Mike Explains the Ratchet Effect

 NSA Spying On Spies is a Prime Example of the Ratchet Effect

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “As a result of the previous expansion, we now have a new crisis that has to be dealt with, that’s going to require new agencies and more employees be hired by current agencies.  Is this a great scam or what?  Thus you have the never-ending, impossible-to-stop federal leviathan, which is empowered by what Higgs described as the ratchet effect.  An agency comes into existence and is never sunsetted, ever.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  There is a crisis and the politicians and the political class and the media elite class, they swoop in to demand government action.  Of course, the citizenry is then scared to death of an over-steroided, hyperbolic media and press corps that drums up the issue and makes it sound or seem as though [mocking] “It’s the end of the earth.  If we don’t fix this, we’re all dead.”  Then the crisis now becomes a full-blown acknowledged crisis, even though it may not be a crisis.  It has now been turned over to the biggest and brightest and most erudite and studied minds among us, that being those in our political class.

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They then will work studiously and leave no stone unturned in pursuit of a solution to the crisis, which is almost always going to come in the form of the creation of some new bureaucratic entity.  Whether it’s a full-blown agency or whether it’s an expansion of an existing agency, whether it’s an act that creates new agencies and adds to existing agencies, it will always call for an expansion of government.  That’s step one and two of the crisis effect.

Step three, implement said solution.  Step four, media that was scared to death that step one was going to be the end of humanity finds a new story that is the end of humanity.  Current story that is the end of humanity is no longer the end of humanity.  It’s now been put to the backburner.  It could be the end of humanity, but it’s no longer as important as the new threat to humanity.  Step five, newly-formed agency to deal with crisis continues to deal with crisis that is now not a crisis.  Step six, people that work for new agency and are affected by and are grifting and receiving crony-capitalism and wealth transfer thanks to steps one, two, three, and four now fight for their life.  That is the new crisis.  Step seven, the reason that we can’t solve this problem entirely and why this agency is still necessary is because it’s not properly funded.  Step eight, increase funding for crisis that was identified as step one, which was rectified and supposedly solved in steps two, three, and four.  Step nine, rinse and repeat every year.  Step ten, 50 years later you have the Social Security Administration.  Fifty years later you have the Medicaid Act.  Fifty years later you have farm subsidies.  Fifty years later you have the SNAP program.  Fifty years later, insert federal atrocity here.

You may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, that the last time we had a burial ceremony, an actual funeral for a federal agency, Grover Cleveland was in the White House.  This is the ratchet effect.  If you keep doing this over a segment of time, you will greatly and mightily expand government.  While you’re expanding it, some of the crises that you will create will actually be as a result of the expansion.  That’s the story that we have today.  As a result of the previous expansion, we now have a new crisis that has to be dealt with, that’s going to require new agencies and more employees be hired by current agencies.  Is this a great scam or what?  Thus you have the never-ending, impossible-to-stop federal leviathan, which is empowered by what Higgs described as the ratchet effect.  An agency comes into existence and is never sunsetted, ever.  All it does then, if it’s a good agency and you’re a proponent of big government, then all agencies are good.  They’re all their children.  The Dianne Feinsteins and Steny Hoyers of the world look at all of these agencies: That’s my child.  I’m going to give my child every opportunity that child can have in order to wreak his havoc on not only this generation but the next generation.  Of course, they don’t say “wreak havoc.”  They say “spread the benevolence.”

Here’s the story:

[reading]

U.S. intelligence officials are planning a sweeping system of electronic monitoring that would tap into government, financial and other databases to scan the behavior of many of the 5 million federal employees with secret clearances, current and former officials told The Associated Press.

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Mike:  You have to love this one, folks.  You have to love this one.  So we have to create the administrative cyber security spyfare super-state in order to spare us all from being bombed back into the stone ages by marauding terrorists hanging out in caves in Afghanistan.  Then we grant 5 million of them security clearances.  Then an Edward Snowden happens.  Then it’s [mocking] “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?”  Then they come up with the bright idea: Let’s form a new agency to spy on the other agency we created.  Yeah, let’s do that.  Hey, let’s hire some new guys and employ some new subcontractors — can you say crony-capitalism? — to write some new software and to give us some new tools to spy on the people that we hired to deal with the first crisis.  If I had read this in a fiction novel, I’d say: Wow, that story kind of fell into place, didn’t it?  Unfortunately for us, fair citizen, this is not a fiction novel.  This is real life and it’s happening right in front of our very eyes.

[reading]

The system is intended to identify rogue agents, corrupt officials and leakers, and draws on a Defense Department model under development for more than a decade, according to officials and documents reviewed by the AP.

Intelligence officials have long wanted a computerized system that could continuously monitor employees, in part to prevent cases similar to former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. His disclosures bared secretive U.S. surveillance operations.

An administration review of the government’s security clearance process due this month is expected to support continuous monitoring as part of a package of comprehensive changes.

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Mike:  Now we’re going to monitor the monitors.  What happens if the guys that are monitoring the monitors aren’t doing a good enough job monitoring?  What will you then do next?  Well, we’ll have to have another response to that crisis.  We’ll have to hire monitors to monitor the guys that are monitoring the monitors, rinse and repeat.

[reading]

Privacy advocates and government employee union officials expressed concerns that continuous electronic monitoring could intrude into individuals’ private lives …

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Mike:  We can’t have that.  You’re only allowed to intrude into the private lives of citizens that are not employed by the federal monstrosity.  You can’t intrude into the private lives of individuals that are employed by the federal government.  They’re the guys that we rely upon to intrude upon the private lives of every other citizen.

[reading]

Workers with secret clearances are already required to undergo background checks of their finances and private lives before they are hired and again during periodic re-investigations. [Mike: Footnote to federal government: How’s that working out for you?]

“What we need is a system of continuous evaluation where when someone is in the system and they’re cleared initially, then we have a way of monitoring their behavior, both their electronic behavior on the job as well as off the job,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress last month.

Clapper provided lawmakers with few details but said the proposed system would extend “across the government,” drawing on “six or seven data streams.” Monitoring of employees at some agencies could begin as early as September and be fully operational across the government by September 2016.

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Mike:  Here’s the best part, citizen.  Citizen, are you paying attention, citizen?  Here’s the best part about this.  Are you ready?

[reading]

The price tag, Clapper conceded, “is going to be costly.”

[end reading]

Mike:  You create a crisis, you swoop in, form new agencies, hire millions of people to deal with the crisis, then you discover the millions of people that have been hired to deal with the crisis are indeed causing a crisis themselves.  Solution: we’re going to have to hire millions of new people to supervise and monitor the people that were hired to deal with the first crisis.  That’ll put an end to that.  As you well know, fair citizen and my friends, that’s not going to happen.  You just keep rinsing and repeating this.  Every time it’s rinsed and repeated, the pack of debt that you and I are carrying up Mount Washington like a couple of sherpas helping some guy climb Mount Everest, the pack gets heavier and heavier and heavier.

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To these clowns, it doesn’t matter.  [mocking] “We have to do this.  We’re official Washington.  On behalf of the American people…” and this is what they’re going to say, on our behalf they have to do this.

Just to refresh in case you’re not paying attention at home, it was necessary to spy on every American citizen and to basically treat every American citizen as though we are the terrorists.  We had to hire and had to employ millions upon millions of people to do it, spend tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware and software systems, which is still ongoing.  As we know, we had to dig holes in the ground in the middle of Utah, pump in hundreds of millions of gallons of water to cool a new data system that’s going to store all the information that was going to be confiscated from or gleaned, rather, from the first instance.  Then when it is proven that in the first instance the people that had been hired are not trustworthy and are indeed causing a problem themselves, then we must hire and make a new system to monitor the original system.  This is how the ratchet effect works.  This is why all of your efforts, no matter how noble and pure your heart is, are going to fail.  The endeavor, folks, to say it’s out of scale is an insult to the use of the term scale.  There is no scale in the history of mankind that you can apply to this.

End Mike Church Show Transcript