Author: admin

September, 2017, the North Korea foreign minister, speaking, for Kim Jong-un before the United Nations, declared to the world that a North Korean nuclear strike against a U.S. city is “inevitable.” Should we believe him?  Is it even possible?

Who should lead the investigation? If the issue is one of paramount national security and the safety of all Americans should the President be personally involved?  Of course, he should and that is exactly what President Trump did; he got up-close-and-personal with Kim.   

Nine months after the North Korean declaration at the UN, President Trump was able to set up the first one-on-one meeting in Singapore with Kim Jong-un June, 2018.  They met again in Hanoi Viet Nam, February, 2019. and a brief third meeting at the North/South Korea DMZ in June 2019.

Were the meetings the standard large conference table setting with the leaders faced off across the table and aides flanking each leader and all with an agenda sheet in front of them?  No, for the most part they met one-on-one for secret unrecorded talks. 

What would have been President Trump’s objective?  In a word, deterrence; respect for our capabilities and a belief that we would never initiate military action against North Korea but if they initiated military force we would immediately and totally destroy him and his country. It’s not called negotiation, it called MAD mutually assured destruction. It works. We survived decades of the Cold War faced off against the Soviet Union with each side believing in MAD.

For the most part, the Trump/Kim meetings were secret but one scenario might have gone something like this:  President Trump could have casually showed Kim a glossy 8×10 close-up color photo of Kim riding his big white horse at his vacation retreat at which time Trump would have looked him in the eye and said, we know where you are and how to reach out to you 24/7, now let’s chat about all of your missile and weapons testing and your plan to nuke one of my cities.  Deterrence is not bragging; it has to be real and the delivery has to be from someone the recipient believes and/or fears.  

2021: Predictably, with Trump on the way out, Kim needed to test the resolve of Biden with a full-court-press on missile testing. Various headlines and commentary over the past 12 months:

MISSILE TESTING:  What follows is a sampling of the headlines and commentary over the past year.

January 2021, just before President Biden took office: “North Korea unveiled a new submarine-launched ballistic missile at a military parade, calling it the world’s most powerful weapon”.

March 2021: “North Korea unveiled a new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).”

March 2021: “North Korea carried out a launch of a new-type tactical guided projectile which it said was able to carry a payload of 2.5 tons; in theory, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.”

May, 2021: “North Korea tests missile.”

September, 2021: “North Korea carried out tests of a new long-range cruise missile according to South Korea.  The missiles are meant for a “strategic role.”   

September 30, 2021, “North Korea fired a newly developed anti-aircraft missile.”

“The hypersonic missile tested September,2021, can travel at much faster speeds, and avoid radar detection for longer than ballistic missiles.”

January, 2022: “North Korea conducted more missile tests this month than all of 2021, an unprecedented pace of weapons testing.”

A senior Biden administration official: “North Korea tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile system in launches February 26 and March 4^th, 2022, a serious escalation.” 

March 8^th,2022: “North Korea says it conducted another important test of a spy satellite.” 

Kim has made it known that he is interested in developing satellite technology and experts believe he is using this as a guise in order to develop more advanced ICBM capability. 

“North Korea’s ICBM focus is the Hwasong-17, their biggest missile which could potentially fly 15,000 KM (9,320 miles), far enough to strike anywhere in the U.S.”  “It could carry a larger payload, potentially including multiple warheads.”

NUCLEAR TESTS:

June 20, 2021: “North Korea has been restoring demolished tunnels at its only known nuclear test site in the country’s northeast, South Korea’s military announced on Friday, in the latest indication that Pyongyang may be preparing for a future underground nuclear weapons test.”

The UN reported in 2021: “On the basis of satellite imagery, it appeared North Korea had restarted the Yongbyon reactor, thought to be its main source of weapons-grade plutonium.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency: “The nuclear program is going full steam ahead with work on plutonium separation, uranium enrichment and other activities.”

Wikipedia: “North Korea has a military nuclear weapons program and, as of early 2020, is estimated to have an arsenal of approximately 30 to 40 nuclear weapons and sufficient production of fissile material for six to seven nuclear weapons per year.  North Korea has also stockpiled a significant quantity of chemical and biological weapons.  In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

U.S. RESPONSE TO ALL OF THIS:

“The U.S. Pacific Command in a statement condemned the launch and called on North Korea to refrain from further destabilizing acts.” 

When asked if President Biden would sit down with Mr. Kim, the White House response was, “That is not his intention.” 

BACKGROUND:

Everything about North Korea’s history that is relevant today has happened since 1948 under the Kim dynasty:  In 1948 the Korean Peninsula was divided between a Soviet-backed government in the North and an American-backed government in the South. War broke out along the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. Two days later, the United States officially entered the Korean War and U.S. forces have been stationed in the Republic of Korea for the past 72 years.

The Kim dynasty:  Kim Il-sung, 1912-1994, came to power in the North in 1948 after the end of the Japanese rule in 1945.  Kim Il-sung started the Korean War in 1950 in a failed attempt to reunify the Korean Peninsula. 

Kim Il-sung ruled with a Stalinist hard-fisted manner until his death in 1994.  His son Kim Jong-Il, 1941-2011, continued the torturous Kim-regime until his death in 2011 wherein more authoritarian rule by Kim Jong-un, born 1984, began.

The first take-away from the above three background paragraphs is that North Korea, with the Kim dynasty, has for 72 years viewed the United States as its enemy.

Secondly, the background begs the following questions:  Did Kim Il-sung create North Korea’s nuclear program as a way to reach out to his long-time enemy, the United States?  Has Kim Jong-un picked up the baton and created methods for delivery of nuclear weapons to the United States via ICBMs and/or Submarine-launched missiles?

What does Kim Jong-un have to fear?  Will his big neighbors China and Russia invade?  No, neither need a small, starving, strategically insignificant nation to take care of. Will Japan again invade the Korean Peninsula? No.  Will the U.S. invade North Korea without provocation?  No.

Understandably, North Korea feels the need for a strong defense against South Korea who admittedly would like to reunify Korea. To that end, does North Korea need to starve millions of their people in order to join the list of the world’s nuclear powers? No. 

So, what motivates Kim Jong-un?  Is he simply dutifully completing the scenario envisioned by his grandfather and father to finally defeat the United States? It is important to remember that the Korean War is not “over.”

In 1953 there was a cease fire followed by a signed armistice separating North and South Korea by a Demilitarized Zone which has resulted in the absence of armed conflict on the peninsula for the past 69 years.  In retrospect, there are those who would say the U.S. should have taken the fight to the North, defeated them and ended up with a unified Korea.  On the other hand, Communist China entered the war on behalf of Kim Il-sung in late 1951 with hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops augmenting the North Korean army, there-by changing the dynamic of the fight in two ways.  First, the Chinese had an almost unlimited number of soldiers they could commit to the ground combat and secondly, the Chinese entry into the conflict created an open border with North Korea that the U.S. was unwilling or perhaps unable to close without starting World War III.  The Korean “War” is not over; does Kim Jong-un simply see this as unfinished business?

Is Kim Jong-un crazy?  Dr. S.D. Norrholm, Wayne State University, sees Kim Jong-un aligned psychologically with the likes of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot.  He writes, “Kim sees himself as a very special person, deserving of admiration and, consequently, has difficulty empathizing with the feelings and needs of others.  He tends to show a pervasive pattern of grandiosity and is likely to behave with a vindictiveness observed in narcissistic personality disorder.”

Would this disorder account for the fact that Kim Jong-un is believed to have orchestrated the assassination, in 2017, of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam; the eldest son of their father, Kim Jong-il?  Additionally, it is widely reported, but unconfirmed, that in 2014, Kim Jong–un executed his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, the number two official in North Korea, and five of his closest aides by throwing them into a cage with 120 starving dogs. 

Kim Jong-un’s leadership style is vindictive and void of empathy, some examples: 

Of the five and one half million children, ages 1-14, an estimated 80%, 4.4 million, will be stunted due to malnutrition and lack of adequate health care.  Plus, the U.S. State Department reported in 2020 that North Korea forces minors to perform, “the worst forms of child labor. Many aged 16 and 17 are enrolled in military-style youth construction brigades for 10-year periods suffering physical and psychological injuries, malnutrition, and exhaustion.

The North Korean deputy ambassador to London, who defected to South Korea in 2016 testified that, “North Korea is a huge slave society ruled by the Kim family.”

Just like the concentration camps during WW II, Kim Jong-un continuously sends political prisoners to the six camps around the country with an estimated 200,000 imprisoned, never to be released, inmates.  All are subjected to 14-hour work days under horrible conditions and a starvation diet. It is believed that over 400,000 have died in these gulags.  

Kim Il-song’s dictatorship, 1948-1994 is noteworthy by his hatred for the U.S. and the belief that the U.S. would attack North Korea and force reunification.  By the early 1990’s experts say North Korea believed nuclear weapons would be the only way to one-up the U.S. Is it that conclusion that is driving Kim Jong-un’s development of nuclear delivery systems?

During a news conference, in response to a question concerning North Korea’s unprecedented missile testing schedule, Biden said, “We are consulting with our allies and partners and there will be responses if they choose to escalate, we will respond accordingly.” Well, Mr. President, if what they have been doing the past 12 months is not escalation, what is?  Do they have to nuke one of our cities to get your attention?

Kim is the leader of a small, poor, relatively insignificant country but he wants to be viewed as a player on the world stage.  He probably has Putin and Xi Jinping on his speed dial.  President Trump traveled across the Pacific three times to meet with Kim. No matter the sobering news that President Trump delivered, in his mind Kim probably saw it as a major achievement. He became headline news around the world; what better way to feed his ego.

By the way, if the missile and nuclear testing are not enough of a threat, UN experts have reported that, “North Korea has developed increasingly sophisticated hacking capabilities.”

CONCLUSIONS:

Kim’s accelerated testing of weapons of mass destruction is alarming.  We have already been warned in a most dramatic way when the North Korean foreign minister declared to the world that a nuclear strike against a U.S. city is “inevitable.” What is it about the word “inevitable” that the Biden administration does not understand when it is backed up with aggressive North Korean missile and nuclear activities over the past year? 

Kim does not have to run for reelection, time is on his side; the Trump deterrent actions were just a temporary speed bump.  Kim is moving forward with intent to do something. We better figure out what he sees as the end-state, now!

Biden is unable or at least unwilling to talk about our existing critical and difficult national security issues; an open border, record deaths from massive illegal drugs smuggled into the U.S., rampant lawlessness, forfeiture of energy independence. Given the potential outcome of a North Korean strike on the U.S., dealing with Kim Jong-un should be a priority national security issue.  

The vulnerability meter has about pegged out for the U.S. over the last year.  Our enemies, China, Russia, Iran, global terrorism and North Korea were all watching carefully as the Biden Administration stumbled through the pathetic Afghanistan withdrawal debacle.  They have concluded that Biden, and by extension the U.S. as a whole, is weak.  China has conducted threatening air and naval demonstrations towards Taiwan, Putin invades Ukraine, within the past month Iran fires rockets into the U.S. Army base in Erbil and our embassy in Iraq, our country may be loaded with terrorist cells who walked across our open border.  Our deterrence is gone, our enemies no longer respect or fear us and are all acting out recklessly.

Kim’s legacy will never be about becoming an economic powerhouse like South Korea, a voice of reason in international affairs, a valued ally, a benevolent nation, intellectual accomplishments or inventions.  He has one shot at making history and that is to finish what his father and grandfather envisioned, destruction of their arch enemy, the United States.

If Biden does act, it will begin with his standard statements about diplomacy this and diplomacy that and in the process accomplish nothing.  There comes a time when “diplomacy” is an in-your-face meeting between two leaders. But because of Biden’s perceived weakness, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The Biden administration has attempted to conduct talks with North Korea but those efforts have been rebuffed.” Kim is in charge.

The title of this article, BIDEN’S NEXT CRISIS, does not have to come true.  When faced with a serious problem there is always a choice, be proactive or do nothing. Ultimately, without taking proactive steps a leader will end up being reactive.  In that state you are starting out behind the power-curve, trying to push the noodle up hill.  While reacting you have forfeited any advantages you might have otherwise had.

Biden has clearly demonstrated that he and his administration are incapable of recognizing looming national security issues while being singularly focused on COVID and masking policy. For example, last summer dismissing inflation as just a temporary economic bump in the road, having no concept of the geopolitical and strategic importance of giving away our energy independence, claiming the Afghanistan withdrawal was an “extraordinary success,” alienating our Middle East allies with a knee-jerk decision to take Yemen’s Houthi terrorists off the terrorist list and cancel military sales to Saudi Arabia, impowering Iran economically enabling them to better support world terrorism, ignoring our long-time Middle East ally, Israel, embarrassing the U.S. by begging the Middle East to increase oil production, and ending up buying from the likes of Russia and Venezuela.   It is an unprecedented list of failures in one year, with long-tern national security ramifications.  This summary of failures only serves to demonstrate the potential ramifications of also not focusing on North Korea as they ramp up their strategic offensive capabilities.     

RECOMMENDATION: Take these three actions,

ONE: Make sure this message is delivered to Kim Jong-un.

Date:  April xx, 2022

To:  Kim Jong-un

Subject:  Proposed Meeting

September, 2017, your foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, speaking before the United Nations, declared to the world that a North Korean nuclear strike against a U.S. city is “inevitable.”  Given your accelerated missile, submarine and nuclear testing schedule over the past 12 months, we have no alternative but to conclude that your foreign minister’s statement clearly articulates your intensions.

I will arrive in South Korea on April xx, 2022, and intend to meet with you the following day at the North/South Korea Demilitarized Zone facility to discuss the relationship between our two nations from that day forward. 

I you decline to attend, we are prepared to immediately implement a sanction that will completely shut down your economy.  At that time, I will inform you of a second opportunity for the two of us to meet. Your failure to comply a second time will have left us with only one alternative and that will be a massive preemptive strike to destroy all of your strategic offensive capabilities; missiles, launch facilities and naval forces. 

President Biden.

Mr. President, your intent at that meeting is to depart with an assurance that the two of you have reached a clear understanding of MAD, mutual assured destruction.  MAD is a proven concept that got the free world safely through the decades of the Cold War with the Soviet Union).

TWO: Tell Commander in Chief, Pacific Region, to begin planning for a naval blockade of all shipping in and out of North Korean ports and be prepared to keep it in-force until all North Korean missiles, submarines and launch facilities have been shut down and disassembled.  Shipping is the life-blood for North Korea and they could be severely crippled in a few weeks time. Additionally, begin planning for the preemptive strike.

THREE:  Address the American people on this subject using the above narrative as an outline for the speechwriters. Why?  I suspect 99.99% of Americans do not know about the “inevitable nuclear strike” threat and 90% have not tuned in to North Korea’s strategic-strike buildup over the past year.  Declassify and release to the media satellite imagery of Kim’s preparations. 

Final thought:  North Korea will be BIDENS NEXT CRISIS if the president does not get proactive and act.  But, unlike all the other critical issues and self-inflicted wounds he has imposed on to the American people, this one could be a complete game-changer if he fails to get ahead of the crisis.  

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

Suppression: “The act of curtailing or prohibiting an activity”, in this case the act of voting.

1. Sanctity of lawful, free elections is a corner stone of this nation.  It is one of the principal elements that separates us from the likes of corrupt banana republics.

Surveys tell us that over half of all Americans have lost confidence in our election system and rightfully so. We can easily fix it.

2. “Republican voter suppression” has become a central theme of the Democrat Party platform. It is one of those lies that if used often enough by enough people day-in-and-day-out over a prolonged period of time, many will conclude, well it must be true. Voter suppression accusations are sad, frustrating, unintelligent outright disgusting and harmful to the nation.

The election is only about eight months away.  The Republican National Committee needs to issue a powerful counter argument to the Democrat lies about voter suppression

3. Background:  Take off your rose collared glasses; election fraud does exist. The whole system needs an overhaul.  Here are the top ten reasons why.

a. Voter registration:  Across America the states’ voter registration rolls are terribly maintained and highly inaccurate. For example, Judicial Watch brought suit (and won) against Los Angeles County forcing them in 2019 to begin cleaning up the 1.5 million ineligible voters on their rolls. 

b. Voter registration fraud: This involves filling out and submitting a voter registration card for a fictional person, or filling out a voter registration card with the name of a real person but without that person’s consent and forging his or her signature on the card.

c. Ballot stuffing: A means of casting illegal votes or submitting more than one ballot per voter.

d. Voter impersonation:  This occurs when a person claims to be someone else when casting a vote.

e. Fraud by election officials:  This happens when ballots are manipulated by officials administering the election, such as tossing out ballots.

f. Chain of custody:  In so many ways voters lose control of their ballot; ballot harvesting being a prime example.

g. Chaotic behind-the-scenes ballot counting.  During every election we see videos of counting rooms with large numbers of election workers milling around and tables stacked with hundreds or thousands of ballots.

h. Voter apathy: A disgusting reality is that voter apathy is rampant.  In the 2016 election an estimated 100 million eligible voters did not vote; in the 2020 election a record number of Americans voted but still an estimated 80 million did not.

i. Elections in one day?  Why are we so stupid as to believe one of the most important functions of our cherished republic has to be a hurry-up affair during one work-day?  

j. Celebrate voter rite-of-passage:  When a high school senior celebrates their 18^th birthday, the celebration should include more than a birthday cake.

There is one easy fix for all of this, back to that in a moment.

4. What the Democrats want is to follow the lead of the New York City Council which passed an ordinance allowing over 800,000 noncitizens to vote in city elections, declaring, “New York City must be seen as a shining example for other progressive cities to follow.”  On a larger scale, what the Democrats won’t say but what they want is blanket amnesty for tens of millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. and thereby giving them the right to vote. In this session of Congress, the House passed HR1 election reform which will allow same-day voter registration without Voter ID and expands mail-in voting in a massive 800-page law.  Fortunately, the Senate did not take up this legislation.  What the Democrats do not want is Voter ID.

5. Precedent for personal IDs:  In 2005 Congress passed the Real ID Act establishing minimum security standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards.  Implantation was to have been October, 2020 but has been Covid-extended to 2023. Under the law applicants applying for a Real ID must prove their birth date, birthplace, citizenship, legal status, Social Security number and residence documentation.  Without a Real ID, we will be denied access to TSA at any airport. The point to be made here is this; is there a movement by the Democrats to oppose the Real ID law?  Have you heard one single dissenting voice in the Democrat-supported main-stream media concerning the Real ID requirement?  No, you haven’t because there is no opposition.

Stop reading for just a moment and ask yourself this question; do I know any adult U.S. citizen who does not have a valid ID……..  I thought so, you can’t think of one, neither can I.  So, when Voter ID becomes an actual Republican proposal, Voter ID becomes part of the Democrats’ description of racist voter suppression. It makes absolutely no sense but, as previously pointed out, Republican voter suppression, no matter how illogical the argument, will become an important part of the Democrat 2022/2024 campaigns. 

6. President Biden has been asking, in a sneering way, “What are Republicans for?”  Easy answer, Republicans are for Voter ID and the Democrats are against it.  Republicans are more interested in free and lawful elections while Democrats see advantages in the current chaotic system.

A Voter ID Card system will solve the ten election problems outlined above in para 3a-j and it will be self-policing.

7. A proposed Voter ID law:

a.The intent of a Voter ID Card law is to positively identify a voter at a voting site with a current photo, a valid state Voter ID number, current address and a history of voter activity. Under this federal law everyone who is eligible to vote must have a Voter ID Card in order to perform in-person voting or to apply for an absentee ballot, the only two voting methods that would be authorized. 

b. The Voter ID Card will be obtained from a state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) facility and it will expire simultaneously with the expiration of a driver’s license. Both can be renewed at the same time. 

The Voter ID Card will be the same size and quality as today’s Real ID. the Voter ID Card will present a photo, full name, date of birth, address, sex, eye color, height, hair color, expiration date and, most importantly, an individual Voter ID 10-digit number beginning with the two-letter state abbreviation such as NC-456-789-3322. 

In order to obtain a Voter ID Card, you must be 18 years of age and present the following documents: a valid passport or birth certificate proving identity and date of birth.  One document confirming full name and social security number. Two documents with a current physical address proving state residency. Those who are physically unable to travel to a DMV processing site may sign a sworn affidavit requesting that another person assist in obtaining a Voter ID Card for that person.

The state DMV will immediately provide the state election headquarters with all Voter ID Card data.  Important point here:  that list will become the states’ voter registration roll. This prevents voter registration fraud (para 3b).

c. When a voter presents their Voter ID Card at the voting site, the administrative assistant will swipe the Voter ID Card and ascertain if that particular Voter ID Card number has already been used during the current election period.  if not, the assistant will print out an individual ballot which has the voter’s full name, address and Voter ID Card number printed on the ballot.  In the presence of the voting assistant, the voter will sign the ballot acknowledging that the data is correct.  Fraudulently signing a ballot will be a federal offense. With Voter ID Cards, every ballot instantly becomes individualized with the voter’s name and number.  This prevents ballot stuffing (para 3c), voter impersonation (para 3d) and fraud by election officials (para 3e). 

Once the voter has filled out the ballot and it has been “read” by the vote-tabulating machine, any subsequent ballots presented with that Voter ID number will be automatically rejected.  Additionally, any ballot presented without or with a fraudulent ID number will be rejected.

d. Across America the states’ voter registration rolls are terribly maintained and highly inaccurate. the Voter ID Card system will solve those problems and be self-policing.  That is, when a Voter ID Card hits the expiration date the software will automatically delete that Voter ID name and number from the system.  Furthermore, when a voter gets a new card or renews an expired one, the system will automatically add the voter to the registration rolls.  The result will be that we will no longer have dead people “voting” or 1.5 million ineligible voters registered to vote in LA County. Another method of voter fraud struck down. 

e. Voter apathy is rampant.  in the 2016 election an estimated 100 million eligible voters did not vote.  in the 2020 election a record number of Americans voted but still an estimated 80 million did not.  There are two simple actions that can assist in solving this problem. 

Rite-of-passage.  When a teen turns 16, in most states this authorizes them to get a driver’s license.  This is an important milestone; more freedom, more flexibility, more responsibility and being viewed as a young adult.  We can and should do more to celebrate the rite-of-passage at age 18, to become an active participant in one of America’s foundational rights, the right to vote. Since most teens reach age 18 while in their senior high school year, schools could and should do more to recognize this.

Secondly, election day is on a work day.  Many citizens just cannot get away from work to vote or use that as an excuse to stay away.  To exacerbate this, election day is only one day with long waiting lines or perhaps bad weather.  There is an easy fix, make the election a weekend happening.  The Constitution gives the States and Congress the authority to set the time and place of elections.  Begin voting on the first Saturday in November, 8-5 o’clock? Continue on Sunday, 11-5.  The majority of votes do not work on weekends. Top this off with a national election-day holiday every even numbered year. Give everyone ample opportunity to participate, eliminate long waiting lines, and take away most apathetic folk’s lame excuse for not voting. 

8. The Democrat view of elections:  Having passed H.R.1, The Peoples Act, in the House, January, 2021, the Democrats in the Senate pushed hard, but fortunately failed, to pass S.1, to federalize elections. That 800-page bill would, in fact, have enhanced the possibilities of election fraud. For example, states would have been forced to allow ballot harvesting, it would have gutted commonsense state voter ID laws in 36 states and would have mandated automatic voter registration on short notice, thus allowing some illegal immigrants to vote.

Here is a snapshot of Democrat’s vision of election reform.  In preparation for the 2020 election, California election officials mailed a blank ballot to every registered voter.  Keep in mind that the previous year LA County alone had been ordered by a federal judge to clean up 1.5 million ineligible voters on their voter registration rolls.  No wonder they prefer the status quo.  Chain of custody??

9. Democrats are completely off track on election reform.  This was confirmed by a July, 2021 poll conducted by the Republican National Committee with 800 registered voters (31% Democrats, 29% Republicans, 31% Independents). 

-80% agree Voter ID is a key security measure.

-87% were against ballot harvesting.

-77% rejected the Democrat claim that Voter ID is racist.

-78% agreed with voter signature verification and chain of custody controls.

– 89% agreed that voter rolls need to be cleaned up.

-88% believe states should not send mail-in ballots to the general public and non-citizens.

10. Don’t lose sight of the larger issue here; while this simple fix, Voter ID Cards, solves all of the current election fraud issues and more importantly renews confidence in the voting system with the American public, Voter ID is what the Democrats call racist voter suppression. 

Republican voter suppression is the big Democrat lie for the 2022/2024 elections. But, in the absence of anything positive to run on they will spend time, effort and tens of millions of dollars to convince voters the current system is without fault and need not be fixed.

11. Every Republican candidate at the local, state and federal level needs a short list of positive talking points explaining why the election process needs an overhaul and why Voter ID Cards are an easy and comprehensive fix. We should not be in a position of questioning, every two years, the integrity of one of our most basic rights.  The Democrats are completely out of step on this issue to the extent that they appear to want the current compromised election processes to continue.  They need to be exposed on voter suppression right now. The RNC needs to lead the way by providing talking points to every county Republican Chairperson with instructions to get them into the hands of every local, state and federal Republican candidate immediately.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com

Background:  In 1956, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev said of the U.S., “We will bury you.”  It was not an idol comment as the USSR was gaining strength and successfully spreading socialism and communism around the world.

The intensity of the rhetoric built until 1962 when Khrushchev threatened to station nuclear weapons in Cuba, 90 miles from our shores, thereby bringing the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust. It was a tense standoff as the threat of nuclear war was on everyone’s mind until Khrushchev backed away.  

In 1965, as the U.S. and USSR continued building arsenals of thousands of nuclear weapons, Secretary of Defense McNamara proposed that the guarantee of mutual annihilation could serve as an effective deterrent to both parties and that the goal of maintaining destructive parity should guide U.S. defense decisions.  From that, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction took hold.  MAD is the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both attacker and defender would be annihilated.  Deterrence for the next 25 years worked and the USSR dissolved in 1991.

There is great wisdom in the MAD concept. Could it work today in a different setting?

This week Putin gave the order for massive Russian forces to invade Ukraine.  While doing so he also issued a warning to the world that interference in his, “Special military operation” would be met with, “Consequences never encountered in your history.” Make no mistake, he was figuratively pointing a finger directly at the U.S. and our proposed sanctions.  

In May of 2021 it is believed the Russians conducted a proof-of-concept limited cyber-attack on the U.S. when they shut down the Colonial Pipeline and caused gas shortages for half the East Coast.   

When President Biden met with Putin a month later, Biden brought up the cyberattack issue and presented Putin with a list of 16 critical infrastructure “entities” that must be “off-limits”

Fast forward to today and ask the question, are debilitating economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. considered “interference” in Putin’s invasion?  Given Putin’s warning, “Consequences never encountered in your history,’ what should President Biden do? Given the gravity of the situation, doing nothing does not appear to be a viable option.

President Biden should pick up the phone, call Putin today and tell him the following: 

President Putin, as I explained in our meeting last June, we are certain beyond a doubt that your people conducted the cyberattack on our pipeline the previous month.  At that time, I provided you with a list of critical entities that are off-limits to cyber warfare.  I am calling today to expand that list and inform you that any cyberattack on any entity is absolutely unacceptable. 

My intelligence people have given me a clear picture of your offensive cyberwarfare capabilities and I want to assure you that our capabilities, in the event of a necessary counter attack, are significantly more sophisticated and can be delivered on a massive scale. 

The leaders of the world believe your invasion of Ukraine is gross violation of international law and we collectively, are imposing sanctions as a penalty for your actions and to encourage you to cease operations immediately.  Your warning to the world that, ‘Interference would be met with Consequences never encountered in your history’ is highly threatening rhetoric. 

If a cyberattack occurs against the U.S. you are hereby informed that, unless another country or group takes credit for the actions, we will assume the attack came from you and our immediate and massive counter-attack will bring down your country.

Additionally, there are other countries that have publicly stated their desire to destroy us, namely Iraq and North Korea.  If you have contact with those countries, I would advise you to make sure they do not conduct a cyberattack on the U.S. causing us, in the absence of knowing otherwise, to blame you for the incursion and launch our counterattack.

President Putin, make no mistake, this is not a threat; this is a promise.  My number one priority as president of the Unites States is the safety and security of our people and I will take any actions against an aggressor to successfully fulfill my responsibilities in that regard.  This subject is neither up for further discussion nor negotiation, consider yourself fully informed of my position and intent on this subject.  End of phone conversation.

Why should President Biden have that discussion with Putin today?  Because to just hope (hope is not a process) a cyberattack by this psycho won’t happen places the U.S. in an unacceptably high-risk status.   

Does our military have a counter offensive cyber warfare capability?  I assume so.  If so, is it as sophisticated and massive as asserted above?  I don’t know the answer and it doesn’t matter.  Granted, creating a false narrative about our capability won’t make it real but it may instantaneously create a Cyber MAD scenario, which is the bottom line and critical at this point in time.

President Biden said in his Thursday address to the nation that we will “wait and see what happens” before considering additional sanctions.  Mr. President, waiting and doing nothing at this juncture could be catastrophic.

Putin believes he has nothing to lose by attacking us as he is already viewed by the world as pariah and this will fulfill his life-long desire to punish his nemesis, the United States. Mr. President, making that phone call does not need consensus with our allies nor does it need Congressional wrangling. Executing the the phone call should be highly classified, limited access, need-to-know only for the VP, National Security Advisor, Sec Def and Sec State.  You have everything to gain (save the nation) or everything to lose (the potential for a nation destroyed).  It is a no-to-low-risk phone call, just make it happen. 

Mr. president, here is one good reason to make the call.  There are thirty substations in the U.S. that play a critical role in the nation’s electric grid operations. A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report says, “Destroy nine interconnection substations and the entire United States grid could be down for at least 18 months, probably longer,” Experts say such an attack would be “irrecoverable.”  How do we pump water to 330 million people every day without electricity?  Tens of millions would die.

Mr. President, Mutually Assured Destruction is a proven concept.  Implementation costs are five minutes of you time on the phone.  MAD is a deterrent and deterrence is nothing more than creating fear in the mind of an adversary that a first strike option has unacceptable risk.

Note to readers:  Some of you are probably capable of communicating directly with the president or VP or National Security Advisor or Sec Def or Sec State.  If so, please advise them of this recommendation immediately. We have too much to lose.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

CAMPAIGN FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM

1. Facts bearing on the problem:

Twenty-five million is probably a low estimate of the number of illegal aliens in the United States now.

In 2021, 1.9 million illegals crossed the border and checked in with Border Patrol Agents; tens of thousands were unaccompanied children who are being housed in facilities, some of which are at 800% capacity.   That’s 5,200 illegals per day that we know of, an estimated 20%, 1000 per day, were sick; aka Covid carriers.

In 2021, illegals crossed into the U.S. from at least 54 nations. 

The real taxpayer cost to support Biden’s illegal immigration is undisclosed but $3 billion in 2021 is a starting figure. 

While the agents were overwhelmed with those 5,200 illegals per day who checked in with the agents, Border Patrol knows the 1.9 million illegal crossings in 2021 does not include the tens of thousands of criminals, MS13 gang members, drug dealers, human smugglers and terrorists.

Also, while the Border Patrol Agents were overwhelmed processing families and chasing “runners”, tons of fentanyl, marijuana and cocaine was smuggled across, killing over 100,000 Americans in 2021. 

Branden Judd, National Border Patrol Council President, in a Fox News interview 8 February, made four important points you will not hear about on main-stream-media: 1) “During January, 2022, 2,206 pounds of fentanyl was seized on the southern border”.

2) “If we seize 5% of the drugs crossing the border, we are very lucky.” 

3) “90% of our Border Patrol resources are performing administration duties.”

 4) “For example, in a 150-mile crossing area we have only four agents on patrol.”

2. The Biden administration’s unspoken/unwritten policy on immigration is pure and simple open borders. While it is a huge and growing national security issue, and an embarrassment in the eyes of the rest of the world, it is, first and foremost, the most despicable deliberate national program any president has led in modern U.S. history.  It is the epitome of the democrat programs to develop and nurture an identity group, enable them with disincentivized federal cradle-to-grave entitlements and in doing so develop a solid recurring voting bloc. 

Biden-the-unifier conveniently overlooks the fact that two thirds of Americans disagree with his immigration policy.  Biden won’t talk about it and his immigration czar is busy looking for the “root causes” of the caravans coming out of southern Central American countries.  Madam Vice President, let me give you a little help; anyone with two brain cells to rub together recognizes the root cause is rampant crime, corruption at every level and endemic poverty.  You have recently been emphatic about the need to get out of Washington. Well, how about spending some time in the Rio Grande area and perhaps get inside one of the unaccompanied-minor housing facilities that is at 800% of capacity and then look for the root causes of that mess.  

3. End State.  If the Republican Party was to brain-storm a possible 2022/2024 campaign plan to clean up the illegal immigration mess, what would we be looking for? It might look something like this:

Institute a policy that will shut down the mases of illegals crossing our borders, forever.

Free up the Border Patrol agents to fulfill their intended mission; catch illegals and stop the flow of drugs and human trafficking.

Create a path to citizenship for the hard-working, law-abiding illegals already in the U.S.

Provide a clear distinction for illegals that ICE should locate, arrest and deport.

Do all this with a program that pays for itself.

4. Looks good on paper, but is it doable?  Absolutely, yes, it is. Here is the program outline and possible timetable:

November, 2022: Republicans win majority in the House and Senate.

January/February 2023:  Hold hearing and pass a 10–20-page law that will accomplish the campaign goals in paragraph 3.  To do so the Congress may have to override a Biden veto.  If a veto-override fails, this program should then become a high-priority 2024 presidential campaign issue. 

5. Phase one, Spring, 2023, The Immigration Reform Act (IRA) should:

Require every state to set up Illegal-Immigrant-Card (IICard) processing sites.  The logical solution is to add positions to each existing DMV office.

Additionally, in Phase One, every law enforcement agency in the United States will forward information to the FBI on every felony committed by an undocumented inhabitant (who, what, when and where).  The FBI will establish and maintain a national database of these cases which allows for an immediate check against an application for an IICard.

6. Phase Two, 1 July thru 31 December, 2023:  Every undocumented inhabitant in the U.S. will be invited to report to an IICard registration site in the state where they reside in accordance with a published alphabetical schedule (last name beginning in A, B, C, or D report during July, 2021, etc.).  the DMV will check into the FBI felony data base and if the applicant has a felony conviction, that person will be taken into custody, deported and will NEVER be eligible for an IICard.  This is an example of the specificity of the language that must be in the IRC; one strike and out. 

At this point you, the reader, are thinking something like, invite the illegals to report to the DMV, are you out of your mind?  Please stay with me, they absolutely will report to the DMV. 

Prior to appearing at the IICard registration site, each applicant must download a Federal Form, Employer’s Statement of Employment, fill it out and have it signed by their employer. No employer signature, no IICard.  The form must contain a statement of strong penalties for any employer signing a false statement.  Registration fee for the IICard is $50 per year which is the first step in fulfilling the objective of immigration reform without taxpayer dollars.  

The IICard will have a number for each individual; for example, if issued in North Carolina the identification number will be NC123-45-678. The card will include a photo, height, weight, hair color, issue date and termination date.  

Also, during Phase Two, the IRS will establish a National Registry of Card numbers. Every card issued by the state DMV will automatically be updated on the IRS registry.

When Phase Two ends it will never have to be repeated because every illegal immigrant in the U.S., on 31 December, 2023 will be either a legal holder of an IICard or they are deportable.  That is, on 1 January, 2024 we will know how many employed illegal aliens there are, where they live, where they work, what they do and how many direct family (spouse and children) members they have.  The remaining non-IICard holders need to be located and deported.   

7. Phase Three, 1 January, 2024:  This is the phase that begins to change behavior and thereby solve the dual problems of 25 million undocumented inhabitants and continued unsecured borders.

On 1 January, 2024, the day following the initial 6-month registration period any employer who employs an undocumented worker (no IICard) will be subject to a first-offence fine of $25,000 for each worker and $50,000 each worker, second offense. No exceptions, no excuses. No employer is going to risk their livelihood over the employment of an illegal alien. Laws change behavior and immediately adds accountability of employers into the immigration solution.   

This simple act of requiring illegal aliens to carry an IICard will have four positive and immediate results:

First, employers will protect themselves from potentially heavy fines by only hiring inhabitants who have a valid IICard.

Second, undocumented inhabitants who choose not to apply for an IICard or were denied an IICard will not be able to find an employer who will take them on.  They will therefore be unemployable, will be constantly liable for deportation if detained for any reason and will likely return to their country of citizenship.

Third, and this gets us to the objective in paragraph 3 to, “shut down the mases of illegals crossing our borders, forever”.  Foreigners contemplating illegal entry into the United States in order to work will soon learn that no employer is going to hire them and illegal entry will be a futile effort. This inevitable behavior change will, by default, reduce illegal immigration to a manageable trickle.          

Fourth, this will provide Border Patrol agents the opportunity to concentrate their efforts on the illegal entry of drugs, terrorists, gang members and those operating in the slave/sex trade.  

8. Phase Four, 1 July 2024 thru 30 June 2025:  This phase begins the twelve-month reissue of IICards; $50 fee.  The IICard color will change each year.  ONLY those inhabitants holding an IICard can receive a renewal card.  Additionally, they will be denied renewal if they have been unemployed and made less than $5000 or if they have been convicted of a felony or if they failed to pay their 10% federal tax.  Once denied, they will be detained, deported and never receive another card. Any IICard that is not renewed by the annual renewal date will automatically be moved to the government’s deportation list.

9. In order to fund the Immigration Reform Act, a provision in the law will require IICard holders to pay 10% Federal income taxes on gross income.  Employers must issue a 1099 using the individual’s IICard number to identify them to the IRS.  The IRS will establish a National Registry of Card numbers and the data base will list earned income and taxes paid for the previous year.

During the IICard renewal process, the DMV registration center will access the IRS data base to determine if the applicant has in fact been employed, made at least $5000 and paid taxes.  No tax records, no renewal and the applicant will be detained and deported.  The Federal Government will retain 2% of the tax revenue to fund four national data bases for The Immigration Reform Act. The remaining 8% will be returned to the States in proportion to the number of IICard holders. 

Any IICard holder convicted of a felony will have his card pulled, be detained and deported.  That person’s file and IICard number will be annotated at the national registry to ensure that any future attempts to reapply will be denied.

10. To assist the law-abiding, hard-working illegals towards citizenship, the Department of Labor will establish a web site that can assist an individual who has lost their job.  Any card holder can get on the Labor Department website and provide their name, location and skills.  Employers will be encouraged to check this website when they have job openings.

11. There will be four related national data bases associated with this plan.  First is the basic national data base with the personal data and card number of each IACard holder, maintained by Immigration and Naturalization Services.  Second is the data base of taxpaying IICard holders maintained by the IRS.  Third, is the data base of undocumented known felons in the US; maintained by the FBI.  Finally, there is the jobs-available registry at the Department of Labor. 

  12. An IICard holder will have the following four privileges:

One, they may apply for a state vehicle operator’s license and will be tested in English. A provision of the law will be that every state must also prominently display the individual’s IICard number on the State Driver’s License.  Additionally, every applicant must show proof of auto insurance.

Two, a current IICard will authorize the holder to legally cross U.S. borders. 

Three, legal holders may apply for an IICard for their immediate family members using the sponsor’s IICard number with a suffix, for their spouse and children (no extended family members).  If granted, the sponsor will be authorized to escort the dependents across the U.S. border.

Four, after legally holding an IICard for five consecutive years, that person is eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship for themselves and their immediate family (spouse and children).

13. Remember, these people are here illegally.  Therefore, they will not be eligible for social security, federal welfare payments, food assistance programs, Medicare, Medicaid, or social services.  This will save hundreds of billions of dollars per year in federal and state assistance payments.

14. Conclusions: 

Objectives for a completely reformed immigration system, paragraph 3, are reasonable and clearly within the art of the possible.  But it isn’t going to happen unless the Republican Party collectively gets to work and makes this a priority campaign issue in 2022.  Has anyone in the Republican Party figured out that this is 2022 and we are just nine months away from perhaps the most impactful election in our history?  We cannot take a chance on not winning because this nation may not survive three more years of Biden/Harris/Pelosi/Schumer.

Have we yet heard from a Republican leader exactly what the party will stand for this election year?  Have we heard any candidate spell out in detail, this is what needs to be done and this is how we can get there? 

Has anyone searched the RNC website looking for a page that lists the 2022 Republican platform.  Yes, I have and it isn’t there. Biden has already asked the question, “What are you (republicans) for?”  Well, I don’t know because the RNC and Republican leadership has not told our hundreds of 2022 candidates what to talk about, what to promise, what to say.  This is absurd, incompetent and disgusting.   For the last six months all we have heard is how easy it is going to be to win in November, 2022.  Well, here is a news flash; that is not a fact, that is an assumption and  plans bases on too many assumption are rarely successful.

15. Note to my readers.  This is the third recent article in which I tried to define a problem, recommend what needs to be done and how to go about achieving the desired end-state.  See Spending and Debt Reform January 22, 2022 and Education Reform in America, January 29, 2022.  In the previous articles I requested that you, the readers, who personally know and can communicate with our 2022 candidates, reach out to them and ask that they make Spending and Debt and Education Reforms part of their campaigns. I again suggest that you do that for Immigration Reform. 

At this point let me depart from the immigration reform issue and quickly look at the possibility of this, or any other subject, being recognized by the Republican National Committee as a critical 2022 campaign issue. 

16. My conclusion is that Ronna McDaniel and the Republican National Committee need a wake-up call. Open the website by asking for the RNC 2022 Republican Platform.  What you will get is a 50-page narrative written in 2016 by a committee.  2016!  Yes, it’s good background reading but it is not what we need right now. What the hell has the RNC been doing in 2021 in preparation for the 2022 mid-terms that is the most important election in the last 50 years?  Obviously, nothing. 

We need a list of what we are for.  We need this because Biden, on 19 January, during his 2-hour press conference, said six times, “What are the Republicans for?”, “What are the Republicans for?”

We need sound bites with talking points yesterday.  We need them in the hands of every local, state and federal Republican candidate.  Here is a starter list: spending and debt reform, education reform, a strong military, smaller federal government, regulation reform, states’ rights, individual rights, law and order, secure borders, lower taxes, school choice, immigration reform, etc. etc.  We need at least 25 of them that every Republican candidate in the country can tic off in one minute at every speech.  And for every one we need talking points in one short paragraph that tells the why and how.  One paragraph, not a thousand-word chapter from the 2016 platform. 

Additionally, from the RNC, we need a list of what we are NOT for with talking points.  We are not for higher taxes, a massive controlling federal government, over regulation, cradle-to-grave entitlements that are paid for with borrowed money, education unions’ control over education, etc. etc. etc. We need it right now.

In this 2022 campaignwe need to attack two things beginning right now and keep up the pressure.  One is the answer to Biden’s question, exactly what we are for.  And secondly, we need an overall theme that democracy, as we have known it, is being seriously eroded by the Democrats’ socialist/total government control agenda. The Democrats have zero accomplishments to campaign on so they are going to key on the 6 January hoodlums at the Capitol and imply that they are the voice of the Republican Party and their objective is to kill democracy.  Hillary has already publicly stated that should be their game plan. 

Last June, House Minority Leader, Keven McCarthy launched Commitment to America with seven task forces working the details.  The objective is to pull together a proposed legislative agenda for 2023 that would also serve as a 2022 campaign platform.  Great idea, but here is the problem.  When completed it will undoubtedly be hundreds if not thousands of pages.  More importantly, where the hell is it?  We need it yesterday for the 2022 candidates.

Ms. Ronna McDaniel at the RNC needs a wake-up call.  Someone there has been asleep at the switch. Let’s wake her up with about 20,000 emails tomorrow morning.  Go to www.gop.com/contact-us/ and send them an email.  Here is the one I just sent; please feel free to copy and paste:

The 2022 campaign is under way and we, the Republican Party, are not adequately prepared to win the most important election in decades.

Your website gives us a 50-page 2016 platform to work with!  What have you been doing in 2021 to arm every local, state and federal candidate with a list of topics and talking points for 2022? 

Talking points, in the hands of every candidate, will accomplish two vital objectives: First it will answer President Biden’s question, “What are the Republicans for?” which will become the battle cry for the Democrats from now until election day.  Secondly, when the American people hear every Republican candidate singing from the same sheet of music, they will sense the commitment, honesty, intellegence and the compassion of the Republican Party towards every American in 2022.

You need to get to work and support every candidate with the arguments that will reassure Republican voters and win over new Democrats and Independents.  This needs to be done right now.

Here is a scenario that I would like to see played out tomorrow morning at the RNC headquarters:  The Admin Assistant (AA) to Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel (RM) goes in to see her boss and says, “Ms. McDaniel you have 20,000 new emails, do you want them sent to your computer?” RM, “20,000!  What is the subject?”  AA, “They all have the same theme, that is we are not on top of the 2022 campaign.”  RM, “Send me a few.”

A few minutes later, RM to the AA, “Get all the senior staff in the conference room in 15 minutes and tell them to clear their calendars for the next 48 hours.”

RM in the conference room, “We are going to brainstorm the answer to Biden’s question, ‘What are the Republicans for?  Here are the rules: everyone can speak but me, I will listen.  There are no wrong answers, everything goes on the white board; there will be no debate at this time.  Susan, you record the input on the white board, John, you type it all into your laptop.”  20 minutes later they have a list of what the Party stands for.

RM to the staff, “OK, now go back to item #1, Secure Borders.  In phrase and sentence form, develop the talking points for Secure Borders.  Susan at the white board, John capture it all on your laptop.  We need fact-checked numbers to back up the verbiage.”   And they proceed through the entire list for the remainder of the day.

RM to the staff, “OK, good work, we have talking points, every issue with talking points will become a one-page fact sheet.”  RM makes each staff member responsible for three of the issues and then says, “Final draft of all fact sheets are to be completed by 4 pm tomorrow.  A packet of all the fact sheets will be provided to each of you by close of business for you to review and comment on tomorrow evening.  The day after tomorrow we go final with the fact-sheet package.  Today I will contact every state Republican Party Chairperson, update them on this project and direct them to forward the finished product to every county chairperson with instructions to get a copy in the hands of every local, state and federal candidate that resides in their county by close of business three days from now.  Two days from now we will reconvene in the conference room to begin the entire process over again answering the question, what is the Republican Party NOT for.  

 My point is, this is leadership 101, working this simple problem is not rocket science and can be accomplished this week but they need a kick in the butt to get them moving.  Your emails is a kick in the butt.

17. Final thought on Immigration Reform:  Mr. President and Madam Vice President, unless you were watching Fox News on 9 February, you probably don’t know that Border Patrol agents rescued (another in a long list) a 5-year-old unaccompanied little girl from Guatemala on the banks of the Rio Grande River.  That little girl and the dedicated Border Patrol agents were lucky this time.  But Mr. President and Madam Vice President, how many 5-year-old children were abandoned by some Cartel coyote, not rescued by our Border Patrol agents, and died along that river, alone, cold, hungry, frightened and calling out for their mother?  Where is your compassion, your common sense?  How can you turn a blind eye to the death, rape and suffering along the route to our southern border? How can you be driven by such an unethical, unamerican, politics-driven policy of open borders while two thirds of Americans disagree with the policy? 

18. Readers, please send your email to the RNC right now. Thanks. 

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

1. A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable federal government was never the vision or intent of the founding fathers.  Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; it ceases to be efficient, effective and/or no longer performs the functions for which it was created.  At that point a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value added.
2.  Some or all of that could apply today to the Departments in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in two major problems that must get fixed.  A too-large organization is very expensive to maintain.  A more effective and efficient Executive Branch will be much smaller and less expensive. Every 1% reduction in end-strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salaries plus billions of dollars more in long-term retirement pay and benefits.

Secondly, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies.  These programs are this organization’s product.  General Motor’s product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer supported programs.  The question is, what is the value added of those programs?  An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant, programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution, programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local officials, programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but live on forever.  The list is long.  President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

3. Before we launch into how to fix spending, a word about national debt.  The out-of-control spending and debt increase is a relatively new problem. The Obama/Biden administration swamped us with more debt than all of the 43 previous presidents combined.  And now increasing debt annually has become the norm.  The Congressional Budget Office has been telling us for several years that annual debt increases is “not sustainable”, aka there will be a day of reckoning and it will be ugly.   

It is difficult to get our minds around the almost $29 trillion debt.  If you had stood on a street corner in 1960 handing out dollar bills, one dollar per second, you would just about now finish giving away the first billion dollars. Your federal government spends a billion dollars about every 8 hours, 24/7.  You would be on that street corner for 62,000 years to hand out the first $1 trillion. If you were paying off the current debt at one dollar per second, it would take you 1.8 million years.  Unsustainable. We have to do something about spending and we have to change the way we think about debt.   

4. A frontal assault on the Executive Branch could result in the first major attempt at reducing annual federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars; something the current Executive Branch and Congress collectively are incapable of doing. 

The federal government can be fixed but it will take strong leadership, attention to detail and, if done properly, at least six months of hard work.  The current administration is incapable of taking on this project. But fortunately, the Biden administration will eventually go away and when that happens it provides an opportunity for the Republican party and for the future of our country. 

5. There was a time when the Republican Party stood for smaller government, states’ rights, strong defense, strict interpretation of the Constitution AND FISCAL CONSERVATISM.  Politicians have moved away from being fiscally responsible. Just as was the case in 2016, the American people are looking for someone to lead us away from growing governmental control, cultural entitlement and out-of-control government spending aka uncontrolled taxation.

Reducing the size, reach, budget and influence of the sprawling Executive Branch should, become a major plank in every Republican congressional campaign this year leading on to the 2024 presidential election. Here is what needs to be accomplished now through June, 2025 in five phases.

6. Phase 1, Planning and Message Proliferation. Now through November 2024

a. Of the tens of thousands of Rip’s subscribers who are reading this, some of you know and can communicate with the Republican candidates for House and Senate seats this year.  Those of you who believe the following program is necessary, encourage your candidate to make Spending and Debt Reform a priority in their campaign. If this happens, Spending and Debt Reform awareness will be set up across the nation for the 2024 presidential campaign. 

b. There are Republican movers-and-shakers who have national influence and are frequently asked by the media to comment on policy and issues; three that come to mind are former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Governor Mike Huckabee and former presidential Special Advisor Karl Rove.  Additionally, we can easily begin to make a list of potential 2024 presidential/vice presential candidates; for example, Senator Tom Cotton, Governor Ron DeSantis, former Governor Nikki Haley, President Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senator Lindsey Graham, Governor Kristi Noem. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and other influential Republican stalwarts also need to be on the list.  The point here is that those of you who know and can communicate with those on the list, should have a serious discussion with them about making Spending and Debt Reform an important addition to their political position from this date on through the 2024 election.

Comment on the above paragraph:  This is by no means a complete list but I cannot recall a time when the Republican Party had such a strong bench of spokespersons and potential presidential/vice presidential candidates.  The challenge is to get them focused on Spending and Debt Reform as a critical national issue before it is too late for this country.   

7. Phase 2, 118^th Congress, January 2023-2025.  When the 118^th Congress convenes, the newcomers should inculcate Spending and Debt Reform into daily Capitol Hill dialogue and become an issue for every piece of legislation.

8. Phase 3, The 2024 Presidential Campaign.  All primary-election Republication candidates should be in agreement that Spending and Debt Reform is a critical issue facing the nation and if elected will make it a priority to execute the reform process. During the general-election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate will make it clear that the first priority for his/her vice president will be to lead Spending and Debt Reform execution.

9. Phase 4, Nominate Executive Branch Leaders, November, 2024-January 2025. The President/Vice President-elect should concentrate their selection process on principals and their deputies who understand organizations, who have successfully led large complex organizations and who will lead the effort to re-think their mission and to restructure their organization to most effectively and efficiently achieve their mission.

10. Phase 5, Spending and Debt Reform Execution, January 2025-June 2025.  

This will be a difficult process because we are talking about change, massive change.  We must recognize that for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive Branch, change is hard. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force, especially in government with an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff, stifling and in many respects self-serving.

The newly elected Vice President will provide hands-on leadership from start to finish with periodic in-progress reviews to the American people.

How does all this get accomplished? It is a long and tedious process, even explaining it is a long, tedious read, but there are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing and re-structuring large organizations and make them be all they can/should be. 

First, the vice president should set up a senior Spending and Debt Reform Task Force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies and commissions. They will be the change agents and become the junkyard dogs of Washington.   

Secondly, define the end state and end date for the campaign. For example, the VP might say, “Over the next six months our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch.  We will assess their mission (is it relevant today), their structure (too many or too few people), layering (is it OK or dysfunctional), can the organization integrate (communicate) vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis? Is the organization as a whole agile (able to deal with change as a matter of course) and is there overall value added for the government and especially for the American people?”

Third, organization charts: The process begins in every named organization by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the visual for the task force and it provides an immediate sense of the size, complexity and layering.  Big government is layer after layer after layer; some of which produce nothing; they exist just to oversee what is being produced at the layers below.  Why the organization chart?  Because it allows the task force to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. One cannot reorganize and restructure top down; to be successful it must be bottom-up. 

Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, there are 65 different organizational elements that come under the headings of “departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards and facilities.” Inside them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells and individual elements.  Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart.  Each organizational box must list the name of the element, number of employees and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, whatever.

Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the deputy Secretary, part of the VP’s senior task force, will form his/her own internal departmental task force. The Department Task Force’ first action will be to send out an internal memo to the leaders of every “box” to submit in one week a no-more-than-two-page report to the Deputy Secretary.  The report format should include, as a minimum:

a.  A one or two-sentence mission statement that describe what it is that element collectively does.  (for example: responsible for writing, executing and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………)

During the following week, the Department Task Force’ job is to ask itself: do we need Dept Reg 135 any longer?  If so, could this be done with fewer people?  Could the same number of employees also be responsible for Dept Reg 246, Pork Export Program? Do we need the report quarterly? And most importantly, what is the value added to the overall Department’s mission.

There are probably tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative and being a roadblock to progress.

b. The report should describe the grade structure of all the employees in the box.

Task Force will look at the grade structure; is it commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined, perhaps scaled down and led by this same leader (a span of control issue)? Is the leader a “working leader” or just grading the papers of his/her subordinates and passing them up the chain?

c. Describe a typical work week; number of meetings, amount of travel, etc.   

This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader.  Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”.  Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with.  Is the travel critical to success, nice to have or perhaps just to fill up the work week? Travel is very expensive.

d. What regulations guide your work? 

After reviewing the answers to the other questions, it may become apparent that these regulations are no longer necessary.  Another piece in getting the big organizational picture.

e. Product.  A list, in single sentences, of major accomplishments in the past 12 months

The task force will then determine if the accomplishments are in line with the mission or are they just doing “busy work”?

f. A short statement of value added to the department of…..(agriculture).  That is, “Without us the Department would not/could not do the following……….”

The Task Force review of the input is all about policy, practices, process, grade structure commensurate with overall responsibility, span of control, layering and value-added determination.  When the VP randomly attends Departmental Task Force sessions, he/she will be grading their work and progress; are they tough enough, too tough, thorough enough, on the right track or being overly protective of the status quo?  The VP will also be able to pick up strong-points and pass them along to other Departments as best practices. 

Once the task force has worked its way up from the bottom, looking at every element, their individual mission and value added, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary or even counterproductive.  They will then be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking reorganizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile and rid of pockets of resistance

What must be emphasized here is the importance of the bottom-up review process.  As the task force works up from layer to layer on the organization chart, they will come to some conclusions about value added at each level. Having reached the top of the org chart it is possible the Vice President’s senior task force could conclude that an entire department’s continued existence should be questioned.  A prime example is the Department of Education.  Education in America is a national disgrace and not getting better in spite of the hundreds of billions of tax dollars expended by the department since its inception 40 years ago.

This process may look tedious and time consuming, because it is.  But unless you begin at the bottom and unless you include every element, you will never achieve an acceptable level of success.

11. CONCLUSIONS: 

a. The task forces must be especially mindful of the phrase “we provide oversight.”  That is a red flashing light that an organization does not, in and of itself, produce anything of value. They simply exist to grade papers, expand their purview, inhibit progress and expend tax dollars.  As President Reagan reminded us, “The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

b. During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the two-fold objectives.  First, the objective is NOT to reach some specific lower number of federal employees.  The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no “value added”, they just exist because they have always been there.  The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and agile.

c. Why do all of this work?  Two reasons: 1) The most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience used numerous times over the past decades, have been to declare a hiring freeze or order an across-the-board xx% personnel cut, neither of which make any sense nor achieves any positive results.  2) What I have described above has never been done before.  We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process.

d. When completed, many positions (perhaps tens of thousands of them) will be eliminated. It will then take a couple years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and worth the effort. 

e. That budget is the sum of what all of the departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards and facilities need to accomplish their mission.  When, perhaps tens of thousands of actions, programs and policies are eliminated because they are outdated, unnecessary and/or redundant, the budget requirement can be downsized by billions of dollars.

f. There is also a states’ right issues in all of this.  As the federal government grows a natural outcome is that they over-reach into areas that are better and more effectively handled at the local and state level.  Federal over-reach tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to problem solving and it is usually ineffective and inefficient. 

g. President Reagan got it right when he said: “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” “Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”

12. BOTTOM LINE:  Getting spending and hence debt under control will resonate with the American people a lot more than the tax-and-spend economic baseline of the Obama and Biden administrations.  This is a necessary, positive endeavor the Republican Party needs to embrace. 

The vice president-led Spending and Budget Reform Task Force accomplishments will send a powerful message to Congress.  Congress has become increasingly irresponsible over spending and debt.  They need a wake-up call and if the Republican Party will campaign and win 2022/2024 with the Spending and Debt Reform message, the Congress will change.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com

For someone way past middle age, I have the advantage, as an adult, of perspective when it comes to comparing the overall performance of the last twelve presidents, JFK through Biden.  I cannot recall anything as egregious, nonsensical, misleading, premeditated and unlawful(??) as what is happening since 20 January, 2021 on our southern border.   

National security begins with border security.  National security is enhanced by laws, policy, intent, and border security forces that are equal to the task.  National security, and by extension, the safety of Americans is every president’s number one priority; or at least it has been until now.

President Trump campaigned on bringing order to the southern border.  Through tireless efforts, doing battle with the Congress and the courts, he accomplished what he promised he would do.

On day-one President Biden opened the border with a dramatic statement by freezing all funds for border wall construction and terminating Trump’s national emergency declaration along the border.  During the first four months in office, that decision accomplished two things; it cost taxpayers about $2 billion dollars and, most importantly, it sent a signal that the border is open.

For months, we have watched daily videos of illegal immigrant masses crossing the Rio Grande River, being met by Border Control agents, processed and transported to holding areas.  To add insult to injury, all the while President Biden and his disciples are telling the American people, “The border is closed.”  It goes beyond misrepresentation; it is an outright lie and everyone knows it is a lie.  

But the numbers don’t lie.  FY 21 ended with 1,734,686 illegal immigrant encounters, the highest total ever recorded in one year. Additionally, 21% were aliens who had been encountered before.  Why not try again, this time the border is “open.”

If that is not bad enough, it is the other number that is exponentially more serious; that is, Border Patrol leaders estimate that perhaps hundreds of thousands entered and were not apprehended. Because the Border Patrol agents are routinely overwhelmed with masses of families and unaccompanied children voluntarily reporting to agents at regularly used crossing areas, literally hundreds of miles of border are not patrolled at all.  In those areas the illegals entering are the criminals, MS13 gang members, terrorists and drug and human traffickers. They are a direct threat to our national security and safety of U.S. citizens.

The president and all of his border administrators understand all of this yet continue to insult our intelligence by insisting the situation is not a crisis and the border is not open.

But the situation gets worse by the day.  We are battling a pandemic.  An estimated 20-25% of the aliens are ill when they arrive which for many means Covid positive.  Now it gets worse.  Where are those 1.7 million that we know about?  They have been relocated around the country on busses and planes.  These people have not been tested or vaccinated for Covid.  It is likely that many of those buses and planes were hauling a Covid super-spreader.  Is anyone getting a sense of the hypocrisy relative to Biden’s Covid policies that are being pressed on citizens? 

While vigorously supported by his Executive Branch principals and congressional Democrat leaders, why is our president allowing open borders?  He and his minions refuse to answer that question and seem to believe we are all too stupid to figure it out. The reason is simple, votes; tens of millions of potential democrat voters.  The second chapter to this insanity is currently contained in the Build Back Better legislation which contains a provision for amnesty for at least 7 million illegals.  And of course, we all know that if that becomes reality it will establish a powerful precedent for follow-on amnesty programs. 

Back to the title, IS PRESIDENT BIDEN GUILTY OF AIDING AND ABETTING?  Noun: The act of helping, encouraging, or supporting someone in the commission of a crime.  Verb: To actively encourage, to assist, or to support the commission of a criminal act.  Seems pretty clear to me since every illegal immigrant is guilty of committing a federal offense.

Let’s take the allegations of aiding and abetting a step further with this question; IS THE PRESIDENT ALSO GUILTY OF VIOLATING HIS OATH OF OFFICE?

The presidential-mandated oath of office is found in Article II of the Constitution. It contains 35 words and begins as follows: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” That first sentence, in and of itself, is a commitment to all Americans that the president will take all necessary steps to keep foreign enemies out of our country. 

We know, from data released by the Border Patrol, that they continue to apprehend illegals who are on our Terrorist Watch List.  That list has existed since the attack on the United States, September 11, 2001, as we have been actively engaged in a global war on terrorism to keep our county safe.   So, when President Biden willfully opens the borders and takes proactive steps to remove actions that were in place to inhibit illegal entry, isn’t he in violation of his oath of office to, “defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic?”  Based on recent history, isn’t it crystal clear that if President Trump had perpetrated this dastardly charade he would have been impeached, convicted and be gone in his first six months?

Unintended consequences that the President and Vice President avoid talking about:

• Too many of these aliens are not here for the “American dream”, they are here to partake of the American welfare system and it’s costing the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars for decades to come. 

• Drugs of all kinds are pouring across the border in tonnages never before experienced. For example, two pounds of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people; 130 pounds could kill everyone in the United States. By April, 2021 after Biden opened the border, 6,494 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the border, a 233% increase from the same period in 2020. The question is, how many tons of drugs came in undetected? Is anyone surprised that drug overdose deaths in America in 2021 topped 100,000 for the first time? Anyone in the Biden administration being held accountable?

• How do Americans feel about what is happening every day on our southern border?  Polling data tells us that only 25% of Americans approve of Bidens border policies; translation, tens of millions of democrats and independents join with republicans in disapproval. What we heard on 20 January is that, “I will be there for all the people”, not just 25%.  The reality is to the contrary.

• Parole Authority, a form of legal status given to illegal immigrants as they enter the U.S., provides them the ability to apply for work permits. Federal law says parole authority is to be used on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian purposes” and “significant public benefit.” A recently retired head of the Border Patrol said he would normally provide 5 or 10 parole authority documents per year.  The Biden administration is issuing them by the tens of thousands. Urgent purposes? Are they breaking another federal law?

• The Cartel is one of the biggest crime organizations in the world. The cartel is one of the biggest drug manufactures in the world.  Cartels control the border. They determine who, what, when, where and how much it will cost to cross the border.  Costs range from $1300 to $10,000 depending on the migrants’ nationality. Illegal immigration has become a major revenue stream for the cartels. Have you heard President Biden address this cartel issue?  Neither have I.  It is just another item in his too-hard box.

• There is one more important but unintended consequence of this whole border mess. We now have confirmation that Vice President Harris is pretty much a zero when it comes to planning, commitment, leadership, honesty and communications and that President Biden appears to be OK with that outcome.   We should be worried about what that portends for the future of this administration and our country

How can this administration get away with all of these lies, the deceit and deception? One answer has to do with the fourth estate. The term “fourth estate” is often attributed to British politician Edmund Burke who observed, “There were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than them all.”

In the United States, the term fourth estate has been used to place the press alongside the three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial.  The fourth estate refers to the watchdog role of the press, one that is important to a functioning democracy.

Watchdog, a proper graphic term. Unfortunately, its importance to the proper functioning of our democracy has diminished to the point that it is now, performing a divisive disservice to the every-day functioning of our government.

The journalists in the U.S. are not stupid, blind or unaware of what is happening on our southern border.  But their leaders in the main-stream media, for the most part, have become so politicized they have completely lost the capability to perform the once-vaunted fourth estate role.  Honesty, integrity, just doing the right thing are gone from reporting.  We the people are being lied to and misinformed on a daily basis.

 But the most insidious power the media has is the power to ignore.  And that is what is happening today with respect to the illegal immigration problems. With the exception of a few news papers and TV news sources, the main-street media goes out of its way every day to provide cover for the Biden administration, across the board democrat leadership and the democrat/liberal establishment.

But the problem goes much deeper.  With the media providing cover for bad decisions, bad policy and lackluster leadership, the administration, the Congress, the bureaucracy feels safe operating with accountability.  Without accountability an organization and all it/they control will begin to lose its foundation, its honesty, its integrity, its vitality and spirit. Morale goes down the crapper. 

Conclusions:

• President Biden is culpable for what is happening and what is not happening at the border.
• For the Biden/Harris administration to not recognize the humanitarian crisis that has existed during his months in office is reprehensible; the rape, crime, unsanitary conditions and suffering during the long journey. Consider the trauma associated with an estimated 180,000 unaccompanied children, many of them found alone and only 5 or 6 years old.  Where is the compassion?  This is not who we are as a compassionate and benevolent nation. 
• In our daily lives we are rarely able to have all we want, when we want it and that leads to prioritization. With respect to the illegal immigration issue, the Biden administration has prioritized and placed  an atmosphere of control over what is best for we the people and our great nation.  They are not stupid and during quiet, reflective moments most of them perhaps see and understand that they are not right, not supporting us, not properly providing for our security. But they are driven by a philosophic underpinning of control and power at any cost.  Control the people, control the government, control future power.
• At least for the present, President Biden will not be held accountable for aiding and abetting criminal activity on our southern border or for violating his oath of office.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

Many today look at the too-far-left democrat party and declare that they are trying to create a socialist state.  With the exception of Bernie Sanders, I do not necessarily believe the Biden administration set out to create a socialist America.  Having said that we need to take a deep breath and look at the current direction of the U.S. Are we headed for socialism?

First, we can look at the short-hand version….Eight Steps to Socialism.  This list is commonly attributed to Saul Alinsky; however, this particular list did not appear in either of his two books. Whomever actually wrote it, it is a pretty scary list.

Saul Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. Alinsky synthesized his theory of political agitation is his famous 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. His book is considered a founding text of modern community organizing and a classic of radical-leftist agitation-propaganda theory. Barack Obama received a comprehensive course in Saul Alinsky during his years as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience Obama recalled as “The best education he ever had.”

The Alinsky equation is summarized in his famous Rule # 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Can this happen in our great country? Consider the Obama/Biden rhetoric about wealthy Americans (although they both are in that category); make the rich a target and scapegoat for all of our ills, divide and conquer, demonize some to extract power for others.

Obama and Biden have both told us, countless times, that their intent is to “transform America.” The Alinsky model is certainly transformative.  BTW another prominent Democrat, Hillary Clinton, has also often been linked with Alinsky because she wrote her senior thesis entitled “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model” while she was a student at Wellesley College in 1969. Anyone surprised?

Here are the Eight Steps to Socialism, read them and draw your own conclusions about the Obama/Biden transformation:

1)Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (food, housing, and income).
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the government and schools
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor.

Does any of this sound like what is happening to the United States? Whomever actually wrote the 8 steeps, merely simplified Vladimir Lenin’s original scheme for world conquest by communism. Joseph Stalin described his Russian converts as “Useful Idiots.” Is that what we are becoming?

Back to the title of this piece, WHERE IS AMERICA HEADED AS OF NOVEMBER, 2021?  At its core socialism is about economics. To accomplish those eight steps a number of economic factors and action should be considered. 

MASSIVE GOVERNMENT SPENDING, what are the consequences (I will continue to emphasize this word)? Spending, in and of itself, is not always bad, for example massive government spending for the “New Deal” in the 1930s was unprecedented and served a specific purpose to solve a specific problem, that problem being the Great Depression with its 25% unemployment. The goal was, “relief, recovery and reform.”

 The New Deal spending was designed to put millions back to work and the work was to produce the likes of dams, national parks, infrastructure.  For example, the Civilian Conservation Corps hired 4 million workers over nine years to conserve public lands, plant forests, build dams and maintained roads and trails.  The Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million people to work.  When a project was completed, the spending stopped.  Each project provided a positive for every American.

Consequences?  New Deal spending along with the onset of World War II rapidly took the U.S. out of the depression and transformed America into an energetic, confident, prosperous and envied world leader.

Contrast the positive and lasting impact of the New Deal with the potential consequences of massive spending today:

• It will continue to increase the size of an already massive federal government bureaucracy.  
• Much of the new massive spending is for new entitlements which will continue to grow, the funding for which will never end and will never be scaled back.
• Entitlements lead to unprecedented government control over the daily lives of every American, cradle to grave.
• With size and control, comes government regulations and the resulting negative impact on entrepreneurial spirit and economic growth.
• Massive federal regulation and control leads to reduced states’ rights.
• And most importantly today’s massive spending is a stake in the heart of perhaps the most important 55 words ever written:  Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  Today’s massive federal government spending powers are certainly not based on “consent of the governed” but we the people are on the hook to pay for every cent of this spending

INCREASED TAX BURDENS are the consequences of massive government spending. Corporate taxes, wealth taxes, death taxes, increased individual income taxes on the wealthy, taxes on capital gains and perhaps taxes on unrealized capital gains.  All of these taxes targeting the wealthy to pay their (yet to be defined by Biden) “fail share.”  Consequences of massive tax increases are reduced capital investment (the life-blood of capitalism), disincentivization to expand and grow, reduced entrepreneurial spirit and the rich moving their wealth out of the U.S. Yes, the rich can leave; France thought it was a great idea to soak the rich with high taxes and, in 2016 alone, over 12,000 millionaires departed their homeland. France has been forced to back off on their taxing-the-rich policies. 

The bottom-line consequences of overtaxing the rich are REDUCED GROWTH LEADING TO ECONOMIC STAGNATION. Over the last 20 years, the European Union, which featured socialist and semi-socialist states, had almost zero economic growth.  

DEBT and the consequences therein. A highly reliable measure of a nation’s economic wellness is to look at the ratio of debt compared to its productivity. When Obama took office, January 2009 the U.S. ratio of debt to GDP was about 77%, considered reasonable and far below other industrial nations.  Today, after a decade-plus of deficit spending our debt to GDP ratio is about 127%. When over 100% it speaks volumes about our ability or inability to repay the debt.  Consequences?  Additionally, a 2013 study by the World Bank found that if the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 77% for an extended period, it slows economic growth.

INCREASING THE MONEY SUPPLY consequences:  Massive spending leads us down the path to artificially increasing the nation’s money supply, aka “printing money.”  In 2020, the money supply was increased by almost $4 trillion, by far the largest annual expansion in U.S. history. Consequences: increasing the money supply beyond the needs of economic growth leads to inflation and in many countries, it has led to hyperinflation. Venezuela’s inflation, for example, has risen by over 1 million per cent.  But, you say, that can’t happen here.  It already has. During the Civil war, the Confederacy of southern states found itself short of finances (it could only raise 46% of the cost of war from taxes and bonds) so it increased the printing of money to pay for materials and soldiers. However, with economic output falling, this caused inflation of 700% in the first two years of war and reaching a peak of over 5000% by 1865.

CONCLUSIONS:  The above economic factors, massive spending, massive tax increases, out-of-control national debt and printing trillions of dollars are not necessarily sequential actions and activities; they sometimes overlap and feed off each other’s momentum.  But at some point, there is enough confluence of these economic factors that the totality becomes overwhelming, uncontrollable and perhaps irreversible.  That is what the Congressional Budget Office keeps telling us when they conclude that the massive government spending, entitlements and debt are “unstainable.”

What has happened in just the past ten months has caused alarm bell to ring loud and clear.  More and more of us are asking what is going on, where are we headed, what will our country be like in the next few years?  Optimism is waning. Our feel-good spirit is being crushed. Is the “American dream” no longer a possibility? This is not a good place for a country to be.

It is as though President Biden climbed to the top of a very large snow-covered hill on 20 January, made a big round snow ball and tossed it down the hill. We watch it roll and grow in size (government). We see it gaining weight (government control).  Half way down the hill it becomes obvious that it is becoming an uncontrollable mass (thousands of pages of multi-trillion-dollar legislation that no one has read) that may have the potential to be a destructive force to all classes of Americans.   That is, a disincentivized wealthy class as government takes an ever-increasing percent of their wealth to the point that there is no more to take. Destruction of the middle class as the need for more and more taxes negatively impacts their well-being and kills their entrepreneurial spirit.  At the lower end of the spectrum are the masses that will have lived every phase of their life with a government handout; child care, rent, housing, heating, cell phone, food, paid time off, unemployment compensation, medical, education, social security.  Cradle to grave generational dependence and none of it requires recipients to get a job.

Surely socialism cannot happen to America.  But, what if…..

• What if we cannot stop printing money? 
• What if we cannot control today’s inflation and it begins increasing by factors of tens or hundreds (as it has in so many countries in recent history)?
• What if we do nothing about deficit spending and national debt ($28 trillion now) that is increasing at a rate of $45.5 per second!!?
• What if interest rates go to 6% and the interest on our debt consumes so much of the budget that we cannot provide for an adequately sized, trained and ready military force for national security?
• What if all of the above leads our enemies to conclude that we have reached the point of no return and are vulnerable to multiple attacks by various means?
• What if social security goes broke (currently scheduled to be insolvent by 2033)?
• What if Medicare goes broke (currently scheduled to be insolvent by 2026)?
• What happens if the government checks stop coming to the masses who have become government dependent?
• What if the wealthy find a way to hide their wealth or find a new place to live (as previously mentioned, in 2016 France lost over 12,000 millionaires because of the exorbitant wealth tax)?
• What if our borders remain unsecure and the world’s masses become ours to feed, cloth, house, educate, and care for?
• What if Medicare-for-all becomes reality with an estimated yearly cost $3.2 trillion?
• Etc.

This is not just my personal what-if list, this has become the concern of millions of Americans, especially our middle class, the greatest middle class in world history.  What is happening before our eyes could cause our middle class to become nonexistent. 

The United States is not, currently, a socialist nation. Our economic vitality remains generally decentralized which is a necessity for a stable republic.  But as the power of government grows our rights correspondingly diminish and ultimately socialism is maintained by force.

History, of course, is not a pre-determined straight line. Wise leaders have steered civilizations away from bad decisions. Are we blessed with a wise leader today? Just take a quick look back 10 months and you draw your own conclusions.

On 20 January, 2021 the nation listened to President Biden’s impassioned inauguration speech about being a leader for all Americans and that the centerpiece of his administration would be to bring unity to America.  The immediate reviews of the speech by all media and most politicians were glowing accolades. But before the ink was dry on praise for his words, he was busy at his desk, also on 20 January, signing the first of 40 executive orders he would issue in his first two weeks in office. 

For the most part those executive orders were specifically designed to counter Trump initiatives, policies, and accomplishments.  Remember, in November, 2020, 73.6 million Americans voted for Trump and that total was 7 million more than any sitting president in history had received. My sense is that a significant portion of the 73.6 million votes were not cast because they liked his tweets, personality or leadership style; they voted for Trump because of the numerous policies he put in place that positively impacted all Americans.  How did Biden’s knee-jerk actions in the first 48 hours contribute to his “unity” promise?  Within 48 hours our country had transitioned from a Trump-promises-made, promises-kept administration to a promises-made, promises-go-to-hell Biden intent. That’s authoritarianism in a nut shell.  That’s power and control personified. That’s a formula for tearing down this great country and it seems to be working out just as planned.  Do we have a leader we can believe in, who we can trust, who is looking out for the best interest of every American?

“The borders are closed.”

“We have gotten control of the border.”

“I have been to the border before; I know it well.”

“We will get all Americans out of Afghanistan.”

The Afghanistan evacuation was, “most extraordinary.”

“If you make less than $400,000 a year, you will not pay one more cent in taxes.”

“My Build Back Better agenda costs zero dollars.”

                                                            President Biden, 2021

CONSEQUENCES.  I took the liberty to highlight that word with underline throughout this missive.  Why?  What I have attempted to portray is the reality of our potential future. “Reality the quality or state of being actual or true.”  Reality is something we have to debate individually by relying on history, research and the wisdom of others. I leave you then with this thought.  Every day in his publications, Rip McIntosh, who I am proud to call my friend, leaves us with this important message…. “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality.”  Ayn Rand

Think about the potential consequences of what is happening to our great nation, draw some conclusions and, if appropriate, speak out against the reality and the consequences.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com

At its core, America has been the home of the brave, land of the free, be all you can be, benevolent, compassionate nation. That is our greatness.  That is what has made the United States the envy of the world for the last 200 years. 

But we are losing it.  We are moving at warp speed down a path that will crumble the foundations of our nation forever.  What is happening today, right before our eyes, can dramatically and negatively impact every family in America and it is unlikely that we will be able to fully recover.  We have to stop thinking that we can just wait for the 2022 and 2024 elections to get back on track. The future of America is being defined right now and its very ugly.     

Socialism is being defined in so many ways by so many people today as we watch Biden/Pelosi/Schumer act out this charade.  At its heart socialism is about economics.  Economics rule our daily lives beginning at the kitchen table where mom and pop work out the budget. 

Let’s go back to the title of this missive, THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT, SAFETY NET OR ENTITELMENT? 

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT, unconstrained growth, greater bureaucratic intervention in our daily lives, taking away personal choice, dictating what we must and/or cannot say, measuring success by the number of Americans receiving some form of government welfare?  That list is getting longer and more controlling every day.  We are becoming government-run robots.  Is that Build Back Better?

SAFETY NET is what this country has always been about with its compassionate and benevolent culture.  Safety nets are for those who face circumstances beyond their control and are in need of temporary, or in some cases permanent outside assistance. It begins with family assistance, transitions to community assistance and when necessary to state and/or federal help.  Safety nets kick in after the fact, after the need for personal help manifests itself.  It is not preemptory.  It is not a net spread over the country and engaged whether needed or not.  Safety net is not a solution in search of a problem. 

ENTITLEMENTS always start small and rapidly grow.  Medicaid was once a safety-net program but now, for example, covers 37% of Californians. Medicare started as a program for seniors; democrats now want to cover everyone over age 55 while the socialists want Medicare for all.

Social Security is on a path to become insolvent in the early 2030s, with only enough money to cover about 80 percent of its obligation.  Medicare would become insolvent by 2026, if no changes are made to payroll taxes or how health providers are paid.

In 2019 entitlements consumed 56% of the federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office tells us spending on the three big entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is growing unchecked on autopilot. By 2028, spending on these programs alone will claim over 73 percent of all federal revenues.

While these programs are simply unsustainable in their current form, President Biden’s expanded welfare-state could take us over the cliff to an unsustainable fiscal future. 

THE BERNIE SANDERS/BIDEN MODEL FOR AMERICA: The liberals/progressives/socialists look to European countries as enviable models of welfare states. But the facts tell a different story.  For example, U.S. labor participation rates in 2019 were 62.6% while 49.7% in Italy, 55% in France, and so it is in all the social democrat countries.  Why work when the government will send you a monthly check not to work?  Labor participation plays a significant role in a country’s economic growth.  Even under the tax-and-spend economic policies of the Obama/Biden administration the U.S. GDP averaged 2.3% growth. During that same period, GDP growth in Italy, Spain, France and Germany averaged a weak 1.6%.

Another insane program that impacts economic growth in socialist Europe is their family leave policies. Italy offers 22 weeks maternity leave at 80% of previous earnings, France 16 weeks at 90%, Spain 16 weeks at 100% and so it goes across the European welfare states. 

What the liberals who are impressed with Europe’s welfare state don’t tell you is that long ago they tapped out the wealthy or forced them to take their money and depart so the middle class is paying the bills. The favorites are value added taxes (about 20%) and payroll taxes. The combined employer/employee social security tax rate is 36% in Spain, 40% Italy, 65% France.  The result is that several of these countries are now desperately trying to figure out how to reform their tax and welfare systems in order to be competitive in the global marketplace and to grow their GDP. 

BIDEN’S MANDATE?  There is a separate but important issue associated with Biden’s dash to complete the welfare state.  First let’s think back to the 2016 election wherein Trump told us exactly what he was going to do for us (for us as opposed to, to us). You know the list, fix immigration, kill Isis, cut taxes, hammer NATO members to pony up, etc.  He got elected on that message and then, something unusual happened, he kept every campaign promise.

By stark contrast, Biden and Bernie Sanders met in July 2020 as Biden emerged as the presidential candidate.  They agreed on a 100-page liberal program but Biden did not campaign on those issues.  He was elected on an anti-trump, national unity, raising taxes and Covid agenda.  Biden has absolutely no national election mandate to take this country down the dangerous, potentially ruinous welfare state path we are on. 

BIDEN’S WELFARE PLAN, safety net or buying votes?  Over the first few months of his administration, he has given us bits at a time of his thinking on developing and perpetuating his welfare state.  Keep in mind that these programs will get stacked on top of the 80 existing federal programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, social services, training, and targeted education aid to poor and low-income Americans. 

• Paying families to raise a child.  $3,600 allowance for children up to 6 years old and then $3,000 per year through age 17. This is not just for the poor and disadvantaged; payments go out to couples earning $150,000. A monthly check for about 70 million kids!!  A very expensive safety net?
• “Free” universal preschool for about 5.5 million children ages 3-4.  A Biden version of a safety net?
• Provides for the largest child tax credit ever. Any semblance to a safety net here?
• Subsidized child care to be “extended for years to come.” Under this plan, the average American family with young children may save $14,800 a year on child care.  How did America survive for a couple hundred years without this safety net?
• Two years of (here’s that word again) “free” community college for everyone.  Safety net welfare?  Come on man
• A program for people taking leave because they or a family member are sick, welcoming a new child, or dealing with sexual assault or domestic violence.  It would provide up to $4,000 a month, and up to 80 percent of full wages for the lowest earners during that period.  Safety net for what?  How many generations of Americans have done just fine without this? 

These are classic examples of a temporary helping hand that will become an entitlement.  And it remains to be seen if there are more giveaways hidden in the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better package still under consideration.  By the way, imagine 25 100-count reams of paper stacked up; that’s the size of the printed bill and it works out to $1.4 billion per page.  And, by the way do you believe for a minute that anyone in Congress has read it?

There are a number of lies associated with these programs.  Our President has told us universal child care for 5.5 million children and community college tuition for everyone are “free”.  Of course, that is not true, nothing is free. Also, about the $3.5 trillion bill, he tells us, “It is zero price tag on the debt. We’re going to pay for everything we spend.” 

WELFARE HISTORY LESSON AND A BETTER WAY FORWARD: The liberals, many of them in Congress during the 1990s could take a page from the Clinton presidency and provide an entirely different approach to welfare.  President Clinton once commented that, “Welfare should be a second chance not a way of life.”

With that attitude and pronouncement President Clinton worked hand-in-glove with the Republican Congress, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Some of the provisions are as follows:  Instead of welfare being funded in a more open-ended manner, now welfare was funded by federal block grants to states, along with a requirement that states had to match some of the federal dollars. The program added work requirements for aid, shrinking the number of adults who could qualify for benefits. It also created caps for how long and how much aid a person could receive, as well as instituting harsher punishments for recipients who did not comply with the requirements.

They asked parents to either work, go to school, or get job training in order to get welfare. This simple reform had incredible results. Welfare enrollment significantly declined for the first time since the War on Poverty started in 1965. Employment shot up, especially among single mothers who didn’t graduate from high school. Child poverty, which hadn’t budged in decades, fell faster than ever before. By connecting welfare to work, Congress gave hundreds of thousands of vulnerable families a better shot at a better life.

Instead of “Welfare-to-Work,” today’s liberals are all welfare, no work. This approach creates long-term dependency rather than creating a productive future.

One of the clearest lessons learned from Covid is that given the choice of going back to work or staying home waiting for the government check, millions stayed home while small businesses could not get up and running for lack of employees.  Studies show that long-term unemployment makes it harder for those employees to ever return to work.

By stacking on more welfare programs families will be trapped in poverty, when what they really need is a chance to prosper.

Some good advice from Nikki Haley, former South Carolina Governor: Between unemployment-insurance bonuses and child-allowance welfare checks, Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress want to end the commonsense, work-focused safety net. Their argument is that no-strings-attached checks will reduce child poverty. They won’t. Long term, this policy will push more people out of the economy and onto society’s sidelines.

This isn’t to say that our current safety net is perfect. The current system — which consists of over 80 redundant programs and runs up a trillion-dollar-tab every year — is too costly, too complex, and so poorly designed that it fails millions of families every year. By all means, America needs to reexamine and reform welfare to empower as many people as possible.

Safety nets can only work when they help people today while preparing them for tomorrow

In April 2018, President Trump signed the Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility, executive order which ordered government secretaries to review their existing welfare programs and propose new regulations. It is believed that these new regulations would focus on cuts, including stronger work requirements. Of course, Biden immediately flushed that one down the toilet.

DEBT. We cannot think about the on-coming welfare state and more entitlements without also dealing with the elephant in the room….Debt.  How much debt is too much? I believe that a reasonable answer would be that when the debt exceeds the gross domestic product it is too large and out of control.  National debt on 20 January, 2021 was about $21.6 trillion while the 2020 GDP was about $20.9 trillion.  Deficit spending in 2021 has already put the U.S. in red figures for debt v GDP.  Deficit spending in FY 2021 is expected to be at least $2.8 trillion. 

WHY WE SHOULD BE AFRAID OF WHAT IS COMING AT US:  An illustration:

A family sits down at the kitchen table to work on the annual budget:

• They know their current credit card debt is $541,287.
• They know their income will be $68,703 (medium family income in the U.S.).
• They plan to spend $131,620 in the next 12 months.
• They figure ($131,620 minus $68,703) they will have to put another $62,917 on the credit card. 
• Conclusion: this family is nuts!

STOP, do not go on reading until you have digested those numbers. Yes, this is an insane scenario; the bad news is, those numbers–income, debt, spending, borrowing–relatively speaking, accurately represent what our federal government leaders are doing right now.

Perhaps by now some, maybe many, of you are thinking, Covault has finally gone off the deep end with all the above prognostications that the country could be just days or weeks from going under. 

My rebuttal: This country cannot go on forever with the kind of fiscal nonsense illustrated by the above family budget.  We will reach a point of no return at some point and it just might be now with all the junk included in the bills that have not even been read, let alone vetted by expert witnesses in a series of Congressional hearings.

FINAL THOUGHTS: 

Resolve is driven by economics.  There are about 10 million jobs unfilled in the U.S. right now. The Covid lesson learned is that, for millions of Americans, they will resolve to go get a job, but only if the government checks stop coming. What is it about the word disincentivize that liberals don’t understand?

All this should make one wonder how the so-called Democrat politicians can believe that higher taxes and more social welfare is a viable path to Build Back Better when there is not a single example in the industrial world of a country prospering from such a plan. And then Biden/Pelosi/Schumer berate Republicans for opposing this insanity by announcing that our opposition makes us, “complicit in America’s decline.”

Many of America’s problems stem from this: Politicians share one thing in common, they are profoundly self-interested, cannot see or plan beyond the next election and see themselves as blameless and unaccountable. 

Fiscal suicide by a thousand cuts.  Yes, some entitlements are necessary; the problem is they tend to grow in both size and in number.  It is not beyond reason to assume that Biden’s proposals could ramp up entitlement spending this decade to perhaps 80% or more of federal spending.  When that happens, disposable revenue to cover all other government requirements will get slashed to the bone.  The first big-ticket item to fall under the axe will be national defense. At that point we become increasingly vulnerable to attack in so many ways from China, Russia, North Korea and/or Iran.

BOTTOM LINE:  What Biden is doing TO AMERICA, not FOR AMERICA, was succinctly summed up by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, 7 October:  “America escaped from its 1970s decline by returning to its historic model of liberating private initiative and enterprise.  Biden’s plan would empower the government, pile burdens on the private economy and erode upward mobility by encouraging people not to work, that’s the real recipe for decline.”

It’s time to wake the hell up America, our once great country is being redefined now, in the days and weeks ahead, and it is destructive and ugly.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com

Today, 28 September Sec Def Austin and JCS Chairman Gen Milley appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee.  The subject was the retrograde from Afghanistan. 

To be clear, I did not watch the entire proceeding; but I did hear them explain “The Plan.”  I paraphrase, The Plan, locked in last spring, was to 1) scale down combat operations, 2) recover excess military equipment and 3) withdraw U.S. military forces, in that order.

When asked about the part of The Plan that covered evacuation of U.S. noncombatants, they admitted it was not part of their plan.  The Plan, they said, was properly executed as written. 

Here is where I begin to criticize The Plan:

When putting together a plan of this complexity planners never have a completely factual base of information with which to work. In the absence of facts, they are compelled to make some assumptions in order to have a complete picture of the proposed operation.  Assumptions are dangerous critters and every military planner above the grade of 2^nd Lieutenant knows that. 

Time sequencing the planning process conducted by the Central Command (the Combatant Command encompassing the Middle East area of operations) should have looked about like this:

First is the list of facts (e.g., how much stuff to haul out of country, how many military personnel are there, what is the time-line, how many cargo aircraft required, how many air tankers will it take, where will everything and everyone go, you get the picture).  Easy stuff. 

While the first step is underway, in the back of ever planners mind are the assumptions.  At this point they may not necessarily even be written down. But when the first draft of The Plan gets briefed up the chain of command, the assumptions will begin to get aired.  It goes like this:  The Colonel taking the briefing says to the briefer, “As we begin to withdraw U.S. forces the Taliban will undoubtedly want to fill that void.  Will the ANA (Afghan National Army) be able to hold their ground?”  That is an example of a series of question that would be raised and have to get answered before the briefing can go any further up the chain of command. 

The planning staff goes back to the drawing board and now begins to put together, in writing, a set of assumptions that fill in the big picture in the absence of facts. 

During that process, these three huge assumptions would undoubtedly have surfaced:  1) It is assumed that the ANA will, generally speaking, be capable of holding the ground currently in their possession. 2) It is assumed that the current fully-functioning Afghan Government will continue to exist following the withdrawal. And 3) the U.S. Embassy will remain in place for the foreseeable future and, by extension, U.S. citizens spread about the country will continue with their work. 

Continuing with the briefing process: The briefer, now addressing a more senior officer, will begin by saying, “In the absence of facts to the contrary, this plan is based on the following assumptions…..”  There will be a lot of them, but let’s just focus on the big three: the ANA, Afghan Government and the U.S. Embassy. 

From the testimony today by Austin and Milley, it is now obvious that they believed the answer to the big-three assumptions was yes, the ANA will fight, yes, the Afghan government will continue to function and yes, the U.S. Embassy is there for the long-haul.  In retrospect that was an enormous mistake and failure of current intelligence, or misread of current intelligence or simply not listening to experts on the ground. For example, in July 23 U.S. Embassy officials sent cables to Washington telling the Biden administration that the Taliban would likely re-take control if the U.S. military departed.  It now appears that the powers-that-be just rolled ahead with The Plan hoping it would all be OK.  But, as the saying goes, hope is not a process.

At this point in the months-long planning process, those three critical assumptions should have been discussed, investigated and would have fallen into the category of Center-of-Gravity issues.  Definition:  A Center-of-Gravity can be a person, place, thing or circumstance that, in and of itself, is central to success of the plan.  Or, stated another way can cause partial or complete failure of a plan. 

Once planners understand the critical nature of an assumption, they should then move on to the next step in the planning process; development of contingency plans.  A contingency is simply the answer to the question, what if. What if the ANA folds under fire?  What if the Afghan President exits stage-left in the middle of the night and the government ceases to function? What if the total U.S. Embassy has to be evacuated under duress?

At that point, the briefing is a complete product.  The key to success is that the contingency planning becomes an integral part of The Plan. When that happens the contingency plans get resourced before the fact so that The Plan is prepared to deal with all known and imagined issues that unfold during the heat of battle.  For example, the contingency plan for evacuation of all U.S noncombatants would have included a tasker to the State Dept to determine and report, before the fact, the exact number to be evacuated, their exact locations and their ability or inability to get to Bagram Air Base in an emergency.

If these contingency plans had been in place during the withdrawal fiasco last month, the Center of Gravity for each contingency would have been for the U.S. to retain complete control of Bagram Air Base right up to the last flight out of country.    

At this point, many of you may be thinking, OK Covault, this is all Monday-morning-quarterbacking, anyone could have come up with this critique a month after the withdrawal.   I disagree because what I have described above is what U.S. Army (I will speak only for my Service) officers are taught to do.  They spend an entire year at the Command and General Staff College as majors studying, learning and doing this type of planning with every factor I have laid out above.   More senior officers spend another year at the Army War College thinking through this exact type of planning problem involving Joint U.S. forces, other government agencies (CIA, State Dept, etc.), the United Nations and combined operations with other nations’ armed forces.  I didn’t just dream this up the above planning scenario, this is what we do and how we are taught to think. 

A word about the National Security Council.  Deputies and staff work full time in the NSC, but during critical issues the NSC “principals” meet; i.e., the President, VP, Department heads, CIA, Chairman JCS, etc.  If The Plan as I have outlined it above was presented to the NSC Principals by Sec Def Austin and Chairman JCS Milley and then disregarded by President Biden, my conclusion is that they did about all they could do. 

But, if The Plan they briefed did not lay out the assumptions and contingencies, in my opinion they failed the President and the country.  And when military leaders as that level fail, people needlessly die. And they did die.

The future ramifications of the Afghan withdrawal fiasco are yet to come to fruition, but It appears certain that Afghanistan could again become a focal point for intensified global terrorism with the United States as a specific target.  Additionally, it is becoming clearer every day that our allies have lost confidence in the U.S. and our enemies have lost respect for our capabilities. Summed up, that equals increased vulnerability and that means a less secure America.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

In 2010, during a news conference concerning the Affordable Care Act, Speaker Pelosi made perhaps the dumbest statement ever about a piece of pending legislation: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” And it was only 2700 pages long.  Well, she is at it again but this time the issue is exponentially more complicated and dangerous. At issue is the $3.5 trillion reconciliation, democrat-led wish list that is being processed in Congress at warp speed.  Congressional committees are rushing through a mark-up in order to meet Pelosi’s scheduled House vote on 27 September. 

There are five enormously important individual issues at play right now with the Biden administration and the Congress; 1) how Congress uses and/or abuses its legislative process, 2) entitlements, 3) taxes, 4) debt and 5) the impact on the overall economy.  These issues, rolled together, may perhaps in days, not months or years, dictate the future of our country and it’s not a pretty picture.

CONGRESS’ LIES AND DECEPTION:  First of all, it is a stretch to believe that this reconciliation method should even be in play.  To qualify for passage under reconciliation any provision in the bill is supposed, “to affect the budget in a way that is more than incidental.”  There are more and more indications that many of the proposals are not even budget related.

The processing of this bill disregards a couple hundred years of rules, protocols and tradition.  Discussions of the specifics of a bill are to begin in the various committees with testimony from expert witnesses in open session laying out the pros and cons of moving forward.  Committee members will discuss the issues, offer and debate amendments and finally vote as to whether or not the bill should be brought to the House or Senate floor for further consideration and a vote.

This bill is reportedly about 10,000 pages long.  No one will read it.  No one will know what all is buried inside the bill. The majority of the issues will not even be exposed before Pelosi’s 27 September vote.  The American public will even be more clueless than our elected officials (if that is even possible).  Issues costing hundreds of billions of dollars will not see the light of day, perhaps for months after the bill is passed.

Before diving in we should at least ask the question; is it really $3.5 trillion?  For sure no one knows the answer because the hundreds of proposals included in the 10,000 pages have not been vetted.  There are experts who are now suggesting is could be as much as $5.5 trillion. Let me give you a little perspective on $3.5 and $5.5 trillion.  The whole federal budget 2021 was $4.8 trillion and the federal revenue was $3.8 trillion.  About $3 trillion of the spending was mandatory entitlement.  And now we are talking about a single bill that is potentially larger than an annual budget?

ENTITLEMENTS: The headline issues in the bill that have been reported are expanding Medicare and Medicaid, child care, preschool, more food stamps, 12-week family and medical for all workers and free community college.  What do they all have in common?  They will become entitlements. Entitlements are dangerous because they have two things in common; the never go away and they grow.

Fifty years ago (when Medicare and Medicaid were new programs) about 36% of federal spending was some form of welfare for individuals as compared with today at about 80%.  Now consider the headliners in this bill (more Medicare, more Medicaid, child care, preschool, more food stamps, 12-week family and medical for all workers, and free community college.)  These are new entitlements that will grow and not go away.  The Congressional Budget Office has previously declared that additional entitlements are “not sustainable.”  Where is the Congressional debate, where are the expert witnesses, are these necessary for our country to succeed?  At what entitlement percentage point, 85%, 90%, 95%, are we obliged to admit that we live in a welfare state?

One way to describe some of what is supposedly in this bill is to say it is the culmination of Obama’s life-long plan for America.  Recall the hot-mike while campaigning for president in 2008; Obama was asked by Joe-the-plumber about his goal for America.  Obama summed it up by saying he, “wanted to spread the wealth around.”  Well, that is certainly where we are headed .

HOW DO WE PAY FOR A $3.5- $5.5 TRILLION BILL?  Taxes, taxes and more taxes. The House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees are hard at work putting together the largest tax increase since 1968.

At the top of the list is corporate tax. Before the Trump presidency, U.S. corporate tax was the highest in the developed world and it must be looked at for what it is exactly; it is a cost of producing a product, just like wages and raw materials.  And just like every other cost it gets passed on to we-the-people, rich and poor.  By extension, a high corporate tax makes us less competitive in the global market place.  Trump reduced the tax from 35% to 21% resulting in higher wages, GDP growth and renewed global competitiveness. Biden will increase corporate tax to 31%; congratulation U. S.  We will be back to the highest rate among developed nations.

The top income tax rate will go up from 37% to 39.6% and kick in at $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples.  For those making over $5 million, there will be a 3% surcharge. For the high-bracket folks living in California and New York, the governments will be taking about 60% of your income.  The fuel for capitalism is investment capital.  Where does it come from?  From folks who have a lot of money and don’t have a large enough mattress to hide it under.  They are the source for investment and what happens when the federal government, through taxes and disincentivization, takes it away? GDP growth is negatively impacted.

Small businesses that pay through the individual tax code will pay the highest rate plus a new 3.8% surtax. The death tax exemption level will be cut in half. Higher tobacco taxes for everyone.  And don’ forget about the inflation “tax”; July 2021 prices are 5.4% higher than July 2020.  Gas prices are up 40% since Biden took office, which kick-started an inflationary hit on every American because every single thing we buy, at some point, comes out the back of a gas-guzzling truck.   

 In addition to the tax increases mentioned above that we have been hearing about, Larry Kudlow, in a recent article, succinctly articulated the pending tax assault; “stock buyback tax, a corporate alternative minimum tax, tax on so-called high salaries, tax on CEO pay disparity, a tax on unrealized capital gains, a tax on carried interest, an end to the 20% small business deduction, a tax on estate planning, limits to active business loses, a tax on so called mega retirement accounts, new bank reporting requirements for all depositary inflows and outflows, a plastics excise tax, a carbon tax and a fossil fuel tax,

And with these taxes comes thousands of pages of new regulations and big-government control that will strangle businesses, small and large, taking the economy rapidly into a Carter/Obama/Biden-like stagflation.

Over and over and over we have heard our president emphatically point his finger at us and say, “Anyone…. making…. less….. than….. $400,000 …. will …NOT …… pay …..any …. more…. income…. tax.  If he knows that it is a lie but keeps saying it, we are in trouble.  Conversely, if he believes it is the truth and keeps saying it, we are in even deeper trouble.  As the overall economy slows and inflation spreads across all goods and services, businesses will not support increased wages and the middle class is going to get hammered.

An added note about, “billionaires paying their fair share,” a familiar Biden/Bernie Sanders refrain.  According to Forbes there are 724 U.S. billionaires with a collective net worth of about $4.4 trillion.  The democrats have lined up $3–$6 trillion in new spending beyond the baseline budget of about $4 trillion. It is impossible to make the numbers work. Assume we just take everything the billionaires have, cash it in and send the check to the feds. It wouldn’t cover the current Biden spending binge and then how do we get the billionaires’ taxes next year?  And don’t forget about Bernie Sander’s Medicare for all which is not yet on the Biden/Pelosi/Schumer to-do list.

THE DEBT BOMB:  Even before this year’s Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree, the federal debt was forecast to reach at least $33 trillion by 2024 and $45 trillion by 2031.  We have to service that debt which is currently about $400 billion annually with historically low interest rates.  Should the 10-year Treasury rate move to a reasonable 5%, as it was in 2007, the annual interest payment would be about $1.4 trillion. That plus entitlements suck up all the projected revenue.  What then do we do about discretionary spending to run the government? That is one reason why the Congressional Budget Office continues to call our national debt “unstainable.”

BIDEN’S “BUILD BACK BETTER”: A White House economic analysis last spring asserted that the U.S. economy can’t grow faster than 1.9% over the long term.  The Wall Street Journal concluded that 1.9% growth will, without a doubt, create a disconnect between the rising cost of the Biden entitlement state and a reduced ability to finance it. Where is the “build” and where is the “better” in Biden’s sound-bite economic policy?

The eight-year anemic Obama/Biden economy was lit up by President Trump in 2017.  What happened is not rocket science.  When taxes were cut, we-the-people had more disposable income and we bought more goods and services which caused increased production. Increased production caused an increase in wages and less unemployment.  Unemployment for women and minorities became the lowest in history. Numbers of families collecting some form of government welfare plummeted. Gross domestic product went steadily up.  And, pay attention democrats, even with lower tax rates the federal revenue in 2019 was the highest in history.  What is it about this formula that is so difficult to understand?  Oh, I almost forgot about the Biden number one governing maxim, if it was a Trump success it must be bad and therefore must be reversed.  

TRANSFORMING AMERICA:  Today, not tomorrow, today Americans should be worried about stopping this Biden/Pelosi/Schumer steamroller before (as someone recently wrote), “we wake up to a government that dominates and controls our lives in a country we don’t recognize.”

WHAT ELSE?  1) I will not be surprised to see somewhere in the 10,000 pages of the reconciliation bill a statement that grants amnesty to 20-some million illegal migrants.  Why not, the issue will not get debated or exposed to we-the-people before it, all of a sudden, is the law of the land and thereby solidifies the Latino democratic voting block for years to come.  Amnesty has the potential to severely damage this nation.  Precedent is a powerful force, especially in government.  Once amnesty is declared and the precedent set, every border will, in short order, be overcome with masses of illegals from all around the world, hoping to get in line for Amnesty #2.  Our schools, medical and welfare systems will be rapidly overwhelmed.  

2) There may well be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to education.  Why?  Because our education system is pathetic and the only solution politicians can see is to throw top-down money at the problem with little to show for it.

3) Student debt forgiveness is another democrat pet give-away idea that may see the light of day.  

4) The democrats will likely throw some bones to organized labor to give them greater access and leverage in the work-place.

CONCLUSIONS:

Wake up America, the democratic leadership is hell-bent on controlling every aspect of your life by dividing the nation into identity groups, pitting one group against another, creating a general governmental dependency and thereby perpetuating their control.

National debt does not concern Congress, even though the Congressional Budget Office has for years been telling all of us that the projected debt levels are “unsustainable”.

Even with trillions of dollars on the table, it is doubtful the democrats will acknowledge the herd of elephants in the room; 1) lawlessness, 2) an open border, 3) tons of Cartel illegal drugs and China-produced fentanyl flooding our country and killing record numbers of Americans, 4) accepting and transporting tens of thousands of Covid-positive illegal immigrants to towns and cities across America every day.

The Biden American Rescue Plan, March 2021 clearly exposed an element of America’s human nature; those millions of able-bodied workers would rather accept a federal check and do nothing than answer any one of hundreds of local ads for employment.  What does that tell us about the potential productivity of a disincentivized U.S. welfare state?

Any administration that attempts to lump their four-year policy agenda into a single bill and pass it without due process, debate or sufficient public disclosure is irresponsible and disregards the will of the people it represents.  It is a dangerous precedent.

Senator Joe Manchin, democrat, West Virginia, tells us, “The purpose of the proposed $3.5 trillion in new spending isn’t to solve some urgent problems, but to re-envision America’s social policies.” In this case I believe re-envision is a euphemism for transformation.  

For the past few years, I have not believed it possible for Congress as a whole and Congressional leadership in particular to act any more irresponsibly.  But I have underestimated them.  This moment is an historic low in terms of accountability, integrity, political bias, self-service and lack of concern for the general well-being of all Americans.   

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com