Posts Tagged → accountable
Two Steps to Political Heaven
Much talk going on now about how President Trump is supposed to get a stranglehold on the lawless and insubordinate federal bureaucracy if he is elected to a third term this November. As a former seven-year federal policy bureaucrat who fled the belly-of-the-beast US EPA in Washington, DC, in 1998, here are my suggestions. These are based especially on my witnessing the changing of the Senior Executive Service (SES) guard from the Bush I administration to the Clinton administration, and all of the cascading management changes that followed.
Step One: Enter the White House with a clear and specific staffing plan and the prospective personnel to implement it. Ground Zero is the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which processes all federal personnel hiring and firing. From 2017 through 2020, OPM infamously held up a high percentage of Trump’s selected future staff to be seeded across the bureaucratic horizon, where they were supposed to implement Trump’s agenda. But many of Trump’s prospective picks had their paperwork deep-sixed and “lost” in obscure file drawers throughout OPM, their hiring process dragging on so long that they had to find other jobs after having put their current employers on notice of their imminent departure for the Trump Administration. When you control OPM, you can get all of your staff quickly seated and working throughout the bureaucracy. If you don’t control OPM, well, your hard-won third term won’t add up to much.
Step Two: Take no prisoners. Treat every at-will federal position as the at-will position it really is, and work hard from there to drill as deeply as possible. Treat all management positions as targets for immediate change. On Day One be prepared to immediately terminate every single SES and political position and have in hand their loyal replacements, with OPM processing them at record speed. The marching orders for all new loyal SES employees is to replace as many senior staff as they each can, as quickly as they can, with extreme prejudice. Which goes something like this:
New SES manager: “Hi Mary. Good morning. You have been a division chief in this agency for, gosh, twelve years. And yet here I find you late to our meeting this morning and dressed unprofessionally. I am issuing you two written warnings right now, one for each infraction…”
Division Chief Mary: “What are you talking about? I was only one minute late! And I have had a casual dress policy here since…”
New SES manager: “Mary, being unprofessional and insubordinate to your boss is a third violation of the OPM standards of conduct. I am writing you up right now with a third warning, which means that I am now beginning your termination and separation process from the agency as soon as we are finished here. You have three minutes to pack up your personal items and then Officer Jones here will see you out of the building.”
This “direct action” between new senior executive and entrenched senior managers must happen at every level throughout every federal agency, every day, until every senior manager has been replaced with a loyalist (loyal to the new administration and thus loyal to the Constitution). And each new, loyal senior manager will have the same directive for dealing with DC Swamp subordinates down to the bottom of the civil service staff barrel.
Anything less than this admittedly tough hands-on style means that the enormous communist rat warren continues to host a zillion rats, each one quietly gnawing away and illegally stopping the implementation of your presidential agenda and the will of the American People.
How well do I recall an EPA biologist sitting on a huge stack of biological tests done to study the effects of Chlorothalonil, a highly useful insecticide. He personally disliked and opposed the company that owned Chlorothalonil, and so he just sat on their studies. He was unwilling to meet the statutory deadline for agency review and approval or rejection. And his superiors did nothing to compel him to act. And so the company’s expensive research went nowhere, floated in purgatory, and their expensive chemical unnecessarily languished outside of the market. This story times a million is the lawless ball and chain wrapped around America’s throat right now. This must end, and if it doesn’t end by 2028 or sooner, then American government is no longer of, by, and for the American People; it will have become something utterly of by and for itself.
An autonomous, unaccountable federal bureaucracy is the end of representative government. The bureaucracy itself is not democracy, as so many DC Swamp Rats proclaim. Rather, the bureaucracy is now a stale and outdated exercise in representative government that must be dramatically changed. Democracy is the process in which We, The People hold our representative government accountable. And as the American Declaration of Independence states, The People not only get their rights from God, and not government, but The People have the right to abolish government and create a new one whenever they so choose.
Where America is at right now, with its out of control, lawless, unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy (i.e. heavily armed IRS SWAT teams like feudal tax collectors of olde), is the myriad federal bureaucrats have come to really enjoy their centralized power and artificially high pay. And they also don’t want to be told what to do by anyone who is not one of them. For America to adhere to democratic norms, this federal bureaucracy must be greatly reduced in size and scope, at least.
For those who might shed tears about all the sad Marxist bureaucrats being cut loose to find jobs in the private sector they mocked, hamstrung, and crapped on from their artificially protected positions, cry me a river. No bureaucrat is owed a job. They have these public service jobs solely at the will of The People and their chosen chief executive, the President of The United States. With OPM under new management and this tough love approach to running the federal government, that is the Constitutional democracy the DC bureaucrats say they are so worried about protecting.
A version of this essay was published here at the American Thinker.
Career politicians ended representative democracy
At its founding, America was envisioned as a representative government, a constitutional republic, where We, The People would vote for good citizens from amongst our ranks to represent our interests in government. Guy leaves his farm and plow behind to do his civic duty, returns back to the farm four or six years later. It is a good idea, because it does away with unfair feudalism and hierarchy, where only a few people at the top have power and everyone else is a powerless serf/slave/peon with no individual rights. The people making the laws are the same people who will be subject to the same laws. Everyone is treated fairly under the law.
And for a long time America worked pretty well on this model. Yes, there have been some political scandals along the way, and some power grabs that were turned back. Typically the American citizenry have been jealous of their rights and understandably suspicious of government in every way, and so they “throw the bums out” when the collective situation gets bad.
But somewhere in the past sixty years, maybe eighty years, America got deeply into political careerism. You know, where elected officials Mary Jane and Billy Bob were so respected and maybe even revered, either for their honorable traits or for their ability to deliver taxpayer funds to private beneficiaries, that the voters routinely, even habitually vote for them at every election. And so these people who kept getting elected in primaries and in general elections became career politicians. Either their entire career or most of it was spent working their way up a sort of “ladder” from local positions of authority to national positions of authority. And thus did people aim to have a career in politics, because of all sorts of reasons, some good, some bad, some corrupt, but there developed an entire culture within the two main political parties, Democrat and Republican, where party bosses would work with special interest groups to line up tame candidates who owed their political career not to We, The People, but to the party bosses and special interest groups.
And career politicians began to get really rich from their relatively low-paying public jobs. All the more reason to just stay in there and not do anything else with your life!
And so here we are, mid 2023, and career politicians in both political parties are willfully destroying America (e.g. faux “debt ceiling” wild spending spree that no one can ever pay for, Department of Defense can’t track expenditures below $100,000,000 and so our tax dollars are wasted and stolen from us, $83 billion worth of American military hardware is abandoned to our enemies in Afghanistan by Biden, neither party will hold Rep. Adam Schiff accountable for being a serial liar needlessly costing taxpayers $32 million etc).
Because career politicians are so personally invested in their political careers that if they deviate and try to do the right thing, then they stand a good chance of losing their elected office. And then doing the wrong thing becomes accepted and then promoted by the various established information outlets.
And so career politicians continue to make one bad decision after another, to hold onto their own personal power. To the point where even when Americans lose, when America loses, career politicians still win.
And so we reach the present financially and culturally unsustainable points that will inevitably result in America failing, and everyone losing their individual rights, and then some feudal overlords take over and use brute force like everyone else around the world lives under.
I know, I know, so many readers here laugh out loud when I write this stuff.
“America destroyed! Unsustainable! Ha ha ha that Josh guy sure is an idiot, because he obviously doesn’t know America is waaay waaay too big to fail!”
And so despite a long human history littered with wrecked human civilizations, the warnings from taxpaying worker bees like me go not just unheeded, but mocked and belittled by career political staffers and career politicians in both parties as they all continue to make financially and culturally unsustainable and reckless decisions for the collective rest of us. And at the end of their day, all the careerists see is money and power, and so anyone within their orbit can commit the most grievously corrupt behavior without being held accountable. As one of my mentors Frank used to say, the longer a career politician is in office, the tighter the horse blinders get, until they see nothing except what is right in front of them, which is money and power.
The rest of us? The We, The People worker bees? We see the corrupt rot all around us eating away at America. We see Rome beginning to burn, while the career politicians feast and live carefree lives devoid of discipline or honesty. This is not going to last, friends. If we all continue to re-elect career politicians, then our freedom-loving civilization is probably going to end within the lifetimes of the people reading these words, and everything we take for granted will be gone. All of it. It will all be History, as they say.
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC swamp thing
Congressman Kevin McCarthy is a corrupt career politician from the Marxist state of California. To be a Republican from California in 2023, you would by necessity have to be really slimy and corrupt. McCarthy has been in Washington DC for a long time, and his ties to the evil DC Swamp run long and deep. Heck, just look at his shielded face, his hooded eyes. You can easily read McCarthy’s crookedness by his outward facial appearance and body language. In fact, he has a lot of Justin Trudeau’s same body language going on (Canada). And Gavin Newsom’s for that matter (California governor).
These people above all share a common lust for power and control that overrides elementary human decency and empathy. Anyone who wants that much control should never be allowed to have it, and yet, if McCarthy becomes the next Speaker of the US House, then he will have it.
My congressman, Scott Perry, has been wonderfully vocal about McCarthy’s cozy relationship with the DC Swamp, and how McCarthy refuses to make commitments to transparency and accountability that would change the way Washington DC spends our taxpayer money. Thank you, Congressman Perry.
What is really amazing is how weak willed and sycophantic most elected congresspeople are. They each want power and control so badly that they fall all over themselves to elect someone dirty like McCarthy. The people supporting McCarthy for Speaker are not conservatives, they are career politicians in search of wealth and power through a public service job. And this list of lame-os now includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman congresswoman who has raised hell with Washington DC criminality since the day she arrived.
How did fake Republican Liz Cheney go to Congress for just six years at an annual $175,000 salary, and emerge as a multimillionaire? What kinds of illegal, unethical, anti-citizen, anti-America back-room deals did she make to earn that kind of wealth? And it’s not just Liz Cheney, it is the vast majority of the elected officials in Washington that use their official office for personal gain.
Yuck!
So here we are today with RINO Rep. Kevin McCarthy trying to gain the speakership at all costs and with no commitments to advancing Republican values like good government, limited government, accountable government and public employees. I wonder if USA arch enemy China has purchased McCarthy like a sack of potatoes, too.
Like a lot of Americans, I am fed up with the political parties. They do not interest me, because it’s like watching two criminal gangs fight each other. The citizens lose no matter which gang is in charge. What does interest me is limited government, transparent government, accountable government.
Like: Why the hell is the IRS now empowered to track our $600.00 (six hundred Dollar) purchases and incomes, along with enormous destruction of our individual constitutional rights, but We The People have zero control or information over how the federal government, like its IRS, spends OUR money?
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC Swamp Thing. He cannot be Speaker, and if he does become Speaker through the weakness of most GOP congresscritters, then America is done for, because he will protect the DC Swamp from being changed or challenged or held accountable. And America will never have another opportunity after this Congress to hold DC accountable.
America is gonna need a Truth & Reconciliation Commission
When the Democrat Party’s brutal and lawless assault on Americans who support democracy and the Constitutional Republic as America was founded comes to an end, America is going to have to go through a South Africa-style Truth & Reconciliation Commission process to resolve the endless injustices now being committed against political opponents of the evil Democrat Party.
Just looking at the Department of Justice’s latest illegal attack on President Trump, we all can imagine what horrible pain is in store for the rest of us citizens. DOJ AG Merrick Garland won’t voluntarily release the affidavit that was used to secure the bogus search warrant that allowed thirty federal agents to swarm through President Trump’s personal belongings inside his home in Florida, searching for a crime they don’t know of yet. Already the DOJ and FBI are returning personal items that were improperly removed, like President Trump’s passports.
A legitimate search warrant written according to the US Constitution specifies EXACTLY the items that are to be removed from a private home or business. Any search and seizure that results in all kinds of “oopsy” property removal is on its face an illegal search and seizure. But this DOJ FBI brutality isn’t a mistake, it is on purpose. They are looking for a crime, any crime, so they can hurt a political opponent, which is illegal.
It was this EXACT bully behavior by the authoritarian British against the early Americans that resulted in the Revolution, that resulted in the US Constitution and its Amendments, so that government could never again behave in such a lawless fashion.
Yet here we are now, and here we are headed for more of this behavior with not just the DOJ and FBI, but a new literal army of IRS armed agents coming to our homes. It seems that under the Democrat Party, ruling the populace through SWAT team is the new daily norm. Which of course is not normal, and it is not legitimate. American voters did not and would never have given the Democrat Party any of this authority or power, and it is why the Democrat Party had to steal the 2020 election, steal the presidency, and then hijack the federal government. They are now building on that steal and aggressively consolidating power and control over every US citizen.
Inevitably Biden’s lawless, cruel, evil, and oppressive misuse of official government is going to result in a lot of badly hurt people and seriously damaged lives. Americans who are right now kind of coasting through their lives are about to get a seriously rough awakening from Biden’s SWAT teams and heavily armed IRS agents. These agents are not coming to our homes to help us out. They are not coming into our lives to help us and assist us in complying with a complex tax code that requires mental gymnastics even for the Certified Public Accountants we use to report our taxable income.
No, these heavily armed federal agents are all arriving in our kitchens and living rooms and dining rooms to control us with an iron fist, to arbitrarily and capriciously hold us extremely “accountable” for even the smallest and most honest of our mistakes. Just like the British bullies did in the 1770s, with all of the unfair human wreckage they left in their wake. And before that, just like the Sheriff of Nottingham did in Britain.
So if old history is repeating itself now as tax compliance authoritarianism and it becomes the new normal, then maybe America will need to borrow a page from more modern times. For example, after Apartheid ended in South Africa, and yes I believe that even after just eighteen months America is already right now deeply into an Apartheid-like system, the only way to help South African citizens heal and learn to live in peace with one another was to have a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. And America is going to need the same thing.
The American Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s purpose will be to address and resolve the terrible political injustices that are being perpetrated by the Democrat Party under color of “law.” Anything other than a process like this is going to leave a deep and festering scar under the surface of America’s skin…pretty much like what happened after the Democrat Party’s Civil War from 1861-1865. Back then the Republican Party took away the Democrat Party’s African slaves, and the Democrats never forgave the Republicans for it, and the Democrats created all kinds of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings, to hold onto their power. And here we are, 160 years later, with the Democrats yet again trying to brutally control and enslave everyone. Political lynchings of people like President Trump are only the beginning.
Americans eventually getting out from under Democrat Party brutality are going to have to go through a better process than we did the last time the Democrats did this. Let’s start planning the American Truth & Reconciliation Commission now.
Did America have a Stzroke?
With his brazenly arrogant personality and his private corruption, FBI agent Peter Stzrok has now made a name for himself in so many ways.
Unbeknownst to the American people, Stzrok started out making a power-abusing political insider name for himself at least in 2015 by disabling a serious criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton. He then went on to try to frame candidate Trump and his political allies, and bury evidence of incredibly illegal activity by staff and leaders at the FBI and DOJ.
Stzrok’s damning emails, text messages and memos leave no question that the man is a corrupt partisan political warrior, using his awesome official law enforcement position to advance a partisan political cause that is contrary to how the American people voted in 2016.
Everything Stzrok has done has been illegal and totally un-American, from the fake search warrants to the wiretaps and domestic spying, to the use of federal law enforcement powers to re-write interview notes that bear no resemblance to what really took place, to colluding with Fusion GPS and the Perkins, Coie law firm, and the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
This past week Stzrok testified before Congress and provided a view into how distant the Washington, DC insiders have become from the American people. Stzrok’s arrogant, contemptuous, smug lying and dismissive attitude struck everyone as the essence of what has gone wrong in Washington, DC.
Stzrok’s damning testimony increasingly revealed how out of touch he and his FBI and DOJ colleagues are, how insulated and unaccountable to the rule of law they are, and how corrupt the past administration was.
So we must ask, Did America just have a Stzroke?
Is America now paralyzed or disabled by this one criminal FBI agent?
We ask, because everything that American has ever stood for is hanging in mid-air. The rule of law is hanging suspended. If Stzrok gets away with his criminality, then what?
Elected Democrats were actually applauding Stzrok’s testimony real-time, because they are so deeply opposed to those holding the elected majority that they will side with anyone who has done anything, like Stzrok, so long as their own party’s narrow political interests are advanced or protected.
To those who recall their seventh grade civics classes, this is not how America works. The good of the nation always comes first, before political party or person.
It is now unclear if America is still a nation of laws, or if official lawlessness and political willpower are the new standard for running government.
Stzrok is not acting alone. He has many known criminal compatriots in the FBI and DOJ; despite his and their known crimes, he and they still work there; and no legal accountability has been brought to bear on any of them, many of whom actually brazenly continue to act in political ways in what are supposed to be purely professional jobs.
It is as if there are two sets of rules, two legal standards in America now: A lenient standard for one political party allied with the mainstream media, and then another impossible standard for the other party and its political allies. Stzrok is clearly being protected from being held accountable, as was Clinton, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and many others in the past administration.
On the other hand, American military personnel are serving jail time right now for having done a smidgeon of what Stzrok et al did. Trump and everyone around him are being falsely investigated for fake reasons.
So what happens now?
Does Stzrok get the last word in, and thereby pound a stake into America’s heart?
When I left the US EPA in DC in 1998, several of my colleagues asked me in disbelief “Josh, are you really willing to give up all this power you have as a federal bureaucrat?”
Folks, public service has never been about amassing personal power. It is supposed to be service to our fellow citizens, who pay all those federal paychecks. Personal politics and private values have no place in those federal jobs (or any other government job, be it township, county, or state level), where decision making must be about the good of the nation.
Unfortunately, like the FBI, the EPA also developed an insular and unaccountable staff culture, where personal politics override science and everything else. I hated it, and I could not in good conscience be a part of that corruption. So I removed myself from it.
I hope America has not just had a Stzroke, and that we are not paralyzed. If the rule of law has been suspended, and there is no accountability, and political willpower to amass political i.e. coercive power overrides everything, then our nation is over. The great experiment has ended, and now it is merely a political slugfest that inevitably becomes an armed slugfest that will eventually determine who ends up holding power.
Property Tax Accountability
Yesterday a majority of Pennsylvania voters passed a referendum, the first step in amending the Pennsylvania constitution to allow for a much fairer property tax situation.
The current Pennsylvania property tax arrangement is backwards, dating either from the 9th Century or the 1720s, either way fundamentally unfair to home owners.
Perhaps in the 9th Century or the 1720s owning a home or property was a big deal and unusual, indicating great wealth. Taxing the source of that great wealth may have made sense a thousand years ago or three hundred years ago, but today’s America bears no similarity to those bygone worlds.
In fact, one of the great things about America is that our form of capitalism distributes the greatest amount of wealth to the greatest number of people, based on one’s willingness to work hard. This is the heart of American meritocracy, and home ownership in a meritocracy is widespread, not unique. Owning your own home is an American standard, a basic goal of all Americans.
And so punitively taxing the very emblem of meritocracy is an artifact of the feudal society America rejected in 1776.
But Pennsylvania home taxes are now so high that people are essentially renting their homes from the government.
No matter if you buy your home with cash, build it yourself on property that has been in your family, or buy it with a mortgage that you eventually pay off, you still must pay incredibly burdensome property taxes that bear no relationship to the actual costs your home might (or might not) impose on the surrounding community.
Property taxes are now a form of rent. And if you run out of money to pay the government rent, the government can come and steal your home from you and sell it cheap to someone else.
The unpleasant truth is, your home is now a cash cow for others.
Teacher’s unions and their pet career politicians are the primary beneficiaries of the current property tax arrangement, rooted as it is in the government threat to steal your home if you don’t pay their crazy rent. Current property taxes are conveniently off the books, coerced from unwilling serfs, and paid to unaccountable government employees who by all standards are primarily failing.
Most government-run schools are disasters, failing to deliver on the most basic educational results, and yet the tax-paying public is constantly told that we must pay ever yet more money “for the kids.” And here in PA, the teachers automatically must pay the unions, and the unions then dump our own tax money into buying yet more career politicians to work against our interests.
Something has to give.
This is more about making government tax collection accountable to the people who pay the taxes, than it is about total tax reduction. Right now there is zero accountability for property tax expenditures or increases. Greedy unions control almost the entire process.
Unaccountable government schools continue to underperform and yet demand more and more money. The government schools oppose all forms of competition because they are committed more to holding onto their own power than they are to the success of the children they are supposed to educate. The way property taxes support this shameful situation serves everyone involved except the children and the taxpayers.
Something has to change.
The Pennsylvania of the 21st Century cannot continue to live under an ancient feudal arrangement. It is not fair, it is not sustainable, it is not good government.
We all deserve better.
Rolling Stone & Gawker decisions are a good first step
First it was Gawker, the sensationalist “new media” icon that abandoned decency to make an extra few pennies. Along the way of Gawker’s brutal path lay strewn the unfairly damaged reputations of many innocent people, including homosexuals who wanted their private lives to remain private.
When Hulk Hogan sued Gawker and won a huge award that reflected the cruelty they had inflicted on him, normal people rejoiced.
Today Rolling Stone magazine has been held accountable for a fabricated story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia campus.
Turned out, everything in that story was false. A federal court jury assigned a huge award to the very real victims of that story, and more victims will be coming forward to hold the fake journalists responsible for their assault on truth and justice.
These are good steps in the correct direction. It is time the other media outlets were also similarly held accountable for their fake “reporting” on political and cultural subjects. The willful misconduct now being represented as honest reporting is damaging American democracy. All this pro-Clinton anti-Trump political activism masquerading as impartial, professional journalism counts as an illegal and unaccounted trillion dollar donation to the Clinton campaign. Time to clean this up.
Every day now new facts leak out from the FBI and the New York City police department. Computer files demonstrate how utterly corrupt and evil Clinton is and those who surround her. America was not designed to withstand official corruption aided and abetted by the media complex. And the official mainstream media news blackout about the corruption emanating from the White House is exactly that: Aiding and abetting
Without a public airing of this dirty laundry, America cannot cleanse itself and right the ship. Political coverups are like initial murders. The collateral murders that follow as the perpetrators try to cover their tracks are where the real damage is done.
Here we have a growing pile of evidence of the worst sort of illegal deeds, and the people who don’t want to be held responsible are making official government decisions to stop the inquiries.
Only the media can let the American people know, and yet they are blocking the news. What is the cost of this crime? What is the penalty?
Holding news “reporters” accountable
Liberal news propaganda outlet Politico attacked a guy who is a part-time actor and full-time lawyer. He appeared in a political ad. That was his sole exposure to politics. Politico’s Jonathan Martin called him a pornographer, but the movie is an intentionally Z-rated horror film.
Since when do private citizens get treated like politicians?
How do we hold accountable reporters like those as Politico?
It’s doubtful that reporters want to be held to the same standard they apply to their victims.
Today I got into a back-and-forth with yet another liberal reporter. He wrote a story about carrying concealed guns, and I was quoted. I objected to his obvious bias. He would not accept the truth that he is a political activist, and not a news reporter. Nice enough guy, but like so many in the news business, he’s dedicated to his version of the truth, not to accuracy, not to giving all sides equal opportunity.
At some point, we need to start digging around on the private behavior of activists who represent themselves as objective reporters. Let’s hold them to the standard they hold everyone else to. Or they can begin to provide truth in advertising, and be honest about their personal views that shape their writing about other people they usually disagree with.