Posted on 07/04/2013 2:47:42 AM PDT by LD Jackson
There really is something to be said for a small government. Any large entity, be it a government, corporation, or other organization, is hard to control. The founding fathers had it right when they purposefully limited the size and scope of the federal government, giving most of the delegated powers to the states. Our government was designed to be for the people, by the people. A large federal government has a tendency to get out of control and become much more than a government for the people. That is exactly what we are seeing in America today. The federal government is out of control and should be cut down to size.
A good example of this is the IRS. This government agency has far too much power over our lives and the people who run it seem to believe they are above the law. When asked to testify before Congress, they refuse to answer the questions, even pleading the 5th Amendment when doing so. As egregious as that is, there is much more going on than the average American is aware.
As with all government agencies, it seems the driving force behind the employees is the public union. If you have read my musings on Political Realities for any length of time, you will know of the disdain I have for unions. While they have certainly served a purpose in the past, the influence they now wield is far out of balance. That influence may very well be the root cause of the story I want to relate. Did you realize that hundreds of IRS employees are being paid by the American taxpayer, that's you and me, to do union business?
Senator Tom Coburn and Representative Phil Gingrey have sent a letter to the IRS, asking them to stop the practice of paying IRS employees for what is known as "official time".
The Washington Times - The Internal Revenue Service spends millions of dollars a year for 200 employees who actually work full-time on labor-union business even as it furloughs employees and cuts taxpayer advice services under the budget sequester, Congress‘ chief waste watcher said in a new letter to the tax agency.Only in a public union would union members expect to do the work of the union and get paid for it by their employer. Only in a federal government so large would they be able to do this with little scrutiny about how they are wasting money. Dd I say wasting money? Perhaps I misspoke. It really should be stealing money. In effect, that is exactly what they are doing.“While the IRS continues to request more funding to further close the more than 14.5 percent tax gap, especially under the current budget crunch and sequestration, it makes little sense to use taxpayer resources to pay for union work,” the two lawmakers wrote in the letter dated June 27. “This kind of practice takes place only in the government — in the private sector, union work and staff are paid for by union dues.”
Known as “official time,” the arrangement allows federal employees to get paid by taxpayers even as they perform their union duties.
The lawmakers said more than 40 of the workers doing union business make six-figure salaries, and all told there were more than 200 IRS employees serving in 100 percent “official time capacity” from Jan. 20 through June 6, 2012.
Not every employee of the federal government is like this. I am sure there are many who are conscientious about their jobs and desire only to do their work as best they can and to receive payment for said work. In no way am I disparaging the people who work for the federal government. My contention remains, however. Only in a a federal government so large and out of control could something like this proceed, unabated.
Ask yourself how your employer would feel if you performed duties for some other entity while you were supposed to be working at your job. How would they react if you received a paycheck from them, but spent 100 percent of your time working for someone else? Would they not object, vigorously so? I know my boss would and he would be well within his rights to do so.
But, this is the federal government and the IRS we are talking about. Obviously, they have other priorities and are not watching out for the people they are supposed to be working for. Instead, Senator Coburn and Representative Gingrey have to play their role as a watchdog and ask them to cease the stupidity known as "official time".
I say again, this is a great example of why our federal government needs to be reigned in and cut down to a more manageable size. It also speaks to the need of reducing the influence wielded by public unions. The employees of the federal government should be working for us, not the National Treasury Employees Union. This nonsense has to be stopped or our federal government will never return to being the government is is supposed to be.
ALL federal departments and many business, state and municipal unions do the same thing. This is NOT a new thing, just wasn’t well-publicized. AFGE and AFSCME are riddled with these people.
Correct, 2DVet. However absurd, union reps in both the private and public sectors are employees. When or how this came about, I don’t know.
TC
Oh, I am under no illusions that this is a new thing. I know it has been going on for a long time. That fact doesn’t make it any less wrong.
MICHAEL WALSH/OPED/NY POST/7/4/13 Now, everyone can recall the stirring preamble to the 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...” The entire American experiment in personal liberty is predicated upon them.
What’s often forgotten, though — is what comes next: the bill of particulars against King George III that justified the colonial rebellion. And it’s helpful to recall how we got here — and what we must always be on guard against.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance,” reads one of Jefferson’s indictments against the king. Today, those words nicely cover big government, the intrusive leviathan state and its army of unelected regulators and unaccountable bureaucrats who really run the country.
Recent and still unfolding scandals involving the Internal Revenue Service (now hiring some 16,000 new agents to enforce ObamaCare’s mandate that everyone buy health insurance or pay a “tax” for noncompliance) show just how much we have to fear from politicized agents acting not on behalf of the nation but of the government.
ACTION ALERT Freepers should mobolize locally--get grand juries to begin indicting these Senators for FAILING TO UPHOLD THE LAW AGAINST FELONIES. A few convictions and imprisonment oughta wake up the treasonous Congress. KEEP IN MIND---those elected to office are held to a higher standard of law than we peons....but have never been held to account.
NOTE Falsifying govt documents incurs several felnoies and could involve forgery. Aiding and abetting felonies is a felony.
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CONGRESS AIDING AND ABETTING FELONIES
EXHIBIT ONE A bill that would close an IRS tax credit loophole that allows the IRS to funnel over $4 billion to illegal immigrants is being held up by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee: I’m disappointed that the Majority Leader objected to our effort today to prevent billions in (EITC) tax credits from being sent to illegal immigrants claiming list of dependents, many of whom do not live in the US.
SOURCE http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/23/Sen-Reid-Blocking-Ban-On-4-Billion-Illegal-Immigrant-Tax-Credit-Loophole?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29
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EXHIBIT TWO: Just before the procedural vote, on the immigration reform atrocity Judiciary Committee member Sen Grassley offered a simple amendment to the Judiciary Committee considering voting the bill out of committee. "The secretary (of homeland security) may not grant registered provisional immigrant status to an alien under this section unless the alien fully discloses to the secretary all the names and Social Security account numbers that the alien has ever used to obtain employment in the United States," said Grassley's amendment.
Grassley's amendment would not have prohibited illegal aliens from being converted into legal aliens just because they had used names and Social Security numbers that did not belong to them. It would only have required that the illegal aliens make the names and numbers they used known to DHS before they could be granted the right to legally live in the United States.
Grassley said, "Congress should not thumb its nose at the millions of Americans who are victims of identity theft, often perpetrated by an undocumented person who steals Social Security numbers to get jobs, govt benefits, driver's licenses and more. This amendment will simply require the person applying for RPI status to disclose any previously used Social Security numbers," said Grassley. "It's the first step to helping clean up the mess that's been created for the victim of identity theft. The amendment also authorizes certain federal agencies, upon receipt of this information, to notify individuals who were the victims."
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ON RECORD AS AIDING AND AETTING FELONIES Ranking member Sen Schumer dismissed Grassley's proposal. "When people are living in undocumented status, there are times, I suppose, when they've made up identities, made up Social Security numbers," Schumer told his Judiciary Committee colleagues. "How are they going to remember all that, and are we going to delay RPI status? "(The) purpose of this bill is to bring people out of the shadows. We all know when they lived in the shadows, they had to forge documents, forge Social Security numbers, et cetera. I just don't see how, when you've lived here 10 years, and you've had many different identities, many different numbers, you're going to remember them all," said Schumer.
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The Senate Judiciary committee defeated Grassley's amendment 8 to 10 on a party-line vote.
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Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Room
226 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC:
MAJORITY MEMBERS
Patrick Leahy, Dem-Vermont, Chairman
Dianne Feinstein, Dem-California
Chuck Schumer, Dem-New York, ranking member
Dick Durbin, Dem-Illinois
Sheldon Whitehouse, Dem-Rhode Island
Amy Klobuchar, Dem-Minnesota
Al Franken, Dem-Minnesota
Chris Coons,Dem- Delaware
Richard Blumenthal, Dem- Connecticut
Mazie Hirono, Dm-Hawaii
Source: 2013 Congressional Record, Vol. 159, Page S296 to 297
WASHINGTON Braulio Castillo began winning hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts with the IRS within months of founding his technology company Strong Castle in early 2012. The House Oversight Committee says Braulio Castillo was given priority by claiming a 27-year-old disability and cunningly choosing his company's location.
"We've found the kind of wrongdoing that should have caused this contract to be cancelled," said Republican Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, which investigated Castillo's rapid rise. They found that just before opening Strong Castle, Castillo filed for a "disability rating" with the Veterans Administration, citing a "foot injury he suffered in 1984" -- 27 years ago -- while playing sports at a military prep school.That rating enabled Castillo to register Strong Castle as a "service-disabled, veteran-owned small business," eligible for preferential treatment in bidding competitions.
"He never served a day on active duty, went to a school at taxpayers' expense and had a minor injury that didn't keep him from going on to play college ball," Issa said. Castillo, who lives in Virginia, also chose carefully where to locate Strong Castle: "In the heart of Chinatown," says his company website.
It's a formerly blighted area now bursting with shops and restaurants, but Chinatown is still designated a government "hubzone," which meant Castillo's company qualified for even more priority in bidding. Yet when investigators visited Strong Castle's offices repeatedly, no one was there. Investigators said it appeared Castillo's wife "manipulated employee timesheets" to make it appear that workers spent more time there.
Castillo denies the allegations, telling CBS News in a statement, "Throughout our work with the IRS, we have never received any improper preferential treatment and have competed fairly for every contract that we have received." The committee told the IRS about their findings several months ago, but officials there said it would be too disruptive to cancel a contract worth $260 million. Castillo and IRS officials have been called to testify Wednesday.
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57591030/probe-irs-contractor-won-up-to-$500-million-in-questionable-bids/(CBS News)
NOTE: Braulio Castillo (born March 30, 1933) is a native of Bayamon, Puerto Rico, who enjoyed a very successful career as a telenovela actor in Latin America.
On this July 4th the Egyptians have more freedom
than Americans because they have removed
the yoke of Tyranny of Obama-the-Undocumented FRAUD.
If Joe Sixpack had done this, an IRS SWAT team would be conducting a dynamic breach through his front door.
I would bet this type of practice.... Government employees working for union eniities Is rampant though the government...
Under this administration the lines are getting real blurry between government and union.....
Ditto employees at the VA hospitals...
Da, tovarisch, Party and State are now one and the same! All hail Party Secretary Barack Barackovich Obama!
Back in the early 70’s I worked for a company that made the transformers you see on the poles outside of some of your houses. I was one of two people in the coil winding room that refused to join the union.
They had quotas for the number of coils you were supposed to produce in an 8 hour shift. This resulted in the union coil winders standing around and BS’ing most of the shift. I started producing 3 times the quota.
They got the union shop steward to move me off the electric winder to an old hydraulic winder. I didn’t slow down, so someone started cutting the wire in my barrel before I clocked in. It slowed me down a bit, because I had to repair the cut.
One day, I put together a coil with no turns - a straight thru wire and packed out to look like a real coil to mess with them. The union quality control station got the coil off the skid and hooked it up to the ratio machine. At this point the fun started. He scratched his head, unhooked the coil, reconnected it and got the same faulty result. Then he got out the second ratio machine and repeated the process. After that he called over the shop steward, who repeated the process. Then they called over the foremen (who was former union) and he repeated the process. It was like a Polish joke (no offense). They called one of the engineers out of the front office and he said, “Tear that coil down. I don’t think there’s any wire in it.” Sure enough they found a single wire connecting the leads. The union pukes were pi$$ed. They looked at the tag on the coil to see who wound it. The tag read “Mickey Mouse.”
I got threats and eventually they would cut the wir
I can tell you that I witnessed this stuff going on, where government employees spent all their time as union stewards or higher, with afforded offices and furnishings for this stuff, and not one minute of work in their contracted positions, at full GS-level pay, from 1986 to when I left, in 1994.
It was the AFGE at Grumman Aerospace, Bethpage, NY.
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