What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (25 page)

The riots and demonstrations happening in the United States and in western Europe are all following the same script, written and executed by the international Left, whose objective is to roil the world, upset the existing order, and ultimately overthrow it. This is Saul Alinsky on a worldwide scale; it’s global community organizing. It is the very essence and objective of the Obama agenda.

Of course, what would a radical anticapitalist protest be without Obama’s old domestic terrorist pal Bill Ayers? One of the original agitators behind Occupy Wall Street, Ayers launched tutorial sessions for the kids in the streets. He inspired them with the same words he had used in the early 1970s: “Action creates facts, and facts are essential,” he blogged to OWS. “The silenced majority, the 99 percent, has finally been pushed so far that it is pushing back. Every movement is improbable until it happens; after the fact it so clearly was inevitable.” Billy Ayers, master of wagging the dog.

Within a day of Ayers posting his first blog on Occupy Wall Street, his old friend and the man on whose behalf all of this was being done weighed in.

Obama first said of the protests, “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.”

This was followed by a series of comments in which Obama ramped up his support for the leftist movement, including saying point-blank: “We are on their side.” Of course he’s on their side. He IS them. They are him. They were sent into the streets to frame his 2012 campaign message of “income inequality” and to renew his platform of “economic justice.”

Many observers wondered why the protesters didn’t seem to have a coherent message. This was not a mystery to the Obama White House. In order to get reelected, Obama needs a fired-up base of leftist activists, just as he did in 2008. So the SEIU and other kooks set about to get the kids, hippies, socialists, commies, and rank-and-file union members riled up. It didn’t matter what the message or the cause was, at least not early on. The point was to get the leftist mob acting
first
. Let the protest form and be disorderly and unreadable, because the Kook Generals would then later supply its objectives. Having invested so much in acting, the mob would then be quick to accept any justification the leftist masters supplied.

This is exactly what happened. At first, very few of the protesters could articulate why they were there. As time went on, they became a bit clearer: Anti-capitalism? Sure! Hate the banks? Me too! The wealthy should pay more! Right on! Collectivism. Fairness. Justice. More important, they would carry that energy into protesting, organizing, campaigning, and, yes, voting in 2012. That is, if they can actually find their way to the polling station. And if they’re not behind bars by then. Although, from the Democrats’ perspective, being in jail would not necessarily impede their ability to vote. Nor would being dead.

The Occupy Wall Street protests were a perfectly executed bit of leftist psychology: organize leftists, identify and amplify grievances, pit group against group, stoke class warfare by hitting the rich and telling others they are entitled to more of what has been robbed from them, manufacture bedlam, and then seize it to advance their agenda. This has been Obama’s shtick from his earliest days in Chicago to the White House.

And yet, Obama has missed—or is deliberately disregarding—a profound flaw in his economic logic. Apart from its crass and offensive objective of dividing Americans, class warfare has always had limited utility in American politics. In the past, populists who have played that card have gained some traction by pitting the rich against everyone else, by inspiring people to haul out their metaphorical pitchforks and storm the lairs of the rich and powerful. But the key reason class warfare has had less success here than in western Europe and elsewhere is that America is an aspirational society. Built on the notions of merit, ambition, hard work, and risk and reward, the United States enshrines the promise of achievement regardless of class or status. Attacks on the rich ultimately backfire because many Americans desire to
be
rich. And they know that in America, diligence, creativity, innovation, and commitment can pay off in big ways, including amassing incredible wealth. The goal of the leftists is to kill that dream, to shatter personal goals, and to ensure that the potential of accumulating wealth is severely diminished. In Obama’s world, we’ll all live in cardboard boxes and eat every meal at a soup kitchen, where we’ll be served leather boots boiled in water by Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The leftists are tearing at the quintessentially American notion of success because neither they nor their agenda can thrive as long as most Americans are willing to fight for one simple truth: that maximum economic freedom leads to the most individual success—and
that
is the best and most efficient way to “spread the wealth around.”

On the afternoon of August 10, 2011, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was tanking by about 400 points. That month, as we learned later, was particularly catastrophic for jobs: zero net new jobs were created. But at lunchtime that day, the president decided to take a gaggle of young campaign volunteers who had won an essay contest about “organizing” out for a bite.

He took them to a Washington establishment called Ted’s Bulletin, which is famous for—wait for it—its Great Depression–era theme. Apparently the White House image makers and communications folks were too busy playing shirtless beer pong to stop this before it could become a metaphor for unemployment in the Obama era.

The full force of the financial crisis hit in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

As the contagion spread and a crisis that had been limited to the financial sector morphed into a broader recession, the layoffs began. In December 2007, the nation’s unemployment rate stood at 5.0 percent. By January 2009, it was 7.8 percent. The rapidly escalating unemployment situation was dire and getting worse; it was in that environment that the 2008 election would take place. It was also a situation that represented a rich political opportunity for the Obama campaign. Obama quickly and deftly positioned himself as the Only One who could “fix” the economy, with the help of some Wise Minds to advise him.

A few weeks before the election, vice presidential nominee and part-time rodeo clown Joe Biden ran to the microphones to second the notion that they were
the
ticket for economic restoration and job creation. After accusing the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, of failing to appreciate the seriousness of the jobs picture, Biden demonstrated that he should spend more time watching
Sesame Street
: “Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.” Well, at least he got the “B-S” part right.

Once they entered office, Team Obama did a hit-and-run on jobs in the form of the “stimulus” and then turned its attention to everything
but
the unemployment crisis: ObamaCare, cap and trade, financial regulation, raiding Gibson Guitars over its use of allegedly illegally imported wood, running guns to Mexican drug cartels, holding sit ’n’ spin policy sessions at the White House, drawing devil’s horns on the Republicans, smearing the Tea Party, going after California’s pot dispensaries, suing Arizona over its illegal immigration law, and playing the back nine.

The “stimulus” was rushed through at warp speed for two reasons. First, they needed to
look like
they were “doing something” to create jobs. Stubbornly high unemployment is the single biggest driver of political discontent. Americans will tolerate bad jobs news if they believe that the jobs environment is improving. In 1984, President Reagan ran for reelection with an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent. But Reagan had put pro-growth policies in place, such as deep tax cuts, sound money, and deregulation, that had unemployment falling precipitously and GDP growing between 6 percent and 9 percent. By the time of the 1984 election, the U.S. economy was smokin’, and he won reelection in an historic landslide.

Team Obama sold its “stimulus” as a way to at least stop the employment hemorrhaging and get the government-created job party started. They wheeled out Obama’s chief economist, Christina Romer, to predict that it would create “millions of jobs” and keep the unemployment rate at or below 8 percent. Romer and fellow Obama economist Jared Bernstein argued that without the “stimulus,” unemployment might rise all the way … to 9 percent! It subsequently climbed through the 9 percent range, sailed over 10 percent in October 2009, and then settled back into the 8 to 9 percent range for much of the rest of Obama’s term. “Where are the jobs, Mr. President?” So whined the then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August 2003, when the July unemployment stood at—wait for it—6.2 percent. Obama’s advisers Romer and Bernstein probably would also like to erase their other prediction: that by mid-2012 unemployment would be below 6 percent, with that number dropping like a cement shoe in the Hudson River.

The second reason Team Obama needed the jobs situation out of the headlines is that they were moving on to much more important things. The “stimulus” was their first shot across the redistributionist bow, but the bigger, juicier, longer-term redistributionist goals awaited. They rushed through the “stimulus” and then sped toward the crown jewels of their “more perfect union.” None of that could be accomplished if they were focused solely on jobs. Unemployment? No biggie. The “stimulus” would work its redistributive magic, the economy would soon be chugging along in eternal Keynesian bliss, and government or government-supported jobs would be flowering across the land.

In the summer of 2011, Obama gassed around with his Potemkin Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, whose head, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, spends much of his time shipping major GE divisions, infrastructure, and jobs to China while paying $0 in corporate taxes on billions of dollars in profit. He also spends a good deal of time partying with Mika Brzezinski, taking showers with Chris Matthews’s tingling leg, arm-wrestling Rachel Maddow, and admiring Chuck Todd’s ginger beard. But just because Immelt is paying no corporate taxes and is creating jobs abroad instead of in the United States doesn’t mean he can’t put on a good show. As Immelt and the other “jobs council” puppets surrounded Obama, there was no discussion of the fact that Obama’s own policies were smothering the economy and preventing job creation. Instead, they were more interested in yuks. At one point, Obama was asked about the epic waste of nearly $1 trillion of our money on the failed “stimulus.” He smirked: “Shovel-ready was not as … uh … shovel-ready as we expected,” he replied, chuckling as Immelt and “job council” advisers—including Eastman Kodak’s CEO, Antonio Perez, whose company later went bankrupt—joined in the laugh. Ha ha. The joke’s on you, America.

On February 24, 2009, Obama sold his “stimulus” by saying: “Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector—jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges; constructing wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit.” Hello, Solyndra! And hello, unions!

“Because of this plan,” he continued, “there are teachers who can now keep their jobs and educate our kids. Health care professionals can continue caring for our sick.” Hello, teachers’ unions! And gangway for ObamaCare!

And month after month, year after year, Obama repeated the same song, claiming the “saving or creating” of “millions” of jobs, demanding tens of billions of dollars more for unions and green jobs boondoggles, and offering shiny justifications for ever-greater government intervention in the private sector. High unemployment is part of the price of admission to the redistributionists’ theme park. That, along with the fact that it’s the only amusement park where you have to pay upon entry
and
exit. My favorite ride is called “It’s a Soviet World After All,” where you get to work in a sweatshop while you starve to death. Because everyone knows that the only refreshments at Redistributionland are the ones you have to bring with you and distribute to the other park-goers.

During the Obama years, median income has fallen by an astounding 10 percent. Long-term unemployment has been by far the highest since the Great Depression. Job growth during the first three years of the economic recovery after a severe recession has been the slowest since the end of World War II. Unemployment has stayed above 9 percent for most of the Obama term, and when the rate did drop, it was largely because record numbers of people simply gave up looking for work altogether, shrinking the labor force to its lowest in decades. More than one in four jobs added to the economy were temporary. Total unemployment—counting all those unemployed, those working part-time who would like full-time work, and those who have simply given up looking for jobs—has been at or above 16 percent. Roughly 6 million people have exhausted ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits. Black unemployment has been consistently over 16 percent. Unemployment among Hispanics has been over 11 percent. The unemployment rate among the young has been close to 20 percent.

There have, however, been some sectors of the economy experiencing a boom. We’ve seen 100 percent employment of union skull-crackers, tenured Bolshevik college professors with hairy upper lips, Ganja grocers at medical marijuana dispensaries, and, of course, the guys running the money printing presses.

Democrats argued for extending unemployment benefits to ninety-nine weeks and beyond to help soften the blow of joblessness, and many Republicans supported it, partly because the jobs crisis is so acute and partly out of fear of being painted as heartless boobs who didn’t care about the jobless. The problem is that while longer benefit terms sound humane and unobjectionable, several studies have shown that about one-third of those receiving unemployment benefits get a job immediately after those benefits run out. In 2009, when the recession was at its height, 13 million Americans were out of work but 3 million jobs went unfilled, either because the jobless didn’t seek them out or they weren’t trained or qualified for them.