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February
06
2023

A History of how Corruption has Grown in the Federal Government
Wallace Garneau

The Federal Government of the United States has always been corrupt. President George Washington was the largest whisky producer in the country – he used his power as President to tax all whisky produced, except his own. This sparked what became known as The Whisky Rebellion, which Washington put down using federal troops. Other whisky producers moved across the Appalachian Mountains, producing whisky illegally and smuggling it to market, and American whisky is still primarily made in Kentucky and Tennessee as a result.

Thomas Jefferson bought a bunch of swampland for pennies on the dollar through an act of Congress, and then sold it to the Federal Government for dollars on the penny through another act of Congress, in a deal with Alexander Hamilton in which Alexander Hamilton got to create a central bank.

We know from recently released documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination that the CIA was directly involved (with the mob) in killing a sitting President. What was the motive? That’s still tied up in documents yet to be released, but we know that Joseph Kennedy made a deal with the mob to get John F. Kennedy elected, and that after Kennedy was elected, Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, reneged on that deal and went after the mob. Michael Franceze, former Caporegime in the Colombo crime family and son of Columbo Underboss and mob legend, John “Sonny” Franceze, says that his father was in the room when the decision to kill the Kennedys was made.

Michael Franceze also says that in the process of taking down the mob, the government learned the methodology of the mob and that our government, for all intents and purposes, became the mob, using the power of government to enrich itself with less regard for the country than the real mob had.

The Italian mob still exists, but it is a shadow of its former self. Our government, in the meantime, only grows in power and reach.

Sicily, incidentally, has been considered ungovernable from the mainland for most of its history, which is why the Italian mob formed in the first place. The Italian mob was effectively the government of Sicily, so it is no surprise that our government would find its methods useful in both controlling, and fleecing us.

We know that the CIA spent Vietnam smuggling heroin into the United States, in the pallets used to ship the caskets of fallen soldiers home, and then used the proceeds from the heroin sales to fund off-book operations. The CIA even had custom pallets made specifically for this purpose to hold more heroin.

The CIA continues to do off-book operations. Ask yourself how they fund those operations today, and ask yourself how much you like knowing that the CIA can fund and perform its own operations completely outside of any oversight.

We also know that John F. Kennedy was never going to send more than advisors to South Vietnam and that Lyndon B. Johnson sent combat troops, just under 60,000 of whom died there.

There are still more than 14,000 documents related to the Kennedy assassination that have never been released to the public. Do any of them prove that a deal existed between the mob, the CIA, and Lyndon B. Johnson in which the mob got rid of Kennedy, Johnson became President, and the CIA got to smuggle heroin into the United States on the pretext of a war?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know a good bet when I see one.

How about today, when Sam Bankman-Fried created a multi-Billion dollar crypto exchange that was used to launder untold sums of aid sent to Ukraine into campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of members of Congress? Who knows where else that money went?

Note that at least $31 billion of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan vanished. Our government cannot tell us where that money went.

Some wars may be justified, but all wars are profitable and not just by companies in the defense industry. The politicians who start wars get rich as well. Ask yourself how many US service members died to defend our country, and how many of them died to help George W. Bush buy a baseball team.

How much is the Biden family making off Ukraine? It turns out Hunter Biden sent classified materials to the board of Burisma Holdings while his dad was Vice President, and while Joe Biden was responsible for our foreign policy withUkraine. Now we know why Burisma paid Hunter $80,000 per month.

Nancy Pelosi made hundreds of millions giving tax dollars to a business run by her husband, and by trading power for inside information. Just the other day, Nancy Pelosi sold $4 million in Google stock right before the DOJ announced it was going to start an antitrust case to break a part of Google up.

The election of Bill Clinton was a watershed moment for the destruction of our country. Before the Clintons, corruption was common, but it tended to be transactional. The Clintons created an apparatus that allowed them to do corruption on an industrial scale – and it has been done on an industrial scale ever since.

The Clinton Foundation took billions of dollars from foreign governments, and then gave millions of dollars to officials in those countries to pay Bill Clinton millions of dollars to give speeches. The Clintons involved everyone they could in their corruption such that should the Clintons go down, everyone else goes down with them. As a consequence, the Clintons have nothing to worry about.

As Senator, Joe Biden started a cancer charity that took in millions of dollars in donations and that spent nothing on charity – but that paid a lot of money to members of the Biden family, who were also employees. As Vice President and President, Joe Biden took tens of millions of dollars from China, Ukraine, and Russia (through his son and brother), in exchange for creating policies that were favorable to China, Ukraine, and Russia.

Look at all the money our government is laundering through Ukraine with zero accountability. Is it possible that Putin and Zelinski get some of that money? We, of course, have no way of knowing, as Congress specifically barred any steps to keep track of any of that money.

I could go on and on and on. The point is that our government is hopelessly corrupt, and frankly – it always has been.

New members of Congress are quite literally taught how to be corrupt as a part of their orientation, and like a corrupt police department, those who do not ‘take a taste’ are ostracized by fellow members and their party alike. It is hard to win an election without some of the ‘dark money’ that flows to parties rather than to individuals, so honest people in Congress tend to be one-term.

Corruption also grows over time within individuals. The first corrupt act may be difficult, but each subsequent act of corruption is easier, and because corruption is a part of the very fabric of Congress, the body as a whole is hopelessly gone – following the wishes of the highest bidder (often hostile foreign powers) with little to no regard for the interests of the American people.

Congress wishes to have power over us – and uses free handouts to, in turn, corrupt us – but Congress has no real interest in our country or our people.

And sadly, many of the American people no longer have an interest in our nation either. Hating everything our country has ever done or stood for is the new form of ‘patriotism’ – one where our own flag is considered offensive.

There are individuals in Congress who do care, and probably a few on each side of the aisle, but the body as a whole is gone, and because the apparatus itself is a part of the corruption, it cannot and will not be saved through elections alone.

When George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fleeced the American people, they could only do so much as the Federal Government was small. Most of the power rested with the individual states or individual people. When power is distributed, so too is corruption, and distributed corruption does not scale well, but becomes prohibitively expensive fast.

When we centralize power, corruption, too, becomes centralized, meaning that people can make far more money bribing far fewer people.

Today, big pharma makes $56.5 billion a year, giving vaccines (in many cases against people’s will) around the world, paid for through tax dollars. We now know from research in Germany and Israel that Pfizer knew the vaccines it created would kill millions of people, but big pharma paid $1.6 billion in royalties to Anthony Fauci and other leaders and scientists in the National Institutes of Health, so our government had every incentive to protect Pfizer, and to keep giving people around the world deadly shots such that the money keeps rolling in.

Note that our government has made it illegal to sue Pfizer for any harm that may have been caused by its Covid vaccines.

And I’m just listing corruption off the top of my head that we know exists thanks to documents that have been released into the public sphere. How much corruption takes place that the public never even hears about?

The other thing with corruption is that people and institutions get better at it over time. Washington and Jefferson made peanuts compared to what the big banks made, first on the housing bubble of the 2000s and then on bailouts from the government that kept them afloat. The bank bailout of 2008 was, at the time, the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in human history.

When all the dust settles, we will learn that the Covid spending was even worse.

I can separate economists into one of two camps: those who see a government solution for every problem, and those who see societal problems with every government solution. Both camps are right in their own way. The government solution types look very short-term, using ‘solutions’ that address immediate problems but that then cause more problems in the future. Economists who think long-term see this as playing whack-a-mole; every time the government solves one problem, two more pop up until the government is overwhelmed.

Short-term economists assume the government will be able to solve every problem their solutions cause, as they occur, and are not worried about the long term. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

John Maynard Keynes was right: we are in his long term, and he is dead. We are currently paying for his arrogance, and he is not.

Short-term economists often like bubbles. We had a very small recession when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, causing Paul Krugman to announce in the New York Times that President Bush needed to save the economy by creating a housing bubble.

Apparently, someone listened to Paul Krugman, causing the 2008 recession.

Economists like Paul Krugman study bubbles, finding ever more ingenious ways to make them bigger and to keep them from bursting for longer periods of time.

Economists like Thomas Sowell also study bubbles, but rather than trying to get better and better at using them and prolonging them, longer-term economists study how to prevent them from forming in the first place.

You can accurately predict the political leanings of an economist just by knowing which camp they are in.

Not surprisingly, government officials (both elected and unelected) prefer to listen to short-term thinkers as an active government gives them more power, allowing more corruption to take place.

What should also not be surprising is that government officials (both elected and unelected) study corruption in the same ways short-term economists study bubbles, getting better and better at using crises to enrich themselves at the public’s expense.

And then the same politicians brag to us that we would need F-15 fighter jets to stop them…

Was Covid-19 created in a lab with funding from the NIH (including ‘gain of function’ funding)? Yes.

Was Covid-19 intentional?

We will never know whether or not Covid-19 was released intentionally, but nor is that the most important question (unless we plan to hold people accountable rather than re-electing them – which will never happen).

The real question is whether or not the people who study how to make more money off of ever more corrupt ways have figured out that they can make a lot of money, not just by waiting for crises to occur, but by actively causing them, and if the answer is ‘yes,’ then even if 9/11, 2008, Covid-19, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and now Ukraine are all legitimate crisis our own leaders did not create, what are the odds that our leaders might create the next one?

Furthermore, our leaders study how to help the country recover from crises even faster, as they need to allow some level of recovery before they can start the next crisis.

With Covid-19, the government prevented a really bad recession by printing money and flooding the economy. As a consequence, Ukraine did not have to wait very long, and now the corrupt are fleecing the public, not just of the United States, but of the world, making money off of two crises AT THE SAME TIME.

The real bubble is government debt – and you can’t wait to see what happens when that bubble bursts.

And, perhaps worst of all, government power is far greater and far more centralized than it was just a few years ago. In many countries, government power is absolute, and even the so-called free nations are, at best, on the verge of totalitarianism.

The days when Presidents and members of Congress could only make a modest amount of money through crooked tax schemes and crooked land deals are long since gone. We now have a Federal Government that can do whatever it wants, with government officials who have learned that there is no limit to how much they can make screwing the American people over!

 
 



 Wallace Garneau is a two-service military veteran, with four years in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, and four years in the US Army. He has twenty-three years of experience in process improvement roles, having served as the E-Commerce Manager, IT Manager, and Director of Business Systems for a variety of medium to large manufacturing companies. Wallace holds a Bachelors of Science from the University of Phoenix, and an MBA in Lean Manufacturing from the University of Michigan. Wallace is currently finishing a Masters of Science in Lean Manufacturing, at Kettering University.

Wallace is a published poet and essayist, and recently finished his first book - The Way Forward: Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking for Large and Small Businesses.


 

dailyreckoning.com

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