RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the matter of Barack Obama and the performance of the U.S. economy, the aptest metaphor is anatine: We aren’t swimming in gold like Scrooge McDuck, and we haven’t blasted the beak off our face with a shotgun like Daffy Duck, but instead limp along like what the president is: a lame duck.

Spare me the technicalities about how President Obama isn’t officially a lame duck until after the election; we aren’t officially in recession, either, but 0.5 percent annualized growth — the most recent figure — is close enough.

How should we judge President Obama’s economic record? There are two ways to go about that: First, from the point of view of people who understand at least a little about economics; second, from the point of view of Barack Obama.

We Americans maintain a superstitious, priest-king attitude toward presidents and economies. Just as moral and religious defects in the holy chieftains of old were thought to be the source of droughts and crop failures, we take weakness in the economy to be the result of presidential flaws: He didn’t “care about people like us” enough, he followed the wrong policies, listened to the wrong people, etc. That’s mainly not true.

The most important factors shaping the economic performance of the United States, or that of any advanced country, isn’t policy, but events, from developments abroad to entrepreneurship and innovation at home. The 1990s didn’t boom because Bill Clinton pursued a radically different economic agenda from that of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush: He ran on “time for a change” but more or less stayed the course, thanks in no small part to Newt Gingrich and the 1994 election. The 1990s boomed because the development of the personal computer and other forms of information technology, supercharged by the growth of the web, launched an extraordinary period of investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen (whose Netscape browsers brought the web to the masses), the development teams at Ericsson and Nokia, and a few million Americans who invested enthusiastically in everything marked “dot-com” had a lot more to do with the economy of the 1990s than Bill Clinton did. Likewise, the rough spots of that era (such as the Asian currency crisis) weren’t the president’s doing, either.

There is no mystical connection between presidents, GDP growth, employment, and wages.

PJ Media has obtained video taken inside Justice Department offices which show empty, unused office space within leased commercial space. The offices are intended for at least twenty federal employees according to DOJ sources — but only TWO are using them.

The Justice Department Community Relations Service offices in Dallas are on the 20th floor of the Harwood Center, a luxury downtown high rise. Justice Department sources provided PJ Media with a video taken inside the Dallas DOJ offices which documents the brazen waste of taxpayer dollars.

The video shows empty offices, boxes stacked on unused desks, jumbo window offices with couches, large conference rooms with television sets running, enormous offices which appear to be unused, stacks of printer boxes, bookshelves filled with VHS tapes, and a kitchen area with seating for four.

The video shows 58 chairs for use by just two employees working in the office.

Ghazala Salam has embedded her life in groups associated with terror. This year, she left her job with CAIR, an organization that has been linked to terrorist financing and terrorist leaders, for a position with Emerge USA, a radical Muslim outfit attempting to push its way into the political arena. Yet, even with this sinister background, Salam has managed to achieve numerous honors from South Florida government and government-related institutions. Has she pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes or are they intentionally ignoring facts.

On April 12th, Ghazala Salam stood next to Broward County Commissioner Stacy Ritter and accepted a proclamation declaring that day ‘Equal Pay Day,’ “urging all employers in our community to recognize the full value of the skills and contributions of women in the labor force and recommit to making equal pay a reality.” Signing the proclamation was Broward County Mayor Marty Kiar.

On March 25th, Salam received the honor of speaking at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Citizenship Ceremony, where new US citizens are sworn in. Emblazoned on the podium where she spoke from was a prominent Department of Homeland Security logo.

Photos and information regarding both of these events are found on the Facebook site of Emerge USA, an organization where Salam serves as its Florida State Director.

Emerge USA, despite its patriotic sounding name, has an extremely radical agenda based on terrorism and bigotry shrouded in the guise of political advocacy.

The main individual behind Emerge USA is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists. They include members of al-Qaeda and financiers of the Taliban. According to the Miami New Times, Wahid himself was placed on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011.

A “pervasive army” of more than 25,000 federal lawyers have raked in $26.2 billion from U.S. taxpayers since 2007, according to a new report by the non-profit government watchdog Open The Books.

“Today’s federal government is protected by a pervasive army of attorneys,” Open The Books founder and the report’s author Adam Andrzejewski told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “At a force size of 25,000, that’s bigger than a conventional combat division.”

Nearly half of the lawyers are based in Washington, according to the report, called “Lawyered Up: Federal Spending On Lawyers, 2007-2014.” Open The Books maintains a database containing 2.6 billion lines of government spending, representing the largest such digital resource in the world.

The federal portion of the database was made possible by the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which was co-sponsored by then-senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Barack Obama of Illinois, and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

“Since 2007, federal spending on attorneys exceeded $26 billion in salaries and bonuses,” the report said. More than 50 salaries exceeded $250,000 and 19 bonuses were for more than $50,000 since 2007. (RELATED: It Pays To Be A Lawyer In DC … A Lot)

“In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency employed 1,020 attorneys while the Internal Revenue Service employed 1,423 attorneys,” the report said. (RELATED: Justice Department Plans Attorney Hiring Spree To Keep Pace With Obama’s Pardon Push)

Open The Books also found:

In 2014, the top federal lawyer salary was $266,469.

New counts show the number of federal lawyers now exceed the individual public payrolls of twelve states or the top seven largest private law firms in the USA – combined. It’s Uncle Sam, Esq.

This week, we released our OpenTheBooks.com Snapshot Oversight Report – Lawyered Up, Federal Spending on General Attorneys from FY2007-FY2014. We mapped an army of lawyers larger than a combat division. Yet, in a sense, the lawyers have more firepower. As Mario Puzo cautioned in The Godfather, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”
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New mapping software allows citizens to track the 25,060 federal lawyers across 200 agencies and the 50 states by employment location.

Many times, those lawyers are out to protect the government’s interests, not the public interest.

Consider the example of North Carolina convenience store owner, Lyndon McLellan. McLellan was accused of making cash bank deposits less than $10,000 to avoid reporting requirements. The feds dropped the case but kept McLellan’s life savings of $107,000 for two more years. Prosecutors even had the gall to warn him not to go to the media.

A couple years ago, Chicago teamed up with the feds to rid itself of the numerous little-entrepreneurial electro-platers on the South and Near West sides. After the regulations, the enforcers moved in and today, there are very few left. In just one case, federal lawyers spent $1 million to shutdown a family owned electro-plater – settling for under $50,000. The business never recovered.

Our study illustrates the extent to which the little guys are outgunned. Here is just a small sample of our findings:
25,060 lawyers on the rank and file federal agency payroll with a job classification of ‘general attorney’ cost taxpayers $3.3 billion last year and $26.2 billion since 2007, plus $130 million in bonuses

The average federal lawyer ‘earned’ $132,817.06 plus bonuses in FY2014.
The number of federal lawyers exceeds the total public payroll headcount of twelve states including Alaska (25,050); Delaware (23,249); Idaho (20,270); Maine (18,602); Maryland (16,877); Nevada (24,524); New Hampshire (14,694); North Dakota (15,742); Rhode Island (17,073); South Dakota (12,774); Vermont (13,289); and Wyoming (8,500).
If the feds were a private-sector law firm, they would exceed the TOP 7 Largest Private Law Firms – combined (24,411): Baker & McKenzie (4,363); Yingke (4,153); DLA Piper (3,702); Dacheng (3,700); Norton Rose Fulbright (3,461); CMS Legal Service (2,522); and Jones Day (2,510).
More than half of the lawyers are located inside the Washington, D.C. beltway.

Most Americans probably assume that Uncle Sam’s lawyers are employed at the IRS, or Department of Justice. Yet, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are employing nearly as many lawyers as the IRS. The EPA employs 1,020 lawyers with payroll exceeding $1.1 billion since 2007, while the IRS employs over 1,400 lawyers. Last fall, in a piece at Forbes, I covered the EPA’s penchant for lawyers – the agency alone would rank as the 11th largest domestic law firm.

Former U.S. senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) had a somber message for Congress Wednesday when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “America doesn’t trust you anymore,” he told his former colleagues. “That’s the truth.” Coburn was appearing alongside Gene L. Dodaro, the head of the Government Accountability Office, during the hearing to discuss duplicative federal programs.

Via the Washington Free Beacon:

The GAO recently released its annual report, finding the federal government could save hundreds of billions of dollars just by consolidating duplicative programs.

Coburn, making his first appearance before the Senate since his farewell speech when retired in late 2014, pleaded with Congress to take action to reform government, simplify the tax code, and save taxpayers billions of dollars in the process.

Coburn, whose efforts at combating waste, fraud and abuse are legendary, is the man behind the annual government wastebook. Now he is a senior advisor in the Convention of States Project, which aims to force Congress to balance the budget. The Convention of States Project is currently organized in all 50 states, with hundreds of thousands of working volunteers, supporters and advocates committed to stopping the federal government’s abuse of power.

He said 10 of 34 states needed have passed resolutions so far.

“I would just tell you a little of my background this last year in 2015 I spent my time in 21 different states,” Coburn told the committee. “And America doesn’t trust you anymore. That’s the truth. Because they don’t see the actions coming out of Congress that should be coming out.”

“And that doesn’t mean that they’re right all the time, but you’ve lost their confidence,” he said. “And that’s not one party, that’s both. And so when you have hundreds of billions of dollars that could be saved and aren’t, and they know it. You know, they actually read your reports. People online, and then they use social media, pass it around.”

The small state of Vermont is poised this summer to upend national policy—and it doesn’t have anything to do with Bernie Sanders. Starting July 1, many foods sold in the Green Mountain State must carry a label if they are made with genetically modified ingredients. The law is full of carve-outs: It applies to grocery stores, but not restaurants, and to packaged foods, but not meat or cheese. Nonetheless, it will have nationwide implications. Because food manufacturers may not want to create separate packaging for different regions of the country, or to risk the legal liability if a non-labeled GMO winds up in Vermont, they will probably adjust their supply chains far beyond New England.

Lawsuits and bills in Congress have attempted to nullify the Vermont measure, but they have been unsuccessful. Those in favor of labeling and those against have tussled over philosophical and legal matters. What is the consumer’s right to know? Can the government compel speech when the best science suggests that GMOs pose no safety risk? Proponents argue that the only cost of labeling is the price of ink. Opponents worry that labeling GMOs will stigmatize them, causing food manufacturers to switch to more expensive non-genetically engineered ingredients.

Polls do show that 80% or more of consumers support labeling GMOs. But this is a dubious argument in favor, since most know little about the issue. A survey that I conducted on food preferences in January asked more than 1,000 Americans about an absurd hypothetical policy mandating labels for foods containing DNA. Eighty percent supported the idea. A follow-up last February asked another 1,000 people whether they thought that the statement “all vegetables contain DNA” was true or false. More than half, 52%, said “false.” For the record, the correct answer is “true.”

My research shows that when people are directly asked how they want the issue of GMO labeling to be decided, they do not defer to politicians or their fellow citizens. In a survey last May, a strong majority, 61%, preferred to put the matter to experts at the Food and Drug Administration. This seems to be borne out at the ballot box: To date, referendums on mandatory labeling have been held in five states, and none has passed. CONTINUE AT SITE