Catastrophe (2 page)

Yet, as desperate as our agony is today, it is not our major threat.

Only when we come out of the darkness, blinking in the light of a more normal economy, will the true nature of our catastrophe become apparent.

Unless we act today, we’ll be returning to a very different world.

Will the bank on the corner be run by the government? Will it be like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles? Will we be able to get loans for cars and houses
without passing a political loyalty test or a government-sponsored means test to establish our need?

And will our doctors be free to treat us as they wish, or will they have to check with Washington to find out what medications are approved and which procedures they can offer?

Will we be free to listen to talk radio as it explores alternatives to socialism, or will it have been forced off the air?

At our workplace, will we be coerced into joining unions that represent the Democratic Party but not us?

And will our country be dominated politically by a coalition of those who pay no taxes, while the rest of us are powerless to protest when the government takes two-thirds of our income?

These are the real stakes.

As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”

Nor can any of us afford to shrink from the present task, which demands our attention, our energy, our commitment, and our resolve, We, too, must welcome this challenge. And we must prove worthy of meeting it.

We need to attack Barack Obama’s socialist agenda in ways big and small. Between now and the elections of 2010, we must fight and win the special elections that will be called to fill vacancies in Congress. We need to demonstrate the revitalized power of opposition to socialism in the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia. And we must mobilize opinion, particularly in the districts of the marginal Democratic senators and congressmen—the frauds who run like moderates and then vote like socialists. We need to lay the basis for their defeat in 2010 and make them think twice before they vote to curtail our freedoms and give away our health care.

We must strike terror into the hearts of the Democrats in Congress who rubber-stamp Obama’s programs, so that we can slow his momentum. Those who perpetuate his radicalism must fear for their seats as we stir public anger at their actions in their districts.

Don’t worry if you don’t live in a district with an election coming soon or with a phony Democratic moderate. In a very real sense, these days we’re
all in one district—our money, work, conversation, and anger carry across state and district lines. We will be heard!

And, when 2010 comes, we’ll be ready to take our country back. We will know the stakes. And we won’t be conned by a moderate-sounding president whose idea of change is the end of freedom and the dawn of socialism.

That’s not change we can believe in.

This book is a call to action. At the end of each chapter, we suggest specific actions that can help us regain our country.

Join us in this most necessary and urgent work.

In his provocative book
Liberty and Tyranny
, Mark Levin speaks of the “soft tyranny” of government regulation. No longer will we be blind to that threat.

Not if we work together.

To quote Obama: NOT THIS TIME.

Last year, in
Fleeced
, we predicted the disaster in which we now find ourselves. But who could have predicted the steps Barack Obama would take to turn this disaster into a catastrophe?

President Obama pledges to bring us back to prosperity, to end the recession. But his policies are likely to do the opposite—possibly casting us into a full-scale, long-lasting depression. At the very least, his huge spending will bring inflation and even more economic pain. And, in so many ways, Obama’s program undermines the very business confidence that will be essential to restoring normal economic activity.

We are hostage to an ideologue who wants to use this crisis—not solve it—to promote his dogmatic agenda.

How did we let things get this far?

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: HOW OBAMA GOT INTO POWER

From the moment he first realized he could win the presidency, Barack Obama has known exactly what he would do in the Oval Office. He just wasn’t sure how to pull it off.

He told us his agenda with unusual specificity and elaboration. He hid nothing. He pulled no punches. Not for him the tack taken by Charles de Gaulle as the anxious French pressed him for his agenda before assuming
power in 1957. “When I achieve power,” de Gaulle replied haughtily, “I will know what to do with it.” Obama not only knew what he wanted to do; he told everyone who would listen. If he hid his program, he did it in plain sight.

But most of America wasn’t listening. Enthralled by his charisma and the trappings of his candidacy, they tuned out his program and mindlessly applauded his sound bites. Willfully suspending skepticism, they eagerly believed his superficial promises to change the way Washington worked, to exclude the lobbyists and special interests, and to end partisan bickering. Only after he was elected, when we started to see him appoint lobbyist after lobbyist and ride roughshod over the Republican opposition, did we come to realize that these vague commitments were just the window dressing on his program. The parsley around the meat.

But his program was never obscured. In a mind-numbing series of debates with his fellow Democrats, he spelled it out for us all to hear.

But we weren’t paying attention to the boring programmatic details. How much more exciting it was to focus on the fact that we were witnessing the end of the color bar that first blighted America centuries ago, when the early slaves stepped onto these shores in chains. How much more thrilling to watch Barack Obama overcome the inevitable nominee, Hillary Clinton, by outsmarting her, defeating her, and making a mash of her strategy. What a relief to watch Mrs. Clinton’s ill-conceived focus on experience, in what was clearly a moment that called for change, backfire on her.

But what change did Obama represent? The truth was hard for us to accept: that the man who was marching inexorably to the White House was a genuine radical from Harvard and Chicago. We heard the rantings of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the stories Sean Hannity told about William Ayers, but we wouldn’t believe the clues. The conclusion was too horrible. Were we really about to elect a man who would change not just Washington but our values, our nation, and our own lives?

But the program lay out there in the sun day after day. It never varied. Obama never temporized. He trimmed his tax proposals from time to time and waffled on details of his national security stance, but the basic thrust of his administration was as clear on the day he announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, as it was when he spelled it out in his first address to Congress as president.

Most presidential candidates don’t bother. Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and John F. Kennedy all took office with only a vague idea of what they would do with the power. George W. Bush told us what he had in mind, but the agenda was so limited that it never much mattered. In our recent past, only Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan took office with as clear an idea of what they wanted to achieve. And, like both of these presidents, Obama did not trouble to hide his proposals as he campaigned for the job. Like Johnson and Reagan, Obama let it all hang out.

Didn’t he plainly and frankly tell us that he would:

• Socialize health care
  
• Raise taxes sharply on those making over $200,000
  
• Raise capital gains taxes on high-income people
  
• Block the repeal of the estate tax
  
• Raise the Social Security payroll tax so everyone (or practically everyone) will have to pay it on his or her whole income
  
• Rebuild our infrastructure regardless of cost
  
• Pour money into alternative energy sources but go slow on nuclear power
  
• Pull out of Iraq
  
• End tough interrogations of terror suspects
  
• Dramatically increase federal spending
  
• Weaken the standards in the No Child Left Behind Act
  
• Push legislation allowing unions to organize without secret ballots
  
• Call for immigration legislation granting amnesty to most illegal immigrants already here
  
• Extend health care benefits to all legal immigrants, even those recently legitimized by his own amnesty plan
  
• Sharply increase aid to states and cities
  
• Change the ownership and rules of talk radio
  
• Shift our stance from support of Israel to greater sympathy for the Palestinian position
  
• Increase regulation of business
  
• Do more to regulate executive pay
  
• Weaken welfare reform
  
• Cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans while raising them sky high on the rest.
  
• Tax hedge fund and real estate partnership earnings as ordinary income
  
• Cap and trade legislation to charge utilities and industries for their carbon output
  
• Revise NAFTA and restrict free trade
  

This agenda was not new. It was a greatest-hits collection that revived proposals made by the Democratic-union Left for the past thirty years. But since Lyndon Johnson, and especially in the wake of Ronald Reagan, no Democratic president had dared to embrace it. Even with a Democratic Congress, Bill Clinton pursued only a small part of the liberal program.
Politics, after all, is the art of the possible—and, in political terms, the labor/left agenda was clearly impossible.

Obama camouflaged his domestic agenda behind the single overshadowing position of opposition to the war in Iraq. His emphasis on this theme—as opposed to the changes he contemplated at home—distracted us from the essential radicalism of his agenda. Obama may not have been another Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, but he was clearly another Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, and Michael Dukakis. He just couldn’t let anyone know.

The swelling casualty count in Iraq disenchanted Americans and distracted them from the importance of preserving our national security. Isolationism and obliviousness to the obvious costs of a premature pullout became the order of the day. As public opinion moved to the left, driven by the incompetence of George W. Bush’s war strategy, Obama seemed to offer a reasonable alternative. His antiwar position—once easily dismissed as turning tail—now looked like a rational position.

The war was an issue that would ratify Obama’s liberalism as centrist, and it gave him the opportunity to hide his radical domestic agenda behind his antiwar rhetoric. As Hillary’s more security-minded position stalled in the mud, Obama’s idealistic stance rode a national wave of war fatigue.

But then a funny thing happened: We started to win in Iraq. Guided by the new strategy of General David Petraeus and the surge in troop strength, the issue began to go away. By the late summer of 2008, Obama was left high and dry by the shifting tide—and his radical agenda threatened to attract newfound, and unwelcome, attention.

OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN: SAVED BY THE CRISIS

When the stock market began its long, dismal crash to the bottom on September 29, 2008, it saved the Obama campaign. The Democratic nominee had never really recovered from the loss of the Iraq issue, and for a moment Sarah Palin’s exciting debut seemed to put Obama on the ropes. But when the market fell apart on Bush’s watch, Obama was saved.

From there, the Democrat coasted. He encountered a momentary speed bump when a plumber named Joe did what the rest of the country had
failed to do: read Obama’s program. Accused of raising taxes, the Democrat admitted that he was, in fact, trying to redistribute income. But in the trauma of the crisis nobody listened, and Obama scored his massive victory.

There is, however, one consolation: in a democracy, no victory lasts forever. The American people are watching Obama closely. His promises of recovery have been so bold that waiting to see if he manages to keep them has become a new national pastime. But the programs he has launched are likely to dig us deeper into the hole than we were when he took office. That’s why it’s crucial for us to understand what he’s doing to our country—so that we can reject his socialist agenda in the congressional elections of 2010.

“NEVER LET A SERIOUS CRISIS GO TO WASTE”
—RAHM EMANUEL

Having won the presidency, carried a top-heavy majority in the House, and filled the Senate with sixty Democrats, Obama knew he could count on easy sailing in Congress. He would have no problem getting most of the new spending programs he wanted passed during his term (or two) in office. He would likely succeed where Clinton had failed and pass health care reform.

But Obama had more—a lot more—in mind. He had no interest in a typical Democratic presidency, with the focus on incremental change that characterized the Carter and Clinton years. He wanted to be a president in the mold of Lyndon Johnson or even Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wanted to pass everything, and he wanted to do so right away.

Just as the economic crisis showed him the way to win the election, now it pointed the way to pass his program. He merely had to rebrand his radical/socialist agenda as an economic recovery package.

Taking a page from Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, Obama decided he wouldn’t “let a serious crisis go to waste.” Far from being wasted, this crisis would be put to a cynical use—to catalyze the most dramatic change in American politics and economics since the 1930s. When Obama got finished “solving” the crisis, nothing would ever be the same again.

Suddenly everything was possible! No need to wait year after year to pass the programs on the environment, energy, welfare, education, health care, higher education, veterans, infrastructure, and urban problems that
Democrats had been pushing for years. Do it all at once! Jam through eight years of new spending proposals in one year! For that matter, do it in one week!

By cramming every Democratic spending fantasy into one bill—into that Trojan horse called “the stimulus package”—Obama could have it all, up front. No waiting.

It was just like the game urban social work agencies have played for years. The antipoverty storefront of the 1960s became the community development program of the 1970s. In the 1980s it morphed into an empowerment zone. Under Clinton it became a job training center, under Bush a tutoring program for No Child Left Behind. Same storefront. Same staff. Same clientele. Just a different shingle hanging outside.

So now Obama could put his entire agenda on the table at once, declare a national crisis, and jam it through. No time for debate. No time even to print the bill so members could read what they were voting for.
Emergency!

Despite the empirical evidence that spending and one-shot tax cuts don’t work, Obama couldn’t resist. He finally had a chance to take advantage of Keynesian economic theory, to get Congress to pass all of his pet spending bills—his fantasies about renovating schools, computerizing health records, rebuilding roads and bridges, spreading broadband access, widening health care coverage of children and the unemployed, increasing scientific research, building alternative energy sources, and so on in the name of stimulating the economy, and so on. Suddenly everything was a stimulus measure.

Obama must have known that his stimulus package would do little to end the recession. He must have realized that the simple Keynesian approach wouldn’t work. But he didn’t care. He wanted the spending. He wanted the social programs. He wanted government to grow, and this was his excuse for doing it.

The wonderful thing about a spending/stimulus package is that it doesn’t really matter what you spend the money on. A check is a check is a check. It doesn’t matter if you’re hiring a teacher or a cop or a scientist or an artist or a dishwasher. The goal is to spend money, and it doesn’t much make a difference what the money is buying. So Obama invited the House and Senate Democrats to name their pet projects; whatever they were, he’d put them in the package.

It was like inviting an alcoholic in for a drink. And Congress was a thirsty drunk.

The proposals came fast and furious. The total cost was $787 billion. The stimulus bill itself ran 1,071 pages. Not that any member of Congress had time to read it, because the text didn’t reach them until a few hours before they had to pass it.

And here it is in all its gory glory!

OBAMA’S STIMULUS PACKAGE