The Disingenuous Discussion of Race in this Country

Sparked by a tragic encounter between a police officer and a young black man in Ferguson Missouri, the shooting death of Michael Brown buy officer Darren Wilson has once again awoken those who have made a profession of exploiting the social disparity in the poor black communities of American.

The tragedy in Ferguson was instantly thrust into the national spotlight by a less than responsible media which shirked its obligation to provided honest and unbiased journalism for a chance at top billing in the evening news cycle.  Across the national, networks and news platforms pushed a story that leaned heavily on the side of a community which claimed that a white police officer shot down an unarmed black man in cold blood.  And so the fire was ignited!

Hands Up Don’t Shoot

Spurred from the attention being received by the civil actions, prominent black figures began to come out of the woodwork to cast their aspersions on both Officer Wilson and law enforcement in general who they claim has a long seeded history of racial bias against blacks.  The underlying message from all was the same, they were tired of a claimed overwhelmingly disproportionate number of black men getting killed by white cops and demanded that this social injustice be brought to an end.  On the ground, the false account of the police shooting, perpetuated by the young black man Michael Brown was walking with at the time of the incident, birthed the Hands Up Don’t Shoot mantra. 

With hands raised in the air, protesters in major cities across the nation have been demonstrating.  Most demonstrators have been peaceful while some have been disruptive and in a few incidents protestors have become destructive.  In a veiled attempt to justify their disruptive and sometime destructive behavior, protestors have claimed they are doing so to foster attention to the injustice that was bestowed upon Michael Brown, an injustice that was concluded by a grand jury to have never occurred. 

Crusaders Come and Crusaders Go

The Ferguson incident is not the first and certainly will not be the last that will dredge up a group of self-proclaimed defenders of the cause and place them in the limelight.  Their devotion to standing against social injustices lasts for as long as current headline stays in the news cycle and then they are gone.  Not until they see Al Sharpton’s face appear on the evening news again will the even give a second thought to it.  Their temporary outrage is as disingenuous as their message and does a disservice to those who are actually engaged in fight against social injustice and racial bias.  However, their moment in the spotlight often does tell an important story, as has very much been in the case in the Michael Brown shooting.

A three month long grand jury hearing kept the protests and social unrest in Ferguson going.  As well, it did the same for the story in the news cycle.  This provided a great opportunity for the less liberal leaning cable news outlets to invite the most recent group of black conveyors of social justice to appear on their news segments and get their views on the justice system and how it is applied to the black community.  What we saw in virtually every interview was contempt for white police officers and in many cases a general view that any jury that does not reach a verdict in favor of a black defendant as being racist.

For those few who have spoken out in favor of the white police officer in Ferguson, they have been chastised by many of their black peers and throughout social medial, predominately by other blacks.

Don’t Be An Uncle Tom!
It’s a disturbing message and one that cannot be ignored when those who are black and choose not to play Michael Brown as a victim are labeled as traitors to their race by so many. Many have even gone so far as to call these individuals Uncle Tom’s.

There is clearly a racial divide but not one created by the white segment of society.  Many of those in the black community whom have made derogatory remarks about those blacks that do not share their racially biased opinion have done so loudly and proudly while embracing their own hypocrisy.

Change Cannot Happen Without Change

After watching and listening to one black spokesperson after another make outlandish claims, such as cops are hunting down blacks and that no black man could ever get a fair trial, you can’t help but wonder, do these people not realize that we live in the 21^st century?  Those making these claims include several elected officials and those of prominence.  Countless wildly embellish statistics have also been thrown around over the past several months, some so blatantly false that it makes you scratch your head in wonder what the real object is, what message are these people truly trying to convey?
 
There is nothing that can be said or done that will change the minds of this segment of black society and until they decided to be honest with themselves and take some responsibility for what is going on inside the depressed black neighborhood instead of always claiming to be the victim, nothing is likely to change. 

Let Us Not Forget How Far We Have Come

Far behind us are the dark days of our nation when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and drink from a separate water fountain. Through the civil rights efforts of great men and woman including but certainly not limited to the likes of Roy Wilkins, James Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr., the blatant violation of even the most basic civil rights of black Americans have all but been eradicated.  That is not to say that America is free of bigotry and racism which is the reason we must remain vigilant in our efforts to stomp out these intolerances as they surface. 

What we must not allow is for those who make their living on the issues of racial hatred and mistrust to create a racial divide that serves their professional interest.  We also must not allow those who exploit racially charged incidents used to further their political aspirations to do so.  Both are opportunists and their motives disingenuous, self-serving and have done more to victimize the depressed black communities throughout the nation than to uplift them.

Obama Has His Sights Set on the History Books

President Obama seems to have already checked out as the nation’s chief executive and instead looks to have his sights set on the history books!

As the president comes to terms with the fact that he will serve the last quarter of his presidency as a lame duck, he seems dead set on leaving more to show for his eight years in office than a half dozen scandals, the slowest economic recovery on record and a troubled and unpopular healthcare law that bears his name.

With little to look forward to other than a mountain of legislation that will hit his desk once Republicans take full control of congress in January, the president has been reviewing his first year agenda to see what he might be able to get done through executive action over the next two years.

The president has already started on his quest for historic relevance with his recent executive actions on immigration.  Neither executive action was ground breaking nor will either do anything towards a permanent solution to the immigration problem in this country but to his supporters, they see them as a bold and historic move by their beloved president.

The executive actions in immigration will likely earn the president little more than a brief mention in the history books but as a legal and political matter, they will be fodder for republicans to chastise democrats with for decades to come.

Obama has also begun an effort to close the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  A first year pledge that he has largely ignored, it looks as though the president is going to make a real charge at putting a checkmark next to Gitmo before he leaves office, even if it means the release of war criminals, many of which will likely return to the fight.

A move viewed by his critics as putting politics in front of the security of the nation, the motives behind the president’s push to close Gitmo are much more cynical.  Obama will not be in public office in two years but he will be in history books forever.

President Obama will likely do some kind of end around on minimum wage, gun control and maybe even something on education.  Any executive actions taken on these issues will be of little consequence as the president cannot create legislation and there is no precedence or existing law to piggyback an executive order on.

But a memorandum signed by the president means a great deal to liberal academia which is filled with those just dying to immortalize the achievements of the first black president of the United States into print, as insignificant as these achievements may be.

Obama Should Have Thanked Bush not Blamed Him!

President Bush could not have handed the United States first black president a better chance at success if he tried.

Even before Barack Obama won the democratic presidential nomination in 2008, it was reasonably safe for him to assume that if he were to win the presidency he would do so with Democrats in full control of congress.  A war weary American had already handed control to Democrats during Bush’s 2nd term in office and there was no scent in the air that that was going to change.  Congress was just the first of many political advantages that President Bush provided to Barack Obama, of which he would fail to capitalize on during his presidency.

And so it was, Barrack H. Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.  With his “to do” list of promises in his breast pocket and congress ready to do his bidding, President Obama set out to make history with his progressive agenda of Hope and Change.

But Obama fumbled away the greatest gift that can be given to a president, a congress controlled by his own party! 

During his first two years in office and with the luxury of a democratic controlled congress, President Obama managed to sign in to law only one major piece of legislation, his namesake healthcare reform law aka ObamaCare.  Certainly the president had his hands full in dealing with the recession however, he squandered away an easy opportunity to move legislation forward on immigration reform, gun control, income inequality and a list of other progressive line items on his “to do” list while the balance of power was in his favor.  

The Gift of the Great Recession

Officially taking office late in the month of January, President Obama went straight to work on his $831 billion plan to buy they economy out of the recession he inherited from the Bush Administration, and on February 17th, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), better known as “the stimulus” was signed in to law.  Popular only amongst democratic lawmakers, even those economists who did support the Keynesian approach of the stimulus felt that the effort was far too small to have any measureable effect on the back broken economy.  Republicans had a different view and saw the stimulus as nothing more than a spending bill to fund the liberal agenda Obama laid out when he was campaigning for president.   As it turns out, both the economist and republicans were correct.

By the time any funds from the stimulus were distributed, the economy had already turned the corner thus robbing the president from take credit for ending the recession, something he did anyway.  The economy was at its lowest point and had no place to go but up making it all but impossible for President Obama to come out smelling like anything but roses even though he arrived late for the party. 

Instead, the failed stimulus, along with a long list of other bad economic policies put forth by the president, all worked together in creating the worst US economic recovery in the history of our nation.  There was so much uncertainty created by Obama’s plan for recovery that people lacked the confidence to spend heavily, fearing that the policies being put in place by the new president were going to slip the economy back into a recession.  President Obama somehow blundered an economic growth opportunity, handed to him by George W Bush, that was virtually impossible to foul up.

A Hole Left in the Job Market

Bush handed President Obama a massive hole in the job market some 8 million deep.  With an economy that was just starting to bounce back, a brief and measurable surge in new employment was expected at some early stage, a phenomena which occurs in every economic recovery, perpetuated by a renewed security in spending.  But in this recovery, a jobs surge never transpired.  

Obama’s plan was to buy jobs.  He vowed that if congress would pass his $831 billion stimulus package, unemployment would drop to 5.6%, by the end of his first term in office.  The president missed the mark by almost 3% with the unemployment rate dropping to only 8.3% (from 9.5%) four years and hundreds of billions of dollars later.  To add insult to injury, when Obama was lobbying for his stimulus package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that unemployment would have dropped to 6.0% without the massive stimulus.  It seems that Obama’s economic recovery policies were doing more harm in creating jobs than good.

Not since the Great Depression has it taken longer than 2 years to recover the jobs lost in a recession however, it took the policies of the Obama Administration over 5 years to do so.  Another sure fire opportunity for Obama to claim success, handed to him by George W Bush and subsequently squandered away.

Debt and the Budget Deficit

Driven by a large expansion of the federal government and the cost of fighting 2 wars, Bush handed President Obama 8 years of massive growth to the nation’s debt and deficit.  This created an easy success story for Obama, all he needed to do was slow down the growth of both.

When Obama took office in January of 2009, the Status of Forces agreement which marked the coming end to the Iraq war had already been signed and troop drawdown began the following month.  Three years later, all combat troops had been removed from Iraq as well, the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan commenced.  The close of the month of June, 2009 also marked two consecutive months of positive economic growth, officially bringing the Great Recession to an end.  The wheels of debt and deficit reduction looked to be well in motion.

Fiscal years 2009 through 20012 each brought budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion.  In full disclosure, the FY 2009 deficit fell largely on the Bush administration and skyrocketed over previous years deficits due to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) spending which Bush signed in to law as one of the measure to prevent the worsening of the 2007 financial crisis.  The subsequent 3 years President Obama maintained a deficit more than double that of any year during the Bush administration excluding FY 2009 of course.

With the financial crises and auto industry bailout far behind him, the war in Iraq over and the withdrawal in Afghanistan started, President Obama was finally able to reduce the federal budget deficit below the $1 trillion mark in FY 2013 but deficits still remained historically high.  As a result, the national debt has increase by well over $7 trillion in less than 6 years that President Obama has been in office.

President Obama did in fact stand by his pledge to cut the deficit of $1.4 trillion, his administration inherited, in half however, the pledge he made was disingenuous knowing that the FY 2009 budget deficit was an anomaly created by the financial crisis.  In all other years Obama has failed to reduce the deficit lower than Bush’s worst year in office and is likely not going to do so in his final two years as president.

George W Bush could not have provided President Obama with a better chance of look like a political success if he had tried, but the president’s progressive policies and lack of experience turned opportunity into failure.

Second Round of ObamaCare Enrollment Underway – Let’s Look At the Numbers

This past Wednesday, in a closed press call, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Burwell gave us our first look at how things were shaping up with the 2015 ObamaCare open enrollment.

In a marked improvement to her predecessor Kathleen Sebelius, Burwell provided not just the total number of customers who had selected a qualified healthcare plan (QHP) on the federal healthcare exchange, she also was candid in qualifying this number to include those that were renewing or changing their plans from 2014.  Such transparency was unheard of during the initial enrollment where figures were falsely inflated in any and every way possible to give the perception of success.

Going forward, it appears Burwell is looking to do a better job in providing transparency when it comes to releasing enrollment figures, at least as much transparency as the administration will allow her to provide.

Here are the Numbers!

During her press call, Burwell stated that in the first week of the 2015 enrollment period 462,125 customers selected a healthcare plan on the federal marketplace and of those customers, 240,000 were renewals or customers changing their plans.  This would indicate that just less than half of those plans selected, about 222,000, are new customers.

222,000 new customers selecting plans, that looks to be a pretty good start right?  Well maybe yes and maybe no.

The federal marketplace encompasses 73% of the 50 states and DC making the nationwide new enrollment somewhere around 303,000, all things being equal.   With 13 weeks available in the enrollment cycle, if the same new enrollment trajectory were maintained then we could expect to see enrollment numbers approaching 4 million.  That would be a welcome sight no doubt but highly unrealistic considering that there were only about 3.4 million¹ long term uninsured who purchased a QHP during the inaugural 6 month open enrollment period.

We Won’t Be Fooled Again!

We learned a valuable lesson from getting caught up in the preliminary numbers released by the administration during the first enrollment period.  Who can forget the outlandish claim made by the president in his 2014 State of the Union Address where he stated that, as a result of his signature healthcare legislation, more than 9 million had signed up for healthcare through the states exchanges and Medicaid expansion.   This falsehood earned President Obama 4 coveted Pinocchios from The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker and was one of many inaccurate enrolment claims that surfaced from the administration throughout the initial enrollment period and for months to follow.

Hopefully the days of the Obama Administration’s intentional misleading the public on ObamaCare enrollment are behind us but we still must remain diligent in our interpretation of what it is exactly that both the administration and the media are reporting.  Selecting a plan is significantly different than paying for one.
 
It does seem however that HHS is being forthcoming in their differentiation between new and returning customers and they no longer appear to be bundling those that are taking advantage of the Medicaid expansion with those who have selected plans on one of the healthcare exchanges either.

The Second Wave of Insurance Cancelations is Underway

Of the 6.7 million who purchased and paid for a QHP on the healthcare exchanges for 2014, more than half came from those who had their insurance plans canceled for being non-ACA compliant.  And with the second wave of insurance policy cancelations already in the mail, the process will repeat itself with hundreds of thousands more individuals expected to soon lose their old healthcare plans.

For those that have their healthcare policy canceled, they do have the option of shopping for a new ACA compliant plan directly from the private insurance marketplace.  However, the skyrocketing healthcare insurance premiums which resulted from the ObamaCare mandated essential benefits package, will force most to seek out the tax subsidies offered only on the state and federal healthcare exchanges.

Those that do purchase a healthcare plan through one of the healthcare exchanges will be counted as a ‘new customer’ by HHS but of course these enrollments do nothing in regards to lowering the number of the nation’s uninsured and should not be counted as such, as they have been in the past.

How Many Will End Up Paying

The difference between a selected plan and an actual enrollment is payment!  The distinction between the two became a massive point of contention between the Obama Administration and ObamaCare opponents during the 2014 open enrollment period when the administration was spinning weak sign-ups every way possible.

When the dust finally settled nearly 20% of those that had selected a healthcare plan on one of the exchanges never made their first payment or had canceled their plan shortly after.

Will we see the same trend during the 2015 enrollment period?  Likely so as there are always a certain number of consumers who change their minds.

Some Will Not Renew Their Policies

The gravest concern of the administration is the number of those who will not renew their insurance plan.

Almost universally, insurance premiums for 2015 have increase although not near as much as many had feared.  None the less, premiums did go up which makes consumers unhappy and the president very uneasy.

Overall, premiums across all tier levels and all states increased by 5.2%, as reported by PricewaterhouseCoopers, but the most popular plan of 2014, the cheapest Silver tier plan, realized an average premium increase of 10%, as stated in a study conducted by Avelere Health. 

A 10% increase to an average middle tier plan of $328 adds up to nearly $400 out of wallet to the holder annually, much more if they are a millennial.  For the average family, the 10% increase will pull over $1000 out of their annual budget.  Their goes that summer vacation.

Unable to get away from the premium increases, President Obama has stated that there are plenty of choices on the exchanges and suggests that people shop around for better deals that fit their budget, i.e. trade in their Silver plan for a leaner Bronze plan.  Is this what having quality and affordable healthcare insurance has come to?

What Happened to the Massive Rate Hikes Some Were Predicting?

Giving the marketplace a moment to settle out after the close of the 2014 enrollment period, around mid-year several think tanks and insurance industry watchdog organizations began the task of analyzing the effects the new law was having on the marketplace and started making predictions of what we could expect down the road.  Across the board groups such as the Urban Institute published reports predicting that insurance premiums were likely to increase significantly in 2015.  So what happened, did they all get it wrong?  Absolutely not, the devil is in the details.

Once the insurers began to echo what others were reporting, President Obama began to put on the pressure.  He negotiated tirelessly with insurers and pleaded that they keep their premiums as low as possible.  Insurers obliged the president as best they could and offset some of the premium increases by shifting the cost to other components of the insurance plans such as increasing co-payments, deductibles and other out of pocket expenses. 

At the request of the president, insurers may have held premiums down to a level that would help retain and attract customers but as a result many customers cannot afford to get sick.

What All This Means to ObamaCare

In a nut shell, the future of ObamaCare continues to looks pretty grim.  Insurance premiums that were once predicted to be so low that the uninsured would flock to the exchanges and sign up for healthcare insurance have turned out to be so high that many cannot afford to purchase the cheapest plans even with federal tax subsidies.  The poor turnout of the uninsured forced the administration to lower enrollment expectations to 9.1 million, down from 13 million, and the administration still remains unforthcoming in disclosing how many of those who purchase a QHP were formerly uninsured.

A footnote;  Let us not forget, the goal of ObamaCare is to insure the long term uninsured not to transfer responsible individuals off of one insurance plan and on to another, at least that is what they told us!

 

¹ To arrive at the 3.4 million figure, I took the average of the findings in the reduction of the uninsured during the first open enrollment period provided by Gallup-Healthways Well-Being, the Urban Institute and the RAND Corp (10.3, 9.3 and 8 million respectively) and subtracted the 5.8 million HHS reports were added to the Medicaid rolls, as part of the Medicaid expansion over the same period, arriving at 3.4 million as the number of formerly uninsured that obtained a qualified healthcare plan.  It has been assumed, in this writing, that all 3.4 million enrollments came from one the healthcare exchanges as there is no way to determine how many obtained insurance on and off exchange.

The ObamaCare Compromise

Aside from not actually being healthcare reform, the fundamental flaw in ObamaCare is that it is a “One Size Fits All” solution to a problem that didn’t exist.  It is not a healthcare insurance problem that our nation has been battling for decades; it is the actual cost of healthcare that has priced people out of the individual healthcare insurance marketplace.

To fix ObamaCare it needs to be taken completely apart and most of it discarded.  In other words, ObamaCare needs to be repealed.

But maybe there is another solution! 

Building a Case for Compromise

In January, Republicans will take full control of congress and most certainly could pass legislation to repeal ObamaCare but it is unlikely that enough democrats would untie themselves from the party line to muster the super majority vote needed to override a presidential veto.  With President Obama hell bent on preserving the only feather he has in his presidential cap, attempting to repeal ObamaCare would be the same exercise in futility Republicans have tried in the past.  Or would it?

The federal mandate which requires uninsured individuals to obtain healthcare insurance is a documented failure. With enrollment of the uninsured expected to be only half to one third that of the administrations original 13 million projection for 2015, it will become politically damaging for democrats to argue in defense of the costly and poor performing healthcare law in the coming months and years ahead.

ObamaCare caused Democrats to lose their House majority in 2010.  And again, in 2014, Democrats suffered a second major blow losing their Senate majority due in part to the increasing unpopularity of ObamaCare. 

Not wanting to suffer a three-peat, Democrats are looking for ways to cleanse their soiled party brand and prevent having to turn over the keys for the White House to Republicans in 2016.  So maybe, if given a way out that would allow at least a partial ObamaCare victory to be claimed, Democratic lawmakers might be able to persuade President Obama in to consider a compromise.  Democrats are well aware that they are going to be saddled with the burden of ObamaCare long after the president leaves office unless big changes are made.  As well, if Republicans take the White House in 2016 the law will likely be repealed anyway.

How a Compromise Might Look

Taking advantage of the comprehensive nature in which the ObamaCare legislation is written, key provisions such as the Medicaid expansion and a funding mechanism for the Guaranteed Issue, something similar to that which was created for the stopgap Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan provision, could be extracted from the law and crafted in to stand alone legislation.  In exchange, the individual and employer mandated could be scrapped along with the practice of providing subsidies as the means of lowering the cost of insurance premiums.  This would be a significant first step towards responsibly re-writing ObamaCare.  Also, by maintaining the integrity of key components of the original law both Democrats and the President would still be able to claim a victory.

Of course, for such a compromise to take place, Republican lawmakers would have to be ready to lay out a roadmap to reform and be prepared to aggressively pursue it, hopefully in a bi-partisan manner.  Unraveling what has already been done would take both time and cooperation from all parties and you can bet your bottom dollar that the insurers have already been working the problem.  Insurers have known from the start the uncertainty as well as unpopularity of the massive healthcare insurance reform and have not been sitting idly by waiting for a shoe to drop.  

There Would Be Hurdles

One of the greatest hurdles that would have to be overcome is patience.  People, particularly politicians who are always looking to score points and an opportunity to criticize their opposition, will need to be patient.  Healthcare reform has been a point of contention for decades and once it was finally tried, a massive piece of incredibly complicated, partisan legislation attempted to do too much too fast.  Of course the party behind any plan wants quick results as it bodes well for them politically however, in the case of healthcare reform, the better good of the nation would need to be put ahead of political posturing for the next election cycle.

The second hurdle to be cleared affects only Democrats who would have to let go of the idea of Universal Healthcare.  This should not be too difficult seeing’s as how ObamaCare did not deliver Universal HealthCare to them anyway.  All parties would need to grow comfortable with the prospect of a market based healthcare system, such as the plan proposed by George W Bush in 2007, a system which hands control over to the state.

If the President would be willing to accept a compromise and these two hurdles could be overcome then there is a real chance that actual healthcare reforms could finally be achieved.  Fair legislation could be introduced that would set the necessary federal minimum standards to which states would have to meet as part of their mandate to reform their states healthcare system in a manner which best suites their particular set of circumstances and needs.  At the same time, cost reforms from within the healthcare industry could be addressed in a bipartisan manner such as reining in the out of control costs in pharmaceuticals and taking an honest swing at tort reform.

Taking A New Approach to Reform

There are a variety of approaches that could be taken to entice individuals into obtain healthcare insurance and under some form of federal incentive, each state should be allowed to decide which path they choose to take.  From the federal level, legislation would be needed that clearly defined certain minimal guidelines to which all states would have to adhere to.  Federal assistance could also include helping with such ideas as expanding the role of healthcare savings accounts and bringing equality to how individual and employer provided insurance plans are taxed.  Each state could then take responsibility in devising and executing a plan best suited to their particular needs.  Federal oversight could also be established to ensure each states plan was able to pass some form of litmus test before being imposed on its people, however this might be viewed as an overreach by some.

Of course, none of this can happen overnight.  Unlike  ObamaCare, which injected immediate affordability into healthcare premiums through large subsidies paid for by a mountain of new taxes and cost redistribution, a more responsible and stepwise approach could be adopted that  would affect actual cost savings through reform over time. 

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Undoing ObamaCare does come with a cost as the obligation to make whole on the deal brokered with insurers to participate on the healthcare exchanges would still exist.  But the costs faced by unraveling ObamaCare would be just a fraction of the cost if ObamaCare were left to collapse on itself which seems more an inevitability each passing day.  At the very least, if left alone, the shortcomings of ObamaCare are going to add tens of billions of dollars to the federal debt, the very thing the law was created to reduce.

Insurers would likely be happy to see changes to the ObamaCare law as well, as their guaranteed payments end in 2017 at which point they would be stuck picking up the pieces if the troubled healthcare law did in fact collapse.

Why Would the President Compromise?

If ObamaCare had worked as envisioned, by those who wrote the law, insurers stood to profit handsomely from the 25 million uninsured that were projected to participate on the individual insurance marketplace.  However, at the administration’s own admission, enrollment on the healthcare exchanges will be less than half of what was projected leaving 39 million or more Americans uninsured over the next decade.

President Obama has become desperate to hold on to the single check mark on his presidential ‘To Do’ list and also knows that his namesake legislation is getting harder and harder to defend.  Even more troubling to the president is the fact that he knows he is running out of time and therefore he may be receptive to a compromise on ObamaCare if one is presented to him that would allow both he and his party to save face.

Add Ferguson to the List of Black Communities Burned

Following the release of the news that no charges would be filed against the white police officer who, in self-defense, shot and killed a black teen in Ferguson Missouri, a faction of the community spent the remainder of the evening looting and burning down their own town.  Subsequently, today and for several days to come, we will get to listen to all the self-proclaimed spokespersons of the black community explain how these actions are everyone’s fault but their own.

These patterns of mindless destruction and violence have become is predictable as they have been repeatable and there is nothing that can be said or done to stop it.  It has been tried for decades with program after program, outreach after outreach and opportunity after opportunity, injecting billions of taxpayer’s dollars into communities that seem to have little to no desire to better themselves.

It is time we quit making excuses for bad behavior.  As well, it is time to stop shifting the blame away from those who choose to act out in a lawless and destructive manner.  Not until the people within our nation’s depressed black communities choose to quit playing the victim and decide to better themselves will things change.

But this will never happen so long as the people of these communities choose to be represented by national figures the likes of Al Sharpton and other such race baiters who surface just long enough to keep themselves relevant and in the process stir the racial pot into a frenzy.  So long as the Al Sharpton’s of the world continue to convince the people who live in these poor black communities that they are victims they will remain so.  What these communities need is not another social program, what they need is better national leaders and representatives. 

All that the great Reverend Martin Luther King accomplished in his all too short a lifetime often seems all for not.  The people who vandalized, burned and stole from businesses in their community last evening should be ashamed of themselves.  The problem is that they are not!

A UNION of STATES!

It was during the birth of our nation that a very meaningful proposal was made, by Richard Henry Lee, which stated that “The Colonies” should be “Free and Independent States”.  This proposal was embraced by the shapers of the new nation and prompted the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Model Treaty.  These documents set the foundation for this new Union of States, which was identified as The United States of America in these writings.

The statement “Free and Independent States” was intended in the most literal sense whereas each state's government was to possess full power to administer and maintain affairs of its state so as to ensure and improve its prosperity, and also to preserve and improve the lives, liberties and the prosperity of the people of the state, all without the influence of the Federal Government.

In sharp contrast, the vision of our founding fathers saw the role of the Federal Government far more limited, as is stated in the United States Constitution, namely those powers pertaining to issues concerning War, Peace and Foreign Commerce.

Certainly, with the massive expansion of this nation, over the last 200 plus years, it was necessary for the role of the Federal Government to expand beyond what was initially defined by our founding fathers. However, the basic premise that this nation is a “Union of States” of which each state is to govern itself, in its best interest should never be compromised.

We must never forget that we are a Union of States, were each state is responsible for its own governing, and is strengthened by the bond of a single Union to which limited power has been entrusted to the elected leaders, of our Federal Government, to protect the Union.