Trees Have Rights

“I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest against the sweet earth's flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, and lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in summer wear a nest of robins in her hair; upon whose bosom snow has lain; who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” — Joyce Kilmer - 1886–1918

As a fledgling surveyor in Cleveland, Ohio I had the experience of hearing Kilmer’s poem for the first time. I was surveying a tract of land and in order to set the rear property corner I had to cut a few overhanging branches that were blocking the line of sight with our transit along the property line.

Upon completion of our survey I returned to the office and found my boss waiting at the door with folded arms and a scowl on his face. When he beckoned me into his office I knew I was in trouble. He had received a call from the neighbor adjacent to the property we had surveyed complaining that we had cut her trees without her permission.

The neighbor was quite emotional and had recited Kilmer’s poem to my boss over the phone along with demanding compensation for the pain and anguish we had caused her in trimming a few branches. Legally speaking he neighbor was not on sound legal ground as her branches were encroaching on our client’s property. To placate our client and the neighbor my boss offered her several hundred dollars as compensation, which she refused after she cooled off. As punishment my boss required me to learn Kilmer’s poem and recite it to him a few days later.

Several weeks ago I had a tree in our side yard that was leaning onto our roof and its roots were endangering my neighbor’s concrete walkway. The tree, an Australian bottle tree, had grown to height of 20 feet in the seven years since it had been planted and was quite beautiful. However, this beautiful tree was now endangering my house and he neighbor’s property. Its roots had become weakened due to over watering and it had to be removed before a high wind blew it over.

I retained the services of a tree trimming expert who removed the tree and planted a small orange tree in its place. It was very sad to see this wonderful tree being cut to pieces — a tree that had been with us since the house was new.

At the time I had the tree removed I was unaware that this Australian bottle tree had civil rights and should have consulted Pachamama to obtain their permission to remove the tree.

You see Van Jones, the Obama administration's controversial former "green jobs czar," and communist organizer has found a new calling: helping to push for a new, global architecture of environmental law that would give Mother Nature the same rights status as humans.

The new movement is almost certain to be showcased at a U.N.-sponsored global summit on “sustainable development” to take place in Rio de Janeiro in May 2012, when similar issues of “global environmental governance” are a major focus of attention.

Jones is taking up the challenge as one of the newest board members of an obscure San Francisco New Age-style organization known as the Pachamama Alliance, which has been creating a global movement to make human rights for Mother Nature an international reality — complete with enforceable laws — by 2014. The Rio summit will create an important midpoint for that campaign.

Jones joined the alliance's board last December, shortly after the organization announced creation of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature to carry the concept around the world—and install it not only in international law but in the statutes of communities and municipalities across the U.S.

He resigned from the administration in September 2009 after making public apologies for some of his past actions, including the signing of a 2004 petition that questioned whether the Bush administration had deliberately allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to happen, and his previous affiliation with a self-described communist organization, the Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM).

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature “is working to build a movement of millions of educated and inspired individuals, with thousands of successful cases of enforceable Rights of Nature legislation having been enacted at local and national levels, by the end of 2014,” according to the Pachamama website.

he group also is running a parallel media campaign, called "Four Years. Go.," to build enthusiasm for the same rapid environmental change, using “personal communication, social media and a rich web presence to inspire a movement of people who recognize the urgency, and the opportunity, of this time and stand for using the next four years, through 2014, to literally change the course of history.”

Organizing and advocating just such a radical “green” restructuring of the U.S. economy is the skill set that brought Jones to the Obama White House staff as a “green jobs czar” in the first place.

Jones has continued to advocate those ideas since leaving the administration, as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with financier George Soros, and at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center for International Affairs.

Now, his green community organizing skills apparently are going global, along with the Pachamama Alliance’s rights-for-nature campaign. Telephone calls and emails to Jones, his assistant and the institutions where he now works as a fellow, as well as to the San Francisco offices of the Pachamama Alliance, had not been returned before this article was published.

The movement that Jones has joined shares its goals with some of the more radical governments represented at the United Nations, notably Ecuador and Bolivia, both nations with substantial territories in the Amazon Basin, and both with close ties to the socialist government of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Bolivia last week sponsored an “interactive dialogue” on “Harmony With Nature” at the United Nations that included promotion of the same notion of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for Mother Nature. By no coincidence, the U.N. debate was scheduled immediately prior to this year’s April 22 Earth Day celebrations—renamed “Mother Earth Day,” at the United Nations. This year, the global celebrations also start an unofficial countdown to the U.N.-sponsored global summit in Rio de Janeiro next year.

The summit, known in U.N. shorthand as Rio + 20, is intended as a 20th anniversary successor to the famous Earth Summit of 1992, which gave enormous stimulus and legitimacy to the global environmental movement. This time, its aim is to produce new efforts at “global environmental governance,” meaning a strengthened international regulatory framework for environmental issues, and to provide new momentum for a global “green economy.”

Next year’s summit may also offer the “Rights of Nature” movement a chance to unveil at least a draft version of such a universal declaration, a prospect welcomed by the Bolivian sponsors of the April 20 debate at the U.N.

“Rio + 20 is a good opportunity to have that step forward,” said Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “It would be like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Salon sees such a declaration as the kickoff to a longer-term campaign to create legislative reinforcing the new Nature rights, and he noted in an interview with Fox News that the Bolivian government asserts it is the first country to give the rights of nature equal status with human rights in its legal system. Bolivian President Evo Morales has frequently said that “the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism.”

Salon also told Fox News that his country is working with an offshoot of the Pachamama Alliance, known as the Pachamama Foundation, on its nature rights campaign, but emphasized that the Pachamama group is “one of many networks” Bolivia is working with on the issue.

Among other things, the Pachamama Alliance claims that through the Pachamama Foundation—a “sister organization” it created in 1997 among native peoples of the Amazon Basin -- it was instrumental in helping to install the same “fundamental rights for nature” it espouses into the constitution of Ecuador in 2008.

The constitution includes such provisos as “Nature has the right to be completely restored,” and it mandates the government ban “introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic heritage,” among other things.

On its website, the Pachamama Alliance says that its co-founder and current CEO, Bill Twist, continues to “guide the work in Ecuador” through the the Pachamama Foundation. On its own Spanish language website, the foundation, which is ostensibly an organization of indigenous peoples in one of the most under-populated areas of the Amazon, says it is the alliance’s “national counterpart.”

The foundation says its main purpose is to “promote an alternative and innovative model of development, based in good living and with an emphasis on recognition and respect for human rights and the rights of Nature.” It is promoting an alternate monetary system for use among native peoples in the Amazonian region.

Also, according to a recent posting by the Pachamama Alliance, the Ecuadorian foundation has forged a strong relationship with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty arm, as an official monitor of UNDP investment in the Amazon region.

The website says that its foundation oversees eight development projects financed by UNDP’s Small Donations Program. The projects are “aimed at improving social-environmental problems through community ecotourism, organic cacao production – capacity and awareness building,” among other things.

The foundation, in other words, is well positioned to become a poster-child in the walk-up to next year’s Rio environmental summit—in the new movement for a radical regime of global environmental law that Van Jones has agreed to help organize.

I recall one of Tom Clancy’s novels “Rainbow Six.” The 2004 novel is not only about an international counterterrorist unit, but a group of environmental extremists who are plotting to reverse centuries of man-made damage to the Earth's biosphere by committing the most horrible act of mass murder in history.

Clancy's novel paints a troubling picture of what happens when a noble idea (such as promoting global conservation) is twisted and perverted by charismatic and cold-blooded individuals.

This is just another attempt for the progressives and communists to destroy our capitalistic system and impose its tyranny. Several days ago I posted a blog addressing this point. For years the “greens” have slowly been taking control of our political dialog with their environmental movements. When they discovered that their “social Justice” campaign was not enough they turned to the “environmental justice” movement to bring down our freedom and capitalistic system. They are nothing but watermelons using the green agenda to gain power.

The Politics of Envy

"Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)” — Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, Rule no. 3.

One of the ways Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky suggested to “increase insecurity and anxiety” was to use the politics of envy. This is in total contradiction of the tenth commandment of God and the bible: “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.”

Lloyd Brown writes in American Thinker; “During the next 18 months, we can look for liberals to pull out all the stops on their hate campaign. The target is "the rich." To generate hate, liberals will use an old device: envy.”

“Those who have not been as successful will be urged to hate the people who have worked hard to get an education, get a job, and master the job skills that get them promotion and raises. They have saved their earnings and provided for their retirement.”

“It will be difficult to hate them individually, because they are not the same people from year to year. More than half of those in the "rich" category are not there the following year.”

“Nevertheless, liberals will portray their hard earned wealth as ill-gotten gains, taken from some mysterious pile of wealth that in a world where "economic justice" reigned would be divided equally among all Americans.” Barack Obama expressed this to Joe the Plumber as "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." This is the basic philosophy behind communism.

“They will say there are no jobs only because the wealthy don't want to create jobs. (Sheep who follow this line will not ask, "Why wouldn't businessmen want to make profits?" The shepherds count on that lack of critical thinking, which has been drilled subliminally into the sheep in government schools.)”

“With government debt at record levels and climbing, the nation's credit being downgraded and the economy still moribund, liberals insist everything is fine.”

“Obama ignores the recommendations of his own commission, and trashes the conservative plan put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan to trim $6 trillion in government spending.”

“Liberals are holding rallies around the country at which obscenities are shouted, insults are thrown about, and property is destroyed. The lapdog media ignore them and allege misconduct at Tea Party rallies, without being able to document any.”

“This is a must-win presidential election for liberals. Only a lame-duck liberal president can do the kind of things they want to do in the next four years. The hatred will be palpable.”

The genius of the Constitution is not some person, time, or place. It is a very improbable conjunction of all three. Jefferson and Madison were not the only ones to fear the abuse of power. That idea goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Every family with an alcoholic father or a tyrannical grandmother knows it. In England John Locke and Edmund Burke feared tyranny as much as the American founders, but they never had a chance to build the foundations of a new, independent, great power.

Obama is our first Marxist-Leninist president. He never quite uses those words, but in words and deeds he makes it clear beyond doubt. His two autobiographies all but say it.

“ I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. ... The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists ... we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” (from Dreams of my Father)

The Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation has also published a careful summary of the public record that leaves no doubt about whom Obama really is. “To understand Barack Obama we had better learn about Saul Alinsky .The founder of the radical socialist Gamaliel Foundation that Obama once worked for, Alinsky was a political organizer in Chicago who developed leftist strategies for bringing about social change through protests and the seizing of political power.

With a strong reliance on Machiavelli’s The Prince, Alinsky stressed that power, not political influence, was the main goal of the community organizer. To him truth was relative and in a perpetual state of flux. In his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, which he dedicated to Lucifer, the world’s first radical, Alinsky urged his followers to cut their hair and put on suits to avoid scaring the middle class. He believed all effective action requires the passport of morality. This was one of the first lessons Barack Obama learned from his mentor as a 21-year old.

Alinsky’s greatest legacy for Obama’s political future was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,(ACORN) a left-wing group that is the nation’s largest community organization of low and moderate-income families. Obama cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a community organizer and later as their attorney. Thousands of ACORN volunteers have worked on his campaigns, while he has served on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which generously poured money into ACORN’s coffers. Court documents reveal internal discussions among the group that blur the lines between its tax-exempt housing work and its aggressive electioneering activities nationwide.

Obama wrapped himself in his own lifelong cult. Universities are supposed to be places of open debate and open minds, but Obama knew his own life course from childhood on, and never opened up to anything else.

Marxism-Leninism grew out of Europe's totalitarian and imperialistic tradition. It has nothing but contempt for electoral "bourgeois" government. In the free atmosphere of American life, Marxist campus cults are like little cysts that grow in isolation from the real world. Some of them grow bigger and bigger and finally explode into a billion cancer cells, to enter the bloodstream of American life.

No great power in Europe or Asia has ever managed to keep an American-style constitutional balance for long. After Napoleon, France kept trying different Republics, until de Gaulle created its current constitution, which is now being supplanted by the EU. Britain doesn't have a written constitution, but rather a vaguely defined cloud of principles that is now crumbling under the assault of Political Correctness. Canada was a British colony until 1931, and is turning into a PC corruptocracy like Europe. Latin America inherited a hidalgo style of politics from Spain, arrogant and contemptuous of peasants and merchants. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are just hidalgos of the left, with Fidel inflicting mandatory six-hour television lectures on his suffering people over half a century. That's what hidalgos do; no American president could get away with it, and when Obama tried one long speech after another, people just turned off their TVs. Obama must have been stunned that people were not listening to him like the Cubans were listening to Fidel. What's wrong with these people anyway?

As for classical Athens, often called the source of Western democracy, Plato and Aristotle were slave-holding aristocrats in a time of endless war, treachery, imperial conquest, mob rule, hedonistic excess, genocide, and tyranny. Plato's Republic argues for a hereditary aristocracy as the golden mean between one-man tyranny and mob rule, because Plato saw so many political horrors.

In Europe and Asia, new power classes just kept taking over, century after century. Europe gave birth to the political ideals of the Enlightenment, but was never able to put them into practice. Today's European Union is another gigantic front for the unelected political elite.

Europe's suicidal weakness today is its cowardice in the face of radical Islam, and the prosecution of heroic Resistance fighters like Geert Wilders, just for saying what millions of Europeans are thinking. In 1938 Churchill was despised by the political elites, but he was never prosecuted for sounding the alarm about Hitler. In the Libyan mess it looked like Europe might finally be growing up. So far it's getting a D-, mostly for trying hard.

Soon after the American Revolution of 1776, history conducted one of its rare experiments as the French Revolution broke out and quickly fell into bloody anarchy. A decade later Napoleon turned Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité into another egomaniacal empire. That's what Mao Zedong did after the Chinese civil war, Lenin after the Romanoffs, Hitler after the Weimar Republic. Most countries just keep flipping between tyranny and civil war. The Arabs are doing it right in front of our eyes today.

What's new in history is 200 years of peace and stability across 3,000 miles of territory, with only one great breakdown, the American Civil War. Protected by two great oceans and a constitutional balance of powers, millions of people born in the Old World were able to thrive in freedom — not perfect freedom, which does not exist, but far greater liberty than other major countries.

Obama is our first Napoleonic president whose beliefs are far outside our political tradition. After George Washington was elected, nobody knew how a constitutional president would behave. There was real fear that America had just traded one King George for another. When Washington went home after two terms, there was a palpable sigh of relief and celebration. In the last two and a half centuries only FDR has clung to office more than two terms, and that led to the 22nd Amendment. Washington set the precedent.

Obama acts like a Third World socialist, like his Kenyan father, and his thinking is stunningly rigid. He seems to be woefully ignorant about basic economics, science, and technology, international affairs, and the conventions of American politics. Either that or he is acting that way as part of his peculiar character disorder. Deliberately violating norms is a way to show contempt for the middle class (Bourgeoisie). It's the bourgeois values that Karl Marx hated so much. In psychiatry, deliberate lifelong violations of accepted rules are a sign of "oppositional-defiant personality," closely allied with grandiose narcissism. That describes Obama's lifelong character. Just at look at the manner in which he speaks and holds his head in Mussolini fashion.

But let's not exaggerate Obama's danger. Politicians come and go. Obama calls Republicans "extremists," "radicals," and "unpatriotic." He's trying to flip the political world upside-down, but the American people know who is really "radical," "extremist," and "unpatriotic." It's not hard to tell. The left is unpatriotic by definition: They simply refuse to believe in "patria," the land of one's fathers and mothers. They are radical transnationalists who pin their faith in some imaginary worldwide command center (like the UN) that will finally solve all human conflict. It will be run by Obama and his kind, of course. This idea is so ancient that it goes back six millennia to Sumer and the Yellow Emperor.

Other politicians in the last 200 years have tried end-runs around the Constitution. The Dixiecrat South was a one-party machine that clung to power for half a century after Reconstruction. Al Capone's Chicago was a one-party machine, backed by threats and violence. Michelle Obama, nee Robinson, is the daughter of a ward heeler on Southside Chicago. When she told the world that she "had never felt proud of her country," she was just echoing the everyday prattle of her cult. Jesse Jackson is a family friend, and Louis Farrakhan is a big political power in Chicago. They are above criticism, because that's how machine politics works. They all practice the politics of envy.

Every single imperial ideology in the last two centuries has come from Europe, from Napoleon to Stalin. Obama is not a Jeffersonian democrat. He does not understand or value the European Enlightenment; his roots are in the class war of the 19th century, which has now turned into war of all against all: Women against the men, poor against the rich, blacks against whites, gays against straights. Our media constantly whip up such hatreds, and children learn them in the schools. We have not been able to mount a coherent defense against the leftist divide-and-conquer strategy.

Europe has extreme difficulty with a self-balancing power mechanism like the US Constitution, with the three branches constantly tilting against each other; the States and localities against the Feds; and press monopolies, like today's liberal media, being constantly challenged by new technologies.

Constitutional government is under sustained and vicious assault by the internationalist left. Just read the headlines. It's not a coincidence.

Obama believes in internationalism, with grandiose egos like his own ruling the world. That's what the left is all about, and has been since Karl. Marx is not "progressive" but "retrogressive," because grandiose empires started six millennia ago in the great river valleys of the Old World, where city states amassed the power and ideological beliefs to conquer their neighbors. Obama would be at home in Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Alexander's Greek Empire, Rome, the Inca and Maya empires, Russia, Austro-Hungary, the Soviet Union. They are all pyramid-building empires made up of "soviets" – councils — commanded from the top.

The European Union is not an American-style delicately counter-balanced construction, designed to give the people the last word. No, the EU is just another imperial pyramid, and it is systematically disempowering the peoples of Europe.

Americans are the luckiest people in the world, not only because of our material fortune, nor even because of our fundamental decency and good will. We are the luckiest because we can afford to be as dumb as a brick, fail to educate our children, remain blissfully ignorant of the dangers that have killed hundreds of millions of people in the last 50 years, indulge in all the newest drugs, the biggest quantities of alcohol, the widest range of cuisines and tastes, and the usual range of sensual self-indulgence – and we are still protected from doom – So far.

The reason for our astonishing luck can be summarized in a few words. It's the Constitution.

We've been skating on our luck to the point of blind arrogance – so much that our law schools are teaching their students the "revolutionary" fads of Marxism, explaining how to destroy the legal foundation that is the source of all our good fortune. "Revolution" is celebrated, but "revolution" is just a roll-over of power from one ruling class to another. Even the word "revolution" came from Copernicus's book about the rotation of the earth in the solar system. That kind of turnover of power changes nothing.

Obama really belongs in the post-colonial socialist world, like his father, who also never understood that the land he visited so briefly to father a child, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., represented the biggest revolution in political history. Barack Sr. flew back to Kenya to join Jomo Kenyatta (and his Mau-Mau supporters) in just another disastrous post-colonial tyranny, one that may have ended in his own death from alcoholism, despair, and two disastrous automobile crashes. Barack Sr. may have dimly apprehended that things were terribly wrong in Kenyatta's post-colonial paradise, as indeed they were. India and China also suffered terribly under post-colonial socialism. They only began to recover when they found a way to give their own talented peoples a modicum of freedom to become productive. They re-discovered their own abilities to thrive without bureaucratic tyranny. Obama Jr. has never figured that out.

The US Constitution is the revolution; the rebellions of the left are just reactionary throwbacks. Whether the liberals like it or not, it's the American Revolution that is radically new, a genuine step toward a different way of living and governing.

The left is not "progressive." On the contrary, it is a reactionary throwback to a tyrannical past and the politics of envy is their vehicle.

Libya, NATO, and Afghanistan

"How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation?" — James Madison

Today, this Monday after Easter I thought of so many things I would like to blog about that I couldn’t decide on anyone topic. Instead I am taking a page out of Matt Drudge’s and Adriana Huffington’s book and practice some aggregation.

Iraq: “Two suicide car bombs were detonated outside the perimeter of the former Green Zone in Baghdad on Monday, killing five and wounding as many as three times that. Recent militant activity in the country has been on the upswing but one of the most important dynamics is the looming withdrawal of the remaining American military forces by the end of the year.

The current Status of Forces Agreement between Washington and Baghdad stipulates the remaining nearly 50,000American troops still in country must be withdrawn by the end of the year. The United States has expressed some interest in extending this deadline, including during the visit sending U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Baghdad earlier this month. However, all such overtures thus far have been rejected by the Iraqi government. The numbers being discussed go as high as 20,000 American troops, and Washington has attempted to emphasize the capabilities the United States provides Iraq that the Iraqi military is not yet capable of providing for itself — everything from the defense of Iraqi airspace, to more sophisticated capabilities in planning, logistics, maintenance and intelligence. U.S. officials have also reportedly emphasized to Baghdad that once the withdrawal of American combat forces is complete, that it will be much more difficult for the United States to come to Iraq’s aid militarily in the future.

At the heart of this discussion is the fundamental importance of the U.S. military in counterbalancing Iranian power in Iraq and in the wider region. The large American military presence in Iraq has been the single most important element of American power in Iraq and in the region since the U.S. invasion in 2003. But it is far from clear how Washington is going to balance resurgent Iranian power in Iraq and in the wider region once those forces withdraw. It is not clear whether a new agreement or an extension can be negotiated between Washington and Baghdad — the U.S. has signaled the ball is in Iraq’s court. But an increasingly rapid withdrawal will have to begin no later than late summer or early fall, this quarter and the next are of pivotal importance not only for the United States and Iraq, but for Iranian power and the wider region.” [Stratfor]

Libya: “The African Union and the Turkish government are both trying to negotiate a cease-fire in Libya. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has already given the green light to an African Union proposal led by South African President Jacob Zuma on the condition that NATO first cease its airstrikes. The rebels in the east have rejected the terms of the cease-fire, sticking to their demand that Gadhafi first step down. Meanwhile, NATO forces maintained that they will continue launching airstrikes as long as Libyan civilians in the east are threatened.

Clearly, the cease-fire negotiations are fraught with complications. But as time wears on, it’s looking increasingly likely that the current stalemate in Libya could give way to a de facto partition between east and west. This may not be the ideal scenario for many, but it could allow the United States to avoid another costly nation-building exercise in the Islamic world, while allowing Gadhafi to remain in power, however tenuously. Each party in this conflict — whether you’re talking about the eastern rebels, Gadhafi’s forces or NATO forces — are facing considerable dilemmas in how to proceed in this military campaign.

The eastern rebels have made clear that they’re not content with holding onto the east and ceding the west to Gadhafi’s forces. The problem with the rebel forces it that they are severely ill-trained and ill-equipped. And if you take a look at the battles that have been taking place in the energy-critical areas of (Marsa el) Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya and the port of Sidra, show just how difficult of a time the rebels are having in trying to push Gadhafi’s forces back. And the more Gadhafi’s forces deliberately pull back into built-up urban strongholds in the west, the less likely NATO forces are to provide air cover for fear of causing mass civilian casualties. Simply put, the rebels do not have the fighting power to advance westward to Tripoli.

Meanwhile, Gadhafi’s forces remain largely in control of the main energy-producing regions running alongside the dividing line of the country and the Gulf of Sidra region. These forces reach as far as Ajdabiya, just below the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Though a number of Gadhafi’s tanks are being eliminated by NATO airstrikes, his forces have been able to rely on much less resource-intensive and highly mobile civilian vehicles and technicals to move their forces around and push the rebels back. Gadhafi’s forces are facing heavy constraints in resupply as long as NATO forces are patrolling the seas and the skies over Libya. All in all, though, Gadhafi would be negotiating from a relative position of strength in any cease-fire negotiation. Even if Gadhafi himself is eliminated, there do appear to be enough forces loyal to him that could step in and reassert control from the west.

This obviously puts NATO in a very difficult spot. As long as Gadhafi’s forces have the option of pulling back into well built-up urban strongholds, NATO will face very heavy constraints in trying to avoid the risk of blowback in causing civilian casualties. This gives Gadhafi undeniable staying power. Meanwhile, the United States is facing much more pressing and strategic concerns more eastward in the region in the Persian Gulf region, where Iran is waiting to fill a power vacuum in Iraq as U.S. forces are drawing down there. The U.S. then may be resigning itself to the idea that it may not be getting much beyond a stalemate in Libya, and that forcing a power vacuum in the country may be a lot more trouble than it’s worth.” [Stratfor]

"Obama's ideology tethers him to the idea that the central government should be the primary engine of economic growth and the super-arbiter of the winners and losers in our economy. He cannot countenance the possibility that Keynesian stimulus spending does not appreciably stimulate and probably does just the opposite; never mind that we can't afford it. He can't process that we cannot tax ourselves into prosperity or out of debt. He is viscerally unwilling to restructure the programs that have us committed to $88 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And he either cannot comprehend or is morally hardened to the evil and ineffectiveness involved in the government's making command-control decisions rather than free people through the invisible hand of the market, especially in health care. He cannot understand or is rebellious against the truth that capitalism is morally superior to and produces greater prosperity across the board than any other economic system, bar none. ... Obama, captured in his maximum-security class warfare prison mindset, has proposed even higher taxes on the already overburdened producers, which would further smother the economy and prevent economic recovery, growth and abatement of the national debt. His only real remedy for Medicare is to empower the Independent Payment Advisory Board to ration health care according to its one-size-fits-all lunacy. ... There can be no workable compromise with Obama because his plan could not work to retire the debt and avert our national crisis. The only solution is to retire him." — columnist David Limbaugh.

Afghanistan: Real life imitated art in Afghanistan's troubled Kandahar province as the Taliban took a page out of Steve McQueen's playbook, dug a tunnel underneath an Afghan prison where hundreds of high value detainees were being held, and 478 prisoners waltzed out of jail — free men due to the incompetence of Afghan security forces.

“Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in Afghanistan's south on Monday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a "disaster" for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months.

“Tooryalai Wesa, governor of volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 488 prisoners escaped due to the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province's main jail. He said the tunnel led to a nearby house.

The Taliban said in a statement that 541 prisoners escaped through the tunnel, which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations. The prison, touted as one of the most secure in Afghanistan, is located on the outskirts of Kandahar city.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman told a news conference that the incident, in which many Taliban commanders were said to have escaped, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.

"This is a blow, it is something that should not have happened. We are looking into finding out ... what exactly happened and what is being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in the prison," spokesman Waheed Omer said.

General Ghulam Dastgir, the governor in charge of the jail, said the prisoners had all escaped through the tunnel.

"No one managed to escape through the main gate, everybody went out through the tunnel. The insurgents worked on it for some seven months," Dastgir said.

"The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed," he said.

Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, has been the focus of the U.S.-led military campaign over the past year, with tens of thousands of U.S. and Afghan troops launching offensives around Kandahar city.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said it is too early to tell what impact the escape will have on plans to hand over other prisons to Afghan security control.

A U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that the push to transfer more security responsibilities to Afghan officials will continue.

"This escape is a serious issue which the Afghan authorities are working to address," the official said, adding that both U.S. and Canadian advisors helped train and mentor Afghan Central Prisons Directorate staff at the prison.

Twenty-six prisoners were recaptured and two killed in a gunfight with security forces, Wesa said.

Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Afghan officials had not officially asked for help in recapturing the prisoners but NATO "personnel who patrol the area are aware of the situation and will assist the Afghan authorities in responding as needed."

Reporters were taken into the prison after the jailbreak to view the opening of the tunnel in one of the cell blocks.

Reuters photographs showed a hole, several feet deep, cut into the concrete floor of one of the cells. The hole, big enough to allow one man to climb down at a time, appeared to be connected to a tunnel.

A large carpet in the cell looked to have been folded back to expose the hole. Police told reporters the insurgents had used car jacks to break through the concrete floor, which was several centimeters thick.

The Taliban said the prisoners escaped over a four-and-a-half hour period during the night, meaning more than 100 prisoners an hour would have had to crawl out through a tunnel barely large enough to fit one man.

"Mujahideen started digging a 320-meter (1,049 feet) tunnel to the prison from the south side, which was completed after a five-month period, bypassing enemy checkposts and the Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading directly to the political prison," the Taliban statement said.

"They moved people in several groups. They had a comfortable period of time to move that many people. It's obviously very worrying with the timing around fighting season," said a foreign official in Kandahar with knowledge of the incident.

Wesa said of the 488 who had escaped, 13 were ordinary criminals and the rest were insurgents. [Reuters]

The Steve McQueen movie – The Great Escape – was a dramatized account of allied POW's digging a tunnel to freedom for 76 men - most of whom were eventually recaptured (50 escapees were murdered by the Gestapo.) The Taliban had considerably more success and few of the prisoners will probably be recaptured.

It is even money that the prisoners had help from some in the Afghan army who were guarding them. That kind of corruption is common place in a country that continues to show it is unworthy of the expenditure of treasure and blood by the US military.

NATO in Libya: "The official Pentagon estimate is that the war in Libya cost us $608 million for the first 17 days. Some think that is a laughable underestimate, however, except that nobody is laughing. Forbes reported at the end of March that 'what looks like an inexpensive military operation in Libya is actually costing taxpayers about $2 billion per day.' Remember how Democrats and Republicans in Congress wrestled back and forth recently, nearly shutting down the government over a lousy $38 billion? Heck, we've already burned through that in Libya and Muammar Gadhafi is still thumbing his nose at us from Tripoli. Technically, the air war in Libya is being fought by NATO. But the United States, in addition to paying for our own forces, pays about a quarter of NATO's budget [25.2%]. The numbers get kind of dazzling, but according to the Fiscal Times: The United States now pays NATO $90.2 million for its civil budget, $462.5 million for its military budget and $259 million for NATO's Security Investment Program, which covers radar bases, airfields, fuel pipelines, etc. That is about $811.7 million per year. And how is NATO doing in Libya, by the way? Not all that well." [columnist Roger Simon]

A little Political Shock and Awe is Needed

“Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

In looking over the current field of potential Republican candidates who might oppose Barak Obama in 2012 I see very little to give me optimism. There are at least ten people who the media is touting as potential candidates and they keep posting polling numbers, which at this time are only indicative of name identification. Probably less than one-quarter of the electorate could name three of these potential wanabe presidents. This is why Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee led these polls — they each have TV shows.

At the 11th hour of the 1994 gubernatorial campaign in Florida, about 70,000 calls were placed to mostly Republican voters in the Tampa area by campaign operatives of the Democratic candidate, Gov. Lawton Chiles, "who said they were from the Florida Association of Senior Citizens, a group that had nothing to do with them, and the Citizens for Tax Fairness, which does not exist," wrote The New York Times. The callers' message: the Republican candidate, Jeb Bush, was "no friend of seniors" because his running mate wanted to abolish Social Security and cut Medicare. The trick worked; the incumbent won by a slender margin, even though many of the seniors, who changed their minds and voted for Chiles, knew full well that a state governor, much less lieutenant-governor, had no power to mess with federal programs. Still, they voted for the Democrat — just to be on the safe side.

I cite this episode as the Democrats begin gearing up for the upcoming campaign. It is crystal clear that they are planning to use, once again, their venerable strategy of smearing their opponents and scaring the electorate, above all it’s most gullible segment — seniors. In fact, they don't have much ammunition in their arsenal other than that hardy perennial. The "hope and change" message won't work this time; while fresh and promising in 2008, embodied by a total unknown who could thus be imbued with all sorts of expectations, it has been thoroughly discredited and each passing day looks more and more like a late night.

Now Obama has a record and will have to defend it. Inasmuch as any election involving a president running for his second term is always a referendum on the incumbent. Considering the kind of record Obama has amassed, it will be of little help to his reelection prospects. To be sure, the Democrats will make a herculean effort trying to convince the voters that electing the first black president, while laudable, actually failed to qualify as convincing proof of genuine contrition and did not amount to a true expiation of the racial guilt. Only the reelection of the black president would do the trick, proving once and for all that White America has finally left its shameful legacy of racism safely behind. But will it be enough?

Probably not. This is why the Democrats will have to put all their chips on the tried-and-true expedient of waging class warfare and vilifying the President's opponent. A full-blown "Sarah Palin treatment" awaits the eventual Republican nominee, whoever he or she may be. The Democratic campaign strategy will consist of a flood of outright lies, vicious ridicule, unbridled vitriol, and, above all, attempts to scare the voters out of their wits — especially the seniors. The Democrats don't need to win over the voters to their point of view; merely instilling in their minds doubt about the opposition and salutary caution will do the job: why change the — admittedly imperfect — present for a scary unknown? Of course nobody believes the Democrat politicians who say that Republicans just love to kill old people, children, and women. But the objective is not to make the accusation believable, it is to smear the Republicans just enough so that an unpleasant odor should stick to them. Will it work? There is no reason to think it won't. So far it has worked every time. After all, they don't call the entitlements "the third rail of politics" for nothing. So how do conservatives counter the seemingly invincible smear tactics?

So long as Dancing with the Stars or American Idol is far more popular than the nation's murderous debt; so long as spending, say, on the dental services for pets continues to rise, it doesn't look like most of the voters are serious about their politics. They are thus amenable to liberal propaganda (as they have been since Wilson) that the crisis has been conjured up by evil Republicans for their nefarious ends. Oh, it's so comforting to think that life is still good and one doesn't have to give it another thought. Demagoguery is not about merely promising people the moon and the stars; it's also about lulling them to sleep, reassuring them that they don't have to bestir themselves and make hard choices, that they can continue their "pursuit of happiness," leaving the bothersome task of ruling to their elected "servants." So the demagogues have a pretty good chance of holding on to power until and unless voters are forced to contemplate the country's plight. But how do we do it? I think shock therapy is the answer.

Some three decades ago, economic shock therapy was tried as the last, desperate resort — and it worked. The place was Great Britain, the doctor the Tories and their indomitable leader, Margaret Thatcher. As described by Claire Berlinski in her book “There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters”, in 1979, Britain was much further down the road toward ruin than the United States is today, though under Obama's tutelage our country has been making giant strides in that direction. Britain was being ineluctably sucked into the quicksand; there was no light at the end of the tunnel; the country was in an advanced state of decomposition and the unions saw to it that it stayed ungovernable (for union tactics, check Wisconsin). The atmosphere of doom and gloom enveloped the once greatest nation on earth, pessimism was pervasive, the conservative opposition talked only in terms of managing the inevitable decline. It seemed Britannia was finished.

In the face of national calamity, Margaret Thatcher chose a dramatic electoral strategy. Instead of taking a defensive stance and advocating a more benign version of the progressive agenda, she drew a sharp distinction between the Tories and Labour, offering the voters a stark choice between two polar opposites. More important still, rather than making economic efficiency the centerpiece of her electoral program, she took a moral case to the voters, extolling the free market. Instead of making excuses for socialism that it is a noble idea misapplied, she forcefully argued that it is an unavoidable economic disaster; that it robs people of their dignity and it's basically immoral; that it is an inherently evil idea, dooming any country to mediocrity, bureaucratic tyranny, and decay, both moral and physical. Using moral indignation as her primary tool, the Iron Lady appealed to the voters' sense of dignity and shook them out of their leaden stupor.

It is reported that at the Conservative Party Conference of 1966 she criticized the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism. She held up Friedrich August Hayek’s book “The Road to Serfdom” and urged every member to read it. She said the members of the Conservative party needed to develop a spine if they wanted to save the Great Britain, thus yje nickname “the Iron Lady.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Claire Berlinski argues that the British experience needs to be replicated in this country. But the Thatcher treatment is not the only kind of shock therapy available. There is another way which promises to be just as effective as appealing to the nation's pride and moral sensibility. I suggest that fire be fought with fire. The voters should be shaken out of their complacency and scared into a serious attitude. They have to be made to understand that the country is indeed hurtling toward imminent catastrophe, that cutting the budget deficit and reducing the national debt is not a matter of choice but of dire necessity; that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security do need to be seriously reformed to avert their total collapse; that by their indifference Americans endanger not just the future of their children and grandchildren, but their own well-being.

Only if the voters are made to open their eyes will they come to the realization that real sacrifices are needed to save America and, incidentally, themselves. Because if the country goes, so will their savings, their pensions and their benefits. The medicine may be bitter, but it is the only way of saving the patient's life.

This means, enough of meek protestations that today’s seniors have nothing to fear, that all the sacrifices will be exacted down the road, from somebody else. What is needed is not another mealy-mouthed professional politician in the Bob Dole or John McCain mold whose biggest concern is not to offend someone, anyone, but a straight-talker who tells it like it is. A lot of Americans are tired of politician-speak and yearn for straight talk (something McCain promised but did not deliver). Why do you think Donald Trump is skyrocketing in the polls? Because of his ridiculous hairdo or his stupid boast that he is "many, many times richer than Mitt Romney?" No, it's because he dares say openly what a lot of people think and he makes no excuses saying it. Furthermore, this time the Republicans have a huge inherent advantage in the existence of the Tea Party that will have the back of the bold leader who will unabashedly accuse Obama and the Democrats of leading the nation toward perdition and offer a painful, but needed remedy.

Is it risky? Of course it is. Maybe it will work, may be it won't. But at least it offers a chance of success, while the alternative is a high probability of ruin. Just look at the destruction Obama and his cohorts have wrought in a mere two plus years and think of the misery they will be able to inflict on the country if given four more years unencumbered by the President's need to maneuver and bob and weave, positioning himself for the reelection bid. The prospect is too horrible to contemplate.

So now is the time to fight. "The truth will set you free," said a wise man (John 8:32). Indeed, but only if it is spread widely enough and driven home relentlessly enough. The truth should not be whispered; it should be shouted from the rooftops and incessantly pounded into the minds of the people. To shake the voters out of their complacency, an awe-inspiring shock is needed. Shock and awe, Republicans, please.

Sandy Springs is Showing the Way

“Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.” – Milton Friedman

For years I have been preaching the value of outsourcing most of the services provided by government to the private sector. As Ronald Reagan once said “government should not provide any service that they can buy in the Yellow Pages.” This applies to all levels of government: city, county, state and federal.

By creating staff in-house, a governmental agency is not only being inefficient it is creating debt for the taxpayers. For years governmental agencies have been building bloated staffs to do what is available just by looking in the yellow book.

The reason hey do this is because over the years the myth has been pushed on us that only government employees could provide services such as: public works engineering, trash collection, legal services, infrastructure maintenance, tree trimming, financial services, police, fire fighting, water delivery, air traffic control, airports, schools, and many other services the people of a community or the nation desire and are willing to pay for.

Over the years these bureaucratic public employees have garnered support from the politicians (mainly the Democrat party) and formed unions, like the AFGE, AFSCME and numerous teachers unions that now control most government workers and the agencies they work for.

Daniel Disalova states a good case against government unions and public sector employment in a 2010 article in National Affairs “Since the middle of the 20th century, organized labor in America has undergone two transformations with major implications for the nation's politics. The first is the dramatic decline in overall union membership. In 1955, organized labor represented one-third of the non-agricultural work force; today, it represents just 12.3%. The second transformation, however, is even more significant: the change in the composition of the unionized work force.”

“As private-sector unions have withered, public-sector unions have grown dramatically. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, in 2009, for the first time ever, more public-sector employees (7.9 million) than private-sector employees (7.4 million) belonged to unions. Today, unionized workers are more likely to be teachers, librarians, trash collectors, policemen, or firefighters than they are to be carpenters, electricians, plumbers, auto workers, or coal miners.”

“The rise of government-worker unionism has also combined with the broader transformation of the American economy to produce a sharp divergence between public – and private-sector employment. In today's public sector, good pay, generous benefits, and job security make possible a stable middle-class existence for nearly everyone from janitors to jailors. In the private economy, meanwhile, cutthroat competition, increased income inequality, and layoffs squeeze the middle class. This discrepancy indicates how poorly the middle class has fared in recent decades in the private economy, which is home to 80% of American jobs. But it also highlights the increased benefits of government work, and shines a spotlight on the gains public-sector unions have secured for their members. Perhaps this success helps explain why, on average, 39% of state- and local-government employees belong to unions. (Differences in state and local laws of course mean that the percentage varies from state to state; New York tops the chart with roughly 70% of state employees in unions, while many Southern right-to-work states hover in the single digits.)”

Disalova continues; “Since public-sector unions began to develop in earnest, their importance in political campaigns has grown by leaps and bounds. Starting from almost nothing in the 1960s, government-workers' unions now far exceed private-sector unions in political contributions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, from 1989 to 2004, the AFSCME was the biggest spender in America, giving nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections (98.5% of it to Democrats). It is important to stress that this was spending on federal elections; the union represents mostly state and local workers. But given the magnitude of federal contributions to state budgets, the AFSCME is heavily involved in electioneering to shape Washington's spending in ways that protect public workers and the supply of government services. And so over that 15-year period, the AFSCME was willing and able to outspend any other organization in the country.”

“The political influence of public-sector unions is probably greatest, however, in low-turnout elections to school boards and state and local offices, and in votes to decide ballot initiatives and referenda. For example, two of the top five biggest spenders in Wisconsin's 2003 and 2004 state elections were the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the AFSCME-affiliated Wisconsin “PEOPLE Conference. Only the state Republican Party and two other political action committees — those belonging to the National Association of Realtors and SBC / Ameritech — spent more. The same is true in state after state, as unions work to exert control over the very governments that employs their members.”

“This political dimension of public-sector unionism also changes the substantive priorities and demands of the unions themselves. Although private-sector unions in the United States have engaged in leftist "social activism," they have mostly concentrated their efforts on securing the best wages, benefits, pensions, and working conditions for their members: "pure and simple unionism," as longtime American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers used to call it. Rarely do they demand more hiring, since — given the constant private-sector imperative to keep operating costs minimal — increasing the number of a company's employees can limit wage and benefit increases for the workers already on the company's payroll.”

“By contrast, as economist Richard Freeman has written, "public sector unions can be viewed as using their political power to raise demand for public services, as well as using their bargaining power to fight for higher wages." The millions spent by public-employee unions on ballot measures in states like California and Oregon, for instance, almost always support the options that would lead to higher taxes and more government spending. The California Teachers Association, for example, spent $57 million in 2005 to defeat referenda that would have reduced union power and checked government growth. And the political influence of such massive spending is of course only amplified by the get-out-the-vote efforts of the unions and their members. This power of government-workers' unions to increase (and then sustain) levels of employment through the political process helps explain why, for instance, the city of Buffalo, New York, had the same number of public workers in 2006 as it did in 1950 — despite having lost half of its population (and thus a significant amount of the demand for public services).”

For a case study in how public-sector unions manipulate both supply and demand, consider the example of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the CCPOA lobbied the state government to increase California's prison facilities — since more prisons would obviously mean more jobs for corrections officers. And between 1980 and 2000, the Golden State constructed 22 new prisons for adults (before 1980, California had only 12 such facilities). The CCPOA also pushed for the 1994 "three strikes" sentencing law, which imposed stiff penalties on repeat offenders. The prison population exploded — and, as intended, the new prisoners required more guards. The CCPOA has been no less successful in increasing members' compensation: In 2006, the average union member made $70,000 a year, and more than $100,000 with overtime. Corrections officers can also retire with 90% of their salaries as early as age 50. Today, an amazing 11% of the state budget — more than what is spent on higher education — goes to the penal system. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed privatizing portions of the prison system to escape the unions' grip — though his proposal has so far met with predictable (union supported) political opposition.

The skyrocketing costs of public employees' pensions now present a huge challenge to state and local governments. If allowed to persist, such massive obligations will inevitably force a fundamental re-ordering of government priorities. After all, if government must spend more on pensions, it cannot spend more on schools, roads, and relief for the poor — in other words, the basic functions people expect their governments to perform. But because many states' pension commitments are constitutionally guaranteed, there is no easy way out of this financial sink hole. Recent court decisions indicate that pension obligations will have to be fulfilled even if governments declare bankruptcy — because while federal law allows bankruptcy judges to change pension and health-care packages in the private sector, it forbids such changes in public employees' agreements.

I have written numerous times about this issue, mainly from the perspective of public works engineering and architecture services. No city, county or state need have an in-house capability for these services as they can be found in the private sector. Some will use the argument that the public sector employees are better educated, better trained, more efficient and more cost-effective. That claim is pure balderdash. I and my colleagues in the private sector were educated in the same schools, licensed by the same state bureaus and have done the same work as they. This is just an argument the public sector uses to bamboozle the taxpayers and the politicians who support them and expect their contributions and votes.

Municipalities are the ones hardest hit by this issue. They have a limited or declining tax base. Due the collapse of the housing bubble many houses have been devalued creating a lowering of property tax revenues while their payrolls and pension obligations have been increasing. No business could operate this way – bankruptcy would be on the horizon. This condition also affects the public school system. In essence the honeymoon for the public sector is over.

One city in Georgia has dealt with this problem in a business-like efficient and cost-effective manner. The city of Sandy Springs has privatized all aspects of city services with the exception of police and firefighting – services which also could benefit from some degree of privatization.

Outside of the police and fire departments Sandy Springs, a city of 87,000 has a mere four employees on the public payroll. No bloated salaries, no pension liabilities and a more efficient means of delivering the services their citizens desire.

To accomplish this they retained the services of CH2M-Hill, a Colorado based engineering and program management firm. I am familiar with CH2M-Hill as I have been a subcontractor to them on several infrastructure projects in California. They are a good firm with a good reputation. Cost containment is one of their major missions.

Sandy Springs is become a model for the outsourcing of municipal services at all levels. This is how it works:

• The municipality retains the services of a program management firm like CH2M-Hill, or others through a qualifications based selection.
• The program management firm then performs a needs analysis of municipality.
• Once the needs analysis is completed a report is given to the city manager and city council, who then approve it of recommend changes
• Once the report is approved a strategic plan is developed and submitted for approval to the city manager and council.
• After approval of the strategic plan the program manager, in this case CH2M-Hill, begins subcontracting to local firms for the services the municipality desires. This subcontracting is done in two ways. If it the services are cost based services such as street repair or trash collection they are retained by competitive bids from qualified, reputable firms. If the services are professional in nature, such as civil engineering or legal, they are retained in a three-step process. The first step is to garner qualifications from firms interested in providing the services. The second step is to create a short list of qualified firms and conduct interviews. The third step is to select the “most qualified firm” and negotiate a fee schedule. If they cannot conclude successful negotiations with the most qualified firm they will move to the next firm on the list. In all my days of providing professional engineering services I have never encountered a case where the most qualified firm has not negotiated a fair and equitable contract.
• This method of outsourcing brings several benefits to the taxpayers:
• The municipality is not obligating itself to long term public sector employment contracts.
• The municipality is not incurring long term pension and health care obligations. Those obligations re left to the program manager and the subcontractors. Things like health care may be mandated in the contracts and the only impact will be the increase in legitimate, allowable overhead costs to the contractor, which will be negotiated into the contract.
• People can be fired for poor performance or malfeasance without going through union representatives of public boards.
• Staffing levels can be adjusted to fit the needs of the community or economy very quickly.
• A better class of employees can be retained

Pay for performance can be delivered by the contractors in the form of performance bonuses.

Complaints by the public are given a greater degree of service as no contractor wants to aggravate their clients. They are driven by the profit motive – no client, no profit.

I have delivered professional engineering services to cities, county and state agencies for over twenty-five years and I know this system works. It is a completive field and the clients have a plethora of good, qualified firms to choose from. There aren’t and “no bid contracts”. All contracts are given by one of the two processes listed above.

While cities across the country are cutting services, raising taxes and contemplating bankruptcy, something extraordinary is happening in a suburban community just north of Atlanta, Georgia.

Since incorporating in 2005, Sandy Springs has improved its services, invested tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure and kept taxes flat. And get this: Sandy Springs has no long-term liabilities. It has outsourced everything except police and fire fighting.

Sandy Spring is doing it right. By never letting the public sector unions in the door the politicians will have no group to go to for funds. Therefore the taxpayers will be the better for it.

John Stossel exposes the dangers of public service unions

Sandy Springs has no long-term liabilities

You can click here for a page where there are numerous links to video reports on the success of Sandy Springs. Now let’s go for some privatization in the schools, police and fire departments.

Sarah Palin was Right on Death Panels

Sarah Palin was Right on Death Panels

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.” – Plato

On August 7, 2009 Sarah Palin posted the following on her Facebook page:

“As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!”

“The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

“Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.”

“Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.”

“We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let’s stop and think and make our voices heard before it’s too late.”

When Palin posted her comments she received tons of hateful vitriol from the left. At the least she was called misinformed, at the most an outright liar. Palin stuck to her comments and last week she was vindicated by no other than the campaigner-in chief, Obama.

Contemplating the 2012 election that can already be seen looming on the distant horizon, the President's advisors were no doubt hoping that the "death panel" debate was… well… dead. But Obama himself inadvertently resurrected it when, in response to Republican budget proposals, he claimed that Medicare costs will be kept under control by the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). ObamaCare opponents have been screaming about this committee since it was first added to the "reform" bill. And, since that time, anyone with the temerity to call it by its proper name – death panel – has been vilified by the Democrats and the "news" media. Nonetheless, that's precisely what IPAB will be. Its sole purpose is to cut funding for some health care services seniors now take for granted. And those cuts will kill people.

One of President Obama’s key proposals to reduce skyrocketing Medicare costs is a so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The IPAB would consist of 15 members appointed by the president (and confirmed by the Senate), empowered to decide what medical tests and procedures Medicare would cover and how much it would pay providers.

Giving this power to the IPAB would put tremendous medical decision-making in the hands of unelected officials with minimal accountability. We’ve already seen a foretaste of this when a federal government medical panel attempted to save money by restricting screening mammography to women over age 50, even though decades of medical research has shown clear benefits to starting annual mammograms at age 40. Although the Obama administration stated that the IPAB would not ration medical care, its power to set payments to doctors and hospitals would give it de facto rationing power.

IPAB was created pursuant to section 3403 of the ironically named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and its ostensible purpose is to "control costs." In reality, it will do nothing at all about costs. Instead, the board's fifteen "experts" will impose old-fashioned price controls. Before ObamaCare was signed into law in March of 2010, only Congress had the power to make changes to Medicare's reimbursement rates. But PPACA, for all intents and purposes, transfers that power to this tiny cadre of presidential appointees who will have no accountability to the voters. In theory, IPAB can only propose changes to Medicare's payment rates. In practice, however, the board's proposals will take effect automatically unless Congress passes contrary legislation and the President signs it into law.

This concentrates a huge amount of power in the hands of these fifteen people. As Obama's former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, phrased it last year in a discussion at the Economic Club of Washington: "This institution could prove to be far more important to the future of our fiscal health than, for example, the Congressional Budget Office. It has an enormous amount of potential power." This comment suggests that the Obama administration always intended to maintain the country's "fiscal health" by stinting on Granny's physical health. Hyperbole? Consider Orszag's description of the automatic implementation feature of IPAB's proposals: "So the default is now switched in a very important way on the biggest driver of our long-term costs, which is the Medicare program."

Considering that IPAB's mission involves Medicare cuts, one can't help but wonder if Obama's political team was comfortable with how much emphasis he put on it during last week's budget discussions. He made it abundantly clear that, if spending rises faster than expected, he "will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare." But the relevant provision of PPACA was obviously written to keep IPAB below the radar until the President, and the Democrat majority in the Senate, have survived the 2012 election cycle. The law doesn't require the board to produce its first recommendations until 2014. Thus, a safely reelected Obama would have time to submit even controversial nominations for IPAB membership, which a friendly Senate would happily confirm.

Such political considerations notwithstanding, Obama probably wasn't worried. He no doubt sees PPACA's death panels as a feature rather than a bug. This sentiment is shared of most advocates of socialized medicine. In a piece titled, "Why 'death panels' are a necessary evil," columnist Jay Bookman captured this progressive consensus when he wrote that "Death panels exist, they will exist in any conceivable system of health-care delivery, and we all know they are necessary but prefer to ignore it." For these people, it's either us or Granny: "Somebody has to say no to the terminal patient who refuses to acknowledge that he or she is terminal and demands hopeless if expensive treatment. Somebody has to have the power to rule that Procedure A or Drug A is more cost-effective than Procedure B or Drug B. Even Heaven has a gatekeeper."

With this last snide flourish about St. Peter, Bookman inadvertently stumbles upon the thing that makes many people, of all political persuasions, uneasy about the amount of power that has been given to IPAB. The members of this board will be mere mortals, installed by a president whose choice of appointees thus far has shown little divine inspiration. Thus, even some Democrats have grave concerns. Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D-PA), for example, is among the co-sponsors of a bill that would repeal IPAB. In a statement released last week she said, "Congress must assume responsibility for legislating sound health care policy for Medicare beneficiaries. Abdicating this responsibility, whether to insurance companies or an unelected commission, would undermine our ability to represent the needs of the seniors."

The tragic irony here is that costs can be controlled without pulling the plug on Granny. There are market-based alternatives to government rationing. Despite what we have been repeatedly told by progressive policy wonks, health care is not a unique universe in which economic forces fail to operate properly. It is, in reality, possible to utilize the market to control costs. One plan for doing so has been put forward by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who would introduce competition among insurers, realign tax incentives and remove some of the regulatory morass that reduces the efficiency of health care providers. This market-based approach was used with success in the Medicare Part-D program, which was actually starting to drive down drug costs until the Democrats began meddling with it after retaking Congress in 2006.

Another alternative is the "Purple Health Plan," proposed by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff. As David Hogberg reports at Investor's Business Daily, this plan seeks to "achieve the liberal goal of universal care via a market-oriented voucher." A lot of prominent economists have endorsed it, including Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Thomas Schelling. Kotlikoff's basic idea is to "trade in" outmoded ideas, like the employer-based tax exclusion and the major federal health programs, and use the money thus saved to provide Americans with vouchers that we would use to buy our own health insurance plans. There are features to this plan that will incur the displeasure of free market purists, including its own panel of physicians who would make arbitrary decisions, but the point is that it is another choice.

Unfortunately, choice is not a popular concept with the President and his health care apparatchiks at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). For them, "cost control" means government-imposed rationing of care to the elderly. Obama's CMS administrator, Donald Berwick, and lead health czar has often praised IPAB's deadly British prototype, the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has famously claimed that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care; the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open." The problem is that ObamaCare's death panel, as Sarah Palin correctly dubbed IPAB in the Wall Street Journal, will end up closing a lot of aging eyes – permanently. Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t make them wrong, and this is what the main stream media does with Palin. Click here to hear Mark Levine’s comments about Donald Berwick on his May 13, 2010 radio show.

Obama’s Health Care Czar addressing the British Health Care System in a 2008 Speech

In a fully free market for health insurance, everyone would be free to purchase whatever level of coverage they desired according to their best rational judgment from any willing insurer. This would allow them to join voluntary insurance risk pools with others with similar preferences without imposing their choices on others with different priorities. Individuals have the right — and the responsibility –to make these important life decisions for themselves. The government should not be making these decisions for us.