most of what government does is legitimate. Pinky-promise.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.
This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.
All of this was illegal.
But more to the point this is precisely how the United States sold the American people, and everyone else in the world, on our "involvement" at Maidan -- and set in motion what turned into a war with a huge number of dead Ukrainians.
Oh, you think not? This is hyperbole? Were you smoking weed while McCain was over there giving a speech, or perhaps while snipers were shooting protesting civilians -- exactly zero of whom, I remind you, in the decade since have been identified, arrested, tried and punished. Is that not fairly decent evidence on who's "side" said snipers were?
What was the bottom-line argument for Maidan?
Yanukovych's looting, including allegedly a golden toilet, which became a symbol and synonym for that government's time in power, was both symbol and substance of why he was ejected from power by force. He was ultimately deemed guilty of treason and there is an active Interpol warrant out for his arrest.
As I noted in a previous column the problem with fraud as a business model if it gets embedded into something is that it becomes an exponential function (Y^x) which rapidly consumes and surpasses the legitimate output of that thing. If, for example, 20% of a thing becomes fraud-as-a-business over five years that will consume the entirety of the legitimate output and half more, and over ten years it will rise to become more than FIVE TIMES the legitimate output of said thing.
You cannot "reform" any entity where such has occurred by nibbling around the edges; you can only excise every element of it and imprison those who engaged in it because you either stop it entirely or for all intents and purposes whatever "good" that original thing used to do is reduced to nothing on a percentage basis and if the good can be perverted to serve the fraud it will be and then you do actual harm.
Medical care anyone? The kid with "measles" who died recently in fact died of pneumonia. We've known for decades how you treat pneumonia; it nearly always has a bacterial component so you hit it with antibiotics (these days the correct choice is usually macrolides such as Zpak) and inhaled steroids such as budesonide -- and if you don't get an immediate response on the first antibiotic you hit it again with another one added into the mix. Both are cheap and neither has any material probability of hurting the person if it turns out there is no secondary bacterial infection (unlikely but possible) and the damage is being caused directly by viral activity. The reason the "Spanish flu" killed so many people was that we had no antibiotics at the time and thus if you developed pneumonia we had no effective treatment for it.
But in this case they didn't do that and the kid is dead.
Why?
Was it because the medical system -- including that hospital -- wanted a totem to stoke fear of measles among the population (and perhaps attack RFK politically) to drive more vaccine uptake and a kid that went into the hospital, got antibiotics and a few puffs off a budesonide inhaler, recovered and was discharged in two days with now-lifetime immunity to measles would not serve that purpose?
Good question.
And one we won't demand answers to, even though it has been known for decades that what they didn't do is what you do if someone presents with pneumonia rather than sticking them on a ventilator.
Another example of this crap in the medical system is AARP and UNH. AARP now collects four times as much in kickbacks from sales of Medicare Advantage plans as it does in dues. May I remind you that the anti-kickback statute I referenced before facially appears to apply here as this is a federally-funded medical program (Medicare) and the penalty for everyone involved in doing that sort of **** is supposed to be ten years in prison.
Now contemplate that "agency" (FMCS) referenced in the linked article at the top. "Oh its just a small agency, a couple hundred people which is nothing."
Uh huh.
Every one of those employees and all the contractors they do business with needs a place to live. Their wildly-accelerated "standard of living" as a result of said fraud ****ed every other person in that area by raising their cost of living because they were bidding up everything in the area due to their outrageously-expanded "income" -- all stolen in exchange for no legitimate work output.
The same applies to every teacher who is employed and gets a paycheck but in fact can't teach, as evidenced by, as one example, zero of several school's pupils being competent at grade level. It is immaterial what the root cause of that is; the fact is that every single dime paid to said "teachers" was paid to them in exchange for nothing of value as measured by the expected output in student progress.
This is not "victimless" because every one of those teachers and administrators bids up the price of everything where they live and by doing so screws every other person who lives there.
The same applies to every employee of UNH and AARP, all of whom have wildly increased spending power as a result of these schemes, and every single person who lives anywhere near any of those employees has been getting it up the ass for two decades as a direct result.
I prefer prison to guillotines but the judiciary that is blocking putting a stop to this **** and every other government and private entity involved needs to understand quite-clearly that this sort of wild-eyed robbery and the inevitable mathematics if they allow it to occur and continue is exactly how both a crazy Austrian painter, with all that followed and the current Ukraine war happened.
It will happen again if we do not cut it out right now as the curve has gone vertical on the cost to everyone.