From: GemStatePatriot.com By Rich Loudenback
“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” – Thomas Paine
Most busy Americans have never given thought to how much better their lives would be should we get serious, as citizens, about operating our government as we were intended to, instead of passively trusting those who can’t be trusted, and force our elected officials to roll back most of our abusive runaway big government.
As I see it, the only problem our country has currently is a non-functioning government ‘of 
the people.’ The United States today is being run by the ‘establishment‘ (formerly clandestine and now in our face) at The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in coordination with their comrades at the corrupt UN. Government no longer acts out of concern for ‘we the people,’ but for the concerns of nefarious forces who are having their way with us and all that we are involved with. Where are our true patriots in Congress? I mean Constitutional patriots! Really?
When congress willingly relinquished its Constitutional responsibility to negotiate all matters of trade to lying, deceitful President Obama with absolutely no negotiating skills in a process done in utter secrecy preventing even Congress from having any knowledge of it until it was completed producing a document that is 5500 pages which most senators and representatives never read – we had a non-functioning government ‘of the people’ just like we had when another deceitful program called “The Affordable Care Act” and all members of Congress who approved it did so without reading it.
CRONY CAPITALISM LIVES
Following is a segment of a report from The Guardian on how much money was paid to senators for voting to give Obama that Free Trade Authority to negotiate The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agenda with complete autonomy:
“Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:
- Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.
- The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.
- The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.” – Unquote The Guardian
This was government corruption and crony capitalism on steroids!
What has been accomplished by the CFR/UN’s minions (those elected officials violating our trust and their sacred oaths to the Constitution) who march lockstep with their dictates and the monies provided by corrupt lobbyists and crony capitalists is that so many overlapping agencies, bureaus, laws, regulations, taxes, fines, market unbalancing subsidy programs, unnecessary foreign aid, countless unnecessary do-good programs, and market manipulations through the fed have been foisted upon us that our once vibrant republic is being intentionally strangled to death.
In the first place, America’s businesses can compete with any other nation if we level the playing field by ridding ourselves of all these purposefully killing costs that other countries don’t have.
In the second place our freedoms would live again without the blatant bullying by the federal government’s unconstitutional drive to control us by taking over our lands here in the west and our water resources throughout America.
And lastly, Americans don’t need our education system, medical systems and all other aspects of our lives run by the federal government. As The John Birch Society states, “The central government was created by the states with strictly limited powers leaving the states to compete with one another to become the best state, the one with the least amount of taxation and controls, one where citizens would want to build a business and raise a family. That spirit of competition produced excellence as honest competition always does.”
We simply cannot survive this path toward absolute ruination much longer as a sovereign republic. It has been quite a testament to how residual and resolute our system has remained in the face of all we have endured in recent years. However, this level of insanity can’t last. Believe it! As the Romans went, so will we, without drastic redress.
CUTTING GOVERNMENT WORKS
As Eric Erickson says in his 2010 book Red State Rising, “Many conservatives, disheartened by years of federal bloat under Republicans and Democrats, think it will be impossible to cut the government down to size. But we know government growth can be reversed,
tax rates lowered and debt reduced – because other nations have done it.
“Over the last sixteen years, twenty-five nations have moved from progressive personal income tax structures to flat tax rates, which have enduring benefits. They are simple and fair, promote economic growth and tax competition, and rise and fall with inflation. Far from seeing revenues drop, as opponents forecast, many of these nations have seen tax revenues actually increase because fewer people dodged the tax collector and their underground economies contracted. Compliance costs for the individual taxpayers are significantly reduced as well.”
“Had the United States been smart enough to eliminate its corporate income tax, or reduce it dramatically to remain competitive, intellectual property migration, an increasing phenomenon, might never have occurred.
“New Zealand presents an admirable case of reform. In the 1980’s its annual deficits exceeded six percent of GDP. It had virtually zero economic growth. The reforms it adopted included removing wage and price controls, cutting public employee numbers, and slashing government spending dramatically (by more than seven percent of GDP) with the aid of privatization.
“As former New Zealand government minister Maurice McTique recalled, ‘When we started this process (cutting government) with the Department of Transportation, it had 56,000 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the forest service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works and ended up being the only employee… We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees.’”
“Slovakia, a significant and recent success story, constrained government spending from 65 percent to 43 percent of GDP in seven years and adopted a 19 percent flat tax.
“Sweden has been the worldwide poster-child for “democratic” socialism. But this liberal home of the Nobel Prizes has been changing its ways. It reduced healthcare subsidies, cut its personal income tax in half, repealed its ‘death tax’ five years ago, and has experienced a resurgence in economic growth. Many wealthy people who left Sweden because of its burdensome death tax have subsequently returned.
“If these nations can downsize and avoid fiscal doomsday, clearly, with commitment and the right leadership, we, too, can bring down the national debt. It will require total commitment among independent, freedom-loving Americans. They must be prepared to challenge those who live off government – and like it – mainly the public employees, their unions, and the hordes of lobbyists and other ‘rent seeking’ special interests that congregate in Washington and its beltway world. Those nations which have reversed course all streamlined their government workforce and its excessive costs. “Entitlement’ recipients will have to be prepared for change and participation in the reform process, as well.”
Establishment forces are out to win and they have proven to be extremely dedicated toward taking our successful heartbeat of freedom from us replacing it with a do-as-your-told world with endless new rules and regulations for our vital lifeblood businesses and way too much of our lives. 
WHAT WE MUST DO!
We must educate ourselves and inform others about issues and this prevailing threat that’s rapidly destroying our very system of government from the establishment that when unmasked is the Council of Foreign Relations and the UN.
Once again, my spiel on how we must correct matters of bad government: We must purge at our voting booths the guilty elected officials we have who do not follow their oaths of office and commit what I consider the most heinous of crimes, the violation of public trust. Then we must replace them with true American patriots who truly understand how a republic with our constitutional system of government should run.
There’s a very simple way of identifying which elected representatives need replacing in our Idaho statehouse and in Congress in Washington. You study The Freedom Indexes for both bodies which show exactly how they vote with criteria in keeping with the Constitution and then cull them at the voting box. Here in Idaho The Freedom Index is published by IdahoFreedomIndex.com by ‘The Idaho Freedom Foundation.’
For the U.S. Congress see “The Freedom Index at JBS.org: A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution” which rates congressmen based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements. In this second 6 month session of the 114th Congress just completed on January 25th, here is how abysmally our congressmen and senators in Washington, D.C. voted with the Constitution: U.S. House 44% and U.S. Senate 47%. So there you see now why we are where we are.
Don’t count on a thing politicians say, only believe what you see and judge them on how they vote!
The terrible voting records revealed in the two The Freedom Indexes, are exactly the explanation for why we are rapidly becoming a socialistic society and our Republic is in danger of evolving into losing our national sovereignty and becoming first a member state of a regional government like a North American Union or Trans Pacific Union overseen by the corrupt UN, and then on to a world government run by unaccountable, unelected global power elitists who know what’s best for us about everything.
Then, all it takes to successfully downsize government is one thing. Resolve!
“It could be said that nothing corrupts like an inattentive citizenry.” — Me
An interesting aside to this article mentioning the Council on Foreign Relations is the article “Trump, Cruz, and the Establishment” from The New American.com.
The Constitution established a federal government of limited powers. Those powers are enumerated largely in Article I, section 8, which allows for spending on such limited functions as national security, establishing courts, coining money, and providing for an open national economy.
Despite the straightforward limitations created by the Constitution, the Supreme Court has accepted looser readings of those limits over time, especially since the 1930s. Today, federal spending is directed into virtually any area that suits the whims of Congress. The government funds a wide range of activities that violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution, as the modern Court fails to enforce the original limits on federal power.