Civil service system

Many countries have some kind of civil service system in place. People become employed by their government to do the many jobs of the government. An example is the administrative system giving stability to Chinese empires by using competitive exams to fill government offices.

U.S. civil service

The Civil War was not just a war between North and The South, it was a war between Democrat and Republican.

The Republican party was founded in 1854 by single-issue voters called Abolitionists. Barely a dozen years later, after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, it had only two things to fight for: full civil rights for Blacks and the spoils of victory, that is, government jobs for party members.

While the Democratic party may have lost the Civil War, it has won the battle to control the United States Civil Service bureaucracy. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1876 and passage of the 1882 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, the Democratic party is no longer dependent on the spoils system and winning elections to maintain its power.

This control of unelected government positions is the source of the Democratic party's power. An unelected army of Democrat civil servants doing behind the scenes favors and handing out government goodies is the key to success for elected Democrats. This is why Democrats spare no expense in the budget, none of them pay for anything and there are always votes to be bought. Their sweeping power is so encompassing they unabashedly call themselves, "the party of government."

Spoils system

Main article: Spoils system

From the mid-1830s to the Civil War, the Democrats were the nation’s majority party, controlling Congress, the presidency and many state offices. Prior to the election of the notorious racist and founder of the Democratic party, Andrew Jackson, the federal government was dominated by the aristocratic upper class, 1% and bourgeois plantation owners. With the election of Jackson, for the first time backwoods hillbillies and common folk had access to opportunities to fill government jobs, from the U.S. Post Office on up, through the spoils system.

The spoils system was rife with corruption and cronyism.

Reconstruction

See also: Reconstruction

With the defeat of the Democrats and the South, to the victors went the spoils. The Republican party was founded a little more than a decade earlier, and lacked for issues other than dividing the spoils of victory, i.e. government jobs once the slaves were free. Republicans immediately stripped white males who engaged in rebellion against the United States of the vote, and gave it to Blacks. The white males who were deprived of the vote were universally Democrats.

Reconstruction earned Republicans the undying hatred of Democrats, which has been passed down generation to generation until the modern day. This hatred is so intense, the very mention of the word "Republican" is often enough of a trigger word whose mere utterance can send a fourth or fifth generation Democrat into paroxyms of rage.

Republican carpetbaggers flooded the South after the war to buy up tax-delinquent plantations and run for political office. Newly freed Blacks also held local, state and federal elected and non-elected positions. Many whites were barred from holding office and voting. This disenfranchisement created enormous resentment among Democrats, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan to engage in voter intimidation and suppression.

By 1876, the situation had become ungovernable for Republicans, who were ideological and inexperienced in the politics of the spoils system. The Republicans had been able to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments which guaranteed Blacks basic equality and civil rights, but at the same time also declared an amnesty for whites who engaged in rebellion. Reconstruction ended, and Republicans withdrew from social engineering which had divided the country so deeply and stirred up such bitterness and hatred among Democrats toward their fellow citizens - Blacks and Republicans.

The intra-generational hatred Democrats have toward Republicans, which persists into the 21st century, was born of the fact that Republicans stripped Democrats of the vote and gave it to Blacks.

Civil Service Act

Main article: Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act

The experience of Reconstruction among Democrats, and the inexperience of a party at the crossroads among Republicans led to a general consensus throughout the nation to reform the spoils system. Democrats leaped at the prospect of controlling government offices without winning elections through a so-called "professional career bureaucracy." It seemed like a logical, "progressive" reform.

The immediate impetus for ending patronage and introducing civil service reform was the assassination of President James Garfield by a disgruntled low level campaign worker who was by-passed and felt Garfield owed him a job. Under the spoils system, when voters rebelled and elected the opposition, everyone in an incumbent political machine lost their government job. The see-saw wholesale turnover of government workers created instability in the institutions of government.

Teddy Roosevelt's rise to national prominence as a "progressive" reformer began by ending the patronage system and implementing civil service reform in the New York City Police Department, and later as governor by implementing a state level civil service system.

Prior to creation of a professional career police force, like mail carriers, police forces were staffed with campaign get-out-the-vote volunteers and precinct poll watchers who stuffed the ballot box for their candidate. In the case of police, their job for the new mayor was often to beat up, intimidate and harass volunteers for the loosing side.

The Civil Service Reform Act restored the power that the Democratic party had prior to the Civil War, only this time with no accountability to the voters.

New Deal

See also: New Deal and Agricultural Adjustment Administration

FDR's New Deal began with, long before ever providing any direct relief to the public, an enormous expansion of the civil service bureaucracy. Agencies were created, and people hired, before there was even any idea or plan what they would do. These are the so-called Alphabet soup agencies.

Among them was the AAA, or the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, an organization later found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which led to FDR's notorious court-packing scheme. However, when the AAA was founded, dozens of avowed Marxists and communists who had dedicated their lives to "social justice" and overthrowing the United States government, joined the U.S. Civil Service system.

These were the brilliant geniuses who came up with the solution to ending agricultural surpluses and low prices by paying farmers not to grow crops. The idea worked well for landowners, but not so well for Black sharecroppers who had jobs and were working when President Roosevelt took office, but were tossed out of work when the Democrat civil servants started paying their landlords not to allow crop production on their land. Having created Black unemployment in the depths of the Great Depression, these loyal civil servants than gave cause to create more civil service positions to handle the new crisis they created - a class of unemployed Black voters dependent on Democrat civil servants and elected officials who voted the funding for civil service agencies and salaries, and the handout of "relief."

By the time the Supreme Court found the AAA illegal in 1935, these new professional career civil servants were simply reassigned to other agencies, the idea being it was impossible to fire "non-political" career civil servants once their foot was in the door.

It's no exaggeration to say, many of these New Deal economists and civil servants in the McCarthy era of the 1950s fled to Maoist China to implement their real ambitions after they were suspected of attempting to subvert and overthrow the US Constitution and government. Their time in China is memorialized in history as the Three Years of Disasters.

The Era of Big Government

See also: Great Society and Clinton Administration

The generation that fought World War II were convinced Keynesians - that government debt and spending was the key to prosperity. And the more of it, the better. President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress that rubber stamped his projects fully believed they could mount a major war effort by drafting the nation's teenage unemployed, pursue massive social programs in the War on Poverty, and fund ambitious scientific research in the space race to land a man-on-the-moon, all simultaneously. There were no shortages of government jobs, or civil servants to hand out money during the 1960s.

By the 1970s, the drunken spending boom resulted in a massive hangover. Nixon's attempt to reform the Civil Service system ended with him being railroaded out of town. Jimmy Carter's efforts to revive big government spending funneled at and through the civil service resulted in stagflation. President Ronald Reagan's efforts to curb the rate of growth of government spending, his hiring freeze on the federal workforce and firing civil service air traffic controllers resulted in the standard issue Democratic attacks of calling him Hitler or a Nazi; however Nazi's were not known for controlling the proliferation of civil service jobs, or as Bible thumpers, or encouraging private enterprise, the profit motive, individual initiative or accomplishment.

So successful was Reaganomics at restoring the health of the American economy by restraining the growth of Civil Service, even Bill Clinton couldn't deny it when he said "The era of big government is over." Nonetheless, this didn't stop Clinton from traditional Democrat Civil Service cronyism and expanding Civil Service into paid-volunteerism with Americorps, pushing middle-class welfare with homeownership (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and the Community Reinvestment Act, implementing massive bailout schemes of the Mexican Peso and Long-Term Capital Management, or granting his girlfriends and sexual assault victims civil service positions to hush them.

Statism and the totalitarian police state

See also: Patriot Act, Obama Administration, and FISA abuse

John Kennedy created something of a hybrid human being, a bureaucratic Ubermensch in 1962 when he signed an Executive Order allowing the unionization of federal employees. Saul Montes-Bradley observed:

"The unionization of government employees created a new class of American citizen: A mass of untouchables who ran the daily business of government and who, through the alliance of their unions with the Democratic Party, created a state within the state."

As civil servants, they already were impossible to fire; with collective bargaining rights and a shop steward to represent them, they become too costly and cumbersome to discipline.

See also

• Social Services