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Posts Tagged ‘Accountability’

A Lone Voice of Principle in a Sea of Hypocrisy

Posted by M. C. on March 11, 2025

“It is the same Republican Party that weaponized debt concerns under Obama, only to balloon spending under Trump, Biden, and every administration before them. They do not fear big government; they fear accountability.

“Massie’s vote is a reminder that true liberty will never come from the two-party duopoly. He is carrying the spirit of Ron Paul and the founding principles of this country on his back while the GOP, the self-proclaimed “party of limited government,” turns against him. 

From The Libertarian Party Newsletter

While Republicans campaign on promises of fiscal conservatism, Thomas Massie has once again proven he is one of the only members of Congress who truly means it. By standing firm and pledging to vote against the latest Continuing Resolution (CR), Massie refuses to play along with the never-ending expansion of government that both major parties enable. 

Yet instead of being applauded, he is now under attack. Not just from Democrats, but from his own party and even Donald Trump himself.

Stand with us as we stand with Thomas Massie! >>>

This is the same Donald Trump whose supporters just celebrated mass audits of government waste, fraud, and abuse, yet now advocate for kicking the can down the road and continuing to fund that very corruption.

It is the same Republican Party that weaponized debt concerns under Obama, only to balloon spending under Trump, Biden, and every administration before them. They do not fear big government; they fear accountability.

Massie’s vote is a reminder that true liberty will never come from the two-party duopoly. He is carrying the spirit of Ron Paul and the founding principles of this country on his back while the GOP, the self-proclaimed “party of limited government,” turns against him. 

Libertarians recognize this betrayal for what it is: a warning that the Republican Party will always cast aside its most principled members when they become inconvenient.

Support the Party of Principle today >>>

Massie is not just one Congressman; he represents every American who believes in real fiscal responsibility and the fight for limited government. When they attack him, they attack all of us. 

The Libertarian Party stands in unwavering support of Massie’s commitment to principle. We will not back down, and we will not forget those who have exposed themselves as frauds.

To the Republicans who pretend to be the party of smaller government: If you have no place for Thomas Massie, then you have no place for liberty.

In Liberty, 

Steven Nekhaila 

Chairman, Libertarian National Committee

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Twenty-Two House Republicans Demand Accountability on Biden’s $40b War Spending

Posted by M. C. on May 25, 2022

A cohort of Republicans, part of the dissenting vote on Biden’s Ukraine war package, seeks oversight and specifics about the destination of U.S. money and weapons.

Did your congressperson vote to goad Russia into WW III?

How does this defend America?

Glenn Greenwald and Anthony Tobin

The House of Representatives, on May 10, approved President Biden’s $33 billion package for the war in Ukraine, and then, on its own initiative, added $7 billion on top of it. That brought the new war spending authorization to $40 billion, on top of the $14 billion already spent just 10 weeks into this war, which U.S. officials predict will last years, not months. The House vote in favor was 368-57. All 57 NO votes were from GOP House members. All House Democrats, including the Squad, voted YES.

A similar scene occurred when the Senate, “moving quickly and with little debate,” overwhelmingly approved the same war package. All eleven NO votes were from Senate Republicans. All Senate Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), voted in favor, seemingly in direct contradiction to Sanders’ February 8 op-ed in The Guardian warning of the severe dangers of bipartisan escalation of the war. Efforts by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to delay passage of the bill so that some safeguards and accountability measures could be included regarding where the money was going and for what purposes it would be used were met with scorn, particularly from Paul’s fellow Kentucky GOP Senator, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who condemned Paul as an “isolationist.” Following the Senate vote, a jet was used to fly the bill across the world to President Biden in South Korea, where he signed it into law.

But the lack of any safeguards over the destination of the money and weapons prompted close to two dozen House Republicans, led by Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM), to send a letter to the Biden White House on Monday demanding greater specificity and assurances about legal requirements on how weapons are used. The letter urges a public reckoning on the dangers of the U.S.’s bankrolling of the war in Ukraine: “We write today to express grave concern about the lack of oversight and accountability for the money and weapons recently approved by Congress for Ukraine,” it began.

“The aid package approved by Congress provides unprecedented funding for a foreign conflict in which the United States is not fighting, while there have been no significant hearings or substantive briefings on the use of the money and weapons being provided at taxpayer expense.” The lawmakers raised the prospect of sophisticated weaponry falling into the hands of terrorist organizations, citing a documented history of illicit arms-trafficking within Ukraine, a market which is one of the largest in Europe: 

“According to a 2017 Small Arms Survey briefing on arms trafficking, over 300,000 small arms disappeared from Ukraine between 2013 and 2015 and only 13 percent were recovered. Criminal networks, corrupt officials, and underpaid military personnel can make a profitable business from the sale of arms from Ukrainian military stockpiles. For example, in 2019, the Ukrainian Security Service uncovered a plot by Ukrainian soldiers to sell 40 RGD-5 grenades, 15 grenade launchers, 30 grenade detonators, and 2,454 rounds of ammunition for 75,000 Ukrainian hryvnia or around $2,900.”

Indeed, the relentlessly war-supporting CNN last month acknowledged that “the US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine.” Biden officials admitted the “risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places.” About the heavy weaponry the Biden White House had originally said it wouldn’t send, only to change its mind, a senior official briefing reporters said: “I couldn’t tell you where they are in Ukraine and whether the Ukrainians are using them at this point.”

Following that trail, this new letter accuses the Biden administration of indifference toward Ukraine’s dismal corruption record and the resulting possibility that large amounts of U.S. weaponry could soon circulate around the black market, placing the security of both Europe and the U.S at risk. The only member of “the Squad” to explain her YES vote in support of the $40 billion, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), referenced similar dangers in a written statement explaining her vote:

Additionally, at $40 billion, this is an extraordinary amount of military assistance, a large percentage of which will go directly to private defense contractors. In the last year alone, the United States will have provided Ukraine with more military aid than any country in the last two decades, and twice as much military assistance as the yearly cost of war in Afghanistan, even when American troops were on the ground. The sheer size of the package given an already inflated Pentagon budget should not go without critique.  I remain concerned about the increased risks of direct war and the potential for direct military confrontation. 

The letter from these twenty-two GOP dissenters questions the administration’s compliance with the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which governs and limits the use of weapons exported to other countries by the U.S. Government. The law was particularly designed to control the end-use of U.S.-supplied weapons, and it regulates arms transfers which might result in an escalation of conflict. With those legislative limits in mind, the lawmakers demand a response from the Biden administration to the following key questions:

  1. What steps has Ukraine taken to ensure weapons supplied to them are not falling into the hands of criminal networks or being sold for profit? 
  2. How exactly is the U.S. government complying with the Arms Export Control Act and ensuring that end-use monitoring of defense articles and defense services” adhere to all foreign military sales standards? 
  3. Has the U.S. discovered whether any weapons previously provided to Ukraine were diverted from their intended recipients or stolen? Have any of the weapons fallen in the hands of criminals or terrorists? 
  4. Are you and your administration confident that you have effective end-use monitoring capabilities in place and enough resources to ensure no weapons will be used against U.S. citizens or those of allied nations, like weapons from the Balkans which were used in recent European terror attacks? 
  5. Will the administration commit to the creation of a special monitor to ensure that funds sent under this and other aid packages to Ukraine are not subject to waste, fraud, and abuse and comply with all Arms Export Control Act requirements? This monitor should be modeled after the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

As escalating gas prices and the soaring costs of consumer goods place greater and greater strain on the American worker, the Republican lawmakers signing onto this letter highlighted the strange logic behind the bipartisan position that enormous sums of money must be spent on a war in a country in which the U.S., as former president Barack Obama long maintained, has no vital interest, all while Americas are asked to endure shortages and economic downturn at home. “The American people did not elect us to pour their hard-earned money into a conflict halfway around the world with little ability to track the end use of weapons or their effectiveness,” they argued.

See the rest here

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Police Officers Threaten to Quit If the Public Keeps Demanding Accountability | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2020

Indeed, it’s even a well-established legal principle in this country that police are under no obligation to protect the taxpayers. Meanwhile, when police open fire on unarmed members of the public, officers frequently walk free, and some even continue to get paid.

https://mises.org/wire/police-officers-threaten-quit-if-public-keeps-demanding-accountability?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=a40e73a93b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-a40e73a93b-228343965

Ryan McMaken

Faced with an armed assailant at the Parkland school shooting in 2018, sheriff’s deputy Josh Stambaugh ran away and hid while children were gunned down. He was later fired for his lack of action, but last month arbitrators ruled that Stambaugh must be rehired by the sheriff’s department, and he will likely receive more than $100,000 in back pay. In 2018, at the time of his firing, Stambaugh earned $152,000 in base pay and overtime. It looks like he’ll soon be back on the payroll “protecting and serving” the community.

When faced with unarmed suspects, however, some police officers are quite a bit more enthusiastic. For example, when Mesa, Arizona, officer Philip Brailsford gunned down a crawling, sobbing, and unarmed man in a hotel hallway, he paid no price beyond losing his job. He was acquitted in the shooting and was soon thereafter rehired by the police department so he could claim a $31,000-per-year-for-life pension.

It is cases like these which help explain the growing popularity of police reform efforts in recent years. The public is becoming increasingly aware of the fact that police don’t face sanctions for doing nothing to protect the public from violence. Indeed, it’s even a well-established legal principle in this country that police are under no obligation to protect the taxpayers. Meanwhile, when police open fire on unarmed members of the public, officers frequently walk free, and some even continue to get paid.

Some of this is a result of aggressive police unions, which make it extremely difficult to fire law enforcement officers like Stambaugh. State laws also have been enacted to protect police from any personal liability, far above and beyond what is enjoyed by any worker in the private sector. In short, the deck has long been stacked in favor of both police agencies and individual police officers.

In response to incidents like those involving Stambaugh and Brailsford, and countless similar cases, Colorado in 2020 passed new police reform measures. The legislation is designed to end police immunity in some cases, to mandate the use of body cameras, limit when an officer can shoot a fleeing suspect, and rein in police unions.

As we’ve noted here at mises.org, many of these reforms should have been enacted long ago.

But many police officers are apparently less than thrilled with the reforms, and police agencies are claiming they’ve been unfairly targeted, while “warning” the public that few people will now want to become law enforcement officers.

In August, for example, the Denver Post reported that more than two hundred law enforcement officers in the state had retired or resigned since the new police reform law had passed. It was strongly implied that much of this was a result of the law’s passage.

The Post article contends many law enforcement officers are quitting especially because they object to potentially being held personally liable for misconduct. The state’s reform allows for officers to be sued personally and held liable for 5 percent of any judgment or settlement against them or $25,000, whichever is less.

“I don’t want myself and my family at risk,” one police officer—a veteran who’s enjoyed a taxpayer-funded paycheck for thirty years—complained. A sheriff’s deputy claimed police are leaving because they’re being unfairly targeted by “politics” and lamented, “Who wants to be a cop anymore?”

Meanwhile, the Durango Herald, a paper in southern Colorado, reports that police say the new accountability law is “too much for them and their families.”

But there is unlikely to be a shortage of police due to “too much” accountability.

In the case of Durango, for instance, local police supervisors note “enrollment numbers are up despite current liability concerns. Last year, there were 16 or 17 cadets, but there are 20 or 22 people enrolled for the fall.” And the Post story admits the number of separations statewide is only “slightly higher” than the average. The total also included officers who were fired.

Moreover, men and woman who work in private security have never enjoyed the sorts of special legal protections that police do. This is in spite of the fact that private security work may be even more hazardous than police work. Yet, somehow, these private firms manage to find willing workers.

Nationwide, the median annual pay for police officers is well above the median overall wage. According to a 2015 report from the Marshall Project, “In 25 of 50 states, [law enforcement officers] are paid 150 percent or more of the median salary—and that’s not including their pension or the hefty sums they are provided for clocking overtime and buying equipment and uniforms.”

Nor is police work remarkably dangerous. Law enforcement isn’t in the top twenty dangerous professions and is less dangerous work than being a crossing guard, a truck driver, or a farm worker. That is, police work often pays more than many jobs that are more dangerous.

Whether or not these comparisons apply to specific police departments and sheriff’s departments in Colorado depends on local conditions, of course. But claims that police officers will be forced to quit en masse as a result of added accountability fit into a dubious national narrative. In this narrative police departments will lose their most heroic members because the police are being unfairly targeted by a public that doesn’t properly appreciate them.

As Slate reported last week:

Law enforcement officials have met calls for defunding police and protests against police violence with an implicit threat: be careful what you wish for. More officers are quitting in frustration at the lack of respect, police officials often tell the press, and public safety will surely suffer. This summer, reports of cops quitting en masse have popped up across the country: Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, and New York City, a major center of the 2020 demonstrations.

But there’s as of yet no evidence that a mass exodus of officers will happen or is likely to happen. After all, many of the separations we hear about are officers who are retiring, and many of these were hired during the “hiring spree” in police departments during the 1990s. It’s now been more than twenty-five years for many of these officers, and it’s only natural that they’re now more than happy to retire as policing faces more scrutiny. Staff members who need to show up to earn a living, on the other hand, may find that private sector jobs—or other kinds of government employment—don’t exactly come with all the perks of being a police officer.

Nor should it be assumed fewer police officers will mean higher crime. After all, the data shows that in spite of more officers and bigger budgets in recent decades police agencies haven’t actually improved their performance.

But if police reforms such as those in Colorado are causing some officers to quit, it would seem that’s all to the good. Those officers who are most adamant about quitting when faced with added accountability are exactly the ones we’d want to leave. Those who assume they’re most likely to be on the losing end of a police brutality case aren’t exactly the sorts of people we need to stick around. Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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No Accountability in Washington. The CIA Wants to Hide All Its Employees — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2019

…consider for a moment that if it turns out that serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was indeed a C.I.A. covert source, which is quite possible, he would be covered and would be able to walk away free on procedural grounds.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/25/no-accountability-in-washington-the-cia-wants-to-hide-all-its-employees/

Philip Giraldi

Government that actually serves the interests of the people who are governed has two essential characteristics: first, it must be transparent in terms of how it debates and develops policies and second, it has to be accountable when it fails in its mandate and ceases to be responsive to the needs of the electorate. Over the past twenty years one might reasonably argue that Washington has become less a “of the people, by the people and for the people” and increasingly a model of how special interests can use money to corrupt government. The recent story about how serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein avoided any serious punishment by virtue of his wealth and his political connections, including to both ex-president Bill Clinton and to current chief executive Donald Trump, demonstrates how even the most despicable criminals can avoid being brought to justice.

This erosion of what one might describe as republican virtue has been exacerbated by a simultaneous weakening of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which was intended to serve as a guarantee of individual liberties while also serving as a bulwark against government overreach. In recent cases in the United States, a young man had his admission to Harvard revoked over comments posted online when he was fifteen that were considered racist, while a young woman was stripped of a beauty contest title because she refused to don a hijab at a college event and then wrote online about her experience. In both cases, freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment was ruled to be inadmissible by the relevant authorities.

Be that as it may, governmental lack of transparency and accountability is a more serious matter when the government itself becomes a serial manipulator of the truth as it seeks to protect itself from criticism. Reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) is seeking legislation that will expand government ability to declare it a crime to reveal the identities of undercover intelligence agents will inevitably lead to major abuse when some clever bureaucrat realizes that the new rule can also be used to hide people and cover up malfeasance.

A law to protect intelligence officers already exists. It was passed in 1982 and is referred to as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (I.I.P.A.). It criminalizes the naming of any C.I.A. officer under cover who has served overseas in the past five years. The new legislation would make the ban on exposure perpetual and would also include Agency sources or agents whose work is classified as well as actual C.I.A. staff employees who exclusively or predominantly work in the United States rather than overseas.

The revised legislation is attached to defense and intelligence bills currently being considered by Congress. If it is passed into law, its expanded range of criminal penalties could be employed to silence whistle blowers inside the Agency who become aware of illegal activity and it might also be directed against journalists that the whistleblowers might contact to tell their story…

Kiriakou also explains how the “…implementation of this law is a joke. The C.I.A. doesn’t care when an operative’s identity is revealed — unless they don’t like the politics of the person making the revelation. If they cared, half of the C.I.A. leadership would be in prison. What they do care about, though, is protecting those employees who commit crimes at the behest of the White House or the C.I.A. leadership.” He goes on to describe how some of those involved in the Agency torture program were placed under cover precisely for that reason, to protect them from prosecution for war crimes.

Even team player Joe Biden, when a Senator, voted against the I.I.P.A., explaining in an op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor in 1982 that, “The language (the I.I.P.A.) employs is so broadly drawn that it would subject to prosecution not only the malicious publicizing of agents’ names, but also the efforts of legitimate journalists to expose any corruption, malfeasance, or ineptitude occurring in American intelligence agencies.” And that was with the much weaker 1982 version of the bill.

The new legislation is an intelligence agency dream, a get out of jail card that has no expiry date. And if one wants to know how dangerous it is, consider for a moment that if it turns out that serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was indeed a C.I.A. covert source, which is quite possible, he would be covered and would be able to walk away free on procedural grounds.

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In 1975, during the Church Committee hearings, the ...

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