Gerrymandering violates the COTUS

According to the COTUS, representation is solely a function of population.  There are no valid political party considerations, there are no valid social considerations.  To grotesquely configure districts to accomplish political or social objectives (as is now considered the ‘normal’ spoils of politics) is a gross perversion of the electoral process.  It is no different than stuffing the ballot box or otherwise attempting to pre-determine election results.  Anyone attempting gerrymandering should be subject to the strictest penalties available under law because it undermines the very foundation of our Constitutional Republic.

Any effort at redistricting should be to adjust for gross population shifts and should be absolutely blind to any other considerations.  ‘Equal justice under law’ requires that every Citizen be afforded equal representation in Congress.  Elected representatives should be focused on the needs of every constituent according to the COTUS, not some artificial or personal political agenda.  The COTUS defines the authorities and responsibilities delegated
to the federal government.  We elect a government to meet those responsibilities within the strictly limited delineated authorities; and to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the COTUS’:  only this and nothing more.

The COTUS does not validate any concept of ‘popular mandate’; ‘political mandate’; or ‘elections have consequences’.  These are simply perversions of the administration of our Constitutional Republic.  It is time for Citizens to demand an end to gerrymandering; and to demand an end to the abuse of the COTUS by power-mad, elitist representatives who manipulate our political processes for their personal gain and personal aggrandizement.

Why Healthcare costs keep rising

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/10/04/newsmaker_interview_with_ceci_connolly_107400.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States 

Healthcare in the US is so expensive.

MLR: Medical Loss Ratio may just explain why medical costs are skyrocketing in America.  MLR is the ratio of claims expense paid to premiums revenue received.  The State and federal governments require the ratio to be in the 80% to 85% range: ostensibly to ‘prevent insurance companies from making too much money” by effectively mandating how much premiums can exceed costs.

So, if a procedure costs $100, it means the insurance company has $15 to cover overhead and profit. If a procedure costs $1000, they have $150 to work with; and for a $10,000 procedure, it’s $1500.  Are you beginning to see how we get $1 tissues?

Under this system, who is motivated to keep costs down?  It isn’t the insurance company because for them, 15% of a big number is better than 15% of a little number.  It isn’t the healthcare facility, or the doctor for the same reasons.  The patient doesn’t particularly care as long as their insurance covers it; and most don’t have a clue how much their medical insurance costs when it is employer-provided (60%) or government provided (28%).  Less than 10% buy their own.  As long as the insurance company is able to pass the costs on to the patient, they don’t care how much it costs.

In a free market, the scope and the cost of healthcare would be determined by fair and open competition. Insurance companies and healthcare providers would derive their profit by constantly driving costs lower.  Lazik eye surgery is an excellent example because it is not covered by insurance.  As more practitioners get into the business, competition drives the price down even as quality is continuously improved to differentiate one supplier from another in order to attract paying patients. 

Without collusion between the government, healthcare and insurance interests to continually increase costs, the free market continually reduces costs while increasing quality and convenience. Because the buyer is paying for the service out of his own pocket, he is
motivated to find the best value; and as is always the case it is that which creates competition.  Unfortunately this is NOT how the majority of the healthcare industry works.

How did we get to this point?  Insurance companies are highly regulated by State and Federal authorities.  Clearly there has been collusion between the regulators and the regulated to take advantage of the sick and infirm at their weakest and most vulnerable.  The genius stroke is to do so in such a manner as the victim is duped into believing that the metric that exploits them is the vehicle by which they are separated from their funds.

It’s the classic con: fleece the pigeon but make them feel good about it.

The Medical Loss Ratio epitomizes the state of the healthcare industry in America today: runaway costs, enriching everyone but the patient while making it appear that a benevolent government is protecting their interests even as it exacts it’s share of the spoils in the form of generous political contributions to keep the con working.

Government mandated healthcare is simply a heavy-handed effort to force the entire populace to participate while simultaneously changing the rules to give the government, not insurers or the providers, the upper hand and thereby take control of this con.

This is what happens when Citizens trade liberty for the appearance of security.  This is what our Constitution was originally crafted to protect us from.  And this is just one example of why we must restore Constitutional governance in America.

Privatization of Social Security

1. Some folks don’t want Social Security to be privatized, which means they are responsible for their own retirement savings (though they must participate by government mandate and there would be regulations and controls on the individual (to guarantee their mandatory contributions) and the investment broker (to limit the riskiness of investments, administrative costs, etc)).


2. Don’t people realize that Congress has stolen every penny paid into Social Security over the past 70 years?

3. Don’t people realize that therefore the government doesn’t have any money to pay Social Security benefits that have accrued and are due?

a. The Fed is simply printing worthless script to cover Social Security benefits now, but that can’t continue as more and more Baby Boomers become eligible to draw on the benefit that they have paid into all their working lives.

b. Sooner or later the worthless script being printed to cover the exploding federal debt; and the exploding federal entitlement will become just that: worthless script.

I don’t have a solution, but if insanity is ‘continuing to do the same thing, but expecting a different results’, it seems to me that leaving Social Security in the hands of those who have stolen every penny of it, qualifies as insanity.

I’m guessing that folks who don’t want Social Security privatized are afraid that bankers might do what the government has already done.

Those who argue against privatization of Social Security are refusing to acknowledge that Social Security doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t since the mid-1960’s when Congress took all the money out of the Social Security Trust Fund and moved it to the General Fund so they could waste it on their pet projects (which most likely assured their comfortable retirement income).

Those of us trying to live on the false image of Social Security are doing no more than “whistling past the grave yard”; praying that the inevitable destruction of the dollar, (due to years of printing worthless script), won’t hit until after we die and no longer need the benefits that we have paid so dearly for our entire lives.

Will those who hate business ever get to the realization that what they hate about business is not from the conduct of business itself, but the abuse that business is able to accomplish as a result of unfair advantage purchased through political contributions? They may not care about the difference, but business is what has brought mankind the kind of prosperity and ease that subsistence farming and hunter-gathering could never accomplish. Government corruption is what enables businesses to exploit people and to take taxpayer money unfairly through government subsidies, worthless grants, useless foreign aid to despots, senseless wars, excess, non-competitive compensation to unions; excessive cost for healthcare (that has existed and expanded on government subsidy for more than 50 years): the list is endless.

Any business that relies on government subsidy to exist obviously does not warrant existing on it's own merit.  The beauty of the free market is that such businesses are permitted to perish.  When one has poison-ivy growing in the yard, no sensible person attempts to pluck each leaf to protect themselves: they find the root, up-root the plant and the problem is permanently eliminated.

Our Founders understood human nature: they realized that delegated authority will always be abused (it’s Man’s sinful nature [that liberals hate to acknowledge]). Because human nature guarantees that delegated authority will always be abused the Founders specified in the Constitution that the federal government would have very strictly limited authority; and NO authority to directly tax Citizens.

If we limit our elected representatives to the authorities and responsibilities originally delineated in the COTUS; the rape of the American people; and the destruction of the American Dream will be stopped.

The cure for 'structural unemployment'

A response to Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/opinion/27krugman.html


So, Mr. Krugman, suggesting another World War to solve the 'structural unemployment problem'? Sorry, the world is a different place and the nature of war has changed. Time to look for more productive solutions.

The US Treasury is empty. The Fed is printing toilet paper as fast as the presses can go. We don't have any money, and what there is, gets less valuable with each passing moment. The government cannot finance another wasteful and ineffective spending spree.

No one has sufficient understanding or control over the future to know what programs or policies to implement to restore our economy: that’s why Central-planning solutions have never worked. Therefore the federal government needs to concentrate on removing all non-essential obstructions to entrepreneurialism; and on eliminating all non-value-added costs that they have imposed on American business for the past 100 years. American business has been continually streamlining their processes for 40 years. It’s time for governments (federal, state, and local) to catch-up. The free market will reveal the ‘natural’ opportunities when it is freed of the suffocating detritus that accumulated when American business did not have to compete for consumers.

The most promising solution is to repeal the 16th Amendment and implement the Fair Tax as presently structured. With the stroke of a pen, everyone who is employed gets a 23% boost in their take-home pay; US exports become 23% more competitive in the global market; monthly pre-bate checks provide an offset for the taxes on essentials and provides cash flow to every household; and the Trillions of dollars sheltered off-shore can come back into our economy to fund the expansion that results from improved export posture.

The only way our economy is going to get better is for Americans to become more productive. The only way to become more productive is to become more competitive in the global market. Therefore we have to eliminate the non-value added costs that accrued during our 25 year, post WWII monopoly on global manufacturing capacity.

Longer-term we need to restore the historic American ideals of individual resourcefulness, entrepreneurialism, and accountability; even as we erase the deadly acceptance socialism promoted so disastrously over the past 50 years.

Productivity is the only key to Prosperity

This is in response to a Jesse Jackson Op-Ed in the Chicago Sun Times


http://www.suntimes.com/news/jackson/2655308,CST-EDT-jesse31.article

Jesse, it’s comforting to see that your incomprehension of reality extends beyond race. Labor brought as much to the prosperity of America as you have brought to understanding between the races: thuggery, extortion, and destruction: nothing more.

Henry Ford, not the labor unions, created the Middle Class. He accomplished that by eliminating waste in the manufacturing process. He was able to eliminate so much waste that he was able to empower workers to be so productive that he could double their wage; cut the work week from 60 hours to 40 hours; all while improving the quality of his products and cutting the selling price in half (or less). That was accomplished by one factor and one factor only: relentless pursuit of productivity solely by eliminating waste in every form.

The labor unions have done nothing but destroy productivity. Their ability to do so was empowered solely by the manufacturing capacity monopoly that America enjoyed between 1946 and 1970 as a result of global manufacturing capacity being destroyed during WWII. Without competition, unions could make any idiotic, destructive, non-productive demand of their choosing (and happily did so). The only drawback was that Americans had to pay more for everything, but they had no alternative.

By 1970 there was sufficient foreign manufacturing capacity that they could start competing for American consumers. The labor unions and government created modern Detroit, Akron, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Flint, et al by sucking the life-blood out of American business. Productivity is the key to prosperity and no amount of liberal drivel will alter that.

Idiotic union work rules that destroyed productivity; coupled with idiotic government mandates and social engineering follies multiplied non-value added costs that make it impossible for American manufacturers to compete using American labor in American cities. Every new mandate; every new cost; every new restriction; every new entitlement chipped away at domestic employment until we are where we are today.

The financial collapse was solely the doing of liberals in Congress and the White House; not conservatives; though they contributed by not un-doing the destructive practices being implemented. The Barney Franks and Chris Dodds forced banks to lend to people totally unable or unwilling to repay their loans. The Fed (liberals all) made credit so cheap and so readily available that it created one bubble after the next as speculators drove prices far beyond intrinsic value: be it tech stocks or real estate. This was exacerbated by Fannie and Freddie that transferred all risk from the private sector to the backs of the taxpayers. The coup de grace was nationalization of AIG that took all liability and stuffed it on the taxpayer.

The BP catastrophe was caused by the failure of the federal government to assure that regulations in place since March of 2000 were implemented. Had they been implemented, the well failure would not have occurred; and had there been a blow-out, on site containment and recovery equipment required by the same regulations would have mitigated the damage so it would never have reached the shore. Keep in mind that the federal government netted $2.3 Billion from the lease that included the Deepwater Horizon site: that should have paid for at least some supervision and oversight. Keep in mind too that president Obama noted in 2008 that the MMS was rotten, yet Billions of dollars and two years later, he still had done NOTHING to correct the problems that he admitted were there. The Gulf disaster is solely the fault of the federal government’s failure to enforce regulations long established. Also note that the cleanup could have been started 3 MONTHS earlier than it did had the president not stupidly refused to make an exception to the Jones Act to permit highly capable and supremely experienced foreign men and equipment from 30 different countries to participate in the clean up: all to “protect” a handful of union jobs.

To add insult to injury, the president then arbitrarily slapped a moratorium on all deep water drilling (which was forced on the industry by making shallow water sites arbitrarily off limits) in the Gulf: driving the rigs and the jobs to foreign destinations. The icing: the president lied about the recommendations of his “expert panel” who unanimously counseled against a deep water drilling moratorium: More government interference destroying jobs.

How many real, productive jobs have been created by PUSH, the UAW, SEIU and AFSCME? The answer is “not a single one”. These organizations exist solely to suck the lifeblood out of employers (and employees) by doing everything in their power to destroy productivity. That in turn destroys jobs as is indisputably proven by the extinction of fruitful jobs over the past 40 years.

If those 570,000 registered voters would get their heads out of their butts and their hands out of other people’s pockets and instead use their God-given abilities to create real jobs based on providing top quality products and services in the most waste-free productive manner possible, there would be reason to hope for a better tomorrow. As long as they continue to be manipulated and lied-to by PUSH, UAW, SEIU, AFSCME and Congress et al they will continue to sink lower into the abyss.

America wasn’t built by government make-work projects or union featherbedders; it wasn’t built as a welfare state; nor was it built by rainbow coalitions of social malcontents. It was built by individuals ecstatically overcome by the opportunity to accomplish their dreams and to reap any rewards there-from; driven by the reality that if they failed to produce a useful product or service they would be back where they started: with nothing.

Our Founders were wise about human nature and that is why they created a federal government with very little responsibility; less authority; and prohibited to directly tax Citizens for the revenue to run a limited government.

The first, and necessary, step to restore America is to restore Constitutional governance. Anything less is counter-productive, and only productivity earns prosperity.

Fundament Restoration is what is required.

The critical issues to the Tea Party Movement are not Republican or Democrat: they are economic and Constitutional. America is in a mess because the federal government, over the past 70 years, under both political parties, has engaged in policies, programs, and entitlements that they have no Constitutional (ie Legal) authority to implement.


Gov. Christie is fortunate that he is dealing with problems with fairly straight-forward and achievable solutions (though admittedly solutions that all of his predecessors have lacked the courage to implement).

The Congress on the other hand has been stealing from the American people and their forced "contributions" to Social Security and Medicare for generations. In addition, Congress has been using these vehicles to promise expansive benefits far exceeding receipts (notwithstanding that the sleazy Congress stole them anyway).

As Boomers reach "retirement age", after "contributing" to mandatory government insurance programs for 50 years or more, they are finding the cupboard bare. Long nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, SS and Medicare are now forced to pay the piper and there are no resources to do that with. Where Christie is faced with $Billion problems, the federal government is facing $100 Trillion in problems.

Making matters worse, we are saddled with a president and his administration who have never held nor created a real job in their lives. Without any real-world experience they are mesmerized with idiotic wealth re-distribution schemes learned from ivory-tower outhouse philosophers that have failed every time they've been attempted since the beginning of time.

There are indeed hard choices that must be made, and expanding entitlements knowing that there is no imaginable way to pay for them simply makes an impossible problem even worse: So clearly so that any rational person should be questioning the ulterior motives of this administration.

We don't need "fundamental transformation" we need fundamental Restoration of Constitutional governance.

Journolist terminally perverts the 4th Estate

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2010/07/whats_so_bad_about_the_journol_1.html


“American democracy is unthinkable without the two political parties, so partisanship can't be all bad”.

Dear Mr. Cost, obviously you have no understanding of what is America. I’ll try to explain it to you.

First, America is most intentionally NOT a democracy; which is best described as two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. America is a Constitutional Republic: that means that we are governed by a Constitution, administered by representatives elected by Sovereign Citizens.

The Constitution of the United States (COTUS) is the contract, crafted by Sovereign Citizens, to establish and define the federal government created to do a very limited range of clearly defined responsibilities within a very narrow range of clearly defined authorities.

We elect a federal government to do two things: to exercise their Constitutionally defined responsibilities; and to “preserve, protect, and defend the COTUS”: Only this and nothing more. Within the COTUS there is no such thing as a “popular mandate”: there is no authority for “fundamentally transforming the USA” (which in reality is a clear violation of the oath of office required of every federal employee before we grant them any federal authority).

Second, you will find nothing in the COTUS to encourage, support, or authorize political parties, which our Founders rightly considered an anathema to our Constitutional Republic. Political parties exist solely to pervert the electoral process.

So, if America is not a democracy (it is not); and political parties are an anathema to our form of government (they are) partisanship is in fact necessarily all bad. Partisanship presumes that there are two or more perspectives on an issue, but in a Constitutional Republic there is only one perspective: that specifically defined by the Constitution.

While the history lesson was honestly fascinating it merely denotes that partisans have been doing their damnedest to pervert our form of government since the beginning. That’s why the Sovereign Citizens amended the COTUS by adding the Bill of Rights listing a number of authorities that the federal government was intentionally, and specifically denied: including the admonition that just because some authorities had been delegated, no other authorities not listed, are. Finally, just in case there is any is any confusion, in the event that someone may think they meant to include some unnamed authority the Sovereigns said “Nope”. Any authority not listed is retained by the Sovereign Citizen unless they have specifically delegated it to the States.

It is patently clear that no elected (or appointed) federal officer has any authority not specifically listed in the COTUS.

Since the role of the federal government is clearly defined (by branch); and since none in the any of the federal government’s three branches has any authority to alter those definitions, the Founders excluded the press from federal control in the 1st Amendment to enable them to freely be the peoples’ watchdog: to keep the federal government “on the straight and narrow” in compliance with the COTUS.

Of course there has always been a partisan press, but the rightful role of the press is to objectively report the facts so that Sovereign Citizens have the honest information required to make an informed decision. Unfortunately in the current age, the press has so badly abdicated it’s essential responsibility by corrupting their reportage in order to shape the debate to their own terms, that they have destroyed their credibility and thereby, destroyed their usefulness. That explains why the 4th Estate can no longer support itself: they no longer provide a useful service.

Mr. Cost, you may find a deceptively partisan press acceptable, but clearly the Sovereign Citizens do not.

In the Founders age anyone that did what the Journolist participants did (pervert the political process for their own gratification) would have been tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. In the modern age they are simply bankrupted and run out of business. Good riddance to them, but it’s such a shame to lose the theater of it.