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The Code of Ethics for U.S. Government Service, adopted by the House of Representatives on July 11, 1958 with the Senate concurring, resolved that it is the sense of the Congress that the following Code of Ethics should be adhered to by all Government employees, including officeholders.
The first two requirements state that any person in Government service should:
1. Put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to Government persons, party, or department.
Written By Lawrence Sellin
2. Uphold the Constitution, laws, and legal regulations of the United States and of all governments therein and never be a party to their evasion.
No informed American can believe that the federal government, as an institution, adheres to those principles. The endemic corruption in Washington, DC is perpetrated by a permanent political class, financed by crony capitalism and facilitated by a complicit media.
The Democrat and Republican establishments are infested with individuals whose allegiance is not to their country, but to themselves and their political party. Their aim is to be unconstrained by the Constitution and the rule of law and unaccountable to the American people.
Their conduct is driven purely by political expediency and winning elections for the sole purpose of obtaining power and profit. There is, in fact, no difference between the aims of Big Government Republicans and Big Government Democrats. The bigger the government, the larger and more numerous the public parasites become.
The US has elections, but it no longer has representative government. Petitioning the Congress for the redress of grievances is futile because its members are self-serving and, once elected, become deaf to the voices of their constituents.
The permanent political class has brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy, has opened our borders to illegal immigration, has permitted a fifth column promoting Sharia law to infiltrate our society and judicial system and continues to pass laws from which they exempt themselves.
Just last month, a law making it again easier for congressional and top executive branch staffers to engage in stock trading practices, illegal to ordinary citizens, was signed by Barack Obama.
The law, which is a modification of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, was passed by unanimous consent of the House and the Senate with no debate or even discussion.
According to an article, The STOCK Act, which became law just a year ago and was designed to discourage insider trading by members of Congress and top government officials, has now been gutted of its chief enforcement clauses.
In theory if not in practice, our get-rich quick Congress can again mix business with governing by trading stocks and making land deals while considering major pieces of legislation, as has been previously reported.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) – When Visa went public in March 2008, then-Speaker of the House Pelosi and her husband bought some of their shares at the opening IPO price—access that would be virtually impossible for the average individual investor.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) – Baucus played a central role in forging the health-care-reform bill. As he was negotiating with pharmaceutical companies and putting his imprint on the legislation, Baucus was also buying and selling health-care stocks.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) – John and Teresa Heinz Kerry made numerous trades in health-care stocks, buying almost $750,000 in Teva Pharmaceuticals in November 2009 alone, while Kerry actively pushed Obama-care as a member of the health-care subcommittee.
Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) – Polis sat on two committees central to the crafting and language of Obama’s health-care bill. At the same time, he invested millions of dollars in stocks and funds related to health care and pharmaceuticals.
Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) – After learning in a September 2008 briefing with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke that the financial markets were in deep trouble, Bachus began aggressively buying and selling stock options.
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) – On Dec. 10, 2009, then-House Minority Leader Boehner bought tens of thousands of dollars of health-care stocks, including in health-insurance companies. On Dec. 15, The Washington Post declared that the “public option” for health insurance was dead.
Rep. Shelley Capito (R-WV) – After a briefing with Paulson and Bernanke, Capito sold between $100,000 and $250,000 shares of Citigroup; she and her husband accrued as much as $50,000 in capital gains from Citigroup transactions made throughout the crisis.
Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) – When Hastert was Speaker of the House, he inserted a $207 million earmark into a federal highway bill for a parkway near land he owned in rural Illinois. When he first went to Congress in 1986, Hastert’s net worth was less than $300,000. When he retired in 2007, it was close to $11 million.
Having anointed themselves the final arbiter of what the public has a right to know, the American establishment media, although vigorous in their pursuit of Republican scandals, have been far less enthusiastic about investigating and reporting on those involving Democrats.
According to The Newspaper Guild document “Professionalism and Honesty in the News Media,” the goal of newsgathering institutions is to report the news in a truthful, accurate and impartial way in order to inform the public. It specifically states the following:
“Those who gather and present the news shall at all times strive for honesty, accuracy, fairness and balance in order to maintain their credibility as guardians of the public’s right to know.”
“Stories, photographs, audio recordings and video material shall not be altered so as to deliberately distort what was said or present a knowingly misleading version of an event.”
“It is the shared duty of newsgathering institutions and those who work for them to oppose any attempts to suppress news and prevent important stories from being told. No employee shall be disciplined for exposing such unethical conduct, regardless of the level at which it takes place.”
In addition to other Obama and liberal scandals such as Fast & Furious, Climate-gate, Journolist, Pigford, and ACORN, nothing demonstrates better how the American media establishment has abandoned any pretense of objectivity or fairness than their corrupt, openly biased attempts to bury one of the biggest presidential scandals in US history.
As Robert Moon notes in his hard-hitting article, on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya:
“All indications are that four Americans were deliberately left to be savagely murdered in the streets of Benghazi by a sitting U.S. president who easily had all the means and opportunity to intervene and save their lives, but simply sat back and chose not to…and then lied about it and even publicly apologized to the terrorists for Americans ‘provoking’ them.”
According to Moon, as of this moment, the news media have:
• openly lied about the facts of Benghazi from start-to-finish,
• attacked any reporter who dared to actually investigate it,
• painted all congressional inquiries into it as a partisan GOP witch hunt,
• allowed Obama to silence witnesses, no questions asked,
• and blindly parroted doctored, fraudulent talking points from the White House falsely blaming it on a film.
The media facilitate government corruption by misinforming and misleading citizens. Rather than challenging power, they have become the mouthpiece of the Democrat Party, defending and serving the interests of its far-left agenda.
The US is no longer, as John Adams described, a government of laws and not of men.
Abraham Lincoln noted that the American people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
The loyalty of the American people is to our country and our Constitution, not to shady officeholders or petty bureaucrats.
For too long we have been silent and inattentive.
“No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.” – President Theodore Roosevelt.
Author Bio
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Afghanistan and the Culture of Military Leadership“. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.