TWO SHORT STEPS, TWO LONG REASONS

     The first things I have to tell you are the things you can’t do, so put the pitchfork back in the barn and ‘ol Betsy back over the fireplace. It doesn’t matter if it’s Washington, Austin or the Cochise County courthouse in Bisbee. If you hand over power to men with guns to run the bad guys out of town, trust me, they will not willingly give up the power you’ve so casually laid in their hands. Things will get worse, and in a hurry. It’s already your fault for having dawdled on the fence for so long. Don’t make it worse.
     I also know the inclination is to tear it all down and start over from scratch, especially since the Declaration set out such perfect reasons and the Constitution laid out a near perfect blueprint for doing it right. I worked in state government in the late 60s, and I swear, if the people had known what went on in their capital city, they would’ve come down and burned that town to the ground. When corruption and cupidity collide it is as ugly as anything Nancy Pelosi sees in the mirror each day.
      But we don’t have all the leisure time in the world to pick and choose a replacement. We have to fix our government where it stands, while it’s still working, and that takes temperance, a plan and some knowledge. It was Lenin who believed that one could tear it all down and built over the ashes of the old empire. But in fifteen years he and Stalin would have combined to kill over thirty million “statistics” and relocate millions more….while never admitting, even to themselves in the mirror, that they didn’t know a damn thing about the wiring and plumping they were pulling out of their country. From 1918 forward, the crops failed every year. Russia stayed hungry and in the dark for over 75 years. I don’t recommend it if you still want hot showers.
       There are only two things you need to know before you decide to take these two simple steps. The first thing is why your government is broken, which can be answered in one word (more or less) and the second is why the person(s) you’ve sent to your city hall, county seat, state capital and Washington, to prevent it, not only haven’t, but have become part of the problem.
       True, the problem is enormous and very complex, and this fact alone is supposed to scare you away. Let the experts handle it, they say. But that’s the problem isn’t it? You hear this a lot in big government and big business, for both are structured so that the people who caused the problems in the first place are the only ones the owners can turn to fix them. It’s like asking the devil to help increase attendance at your church.
        I’m going to reduce it all to two simple targets, one that’s causing you most (but not all your problems) and the other, who you have absolute control over, if you’ll just impose two simple rules to let him/her know who’s boss…and then be absolutely merciless in making sure they do what you tell them to do.
        The first target is what I call the one fixed star in government’s sky…in every government, from the best run democracy to the worst run socialist car wreck. I am speaking of the Bureaucracy. It is the central cog in every government. It is necessary. And it is composed of people, who, no matter where they came from, the church they grew up in, no matter how well they tend to their yard, love their children, make friends with their neighbors, when they put on the hat of a Bureaucrat they become something entirely different. As Anne Richards once said, “They can’t hep it.” A Bureaucrat’s world is as rigid as an electron’s. On the job they live by rules as rigid as the laws of physics. Together they work entirely by instinct and appetite, and do things that are beyond their ability to reason away. 
       So the First Law of Bureaucrats is that they will always act according to their nature…given time. Knowing that, the first common sense rule you learn is that you can’t get angry. You can’t get mad at a dog for being a dog.
        About Bureaucracies, first understand that they are natural to any enterprise that cannot be managed by one person, any project or business that requires a division of labor. This is generally seen as good thing, not bad, for this is how a company can grow from selling say 1,000 pot-holders to 10,000. Even the receptionist/typist in the outside office in a 2-man law firm is subject to the laws of bureaucracy in that, over time, she will add costs to the business that have nothing to do with the delivery of the law firm’s services.
          Miss Tudbaum isn’t going to break that small law firm’s bank account, but imagine 1000 of them in a single building. Manufacturing companies have standard formulae they use to determine how much front office administrative costs should be required against the number and cost of their production and sales departments. Good businesses operate according to one simple rule: REMEMBER THIS: All Business is composed of two things, making a thing well (whether a good or service) and selling a thing well. All other people are in support of that mission. If the boss could do without them, he would.
         Why this is important to understand is that a majority of the US workforce now occupies a job that would be considered bureaucratic in some way or another. We used to be a nation of manufacturers and builders, but now we mostly sit in front of a computer and do paperwork. Our own consultancy here is primarily bureaucratic. It’s a fact, if someone else signs your paycheck and you neither make a product nor sell it, you fall into this category. 
          I hope what I say here won’t offend you, even if you’re in government service, but all bureaucrats in both the private and public sectors are driven by the same impulses and instincts.
          The main impulse of a bureaucracy is to make itself the center of the business. That may not show up for several years, but it is always the way the system drifts. This contest between the owner and his administrative front office begins the day he hires his first clerk. It began the day after the U S Constitution was ratified….although no one seriously noticed it (a few did) until FDR in the 1930s. The primary purposes of a Bureaucracy are (in order of importance) to protect its rice bowl, then grow its rice bowl, and finally, over time, expand the rice paddy. To these ends it always subordinates the primary mission of the company to its own.
          Within a bureaucracy certain professions are better suited than others to do this. I’ve been in too many corporate accounting offices, and seen too many accountants fast-tracked to the upper management, not to know that bean counters come first…even though they make or sell nothing. This has been a troubling trend for several years, and the current housing crisis is in part a result. But in government lawyers come in first, and a close second in the private sector. Their rise to power in both the private and public sectors began with the rise of the regulatory sector in government, as both sides to have one. (“My lawyer won’t talk to you, he will only talk to your lawyer.”) Culturally lawyers are more dangerous than financial managers, and in government they have far more power, for they see themselves in the vainest of images, as members of special class, almost Levitical in nature. In fact, there is a large body of lawyers, private and public, who believe the state is too complicated to be run by seedy legislators, and can be run more efficiently by lawyers and judges. Their power is not inconsequential and much of what drives the government today you can’t see is driven by this view.
           In private business lawyers are second generation support, they never even come onto the scene until all the dirty work has been done, and the business is safely being run from a conference room instead of the shop floor. Still they seek to be the hub of the business and will use their skills to change in thousands of imperceptible ways the thrust of the business’ principal activity. This is especially so in government.
           So, is a bureaucracy by nature bad? The problem with bureaucrats, all of them, is even as they save you hours and hours of work, in even the smallest company, they require you to spend additional hours doing nothing more than looking over their shoulder, and they have all sorts of tricks to make sure you never know what you’re looking at. This is why I favor small business in general, and look upon anything with Big in front of it, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Government as already having one foot on the proverbial banana peel.
          In the private sector controlling a bureaucracy is easy, at least on paper, for in the beginning owner’s pass everything out, from pay, to responsibility, to trust, to authority, with an eye-dropper.
          But no matter how tightly they control it, the bureaucracy grows a little out of line with the rest of the company, especially once the company is passed off to an heir, or sold, or goes public, because whatever waste was in that bureaucracy stays frozen in place. This is when a bureaucracy gets itchy to expand, once the founder is laying on the beach somewhere in the Bahamas.
         The Law of Generations states that no matter how well-led an enterprise is, no matter how well managed financially, no matter how well everyone is in tune with the mission of the company, within fifteen years, give or take, the bureaucracy will revert to nature by subordinating the mission of the company to its own rice bowl and its own rice paddy.
          Most businesses last no more than three generations within a family. There are a variety of scenarios. But in the end the wealth will have been dissipated, even without the government’s help, the grandkids or great grandkids will one day look up to find they have to give up the art lessons and go back to school to study something that can earn them a living.
          Looking at it this way, the Law of Generations is a good thing, by the way, at least as long as we have a free economy and Constitutional protections, for the hill of success is one which everyone can attempt to climb. Companies that are swamped by their own internal waste and complacent children will always be replaced by an even more efficient and vigorous company just dying to get their business….and the cycle starts all over again.
          But let’s turn to government. It isn’t that way over there, for you see, while most families will go 3-4 generations up and down the hill, our government, since the rise of the bureaucratic state in the 1930s, has gone through six generations and is still going up. This is because they can do what no private business can do. They can simply come tell you (us) to give them more money. They don't have to make or sell a thing.
         This is the principle difference between government and the private sector. Waste eventually can kill a company and a new company steps in to replace it. Government has the power not only to cover up waste, but sanctify it. If you think of waste as a cancer, it can kill a private company, but it can also be detected, the tumor surgically removed. But removing the cancer from government is more difficult because only your elected representatives can do it…and only you can force them to. Also remember that a Bureaucracy is like a parasite, that once it attaches itself to a host, it will not let voluntarily…even to save the life of the host. It will let the host die…and it with him.
          So, is the cancer already there? Here’s a simple example, which you can multiply by billions of dollars. For every dollar you send to Washington to help a drunk get on his feet, that drunk only gets about 25 cents, which as everyone knows, won’t even buy the smell of a good vintage Ripple. The rest goes to the bureaucrats. So, how many bureaucrat-middle men do you suppose want that drunk to get better?

       I could have saved you the long read and simply said that government bureaucracies in Washington, your state capital, even your local county and city governments, are grasping for more and more and more, and they generally get everything they ask for from the same set of usual suspects, the elected officials.
       I won’t spend a lot of time telling how this has happened, or how you’re made to think you’re getting more for your buck when you are getting much less. The government has some genuine relief programs, but most are “guilt-relief”, such as our drunk. These are (mostly) for liberals who really could care less if old Joshua beats his problems with the bottle. What they really want to do is feel good that he’s being attended to, which to them means that’s he’s on some bureaucrat’s list of things to do this week. That’s all. he a problem being tended to, for bureaucrats never solve.
      You can see how this sort of thinking serves the purpose of people will far less compassion.
      How bureaucrats throw you off the scent is easy. I told you about the company owner having to spend so much time looking over the shoulders of his staff. Bureaucrats don’t like that, so one of the tricks in the business, accountants and lawyers are especially adept at it, is to make what they’re doing look so complicated you don’t know what they’re doing. They just say “Trust me…” and you either have to trust them…or fire them. Tax laws and law in general fits the bill perfectly. How far can  they go? If you haven’t looked closely, although they won’t get within 1000 miles of one, lawyers now control battlefield commanders in fox holes. There’s a psychology there you may want to give some thought to.
     The bottom line is that a piece of legislation, a budget of thousands of pages can be passed by your legislators, without reading even a single page, all based on not one, but a string of “trust me’s” from a lowly accountant in the IRS to a staffer on the budget committee. What a sweet gig if you’re the congressman who only wants to hang out in night clubs.
      Are we just falling asleep at the switch? Of course we never connect the dots because we thought the guys we hired to represent us are. No matter, you know here the problem...the only (legal way) to fix it. We are the real bosses at the county building, the state capital and in Washington, and the main reason the whole shebang is going to hell in a hand basket is because we’re not looking over the shoulder of the person we hired to look over the shoulder of the government.
       Now stop to consider the bigger picture, one you may not have considered before. Look outside the US…Europe, South America, Asia, even Africa. In all those places the middle class is the government class and they have absolutely no intention of allowing a competing middle class to be formed from the private sector. (Our consultancy is in part dedicated to finding sneaky ways to circumvent this.) The United States is the only country in the world…no, correct that…in the history of the world where the middle class is from the private sector.
      Our government sector middle class came much, much later, but has grown in leaps and bounds since the 1930s. Whether you like it or not, you are part of a much larger war…yes, a war…in which our government class is trying to subordinate the private sector to a position of political and economic impotency, so that, just like the Banana Republics of yesteryear, and Mexico of today, all remaining private sector middle class companies will have their rice bowls only with the permission of the state. The small business sector will remain small and will only get table scraps from the state, just like Kenya.
       That’s their plan. This is not conspiracy stuff. This is how it has always been envisioned ever since the state managers in Europe finally got rid of the divine right of kings and replaced it with their vision of a state-managed democracy. It's how the United Nations sees things. America is a from-the-bottom-up republic so is the sole hold-out.
        No you know the stakes and where you fit into the scheme of things.

        Every election of course, everyone holds their breath as the people once again march to the polls to prove once again they are the real owners of the country…only to breathe a sigh of relief the day after when they find that we really ain’t that mad, that the dozen roses and box of chocolates our legislator brung us back from Austin or Washington, proved he still loved us and all the reports of him sleeping around ain’t really so. Just back fence gossip. Hell, we’re so slap-happy stupid they’ve even convinced us that they can take 25% of our paycheck every two weeks, hold it for a whole year, interest free, then send a portion of it back to us, and we’re ready to send them eFlowers for their thoughtfulness.
       We own these people, or have you forgotten? So, how do you remind them? How do you (we) gain the same sort of control over our hired servants that two-man law firm did over their receptionist?
       Simple answer. You scare the bejezzus out of all of them and fire the rest. For just like bureaucrats elected officials, aka “politicians” have a nature they cannot deny.
        The First Law of Politicians is that they are scared to death of you and your wrath. The natural cowardice of politicians is a good thing, by the way. The Constitution assumed it, which is why it gave us, the common man, the C-Student, the final say in things. But craven cowardice is not such a good thing. The see the difference in every life all the time, as when a person goes to the Moose convention in St Louis and sees lights, and smell and tastes pleasures he never thought imaginable. He may come back to hearth and home and the camera shop, but he forever marks that four days off on his calendar, and dreams of them, and heaven forbid his mother in law should that weekend. He is changed forever because he has smelled the sweet odor of sin, and he will lie, cheat and sateal to it one more time.
       This is no different when a young lawyer from North Platte goes off to Lincoln for his first session of the legislature. “Honey, you can’t believe this place. I’ve never seen so many white Mercedes convertibles in one place in my life. I’m going to a dinner tonight put on by the Scottsbluff Poultry Breeders, but I sure love you, hug the kids.“
        It always starts out that way, a simple image of a young lawyer who has not yet found out that only lobbyists and prostitutes drive white Mercedes convertibles in Lincoln, Nebraska. Oh, the pressures…and pleasures…that are immediately set before this young fellow.  Easy money…a paycheck plus per diem…nice hotels, room service, grand luscious meals that someone else pays for…better’n anything at the Golden Steer in North Platte, and yes, beautiful women who often don’t wear any underwear, with teats the size of Harry Truman’s head…and they aren’t afraid to show them off, neither.
        Your elected politician goes away a bright eyed innocent and comes back, well not so much the wh**e-monger in the most carnal sense of the term, but definitely someone whose tasted pleasures he'd kill to taste again, and again, and again..
         Trust me, this applies to your Congressman as much as it does to that sumbitch from the 30^th District in California, who can’t keep his hands out of everyone elses’ pockets, but still keeps getting re-elected. What is wrong with those people in Beverley Hills? As with any group of legislators, it’s always the other guy’s congressman, only it isn’t, and you have to know that. They are all tempted and most succumb…some to the high life, the hot tubs, the babes, but more often as not, to the spotlight of power, which is the greatest elixir of all.
       There are three basic kinds of legislators, those who are drawn by the allure of the fast life, a smaller more select group who have been seduced to the dark side for the power, and the true believers. The true believers are broken down further into Them and Us, or as Rush Limbaugh likes to call them, liberals and conservatives. I prefer anti-constitutionalist and Constitutionalists, for liberal is really a misnomer today, as while all of those are socialists of a sort, most are fascists who like the high-life and are in the game just to rob the treasury, squeeze the Golden Goose, and basically create a perpetual elite class. Harry Reid and Al Gore, for instance, seem more fascist than communist, as I have yet to see them willing to give up anything (Lenin gave up all sorts of things, including Beethoven) to reach their goal. The poorer we get, the richer they get. Bolsheviks they ain't.
     Identifying just who Those Guys are can be complicated, and here it isn’t important , for they are all the enemy, which by the way, is how they see you and me and those few, those precious few, you send yo Congress and who actually try to stay true to the pledge they gave to you and to the Constitution. They know who they are, just as the elite power bosses know who they are. And so does the bureaucracy.
      What drives the government machine is money, which as I just pointed out, is a fascist perspective, or least the perspective of bandits. Although they call it “raising revenue” the purpose of government is making a profit, just as it is in business and in the lives of individual citizens. In the private sector, this is good. In the public sector this is as dangerously close to the cliff as you can get without jumping off. What connects the politicians to the bureaucracy is of course, their incessant need for money, more money and more desks. But feeding the Beast cements all sorts of relationships and power that go well beyond mere money and emptying your wallets.
       While swearing an oath to you, not unlike a marriage vow, your Congressman, even conservatives, owe deep loyalties to the bureaucracy. So much so it has become their primary constituency. Most of the money they take from you they give to bureaucracy, who in turn takes over half for itself, then sends the rest back to you in the form of some service, maybe a bridge, money for education, chocolates and candy, or maybe even a dose of guilt-relief, in the form of a gift or service to someone down the street or down on their luck…only they neglect to put on the card that it was from you. Even here most of this money goes first to your state and local government who rake off another 10%-20%.
        Seen in its totality, this really isn’t about the money. It’s about power and a kind of power that inures especially to wannabe elites, which is why you find so many lawyers involved. (They’ve always suffered from a kind of p***s envy for the real men and women who built the boardrooms they like to sit in.) This is not Stalinism or communism, but is closer to fascism, for it is a sacking of the treasury not for some utopian goal of brotherhood, but rather for the simpler purpose of creating a perpetual elite management class, locking all the doors (there are several) the Constitution promises every man and woman can through, without a key or a toll, and replacing it with a single door to which they hold they only key.
        Too many conservatives (we’ve written about this elsewhere) believe they can manage this Beast better and can actually save us some money so we can buy a better brand of table scraps. This is not Constitutional protection, as I see it. It is Scam-Lite.

        Enough, already. After such a long-winded preamble, let me tell you how to stop it, and in two simple steps. (They are not easy, however.)
        First, notify your politicians, at every level, that you will not tolerate any untruth coming from their mouth or their office. Even one lie and you’re out. But mean it. And back it up. Granted, for many such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and a bunch of others, this will be like water off a duck’s back. There are entire congressional districts, and entire segments of our society, not to mention one entire political party who think lying is perfectly all right, so long as it leads to a desired end. But in the end, even they can be made afraid.
        But you may ask, what’s so all-fired important about lying? How does that cure anything?
        Let me tell you in simple terms. The Constitution was written so that the common man could build and grow without the permission of the state. Rich people can do without democracy, and they can do without morality. They lie to their wife, they get a new one. A really bad dictator comes to town, they can move or bribe officials. Ordinary people can’t do that. Ordinary people can’t build their lives with their families and neighbors without truth being a foundation…unless…you plan to stay frozen there forever.  Like much of the popular culture that is not as much by accident as you think, dishonesty has been injected into the middle classes in all sorts of ways, from lying to parents, to cheating in school, to petty theft. This sort of behavior assures that you will never move out of the hole you are in, and the elite class wants it that way. Society lives or dies by the moral foundation of its masses, not its richest or best educated. This is a Law: Any society that builds and protects itself upon lies will die, so this is not just a mind game we’re playing with our Congressman. Basic survival is at stake if we allow our leaders to lie without consequence. Nip this one seemingly small matter in the bud, and you will see remarkable change, even, over time, from Senator Schumer’s office.
       By letting politicians know you won’t put up with lying of any kind, they know you have drawn a line in the sand. And while some Democrats will pooh-pooh your threats for awhile, trust em, the majority of legislators will do double-backed flips to keep from being perceived as liars, or as the purveyors of someone else’s lie.
       Second, notify every politician that it is your opinion that a major foundation of the Constitution and our republic is the individual House, and your right to build it, own it and pass it on, and to create reciprocal relations with your neighbor so that neither of you will have an unfair power over the other. Tell them our country is weaker at the foundation because the government, rather than keep us and our neighbors from gaining power of each other, has actually gone to some houses and asked permission to give to them something that had been taken from another's House.
        Tell them that while yes, your neighbor may have a better education, or better skills or have husbanded his affairs better, you know that someday, if not now, then your children or your children’s children will reverse this situation. This is America, after all. (This is actually a natural law of wealth in a free economy.) Therefore, say to your legislators, “We do not authorize you to take any property from my neighbor and give it to me, nor do we authorize you to take any property from me to give to my neighbor, for this severs the fundamental reciprocal relationship in both our houses.”
        Ask them to take this pledge.

         This is a tough one, huh? First of all, iy would take 5000 words to make the case to you, but I can tell you the most grievous breach of Congress' pledge to the Constitution is when they began taking money from one house that did not go for the common good, and rather selectively giving it to another.
         And your representative won’t take that pledge, I promise. But do this once, then twice, then a third and fourth time, and every time a new candidate steps forward to run for public office. Congress regularly passes legislation that in fact does rob from Peter to give to Paul, so you'll be busy, but if you remind them equally as regularly of your position, you will begin to succeed to make him afraid. (The punishment comes later.) Once afraid, your Congressman will face the existential dilemma of having to choose which loyalty binds him most, the oath he swore with you and the Constitution, or the check he wrote to that blonde wh**e in that motel room in Lincoln.
           Here’s how you send it. I’ve found Congressional offices can handle emails and phone calls with a certain indifference, unless there’s a major confrontation, such as the last immigration bill. Emails and phone calls don’t work.
         Send a letter, typed or hand written, letterhead doesn’t matter. Make it from you, or Ed's All Night Wrecker Service, but not from the Citizens Committee or any silly name some people use to form a political action committee.Their office staff has a hard time with letters from ordinary citizens. They feel they have to compile, log and respond to letters “writ by hand.” Let’s just say there’s a paper trail they can't avoid..
         Get 5-10 people to sign with you. Trust me, 100 letters with 10 signatures each have 100 times more impact than a single petition of 1000. Don’t add on other issues, such as the immigration bill, or easing the gas tax. You can write separate letters for those. Make these two issues the umbrella of everything you have to say to the your Congressperson. Use your own name. If there's any blowback, let us know. We have friends.
          Keep it within your district. Nancy Pelosi pays no attention to letters from Albuquerque. Then, every time a lie is uttered, send a “You’re Out” letter, and cite the circumstance that caused you to write. Send a copy to as many newspapers and political parties you can find. At first, they will blow you off, but since we know Democrats, lawyers, their wives and other reformed wh***es lie as regularly as I comb my hair, and will never pass up the opportunity to take money from you to give to your neighbor, your persistence will make them sweat, I promise. So be vigilant. Never let the chance go buy. And ask others to the same…just letters with a few signatures. Nothing more.
         Trust me, your Congressman fears you more than he fears the Party or the Bureaucracy. Just two things you have to demand from him, and he will either come around...or you will fire him, maybe even come November.

          This is not a silly exercise. This or some other similar method, may be the only way. We believe we are a country that was built from the bottom up, and the only way to reform it and take it back is from the bottom up. Most talk show pundits say wait until 2010. I’m not sure there’s time to wait as we believe that a truly focused socialist Congress and president can do irreparable damage in two years. With a dedicated alientist on the democrat side and a known accomodationist on the other, I can’t see that the Presidential election will matter much, although M’Cain can still go some to change this viewpoint.
          What matters is Congress and the courts. We believe that there is much in terms of a groundswell that can be can be done to turn the Congressional elections around, while at the same time making even the most safe seats fearful of a wrathful electorate. Even if we don't take Congress back this year, we can sure scare hell out of 'em and there's benefit in that alone.

          I’m only sorry we don’t have twenty million to throw at this, but really, all it takes a constant stream of letters saying just two things.

VBushmills