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[Warph]

Meet the Insurgency: Inside the Liberal Take-Over of U.S. National Security

Long before John Kerry's Election Day defeat in 2004, his supporters had grown tired of seeing Democrats labeled the weaker party on national security. A few of them pledged never again to be branded as soft on defense. But the problem was that these inspired wonks didn't know how to get into government, much less steer American national security and change the minds of the electorate. There is no local recruitment office for Middle East policy intellectuals like there is for the Marine Corps. The policy world seemed almost impenetrable to all but a handful of the most determined and connected.

So they drafted a plan. They thought it should be possible to formulate a moderate, practical Democratic security policy. And to advance their ideas, they envisioned a network of liberal but pragmatic national security experts that would mirror the influential community of alumni from conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

A decade later, the few have become the many, and a tight network of well more than 1,000 national-security-minded progressives—mostly in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—has succeeded in infiltrating the U.S. foreign policy machine. The group of wonks is loosely connected by two center-left organizations that sprang up in the mid-2000s—the Truman National Security Project and the Center for a New American Security—as well as organizations such as the Center for American Progress, the National Security Network, and Third Way. Like the conservative groups they sought to emulate, they have cultivated a farm league that has groomed and handpicked individuals for key leadership posts at the Pentagon, the State Department, and Capitol Hill.
In short, their success at carving out roles for themselves in Washington's upper echelons has been impressive. But whether they have actually improved U.S. foreign policy is very much a subject for debate.

"WHAT DO PROGRESSIVES STAND FOR?"
 
It all started with their backs against the wall in 2004. "There was an early sense about that campaign that Democrats came out with a lot of work to do," says Derek Chollet, who at the time was Sen. John Edwards's foreign policy adviser and is now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's assistant secretary for international security affairs—one of the most important policy posts in the Pentagon.

It was a tough time to be a national security liberal, but Chollet was intrigued when two young and eager wonks showed up at his doorstep. "I remember, in spring of 2004, I was in Edwards's office, and Matt and Rachel came to see me," he says. Rachel Kleinfeld and Matt Spence were starting a new organization—the Truman National Security Project—that they hoped would prepare foreign policy progressives to someday govern again.

Today, Kleinfeld—proud Alaskan, Yale alum, Rhodes scholar—is president emeritus of Truman. She's also a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Spence is a deputy assistant Defense secretary running the Pentagon's Middle East policy shop.

"We started with $3,000 of my money," remembers Kleinfeld. The aim was to create an organization of true believers that its members could rely on for a lifetime. "We learned that, frankly, from the Republicans," she says. "We looked at other successful movements that had made change in American politics, and the neocons, while we disagreed with their belief set, had been very successful. And we saw how they had formed a community that had started while many of them were in grad school and lasted through the rest of their lives, and that's what we were trying to recreate."

There are now some 1,300 Truman members, of whom 250 are military veterans, 38 hold elected office, and 14 are candidates this year, the group says. Truman barely advertises how to join, and acceptance is competitive for the roughly 120 new-member slots each year.

But originally, it was just Kleinfeld and Spence. At the time, there was "significant disconnect between progressive values and progressive views on security," Kleinfeld says. The new group rejected the polarity that Republicans were the party of security, war, and supporting the troops while Democrats were the party of soft values, like human rights and not torturing people at Abu Ghraib. Instead, she says, they sought a middle ground. They argued "that security is based in democracy; that development, human rights helps security. These aren't trade-offs."

"What do progressives stand for?" asks Spence, reflecting on those times, during an interview in his fifth-floor Pentagon office. "It was hard, then." Spence was 24 years old, in his first year of Yale Law School—Stanford undergrad, Oxford Ph.D.—and volunteering as a foreign policy assistant for Susan Rice, who at the time was advising candidate Kerry. "The Right was the side that was seen as keeping America safe and the Left was in charge of values," Spence says. "That was a false dichotomy."

Spence and Kleinfeld drafted seven policy principles that today clearly read as reactions to George W. Bush. They called for comprehensive approaches to security problems (not just sending the military), strong alliances, "legitimate international behavior" (no going it alone without the imprimatur of the United Nations or NATO), championing democracy through grassroots engagement ("rights-supporting democracy cannot come at the barrel of a gun"), and promoting development and free trade.

But to implement these ideas, they first needed credibility. "We started with the idea that change happens through finding the best people who share that belief set that we have," Kleinfeld says. For a while, Kerry's loss helped give them space away from the spotlight to get started. "Early on we were in the wilderness, politically speaking, so people had time to learn their ideas together, get skills together," she says, recalling that they got help from notables like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Defense Secretary William Perry.

Truman launched in 2005, and Chollet was asked to join the board. "There was a sense of energy and opportunity," he says. "You felt like an insurgency a little bit" against the Democratic establishment of those days.


"GOLDEN MOMENT"

The following year, two senior voices declared very publicly that something special was brewing. Kurt Campbell, senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution wrote in The Washington Post: "After ignoring or denying their problem for years, Democrats have begun to take notice of the fact that defense is the only major national issue on which the Republicans have held a decisive advantage in recent elections and have started to fight back." Citing the Truman Project as well as a number of other groups, the two argued that a power shift was taking place in Washington. "This is a potentially epochal development in American politics," they wrote.

As the U.S. carried out the troop surge in Iraq, Democrats behind the scenes kept organizing, in quiet dinners, retreats, and meetings. Some called themselves the Wilderness Initiative, Chollet says, "because we felt we were in the wilderness." At one dinner, Campbell gave everyone a paperback copy of James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, a book about the network of conservatives, led by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who traced their careers, friendships, and foreign policies as far back as Vietnam. Third Way, also searching for a new message, teamed up with The New Republic to host a national security retreat at the Aspen Institute's Wye River Conference Center and draft a new tough-on-security platform that was derided by some liberals.

In 2007, Campbell and Michèle Flournoy—both former Clinton administration appointees—founded the Center for a New American Security, a think tank for progressives meant to be less partisan than the Center for American Progress and more pragmatic on defense and security issues. (In the Obama administration, Campbell would become assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and Flournoy would become Defense undersecretary for policy.) Campbell organized a retreat, and Chollet recounts drafting their mission statement on a white board with Shawn Brimley, who would go on to be a lead writer of the Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review and is now CNAS's executive vice president.

The center was searching for its identity. One of its first papers would be on Iraq, in which the group came out in favor of a slow and phased withdrawal from the country—not the quick exit that some Democrats wanted. It was a gamble that paid dividends. CNAS would soon be arguably the most influential national security think tank in Washington.

"One of its missions was to recruit, train, professionalize the next generation of national security folks," says Colin Kahl, who had been Chollet's grad-school classmate at Columbia in the 1990s, and who later became President Obama's deputy assistant Defense secretary for Middle East policy—preceding Spence in that role.

Vikram Singh—then a rising Pentagon staffer who would go on to serve as deputy assistant Defense secretary for South and Southeast Asia—was one of the wonks who joined CNAS. "I just got a phone call one day fromMichèle saying, 'Hey, we're leaving CSIS, would you be interested in talking to us?' " Singh recalls. He had been at the Pentagon nearly four years and never worked with either Flournoy or Campbell. "I sort of lucked into this, and it was a dream come true for someone who was a Democrat to say, 'Let's be pragmatic in our approach to national defense.' "

Singh says it was the start-up he was waiting for. He went from sharing a Pentagon cubicle with Kahl to sharing a CNAS office with Brimley. "I think of 2007 as this golden moment in a lot of ways for people who were progressive coming into their own on views around national security," he says.

Singh and Chollet encouraged CNAS's founders to bring Kahl aboard to work on Iraq. Kahl also wanted to be part of a campaign. Hillary Clinton was drawing her team from the establishment, so he approached Susan Rice about working on foreign policy for Obama. She brought him on, and within a couple of months he was put in charge of a small group "who did all the policy work on Iraq for the campaign" but never advised Obama directly. (That was left to Tony Lake, Mark Lippert, and Denis McDonough.)

Spence, Singh, and Kahl all pointed to one key moment for the movement: Obama's 2007 foreign policy speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, where he set himself apart from Bush. "This president may occupy the White House," Obama said, "but for the last six years, the position of 'leader of the free the world' has remained open. And it's time to fill that role once more." Obama offered up five policy principles of his own: End the Iraq War; build a strong 21st-century military while "showing wisdom in how we deploy it"; go after WMDs; rebuild international alliances and institutions; and invest in development and antipoverty efforts.


"LEARNING AS YOU GO"

After Obama won, many of these wonks had to govern. But wonks don't always make good managers. "I think it can be a tough transition," Singh says. "The federal government doesn't come with a user's guide. There's a lot of learning as you go."

"You're working 15-, 16-hour days, battling bureaucracy," Spence says from his office, with an assistant (a younger Truman member) and a uniformed public-affairs officer minding his every word. Policymakers learn how to write speeches and op-eds and drive policy, he explains, but they don't learn mentoring, or how to manage their staffers' careers, or how to position their offices and employees to succeed.

"We ran an executive-agency training program," Kleinfeld says. "It was an 18-week course for Truman members going to serve in this government when the Obama administration first came in, and that was tremendously helpful, I think. We brought in senior officials along with junior officials who'd had those jobs before." Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and a special assistant from the State Department spoke about big issues and micro-realities of the agency. Of 100 Truman members picked for the course, about three-quarters ended up serving in administration jobs.

The training also served a purpose for foreign policy wonks long frustrated with their relatively paltry ability to influence Washington. "It's something I think very few people know, and it's one of the first things that we realized," Kleinfeld says. "Truman realized early on that you can't do policy without politics. That, first, you don't get the jobs. That the people who are most trusted for the policy jobs are people who were in the trenches on the campaign, including in the primaries. That's just human nature, and it's certainly how D.C. works. But it's also that the politics matter to the policy. If you come up with a beautiful policy on U.N. peacekeeping but the American public are not willing to vote on U.N. peacekeeping [funds], no matter how much you show that it's cheaper or effective, you're not going to have a policy."

When Kahl was tapped to run Middle East policy under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he had university, think-tank, and Pentagon experience. But he hadn't run anything. "The piece that very few people are prepared for is the management piece. I inherited an office of more than 40 people," he says. "I had to earn their respect.... I think it was an open question that I could manage anything." His second in command would be a one- or two-star general—and it's a star-making post for general officers. "Everyone who worked for me in that job has gone on to get their third star," he says.


"A LITTLE BIT MORE THE ESTABLISHMENT NOW"

What began as a network of fed up, next-generation national security liberals has changed significantly in the past decade. "Truman may have started with a small group of campaign insiders that got plum jobs, but that's not a good picture of what the community is now," says Mike Breen, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is the organization's executive director. Truman members today include Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden; Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser for communications and speechwriting; James Swartout, spokesman for the deputy Defense secretary; MSNBC host Krystal Ball; Georgia state Rep. Scott Holcomb; and Yvette Bourcicot, special assistant to the Army general counsel.

Truman also considers itself a leading destination for returning combat veterans seeking to get involved in national security policy. During the think tank's annual conference this month, a group of 30 members had a Pentagon audience with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who "spoke to the group for roughly 20 minutes about leadership," according to a senior Defense official.

But the next challenge for Truman, CNAS, and their members who have moved into government is the reality that the foreign policy they have helped to implement isn't proving especially popular. In a March CBS News poll, Obama's foreign policy approval rating was 36 percent—just 5 points higher than Bush's was in a February 2007 Gallup survey. The continuing slaughter in Syria, the deterioration of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have all helped fuel the conservative argument that Obama has been too weak on the world stage. Left-wingers and libertarians, meanwhile, are furious at Obama for expanding drone killings, defending the NSA's domestic spying, and not closing the Guantánamo Bay prison.

Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, thinks progressive national security wonks have been far better at finding jobs for themselves than at governing. "If your ambition is to feed at the public trough, then I think that there are organizations that have done very well under President Obama," she says. "If your ambitions are to influence foreign policy, I would like to know which one of them would take credit for this foreign policy."

Chollet, of course, disagrees. "Many of the policies that progressives championed and developed in the 2000s—managing the transition out of Iraq and Afghanistan; bringing new focus to the war against al-Qaida; maintaining military strength and willingness to use force while achieving greater balance between defense, diplomacy, and development; revitalizing core alliances; addressing issues like energy security and climate change; rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific—are now the core of American foreign policy," he emailed, while en route from delivering a speech in Ukraine to meet his boss, Hagel, in Brussels for a NATO defense minsters' meeting. Chollet added: "Trend lines matter more than headlines, and while many challenges remain, I believe that the U.S. is in a better position to lead and sustain its power in the future."

Going forward, Singh hopes progressives will keep the bench filled with talent as he and his colleagues move into leadership positions at the organizations that once recruited them. "We're not really the insurgents anymore. We're a little bit more the establishment now," he says, adding, "What do we do? We can't just become the old guard. We have to find those young people that we were 20 years ago." Kahl predicts, "You're going to see another crop" of young liberal defense wonks emerge. But before the next generation of defense wonks can find jobs in a Democratic administration, those who currently lead the movement of national security progressives will need to figure out how to defend Obama's controversial foreign policy record in 2016 and beyond

[Warph]

Russia Is Doing It – Russia Is Actually Abandoning The Dollar

By Michael Snyder, on June 10th, 2014

The Russians are actually making a move against the petrodollar.  It appears that they are quite serious about their de-dollarization strategy. 

The largest natural gas producer on the planet, Gazprom, has signed agreements with some of their biggest customers to switch payments for natural gas from U.S. dollars to euros.  And Gazprom would have never done this without the full approval of the Russian government, because the Russian government holds a majority stake in Gazprom.  There hasn't been a word about this from the big mainstream news networks in the United States, but this is huge.  When you are talking about Gazprom, you are talking about a company that is absolutely massive.  It is one of the largest companies in the entire world and it makes up 8 percent of Russian GDP all by itself.  It holds 18 percent of the natural gas reserves of the entire planet, and it is also a very large oil producer.  So for Gazprom to make a move like this is extremely significant.

When Barack Obama decided to slap some meaningless economic sanctions on Russia a while back, he probably figured that the world would forget about them after a few news cycles.

But the Russians do not forget, and they certainly do not forgive.

At this point the Russians are turning their back on the United States, and that includes the U.S. dollar.

What you are about to read is absolutely stunning, and yet you have not heard about it from any major U.S. news source.  But what Gazprom is now doing has the potential to really shake up the global financial landscape. 

The following is an excerpt from a news report by the ITAR-TASS news agency...
Gazprom Neft had signed additional agreements with consumers on a possible switch from dollars to euros for payments under contracts, the oil company's head Alexander Dyukov told a press conference.

"Additional agreements of Gazprom Neft on the possibility to switch contracts from dollars to euros are signed. With Belarus, payments in roubles are agreed on," he said.

Dyukov said nine of ten consumers had agreed to switch to euros.

And Gazprom is not the only big company in Russia that is moving away from the U.S. dollar.

According to RT, other large Russian corporations are moving to other currencies as well...
Russia will start settling more contracts in Asian currencies, especially the yuan, in order to lessen its dependence on the dollar market, and because of Western-led sanctions that could freeze funds at any moment.

"Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies, and to set up accounts in Asian locations," Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times, which was published in an article on Sunday.
Diversifying trade accounts from dollars to the Chinese yuan and other Asian currencies such as the Hong Kong dollar and Singapore dollar has been a part of Russia's pivot towards Asian as tension with Europe and the US remain strained over Russia's action in Ukraine.

And according to Zero Hedge, "expanding the use of non-dollar currencies" is one of the main things that major Russian banks are working on right now...
Andrei Kostin, chief executive of state bank VTB, said that expanding the use of non-dollar currencies was one of the bank's "main tasks". "Given the extent of our bilateral trade with China, developing the use of settlements in roubles and yuan [renminbi] is a priority on the agenda, and so we are working on it now," he told Russia's President Vladimir Putin during a briefing. "Since May, we have been carrying out this work."

"There is nothing wrong with Russia trying to reduce its dependency on the dollar, actually it is an entirely reasonable thing to do," said the Russia head of another large European bank. He added that Russia's large exposure to the dollar subjects it to more market volatility in times of crisis. "There is no reason why you have to settle trade you do with Japan in dollars," he said.

The entire country is undergoing a major financial conversion.

This is just staggering.
Meanwhile, Russians have been pulling money out of U.S. banks at an unprecedented pace...
So in March, without waiting for the sanction spiral to kick in, Russians yanked their moolah out of US banks. Deposits by Russians in US banks suddenly plunged from $21.6 billion to $8.4 billion. They yanked out 61% of their deposits in just one month! They'd learned their lesson in Cyprus the hard way: get your money out while you still can before it gets confiscated.

For those that don't think that all of this could hurt the U.S. economy or the U.S. financial system, you really need to go back and read my previous article entitled "De-Dollarization: Russia Is On The Verge Of Dealing A Massive Blow To The Petrodollar".  The truth is that the U.S. economic system is extremely dependent on the financial behavior of the rest of the globe.

Because nearly everyone else around the rest of the planet uses our currency to trade with one another, that keeps the value of the U.S. dollar artificially high and it keeps our borrowing costs artificially low.

As Russia abandons the U.S. dollar that will hurt, but if other nations start following suit that could eventually cause a financial avalanche.
What we are witnessing right now is just a turning point.

The effects won't be felt right away.  So don't expect this to cause financial disaster next week or next month.

But this is definitely another element in the "perfect storm" that is starting to brew for the U.S. economy.

Yes, we have been living in a temporary bubble of false stability for a few years.  However, the long-term outlook has not gotten any better.  In fact, the long-term trends that are destroying our economic and financial foundations just continue to get even worse.

So enjoy the "good times" while you still can.

They certainly will not last too much longer.

[Warph]

The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme That Should Be Burned Into Your Brain

By Michael Snyder, on June 11th, 2014

     
The numbers that you are about to see are likely to shock you.  They prove that the global financial Ponzi scheme is far more extensive than most people would ever dare to imagine. 

As you will see below, the total amount of debt in the world is now more than three times greater than global GDP.  In other words, you could take every single good and service produced on the entire planet this year, next year and the year after that and it still would not be enough to pay off all the debt.  But even that number pales in comparison to the exposure that big global banks have to derivatives contracts.  It is hard to put into words how reckless they have been.  At the low end of the estimates, the total exposure that global banks have to derivatives contracts is 710 trillion dollars.  That is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable.  And the reality of the matter is that there is really not all that much actual "money" in circulation today.  In fact, as you will read about below, there is only a little bit more than a trillion dollars of U.S. currency that you can actually hold in your hands in existence.  If we all went out and tried to close our bank accounts and investment portfolios all at once, that would create a major league crisis.  The truth is that our financial system is little more than a giant pyramid scheme that is based on debt and paper promises.  It is literally a miracle that it has survived for so long without collapsing already.

When Americans think about the financial crisis that we are facing, the largest number that they usually can think of is the size of the U.S. national debt.  And at over 17 trillion dollars, it truly is massive.  But it is actually the 2nd-smallest number on the list below. 

The following are 12 numbers about the global financial Ponzi scheme that should be burned into your brain...

-$1,280,000,000,000- Most people are really surprised when they hear this number.  Right now, there is only 1.28 trillion dollars worth of U.S. currency floating around out there.

-$17,555,165,805,212.27 - This is the size of the U.S. national debt.  It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.

-$32,000,000,000,000 - This is the total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).

-$48,611,684,000,000 - This is the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts.

-$59,398,590,000,000 - This is the total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system.  40 years ago, this number was just a little bit above 2 trillion dollars.

-$70,088,625,000,000 - This is the total exposure that JPMorgan Chase has to derivatives contracts.

-$71,830,000,000,000 - This is the approximate size of the GDP of the entire world.

-$75,000,000,000,000 - This is approximately the total exposure that German banking giant Deutsche Bank has to derivatives contracts.

-$100,000,000,000,000 - This is the total amount of government debt in the entire world.  This amount has grown by $30 trillion just since mid-2007.

-$223,300,000,000,000 - This is the approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.


-$236,637,271,000,000 - According to the U.S. government, this is the total exposure that the top 25 banks in the United States have to derivatives contracts.  But those banks only have total assets of about 9.4 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 25 to 1.

-$710,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 - The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives contracts generally fall within this range.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives exposure to global GDP is about 21 to 1.

Most people tend to assume that the "authorities" have fixed whatever caused the financial world to almost end back in 2008, but that is not the case at all.

In fact, the total amount of government debt around the globe has grown by about 40 percent since then, and the "too big to fail banks" have collectively gotten 37 percent larger since then.

Our "authorities" didn't fix anything.  All they did was reinflate the bubble and kick the can down the road for a little while.

I don't know how anyone can take an honest look at the numbers and not come to the conclusion that this is completely and totally unsustainable.

How much debt can the global financial system take before it utterly collapses?

How recklessly can the big banks behave before the house of cards that they have constructed implodes underneath them?

For the moment, everything seems fine.  Stock markets around the world have been setting record highs and credit is flowing like wine.

But at some point a day of reckoning is coming, and when it arrives it is going to be the most painful financial crisis the world has ever seen.

If you plan on getting ready before it strikes, now is the time to do so.

[Ross]

Fukushima VICE

[Ross]

For what it's worth!

Kansas ranks among nation's
least corrupt states

By Travis Perry  /   June 16, 2014

MAPPING CORRUPTION: Researchers at Indiana University
and City University of Hong Kong, China,
ranked Kansas as the 10th least-corrupt state in the U.S.A.

By Travis Perry │ Kansas Watchdog

OSAWATOMIE, Kan. — Congratulations, Kansans, you've now got one more reason to celebrate not living in Missouri.

Or Oklahoma, for that matter.

In a recent study completed by researchers at Indiana University and City University of Hong Kong, China, Kansas was ranked as the 10th least corrupt state in the nation. While Colorado (ninth) and Nebraska (fourth) ranked higher, other surrounding states didn't fare as well.

Missouri clocked-in as the 16th most corrupt state in the Union, but was not to be outdone by Oklahoma, which pulled in the region's highest position at 11th most corrupt.

State of corruption: Mississippi worst in the nation

Researches created a state-by-state "corruption index" by analyzing more than 25,000 convictions for violations of federal anti-corruption laws between 1976 and 2008. Those convictions were cross-referenced against the number of state government employees to compile a corruption-to-employee ratio for each state.

Most Corrupt States
1.Mississippi
2.Louisiana
3.Tennessee
4.Illinois
5.Pennsylvania

Least Corrupt States
1.Oregon
2.Washington
3.Minnesota
4.Nebraska
5.Iowa

Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, told Kansas Watchdog the Sunflower State's focus on lean and efficient governance, combined with its leadership culture, may have contributed to its favorable ranking.

"While individual cases of corruption will occur everywhere, I think Kansas has a governmental culture where corruption, even on a small scale, is not normal, tolerated or accepted," Barker said. "Small size and scope of government may play a role. Kansas, being a smaller state has less government, but I'm not sure where Kansas stands on a size of government per capita scale.  Less resources and fewer decisions by government mean less opportunity or reason for corruption."

Indeed, researchers found that corruption goes hand-in-hand with increased spending, with more cash flowing to areas of government which are more easily manipulated for personal gain, such as construction projects.

"The empirical results show that states with higher levels of corruption tend to spend more on items on which corrupt officials may levy larger bribes at the expense of others," authors Cheol Liu and John L. Mikesell wrote.

The Kansas Democratic Party declined comment to Kansas Watchdog.

Related: 'A bastion of cronyism': Alabama ranks sixth in government corruption study
http://watchdog.org/150284/bastion-cronyism-alabama-ranks-sixth-government-corruption-study/

http://watchdog.org/154614/kansas-least-corrupt/?roi=echo3-20977669705-20468379-762ca15e382c7158480b3a03f7ac1996

[Warph]

25 Shocking Facts About The Earth's Dwindling Water Resources

By Michael Snyder, on June 18th, 2014

War, famine, mass extinctions and devastating plagues - all of these are coming unless some kind of miraculous solution is found to the world's rapidly growing water crisis.  By the year 2030, the global demand for water will exceed the global supply of water by an astounding 40 percent according to one very disturbing U.S. government report.  As you read this article, lakes, rivers, streams and aquifers are steadily drying up all over the planet.  The lack of global water could potentially be enough to bring about a worldwide economic collapse all by itself if nothing is done because no society can function without water.  Just try to live a single day without using any water some time.  You will quickly realize how difficult it is.  Fresh water is the single most important natural resource on the planet, and we are very rapidly running out of it.  The following are 25 shocking facts about the Earth's dwindling water resources that everyone should know...

#1 Right now, 1.6 billion people live in areas of the world that are facing "absolute water scarcity".

#2 Global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years and continues to rise rapidly.

#3 One recent study found that a third of all global corn crops are facing "water stress".

#4 A child dies from a water-related disease every 15 seconds.

#5 By 2025, two-thirds of the population of Earth will "be living under water stressed conditions".

#6 Due to a lack of water, Chinese food imports now require more land than the entire state of California.

#7 At this point, the amount of water that China imports is already greater than the amount of oil that the United States imports.

#8 Approximately 80 percent of the major rivers in China have become so polluted that they no longer support any aquatic life at all.

#9 The Great Lakes hold about 21 percent of the total supply of fresh water in the entire world, but Barack Obama is allowing water from those lakes "to be drained, bottled and shipped to China" at a frightening pace.

#10 It is being projected that India will essentially "run out of water" by the year 2050.

#11 It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.

#12 In the Middle East, the flow of water in the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.

#13 Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has essentially given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.

#14 Of the 60 million people added to the major cities of the world every year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.

#15 Nearly the entire southwestern United States is experiencing drought conditions as you read this article.  It has been this way for most of the past several years.

#16 Thanks in part to the seemingly endless drought, the price index for meat, poultry, fish, and eggs in the U.S. just hit a new all-time high.

#17 As underground aquifers are relentlessly drained in California, some areas of the San Joaquin Valley are sinking by 11 inches a year.

#18 It is being projected that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025.

#19 Most Americans don't realize this, but the once mighty Colorado River has become so depleted that it no longer runs all the way to the ocean.

#20 According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie" has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940, and it is currently being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.

#21 Once upon a time, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is already completely gone.

#22 Approximately 40 percent of all rivers and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.

#23 Because of the high cost and the inefficient use of energy, desalination is not considered to be a widely feasible solution to our water problems at this time....

The largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere is currently under construction in Carlsbad in San Diego County at great expense. The price tag: $1 billion.

Right now, San Diego is almost totally dependent on imported water from Sierra snowmelt and the Colorado River. When the desalination plant comes online in 2016, it will produce 50 million gallons per day, enough to offset just 7 percent of the county's water usage. That's a huge bill for not very much additional water.

#24 We have filled the North Pacific Ocean with 100 million tons of plastic, and this is starting to have a very serious affect on the marine food chain.  Ultimately, this could mean a lot less food available from the Pacific Ocean for humans.

#25 One very shocking U.S. government report concluded that the global demand for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030.

Sadly, most Americans are not going to take this report seriously because they can still turn on their taps and get as much fresh water as they want.

For generations, we have been able to take our seemingly endless supplies of fresh water completely for granted, but things have now changed.

We are heading into a horrendous water crisis unlike anything that the world has ever experienced before, and right now there do not seem to be any large scale solutions capable of addressing this crisis.

Hundreds of millions of people living in North Africa, the Middle East, India and parts of China already deal with severe water shortages as part of their daily lives.

But this is just the beginning.

If nothing is done, the lack of fresh water will eventually be deeply felt by nearly everyone on the entire planet.

[Jane]

This is why I am against putting automate sprinklers in peoples yards. I say let them eat the grass when we run out of water. Just my opinion.

[Warph]

This is why I am against putting automate sprinklers in peoples yards. I say let them eat the grass when we run out of water. Just my opinion.

LOL....

[Warph]

Please watch this video below if you have not already done so.  I know its 1 1/2 hours long but, well worth it.  There may be some information in here that helps you to convince at least one other person to NOT cast their vote for Hillary Clinton.  I really don't think America can take another torpedo hit to the belly after what that POS Obuma and the socialist "progressives" have done to her.  Please save your nation if you can do it.  Do you want America to be Islamized?  Do you want your children and grandchildren to live and die under the yoke of Islamic Sharia law?  Hillary Clinton will not protect you from the greatest threat humanity has faced since the Nazis:

[Warph]

(While I don't agree with all of its characterizations, The Objective Standard offers an interesting illustration of the political spectrum)

Heroes of the Left, Illustrated

Don't let anyone try to convince you that the despots of history were men of the right. They were not and their own words prove it.

...the terms "left" and "right" are already widely used to denote the basic political alternative, and because that alternative is in fact binary, the best approach for advocates of freedom is not to reject the prevalent terminology but to clarify it—by defining the relevant terms.

The problem with conventional approaches to the left-right political spectrum is that they either fail to define the alternatives in question, or proceed to define them in terms of non-essentials...

...fascism, far from having anything in common with capitalism, is essentially the same atrocity as communism and socialism—the only difference being that whereas communism and socialism openly call for state ownership of all property, fascism holds that some property may be "private"—so long as government can dictate how such property may be used. Sure, you own the factory, but here's what you may and may not produce in it; here's the minimum wage you must pay employees; here's the kind of accounting system you must use; here are the specifications your machinery must meet; and so on...

....The essential issue in politics is not the size but the function of government; it's not whether government is big or small but whether it protects or violates rights...

The proper purpose of government is to protect individual rights by banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. A properly conceived political spectrum must reflect this fact. Whatever terms are used to identify the positions of political ideologies or systems must be defined with regard to the fundamental political alternative: force vs. freedom—or, more specifically, rights-protecting vs. rights-violating institutions.

Whether you are an objectivist or a Constitutionalist in the mold of the Framers, on this we can agree: those who paint the right as "Nazis" are either ignorant or lying.

'I am a Socialist,' Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, 'and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow'.

No one at the time would have regarded it as a controversial statement. The Nazis could hardly have been more open in their socialism, describing themselves with the same terminology as our own SWP: National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left. Its militants marched on May Day under red flags. Its leaders stood for collectivism, state control of industry, high tariffs, workers' councils. Around Europe, fascists were convinced that, as Hitler told an enthusiastic Mussolini in 1934, 'capitalism has run its course'.

One of the most stunning achievements of the modern Left is to have created a cultural climate where simply to recite these facts is jarring. History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty. You expect this level of analysis from Twitter mobs; you shouldn't expect it from mainstream commentators.

...I just hope that Lefties who have read this far will have a sense of how conservatives feel when fascism is declared to be simply a point further along the spectrum from them. Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism.

Simply listen to Democrats like the unhinged progressive Tom Harkin, who says that income and wealth needs to be "reallocated" -- by force, presumably -- and you can hear the echoes of fascists past.