MATERIALISM VS PURPOSEFUL LIFE: TRUMP, BANNON, AND TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

There are still poisoned, prejudiced hearts that retain the hatred of people solely for their race or religion, but far fewer of them, and they are not in power — even under President-Elect Donald Trump. Bannon is no simple hater, but Breitbart’s tolerance for ugly commenters and attacks on political correctness can easily be seen by the paranoid as tarring both Bannon and Trump by association. Feeding this contamination theory of morality where failing to condemn the bad actors often enough makes you guilty by association suits the propagandists of the crony capitalist machine, which has gained nearly complete control of public education and the media in the West. The populist movements that have sprung up are indeed reactionary — reacting to the suppression of dissenting thought and speech. While some of the people supporting them are “deplorable,” the majority is not — and half the US voted for Mr. Trump despite all his flaws, wanting a change from the business-as-usual machine which systematically loots the middle class to support its credentialed nomenklatura and increases the fortunes of the financial industry and the 1% while pretending to care about income inequality.

What those voters want is an end to the condescension and being told what to do by people who think their education entitles them to direct the lives and even the simplest behavior (plastic shopping bag and lightbulb use, for example) of other less enlightened people. We now know from Wikileaks that Obama’s first cabinet was almost literally dictated by a Citibank employee, that Clinton campaign operatives hired people to disrupt Trump rallies then blamed Trump for inspiring violence, and that nearly all media broke journalistic ethics to try to elect Hillary Clinton after they had given Trump so much exposure that he won the Republican nomination. This story quoting a long-time New York Times editor gets at their behavior: the Times wrote to promote a narrative, selectively choosing facts to support it. Stories which did not support their desired narrative weren’t reported at all or were consigned to back pages.

The administrative state has malfunctioned and produced a bureaucracy that cannot build anything at a reasonable cost, or provide the best standard of healthcare for veterans or anyone else. There is little accountability, with even criminal and negligent employees shielded by government employee unions and Civil Service rules. The union of administrative state apparatchiks and the media elite has controlled what the people are allowed to see, but social media now reveal the lies and inconsistencies.

Which is the source of the anger that fed Breitbart’s growth. Citizens who strive to make a living for themselves and their families find themselves denigrated and blocked by bureaucrats. They want to see a return to rewards for the intelligent application of labor and an end to bailouts for losing bankers, subsidies for connected businessmen, and government-enforced monopolists charging too much and limiting their choices.

Donald Trump may end up being a terrible president. But what’s clear from the hysterical reaction to his victory is that the media-academic-bureaucratic forces will sacrifice their credibility to demonize him and try to erode his legitimacy even before he takes office. The new administration would be doing the citizens of the country a great favor if they help Congress take back much of the rule-making and enforcement authority delegated over the years to the executive branch agencies, staffed largely by partisans and entitled hacks. Reforms to Civil Service and government employee unions are necessary to reduce their corrupt and deadening influence on government productivity. Citizens are not getting their money’s worth and are getting tired of the agencies ruling against growth and business, which has created the stagnation that has half of our youth underemployed and the lowest rate of new business formation in post-Depression history. The return of accountability and popular control of government means some incompetent bureaucrats, teachers, and law enforcement personnel will have to find other things to do.

As for me, I retired from running a family office for a wealthy high-tech friend around 2003, when I realized none of the extra money I was making for his family by clever investment was going to do the world any good. Quite the opposite — his wife began donating large sums to causes like the National Resources Defense Counsel (NRDC), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and Democratic politicians. More than likely they gave a large sum to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Emily’s List. These organizations actively harm the people and the future of humanity through promotion of anti-free-market and anti-limited-government propaganda, and are staffed by lawyers living well by doing good, if good is defined as blocking other people’s projects and regulating some businesses to death while awarding others that support their agenda monopolies and subsidies. Because the core support for the Progressive bulldozer is elite, educated people who work in academia and government jobs, where business to be curbed and hindered. The ultimate conservative is the cloistered academic or bureaucrat, who sees danger in the freedom of others to act out of their control, and whose income is secure no matter how slowly the economy grows.

Trump’s ability to tap into the fears of those who feel marginalized is hardly unique to the United States.

The Globalist dislikes Trump intensely and thinks that what's been going on in terms of companies moving their factories offshore is great, they admit that it's not all beer and skittles in, for example, China.

While an unprecedented number of Chinese tourists have flocked overseas to shop at some of the world’s toniest stores and Chinese investors are key players in global markets, the divide between those who are accumulating wealth and those barely scraping by continues to widen rapidly.

The leadership in Beijing has actually emulated its big capitalist brother in Washington by essentially paying mere lip service to correcting the widening gap between those who have gained from globalization and those who are losing as a result.

It seems that China has a particularly virulent brand of Crony Capitalism. Of course it's easier to do when you don't have to disguise the cronyism because political opposition is not allowed. But if you don't give enough of the spoils to the peasants, pretty soon you won't have enough police and military to prevent a "preference cascade" for a different gang of rulers.

Jeff Immelt, Crony Capitalist

So Jeff Immelt gave megabucks to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was lobbying Algeria to give a multi-billion dollar contract to GE.

Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, asked Immelt at the Oklahoma City gathering: “While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton lobbied foreign governments on behalf of companies including General Electric at a time when those companies were making donations to the Clinton Foundation. In late 2012, for example, Clinton urged the Algerian government to award a power plant contract to GE. GE contributed to the Clinton Foundation. Then in 2013, Algeria awarded the power plant contract to GE. By donating to the Clinton Foundation while receiving a huge favor from the secretary of state … [was GE exposed] to the risk of being charged with honest services fraud?”

Danhof then asked Immelt if he would make public all of GE’s written communications with the State Department during that time frame. And Immelt’s reply?

No, he said, NCPPR reported.

“That’s not something we would do,” he said.

Danhof, in a written statement, expressed dissatisfaction with Immelt’s reply.

“There is no evidence that GE did anything wrong – but that’s the point, there is no evidence, period,” he said. “When one of the world’s most powerful companies teams with the secretary of state and the end result is a massive donation going one way and a multi-billion foreign contract coming back the other way, the company’s investors are right to ask questions. … It is disappointing to see Immelt put GE in the same boat as Mrs. Clinton in hiding the company’s communications from public view.”

Does anyone wonder why GE has been doing so poorly under a crony capitalist like Immelt?

“The company’s actions are really the focus here, not Mrs. Clinton’s,” he said, in his written statement. “Lobbyists have been imprisoned under honest services fraud for far less than the sum that changed hands between GE and the Clinton Foundation.”

The Wall Street Journal listed the GE donations to a health partnership with the Clinton Foundation between $500,000 and $1 million.

“Clinton’s subsequent actions helped GE obtain a contact with the Algerian government to supply turbines for six power plants to the tune of $1.9 billion,” he said.

Scott Walker's with the mainstream on immigration

Scott walker has come out as opposed to illegal immigration - which puts him at odds with Obama, the Far left and crony capitalists that like the low wages that a stream of illegals affords.  And he's for an a legal immigration policy  "

...that’s based, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages  ..."

The Liberal press fainted. The Republican establishment accused him of flip-flopping, but that's where the American people are and that's the most sensible immigration policy imaginable.  As an immigrant myself, I have the ultimate moral authority on this subject and all you non-immigrants can just sit down and shut up.

Scott Walker is right up there with Ted Cruz as my favorite Republican candidate for President.

Billionaire Trying to Force Costly Green Mandate on New York

Billionaire John Catsimatidis is working to slip a biofuel mandate that would add $150 million to New Yorkers’ heat expenses into the state budget just as a company he owns completes construction of the largest biofuel plant in the region.

Can you say "Crony Capitalism?"  Culture of Corruption?  Big, fat contributor to Democrats.

Advice to Republicans: run against plutocrats, crony capitalists and welfare chislers

The Democrats are now the party of the ultra-rich silicon valley billionaires, wealthy Hollywood fat cats, Al Sharpton and Al Sharpton wanna bees, and crony capitalists like GE's Jeff Immelt.  They have demonized the average American, labeling them "bitter clingers." 

Believing that a coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and college professors who disdain Americans, like Jonathan Gruber, constitute an electoral majority, they have become identified as the party of the  greedy rich, government power, welfare and contempt for working Americans. 

That leaves the real American majority ready to be scooped up by the Republican party if they only have the wit to see it.  They don't need, in fact they should shun, the people in the coalition that Obama built.   The other America gave Republicans an overwhelming vote in 2014.  The worst thing Republicans in office can do at this point is to turn it's back on them.  Because if they do, they will, like a jilted lover, find someone who wants them.  This is the point at which a third party can easily become a real possibility.  

How did Mark Warner become the second richest man in Congress?

Step 1: become a multimillionaire by selling cellular licenses that the government gave away for free.

• The FCC gave away licenses to people who wanted to provide cellular services to American consumers. The licenses were free, awarded by a lottery.
• Warner got rich by winning some licenses and going into the business of “flipping” winning licenses, much like some unscrupulous real estate speculators got rich, using other people’s money by “flipping” houses.
• The people who flip houses usually do some work to spruce up a house before selling it to a new owner. Mark Warner made his millions by pushing paper. Warner got rich at the expense of the taxpayers. The U.S. government had given away the radio spectrum for free, and now the winners were promptly flipping it for a huge profit. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass) said the lottery system was “abused by unqualified applicants whose sole objective was the trafficking of licenses” and said described the process by which Warner made his money as looking “ . . . more like ‘Let’s Make A Deal than a government-sanctioned procedure to allocate the radio spectrum.’” Former Representative Don Ritter (R-PA) said, “‘The speculator profits, the FCC plays Santa Claus and the taxpayer gets zip.’”
• Due To The Abuses, The Federal Communications Commission Changed Its Lottery Rules. “Rules now prohibit the kind of licensing-flipping that helped make Warner wealthy, requiring those awarded new licenses to operate a wireless service for a least a year before selling the license”
• But Mark Warner Violated Those Rules. And used his political connections to avoid the penalties.

Step 2: Buy a seat in the Senate.

Mark Warner, the face of crony capitalism.

GE: We Bring Bad Karma to Life

It turns out that GE, in bed with Obama from before the beginning of his disastrous administration, is suffering from the policies of the administration it cheered on.

General Electric is telling its investors that Obamacare is to blame for recent losses in the company’s health care division, The Daily Caller has learned.

It's noted that it's the stupid inconsistency of Team Obama that is leading to the current economic malaise, much as it did during FDR's "Great Depression."

The second under-discussed issue is what scholar Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty.” Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 had been so convincing that people believed he might do anything. FDR reinforced this suspicion with an inaugural address so aggressive that modern presidential advisers would never allow it on the teleprompter. Roosevelt told the nation he sought in government “an instrument of unimagined power.” That scared markets and small businesses.

Roosevelt relished hunting down big firms through regulatory action and blaming new sectors, such as utilities, for slowdowns — on some days. Other days, he invited business leaders into the Oval Office and talked about partnership and a “breathing spell.”

This inconsistency itself posed a problem. The diary of an Ohio lawyer named Daniel Roth, which was recently republished, captures the pervasive anxiety of the period. “We are having a bad steel strike in Youngstown and the mills have closed,” Roth wrote on June 22, 1937. “The state and federal governments seem to support the labor unions and there has been a complete breakdown of law and order. Business is very quiet.”

From the U.K., John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR that it was all right

to nationalize utilities or to leave them alone — but what, Keynes asked, was “the object of chasing the utilities around the lot every other week?””

This is what the Ruling Class and the Crony Capitalists think of you. Chamber CEO: U.S. Needs More Low-Skill Immigration Since Americans Are Not 'Qualified" or 'Willing' to Do Such Work

Half of U.S. Counties Haven’t Recovered From Recession

About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery,

Well, it is tough when Team Obama is working so hard to put a spoke in the wheels of the economy ... except for the part run by crony capitalists and Obama bundlers.

TARP Was Bad, but the Looming Obamacare Bailout for Corrupt Insurance Companies Could Be Worse

My doctor dislikes insurance companies and a few years ago dropped out of the system.  I never had a problem with them; they always paid what they said they would and I have had my share of claims.  But it seems that the industry decided to get behind ObamaCare ... with an eye toward getting a government bailout if things did not go well, and I understand why my doctor disliked health insurance. 

First big banks were the beneficiaries of Crony Capitalism, now it's Big Insurance.  Read the article by Dan Mitchell, then laugh at the cartoons.  

An example

Industry, not environmentalists, killed traditional bulbs

Say goodbye to the regular light bulb this New Year.

For more than a century, the traditional incandescent bulb was the symbol of American innovation. Starting Jan. 1, the famous bulb is illegal to manufacture in the U.S., and it has become a fitting symbol for the collusion of big business and big government.

The 2007 Energy Bill, a stew of regulations and subsidies, set mandatory efficiency standards for most light bulbs. Any bulbs that couldn't produce a given brightness at the specified energy input would be illegal. That meant the 25-cent bulbs most Americans used in nearly every socket of their home would be outlawed.

People often assume green regulations like this represent the triumph of environmental activists trying to save the plant. That’s rarely the case, and it wasn't here. Light bulb manufacturers whole-heartedly supported the efficiency standards. General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — the three companies that dominated the bulb industry — all backed the 2007 rule, while opposing proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescent technology (thus leaving the door open for high-efficiency incandescents).

This wasn't a case of an industry getting on board with an inevitable regulation in order to tweak it. The lighting industry was the main reason the legislation was moving. As the New York Times reported in 2011, “Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards.”

Competitive markets with low costs of entry have a characteristic that consumers love and businesses lament: very low profit margins. GE, Philips and Sylvania dominated the U.S. market in incandescents, but they couldn’t convert that dominance into price hikes. Because of light bulb’s low material and manufacturing costs, any big climb in prices would have invited new competitors to undercut the giants — and that new competitor would probably have won a distribution deal with Wal-Mart.

So, simply the threat of competition kept profit margins low on the traditional light bulb — that's the magic of capitalism. GE and Sylvania searched for higher profits by improving the bulb — think of the GE Soft White bulb. These companies, with their giant research budgets, made advances with halogen, LED and fluorescent technologies, and even high-efficiency incandescents. They sold these bulbs at a much higher prices — but they couldn’t get many customers to buy them for those high prices. That's the hard part about capitalism — consumers, not manufacturers, get to demand what something is worth.

Capitalism ruining their party, the bulb-makers turned to government. Philips teamed up with NRDC. GE leaned on its huge lobbying army — the largest in the nation — and soon they were able to ban the low-profit-margin bulbs.

Obama spends $600 million on rail projects that benefit private companies.

 

Billionaire  Warren Buffet & Barack Obama

Guess who owns a big part of America's railroads?

WASHINGTON — The railroad industry brags in its national publicity campaign that it spends billions of dollars improving its infrastructure “so taxpayers don’t have to.”
But the ads don’t tell everything. The nation’s freight rail network has been the quiet recipient of more than $600 million in federal investment during the Obama administration

Can you say "crony capitalism?"  I thought you could.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/12/02/210101/obama-spends-600-million-on-rail.html#storylink=cpy

Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website

 

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

From the Washington Examiner:

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

Culture of corruption meets crony capitalism.

Google Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk

Google has been buying jet fuel for it's fleet from the government at ultra-low government prices, enriching the founders while cheating the taxpayers.

Google Inc. GOOG -0.35% founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin may have to dig deeper to operate their fleet of private jets, after the U.S. Department of Defense ended a little-known arrangement that for years allowed the tech billionaires to travel on sharply discounted jet fuel bought from the Pentagon.

That's how crony capitalism works.

Fashionable Fascism

 

 

It may surprise you to learn that during the time the Nazis were in power there were over 3,600 German newspapers, over twice as many as there are currently in the US.  One of them, ‘Der Angriff’ (‘The Assault’), founded by Goebbels in 1927, had as its slogan: ‘For the Oppressed against the Oppressors’. Make that the name of your newspaper in any American campus or most major cities and you would have the Liberal intelligentsia clamoring to write for you. I mean, everyone who opposed your paper would be for the oppressors and against the oppressed. Oppose that and you would be classified as a class enemy and possibly a filthy Republican.

You may also be surprised to learn that elections for the German “Reichstag” (Parliament) were held in 1938, five years after Hitler took over, and that the Nazi ticket won with a 98% turnout and with 99% of the vote. Of course it helped that Hitler’s economic policies ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. “Infrastructure” projects were undertaken including the construction of Autobahns (roads and bridges) and the German government supported new industries, leading to the creation of the Volkswagen.   Objectively, that meant that the Nazi economic policies were better than the Obama administration's and Hitler's ability to pick winners and losers was better than Obama's.  Perhaps if Obama had done as well as Hitler - economically -  he would have gotten a larger majority of the vote in 2012.  But in the end, both won. 

 

There was also a major directional change in German foreign policy. The new Reich threw off the shackles of the failed policies of the past and forged a new direction that had the enthusiastic support of the German press and much of the German people.   The policy was wildly successful for a while but ran into a few problems; there were some "adjustments" that were made in the 1940s. 

 

Sound familiar?

 

Gail Collins - the Feminist columnist for the NY Times who’s conflicted about Filthy Filner because he’s a Democrat – decide to write about that part of the Republican party that is not wholly in love with America’s new direction. She is particularly upset with Rubio, Cruz and Paul.

 

And all three are currently in the news for their efforts to get Republicans to promise not to vote to fund the government this fall unless the president cancels Obamacare.

 

That fact that it’s not exactly true, they are simply against raising the debt ceiling without concessions from Obama, doesn’t stop Gail because she is working to illustrate a “higher truth;” that Republicans are nuts.

 

Rubio, Cruz and Paul weren’t the first senators to promote the shutdown idea. But they’re the ones with the national names, in a party that’s got a crush on crazy.

 

This is what passes for reasoned debate in what Rush Limbaugh refers to as the “State-Controlled Media.” In Nazi Germany those 3,600 newspapers were told how to slant the news but make no mistake, the editors of these papers were supporters of the regime. Goebbels was said to discuss that day’s story line to Berlin's editors and communicated it to others by telegram.  Gail Collins supports the regime and is on the NY Times payroll which - to no one's surprise - supports the regime.  They didn't have to be bullied because they are true believers. 

 

During in the Obama administration’s relations with the American press, influential members of the media created Journolist and communicated daily with top members of Obama’s staff to either promote Obama, to kill stories that were harmful to him or to attack his enemies. Today, if you write a column that’s disrespectful of the President, you get fired. The Obama staff is quick to pick up the phone and lay down the law with the “free” press, and the press salutes smartly and obeys.

 

I’m really not telling most people who are well read anything new. Jonah Goldberg wrote an entire book – Liberal Fascism – about the love affair between dictators and Liberals. As I mentioned above, the “State-Controlled Media” is a staple of the Rush Limbaugh program. Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) illustrates this regularly with his references to bad economic news always preceded by the word “unexpectedly.”

 

One other factor should be noted. The American culture with regard to religion has been turned upside-down in the last decade. A few years ago people who we admired could be described as a good husband, wife, worker, associate and even a good Christian. Today, we have people - like the commenter Silly Me on Slate - who would rather cut out their tongues than use the “N” word but have absolutely no problem telling anyone who is willing to listen that “Personally the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] gives me the creeps, but so does the religious right in the US.” While Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East, they are being mocked and ridiculed in the US. Use the “N” word and you get banned from many Internet sites, kick a Christian to the curb and you get a gold star and told how brave and daring you are. It’s so common, the press simply does not deign to notice … when it is not in agreement about the dangers to democracy from Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell and those damned Baptists.

 

Fashionable Fascism demand we have no other gods before the Almighty Government and Obama is his prophet. Anything else is idolatry ... or you're just nuts.

Is the Virginian Pilot going to demand Crony Capitalist and Tax Cheat Terry McAuliffe come clean?

Don't bet on it. He's their candidate and they will do everything they can to make any questions about his past, present and future go away. The Virginian Pilot and its billionaire owners embody the core beliefs of the Move-On group that told us that the Whitewater, Cattlegate and Lewinski scandals were irrelevant. OTOH, Romney's wealth was a scandal.

In short, based on the available evidence, Terry McAuliffe appears to have used Leaf Clean Energy as precisely the kind of perfectly legal tax shelter that he and his fellow Democrats routinely rail against as immoral and irresponsible. Until he releases his full tax returns, there is no way of knowing for sure.

McAuliffe is always promising the moon and delivering nada, nothing, zip. One example close to home is the Franklin pellet-manufacturing project in the abandoned International Paper factory. McAuliffe is using cut-outs on this project so that his name will not be associated with a project that's never gotten off the ground.

That project has engendered its own controversy in Isle of Wight County, as the pellet plant has failed to materialize more than three years after McAuliffe announced his bid for the site. I spoke this afternoon with Lisa Perry, director of the county’s Department of Economic Development, who assured me that the project is still active and answered “Yes” when asked whether McAuliffe was still personally involved (notwithstanding CMI’s removal of McAuliffe from its website). Perry also said, “This is a real project. We have approached it from the beginning as a real project. . . . I have complete confidence that it will continue.” Citing nondisclosure agreements, Perry could not furnish details about the current state of the undertaking; but she explained that “Being engaged with International Paper on this type of economic development project is overwhelmingly difficult,” and cited “just the fact that International Paper is engaged with this company at all” as evidence of seriousness on the part of McAuliffe and his consortium.

Oh, and the place where tax cheat McAuliffe has his headquarters?  Ugland House.  This is what McAuliffe's sponsor said about it.  Is McAuliffe a tax cheat?  You don't have to take my word for it; here's Barack Obama:

On the campaign, I used to talk about the outrage of a building in the Cayman Islands that had over 12,000 business — businesses claim this building as their headquarters. And I’ve said before, either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world. 

One more reason to make Ken Cuccinelli the next governor of Virginia.

This is what "Crony Capitalism" looks like: How Terry McAuliffe got rich

Example of information you will not find in the Virginian Pilot. 

Ten years ago, McAuliffe turned a $100K stock buy into $18M thanks to his relationship with the CEO of Internet firm Global Crossing. Shortly thereafter the company went bankrupt, the stock price collapsed and 10,000 employees lost their jobs.

This was not the only questionable deal he was associated with. But it was part of a pattern in his business life of using insider connections that made him very wealthy.

This was written in 2009, the first time McAuliffe had his eye on the State House.  Since then he has battened his bank account using his political connections at the top of the Democrat party money-raising pyramid.   

The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama

Via the Daily Beast

The Age of Obama, writes Lloyd Green, is mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family TV spots as modern iteration of bread and circuses.

In Barack Obama, America elected a chief executive whose Department of Justice has repeatedly targeted the press, whose Internal Revenue Service has gone gunning for conservatives, and whose government has elevated secrecy into a cardinal virtue. The Obama administration’s data grab is not just about national security, or Edward Snowden. It is also an epilogue befitting a candidate who delivered his 2008 convention acceptance speech in front of a temple façade dedicated to himself, and whose faith in government and the state is at the center of his presidency.

Forget Obama’s paeans to civil liberties. The Age of Obama is a celebration of ever-growing and ever-more intrusive government, with mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family daytime and late-night television appearances as the modern iterations of bread and circuses.

And what does Obama get in return for his push for big government? A government that loves him back. Unlike the financial, insurance and real-estate industries that have been fickle about him — showering him with hosannas and cash in 2008, while offering a relative trickle of support in 2012—Obama remains the living end for government workers.

IRS employees donated to Obama over Romney by a 4-to-1 margin, IRS attorneys favored Obama by 20-to-1, and government lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Education shut out the Romney campaign completely. The federal bureaucracy had effectively lined up against nearly half the country.

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary dissembles daily; the intelligence community appears incapable of delivering a complete and truthful answer to Congress, and IRS employees apparently enjoyed a giant tax payer funded party catered by Wolfgang Puck.

Given this totality, public distrust of Washington should come as no surprise.

For the record, spending $2.4 million on an Olympics-themed confab, complete with an open bar while America’s housing market was crashing, is not prudent. Using credit cards to buy bottles of wine and $140 dinners is not what we want from the IRS’s green-eyeshade brigade. Trust, what’s that?

Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"

NEERA TANDEN, PRESIDENT OF CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: If I were a conservative, I would just say, 'I won.' Okay? They have a centrist plan, there's competition.

JAMES POULOS, HUFFINGTON POST & FORBES : You have everything that's wrong with capitalism and everything that's wrong with big government. Big business and big government partnering together to create this hodgepodge of a thing --

TANDEN: Why is that a hodgepodge? Why do you keep saying these words like hodgepodge?

POULOS: Have you read the bill?

TANDEN: Yes. I helped write the bill. So yes, I read the bill. I read all 2,200 pages of the bill.