ARE THE BUREAUCRATS STRANGLING AMERICA?

A Republican senator views the future with alarm – have we changed, as he says, “from the liberty-loving democracy to a fear-stricken mass of automatons”?

By Arthur R. Robinson, United States Senator from Indiana

We are going through a revolution. Call it what you may — a “change”; and “evolution”; “gradual substitution”; or simply “the New Deal” – the fact is that we have change from a liberty-loving democracy to a fear-stricken mass of automatons ruled by an army of bureaucrats.

Our bureaus which were formerly our servants have now become our masters. Bureaucracy has gone wild in the last year. Today we see a superstructure of more than forty agencies with upward of 40,000 additional government employees.

This is but the beginning. As the gradual change in our form of government moves forward, new agencies are needed. This means more federal employees, more supervision, more bureaucracy – and it all means more money from the citizens’ pocketbooks. But these bureaucrats, utterly irresponsible, do not care who pays the bill so long as they can go merrily on.

This towering burden of bureaucracy contains many incipient dangers to American democracy. We now see in process a moving away from the democracy toward an autocracy of executive dictatorship with countless bureaus and employees, all independent of control by the electorate.

These bureaucrats represent,in large part, plain political spoils. Once in, it is almost impossible to dislodge them, for they wield an increasingly great amount of political influence.

The Home Owners Loan Corporation is reputed to be the worst offending agency of the emergency set-up in this regard. The Senate adopted an amendment to a bill which would make it possible to employ personnel in the HOLC without regard to political considerations. The Senate adopted the amendment; the President wanted it and the HOLC board wanted it; but when the bill reached the House, that body struck out the amendment. Few more unpatriotic acts have been charged against either house of Congress. Yet ever since the advent of the new deal, if anyone has dared criticize, he has been branded “unpatriotic,” “old dealer,” “Tory,” or “standpatter.”

No one has any thought of quarreling with the good intentions of the administration, but present efforts toward recovery have resulted in a virtual abdication of power by the people’s Congress and in a government by Presidential proclamation and edict. Indeed, the system of government now extant is alarmingly reminiscent of the old Russian government by ukase under the czars.

The first step in the much advertised revolution is the virtual abdication of control by representatives of the electorate under the guise of “emergency legislation.” But too often “emergency” enactment graduates into permanent legislation. A majority vote in Congress enacts legislation, but it requires a two-thirds vote to override a veto. Thus constitutional controls are displaced by extra-constitutional controls. This first revolutionary step is bound up with efforts toward hybrid control, some of which is voluntary and some involuntary. Thus as much of the New Deal’s voluntary crop-control efforts fails, we see the administration swinging into an era of compulsory control -witness the Bankhead cotton bill.

Compulsory control is the second major step in the revolution. In industry, with the NRA (National Recovery Agency), we are living under a bureaucracy. Now we learn that the NRA may be made permanent. Industry is being governed by codes, and agriculture is being regimented by voluntary and involuntary crop- and stock-control efforts.

Almost every act of our daily life is influenced directly or indirectly by some of this army of bureaucrats. Here are some of the bureaus or controls, almost every one set up under the New Deal:  AAA, CAB, CC, CCC, CCC [Commodity Credit Corporation], CFC, CSB, CWA, DLB, DSH, Ex-IB, Ex-IB (2), EC, ECPC, EHFA, ECW, FACA, FSLD, FCA, FERA, FFMC, FSRC, FLB, FICB, FSHC, FHLBB, FCOT, FDIC, HOLC, IAB, IBRT, ITPC, LAB, NCB, NEC, NLB, NPB, NRA, NRRB, NPSAC, PAB, PWA, PWEHC, PLPB, SAB, SPBW, RCA, RACC, RFC, SES, TVA, TVAS, USIS, and others.

A political raid foreshadowed what would happen as soon as the bureaucrats could get into the saddle. Just before the present administration came in to power the Senate adopted a resolution demanding that it be furnished with a list of the available jobs in the public service.

This list made a volume of more than four hundred pages and was soon characterized as the “plunder book.” Ironically enough, it was issued on the anniversary of the signing of the first Civil Service Act. Needless to recount what was done with trained and efficient service employees— a literal clean sweep was made by the New Deal regardless of merit or experience.

But the real iniquities began to appear with the Civil Service itself was figuratively tossed out the window and thousands of new employees hired without regard to training or qualifications. Under the lash of the Executive last March, the Congress passed the cruel and inhumane so-called Economy Act. It reduced the budget a few hundred million dollars, but it impoverished thousands of disabled veterans and their families, and depleted purchasing power at a time when it was most seriously needed.

A few millions were lopped from the budget by cutting veterans’ benefits, and several times that amount expended on tree planting in the CCC. Moreover, $148,000,000 was taken from the public works allocation and from labor in the building trades to get the CCC started. Thus useful projects for which money was allocated had to be delayed. Able-bodied young men between eighteen and twenty-five were given jobs while at the same time thousands of disabled war veterans were thrown on charity and relief.

In its annual report last June — and that was before most of the new bureaucratic units had been set up — the National Civil Service Reform League said:

The new administration has turned it’s back on the only method of safeguarding these new agencies from maladministration. Without a single exception the agencies of government thus created have been thrown open to the political spoilsmen to do with as they see fit. The excuse given one objection is made to exemption from civil service tests has been that these agencies are a part of the emergency program and that they may prove temporary in character. A more specious excuse could not be devised to hoodwink the public.

Mark you, this comes from a distinguished nonpartisan body of citizens.

The role of the spoilsman has been eased considerably by the administration’s novel double-budget system. We have had an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” budget. The former was used to include the ordinary business of operating the government, the latter as a “catch-all” for the emergency expenditures.

When the New Deal was to make a great show of “balancing the budget,” or “reducing expenditures,” and “redeeming pledges to reduce expenditures,” it referred to the ordinary budget. But when it asked Congress for an appropriation of a few million or a few billion dollars, it used the extraordinary budget.

As a result we are faced with a treasury deficit of upwards of ten billions and our national indebtedness will reach a new high when it hits the thirty-two billion mark.

The people should refuse to be deceived any longer. Either we must retrench and safeguard our financial standing or we shall be plunged headlong into reckless and utterly uncontrolled inflation.

More alarming still are the estimates which show that a year after the New Deal began approximately one out of every six persons in the United States owed part or all of his living to the bounty of the federal treasury. In addition to this number more than 860,000 were mortgagors or borrowers of the federal government.

However, the real danger is that almost enough people now owe their living to Uncle Sam to control elections and make this dangerous bureaucracy self-perpetuating. Such a step has obvious perils. It would lead to violent change. Either an extreme right-wing or some form of Fascist control would develop, or the machinery of government would suffer a complete breakdown, which would be followed by extreme left-wing control, communism, or something worse.

We have seen power become more and more centralized. We have seen state lines practically obliterated by controls from Washington, as the federal government has taken over more and more of the so-called reserved powers of the states. New state-encroachment bills are being passed today. With these emergency controls we see regimentation of agriculture and industry. The next step, and the one in the midst of which we find ourselves, is that of compulsory control. After this will come absolute price fixing, and then we may expect a sharp era of income regulation. What next? The collectivism of the New Deal will lead us, if we are not careful, into an era of thoroughgoing regulation. This regulation, if carried to its logical conclusion, may well bring on an autocratic government.

Let America beware!

Bureaucracy never means efficiency — it always spells inefficiency. Look at what it did to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War. We are in the midst of a world that envies us, to say the least. We have a enormous international problems. Bureaucracy, irresponsible and its nature, can settle none of them. Representative government, imperfect though it may be, is still the most efficient devised by man. Let us not discard it.  Constitutional government is as essential to the American people today as it any time in the past.

Only by demolition of much of the vicious structure of bureaucracy which has so suddenly grown up among us may we preserve our freedom and the Constitution of the United States which guarantees a square deal to all men.

The End

This article was published on September 22, 1934 in Liberty magazine. With a few minor changes, it could have been written today. Eighty years later we have failed to heed Senator Robinson’s warning and have instead allowed the federal bureaucracies to expand and flourish – further increasing the federal powers (and debt) while diminishing the States’ powers. We still make first cuts at the expense of our veterans. Senator Robinson references a mere forty new bureaucracies. How shocked would he be to discover the eleven pages of Cabinets, Agencies, Bureaus, Departments, and others currently listed on the federal government’s registry? How would he view our current debt problem and our treatment of veterans?

The article notes “Senator Robinson has been a hard, consistent fighter in the cause of nationalism, also against foreign debt cancellation – on which subject he has spoken his mind in Liberty. He is known especially as a Senatorial champion of veterans’ claims; he himself served in the A.E.F. and the army of occupation on the Rhine, and rose from shavetail to major.”

Franklin Roosevelt had been in office for just over one year and America was in the depths of the Great Depression. Unemployment FELL to 21.7%.

 

American Mengele – Death, Outrage, and Kermit Gosnell

The mass shootings at Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School drove liberals, the media, and the anti-gun, anti-2nd Amendment brigade into an all out frenzy to ban any and all weapons for the sake of the safety of the children. It’s always for the children isn’t it?

So where are those same liberals, media, and anti-2nd Amendment brigade when it comes to the thousands of murders committed by our own Joseph Mengele? What about THOSE children? Let’s not mince words here, many of these children were born alive, healthy, and viable and Gosnell or a member of his untrained staff jammed a pair of surgical scissors into the back of their neck and severed their spinal cord.

You don’t have to take my word for it, all the sickening details can be found in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s report to the Grand Jury. Page 99 of the report begins the details the intentional killing of viable babies substantiated with testimony from clinic employees who were directly involved with the slaughter. Be warned, the report and photos are graphic and disturbing beyond belief. Not much disturbs me anymore; this report nearly made me vomit and did bring me to tears.

Despite numerous allegations of wrong-doing, the Pennsylvania Department of Health failed repeatedly to respond or investigate any charges made post 1993; Gosnell was free to butcher women and infants without fear of reprisal. Why did the state refuse to investigate these charges? Why despite reports of wrong doing did the state regulators not only not respond to reports, why didn’t they even perform inspections of any kind on Gosnell’s clinic after the inspection in 1993?
Philly.com reported:

Gosnell’s clinic was reinspected in 1989, 1992, and 1993. Each time, deficiencies were found, including no nurses overseeing the recovery room, missing lab work, no obstetrician-gynecologist on staff, and out-of-date medication. Yet each time, state evaluators reapproved the clinic without requiring or verifying corrective actions.

In early 2002, in response to an inquiry by a lawyer suing Gosnell for malpractice in the death of a patient, a state Health Department official said the agency had received no complaints against the doctor. In fact, it had received four complaints.

In 2007, the Delaware County Medical Examiner’s Office autopsied a stillborn baby, delivered by Gosnell at 30 weeks. The coroner alerted the state Health Department’s top attorney about the potential violation of the abortion control law. It bans abortions after 24 weeks unless the woman’s life is at risk, among other conditions. Instead of investigating, the agency’s attorney said, neither the Health Department nor the medical licensing board had any authority over the matter.

State health officials did not investigate even after learning of the November 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, who developed a fatal heart arrhythmia after being overdosed on anesthetics at Gosnell’s clinic, according to the jury’s report.

The Department of State’s Board of Medicine, which licenses medical professionals, also turned blind eyes, the report says. For example, it took no action nine years ago when a former Gosnell employee reported the illegal practice that years later led to Mongar’s death: Unlicensed, barely trained workers were anesthetizing patients before he arrived at the clinic.

Board attorneys also “disregarded notices that numerous patients . . . were hospitalized . . . with fetal remains still inside; and with perforated uteruses, cervixes, and bowels.”

Kirsten Powers, resident liberal at Fox News has even questioned the lefts’ absolute silence on Gosnell’s house of horrors, but Kirsten shouldn’t be surprised – they care about the children only when the children are convenient for their narrative. Murdering well over fifty thousand predominately black and brown babies passes muster because abortion is legal and all abortion including late-term abortions are perfectly acceptable according to President Barack Hussein Obama and his followers. Remember, he would never want one of his daughters “punished with a baby”. Interesting choice of words from a literal bastard, but I digress.

The children murdered by Gosnell and his staff were not merely zygotes without form, these were fully formed INFANTS – babies that could have just as easily been swaddled in pink or blue blankets and sent home with a full life ahead of them.

I admit that I have, in the past, been a pro-choice advocate, and even though I have been pro-life for several years, I still held the belief that abortion was acceptable in certain cases. The grand jury report and the photos changed that. Whether inside or outside of the womb, it is murder. If you still feel it is acceptable, you didn’t read the report and you refused to look at the pictures.

Please visit http://www.3801Lancaster.com for a short documentary film about Gosnell’s atrocities as well as additional information regarding the case. Also visit http://www.maafa.21.com where you can view the film detailing the truth behind Margaret Sanger’s vision for black genocide in America via Planned Parenthood. Isn’t it ironic that the very demographic intended to be eradicated by genocide is the very demographic that most strongly supports the very organization put into place to bring about their demise?

I submit that the simultaneous viewing of Maafa21 followed immediately by 3801 Lancaster and a full review of the grand jury report will move any pro-life/pro-abortion fence-sitter fully into the pro-life camp and if it doesn’t, well, as we all have witnessed too many times, those without souls do dwell among us.

 

The Deceit Of The New Deal – What We MUST Learn From The Past

Several years ago a friend recommended that I read Witness, Whittaker Chambers’ account of his life as a member of the Communist Party, his subsequent break with the Communist Party, and his part as a key witness in the Alger Hiss Trial in 1949 and 1950. First published in 1952, just two years after the Hiss Trial, the book is a fascinating 799 pages and provides a glimpse into American history that has been entirely rewritten by the liberal progressive agenda.

This book should be required study in every high school in America for the perspective that it offers on the New Deal, widely acclaimed as the most benevolent presidential accomplishment in American history.

Mr. Chambers details a meeting at the home of Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf Berle in 1939 where he informed Berle of the Communist activities taking place within the U.S. Government. Berle took the information to President Franklin Roosevelt immediately, and was “told … to ‘go jump in the lake’”

Chambers, W. Witness. Chapter 10, part X, page 470 Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.

The failure of the meeting with Berle caused Chambers to take a hard look at the New Deal. The following excerpt verified what I have long believed about the New Deal and those who supported it then and support it now – including Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is a passage that I have read through many times, especially as I see American citizens who seem to be intent on embracing an all encompassing government with the power to control every aspect of their lives in exchange for a the moral equivalent of a few trinkets.

I urge you to read the following passage and if you have not already done so, obtain a copy of Witness for yourself and others. Our challenge today is not a new one, merely new players on the same stage; it is up to us to recognize the opposition and their revolutionary intent. Whether it be the Marxists, Socialists, Communists, or radical Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood, we must stand ready to speak up for what is right and ensure that these outliers can never establish a permanent foothold in the United States of America.

Now, Mr. Chambers:

It is surprising how little I knew about the New Deal, although it had been all around me during my years in Washington. But all the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends. I myself thought of the New Deal as a reform movement that, in social and labor legislation, was belatedly bringing the United States abreast of Britain or Scandinavia.

I had noticed it obvious features – its coalition of divergent interests, some of them diametrically opposed to the others, its divided counsels, its makeshift strategy, its permanently shifting executive personnel whose sole consistency seemed to be that the more it changed, the more it remained the most incongruously headed hybrid since the hydra. Now with a curiosity newborn of Berle, I saw how misleading those surface manifestations were, and tactically how advantageous, for they concealed the inner drift of this great movement. That drift was prevailingly toward socialism, though the mass of those who, in part directed, in part were carried along by it, sincerely supposed that they were liberals.

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what it’s more forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform from within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution. It was only of incidental interest that the revolution was not complete, that it was made not by tanks and machine guns, but by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, or that many of the revolutionists did not know what they were or denied it. But revolution is always an affair of force, whatever forms the force disguises itself in. Whether the revolutionists prefer to call themselves Fabians, who seek power by the inevitability of gradualism, or Bolsheviks, who seek power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle is for power.

Now I thought I understood much better something that in the past had vaguely nibbled at my mind, but never nibbled to a conclusion – namely, how it happened that so many concealed Communists were clustered in Government, and how it was possible for them to operate so freely with so little fear of detection. For as between revolutionists who only half know what they are doing and revolutionists who know exactly what they are doing the latter are in a superb maneuvering position. At the basic point of the revolution – the shift of power from business to government – the two kinds of revolutionists were at one; and they shared many other views and hopes. Thus men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves, except that it was just the Communists who were likely to be the most forthright and most dedicated to the common cause. This political color blindness was all the more dogged because it was completely honest. For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely  be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the difference between themselves and those against whom it was made. Conscious of their own political innocence, they suspected that it was merely mischievous, and was aimed, from motives of political malice, at themselves. But as the struggle was really for revolutionary power, which in our age is always a struggle for control of the masses, that was the point at which they always betrayed their real character, for they reacted not like liberals, but with the fierceness of revolutionists whenever that power was at issue.

I believed that the Communists were much more firmly embedded in Government than I had supposed, and that any attempt to disclose or dislodge them was enormously complicated by the political situation in which they were parasitic. Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. If only for the sake of their public health record, the liberals, to protect their power, must seek as long as possible to conceal from themselves and everybody else the fact that the Government had been Communist-penetrated. Unlike the liberals, the Communists were fully aware of their superior tactical position, and knew that they had only to shout their innocence and cry: “Witch hunt!” for the liberals to rally in all innocence to their defense. I felt too, that a persistent effort by any man to expose the Communists in Government was much less likely to lead to their exposure than to reprisals against him. That fact must be borne constantly in mind in understanding what I did and did not do in the next nine years, and indeed throughout the Hiss Case, which was to prove on a vast scale how well-founded my fears had been.

One of my close friends, himself an ardent New Dealer, who knew my story in full detail, summed up the situation tersely. “I see,” he said one day, “why it might not pay the Communists to kill you at this point. But I don’t see how the Administration dares to leave you alive.”

Chambers, W. Witness. Chapter 10, part XI, pages 471-473 Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.

 

 

Long Time Fan Says Adios to NASCAR

It seems that the left turns are not just happening on the track and writer Mark Stuertz has had enough.

Since the onset of the recession, NASCAR has been suffering a long streak of precipitously declining track attendance and TV ratings. And it hasn’t recovered.

NASCAR’s slump has been blamed on a number of things: a sluggish economy, a reliance on an older (and white) male fan base, cookie-cutter cars, the waning of American car culture, weak social media offerings, high gas prices, and boring races. In 2010, NASCAR Chairman Brian France ordered a five-year plan to stem the bleeding.

But on May 21, 2012, NASCAR may have choked off that five-year plan before it could get any traction. On that day, NASCAR inked a deal with the Obama EPA. Under the terms of the three-year pact, NASCAR will “stimulate participation in EPA programs” and “foster greater environmental awareness among NASCAR fans.” The EPA will identify the environmental “programs and messages that are best suited for promoting environmental stewardship and sustainable behavior.” NASCAR is charged with “encouraging greater environmental awareness and sustainable behavior by their fans.”

In other words, NASCAR is now an official EPA apparatchik charged with shoving the agency’s Orwellian propaganda down the throats of its fans in an attempt to change their behavior. NASCAR has essentially agreed to become a corporate crony of the EPA’s job and wealth shredding machine. For a sport that has always prized independence, raw power, and American traditions (invocations and military flyovers start each race), this may be too much for its core fans to swallow.

Is there anything left that this government has not destroyed? That was a rhetorical. We all know the answer is NO.

 

Propagandizing on Behalf of the President and Receiving a Tax Deduction For Doing So

I saw this ad on television somewhere last night.

The claim that the new ‘Green Economy’ has ‘created over 3 million jobs, with many more to come’ is a complete lie put out by Barack Obama’s Department of Labor, with the socialist cheerleader and constant campaigner Hilda Solis at the helm.

But let’s set that aside for a moment.

At the end of the ad they urge people to support the President’s Clean Air Standards. That makes it a partisan political ad, does it not?

The ad is put out by ‘Earth Justice’. Any organization that wraps its name around the word ‘Justice’ causes red flags to go up, emphasis on the RED.

Sure enough, Earth Justice is a spin off of the Sierra Club and is the legal arm that uses its resources to tie up American land through legal action. Earth Justice actually boast that they’ve prevented access to 50,000,000 acres in this country. Fifty Million!

They’re motto? Because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

They’re also working against the coal industry and fracking.

But. If you go to their website’s Donate page you’ll see that your contributions are tax deductible.

Isn’t campaigning by a non-profit on behalf of a candidate illegal? Have the enviro-tyrants overstepped the campaign finance laws or have they cleverly skirted the law by embracing the ‘green’ agenda which happens to be the president’s policy?

 

Obama’s Money Laundering Operation

This video is breathtaking.

A major hat tip to commenter Linda for bringing this incredible video to my attention.  She runs a blog called NoOneOfAnyImport and it seems that she has seriously undersold herself with that name.  What you have here is vitally important and needs to go viral.  Not sure if DTN is the platform.  But maybe it can provide a little boost.

I made a throwaway post about the amount of spam email begging for money that I get from the Obama operation last week.  But Linda points us to a video where the Obamafia have suspended credit card security, allow multiple names for the same card. allow foreign addresses and will take funds from virtually anyone, including Nidal Hassan.  The video also shows that Mitt and Rick are playing by the rules.

Watch this, make your own conclusions and get back to me.  And her.

I would characterize this as UNBELIEVABLE, but it isn’t.  Not one little bit.  America, your republic is under siege from lawless thugs, in case you didn’t already know.

 

Tiger Wood’s 924 Day PGA Tournament Drought Over. U. S. Citizen’s 1082 Day Drought without a National Budget? Not so much

Today marks the first day since Tiger Wood’s world came unravelled in scandal and shame that he’s won a PGA Tour event. He just won the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

That’s his first PGA Tour victory since September 13, 2009.
It was 157 days before Tiger’s last victory that the the Democratically controlled United States Senate, also riddled with scandal and shame, passed a budget. April 9, 2009.
Congratulations to Tiger and shame on the Democrats.

 

Ted Nugent: There’s a Monster in the White House

Ted Nugent doesn’t mince words.  He’s very direct and extremely funny, too boot..  If only our Republican contenders took his advice and went to the Army surplus store to buy a box of scrotums.  OK.  That’s probably not how I would phrase it.

Listen to this excerpt of the Nuge field dressing Obama, his administration, and the Republican field.

Update:  I had another thought on the rotten apples portion of the video and have replaced it with even more rotten fruit.  It’s called artistic license.

Go here to listen to the entire interview with Phoenix, AZ talker Mike Broomhead from KFYI.   The interview covers a range of topics including his love of hunting, his personal brand of ammunition soon to come to market, his upcoming tour and more.

 

This Ad works

Saw this on the local ABC affiliate during Jeopardy last night.

This is gonna leave a mark and it’s fantastic that it was on broadcast television rather than just on the web.

I hadn’t heard of American Future Fund prior to this ad, but they’re asking for donations to keep this running. 

Looks like a good investment.