Category: insider corruption

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insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

The Trillion-Dollar Mark?

ELON MUSK, DOGE

According to Fox News, Elon Musk “met with a small group of House Republicans on Wednesday evening to discuss the quest to find as much as $1 trillion in government waste.”

That would indeed be significant. 

But until then, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” popularly called DOGE, continues to find insane wasteful spending in the “mere” millions.

Consider the Small Business Administration, which “administers” loans to . . . well . . . “DOGE said it identified that the Small Business Administration (SBA) granted nearly 5,600 loans for $312 million to borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the loan,” reports Fox. 

Loans made in the pit of despair that was the COVID pandemic.

Children have no business taking out SBA loans — the obvious quip would be about “lemonade stands” — but Musk suggests there could be reasons for the practice, just not in the 5,593 cases DOGE specifies, because the wrong Social Security numbers were used in those applications.

But let no one say the federal government is not balanced, for “in 2020 and 2021 the SBA issued 3,095 loans for $333 million to borrowers over 115 years old.”

And speaking of the ancient, Bernie Sanders wrote to Newsweek to give the socialist view of the subject: “The person who is running the government right now is Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has taken it upon himself, with the support of President Trump, to virtually dismantle the United States government.”

Don’t get our hopes up, Senator.

Unlike Harry Enten at CNN, I’m not at all shocked to learn that DOGE has majority support in America at present. “I was truly surprised by this,” said Enten last Thursday, “but the numbers are the numbers.”

After all, it’s only common sense to seek to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Isn’t it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption regulation too much government

Killing a Bureau

consumer protection, bureaucrats, paperwork, regulations, freedom

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?

The mission itself is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts.

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState hopes the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it: as critics have long argued. Why does this agency exist except to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise? One of many federal agencies that should expire. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on the CFPB:

Give Them Credit — February 2, 2014
Invulnerable Government — November 28, 2017
Peel Back the Onion — November 30, 2017
Protector Protection — January 6, 2020

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government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

The Biden Is No More

Joe Biden, stumble, exit

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., went out as he came in, plagiarizing.

Well, in style anyway, his bizarre farewell address striking ultra-familiar themes. 

“Most Biden speeches are acknowledged (Lincoln, Obama) or unacknowledged (Neil Kinnock, John Kennedy) homages to other politicians,” explains Matt Taibbi. “This last Biden attempt at an Eisenhower impersonation offers an anti-insight. We’re warned about an ‘oligarchy,’ which Webster’s defines as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.’” 

And here the intelligent reader is already ahead of the author. 

“He tries to tag disobedient billionaires like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg (as opposed to Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Steven Schwartzman, etc.) as this new oligarchy, but there’s one closer to home, which Biden referenced later in the speech: ‘In the years ahead . . . it is going to be up to the president, the presidency, the congress, the courts, the free press and the American people . . . I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. . . . Now it’s your turn to stand guard.’

“Biden’s possibly ad-libbed distinction between ‘president’ and ‘presidency’ was the most inspired line of his career,” Taibbi quips.

And eerily defining . . . of Biden’s stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . . and various vacation hot spots.*

Taibbi contrasts the man — “stumbling, tumbling” — with the machinery of the office — run by a mostly-unseen cabal Taibbi defines with reference to H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Invisible Man.

Other sci-fi metaphors come to mind. In his penultimate paragraph, Taibbi mentions Frankenstein filmmaker James Whale, and then in his last line Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. But didn’t Philip K. Dick provide a hundred examples of fake personae as presidents and tyrants? 

Except that the Biden Administration, whatever it might have been, was limited in its power because it lacked legitimacy from half the population — and was as cognitively challenged as Biden himself.

Yesterday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Meet the Press that our sleepy commander-in-chief had been manipulated by his staff into signing key executive orders under false pretenses. And running interference for this Democratic Party “presidency” were Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).

Thank goodness, the Age of “The Biden” is over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Biden spent 40 percent of his term in office “on vacation.”

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Oligarchy Malarkey

Joe Biden, farewell speech, covid, oligarchs

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape, in America, of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” President Biden warned the nation Wednesday night. 

“We see the consequences all across America.”

Yes, we do, but what specific consequence brought on the president’s sudden awareness of the “O” word: The Democrats’ political defeat? His own? Harris’s?

Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was a swell fellow back in 2020, when he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, tossed in $400 million to goose Democratic Party turnout. But when the Meta CEO admitted that Facebook was bullied by the Biden administration into censoring content, he becomes a terrible oligarch.      

As for “extreme wealth,” Democrats outspent Republicans. By a lot.

Biden compared his swan song to President Eisenhower’s famous 1960 farewell address, in which World War II’s Supreme Allied Commander sounded the alarm about a military-industrial complex with dangerous levels of power. Says Biden: “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

“Potential”? “Could”? 

I guess he means that, say, some day Big Tech might censor discussion of information about a candidate’s drug-addicted, gun-toting son’s international influence-peddling operationjust weeks before an election. 

Or perhaps squelch news on the origin of a pandemic killing millions. 

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” argued the president.

He’s got a point. Look at the elaborate ruse run by Democrats at the White House, in Congress, at the DNC, in the media, pretending for those of us in TV Land that our commander-in-chief, the most powerful man in the world, was fully competent to execute the duties of the office even while knowing he most certainly was not. 

Joe Biden is a charter member of the “oligarchy” about which I’m most concerned. 

This is Common Sense. 

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government transparency insider corruption scandal

Managing the President: 2021–2024

Joe Biden, deep state, lizard people

Yesterday, we considered the farce of Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.), serving out her term from an assisted living home — suffering, her family says, from “dementia issues.”

So, today, let’s discuss the donkey in the room: the president of these United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. 

“Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public,” explains a major exposé in the Wall Street Journal.

How “throughout”? Almost from day one: “a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on,” notes The Journal, “in just the first few months of his term.”

The reportage confirms what we suspected. “The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”

This structure also served to cover for Biden’s most characteristic failing, “foot-in-mouth”: his hand-holders sought “to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.”

Not a morning person, the staff concocted an elaborate schedule of afternoon meetings which they tried to keep very short. “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether.”

Perhaps most importantly, “[t]he strategies to protect Biden largely worked,” the report reminds, “until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump.”

Luckily, the Washington cabal has not quite figured out a way to have a president as figure-head only and keep the deception from the American electorate. 

But too close for comfort.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption

The Pardon We All Saw Coming

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, pardon, Ukraine, China, corruption

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Back in June, after his son was found guilty on gun charges, President Biden said: “I will not pardon him.”

Now he’s saying “I believe in the justice system, but . . .”

Let’s remember the Conspiracy Theory floating around before the election.

Various cynical people, cynics I call them, declared that despite Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son, he was only waiting for the election. After the election, when the action could no longer hurt him or any Biden-substitute candidate, he would then pardon his son.

And so it has come to pass— as of last night.

I guess if you can’t get Al Capone on anything else, you get him on tax evasion. But I don’t care that much about the gun charges or the tax charges against Hunter Biden. I care about the corruption.

I care about the many millions of dollars funneled into the Biden family and the Big Guy, Joe Biden, in consequence of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling deal-making with firms in Ukraine, Romania, and China. Millions that fell into his lap over the years only because of who his dad is. And what daddy could do — as in fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Biden family corruption.

Riding high, Hunter Biden felt he could get away with anything, including massive tax evasion.

The son can, I take it, no longer be imprisoned for any of the law-breaking we know about. Or even suspect.So maybe, thus unencumbered, Hunter can now take the stand about his father’s role in all the graft and bribery. 

Interestingly, Hunter’s pardon removes his ability to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Because he can’t be incriminated, i.e. criminalized, he can be compelled to testify. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption scandal

Disaster Relief Pass-Over

FEMA, Trump, Homeland Security, disaster, Hurricane Milton

It’s the kind of scandal that makes you wonder, briefly, whether somebody made it up.

But nobody made it up. 

In the wake of Hurricane Milton, a sub-boss of the Federal Emergency Management Agency named Marn’i Washington told FEMA workers who had the job of assessing storm damage in Lake Placid, Florida, to skip any houses with Trump signs.

A Microsoft Teams memo outlining “best practices” for performing the work included injunctions like “not one goes anywhere alone” and “avoid homes advertising Trump.” No one can peruse the latter instruction and not know the kind of animus informing Washington’s memo.

Thanks to whistleblowers distressed by these orders, which were delivered both in writing and verbally, the Daily Wire obtained the revealing internal communications.

At least twenty Trump-advertising homes were passed over by FEMA workers who complied with the memo.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others have announced investigations of the incident.

Regarding what went down in this one Florida town, at least, there is currently no cover-up by FEMA. We don’t know whether similar orders were given to damage assessors in other hurricane-hit regions. But had there been, let’s hope that somebody would have spoken up.

A FEMA spokesman admitted that the agency is “deeply disturbed” by Washington’s actions. According to a Daily Wire update, the agency has now fired her.

“This employee has been terminated and we have referred the matter to the Office of Special Counsel,” says FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell.

This is how to handle partisanship in federal bureaucracies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Hillary Disinformation Hunt

Hillary Clinton, disinformation, censorship, mind control, thought control

Have you heard? It’s open season on disinformation.

Disinformation spewed by Hillary Clinton, that is.

Mrs. Clinton has escaped jail time for all her previous crimes, whether committed singly or in partnership with her husband. But now we are going to have a brand-new crime to charge her with. And boy, is she a serial offender!!!!!!

The irony is, we would not even be able to charge anybody with this new category of crime — if indeed we’ll be able to; there’s still some controversy about it — but for the contempt of Hillary Clinton and politicians like her for the First Amendment rights that a large minority of Americans hold so dear.

Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC: “I think it’s important to indict the Russians . . . who were engaged in direct election interference. . . . But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrent.”

Yes, Hillary Clinton “got away with” everything else. But can she get away with all her lies and, let’s face it, downright disinformation, certainly heavily disseminated by her around election times? 

Heck, even if the new category of criminal offense won’t be applicable retroactively, thus giving her a free pass for the last umpteen years, are we in any danger of running out of actionable Hillary disinformation going forward? Does a leopard change its spots?

Maybe she’s counting on selective enforcement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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incumbents insider corruption

Involuntary Campaign Contributions

campaign, funding, politicians, elections, democracy, Labyrinth, advertising, propaganda

Incumbent lawmakers should not be looting taxpayer dollars to fund their election campaigns.

Investigative reporter Lee Fang has learned that incumbents of both major parties are ignoring ethics rules in order “to use government money for ads clearly designed to influence voters.” 

Back in the 1990s, I was shocked to discover that the average incumbent congressperson spent more using the franking privilege, government funding of “official” newsletters to constituents, than the average challenger spent in his or her entire campaign. In this video age, they’ve upgraded their bragging to living color.

Here is a bipartisan couple from the many examples Fang discovered:

Democrat: A taxpayer-funded ad aired by the campaign of New York Representative Tom Suozzi, talks about how “Tom worked across party lines to convince the president” to do something about the border.

Republican: A taxpayer-funded ad aired by the campaign of Virginia Representative Jen Kiggans, in which she boasts about her track record on issues pertaining to veterans and the military.

Fang has identified at least nine other culprits and put together a YouTube video compiling some of these taxpayer-funded ads. Everyone sees these as campaign spots — or “campaign-style ads,” as Fang also puts it.

The ads even say (for example, in Wesley Hunt’s video) that they were “paid for with official funds” from the office of the congressman or with “official funds authorized by the House of Representatives.”

These “official funds” are not voluntary campaign contributions.

Congressmen, you’ve been caught. 

So stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access election law insider corruption partisanship

Degrading Democracy, CNN-Style

watchdog, guard dog, media, press, newspapers

Everyone’s talking about last month’s CNN debate. We can’t unsee President Biden’s performance.

But something else did go unseen: candidates independent of the two dominant parties — specifically, RFK, Jr.

“CNN RULES WOULD HAVE BARRED EVERY INDEPENDENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR LAST 112 YEARS,” read this month’s Ballot Access News (BAN) cover story.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Self-deputized to supposedly defend “democracy,” CNN sponsored the recent presidential debate using criteria pointedly designed to shut out independent voices — even those polling double digits.

The main culprit was their mandate that “the candidate must [be] certified for the ballot in states with at least 270 electoral votes, by June 20.”

That doesn’t make any sense given the calendar for ballot qualification. As BAN relates, “The rule about being on the ballot was probably written by individuals who had no knowledge of the typical time-line for presidential candidates running as independents, or nominees of new parties.”

Plus, “the rule” was applied with a double standard — one for Republicans and Democrats and another for other parties and independents.

“They require certainty for the independent candidate to show ballot placement,” notes BAN, “but they only require probability for the Democratic and Republican invitees.”

Once upon a time major news outlets were seen as playing a vital watchdog role, as referees, politically. Today, CNN and its ilk require their own umpires, a whole new set of watchdogs.

We are it — all of us on X, Facebook, podcasts and the blogosphere — we are those watchdogs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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