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Authors: David Limbaugh
The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (5 page)
BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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It’s not enough that millions of taxpayer dollars are already funneled toward renewable energy worldwide through the United Nations. Now, Obama plans to donate some $5 million to IRENA,
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whose charter demands mandatory contributions from its members based on the level of their UN contributions.
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In other words, once again, the United States will bear a disproportionate share of the costs—as if the Middle East’s petro-states couldn’t spend a pittance of our oil money on developing their own alternative energy.
“THIS IS ABSOLUTELY BACKWARDS”38
whose charter demands mandatory contributions from its members based on the level of their UN contributions.
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In other words, once again, the United States will bear a disproportionate share of the costs—as if the Middle East’s petro-states couldn’t spend a pittance of our oil money on developing their own alternative energy.
Obama talks a good game about bringing American businesses home, while his oppressive regulatory and tax policies send them overseas. In his zeal for green energy development, he also casually extends loan guarantees to foreign businesses that have yielded little domestic fruit. In August 2011, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that the Department of Energy (DOE) had offered a $133.9 million loan guaranty to Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass of Kansas LLC, a subsidiary of a multi-billion-dollar Spanish company. Abengoa aims to use the funds to develop a cellulosic ethanol plant in Hugoton, Kansas, that would convert hundreds of thousands of corn stalks and leaves into some 23 million gallons of ethanol per year. The Department of Energy estimates that with our loan guaranty and others, totaling some $2.6 billion, the project should create 195 permanent jobs.
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President Obama presented his jobs plan in Apex, North Carolina, at the headquarters of WestStar Precision, a specialty manufacturer that had just opened a new facility in San Jose, Costa Rica, creating many jobs in that country, but few, if any, in the United States. Republicans were amazed that Obama could be so tone deaf as to promote his “American Jobs Act” there. GOP spokesman Rob Lockwood said, “Well, the president is coming here to apparently tout how to create jobs in America, and the location he’s chosen has just apparently opened up a new manufacturing plant in Costa Rica. So we are curious how a plant in Costa Rica creates American jobs.”
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Well, American jobs are important, but so is campaign cash, and Obama’s choice of speech venue is understandable once you know that the company’s owner, Ervin Portman, is a local Democrat on the Wake County, North Carolina Board of Commissioners and a donor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
This wasn’t the first time Obama spoke at a North Carolina-based company with overseas employees. The previous June he spoke at Cree LED light company, also to discuss job creation, despite that company’s outsourcing of many jobs to China.
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Making matters worse, Cree was a major recipient of Obama stimulus funds—$39 million as an Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit—and apparently used at least a portion of those funds to send jobs overseas. The company’s CEO, Chuck Swoboda, has openly indicated his intention to use American taxpayer dollars in China, bragging that more than 50 percent of his company’s employees live and work there. He told a Chinese audience that although Cree is an American firm, “Cree management never runs this company as a U.S. company.”
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Making matters worse, Cree was a major recipient of Obama stimulus funds—$39 million as an Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit—and apparently used at least a portion of those funds to send jobs overseas. The company’s CEO, Chuck Swoboda, has openly indicated his intention to use American taxpayer dollars in China, bragging that more than 50 percent of his company’s employees live and work there. He told a Chinese audience that although Cree is an American firm, “Cree management never runs this company as a U.S. company.”
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The Department of Energy has acknowledged that up to 80 percent of some of the green programs related to the stimulus bill, which involved $2.3 billion of manufacturing tax credits, went to foreign firms that employed workers in China, South Korea, and Spain. These vaunted green jobs continue to enrich foreign producers, said Peter Morici, a University of Maryland business professor, because of those nations’ state subsidies and their abundant pool of cheap labor—a fact that has upset Obama’s union constituencies.
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Obama’s allies, like the man himself, sometimes fail to match their rhetoric with their actions. The president appointed Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, as vice chairwoman of the President’s Export Council, a panel seeking ways to increase U.S. exports and thus domestic jobs. In a recent interview, Burns warned about outsourcing, arguing, “The work has to be done, so we send the work to people in other places that can get it done. This is absolutely backwards.” Perhaps Burns’ concerns over outsourcing would be more credible if, shortly after she expressed them, Xerox had not informed its product engineering employees that the company was negotiating to outsource jobs to India-based HCL Technologies.
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Along the same lines, the administration expediently launched a Buy American campaign, seeking to “ensure that transportation infrastructure projects are built with American-made products,” just two months before U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood boasted that he’d advised his daughter to buy a Toyota.
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Along the same lines, the administration expediently launched a Buy American campaign, seeking to “ensure that transportation infrastructure projects are built with American-made products,” just two months before U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood boasted that he’d advised his daughter to buy a Toyota.
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It’s one thing for a private American company to choose, for business reasons, to outsource jobs overseas; it’s another for a president who has created an unfriendly business climate at home to complain about it. But it’s a whole different matter for this president to guarantee a $2.1 billion loan to a foreign-owned company, as he did with German-owned joint-venture The Solar Trust of America.
That guaranty arose from an ill-considered 2005 energy bill that empowered the Department of Energy to guarantee private bank loans for “innovative energy technologies.” Obama took it to the next level, expanding the project’s scope and relieving debtor companies from having to make a down payment. This needlessly increased the exposure of the American taxpayer when we could least afford it. The program has been poorly run since its inception, having widespread gaps in loan documentation.
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As we will see in chapter eight, the Solyndra scandal was the logical consequence of such negligence.
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As we will see in chapter eight, the Solyndra scandal was the logical consequence of such negligence.
In a separate example, from the seemingly endless stash of EPA funds used for outlandish green schemes, the Obama administration, through the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, paid for replacement mufflers for dozens of Mexican trucks to reduce their exhaust emissions, with more to be upgraded in the future.
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It was apparently unthinkable to suggest that Mexico should pay to upgrade its own vehicles.
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It was apparently unthinkable to suggest that Mexico should pay to upgrade its own vehicles.
Indeed, it seems this administration will support
any
progressive cause, foreign or domestic. For example, federal funding of left-leaning National Public Radio is already controversial, but not only has the Obama administration increased this funding,
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it’s even gearing up to distribute a “significant” sum of money to a foreign state-owned news service. The money is meant to assist the BBC World Service in preventing the suppression of the internet in closed societies such as Iran and China. Although this may sound like a good cause, one should note that Britain’s Foreign Service decided to cut World Service’s funding by 16 percent. If the British are scaling back their own service, why is the Obama administration anxious to step into the breach?
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AMERICAN CULTURE? THAT’S INTOLERANT!any
progressive cause, foreign or domestic. For example, federal funding of left-leaning National Public Radio is already controversial, but not only has the Obama administration increased this funding,
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it’s even gearing up to distribute a “significant” sum of money to a foreign state-owned news service. The money is meant to assist the BBC World Service in preventing the suppression of the internet in closed societies such as Iran and China. Although this may sound like a good cause, one should note that Britain’s Foreign Service decided to cut World Service’s funding by 16 percent. If the British are scaling back their own service, why is the Obama administration anxious to step into the breach?
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It’s not just for raw political reasons that Obama and the Democrats pander to ethnic identity groups and block serious attempts to secure our borders. Their attitude also flows from their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, which often amounts to an indictment of American and Western culture rather than a mere tolerance of other cultures. They reject American exceptionalism and the very idea of a unique American culture, and this mindset seems to be eating away at the national spirit. Not too long ago, 60 percent of Americans believed American culture was superior to other cultures, but today fewer than 50 percent do.
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This statistic will not trouble the cultural relativists, but it is troubling to those who still believe that America is the greatest nation in the world and must continue to lead free people and free nations.
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This statistic will not trouble the cultural relativists, but it is troubling to those who still believe that America is the greatest nation in the world and must continue to lead free people and free nations.
This helps to explain the Left’s reluctance to promote the assimilation of immigrants into our culture, their mastery of the English language for their own and society’s benefit, and their learning of rudimentary civics lessons to instill a sense of pride in their new nation. This is why Americans are now bombarded with foreign-language appeals from everyday businesses—political correctness demands it.
Sadly, the Obama administration is promoting the fracturing of our culture. Obama’s Education Department recently supported a first-ever national Spanish spelling bee for students from 4
th
through 8
th
grade in New Mexico at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. The event was held in Albuquerque and featured eleven students from four states.
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th
through 8
th
grade in New Mexico at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. The event was held in Albuquerque and featured eleven students from four states.
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Liberals insist that America’s greatness lies in her diversity, but that misses the point. It is wonderful that Americans descend from many ethnicities and nationalities, but without a common bond based on the cultural unity that
e pluribus unum
implies, we will become an increasingly balkanized country. America is unique in the history of nations precisely because it is united around principles, ideals, values, and a specific and unique form of constitutional governance. As the
Investors.com
editors eloquently wrote, “No other nation in history has been as committed to freeing men, delivering justice and, as the capital of capitalism, advancing prosperity and social mobility as the U.S. has been. None has ever been so humane, so charitable, so inclusive, so overflowing with optimism. It shouldn’t be up to the political class to set the tone of the culture. But in our current environment, a change at the top would help restore the faith we’ve lost in ourselves.”
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“WE DON’T WANT TO DRINK WATER FROM A WHITE WATER FOUNTAIN”e pluribus unum
implies, we will become an increasingly balkanized country. America is unique in the history of nations precisely because it is united around principles, ideals, values, and a specific and unique form of constitutional governance. As the
Investors.com
editors eloquently wrote, “No other nation in history has been as committed to freeing men, delivering justice and, as the capital of capitalism, advancing prosperity and social mobility as the U.S. has been. None has ever been so humane, so charitable, so inclusive, so overflowing with optimism. It shouldn’t be up to the political class to set the tone of the culture. But in our current environment, a change at the top would help restore the faith we’ve lost in ourselves.”
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With immigration, as with many other items on his agenda, Obama thumbs his nose at those who advocate the rule of law in our approach to the knotty problem. He’s expressed his support for illegal alien sanctuary cities and for suspending deportations of non-criminal illegal immigrants.
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His administration has also produced a memo detailing a strategy to circumvent Congress administratively in pursuit of amnesty for illegals.
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His administration has also produced a memo detailing a strategy to circumvent Congress administratively in pursuit of amnesty for illegals.
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Obama has gone so far as to embrace the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic activist organization that advocates open borders and impunity for lawlessness. During the 2008 presidential race Obama courted the group, and in July 2011 he addressed their annual conference in Washington, D.C., expressing his solidarity with them and their goals. Obama bragged that he had “poached quite a few of [their] alumni to work in [his] administration.” He also sent La Raza a clear message that Democrats were their friends and Republicans their enemies, declaring, “But here’s the only thing you should know. The Democrats and your President are with you. Don’t get confused about that. Remember who it is that we need to move in order to actually change the laws.”
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During his address, Obama also reiterated his support for the Dream Act, a small-scale amnesty that would grant permanent residency to illegal alien high school graduates who meet conditions such as attending college or joining the military. When Congress refused to approve the Dream Act amidst popular opposition, Obama officials bypassed the people’s representatives and simply implemented many of the bill’s provisions administratively. As Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies remarked, “When the president spoke to La Raza recently and said he couldn’t just go around Congress and enact an amnesty, the assembly started chanting, ‘Yes, you can! Yes, you can!’ Well, he did.”
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La Raza is a decidedly race-based organization, as its name suggests: La Raza means “The Race.” It supports discounted tuition and driver’s licenses for illegal aliens as well as illegal alien sanctuary cities. Some believe it serves as the public relations front group for the militant Mexican Reconquista movement, which seeks Mexico’s re-conquest of the American southwest.
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La Raza has also funded a Mexican separatist charter school, Academia Semillas Del Pueblo, whose principal articulated these “educational” objectives:
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La Raza has also funded a Mexican separatist charter school, Academia Semillas Del Pueblo, whose principal articulated these “educational” objectives:
We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts…. Ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.
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The school provides this description for its 8
th
grade “United States History and Geography” class: “A People’s history of Expansion and Conflict - A thematic survey of American politics, society, culture and political economy; Emphasis throughout on the nations the U.S. usurped, invaded and dominated; Connections between historical rise of capitalism and imperialism with modern political economy and global social relations.”
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th
grade “United States History and Geography” class: “A People’s history of Expansion and Conflict - A thematic survey of American politics, society, culture and political economy; Emphasis throughout on the nations the U.S. usurped, invaded and dominated; Connections between historical rise of capitalism and imperialism with modern political economy and global social relations.”
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The administration has almost tripled the amount of taxpayer funds (from $4.1 million to $11 million) distributed to La Raza since one of the group’s former top officials, Cecilia Munoz, began serving as Obama’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. The government watchdog Judicial Watch disclosed that the money came from various sources, with a major portion—60 percent—coming from the Department of Labor, whose head honcho, Hilda Solis, has close ties to La Raza and has begun a national campaign to protect illegal immigrant workers in the United States. Other funding came from the Department of Housing and Urban Development ($2.5 million for housing counseling), the Department of Education ($800,000), and the Centers for Disease Control ($250,000). In addition, the Justice Department granted $600,000 in 2009 and $548,000 in 2010 to Ayuda Inc., a social service and legal assistance organization that provides immigration law services to illegal aliens along with a guarantee to protect their identities.
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BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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