The Surge Comes to Salinas by Troy Senik

A plan to apply counterinsurgency doctrine to gang violence

Communities beset by seemingly unbreakable cycles of violence; law enforcement overmatched to the point of essentially ceding sovereignty to an organized and heavily armed resistance; citizens so intimidated by thugs that they won’t report them to authorities, for fear of retribution. Eight years into the War on Terror, this scenario sounds familiar. But its location isn’t the Sunni Triangle in 2006 or southern Afghanistan today; it’s a farm town on California’s Central Coast.

In Salinas—a predominantly Hispanic, blue-collar community best known for producing John Steinbeck—violence has spiraled out of control. With a population of under 150,000, the city’s homicide rate has rocketed to three times that of Los Angeles, largely the result of fighting between the rival Norteños and Sureños gangs. With murders at an all-time high in 2009 (29 as of late December), residents are understandably frightened. When the police go searching for answers in the aftermath of a gang killing, self-interest prevails. Citizens more confident in the gangs’ ability to retaliate than in the cops’ ability to protect them stay mum.

Read more The Surge Comes to Salinas

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Share

CENTCOM in 2010: Views from General David H. Petraeus
Friday, January 22, 2010

Stretching from Egypt to Yemen, Iran and Pakistan, General David H. Petraeus commands the most challenging area of responsibility in the war against terrorism. In addition to deterring non-state aggressors, he also oversees the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Friday morning, January 22nd, the Institute for the Study of War held an on-the-record conversation with General Petraeus hosted by ISW President, Dr. Kimberly Kagan. General Petraeus discussed his competing regional priorities at U.S. Central Command and offered a strategic overview of his AOR, explaining the dynamic effect it has on American national security.

Please see transcript link above.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Obama’s Health Care Ambush
By Michael Fowler

Methinks thou doest protest too….little. Every parent knows that when the kids are suddenly quiet for more than a few minutes this means trouble. Children wrongly believe that silence will reduce unwanted attention from their parents when doing something wrong. Silence is information. When I was in the U.S. Marines, Force Recon unit, we learned that the first attack was generally a diversion for a far more serious and silent attack. Sun Tzu’s wrote about this in The Art of War, “Big noise in east; attack in west.” It may seem like crazy advice America, but look out behind you.

Right in front of us is the main attack: Socialized medicine. We must fight it, it is a real attack and President Barack Obama will fight for it if he can. This is a big noisy assault on liberty from the east called socialism. I believe that there is good reason to think Obamacare is not the main attack but a diversion. Allow me to lay out a few points.

Point One: Insurance companies are silent. If the insurance companies thought for one second that they were going to lose one dime on this deal they would be screaming bloody murder, and spending millions on advertising telling us how this plan would ruin health care in America. There would be no end to “Chicken-Little” television. However, Aristotle’s dictum tells us “silence implies consent.”

Point Two: Health care workers are silent.

Point Three: Money buys political power.

Point Four: Capitalism operates on two basic principles of liberty, which equates power being in the hand of the people, the buyer. One is the power to choose between products or services offered at market. Two is the power not to purchase the product or services. These two basic principles give the buyer the ultimate power to spend the fruit of his labor (income) how and if he pleases.

Point Five: A true government takeover of health insurance would destroy the entire industry. Again we hear nothing.

Point Six: Fifty-two fiscally conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs receive considerably more in contributions than those Democrats who support a public option.

Point Seven: The Athenian Democracy collapsed when politicians discovered the ability to rob the public treasury. Now, industry has learned how to rob the public treasury by buying politicians.

Holding those points in mind, let’s also include a little history from California. In the 1960’s the auto-insurance industry was successful in lobbying Sacramento to pass a mandatory insurance law. The reasoning was that when everyone paid it would lower the costs. Yet, after passage rates did not change, nor did purchasing increase. Then, in the mid-1980’s, lobbyists urged the state again to pass a new law: enforcement. Now a trooper could require you to prove you had auto insurance. All of sudden, rates which had hardly changed since 1910, when indexed, shot up like a rocket. This was exactly the opposite of what the insurance companies had promised. This caused the insurance revolt of 1988 and the passage of Proposition 103—which the insurance companies fought in court for 20 years. This happened because the second principle of capitalism was removed, the power to refuse the product. When this occurred, there was a lack of motivation on the part of the seller to keep the price low. Thus, the people had to use the legislative process to regulate the price.

The logical conclusion of this evidence is that insurance lobbyists are paying off the Democrats for their votes. Is there evidence to support this? Max Sieben Baucus, Democrat senator from Montana, is the current chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance. He is influential in the debate over healthcare reform and has received more “contributions” than any other senator—a staggering $3,973,485 from 2003 to 2008 from the health sector. It is no surprise he is opposed to the single-payer option. While running for presidential office, then Illinois Senator Barack Obama received over 19 million dollars from the health industry. Why would they donate so much money to someone who would shut down their industry—unless, the deal was in the bag all ready?

Attack from the West

Silence is information just as noise is information. I submit that insurance companies are silently working every angle in order to achieve mandatory health insurance—the Baucus plan. They have given millions to Mr. Obama, the Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans. They are covering all of their bases.

As the baby boomers age and continue to vastly outnumber the next generation, the so- called Generation X, they are no longer funding the insurance agencies coffers, and the Gen Xers are not a significant source of new customers to cover the growing bill. So the insurances companies are looking to Mr. Baucus to create a government mandate that will force all Americans to purchase their product. When the baby boomers were young and healthy, the money from premiums abounded, and everyone got rich. Now it’s pay day for the baby boomers and the money is gone. The insurance companies ran a scam, and they need Sen. Baucus to bail them out with our money.

Obamacare will fail; it has never really been the plan. The real plan is to pass mandatory insurance consumption by all citizens. But first they have to scare the public with the specter of socialism in order to get them to accept a lesser option of mandatory insurance. Everyone on both sides has agreed that reform is needed. This may or may not be true, but it is common ground that will provide a foundation for a return to a government-sponsored “company-store” of yesteryear or debt bondage, which is tantamount to slavery.

How so? The American people will be forced give the fruits of their labor to the insurance companies without their consent or agreement. Arguments will be made to justify such actions. Slave owners likewise made such arguments to justify their actions. They claimed that they provided a service to slaves: food, housing, education, security and healthcare in exchange for labor—yet it was slavery. The difference between slavery and freedom is choice. We must explain to others that the most basic form of power is the right to be free, the right to say no and the right to refuse a company’s product.

We have a socialist-communist system of distributing medical care. Instead of letting people hire their own physicians and pay them, no one pays his or her own medical bills. Instead, there’s a third party payment system. It is a communist system and it has a communist result. – Milton Friedman

If Obamacare passes, the Democrats win socialism and if Mr. Baucus wins, the insurance companies win our money—either way the American people will lose. In the end, this will be the largest theft of liberty to ever occur. Both can be stopped cold once the people can see that what is happening is a direct infringement of their rights.
Healthcare reform is the domestic enemy that waits snarling in the dark to strike at liberty today. If allowed to pass, it will invalidate the deaths of every fallen solider from Valley Forge to Gettysburg and beyond who fought for a right to be free.

Originally written for the Edmund Burke Institute’s Reflections Magazine:  Here

http://www.ebireflections.org/index.php?vol=001_vol&iss=009_issue&section=05_public_policy&item=01_public_policy.html#id05_public_policy

-Michael Fowler is Director of Veterans for Academic Freedom.org, an instructor of Christian apologetics, author and talk-radio host.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.