By CARL MUMPOWER

A common comment from federal spending apologists is that the dollars represented are insignificant. Certainly $16 billion out of $3.7 trillion doesn’t represent a major cut in spending, but it is a beginning. Repeated debt ceiling ruptures reveal that recapturing America’s social and economic vigor requires we clean up Washington’s corruption and put a lid on their extravagance. Earmarks are a great place to start because these perks involve Washington’s redistribution of our wealth to their political special interests back home. Most importantly, to get money for your district, you have to play party politics that emphasize power before principles. Pork doesn’t come free and once you start the game your days as a man of the people are numbered. Though Republicans have been as bad about going to the trough as Democrats, under their majority serious efforts have been made to impair this drain on resources and system integrity. No matter what earmark apologists say, America’s beter interests are not served by Washington’s manipulated community welfare program….

Transparent secrecy

 Whistle blowers are under the gun in America. That is not a good thing. Bad things grow in the dark and secrecy is used to protect leadership error and bureaucratic corruption as often as it is used to protect us. Soldiers and contracted employees who break their oath should be prosecuted.  Citizens trying to keep the system honest should be rewarded. It’s not their job to protect our government’s addiction to secrecy. A civil liberties group recently tested Obama’s promise to run a transparent government. Under the Freedom of Information Act, they requested the same information from the FBI, but from different requestors. The FBI responded with matching copies – all censored uniquely. They thus demonstrated why conservatives separate protecting important information from protecting bureaucrats and seats of power – and note the difference in transparency and using fear to turn out the lights….

Welcome to Floridita

During my son’s adolescence, we took two trips a year to foreign lands – including our last, a journey to Cuba. I wanted him to see a communist country at work. The evident poverty, double standards, and corruption didn’t let me down. On one of our evenings we visited Ernest Hemingway’s old Havana haunt, Floridita. Capitalistic enterprise was evident in the government’s exploitation of Anglo Hemingway’s touch on Cuba. A visit to Florida reveals they’ve reciprocated his kindness. In fact, the mass importation of Cuban, Mexican, and other Hispanic people has made English secondary to Spanish in many parts of the state. That’s a problem – Florida is not Cuba or Mexico, its part of America and that state and others been subverted by irresponsible immigration policies. The key to good immigration is assimilation at a rate that nourishes our country and culture and the people who come to join us. But just as rain nourishes soil – floods wash it away. Events in Floridita are proving that the American Dream must be earned, not sold or stolen….

TEA Party is not over

America’s TEA Party has a lot to be proud of. Thanks to these folks, mainstream liberal media, Elephant power brokers masquerading as conservatives, and left leaning culture vultures have been successfully challenged in their missions of mischief. With a Republican majority in congress that has taken conservative talk to a point of action, TEA Party members are tired, but time-out is not in the cards. History reliably tells us that what our politicians say to get elected and what they do when elected rarely match. There is an urgent need for TEA Partiers and other conservative groups to hold our elected officials accountable. Grading the match between principles, promises and actions is a great place to start. Recent events have dramatically revealed the difference in RINO political opportunists and principle driven Republicans.  Though essentially everyone has piled on the Republican effort to resist Obama’s healthcare fantasy and the continuing DC addiction to living beyond our means, what some are calling our elephant’s last stand was an admirable effort to do what was right versus what was politically popular. America’s future will only be secured by the latter. TEA Party members are part of the equation of accountability that is slowly but surely putting such people in office.

Want-need-right cycle

We live in a culture increasingly dedicated to making people dependent on government and the labors of others. It’s probably important to understand the monster being created by this model of incremental cultural conversion. Political vanity kings like the “take the glory now and postpone the bill for later” approach in promising goodies to constituents. Their assumption is that pretending to fight for the needy will produce warm furry loyalty feelings. That assumption is correct, but only for awhile. Dependent people rarely love or appreciate those that they are dependent upon. Instead, over time, anger and resentment bloom into a hostile dependency relationship. When dependencies are challenged, the buried anger bubbles up – often violently.  Witness events in Greece, France, and other countries where even minor benefit corrections or cutbacks are considered. We all have wants, but when someone else is paying the bill, those wants have a way of becoming needs. It feels good to have needs met, but then needs have a way of, in turn, evolving into assumed rights. Remember the argument that we have a “right” to good healthcare with little or no consideration for the personal responsibility part of that equation?  The “rights” of the Constitution are more about restraining government and opening the doors of liberty than giving us some sort of special deal. There is another problem with assumed rights in that nothing in nature conforms to this model. In fact, nature is persistently telling us that we have absolutely no free rights. What we do have are opportunities and the bounties from higher authority that afford unlimited potentials for our prosperity and success – but only if we are willing to earn them.  Assumed rights put the accountability on someone else’s shoulders. Nature does not endorse that exchange. Politicians who trigger the want-need-right dependency cycle are practicing socialists doing great harm to our culture. We do no man a favor in distracting him from his liberty, personal power, and accountability. Those who attempt this corruption of others can count on harvesting the eventual wrath of their creation. In the meantime, the harvesting of the lint out of our pockets and the character out of our culture continues….

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Carl Mumpower, a former member of Asheville City Council, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it