Bill Whittle explains the three great ages; agricultural, industrial and information, and the related government that was necessary. He explains the political corruption associated with the industrial age, from the robber barons to the progressive movement that is now in complete conflict with the form of nimble government required by the digital age. He draws an important parallel between the robber barons of the industrial age and the unions’ unholy alliance with government in the information age.
…because the industrial age is drawing to a close as the information age takes its place, and all of our economic structure, once again, going back to being horizontal, independent, light, fast, agile, decentralized, local, smaller, and cheaper. The old dinosaurs may totter for awhile, but they will eventually fall, and the government that will come out of our third wave information age society will have to be fast, decentralized, local, smaller and cheaper as well. …It’s the people with the Gadsden flags, the ones calling for less government that are on the side of the future, not the public sector union members living in the past to preserve benefits and entitlements that now other people have to pay for. These public sector unions actually have become the old, corrupt alliance of money and political power that they themselves were created to destroy.
Every once in a while, they slip up, and tell you what they are really thinking…and we should be worried.
I have been fretting since I realized some three months ago that the Republicans are going to take control of the Senate as well as the House, and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are going to be ‘the leadership’ for the country. How scary is it to know that the two branches of the same party (Big Government) are sparring so as to appear to be enemies? How scary is it to know that we are moving from the whips and electric cattle prods of Nancy and Harry’s regime to the velvet gloved iron fist of McConnell and Boehner?
McConnell’s comment to National Journal and Boehner’s ‘compromise’ on tax cuts only highlights what we all know to be true about the District of Criminals; it’s all about retaining power and control – not taking care of the country whose wealth has been drained and capital sent overseas.
If Americans want real change in Washington, Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Ron Paul should be the leadership team to push the agenda that demands a rollback of 100 years of progressive nudge and stops the ‘global governance’ crowd from delivering a fatal blow to America’s sovereignty through debt.
A McConnell/Boehner team is not written in stone; it’s just more District of Criminals ‘business as usual’.
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”
Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”
McConnell and Boehner are creatures of Congress who are not driven by any desire to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
McConnell frets, however, about controlling expectations among tea party activists likely to want—and quite possibly demand—that bigger GOP numbers in Congress produce big things: a swift repeal of the health care reform law; a massive U-turn on federal spending; and immediate action to reduce the national debt. Tea party darling and likely freshman mover-and-shaker Marco Rubio of Florida, for instance, summed up the movement’s ax-wielding gusto in July: “Every day we postpone acting decisively to rein in wasteful spending and cut the debt, we pile even more on the backs of millions of young Americans.”
In one sign of conditional unity, Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who backed many tea party candidates in open defiance of McConnell and other GOP leaders, says he isn’t spoiling for a leadership fight. But note the qualification. “I have no intention of challenging the leadership,” DeMint told National Journal. “What I have done over the last year has ruffled a lot of feathers in our conference. The chance of me getting the votes is not realistic at this point.” But DeMint says that Senate Republicans must change the way they approach spending and do it soon, or tea party activists will lose faith and rebel even more.
“We have to understand, this is not so much a Republican victory.… I see it more as a realignment of American politics,” DeMint said. “We’re going to have more Republicans, and the composition is going to be more of a limited-government idea. The biggest challenge we have is to change the idea that senators are here to do what is best for their states, to get all they can for their states and the interests operating in their states.”
And this is where DeMint is spoiling for a confrontation. He wants Republicans to cut spending no matter what effect those reductions have on their home-state constituents. He says this would be a “definitional” culture shift among Republicans, and he considers the pledge made by all the Senate GOP candidates—including relative moderates such as Mark Kirk of Illinois and Carly Fiorina of California—to adopt the no-earmarks policy the beginning of that change. DeMint sees earmarks as a symptom of a deeper problem: the structural bias for more discretionary spending and the clout that comes with it.
To reverse that trend, DeMint wants to upend generations of bipartisan logrolling. What’s his ask? That GOP leaders permanently exclude themselves from the Appropriations Committee, which allocates non-entitlement spending. If that rule had been in place during this Congress, three GOP leaders would have been kicked off Appropriations—McConnell, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. “If we are going to cut spending, we have to take the power away from those responsible for spending,” DeMint says. “We have to say no to a power base that can be corrupting over time, not in the sense of anything criminal, but in the sense that your focus is spending and not cutting.”
McConnell was icily noncommittal about DeMint’s idea: “We will debate any rule changes brought before the conference.” Kyl is downright opposed. “That suggests there’s something wrong with [the current system],” he said. DeMint’s point is that there is, in fact, something wrong with the current system. Thus, Senate Republicans may find themselves divided over their own rules even before they begin to grapple with Obama over spending, tax rates, or entitlements.
I’m worried…
UPDATE: I’m even more worried now. Chuck Schumer as the Senate Leader?
Part 2 of the Bill Whittle ‘FireWall’ series speaking about Tea Party core beliefs. I am reposting the first segment for those that may not have seen it the first time around.
What We Believe, Part 1: Small Government and Free Enterprise
What We Believe, Part 2: The Problem with Elitism
About Ted Kennedy:
Who descended from the bluest blood of all, never had a job that didn’t entail spending other peoples’ money, and creating the rules and regulations that other people had to live by. What is it about all of this that seems vaguely and unpleasantly familiar? Smells a little bit like a ruling class, doesn’t it?
Members of Congress and Michele Bachmann are extending an invitation to you; America, to a tele-townhall over Pelosi’s special session of the U.S. House to pass a $26 BILLION union pension bill next week. The link to sign up is further down in the following article.
Bachmann Calls for Nancy Pelosi To Enter 12 Step Program For Her Addiction To Job-Killing Spending
With Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that Congress will be reconvening to authorize billions of dollars of spending the government doesn’t have, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann announced she will be holding a National Tea Party Tele-Townhall to listen to the response of the American people.
“Nancy Pelosi has already spent over $3.6 trillion on so-called ‘stimulus’ spending and now she wants to give in excess of $20 billion to politicians to spend on even more big government,” Congresswoman Bachmann said. “She is clearly addicted to spending other people’s money and is rushing members of Congress back to Washington to get a spending fix. Could it be she wanted to ensure she has distributed taxpayer-subsidized ‘walking around money’ to public employee unions across the country prior to the election to desperately try to save her already endangered majority? The same public employee unions which will provide the boots on the ground to re-elect a Democrat majority in the mid-term elections, where Speaker Pelosi’s grip on the gavel is in serious doubt?”
“After only a few days away from D.C., Democrats in Congress are determined to not let even a week go by without spending additional billions of dollars for even more big government programs. That’s why I’ll be joining with other leaders to hold a National Tea Party Tele-Townhall to listen to Americans who have had enough of the out-of-control spending and endless tax increases.”
People interested in participating in the National Tea Party Tele-Townhall on Monday, August 9 at 6 pm central – the same time Pelosi will be convening Congress – can sign up on www.michelebachmann.com/sign-up-for-the-national-tea-party-tele-townhall . Over one million people will be invited to participate, and is expected to be the largest tele-townhall ever held by members of Congress.
It appears that FoxNews, LLC has “claimed the copyright on their shows“, and has asked YouTube to suspend certain accounts that feature the Beck videos. Quite an interesting conundrum considering the saudi prince’s investment in the parent company…
I have no idea how long Beck videos will be available for posting.
(Editor’s Note: I will update this post with Stossel’s program later today.)
John Stossel’s program today will cover the new law in Michigan that automatically makes small business owners who run daycare centers be part of a union and pay union dues.
Also in Michigan, a story of three women who run their own independent businesses out of their homes, caring for neighborhood children. They each recently received a letter indicating that they are now dues-paying members of the Child Care Providers Together Michigan union – a complete surprise to them.
After a 2006 Executive Order by the Michigan Governor awarded the union (a partnership of UAW and AFSCME) bargaining rights for home child care workers, all it took for the union to convert all 40,000 child care workers to dues paying members was 5,900 signed union authorization cards. That left some independent home child care workers, who’d for years considered themselves self-employed, feeling dismayed and stunned. Such began cries of forced unionism and initiated a lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Human Services. The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Patrick Wright from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, explains that the whole arrangement –
is nothing more than “a government ’shell corporation‘ designed to get around possible political and constitutional obstructions to the arrangement”. Wright offers a detailed backgrounder on this case and a fantastic explanation of the scheme behind the actions.
So, was this an instance of unintended consequences that were simply unforeseen by the state of Michigan and its representatives working with the unions? Or was unionizing 40,000 child care workers under the quiet cover of an apparently under-advertised vote by mail campaign an intended consequence for AFSCME and UAW? More importantly, why is SEIU’s part in this production so downplayed? Their joint documents clearly indicate that SEIU is driving the national movement to unionize home child care workers all across the country. Not to mention SEIU’s “Kids First” program, which is both the beneficiary and the business driver behind all of these new home child care union members, in concert with AFSCME’s efforts.
A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.
Glenn’s opening monologue is about the collapse of Dubai, the correlation to California, and the exact same path that our current administration is on that was tried during the ’30’s depression. He also speaking about how less than 10% of Obama’s appointees have private sector experience. Comforting, isn’t it considering Obama is having a jobs summit where they do not plan on listening to the CEOs.
I will post his interview with David Buckner as soon as it becomes available.
