Dec 26

United ‘first class’ seats are now mostly reserved for government employees–and higher-level government officials apparently bump lower level government workers to ‘economy’ seating as needed

As private-sector Americans struggle for existence, government officials and workers continue to gain wealth and privilege.

Here is a story published in the London Daily Mail (U.S. ‘mainstream’ news outlets have ignored it) about a school teacher who purchased a first-class seat on a United flight.

The school teacher was told before the flight that her ticket had been canceled, and was given a $500 voucher and a seat in the economy class (where poorer, nongovernment, travelers are seated).

The teacher noticed as she walked past seat 1A (which she had initially purchased) that the seat had been taken by Congresswoman Shiela Jackson Lee, a constant advocate of expansive, intrusive government who masquerades as a champion of the poor.

Dec 26

In socialist Venezuela, food trucks must now be escorted by military guards

Socialism is a curse that should be wished only on a hated enemy. Any society that adopts it will inevitably become sick and weak.

Just 4 decades ago, Venezuela was one of the wealthiest economies in the world. It was 12 times wealthier than China, and by some measures was the 4th richest country on earth. Its people enjoyed the longest life expectancy in South America.

Then the people voted for more government, and trusted government to control and distribute all goods and services in the economy.

Today, life in Venezuela is a daily struggle for survival on the streets, while a wealthy elite controls all resources.

Children work as prostitutes while babies die of hunger and malnutrition. The environment is increasingly devastated and deforested.

As reported by The New York Times, things have gotten so bad there that food transports cannot move without a military escort.

What’s worse, the country’s most vulnerable citizens — it’s children — are starving to death at a much higher rate than the adult population, which is also high:

With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

See here.

Dec 25

Every claim behind “campaign finance reform” is untrue

In 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down a small number of “campaign finance” laws–or at least their application–on First Amendment grounds.

Trusters of government went into hysterics. They claimed the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations are people, and that the Supreme Court had pronounced that money is speech in every instance.

(Of course laws which limit spending on political pamphlets and ads DO infringe on freedom of press, and corporations are–for some purposes–legal persons which can hire, fire, pay taxes, sue, be sued, create books and movies and publish news, websites, ads and information.)

And most of the “corporations” which fund political ads are NONPROFIT ideological groups such as the NRA or the NAACP. (and their influence on election outcomes can always be debated.)

Chief among the “campaign finance reform” advocates has been the New York Times, a FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION which buys its ink by the 55-gallon drum. The Times has been a consistent cheerleader for government expansion and intrusion into every aspect of human life.

And this year the Times actually came out openly as something of a pro-government Super Pac (but which is not subject to the campaign finance laws the Times promotes).

The Times’ editorial board changed the bio on the opinion section’s Twitter account to inform the public that it was “temporarily taking over” the feed to lobby against the Senate GOP tax bill. The board then proceeded to tweet out the phone numbers of various Republican senators and implored the public to deluge their offices with phone calls, “to urge the Senate to reject a tax bill that hurts the middle class & the nation’s fiscal health.”

See here.

Dec 25

Veterans Administration violates medical regulations

Regulation kills. For decades, government policymakers at state, local and federal levels have piled regulations onto the medical industry. Combined with government subsidies, these policies have sent health care costs spiraling upward faster than inflation every year for decades.

Recently the USA Today reported that even government “health care” operations such as the Veterans Administration have had to violate regulations in order to function. The VA has been hiring doctors with revoked medical licenses for years.

(Of course, the licensing laws have been imposed because lobby groups such as the American Medical Association (AMA) deliberately seek to enrich themselves by limiting the market of medical professionals.)

VA officials may have cut corners to address widespread failures to treat veterans, which were publicized throughout 2014 and 2015.

The VA Inspector General admits that hundreds of thousands of veterans may have died as a result of VA wait lists. In Los Angeles, nearly 100 veterans died waiting for health care between October 2014 and August 2015. There’s also another report that links veteran suicides to neglect.

Dec 25

Government scientists rage at slight Trump budget cuts

Study after study shows that when government pays for science, that “science” tends to be very expensive, very inefficient, and biased in favor of government. This can be seen in numerous fields including welfare policy, education, health care and climate science.

Dr. Roger Roots, the founder of Lysander Spooner University, documented the inefficiency of government-funded “science” in an insightful 2013 study.

Dr.Terence Kealey found that government funding of science results in very few important discoveries. He published his findings in The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (1996).

On December 22, the Washington Post published the headline “Government scientists blocked from the biggest meeting in their field.”

The story went on to detail that the Trump Administration recently capped government attendance at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest gathering of Earth, space and climate scientists in the world.

Last year some 450 government scientists from the Interior Department attended and read their research papers at the conference. This year, the Trump Administration decreed that

no more than 199 employees across the department could travel to the meeting, and expenditures could not exceed $399,000.

Dec 21

Thousands flee socialist Illinois

The State of Illinois has increased taxes, fees and regulations on its long-suffering subjects for years.

Now Illinoians are some of the most heavily-taxed people in the world. Their socialist overlords have so bankrupted the State that businesses and workers are fleeing.

Now Illinois has been passed by Pennsylvania as the 5th most populous state. See here.

Dec 21

U.S. life expectancy declines for second year in a row as government takes larger role in “health care”

Where societies are free, life expectancy grows steadily. Abundance, nutrition and technological advancement drive humans to ever-higher standards of health and wellbeing.

But since 1965, the U.S. government has taken an ever-larger role in “health care” and welfare. Now the medical market is more than half socialist. Government slave-plantation health care operations have driven medical costs steadily upward, and faster than the rate of inflation every year for decades.

Consequently, U.S. life expectancy is declining. Last year was the second year in a row in which life expectancy declined.

NBC “news”–which has been secretly supported by millions of dollars from the federal government for years–blames the trend on “epidemic drug overdoses.”

Dec 20

Remember all those emails to the FCC just prior to the FCC’s anti-‘net neutrality’ vote? They were mostly fraudulent.

Remember last week in the run-up to the FCC’s vote to overturn the prior FCC’s “net neutrality” takeover of the internet (from 2 years ago)?

“Mainstream” (meaning government-approved–and approving) media news reported that the public supported the 2015 government takeover of the internet and opposed the current FCC’s vote to overturn the prior FCC’s vote.

(In the 2 years since the prior FCC’s “net neutrality” takeover, internet innovation investments had already declined by more than 5%.)

Now we find out that the supposedly massive “public” disapproval of the current FCC’s ‘overturn’ vote was A FRAUD. See here.

Hundreds of thousands of comments were submitted to the FCC in spikes during the public comment period about its proposal to eliminate the 2015 “net neutrality” order; and, upon further investigation, were found to have been written not by humans, but by artificial intelligence programs using “natural language generators.” Wired.com reports that “over a third of the nearly 22 million comments that poured into the [FCC] . . . included one of seven identical messages,” and “more than half were associated with duplicate or temporary emails.” Additionally, the New York Attorney General is also investigating reports that as many as two-million fraudulent submissions used the names and addresses of real people, both living and dead, from multiple states in a scheme to sway the FCC’s vote.

The fraudulent emails appear to have been on BOTH sides of the issue!

Dec 19

Venezuelan children dying of starvation on a massive scale; government prohibits humanitarian aid from ‘capitalist’ countries

Just 25 years ago, Venezuelans were the healthiest and wealthiest people in Latin America.

Today, after numerous victorious elections by socialist politicians, the people eat out of trash cans, die in knife fights in food lines, and resort to prostitution to survive.

They rape the environment, killing birds, dogs, cats and anything that breathes or moves.

Even doctors teachers, and small children engage in prostitution for food. And thousands of children are dying of starvation and malnutrition. See here.

Meanwhile, the government has ordered a near-total blackout regarding health statistics. The country’s government health care system is reported to function at a “19th century” level.

And when people from ‘capitalist’ countries try to send humanitarian aid, the Venezuelan government intercepts it and turns it away. Accepting it would ‘send the wrong message.’ See here.

Dec 18

Under “campaign finance” laws, Wisconsin became a political surveillance state

Forget the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare or the McCarthy Hearings.

The greatest threat to freedom of speech and press in American history is the scam known as “campaign finance reform.”

Government tyrants and despots have a thousand ways to influence elections to promote more powerful government. They secretly (and sometimes openly, through “public service announcements”) fund the news. They get to stage free press releases and conferences while their opponents must pay for ads to compete with them.

But government officials and their worshippers seek to limit (private sector) money in politics–especially money which pays for political ads which promote freedom, free-enterprise, smaller government or deregulation.

In Wisconsin, the entrenched pro-government forces became so concerned in 2012 that Republican governor Scott Walker’s recall election efforts may have been supported by the evil Koch Brothers that they staged midnight raids and seized millions of pages of emails and other documents. They steadily leaked stories about investigations of government-critical politicians to the press but prohibited the same politicians from publicly defending themselves.

[In 2013 there were] paramilitary-style, pre-dawn raids on the homes of unsuspecting private citizens. With floodlights trained on the targets’ homes, armed officers threatened to beat doors down with battering rams; rifled through rooms; and seized phones, computers, and bank records without allowing the subjects to contact their attorneys. Groggy families awakened to the sound of police boots running through their homes were told that they could not tell anyone what had happened.

Their crime? Supporting conservative causes in Wisconsin.

Years of personal, intimate emails and messages of Wisconsinites who oppose all-powerful government have apparently been gathered and kept by Wisconsin’s “campaign finance” authorities.

See here.