “to $4.7 billion because of the accounting-rule shift.”
Perhaps the most egregious example is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the biggest pension system in the United States. They reported this week that “it earned just 2.4 percent last fiscal year, one-third of the annual return it projects. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the second-biggest fund, gained 4.5 percent, compared with its 7.5 percent goal.” Years of over-generous promises have resulted in an enormous and unsustainable debt that ultimately taxpayer will have to foot the bill for.
When the public sector and unions signed off on lavish pension provisions for the employee, they hoped there would be enough growth and investment returns to cover it way down the road. There were no provisions made to handle the possibility of a low-interest rate society or a fledgling economy like we’ve experienced the last six years; they took their chances and their fallback was always that they could suck money from the taxpayer by raising taxes to cover budgeting shortfalls. That is reckless and irresponsible.
Years of fiscal mismanagement in the public sector has resulted in this fiscal nightmare. Because the public sector does not have the economic forces of competition to keep compensation levels in check, as the public sector does, it was always incumbent upon public negotiators to manage contracts properly. Failing to properly negotiate, making cozy deals, and maintaining unsustainable defined-benefit plans has created the soaring budget and pension deficits we are experiencing.
And its only going to get worse.
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From CNS News:
“The federal government raked in a record of approximately $2,446,920,000,000 in tax revenues through the first nine months of fiscal 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 through the end of June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
That equaled approximately $16,451 for every person in the country who had either a full-time or part-time job in June.
It is also up about $178,156,270,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $2,268,763,730,000 in revenue (in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars) that the Treasury raked in during the first nine months of fiscal 2014.
Despite the record tax revenues of $2,446,920,000,000 in the first nine months of this fiscal year, the government spent $2,760,301,000,000 during those nine months, and, thus, ran up a deficit of $313,381,000,000 during the period.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total seasonally adjusted employment in the United States in June (including both full and part-time workers) was 148,739,000. That means that the federal tax haul so far this fiscal year has equaled $16,451 for every person in the United States with a job.”
There are three months left of the fiscal year. According to the US Debt Clock, today’s federal debt is is about $18,609,920,535,000. At the end of FY 2015 the total government debt in the United States, including federal, state, and local, is expected to be $21.694 trillion.
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I have written about disparate impact many times over the past couple of years. I was gravely concerned about Loretta Lynch’s nomination to be the next Attorney General because of the huge role she has played in civil asset forfeiture cases. Now that the disparate impact case has been decided by the Supreme Court, I am concerned that she will now take up the mantle of disparate impact, much in the way Thomas Perez, the Labor Secretary, has done (and don’t forget, Perez was the original front runner for the AG job).
Below is Loretta Lynch’s statement on the SCOTUS ruling regarding disparate impact — the last line says it all: “Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
Remember, disparate impact allows if a protected class of citizens has a statistically lesser representation with respect to a business (hiring, mortgages origination, etc) it may be implied that the business or offender has intentionally discriminated — because there is an adverse impact as a result. In other words, “offenders” can be sought after for violating the law, whether or not there was actual intent. Unfortunately, disparate impact thus puts the burden to show lack of discrimination on the accused offender, meaning he is guilty until proven innocent.
It looks like with this statement that the Department of Justice will begin to more actively pursue disparate impact cases.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Thursday, June 25, 2015
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Statement on the U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communites Project Inc.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch released the following statement today after the Supreme Court ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project Inc.:
“I am pleased that the Supreme Court has affirmed that the Fair Housing Act encompasses disparate impact claims, which are an essential tool for realizing the Act’s promise of fair and open access to housing opportunities for all Americans. While our nation has made tremendous progress since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, disparate impact claims remain an all-too-necessary mechanism for rooting out discrimination in housing and lending. By recognizing that laws, policies and practices with unjustified discriminatory effects are inconsistent with the Fair Housing Act, today’s decision lends support to hardworking Americans who are attempting to find good housing opportunities for themselves and their families. Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
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March 13, 2015, was the first day that the Daily Treasury Statements showed a closing limit at 18,112,975,000,000. This number has now been frozen for 4 straight months. The latest Treasury statement on July 13, 2015 also showed $18,112,975,000,000 at its closing. This repeating amount is a portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limitation, currently sitting about $25 million less than the legal debt limit allowed by Congress.
Every day since March 13th, the Daily Treasury Statement shows the debt starting and ending with the exact same amount — $18,112,975,000,000.
The same day that the debt amount ended in $18,112,975,000,000, the current Treasury Secretary, Jacob Lew, informed Congress via a letter that he was issuing a debt “suspension period.” His rationale was due to the fact that legislation passed in 2014 suspended the debt limit until March 15, 2015 — in two days time.
Therefore, Lew wrote, on March 16, “the outstanding debt of the United States will be at the statutory limit. In anticipation of reaching that date, Treasury has suspended until further notice the issue of State and Local Government Series securities, which count against the debt limit.” These securities are classified as public debt.
Without having the debt limit raised by an act of Congress, the Treasury Department announced an alternative solution. Lew would issue a “‘debt issuance suspension period’ with respect to investment of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and also suspend the daily reinvestment of Treasury securities held by the Government Securities Investment Fund and the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.”
The last time the Treasury enacted a debt suspension was two years ago for roughly 150 days until the statutory debt limit was resolved. As I wrote back in October 2013,
“Monday, October 14, 2013 marks 150 days since the Treasury Department’s listing of public debt has not moved. The most current Daily Treasury report(October 10) shows “Total Public Debt Subject to Limit $ 16,699,396,000,000; Statutory Debt Limit $16,699,421,000,000.”
The record for these two entries remained unchanged since May 17, 2013, the first time it recorded the public debt at $16,699,396,000,000.”
The debt limit was raised a short time later. Currently, we have not raised the debt limit yet, and probably will not do so until late fall. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a stronger than expected tax season will give policymakers more time to haggle over an increase to the debt limit…An unexpected influx of revenue means that the nation is not expected to be at risk of a catastrophic default until November of December of 2015″
Then, as now, at some point, those transactions suspensions will have to be made up, along with continuing to pay on our obligations. In other words, the Administration is currently picking and choosing what parts of government to fund.
For those who are worried about our public debt, have no fear! The Treasury Department’s FAQ’s already have a solution. Did you know:
“There are two ways for you to make a contribution to reduce the debt:
You can make a contribution online either by credit card, checking or savings account at Pay.gov
You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it’s a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:
Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188″
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On Friday, Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta resigned in disgrace after the magnitude of the recent government data breach was revealed. Of course, she should never have been hired in the first place; her prior job was a political director for the President’s reelection campaign, Obama for America.
So how does one avert blame from the White House for this catastrophic privacy breach? Why, blame Republicans of course. CNN stated that Archuleta had never been properly vetted, writing that “aides to Republican lawmakers who voted for her confirmation now acknowledge they didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of technology in the agency Archuleta was taking over.”
In case you missed the point the first time around, CNN also tweeted out a summary of their article on Archuleta, announcing that “Republicans acknowledge to @evanperez they didn’t properly vet Archuleta’s qualifications.”
Of course this is utterly absurd. Do you know how many Republican Senators voted for Archuleta’s confirmation? Only eight did, while 35 Republican Senators voted against her. But all the Democrat Senators voted for her confirmation — after being appointed by a Democrat President. Yet CNN apparently did not care to mention this or even reach out to any of the Democrats for comment on their failure to properly vet her background for this position. It doesn’t fit the playbook.
What’s worse, if those eight Republicans had voted against the nomination, they would have been branded partisan and obstructionist. Hearken back to 2013, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joined forces with a national Hispanic coalition, the National Hispanic Leadership Coalition, warning against blocking the nomination on the eve of the vote. The leader of the Hispanic group, Hector Sanchez, went so far as to suggest the confirmation vote would be used in a Latino scorecard, saying, “it is important that Republicans understand the impact their actions can have because they cannot play political games on these kinds of issues that are so important.”
All that is clearly forgotten in an attempt to deflect any culpability from the Obama Administration. Who is playing “political games” now? It’s CNN’s determination that one or more of the eight Republicans who voted for her are indeed at fault for her incompetency and the massive privacy invasion. You can expect no less from CNN these days, as they are certainly the White House lapdog.
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From my friend, Michael Cannon:
It appears that Medicaid-expansion enrollees are going to cost states a lot more than they thought. According to a just-released “2014 Actuarial Report on the Financial Outlook for Medicaid” from the Department of Health and Human Services, ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is costing significantly more than projected:
“In 2014, the average benefit costs of newly eligible adult enrollees are expected to have been substantially greater than those for non-newly eligible adult enrollees in the program. Newly eligible adults are estimated to have had average benefit costs of $5,517 in 2014, 19 percent greater than non-newly eligible adults’ average benefit costs of $4,650. These estimates are significantly different from those in previous reports, in which average benefit costs for newly eligible adults in 2014 were estimated to be 1 percent lower than those of non-newly eligible adults.”
So the Obama administration had projected newly eligible Medicaid enrollees would cost about $50 less than other Medicaid-enrolled adults, but they actually cost nearly $1,000 more. Nice.
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How is it not a complete conflict of interest to have a person working for the State Department oversee both the IRS scandal documents for the current Administration and now the Benghazi documents for an important Presidential candidate? Or, looked at it another way, how is it that a current State Department employee has complete oversight of the documents of a former Secretary of State embroiled in a State Department scandal? Where is the impartiality?
Unfortunately, this is the scenario that is playing out. Catherine Duval, a former lawyer who joined the State Department in August of last year, is in charge of the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails and documents pertaining to Benghazi to the House Select Committee investigation the scandal, the same woman who was in charge of releasing IRS documents and Lerner’s emails.
As Rep. Jim Jordan, who is involved in investigating both scandals, pointed out, “She was at the IRS when there was a preservation order and subpoena — and documents were destroyed. She is now at the State Department, where we were supposed to get [certain] information, and we know that some of the emails were not given.”
It was recently revealed at the end of June by the IRS watchdog that IRS employees had magnetically erased 422 backup tapes that would have contained copies of Lerner’s “lost” emails. Duval apparently discovered the missing Lerner emails in February 2014; “though she alerted IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and a friend she had in the administration to the problem, neither she nor other IRS officials told Congress until June.” As many as 24,000 messages were magnetically wiped on March 4, 2014.
Furthermore, “the IRS said its email backup tapes had been “recycled” under the standard policy, insisting no backup of the lost messages existed.
That turned out to be false: The IRS inspector general that summer located backup tapes of Lerner’s emails. And though Koskinen at the time vowed his top people were trying to find out if there was any recoverable data, IT employees overseeing the tapes told the IG that no top-level IRS employees had even asked if such copies existed.
Duval has testified that she did not know the email preservation tapes even existed, telling Oversight investigators the IT chiefs informed her there were no backup tapes — and she had no reason to question their expertise.”
Rep. Jordan further outlined the frustration with Duval’s management, suggesting a “common pattern”: “Duval hasn’t been clear about important details in the investigations. She knew there were important gaps in Lerner’s email records for months and did not tell Congress, Jordan said — just as State did not tell the Benghazi panel for months that Clinton had exclusively used her personal account for work.”
Now the same tactics are being employed with the Benghazi documents, deemed “slow-walking” requests from the investigation committees. A request from last November remains unfulfilled for Clinton’s Libya-related emails and correspondence of her top 10 advisors.
The State Department has pushed back, pointing to the fact that it has “given Benghazi investigators 300 emails from Clinton’s personal account, allowed 21 State witnesses to be questioned and given investigators 40,000 pages of additional documents”, while claiming diligence “to review and publish the 55,000 pages of emails we received from former Secretary Clinton according to [Freedom of Information Act] standards so they are available to the general public and the media.”
However, 60 new Clinton emails regarding Libya, which had not been given to the investigation panel by the State Department, were discovered in a roundabout way — via a subpoena to Clinton’s close friend Sidney Blumenthal. The State Department claimed that Clinton herself did not turn over 15 of the 60 undisclosed emails to the State Department, but the Benghazi Committee pointed to the other 45 which was in the hands of the State Department, yet not disclosed and released to the Committee — which makes one wonder if there are even more emails and documents.
Heads should have been rolling over how the IRS misconduct was handled. Instead, in typical Obama Administration fashion, they are instead anointed and appointed again to lead another despicable government scandal.
