To Ticket or Not to Ticket

The people hate red light and speeding cameras, but our rulers love them. Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras claims, “Since 1991, there have been a total of 35 election contests in Arizona, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Washington. With few exceptions, automated ticketing has failed by as much as 86 percent. One city did embrace the use of cameras after uniformed police officers were dispatched to go door-to-door to "encourage" citizens to keep the ticketing system in place.” If you really thought we had a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” the red light camera issue should disabuse you of that mistake.

As if reading from a script, Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl communicated our rulers’ perspective to The Dayton Daily News. “‘The purpose of using red light and speed enforcement cameras is to prevent accidents and save lives,’ Biehl said. ‘The very presence of the cameras has been proven to change people’s dangerous driving habits. Since the red light cameras were installed in 2003, we have seen a noticeable reduction in light-running accidents at intersections where the cameras are in place, and a similar reduction in accidents citywide. We expect to see further reductions.’”

Even if Biehl was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which he’s not, his argument would still be illegitimate. It presupposes that mundane adults - those who don’t work for government - are children who must be controlled by morally and intellectually superior rulers. This is obviously untrue. People who work for the government have no moral or intellectual superiority over people who don’t. Adults are not children who must be looked after by a paternalistic government for their own good.

Even if Biehl’s claim was true, he fails to mention the trade-offs which the people overwhelmingly reject. The DDN reports, “The number of speeding tickets issued in Dayton increased nearly 1,400 percent to 58,325 since the city added speed cameras to some of its busiest streets two years ago. A Dayton Daily News investigation found at a rate of 152 a day, or more than six per hour, the city’s 14 traffic cameras issued 55,676 speeding tickets in 2012.” Clearly the people do not find Biehl’s supposed benefit worth this outrageous cost.

Furthermore, Biehl is not telling anywhere near the whole truth. A number of independent studies show red light cameras increase accidents and risk to safety, contrary to Biehl’s claim.

Biehl also fails to mention the cameras open the door to significant corruption. Since the people receiving the tickets have no recourse in a criminal court to challenge the evidence against them, there’s no way to know if the camera actually caught the person speeding or running a red light. Many victims claim they didn’t break the law. Many districts shortened yellow lights in order to catch more people.

But the elephant in the room Biehl fails to address is the financial motive behind the cameras. The DDN discovered, “[Dayton] records show speed camera citations generated $2.38 million between April and December 2012.” That’s a lot of other people’s money stolen using these cameras. If everybody paid, that number would have jumped to $4.52 million. Tickets in the region cost car owners $5.6 million in 2012. Al Capone would consider this racket dirty. That’s why a Hamilton County judge banned the cameras. A Florida legislator called them a tax on poor people. That’s why most of Dayton’s cameras are located in poor neighborhoods. There are none around the University of Dayton, Miami Valley Hospital or downtown. Rulers don’t steal money from their cronies; they steal it from others and give it to them.

A suburb of Cleveland called Maple Heights illustrates stealing money, not safety, is the motive behind the cameras. The mayor of Maple Heights told the Associated Press, “‘[Opponents of the cameras] really didn't win anything,’ Lansky said. ‘They bankrupted the city is what they did.’” The oppressed people of Maple Heights can only hope.

Voters also banned the cameras in Cleveland, cutting $5 million from their rulers’ stolen haul. That’s $5 million their rulers can’t use to oppress them, so that’s a double victory. Cleveland’s rulers will have to make do with the millions more they steal in other ways.

All Ohioans may soon breathe a sigh of relief since the Ohio Senate recently passed a bill that would require all tickets to be issued by a police officer. As commonsensical as that sounds, it’s going to take an act of Congress, well, the legislature, to make it reality.

But the legislature isn’t doing this because it’s the right thing to do. They’re doing it because 65 percent of the money collected goes to an out-of-state manufacturer. If this ban passes, some crony will begin producing red light cameras in Ohio and get that ban overturned. Then we’ll be right back where we are today but with no hope for a legislative remedy.

American Voters are Insane

Einstein called doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result insanity. By that definition, American voters are insane. By continuing to vote for the same two big-government, progressive parties, voters keep America trapped in a spiral of decline.

Younger readers may not remember Bill Clinton’s presidency. In 1992, voters were angry at Bush the Elder for raising taxes after he promised he wouldn’t. Contrary to the myth the media created about him, Clinton was a hardcore leftist much like President Obama, but unlike Obama, he was also a realist. He had been forced to govern moderately in conservative Arkansas, and, like Obama, he ran as a moderate because he realized Americans would never knowingly elect a hardcore leftist. As soon as he took office though, like Obama, he governed like a corrupt, hardcore leftist king. He had Hillary push a health care plan, Hillarycare, more oppressive than Obamacare. Angry voters quickly punished him by electing large Republican majorities to both chambers in 1994.

By 2000, voters were fed up with Democrats and barely elected Bush the Younger president because he lied like all Republicans and claimed he supported smaller government. By 2006, voters were rightfully fed up with Republicans and packed both chambers with Democrats then elected Obama in 2008. In 2010 they punished Obama by giving the House to Republicans. In 2014 voters were so angry they packed both chambers with Republicans again.

Voters keep repeating the same cycles and getting the same result then acting surprised. It’s impossible to change direction by electing the same two thieving parties which are destroying the country, but voters do it every time.

With that in mind, it’s easy to predict what to expect in the next two years. Ron Paul tweeted, “Republican control of the Senate = expanded neocon wars in Syria and Iraq. Boots on the ground are coming!”

That’s an easy prediction since both parties love to kill both US troops and foreigners, but Republicans are more bellicose about it. Thomas DiLorenzo observed on Fox News, “Politicians like to talk about problems without doing anything about them and pretending that they will just go away, said the neophyte [Republican] senator. [sic] ‘But ISIS is not going away!’ she continued, followed by lots of canned clapping and cheering by the GOP plants/flaks in the audience.”

Political commentator Lawrence Vance remembers how Republicans dealt with Clinton, “[After 1994] they spent the next six years making excuses for their actions while complaining that they needed a Republican president so they could really do something.” Republicans will chant that same mantra for the next two years.

Vance continues, “Then they got one: George W. Bush in 2000. And we know what happened then. The Republicans went on a spending spree, passed their own version of health care reform, and started two wars.” He forgot to mention expanding, instead of abolishing, the unconstitutional, immoral and counter-productive Department of Education like President Reagan had advocated.

Vance expects a repeat, summing up his prediction for Republicans, “They will continue to spend, spend, spend, bomb, bomb, bomb, tax, tax, tax, and regulate, regulate, regulate.”

That’s exactly what Republicans will do because, the same as Democrats, the more they expand the size and scope of government, the richer they get. The more Americans and foreigners they kill, the richer they get. The more they spy on us, the richer they get. The more money they counterfeit, the richer they get. The more welfare they hand out, corporate and otherwise, the richer they get. This is why Republicans govern identically to Democrats. The only notable difference is their rhetoric.

Sixty-six percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Something is seriously wrong with the other 34 percent. The country is on the wrong track because it’s following the same path to self-destruction the Soviet Union followed. The more government interferes in our economy, the more it interferes in our personal lives, the more wealth our rulers loot, the faster the country declines. Our only hope to mitigate the damage from the impending Soviet-scale, or potentially Roman-scale, collapse, is to aggressively dismantle our oppressive government at the local, state and federal levels. Anybody who voted for a Republican or Democrat for any office, local, state or federal, or a tax increase, is preventing that from happening, and is therefore helping destroy the country.

The biggest irony of the election might be that resistance to Obama’s threat to illegally grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens drove the historic Republican wave, but Republicans have pushed to grant amnesty to illegal aliens since 2000. Voters empowered the fox to guard the henhouse. And Republicans couldn’t stop Obama if they wanted to. The House could impeach him, but Republicans don’t have enough votes in the Senate to convict, so they won’t make the mistake of allowing Obama to play the martyr while remaining in office.

So nothing of substance will change. We can expect both Obama and Republicans to become more aggressive, belligerent and tyrannical, and America’s decline will continue apace.

Republicans Secretly Love Obamacare

I hate to say I told you so because I would love to see the Obamacare disaster repealed, but like I warned all along, Republicans only want to share in the looting.

Five minutes after Obamacare passed, Republicans called for its repeal, but Obamacare was modeled on the Heritage Foundation plan implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. When Republicans chose Romney as their presidential nominee in 2012, it was an implicit embrace of Obamacare. The only part Republicans didn’t like was the giant slush fund for Democrat activists. When Republicans refined their slogan to “repeal and replace”, they meant modify the slush fund so Republican activists could share in the looting. The Republican House, which controls all federal spending, funded this abomination over and over since it passed. That’s not what people who really wanted to repeal it would do.

As recently as March, at the end of Obamacare’s enrollment debacle, The Washington Post reported, “The president’s health care law continues to wreak havoc on American families, small businesses and our economy, and as I’ve said many times, the problem was never just about the website – it’s the whole law,’ [Speaker of the House John Boehner] said in a statement Monday afternoon. ‘Millions of Americans are seeing their premiums rise, not the lower prices the president promised. Many small businesses are afraid to hire new workers, instead cutting hours and dropping health coverage for existing employees. Many Americans can no longer see their family doctor, despite the pledge no one would lose access to their physician. Seniors are feeling the impact, losing their Medicare Advantage plans the president promised they could keep. And taxpayers are being forced to pick up an unaffordable tab.’”

Boehner’s assessment was accurate, and on the basis of that assessment, he promised to repeal the disaster. Just a month later, he made the case that Obamacare could only be replaced with a similar big-government program. New Republic quotes Boehner, “The challenge is that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is there and it has driven all types of changes in our health care delivery system. You can’t recreate an insurance market overnight. Secondly, you’ve got the big hospital organizations buying up doctor’s groups because hospitals get reimbursed two or three times what doctors do for the same procedure just because it’s a hospital. Those kinds of changes can’t be redone. So the biggest challenge we are going to have—I do think at some point we’ll get there—is the transition of Obamacare back to a system that empowers patients and doctors to make choices that are good for their own health as opposed to doing what the government is dictating they should do.” Complete repeal would do what Boehner says he wants, but he ruled that out.

Then a predictable thing happened on the way to this election: President Obama self-destructed. Republicans no longer needed to lie about wanting to repeal Obamacare. The New York Times notes, “Republican attacks on the health care law dominated the early months of the campaign, but now have largely receded from view. The focus instead has been more on tethering Democratic candidates to Mr. Obama with a broad-brush condemnation of his policies.”

The Times continues, “Even though Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who could become the majority leader if he wins re-election and his party nets six seats, has stuck by his promise to repeal the law ‘root and branch,’ he has conceded that is quite unlikely to happen.”

Republican criticism of Obamacare, based on their own plan, has always been a charade for political gain. As economist Lew Rockwell put it, “Since the corporatist scheme was written by big pharma and its cartel allies, the GOP secretly (and now, not so secretly) loves it. In the old days, Republicans pretended to dislike Medicare, too.” Obamacare is another excuse for stealing people’s money and transferring it to giant corporations, much like Medicare Part D which Republicans passed while Bush the Younger was president. As the Mises Institute points out, Obamacare is a predictable evolution of the government takeover of healthcare both parties have advanced for a century. There’s nothing revolutionary about it.

I wonder how many times the people who fell for this Republican lie have fallen for them before and will continue falling for them.

The reason people fall for the ubiquitous lies of both parties is they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of government. Government exists to steal our money. The bigger and more powerful government gets, the richer politicians, all of whom are self-serving, become. This is why there’s no meaningful difference between the two parties except their lying rhetoric. Both parties support ever more warfare, welfare, and expansion of the size and scope of government. Because the state is an inherently criminal organization, stealing money and ordering people around at the points of its guns, it attracts the worst people in the region it controls to work for it. Government is brutally efficient at stealing our money and oppressing us while presenting the illusion of being legitimate, just incompetent.

Fill Up While You Can

As I write this, daytongasprices.com lists local gas prices as low as $2.69. We haven’t seen prices that low in forever. There’s a couple reasons for it.

The good news is despite President Obama’s war on oil and thanks to oil shale, the US is on the verge of surpassing Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer. Bloomberg reports, “The U.S. will surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2015, and be close to energy self-sufficiency in the next two decades, amid booming output from shale formations, the IEA [International Energy Agency] said.” Oil and gas production in the US is booming, and that’s about the only economic sector that is. The private sector still provides. The laws of supply and demand still work.

But that’s not the real story. The best lies are based on half-truths, and that’s what’s going on here. The establishment wants us to believe that suddenly, in just the last few weeks, US production has ramped up so much that it drove down prices. All hail Obama!

Of course that isn’t true. In an interview with Indian newspaper The Economic Times, legendary investor Jim Rogers tells what really drove down prices. The Times explains, “Even as crude oil prices have dipped to all-time lows, Jim Rogers of Rogers Holdings told ET Now that the decline is 'artificial'. ‘Some of this (oil price decline) is artificial. OPEC is trying to drive down prices because of Shale competition. The oil situation is very artificial at the moment.’”

I hate to disagree with Rogers, but even he’s only half right. OPEC was dumping oil, but not because of shale competition. OPEC doesn’t exist to drive prices down. It exists to keep them high. In fact, these low prices are causing problems for the Saudis. Vox presents another piece of the story. “Oil that's below $90 a barrel will throw the Saudi budget into deficit. But the Saudis have a big cash stockpile accumulated over the years,” Vox reported. “Oil that cheap will cause much more serious budgetary problems for the Saudis' regional rival, Iran. It's also bad for Russia, whose behavior in Syria has been at odds with Saudi policy. And Saudis hope that cheap oil will also crimp American production, effectively putting a floor under further price drops.”

The reality is these low prices are driven more by politics than economics. The economics are bad for the Saudis. “Of course this is not an uncontroversial strategy. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the ultra-rich Saudi investor potentate, recently released an open letter criticizing the Kingdom's official strategy of complacency,” Vox continued. “Even the biggest budget reserve will eventually go broke, after all, and further technical innovations could keep Bakken production profitable even at levels where it doesn't currently make sense.”

But the political elephant in the room oddly unmentioned in any stories about this recent, sharp fall in gas prices is the upcoming US election in which Republicans are threatening to take over the Senate. If they do, they’ll be able to force Obama into a bunch of unpopular vetoes, improving their chances at winning the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2016. This is why this midterm election is the most expensive in history, with nearly $4 billion being spent. The bigger and more powerful the government gets, the more wealth there is to be stolen in each election. Therefore the more money gets spent on each election.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Bloomberg informs, “Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, said it cut production by 408,000 barrels a day last month amid signs of a supply glut and Brent oil trading below $100 a barrel.”

The article continues, “The Saudi decline is the largest monthly drop in production since December 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Other estimates collated by OPEC, based on secondary sources, show that the kingdom cut output by 55,200 barrels to 9.86 million a day last month.”

The party is over. The Saudis know how long it takes to turn oil into gasoline. They cut production in order to drive up prices right after the US election. They’re helping Democrats because Obama has kindly agreed to blow a bunch of Syrians to bits and bomb Syria back into the stone age for them. In the Sunni-Shia regional civil war our government has dragged us into, Shiite Iran is enemy number one for the Sunni Saudis, and taking down President Assad in Syria is a stepping stone to attacking Iran. Obama helped the Saudis arm and train Sunni Islamic State [ISIS] fighters, and he’s destroying oil facilities in Syria. The Saudis drove down the price of gas in an evil quid pro quo. Not to mention Saudi Arabia continues to sell oil in dollars.

So fill your gas tank with cheap gas while you can. After election day, prices will climb back over $3 a gallon, then back over $3.50, in hopes of extending the life of the doomed US dollar.

The Manufactured Ebola Crisis

There’s a new meme taking over the news about how President Obama has stepped up to lead the country and the world in the fight against Ebola. El Paso Inc. provides an example. “In recent months, Obama caught criticism for going golfing immediately after speaking about the beheading of an American, and for attending a fundraiser after an airliner was shot down in Ukraine,” it wrote. “This time, as the Ebola threat hit home in America, the president suddenly cleared his schedule, canceling travel and appearances to consult with Cabinet members and talk with world leaders about how to contain the epidemic.” Wow, what a hero.

The only problem is this story is a travesty. Two months ago Ebola was a little known disease that made an occasional headline in the US when an outbreak occurred in Africa. The only reason it’s news today is the president who never wants to let a good crisis go to waste invited Ebola into the country because an outbreak in Africa wasn’t going to motivate Americans to surrender more of their freedom and money to Obama and his henchmen.

The most obvious way to protect Americans from Ebola would be to not bring people with Ebola into the country. That’s a standard response to any outbreak of disease, but instead of doing that, Obama intentionally brought two infected Americans into the country against the advice of the CDC director.

Airlines don’t want people with Ebola on their jets because they don’t want to help infect their passengers and crew for two reasons: they’re compassionate people, and it would cost them much money. This is standard operating procedure for a serious outbreak of disease, and countries around the world that have closed their borders to the hard-hit African countries remain Ebola-free. Yet US airlines continue to fly passengers from the inflicted areas into the US without testing them for the virus. It’s almost inexplicable unless Obama threatened them with civil rights prosecution for discrimination if they didn’t.

And Obama’s henchmen all lied to us about the ability of the US health care system to deal with Ebola. They lied to us about how it’s transmitted. They lied to us about pretty much everything.

For example, all government’s experts originally claimed Ebola couldn’t be transferred through the air. A few weeks later the CDC admitted it could be spread through a sneeze or cough. Joe Alton, M.D. tells the truth. “The well-known and respected Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota recently notified the CDC and the World Health Organization that ‘there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles,’” he informs. “For the first time, they include exhaled breath in their report.” So much for it not being airborne.

When the first Dallas nurse showed symptoms, Obama’s henchmen immediately, boisterously blamed her and the hospital for failing to follow protocol. Foxnews reported, “Top federal doctors acknowledged Sunday that a ‘breach in protocol’ resulted in a Dallas hospital worker getting Ebola while treating the country’s first patient and said changes in the handling of such cases are being made.”

This was a reflexive lie. It came out immediately even though the liars had no idea what had occurred. They promised to investigate to find the breach. Government tacitly admitted the lie when it quietly changed its protocols. The Huffington Post reports, ‘Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said those caring for an Ebola patient in Dallas were vulnerable because some of their skin was exposed. … "So there were parts about that protocol that left vulnerability, parts of the skin that were open,’ Fauci said.” He didn’t admit fault or apologize for previously blaming the nurse.

As for how prepared our healthcare system was, now Obama’s henchmen want to build an Ebola hospital in every state. That’s an admission no state was prepared.

Obama will ask Congress to steal more money from taxpayers to fight Ebola, as if the hundreds of billions the government already wastes on politicizing health care aren’t enough. The Pentagon, of all organizations, is creating a rapid response team for domestic Ebola cases. The generals must plan to unconstitutionally lock Americans in Obama’s new, domestic Ebola hospitals and give forced vaccinations. Stealing our money and freedom is what this manufactured crisis was about from the beginning. Our rulers and their propagandists ratchet up panic while pretending to fight it.

The government can’t save us from Ebola, but private companies can. Despite knowing nothing about Ebola when the outbreak hit, Firestone in Liberia stopped it. Even government-funded NPR notes, “Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks.” Obama might cut off NPR’s funding for that.

Please don’t fall for this evil scheme. Malnutrition, especially of selenium and vitamin C, makes people more susceptible to Ebola. Famine and malnutrition is why Ebola strikes in destitute African countries but rarely elsewhere. You won’t read that from government’s propagandists.

Google and Apple Won’t Save You

NSA spying is old news. A year ago people were up in arms and congressmen demanded reform. It was all a smokescreen intended to soothe angry people until they got distracted by other stories like Obama starting a third war in Iraq.

It worked. The National Journal reports, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the Justice Department's request for another 90-day extension of the National Security Agency's controversial mass-surveillance program, exposed publicly last summer by Edward Snowden and authorized under Section 215 of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The spying authority is next set to expire on Dec. 5.” There’s no outrage at this rubber stamp.

But recent announcements by Apple and Google claiming they would encrypt all information on their phones by default gave some commentators hope. Don’t fall for it. Apple and Google are so thoroughly protected and controlled by government, they’re effectively government agencies. They wouldn’t do anything to bite the hand that feeds them.

Google and Apple, Goopple, are trying to recover from the public relations nightmare that resulted when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing these companies gleefully participated in NSA spying on their customers. Government’s giant corporate agents scrambled to make it appear they were being forced to spy against their will, but they never resisted until their complicity was made public. They aren’t sorry they spied for the government. They’re just sorry they got caught.

While the plutocrats from Goopple huddled in the world’s most outrageously expensive resorts with NSA bureaucrats trying to figure out how to recover from this PR debacle, small, nimble organizations like Silent Circle and Redphone implemented strong encryption protocols on mobile devices. Silent Circle is a security company, and Redphone is an open source project, so both have a genuine interest in securing your communications. Making encryption cheap - free in the case of Redphone - and easy for the masses created a new problem for NSA spies because it takes them years to defeat strong encryption. The more widespread encryption becomes, the more likely NSA won’t have the resources to defeat every encrypted communication. They might miss seeing some naked pictures of teenagers, and they can’t tolerate that. Their only hope was to outlaw such encryption, but those small companies don’t have enough customers to justify Congress targeting them with a law.

Those products also created problems for Goopple because they drew customers, especially foreign, away. So big business and big government - one in the same really - jointly conceived a solution: Goopple would encrypt all its data too, forcing Congress to outlaw it, protecting both NSA and Goopple.

As if orchestrated, because it was, Google and Apple announced their plans the same day. FBI howled in outrage the next. The Washington Post reported, “FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.”

His comments were the most forceful yet from a top government official but echo a chorus of denunciation from law enforcement officials nationwide. Police have said that the ability to search photos, messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist attacks.”

In other words, NSA’s institutionalized, legalized perverts and therefore other hackers must be able to secretly ogle your children’s sexts supposedly to protect your children from other perverts who might ogle them. Cops want you to believe they were never able to solve a crime until they gained the power to hack cellphones. That’s ridiculous. The only hinderance to law enforcement this encryption creates is forcing them to obey the Constitution by obtaining a warrant.

The real problem with default, strong encryption is it forces NSA to obey the Constitution too. It blocks bulk spying on a huge segment of people worldwide. The phony complaints by law enforcement gives politicians in both parties the pretense they need to demonize Goopple and pass a law banning this encryption “to protect the children” right after the election. As always, the plutocrats, politicians and spies win. The people lose.

Journalist Tom Engelhardt describes the futility of ubiquitous spying. “It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way,” he writes. “Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.”

While the NSA spies monitors social media of high school students for personal titillation, they’re unable to find a top al Qaeda recruiter operating in Britain, and they allowed an American jihadist to come and go freely between the US and Syria before he set off a suicide bomb in Syria. The FBI says it has no way to stop ISIS jihadists with American passports from re-entering the country and attacking Americans.

That’s because our rulers consider us, not terrorists, their real enemies.

October Surprise Again

Imagine you are President Obama. You are being overrun by events of your own making. ISIS is cutting off people’s heads in Iraq, so you just started a third war in Iraq and expanded it to Syria, something even President Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You are threatening war with Russia, the country with the world’s second biggest nuclear arsenal, in Ukraine, something else even Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You invited Ebola into America, and, no surprise, it came. You invited an unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrant children to flood the US, and you are spending taxpayer money to find them homes in every state and to give them lawyers. Another mystery virus, Enterovirus D68, has killed more Americans than Ebola, and may be linked to the illegal immigrant children.

You’re also drowning in scandals. You coerced all US personnel with knowledge of the Benghazi massacre into silence, but a group of contractors, US veterans all, exposed a number of lies you and Hillary Clinton told about that night. In a brazen cover-up, the IRS continues to clownishly destroy records about targeting conservative groups. Your Secret Service director just resigned in scandal. Under constant, well-deserved fire, your closest public ally, Attorney General Holder, suddenly announced his resignation. That usually precedes a major revelation of corruption, and Holder has plenty of scandals of his own in his closet including Fast and Furious.

In other words, you’re in deep political doodoo and an election is just four weeks away as of this writing. Republicans threaten to take over the Senate where Harry Reid has shamelessly provided you cover since Republicans took the House in 2010. Your former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta,  just released a book throwing you under the bus. RealClearPolitics puts your approval rating at 43 percent. Faced with overwhelming evidence, even some Democrats have concluded you are intentionally harming the country. Not one Democrat will allow you to campaign on his behalf.

But you have one thing working for you: the bubble economy of the super-rich continues to swell, producing phony numbers that make it appear the economy as a whole is improving, albeit at a snail’s pace.

You also have the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under your command to exaggerate the economy on your behalf. This is nothing new. The BLS lies about the economy every month. The economic numbers it releases to great fanfare are almost always quietly revised down a month later. It does this regardless of whoever is in power because it promotes the power and legitimacy of the state, not just one party.  The BLS publishes perpetual propaganda to make it appear the economy is doing better than it really is. But from time to time, it goes even further overboard than usual for the political benefit of its boss, the president, regardless of party.

Obama seriously needs the help now, so it was no surprise that the September jobs report released by BLS the first Friday in October was abnormally rosey. Bloomberg reports, “A surprisingly powerful surge in hiring pushed unemployment to a six-year low of 5.9 percent in September as the U.S. labor market showed renewed vigor. ” Even establishment economists, the supposed experts who continually overestimate the strength of the economy, were surprised at how much the BLS fudged the numbers to benefit Obama. Bloomberg expounds, “The drop in unemployment was the biggest surprise, exceeding all forecasts. The rate, which is derived from a Labor Department survey of households, was projected to hold at 6.1 percent, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Estimates ranged from 6 percent to 6.2 percent.” But dropping the official unemployment number below 6 percent carries a huge psychological advantage, so the BLS provided it. The BLM even increased the August numbers, which is practically unheard of.

But as always, the more important information is buried in the fine print. Newsmax reported, “The so-called participation rate, which measures the number of Americans employed or looking for a job as a share of the working-age population, decreased to 62.7 percent, the lowest since February 1978, from 62.8 percent a month before.”

Also, depressed wages remained stagnant, and a record number of young, black teens and women aren’t working. Obama is waging economic war on the middle class, women, and minorities, contrary to what the headlines would have us believe. Even the S&P just hit an eight week low.

This is deja vu from two years ago. In August 2012, right before the Obama-Romney election, BLS reported an unbelieveable and psychologically important drop in unemployment from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, and Obama subsequently won the election despite the labor participation rate falling significantly then too. Voters tend not to read past the headlines.

So Obama is up to his old tricks, but while the Waldorf Astoria Hotel sold for a record $2 billion, making the Hiltons even richer, laid off and part-time workers, women, and young blacks know this economy is only working for Obama and his super-rich cronies, not the poor or middle class.