First came the exposure of an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) hoax surrounding the announcement that legal immigration for fiscal 1995 had declined. At the same time this announcement was made, the INS' own projections showed a dramatic surge for fiscal 1996. House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) was angrily surprised to learn the truth during committee debate over proposed reform. Some legislators are now calling for the establishment of an independent system for assessing both current and projected immigration data.
The next support gave way with the publication of a 197-page report by the Justice Department's Office of the inspector General (OIG) describing the elaborate deception which greeted members of the House Task Force on Immigration Reform when they visited INS facilities at Miami international Airport and a nearby detention center on July 10th. When Representative Eiton Gallegly (R-CA) received a letter signed by 50 members of the INS union which detailed the extraordinary steps taken by high-level INS officials to give a false perception of efficiency and order at the facilities, he requested that Attorney General Janet Reno initiate an OIG investigation.
The OIG found, among other things, that aliens were moved out of the overcrowded detention center into non-service facilities; aliens were released into the community, including at least nine people with criminal records; and extra overtime employees were put on duty at the airport to maintain the facade of a smoothly run, efficient organization. During the course of its investigation, the OIG encountered deliberate attempts by INS officials to conceal initial information by means of missing documents, failed memories, and lying. A number of high-ranking INS officials were recommended for dismissal or suspension, but to date no actions other than transfers have occurred. Conspicuously absent from any punitive list was the name of INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, who should be held accountable for actions taken on her watch.
The third beam collapsed when the Border Patrol's highly touted "Operation Gatekeeper" in the San Diego area was exposed as a miserable failure. An article in the North County Times observed that the operation "is failing and immigration authorities falsified records and alter intelligence reports to make it look as though the project is a success, according to Border Patrol agents stationed in the San Diego sector." Included in the article were allegations that bus-loads of illegal aliens were released into Mexico without being processed, that ground sensors were removed, and that agents were deployed in ways which reduced the number of apprehensions. Under severe criticism, Meissner finally instituted an investigation by the INS Office of Internal Audit (OIA) - which was a clever move, since the OIA does not have the authority to grant immunity for agents who report the deceptive tactics being used by senior INS officials.
The New American, December 9, 1996
"If we do not expect parents to pay for their own children's education," Dewey asks, "what credible argument can we then make that they should pay for their food, clothing, shelter, or medicine. Government schooling reduces parents to the role of assistants who ensure the completion of homework, help with occasional projects, and get the kids to soccer practice on time. Government schooling is the very linchpin of the welfare state, the foundational tyranny that led to more than a century of servile laws to follow."
Regarding government-funded school vouchers, Dewey points out that it "is well documented that every government that has subsidized private and religious schools, from Australia to France to Canada, has diminished their autonomy and blurred their distinction from state schooling. Vouchers offer private schools in America the same fate...." So-called "school choice" may make one a chooser, but not an owner, "anymore than housing vouchers make you a homeowner. No government voucher frees you from dependence upon government."
As an alternative to tax-funded vouchers, Dewey urges a system of privately financed vouchers or pre college scholarships. He notes that since the first such program "was started in 1991 by J. Patrick Rooney, the former chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co., the pre college scholarship movement has ballooned to 27 programs covering more than 20,000 low-income children - all private dollars, all private schools."
Dewey believes that "Christians must stop playing king-of-the-hill with liberals for control of Caesar's schools. Instead of lobbying the government for the right of children to keep Bibles tucked in their desks, we might consider building schools where teachers keep them on theirs." He agrees with those who would abolish the U.S. Department of Education, but states that "it must be part of a larger mission to end the federal role in education. Let's not merely shovel its programs back to other federal departments whence they came. Let the U.S. Government be as silent in the area of education as is the U.S. Constitution."
(P.O. Box 638, Mt. Morris, Illinois, 61054)
The New American, December 9, 1996
In Salt Lake County, Utah, it was discovered after the results were announced on election night that flawed punch-card ballots had caused thousands a ballots to be incorrectly tallied. Loose chad (the rectangular paper tabs that are supposed to fall out where poked by the voting stylus) had stuck to many ballots or had not dislodged at all (thereby sending computers a "no vote" signal). Television stations broadcast extensive film footage of beleaguered workers removing chad with tweezers, styluses, fingernails, or whatever else might work. Two days after the election, the problem was deemed to be so serious that all 287,550 ballots had to be recounted by hand. The vote totals in many races changed, but no outcomes were reversed.
After two brothers in New Jersey attempted to vote, and poll workers could not locate their names on registration rolls or elsewhere, they insisted that they had registered via the motor-voter process. As reported by Associated Press, "after being turned away at the polls they appealed to a judge and were allowed to vote." Apparently it is now sufficient to simply claim one has registered, without documenting it.
In North Carolina, a 14-year old youth was enticed to register at a voter registration table during a rock concert this summer, and was allowed to vote on November 5th. He had signed his correct name on the registration form, but listed his birth year as 1956, which should have clued election officials. The Durham Herald-Sun reported, "No one at the registration table or the polling place asked him for identification. Under the law, they don't have to. Michelle Wyatt, voter registration director for the North Carolina Board of Elections, was quoted as saying, "This system is based on the idea that we live in a fair and honest society, that we live in a happy, smiley land where people are going to tell the truth and perjury means something." Clearly some rethinking is in order.
Robert W. Lee
The New American, December 9, 1996
Those are the conclusions of an 18-page report to be released next month in New York and London by Oxfam International, a leading worldwide relief agency.
It presents a powerful indictment of the "corrupt lending and predatory collection practices employed among the most threadbare and vulnerable nations of Africa by giant Wall Street money centers such as the Chase Manhattan Corporation, the financial fief of the Rockefeller family, and by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the backup team and enforcer of global lenders.
Analyzing the "textbook case" of Zambia, the Oxfam study notes that this African nation "mired in hopeless poverty," has made net debt payments of nearly $300 million to foreign creditors in 1994 --a good deal more than it spent on health and education for its people during the same period.
With money levied on U.S. taxpayers and those of other industrial nations, the International Development Association, the major global provider of last-resort refinancing, has extended $2.9 billion in aid -- subsidies, grants and concessional loans - to the most insolvent and debt-ridden nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, the report reveals.
But of this total, described in self-congratulatory UN brochures as "substantial economic assistance," a whopping two-thirds - some $1.9 billion - was promptly taken back by Africa's bankers and other creditors as "debt service payments."
Such usurious loansharking has deprived poor nations in recent years of "the most elementary health services, nutritional commodities and educational facilities," Oxfam claimed.
One out of every four children born in Sub-Saharan Africa dies before his fifth birthday, and those who survive remain, in the majority, "helplessly illiterate," the report found.
Oxfam estimates that exorbitant debt service obligations are creating conditions that will kill 21 million African children by the year 2000.
But the bankers are pocketing plenty of profits, with major international lenders such as Citibank reporting higher yields on their loan portfolios - up to 40 percent in some underdeveloped regions - than ever before.
For more than a decade, the BBA has been touted as the great savior of America's economic future, and it's been a great fund-raiser for neoconservative groups. It's also been the excuse the National Taxpayers Union and American Legislative Exchange Council have given to have a constitutional convention called. Aside from that, it doesn't seem to go anywhere.
The balanced budget debate engaged in by Congress each year is spurious as illustrated in Seven Reason's _Why the Budget is a Fraud_. These reasons are:
Arguments do not address the fact that budget based on debt money cannot be balanced.
Untold billions are spent by intelligence agencies in the so-called "black budget."
The so-called Social Security Trust Fund is non-existent, a collection of markers being held by the taxpayers without their knowledge to be paid by by future generations.
There are trillions in contingencies, liabilities and commitments.
Spending is taken off budget. What this means is that many big ticket programs are simply not considered part of the budget.
All payments made to reduce the debt disappeared from the money supply.
The budget process is guided by politically motivated guesswork based on counterfeit pretenses and false arguments.
The economists at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an executive branch agency, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), play clairvoyants, releasing their projected deficits upon which proposed budgets are based.
But their cloudy crystal balls came up with a disagreement in their economic forecasts for fiscal 1997 amounting to a $125 billion difference. Using OMB figures, President Clinton predicted a $44 billion surplus for 2002. The CBO projected an $51 billion deficit based on Clinton's budget.
Then there's the bogus language of all of the loopholes BBAs Congress keeps voting on year after year. One section allows borrowing to be excluded from the definition of what is to be considered as revenues. The deficit is caused by borrowing, so if a BBA will permit the federal government to continue to borrow, it sort of defeats the purpose.
The BBA promoted by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is rife with escape hatches. It lets Congress refuse to balance the budget by a three-fifths vote; increases the national debt limit by a three-fifths vote; waives the BBA in case of military threat or if war is declared - although there's not much reason to worry about the latter happening. The last time Congress bothered to declare war was World War II.
As the BBA would postpone the cost of war, which always increases the size and cost of government, it encourages the assorted interventionist global adventures the United States keeps getting involved with.
The budget doesn't need to be balanced for another seven years, one year longer than the term of a senator, so the folks voting for the BBA can go on their merry big spending ways without being held accountable.
The very idea that a constitutional amendment is needed to balance the federal budget implies that there is something wrong with the Constitution.
The reason the United States had an annual deficit of about $164 billion in 1995, has an accumulated federal debt of about $5.2 trillion through June of this year and unfunded debt liabilities - that's U.S. debt held by foreigners -- of up to $18 trillion, is because Congress is afraid to say "no" to special interest groups.
The framers, when debating the Constitution at the constitutional convention in 1787, discussed the possibility of annual deficits, and devised a method to effectively extinguish them. The Maryland-based American Constitutional Research Service (ACRS) is doing a yeoman's service to bring this truth to Americans and to lawmakers.
The framers' plan was, first, to limit Congress' spending to constitutionally authorized objectives. Then, if Congress' spending exceeded the revenues it had collected through taxes (imposts, excises and duties), instead of borrowing, was required to lay an emergency direct tax at the end of each fiscal year for the amount in deficit.
Under the emergency direct taxing system set up by the framers, each state was billed for an apportioned share of the deficit based upon the size of its congressional delegation. California, with 52 representatives in the House, would have to come up with 52 times the amount that Delaware, with one representative.
But California would proportionately have more say over the fiscal policies of the federal delegation voting in Washington, D.C. This ingenious formula provided the states with a check on and balance against wasteful spending by Congress.
The rule of apportionment clearly distinguishes our constitutional limited republic from a democracy which operates like mob rule, allowing one group to use its vote in Washington to increase the tax burden on those they can out-vote without also increasing their own taxes.
When a state refused to pay its assessed tax bill, Congress was authorized to send forth its officers to "asses and levy such State's proportion together with interest thereon" against the real property within that state.
Suppose California, for instance, at the close of the 1996 fiscal year, had to return to its own state with a bill for its apportioned share of the deficit and hand it to the governor. Who would have to get these funds from the state treasury or ask taxpayers to cough up more in state taxes?
The California state legislature and the citizens of the state no doubt wouldn't like it too much, since it would hit them directly in the pocketbook.
As ACRS founder John Kurowski puts it, "They would no longer be so eager to demand deficit-creating pork-barrel projects from Washington that ultimately would come out of their own state treasury and would create the burdensome chore of having to increase taxes within their state to pay for Congress' profligate spending."
One problem emerged, however: The qualified finalists did not meet the county's federally mandated affirmative action goal of reflecting the ethnic makeup of the community. So Ventura County dismissed all of the applicants and started over, in search of a more "diverse" pool of potential firefighters.
The New American, December 9, 1996