Democracy Dies in the Administrative State

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In the age of Trump, the so-called “mainstream media” has once again been possessed of its manic Republican administration energy levels, determined to shine the light on government corruption and malfeasance stemming from the administration.

The Washington Post even adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to show the world its rediscovered commitment to keeping government honest, while attacking The Daily Signal’s legitimacy for its coverage of the White House.

However, what happens when the spotlight turns on the permanent, unaccountable administrative state?

Conservative Review recently ran a series of stories on State Department staffers who had deep ties to the Obama administration. Several had been key architects of the last administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, and one had been openly critical of President Donald Trump on social media.

It would seem reasonable that the American people have a right to know about the activities of federal staffers working in the allegedly nonpartisan civil service.

Instead, Politico ran a story about how federal staffers are “panicked by conservative media attacks,” and insinuated that these reports were orchestrated by an administration that operates completely outside of norms.

Politico reported that the civil servants who were exposed worry the White House may “feel pressure to act from voters in the Republican base.”

Politico followed up with an op-ed labeling reporting on the so-called “fourth branch” of government “McCarthyism.”

Yet, agencies wield vast power over individual Americans, and those who staff them have almost absurd levels of job security that Americans working in the private sector could only dream of.

As I argue in my paper, co-authored with my wife, Inez Stepman, and published through the American Legislative Exchange Council, there is a desperate need for immediate change in civil service laws, which have made it nearly impossible to fire federal employees.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed in 1883 to stop the “spoils system” of politicized hiring and firing of employees. But while passed with good intentions, the law created new problems that are more readily apparent in the 21st century.

The Pendleton Act and a century of similar laws increasing the protections around the civil service fit in nicely with the goals of early 20th-century progressives, like Woodrow Wilson, who dreamed of fundamentally changing American government.

Wilson and the progressives argued for gutting the system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founders and awarding their carefully-distributed powers to an ostensibly apolitical branch with technical expertise.

Since the Pendleton law was enacted, civil service protections have gown—as has the size of government—and now around 90 percent of the nearly 3 million federal employees have protected jobs for life from which they can almost never be fired.

And in the rare situation in which the government has “just cause” to fire a bureaucrat, it can take 300 days, filled with a labyrinth of the sort of arcane hearings usually reserved for lawsuits, to get rid of them—even for blatant misconduct and failure to carry out their duties.

Little wonder why so few ever lose their positions, even for criminal offenses.

The progressive dream of a politically-detached civil service of experts has always been a myth, but the curtain on federal agency neutrality has been pulled back more than ever during and after the 2016 elections.

During that campaign, 95 percent of the political donations from 14 federal agencies went to Hillary Clinton, a Democrat-Republican donation ratio more imbalanced than the more notoriously partisan gap among university faculty.

In recent months, some of these allegedly nonpartisan civil servants have openly attempted to undermine the new administration’s policies, including working with their former political bosses from the Obama White House.

Civil service laws have never and will never be able to ensure a truly apolitical civil service. Political appointees “burrow” into the next administration, securing permanent civil service jobs where they are free to continue conducting their policy preferences.

Instead of incentivizing efficiency and expertise, civil service protections have entrenched a class of bureaucrats with their own policy interests in Washington, and insulated them from the corrective force of democratic accountability.

Today, American confidence in government is dangerously low. Though the voting franchise has been extended enormously in the past 100 years, the changes American voters can actually effect in Washington grow ever more circumscribed by out-of-control agency power, and restoring democratic accountability to the agencies is lambasted by mainstream media outlets as unacceptable “McCarthyism.”

For constitutional government to be restored and true democracy to thrive, the administrative state must be curtailed. That can’t begin to happen until the fourth branch is changed from within.

Andrew Jackson, whom Trump has spoken of favorably, warned of a system in which office is “considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.”

The political preferences of modern-day voters are increasingly opposed by a “swamp” class of almost 3 million nearly unfireable bureaucrats: overpaid, underworked, and wielding far, far too much power over the lives of their fellow Americans.

If Trump wants to be able to say “you’re fired” to those opposing him within the executive branch, he would do well to use his bully pulpit to urge Congress to unwind some of these century-old job protections.

Powerful and permanent agency employees who are outraged at the very notion of democratic accountability threaten not just the Trump administration, but the very notion that American government should remain “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” (For more from the author of “Democracy Dies in the Administrative State” please click HERE)

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Rogue Intelligence Agencies Remind Me of the Kennedy Assassination

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On December 22, 1963, one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, former President Harry S. Truman, who initially authorized the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), wrote in the Washington Post:

“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency…For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” that is, as a collator of “accurate and up-to-the-minute information,” upon which the President could make decisions, information not “slanted to conform to established positions of a given department.”

In contrast to Truman’s intent, the CIA, starting with the appointment of Allen Dulles as Director in 1953, became “an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government,” often “injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations” and using intelligence “to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

There is no better example of those assumed roles than the Bay of Pigs operation, a CIA-organized paramilitary invasion to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro:

“Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles had been offended when young President Kennedy had the temerity to ask questions about CIA plans before the Bay of Pigs debacle, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to mousetrap the President.”

“Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”

Kennedy did not deploy the U.S. military to Cuba and the enterprise did fail. Subsequently, Kennedy fired Dulles and his deputy director General Charles P. Cabell, whose brother Earle, incidentally, was mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was assassinated.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy reportedly said that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

In my opinion, as a consequence of Kennedy’s real or perceived hostility toward the agency and its rogue operations, elements of the CIA either participated directly or created the conditions whereby President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

Like Dulles, CIA operative David Atlee Phillips, who “was involved in the organization of the Bay of Pigs operation” and afterwards was appointed Chief of Cuban Operations having “the freedom to roam the entire Western Hemisphere mounting secret operations to get rid of Fidel Castro,” said “his goal was to provoke US intervention in Cuba by ‘putting Kennedy’s back to the wall.'”

Nothing would put “Kennedy’s back to the wall” more than an assassination attempt linked to Cuba.

Phillips, not only had the authority, but had access to all the necessary CIA assets including organized crime, anti-Castro Cubans and a low-level CIA agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, who pretended to be a Marxist and pro-Cuban activist. Oswald ultimately failed in his efforts to infiltrate the Soviet Union and communist organizations in the U.S., but eventually provided the ideal patsy, when an assassination “incident” became a reality, as the mafia took final control of the operation in Dealey Plaza.

That is, the assassination was an operation within an operation, which from the CIA’s standpoint, unintentionally or intentionally killed President Kennedy and, in either case, because of those involved, required a government cover-up.

Fast forward to the present, when, not only do U.S. intelligence agencies still engage in cloak and dagger, make policy, and decide what intelligence the President and Congress are allowed to see, but they now monitor and record every telephone conversation, every email, every social media post and every financial transaction by every American, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Interestingly, less than two years before he was to leave office, Barack Obama authorized CIA Director John Brennan to reorganize the agency, a man who admittedly, as late as 1980, voted for the Communist Party and reportedly converted to Islam.

What was the purpose of a reorganization occurring so late in Obama’s term of office and orchestrated by a close political ally?

Brennan’s reorganization created the CIA’s own cyber capability, the Directorate of Digital Innovation and ten separate centers: “six of which have a regional-based focus – Africa, East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East, South and Central Asia, and the Western Hemisphere; and four of which have a mission-based focus – counterintelligence, counterterrorism, global issues, and weapons and counterproliferation.”

One might say that the new CIA, which is modeled after a traditional multi-function fusion structure like the Counter Terrorism Center, is more tactical than strategic, more operational than intelligence-gathering and, overall, is more digitally intrusive, which potentially affects every “incidentally surveilled” American.

Alternatively, a cynic might conclude that such a late-term reorganization was simply an opportunity to permanently embed personnel and policies that would serve the Obama-Brennan ideology.

Intelligence as a continuation of politics by other means. I don’t think that is what Harry S. Truman had in mind. (For more from the author of “Rogue Intelligence Agencies Remind Me of the Kennedy Assassination” please click HERE)

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PC Kills: Will the West Ever Wake up From the Delusional Approach to Jihad?

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A jihadist attacks individuals in the public square of a Western town.

The media refuses to provide a description of the attacker, reporting only the weapon he used.

A physical description of a man of African, South Asian, or Middle Eastern descent leaks out in the ensuing hours.

Law enforcement authorities deliver a press conference confirming the attacker’s Islamic name and stating that at this time, his motive is unclear.

Rumors on social media percolate about the man screaming “Allahu Akbar.”

Mainstream reporters ask local Muslim community leaders and neighbors about the attacker. They express universal shock, describing him as a decent man who might have been rough around the edges but never showed signs of being a terrorist. The man came from a middle-class family, liked playing video games with friends, and by all accounts lived a normal existence. Toward the end of the stories, those close to the attacker note that he had grown increasingly devout in recent years.

Bloggers begin to research and quickly find that the attacker was a member of a mosque led by an imam who had been recorded preaching hatred and violence toward the West. The attacker posted violent verses from the Quran and railed against the “Crusaders’” wars in the Levant on social media pages captured by screenshot before they were taken down. It emerges that he had spent months in the Middle East during recent years.

Several days later, law enforcement authorities report that the attacker in fact appears to have been a terrorist. But he had no direct ties to IS or Al-Qaeda, so there is no reason for alarm.

Politicians plead with the public that this man perverted one of the world’s great religions – Islam, “the religion of peace” – and that his acts were “non-Islamic.” They urge us all to come together in a shared belief in tolerance and diversity. Love trumps hate. Lone wolves are a fact of life, and their efforts only underscore the need for community engagement to “counter violent extremism.”

How many times are we in the West going to see the above script play out before something changes?

How long will we live a naïve fantasy in which we act as if all is well as the global jihadist movement metastasizes, bringing the violent murder of infidels to our shores?

If the murder of 3,000 innocents on American soil has not caused the West to openly and honestly examine who the enemy is and what animates him, and to develop a comprehensive strategy that mobilizes all of our resources and capabilities to defeat him, do we expect anything to change the next time we experience a mass attack?

Meanwhile, those who do understand the enemy are dismissed as cranks or called bigots. Those who assert that jihad is the motive – that violent subversion with the goal of world domination is justified by core Islamic texts, as the jihadists themselves clearly illustrate – are told to pipe down.

If you offend by speaking truth, you will cause violence. Shut up, and maybe you can keep your head.

Government service predicated on an understanding of the theopolitical Islamic supremacism that animates jihadists is simply out of the question. Heaven forbid that national security and foreign policy officials have any understanding of the Sharia law that both de facto and de jure governs the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

What will it take for the West to flip this script?

To date, murder, bloodshed, and fear abound. In spite of that fact, much of the West would rather cling to a narrative that makes it feel good about itself than recognize the reality of a global jihadist menace that threatens its very survival. This insane delusion will continue to have fatal consequences until we wake up. (For more from the author of “PC Kills: Will the West Ever Wake up From the Delusional Approach to Jihad?” please click HERE)

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Persecution of Journalists Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Is Malicious

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We are witnesses to an abuse of power by government that represents a test of our democracy. Anyone who fails to rally to the cause of the Americans victimized in this case should be discredited.

Though I have not been shy about criticizing President Donald Trump when I think he deserves it, he is not involved.

I refer to the Kafkaesque malfeasance by Xavier Becerra, attorney general of California. Becerra, for many years a Democratic congressman, is using his office to hound two citizen journalists. They came into his sights because their videos exposed the sickening reality behind the euphemistic surface of Planned Parenthood. Becerra and other abortion-rights absolutists found this embarrassing. Why do I call it Kafkaesque? Because David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who went undercover to reveal the law breaking of Planned Parenthood, now find themselves, not Planned Parenthood, accused of 15 felony counts by the state of California.

Their crimes? Recording people without their consent. The editorial board of the LA Times, to its credit, has called this a “disturbing overreach.” And Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, while condemning Daleiden’s politics, has defended his rights, saying, “This was a legitimate investigation, and no level of government should be in the business of chilling it.”

Xavier Becerra is no stickler about secret recordings. In 2012, he relished the release of Mitt Romney’s surreptitiously recorded comments to donors in which Romney mentioned the “47 percent.” Romney had joked that if he were Hispanic, he’d win the election. Becerra didn’t seem concerned about Romney’s privacy rights when he rushed to the press to denounce the Republican: “The insult of all insults, Mitt Romney says if he was Latino he would win the presidential election, as if being Latino would have given him any advantage to win the White House.” (Read more from “Persecution of Journalists Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Is Malicious” HERE)

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The Hypocrisy of the Trump-Hitler Comparisons

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As an historian and expert on Hitler, I’ve been wary to debate the common comparisons between President Trump and Adolf Hitler. But I’ve been slowly pulled into the debate anyway.

Around January 26 Christopher Hooton published an image from my book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. Several internet news sites then picked it up. Some of them also quoted from my chapter on “Morally Upright Aryans and Immoral Jews.” On March 2nd, the Washington Post published this image and quoted from an e-mail interview with me. As you might have guessed, the piece compared Hitler and President Trump.

The image in question was from an article about “The Criminal Jew.” It was first published in 1935 in a Nazi periodical. Several photos featured Jews, along with the crimes they allegedly committed. The article claimed that Jews are biologically prone to criminality. This was a major theme in Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The is what the Washington Post tried to apply to Trump. Here’s the basic argument: Hitler targeted Jews as being criminal and publicized their crimes. Trump is now publicizing the crimes of illegal immigrants. Thus, Trump is like Hitler.

Before dismantling this argument, I should say that I’m not a big fan of Trump’s immigration policies. Nor do I endorse his rhetoric. Though illegal immigration is a tough issue on which decent people can disagree, I think as Americans we should be more welcoming and loving toward immigrants.

Even though I disagree with Trump’s immigration policies, this does not make his policies on par with Hitler. Hitler did many things during his career — some evil, some not. He was a vegetarian, loved dogs, and built highways. Does this make vegetarians, dog lovers, and highway builders “like Hitler”?

Hitler was also a pantheist, as I demonstrated in my recent book, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich. Pantheism has its problems, to be sure. But, it isn’t wrong because Hitler believed it.

I also explain in Hitler’s Religion that before coming to power, Hitler sometimes claimed he was a Christian. He showed no commitment to Christianity in his private life and his morality. Doesn’t this also sound a lot like hundreds or thousands of other politicians who have never done anything like Hitler? Does this make them, or Trump, a Hitler? Of course not.

To come to grips with the Hitler comparisons, we should ask: Why do people consider Hitler one of the most megalomaniacal evil figures of all time? I submit that it was because he launched an aggressive war to annihilate whole groups of defenseless human beings. He exterminated millions of people whom he deemed inferior biologically or racially. This included the mass murder of about six million Jews. Hitler also orchestrated the mass murder of over 200,000 disabled Germans, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, millions of Soviet POWs, and others. Now ask yourself: Do Trump’s policies rise to this level? Is Trump threatening to commit mass murder?

Of course not. Ironically, those who are eager to compare Trump to Hitler are doing just what they are decrying in Trump. What is their chief complaint against Trump when it comes to immigration? It’s that he connects other people — illegal immigrants — with criminals.

But what are Trump’s detractors doing? Associating another person — Trump — with the most fiendish criminal they know. Trump’s critics surely know that Trump is not a mass murderer. So why do they keep tarring him with the Hitler label? It’s simple. They think Trump is hateful and intolerant.

But wait a minute. Aren’t they being hateful and intolerant toward him and his supporters? Flinging the epithet Hitler at someone is not exactly a sign of tolerance, love and good will.

I’m not suggesting that those who disagree with Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric should crawl into a corner and shut up. But, it would be much better, and more productive, if his opponents would take the moral high ground. They should engage in civil debate based on real love and reason, rather than doing the very thing they accuse Trump of doing: demonizing political opponents. (For more from the author of “The Hypocrisy of the Trump-Hitler Comparisons” please click HERE)

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Mitch McConnell’s Bucket of Suck

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It’s worse than most people think. If the Freedom Caucus hadn’t stood in the way of triggering the three-bucket health care solution rightly tagged as “RINOcare,” and it had passed, we’d be on Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) “long game” train that would never reach its destination.

Many people have talked about the “third bucket” of the Republican’s health care plan as one that was particularly enticing. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) explained on “Face the Nation” that the third bucket was the “sucker’s bucket.” He said that everything in the third bucket was put there because there would be a need to have eight Democrats to vote for it, according to the way the Senate is run. Cruz said that phase three was never going to happen because, “You can’t get eight Senate Democrats to agree on saying good morning.”

Jim Geraghty at National Review also questioned phase three, noting that it would be quite a difficult road to get eight Democratic Senate seats to flip in 2018. He wrote, “Nuking the filibuster appears to be off the table, at least for now. So what’s the roadmap to get to 60 votes? And if there is no viable path to get 60 votes … how do the ideas in ‘Phase Three’ ever get enacted?”

So, why would “nuking the filibuster” be off the table in the first place?

I wrote a piece on Mitch McConnell’s recent memoir, “The Long Game” a while back, and I noted that the book is peppered from beginning to end of McConnell’s love for winning elections. It’s what keeps him going, and I recall him saying something like, “The best way to become a great senator, is to remain one.” He is very proud of the elections he, “wasn’t supposed to” win. But he also said plenty about how he believes in the Senate as an institution which must survive for our own good. It is because he believes in the institution over everything else and that he loves winning elections that we had a phase three.

The way the AHCA was set up, looking back, has McConnell’s fingerprints all over it for two reasons. One, the sucker’s bucket, as Cruz aptly termed it, promised all the goodies conservatives wanted yet took eight Democrats to enact. “Impossible!” said nearly everyone. But if you look at it from McConnell’s point of view, it makes sense. He will not change Senate procedure in his “precious institution” where he has sat for 32 years.

The second reason this reeks of McConnell-esque machinations is because a phase that can be put off for campaign purposes — as in spending all of 2018 campaigning on replacement that would take a filibuster-proof Senate when there will be 23 Democrats coming up for reelection — is a chance, as several sources have said, that Republicans can gain seats.

I’m sure we all remember leadership’s mantras in 2011, that they were only half of a third in 2013, that they needed the Senate in 2015, that they needed the White House in 2016, and now, apparently, Mitch McConnell is saying because of Senate rules he needs a filibuster proof majority in the elections of 2018. In every one of these arguments, the leadership continued to claim they would repeal, “if,” the people continued to elect more and more Republicans.

This is precisely why he recently said the following:

It’s pretty obvious we were not able in the House to pass a replacement … Our Democratic friends ought to be pretty happy about that because we have the existing law in place and I think we’re just going to have to see how that works out … We believe it will not work out well, but we’ll see. They have an opportunity now to have the status quo go forward, regretfully.

In other words, McConnell was able to cast blame on the House for a promise in the Senate that he had no intention of honoring UNLESS we elected a filibuster-proof Senate. Even then the law would still not be repealed.

It’s my guess McConnell is probably a little upset that all eyes aren’t on him in the Senate, which they would have been had the House passed RINOcare. He would have been able to command attention for the next two years, promising once again to do what he said he would do — once the voters gave him even more of a majority of course.

In reality, he’s the keeper of his precious institution that under his management is guaranteeing Obamacare will remain. (For more from the author of “Mitch McConnell’s Bucket of Suck” please click HERE)

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We Are Fighting Demons More Than Democrats

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I believe in political involvement. I believe in taking responsibility for our world. I believe in rolling up our sleeves and being agents of positive change. But I also believe that our greatest battle is a spiritual battle — not a political or even a social battle. We do our country a disservice when we neglect the spiritual battle at hand.

Too Much Trust in Men

Paul explained to the believers in Ephesus that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12).

What? Organized cosmic powers of darkness? Demonic forces arrayed in heavenly places? We’re supposed to take this stuff seriously? Absolutely. We ignore the spiritual realm to the peril of our own souls. That’s why Paul exhorted his readers to “take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Eph. 6:12-13). We are in a spiritual war.

Again, I’m not downplaying earthly realities one bit.

I’m not saying that we’re not fully responsible for what we do. We are. We can’t say, “The devil made me do it.” I’m not saying that some Democratic policies are not downright evil or that some Republicans are not downright corrupt or that some of our government’s choices are not downright dangerous. And I’m absolutely not saying that instead of voting and petitioning and speaking up and taking stands we should just stay home and pray.

But I am saying that we have seriously neglected prayer. We have focused way too much on natural things and not nearly enough on spiritual things. We — speaking for many Christian conservatives — have put too much trust in the Republican Party and, for some, even in President Trump. Our hope must be in the Lord. Only He can bring about the changes our nation so desperately needs.

A Common Enemy

Let’s remember that we have a common enemy, the devil, also known as Satan. He hates blacks and whites alike. He wants to destroy men and women alike. He despises gays and straights alike. As Jesus taught, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).

He wants to destroy America (along with every other nation on the planet). And he cannot be defeated in the ballot box.

We must do war against Satan and his minions, and we do it first through devoted prayer. Such prayer ascends to the throne of God and results in extraordinary divine intervention. We also do it by sharing our faith with others, preaching the gospel without compromise or apology, calling a lost world to turn to Jesus and be transformed. (Yes, I really believe all this. Do you?)

And we do it by living out our faith — in our personal lives, in our families, in our church communities — without hypocrisy and without compromise. That’s how America will be shaken. Nothing short of a great awakening will stop (or even slow) our nation’s headlong race to destruction.

Do we really think that the Supreme Court can stem the tide? That Congress can do it? That the president can do it? That passing a specific bill or enacting a certain law will reverse our course?

Again, we should get involved in politics. What our political and judicial leaders do is of great importance. But let’s not kid ourselves. There’s only so much these elected (and unelected) officials can do. The real changes that need to occur in our country can only occur by the Lord, working with His people. Likewise, our national wounds and divisions are too deep for a mere human cure. We need the Great Physician.

Take the Bible Seriously

When I speak like this, I know that some will incorrectly hear ominous talk of “dominionism,” as if I’m calling for some type of forceful, Christian takeover of society. That’s the last thing on my mind.

What I’m calling for is simple and clear. It is for followers of Jesus to seek God’s face in prayer with a deep sense of urgency, asking Him to have mercy on our nation.

It is for us to humble ourselves before Him in deep repentance for our own sins and failings.

It is for us to renew our commitment to the Great Commission and to focus once again on winning the lost and making disciples.

It is for us to shine like lights in dark places, confront evil and injustice, help the poor and the hurting, make a tangible difference for good wherever God has placed us.

It is for us to live in the light of eternity, to recognize that what we do (or don’t do) in our time on earth will matter in both this world and the world to come.

In short, it is for us to take the Bible seriously. That means submitting to God, resisting the devil, and pushing back the forces of darkness by the power of the gospel.

Not only can it be done. With God’s gracious help, it must be done.

Are you with me? (For more from the author of “We Are Fighting Demons More Than Democrats” please click HERE)

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The Ticking Time Bomb That Will Wipe out Virtually Every Pension Fund in America

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Are millions of Americans about to see the big, juicy pensions that they were counting on to fund their golden years go up in flames in the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history? When Bloomberg published an editorial entitled “Pension Crisis Too Big for Markets to Ignore“, it simply confirmed what a lot of people already knew to be true. Pension funds all over America are woefully underfunded, and they have been pouring mind boggling amounts of money into very risky investments such as Internet stocks and commercial mortgages. Just like with subprime mortgages in 2008, this is a crisis that everyone can see coming well in advance, and yet nothing is being done about it.

On a day to day basis, Americans generally don’t think very much about pensions. Most of those that have been promised pensions simply have faith that they will be there when they need them.

Unfortunately, the truth is that pension plans all over the country are severely underfunded, and this has already resulted in local fiascos such as the one that we just witnessed in Dallas.

But what happened in Dallas is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg. According to Bloomberg, unfunded pension obligations on a national basis “have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007″…

As was the case with the subprime crisis, the writing appears to be on the wall. And yet calamity has yet to strike. How so? Call it the triumvirate of conspirators – the actuaries, accountants and their accomplices in office. Throw in the law of big numbers, very big numbers, and you get to a disaster in a seemingly permanent state of making. Unfunded pension obligations have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007.

And of course that $1.9 trillion number is not actually the real number.

That same Bloomberg article goes on to admit that if honest math was being used that the real number would actually be closer to 6 trillion dollars…

So why not just flip the switch and require truth and honesty in public pension math? Too many cities and potentially states would buckle under the weight of more realistic assumed rates of return. By some estimates, unfunded liabilities would triple to upwards of $6 trillion if the prevailing yields on Treasuries were used. That would translate into much steeper funding requirements at a time when budgets are already severely constrained. Pockets of the country would face essential public service budgets being slashed to dangerous levels.

So where are all of these pensions eventually going to come up with 6 trillion dollars?

That is a very good question.

Ultimately, even if financial conditions stay as stable as they are right now, a whole lot of people are not going to get the money that they were promised.

But things will get really “interesting” if we see a major downturn in the financial markets. According to Dave Kranzler, if the stock market were to fall by 10 percent or more and stay there for a number of months, that “would cause every single public pension fund to blow up”. And Kranzler is also deeply concerned about the tremendous amount of exposure that these pension funds have to commercial mortgages…

Circling back to the mall/REIT ticking time-bomb, while the Fed can keep the stock market propped up as means of preventing an immediate nuclear melt-down in U.S. pensions (all of which are substantially “maxed-out” in their mandated equities allocation), the collapse of commercial mortgage-back securities (CMBS) will have the affect of launching a nuclear sub-missile directly into the side of the U.S. financial system.

The commercial mortgage market is about $3 trillion, of which about $1 trillion has been packaged into asset-backed securities and stuffed into yield-starved pension funds. Without a doubt, the same degree of fraud of has been used to concoct the various tranches in these CMBS trusts that was employed during the mid-2000’s mortgage/housing bubble, with full cooperation of the ratings agencies then and now. Just like in 2008, with the derivatives that have been layered into the mix, the embedded leverage in the commercial mortgage/CMBS/REIT model is the financial equivalent of the Fukushima nuclear power plant collapse.

I have previously talked about the ongoing retail apocalypse in the United States which threatens to make so many of these commercial mortgage securities go bad. It is being projected that somewhere around 3,500 stores will close in the months ahead, and this is going to absolutely devastate mall owners. In turn, it is inevitable that a lot of their debts will start to go bad, and pension funds will be hit extremely hard by this.

But the coming stock market crash is going to hit pension funds even harder. Stocks are ridiculously overvalued right now, and if they simply return to “normal valuations”, pension funds are going to lose trillions of dollars.

We are talking about a financial tsunami that will be absolutely unprecedented in our history, and yet investors continue to act like the party can last forever. In fact, we just learned that margin debt on Wall Street has just hit another brand new record high…

The latest data from the New York Stock Exchange show margin debt, or cash borrowed to buy shares, hit a record $528.2 billion in February, up from its prior high of $513.3 billion in January.

Of course my regular readers already know that margin debt also shot up to dramatic peaks just before the last two stock market crashes as well…

Prior periods when margin debt hit records occurred around stock market peaks, including 2000 when the dot-com stock boom went bust, and 2007 when stocks began to crater amid early signs of trouble in the housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis.

Margin debt jumped 22% from the end of 1999 before peaking in March 2000 at $278.5 billion, the same month stocks peaked. In 2007, margin debt shot up to $381.4 billion in July, three months before stocks topped.

We are perfectly primed for the greatest financial disaster in American history, and yet very few people are sounding the alarm.

This massive financial bubble is a ticking time bomb, and when it finally goes off it is going to wipe out virtually every pension fund in the United States. (For more from the author of “The Ticking Time Bomb That Will Wipe out Virtually Every Pension Fund in America” please click HERE)

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Is THIS What Really Happened Regarding Candidate Trump’s ‘Wiretaps’?

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“Stop the presses,” as they used to say in the old days, “for this one!”

Is the letter written by Freedom Watch’s Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman, Esq., real news or fake news? That’s something everyone in the USA ought to be entitled to know the legally correct answer to and, as the familiar colloquialism goes, “where the bodies are hidden,” e.g., the real facts of what happened!

Here is the four-page letter Attorney Klayman wrote to Chairman David Nunes, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the U.S. House of Representatives. Attorney Klayman was so insistent that the Chairman and that Committee received his incriminating letter, he sent it several ways: Facsimile, Federal Express and Mail.

What could be so important about information Klayman was presenting? Remember he’s a licensed attorney, who is subject to legal sanctions for his inappropriate actions, so for him to go out on a limb with the information he presented truly is ‘earth shaking’ not only for him and his career, but also for those involved who are the perpetrators of Klayman’s allegations and apparent proofs.

Since my computer ‘censors’ won’t permit me to copy and paste any part of Klayman’s letter, I refer readers to paragraph 2 on page 1.

Paragraph 1 on page 2 offers some interesting insights:

Regrettably, neither Chairman Nunes nor anyone else on the Committee raised the serious questions I suggested be posed to FBI Director Comey at the hearing on March 20, 2017. In the interests of justice and a full hearing of the important issues before it, these questions must be asked in open session at the subsequent hearing now scheduled for March 28, 2017. Indeed, Chairman Nunes has asked that persons with important and relevant information come forward. That is exactly what whistleblower Dennis Montgomery has done, through me, his undersigned counsel.

In the following paragraphs on page 2, Attorney Klayman goes on to elaborate what whistleblower Montgomery has as documentation: “47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information” Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with which, according to Klayman, “expose that the spy agencies engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, again including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly.”

On page 3, paragraph 2, Attorney Klayman states:

It was there that Montgomery laid out how persons like then businessmen Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration. He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, where illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.

In paragraph 4 on page 3, Attorney Klayman alleges:

It would appear the FBI’s investigation was ‘buried’ by FBI Director Comey, perhaps because the FBI itself collaborates with the spy agencies to conduct illegal surveillance.

And further down in paragraph 7,

My [Klayman’s] expressed purpose: to have Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee ask Comey, under oath, why he and his FBI have seemingly not moved forward with the Montgomery investigation while, on the other hand, the FBI Director recently claimed publicly, I believe falsely, that there is ‘no evidence’ of surveillance on Donald Trump and those around him by the Obama administration. Indeed there is.

Attorney Klayman ends his legally-challenging letter to the Committee and its Chair with this admonition, which is indicative of the swamp that exists within the halls of Congress and Washington, DC, federal agencies:

Do you intend to get at and investigate the full truth, or as has regrettably been the case for many years in government, sweep the truth under the carpet?

Applause, applause, and kudos to Attorney Klayman and whistleblower Montgomery!

Where is the real fake news and media on this one? Why aren’t they knocking on Attorney Klayman’s door for interviews, especially 60 Minutes and the networks nightly news anchors? What’s truly wrong with letting people know the depth and scope of the illegalities government agencies are undertaking upon unassuming citizens in the USA? If this were happening in some foreign country, wouldn’t it be headline news? Maybe not, because this all could be part of the cabal’s New World Order takeover plan so many politicians are clandestinely involved with.

Readers, please do your homework, then demand accountability and transparency from Congress, federal agencies and judges. (For more from the author of “Is THIS What Really Happened Regarding Candidate Trump’s ‘Wiretaps’?” please click HERE)

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It’s Official: The Post-RINOcare War on Conservatives Has Begun

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Seven years of campaign promises to repeal Obamacare were broken when the Republican Party rolled out the American Health Care Act. But somehow, the Freedom Caucus is now taking the brunt of the abuse for the bill’s failure to launch.

Everyone but House leadership seemed to recognize the bill was bad. The chief complaint of conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus was the bill’s failure to repeal mandated essential health benefits – those insurance regulations responsible for increasing premiums and high deductibles. Still, moderates thought the bill went too far and sought to protect Medicaid expansion in their states. Voters across the political spectrum were unhappy, with the AHCA polling at only 17 percent public approval.

When those concerns were brought to the president from the Freedom Caucus, he reportedly told them to “forget about the little shit.” What the president failed to understand was that the “little shit” would break this bill. House Conservatives were on the cusp of supporting the legislation if Speaker Paul Ryan and leadership agreed to repeal the fundamental insurance regulation problems. Moderates in the party balked at that proposition and the Speaker Ryan pulled the bill Friday.

Now the spin has begun. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., declared it was Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who “betrayed” the American people.

The media has latched on to that narrative. The Wall Street Journal lambasted the Freedom Caucus as “the Obamacare Republicans.” Politico published a hit piece over the weekend detailing insider frustrations with the “far-right” members who sunk the bill, insisting that if fulfill seven years of campaign promises.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is running around insisting that the Freedom Caucus just saved Obamacare, and pledging to work with Democrats to overcome conservative opposition to future legislation.

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., is one of the moderates, with a 29 percent Liberty Score©. He is the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and the news that he wouldn’t support the bill opened the floodgates to more moderate defections.

According to one report, Speaker Ryan was pleading on one knee with Rep. Don Young of Alaska for support on the bill. Young, with an “F” Liberty Score©, is hardly one of the conservative “purists” who supposedly defeated this bill. Yet Paul Ryan was begging for his support? If it was the moderates who were pulling out on the GOP health care plan, how is it the conservatives’ fault it all fell apart?

Regardless, on Sunday morning, the president chose a side.

On Friday, President Trump blamed the Democrats for Obamacare’s failures. In the same remarks, he said he would be “totally open” to working with Democrats after Obamacare “explodes.”

Really, the whole of the weekend’s news can be summed up in one succinct Ben Shapiro tweet.

As the Republican Party moves on to tax reform, conservatives should be prepared to be boxed out of negotiations, again. (For more from the author of “3 Questions Ryan Needs to Answer Before Running to the LEFT on RINOcare” please click HERE)

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