Crimes Against Liberty (42 page)

Gerald Walpin’s firing was just one of many such examples, but it has already set a dangerous precedent. Less than a month and a half after Obama fired Walpin, congressional Democrats proposed to give Obama the power to appoint inspectors general at five financial regulatory agencies, a move that could greatly compromise the independent oversight of portions of the federal bureaucracy. The
Washington Times
editors warned this move “would only serve to further politicize these positions”: the Federal Reserve, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Credit Union Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Supporters of the move argued, deceitfully, that the IGs’ independence would not be undermined because they would not be investigating the president personally. But with Obama’s governmental powers growing every day, this was not the time to be reducing checks and balances against abuses.
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Furthermore, in June 2010 a federal judge dismissed Walpin’s wrongful termination lawsuit—incredibly, the judge upheld the administration’s bogus claim that Obama did not technically fire Walpin when Obama removed his authority and placed him on “administrative leave.” As Byron York noted, the decision “means the president can remove future inspectors general immediately, without reason or notice to Congress, simply by placing an inspector general on immediate administrative leave.... The inspector general would be out of his office immediately, stripped of his authority, and the president could claim that he had not actually been fired, and thus the law had not been violated.”
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In the end, although Obama made room in his administration for everyone from the former Communist Van Jones to the environmental extremist Steven Chu, he could not tolerate the presence of an aggressive watchdog of government malfeasance.

PART III

OFFENSES AGAINST AMERICA’S GENERAL WELFARE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Chapter Twelve

TAXING AND SPENDING AMERICA INTO BANKRUPTCY

CRIMES AGAINST OUR POSTERITY

I
t was ironic that during the very week that Obama was, once more, cynically urging a “bipartisan” effort to control our soaring deficits, a survey of economists revealed their belief that Obama’s vaunted stimulus package had not contributed much toward an economic recovery. This “stimulus,” which hemorrhaged borrowed money to prime the economy’s pump, accomplished little more than political payoffs, expanding the public sector, and proving the government was still the king of colossal waste.

The quarterly survey by the National Association for Business Economics polled sixty-eight of its members who work in economic roles at private-sector firms. About 73 percent of them said employment at their companies was neither higher nor lower as a result of the stimulus act. Backing up their assessment were the hard facts that millions of jobs have been lost since the stimulus bill was passed, and that Obama himself had implicitly admitted its failure when he convened his “Jobs Summit” as a prelude to passing his $17.7 billion jobs bill.
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The same week economic experts inside the Health and Human Services Department confessed that contrary to Obama’s claim, ObamaCare would increase healthcare costs.
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As if an innocent bystander observing our exploding national debt, Obama piously warned against the deficits that threaten to erode America’s standard of living as he addressed members of the “bipartisan” National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Later he would similarly show his limitless gall in presuming to give Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel economic advice—that “Europe needed to try something big,” implying his own “big” actions had restored America’s economy.
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Then, at the G-20 conference in Toronto in June 2010, when other nations were focusing on deficit reduction, Obama urged them to continue reckless deficit spending. Even the
Washington Post
recognized that Obama’s remarks “tempered the Group of 20’s headline achievement at the summit, a deficit-reduction target that had been pushed by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the host of the meeting and a fiscal conservative.”
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These remarks came from the same guy who refused to let TARP CEOs pay down their debts; who planned a systematic expansion of our national deficits and debt in order to “spread the wealth around” and shore up his reelection efforts; who wasted billions in the stimulus package and the auto bailouts; who was hell-bent on passing the bankrupting cap and trade bill and the financial overhaul debacle; and who rammed through Cash for Clunkers, the mortgage bailout bill, and ObamaCare. It was becoming cartoonish—in a tragic sort of way.

Obama is the guy who arranged for the U.S. to contribute billions of dollars to an international bailout of Greece over the objections of Congress at a time when we were undergoing the most severe debt crisis in our history. As critics noted, just as with Obama’s various domestic bailout schemes, this would encourage other European countries in financial straits to request even larger bailouts from the United States. Calling the bailout “absurd,” Newt Gingrich rightly asked, “Why should the American taxpayer put up 14 percent of the money, billions and billions of dollars, to bail out a Greek government . . . [that] has terrible work rules, has massive corruption, [and] has government employees rioting in the streets over the idea that they’re going to lose anything? The Greeks are telling us that they don’t want to take care of themselves but they don’t mind us sending them more money. I think that’s just fundamentally wrong.”
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But when it comes to proposed bailouts, there is no satiating Democratic appetites. Democratic senator Bob Casey has introduced legislation to bail out troubled union pension funds to the tune of $165 billion—which would be just the beginning. Obama’s manipulation of the Chrysler and GM restructurings to benefit the unions was apparently not enough payback for their tireless work in getting Democrats elected and promoting their agenda.

STIMULUS

Vowing to “jump start the economy,” Obama unleashed on America his stimulus bill—The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He claimed it would cost $787 billion—on the heels of the $700 billion TARP bailout program. Even casual students of government knew it would cost more than promised. Less than a year later, the Congressional Budget Office upped its estimate to $862 billion, though some said that with interest the bill would cost $1.3 trillion. The greatest factor contributing to CBO’s miscalculation was its assumption that unemployment would not exceed 9 percent. After all, Obama promised his stimulus would keep unemployment from surpassing 8 percent, but joblessness rose above 10 percent in October and thereafter hovered between 9 and 10 percent. With unemployment numbers dwarfing Obama’s predictions, unemployment compensation costs soared far above CBO’s estimates.
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Although the bill was pitched as a way to stimulate the economy and create jobs, it was actually a disgraceful boondoggle full of waste, pork, political payoffs, temporary green jobs, and other programs designed to further expand government. Obama and his Democratic allies stuffed years’ worth of their legislative wish lists into this monstrous vehicle, exploiting the economic crisis to covertly enact legislation as sweeping as reversing the successful welfare reforms of the 1990s.

But even a committed Keynesian would be hard-pressed to describe the stimulus as primarily designed to stimulate. If the only way out of the economic crisis were to infuse nearly a trillion dollars into the economy, then why did Obama intentionally hold back such a great portion of the funds for expenditure in later years? Why did he recklessly waste so much of the money on programs and initiatives that couldn’t conceivably have been expected to stimulate anything, other than liberal euphoria over long-awaited spending on their pet projects and Democratic reelection efforts?

In early February 2009, Republicans published a list of some of the wasteful items in the bill. Among the items:

• $2 billion for FutureGen, a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois from which the Department of Energy pulled funding in 2009 after determining the project was inefficient.

• A $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film.

• $88 million for the Coast Guard to design a new polar icebreaker ship.

• $448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters and $248 million for the building’s furniture.

• $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees.

• $400 million for the Centers for Disease Control to screen and prevent STDs.

• $1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs.

• $125 million for the Washington sewer system.

• $150 million for the Smithsonian museum facilities.

• $1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion.

• $75 million for “smoking cessation activities.”

• $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges.

• $75 million for salaries of FBI employees.

• $25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.

• $500 million for flood reduction projects on the Mississippi River.

• $10 million to inspect canals in urban areas.

• $6 billion to turn federal buildings into “green buildings.”

• $500 million for state and local fire stations.

• $650 million for wildland fire management on forest service lands.

• $1.2 billion for “youth activities,” including youth summer job programs.

• $88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service.

• $412 million for CDC buildings and property.

• $500 million for building and repairing National Institutes of Health facilities in Bethesda, Maryland.

• $160 million for “paid volunteers” at the Corporation for National and Community Service.

• $5.5 million for “energy efficiency initiatives” at the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration.

• $850 million for Amtrak.

• $100 million for reducing the hazard of lead-based paint.

• $75 million to construct a “security training” facility for State Department security officers (who can actually be trained at existing facilities of other agencies).

• $110 million to upgrade computer systems at the Farm Service Agency.

• $200 million to lease alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations.
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Is it any wonder this bill was immediately dubbed “Porkulus?” This list illustrates so much of what’s wrong with socialism and expanding government into areas never contemplated by the framers of our Constitution. If you submitted this list to the people and itemized how much each taxpayer’s share would be, few items would be approved.

There’s also a lot of politically correct environmentalism and make-work projects that are obscenely wasteful, especially on the heels of the similarly extravagant TARP bill. This legislative act was unconscionable, considering that it was largely funded by exacerbating our growing debt problem. That the bill passed both chambers of Congress is a testament to how far Democrats will go if possessed, albeit temporarily, of virtually unchecked power.

The stimulus proved to be disorganized, out of control, and beyond the ability of government to account for, despite promises from Obama and Biden that they would vigilantly monitor the money.
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The federal government’s
Recovery.org
website, which is supposed to have tracked the expenditures, listed some $9.5 million in stimulus money as going to fourteen zip codes in Virginia that did not exist or are in other states, according to Old Dominion Watchdog.
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New Mexico Watchdog discovered $27 million of federal money went to nonexistent zip codes in New Mexico.
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In addition to these disgraceful developments, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported that the stimulus delivered some $2.2 billion in tuition grants to massage and beauty schools, online universities, and other for-profit colleges in Georgia and across the nation.
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