- The American people oppose Obamacare by almost 2 to 1 in the latest CNN poll. Other polls also show lopsided opposition to passing either the Senate or House health-care bill. Public opinion is against the bill because of its obscene costs in higher taxes, burdensome debt, anti-freedom mandates, rationing, and reduced care for seniors. The American people have awakened to the fact that Obamacare is transformational legislation that will drag us against popular will into European-style Socialism.
- The Democrats’ double-counting of Obamacare’s financial benefits has been exposed as a colossal lie. Harry Reid told the Senate that his bill strengthens our future by both “cutting our towering national deficit by as much as $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years” and “strengthening Medicare and extending its life by nearly a decade.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) refuted that assertion. CBO said the claim that Obamacare would provide these benefits simultaneously “would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”
- Obamacare is unconstitutional because of its mandate that all individuals must carry “approved” health insurance, and all businesses must give health insurance to their employees whether or not the company can afford it. “Universal” coverage will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service with power to punish those who don’t have such a plan.The Commerce Clause does not give Congress this authority.
- Since the Senate bill imposes sharp limits on health-insurance companies’ ability to raise fees or exclude coverage, it likely will force many of them out of business. Obamacare is unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and against deprivation of property without due process of law.
- Obamacare blatantly legislates racial and other discrimination. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent two letters to the President and congressional leaders warning about the obnoxious requirements for racist and sexist quotas. The Senate bill requires that “priority” for federal grants be given to institutions offering “preferential” admissions to minorities (race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, and religion). Institutions training social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral pediatricians, psychiatric nurses, and counselors will be ineligible for federal grants unless they enroll “individuals and groups from different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographic, religious, linguistic, and class backgrounds, and different genders and sexual orientations.”
- Obama’s claim that “everybody” will now be covered creates few winners but lots of losers. Universal health insurance will be achieved by forcing young people to pay the additional costs (insurance for the youngest third of the population would rise by 35%), and by rationing care for the elderly.
- According to Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post, the “wild card is immigration.” From 1999 to 2008, 60% of the increase in the uninsured occurred among Hispanics (many of whom are in our country illegally), and Obama’s refusal to close our borders will make this problem more costly every year.
- Obamacare gives Medicare bureaucrats the power to ration health care by forcing doctors to prescribe cheaper medical devices and drugs. In the recent case of Hays v. Sebelius, the court ruled that Medicare doesn’t have the right to make this rule, but Obamacare takes jurisdiction away from the courts to hear any appeal from decisions of the new Medicare Commission. Financial penalties will be imposed on doctors if they refer too many patients to specialists.
- The Senate bill contains at least a dozen of what are often called Sweetheart Deals, but the more accurate term is bribe. Senator Mary Landrieu received a $300 million increase in Medicaid funding for her state (known as the Second Louisiana Purchase), and Senator Ben Nelson received a $100 million permanent exemption for Nebraska from the costs of Medicaid expansion.
- The Senate bill has a four-page section artfully written to enable ACORN to get federal health-care grants. This section describes grant recipients as “community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups” having “existing relationships . . . with uninsured and underinsured consumers.”
Congress Must Stop the Trial in New York
The U.S. Constitution can rescue us from one piece of the Obama Administration’s push toward “remaking America.” Our Constitution is on the people’s side to stop Obama from turning the judiciary into a platform for America’s sworn enemies to spread their propaganda and even use our own laws against us.
Our Constitution’s framers foresaw the probability that power-hungry men would try to take over the judiciary. So, they gave us the tools to maintain a government based on the separation of powers.
Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced that he will move the trial of the confessed 9/11 terrorist mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, from a military court (where he ought to be tried) to a civilian court in New York City. Holder plans to reward this terrorist with all the constitutional rights of any ordinary U.S. citizen defendant accused of an ordinary crime.
KSM fits the statutory definition of a terrorist: “unlawful enemy combatant” who engaged in premeditated, politically motivated violence against noncombatant targets. He’s not a U.S. citizen and he was arrested outside the United States.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to override this Obama-Holder outrage. Congress can and should prevent this travesty, and the sooner the better.
We don’t need any 2,000 page legislation. A single sentence will suffice: “Federal District Courts shall have no jurisdiction over any case involving unlawful enemy combatants, as that term is defined in the United States Code (title 10, section 948a).”
Constitutional authority is clear. Article III, Section I, states: “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”
Nothing is new or irregular about Congress prescribing or limiting the kinds of cases that federal courts are permitted to hear. A long historical record conclusively proves that Congress has the power to regulate and limit court jurisdiction, that Congress has used this power repeatedly, and that the courts have accepted it.
The great Chief Justice John Marshall asserted in an 1807 Supreme Court case that “courts which are created by written law, and whose jurisdiction is defined by written law, cannot transcend that jurisdiction.”
In 2002, for example, Congress passed a law (at Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s urging) to prohibit federal courts from hearing cases about brush clearing in his home state of South Dakota. Pending environmental lawsuits were immediately halted, and a court order that was already issued became null and void.
The most recent example of Congress cutting off court jurisdiction is Harry Reid’s Senate health-care bill, which (if passed) will prevent courts from hearing any appeal from decisions of the new Medicare Commission about rationing and doctors’ fees.
There are many bad consequences to staging the trial of KSM in New York City. If he is given all civilian constitutional rights, the government will be required to turn over to him vast amounts of U.S. intelligence and information that will imperil national security and put us in danger of future acts of terrorism. The chief issue in the trial could become waterboarding rather than the 9/11 terrorist act that killed some 3,000 people.
The Obama Administration is infested with transnationalists, i.e., lawyers who want to integrate foreign law or so-called international law into U.S. domestic law and impose it on Americans.
We wonder if the real purpose of moving this trial to New York is to put the George W. Bush Administration on trial in a foreign court, as the far left has been demanding. The dangerous publicity and classified information emanating from the trial could give the opportunity to anti-Bush lawyers to take some of this material to the International Criminal Court (to which the United States does not even belong) or other foreign court (such as Spain, which illegally tried Pinochet of Chile) and urge a trial against George W. Bush for war crimes.
Before Eric Holder became Attorney General, he and other Justice Department lawyers were in law firms that represented detainees at Guantanamo. Those lawyers should all be disqualified; they shouldn’t have ever been hired by the Justice Department.
The trial of KSM would be a media circus for many months, much like the O.J. Simpson trial, only ten times as compelling. Defense lawyers will be eager to display their histrionics modeled on Johnnie Cochran’s famous argument, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!”
What if KSM is acquitted? And released onto the streets of New York? Holder was pathetic in defending his New York decision at a congressional hearing, even assuring the Congressmen that KSM would not be acquitted. Is Holder planning a show trial where the verdict is planned in advance? Congress should act promptly to stop this dangerous move of KSM’s trial from a military court to a federal court in New York.
Obama has now doubled his KSM mistake by deciding that the “Underwear Bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a 300+-passenger Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, will also be tried by a civilian court instead of a military court as an “enemy combatant.” Umar immediately got himself (in legal slang) “lawyered up” and claimed his Miranda rights, and now our government will not be able to get him to reveal valuable information about his associates.
Umar has dispelled the myth that poverty causes terrorism. His father is one of the richest men in Nigeria. Umar led a privileged life with an expensive education in England, a $4 million apartment in London, and trips to the United States.
It’s Still ‘the Economy, Stupid!’
The Biggest Issue Is Unemployment
The biggest political issue today and in the 2010 election is that one in six Americans are jobless. The political party that offers a solution has the best chance of victory but, so far, both parties just don’t seem to get it.
We are told that the unemployment rate is 10.2%, but that’s only part of the problem. When you add discouraged Americans who have quit looking for a job, plus the underemployed (i.e., working only part-time while seeking full-time work), the figure rises to at least 17.5%.
President Obama plunged America into incredible debt by telling us that his $787 billion Stimulus bill would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs. To borrow a phrase from an earlier campaign, that was just “campaign oratory.”
In arguing for his Stimulus, Obama promised “shovel-ready” jobs, which gave us the mental image of construction workers in hard hats repairing our highways and bridges. But while four out of five who lost their jobs were men, more than half the jobs created by the Stimulus were for women in education or government, where no hard hats are needed.
Two reasons explain this disconnect. The feminists had a tantrum and demanded Stimulus jobs, and Obama wants to make more people dependent on government rather than the private sector (a.k.a. Socialism).
Many Stimulus jobs went to keep state and local jobs from succumbing to budget cuts. That was a payoff to public sector unions such as SEIU (whose president is now the most frequent White House guest), but does nothing to increase jobs in the real economy.
Young people voted for Obama for President by 66% to 32%, but they made a bad bargain because three million of them now have no jobs. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, the percentage of young men actually working is the lowest in the 61 years of record-keeping.
Among men aged 20 through 24, only 65 of every 100 are employed on any given day, and among males aged 16 through 19, only 28 of 100 are working. John Podesta’s answer to this problem is to give a few thousand of them government jobs in AmeriCorps.
These figures were detailed by the New York Times’ African-American columnist, Bob Herbert. He tactfully refrained from stating the obvious, that the ones hurt most by this unemployment are young black men. It’s refreshing that some are waking up to how Obama has used but not helped his biggest constituency, the African-Americans.
A more biting criticism was leveled at Obama by the leftwing journal Rolling Stone in its December 10 issue, which lambasted him in an eight-page attack-article called “Obama’s Big Sellout.” Rolling Stone is in shock at discovering that Obama’s socialism means payoffs to his rich friends and Wall Street contributors while spreading around the poverty (instead of the wealth).
The health care bill is another direct attack on the young people who voted for Obama. The Democrats’ plan will force young people to buy insurance they don’t want in order to subsidize expensive care of seniors. In addition, young people will be stuck with a staggering debt hanging over them for the rest of their lives.
Obama’s promise to allow 20 million illegal aliens to stay in the United States is another broadside attack on the job prospects of young American men. Obama’s immigration policy betrays our own black and white high school dropouts who desperately need entry-level and other minimum-wage jobs to start building a life.
The Center for Immigration Studies reports that there are an additional 18.7 million native-born Americans with only a high-school diploma or less who are not in the count of unemployed/underemployed because they are not even looking for a job. The current employment of seven to eight million illegal aliens is a major cause of unemployment for our ample supply of native-born high school dropouts.
We are constantly told that we need these illegal aliens because of the “jobs Americans won’t do.” In reality, there are no such jobs, yet Obama is continuing to allow virtually unlimited numbers of low-skilled illegals, without even a high school education, to enter our country, take jobs, and depress wages for low-paying jobs.
Agricultural jobs are among those that Americans supposedly “won’t do.” Yet, when farmers posted 726 job openings in 2009 for H-2A visas to work Ag jobs, 1,799 Americans applied.
White-collar jobs are being outsouurced as corporations search for cheaper labor. Telephone operators paid $12.57 an hour in the United States can be hired in India for less than $1. Medical transcriptionists paid $13.17 an hour here can be hired in India for $1.50, and legal assistants paid $17.86 an hour here can be hired for $6 in India.
Only the private sector can create useful jobs that offer hope for the future. Small business, which has the capacity of creating good jobs, hasn’t been hiring since Obama was elected because he is threatening them with tax increases plus a mandate to provide health insurance for their workers that employers can’t afford.
If Obama continues with his current financial, immigration, international trade, and globalist policies, he will give us a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression. To understand and reverse Obama’s attack on American jobs, which is dashing hopes and opportunities for the young, all congressional candidates should read Jerome Corsi’s newest book, America for Sale.
Much has been written about our current high unemployment, but there is a strange reluctance by both liberal and conservative commentators to assess blame for the dramatic loss of well-paying American jobs. The causes are not only the general recession and the collapse of the housing market, but bad decisions by government and business that deserve finger-pointing.
Since 2000, the U.S. has lost millions of jobs due to outsourcing and insourcing. Those are euphemisms for exporting high-paying jobs to low-wage foreign countries, while importing an uneducated underclass willing to work for lower-than-U.S. wages without benefits.
The winners in this game include the corporate executives and stockholders who benefited by cheap labor, but the losers are the U.S. middle class. In addition to unemployment for those whose jobs were eliminated, the real wages (adjusted for inflation) for the jobs remaining have steadily declined.
Since 2000, the U.S. manufacturing sector has lost nearly 25 percent of our total manufacturing workforce. Many of those jobs have gone to Communist China, where toys for the U.S. market are made in sweatshops by workers paid as little as 36 cents per hour, and many white-collar jobs have gone to India where telephone operators can be hired for $1 an hour.
Leading economists are becoming willing to admit that their devotion to free trade was misplaced. Paul Samuelson, Nobel prize-winning economist and a dominating figure in U.S. economics for decades, faced reality before he died and admitted, “There is nothing in the theory that says trade is always a win-win for every group.”
Dr. Jerome Corsi’s latest book, America for Sale, is a superb explanation to help the public understand our current economic woes. He shows that free trade is turning America into a two-tiered country like many foreign countries, with few of the very rich and a lot of the very poor, while the middle class loses big-time.
The Sacramento Bee published an article admitting that California is already “a two-tier economy with Asians and non-Hispanic whites competing for high-status positions while Hispanics and blacks struggle to get the low-paying service jobs.”
Dr. Corsi relates how the United States welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 knowing that free-trade agreements with China would be unfair to America, and that even the expression “free trade,” as applied to China, is a fraud. China uses near-slave workers paid less than a dollar an hour with no benefits, sends us lead-encrusted toys and poisonous foods and medicines, and keeps its currency artificially cheap to unfairly advantage its exports.
The deceit in the free-trade slogan is epitomized by the way China and other nations blatantly discriminate against the United States by using a Value Added Tax (VAT) both to subsidize their exports and to penalize their imports.
The way this racket works is that China reimburses taxes paid in China by manufacturer-exporters, but imposes border taxes against American companies trying to sell their products in China. It’s not just coincidence that the tax barriers foreign countries impose on U.S. goods amounts to about as much as the tariff that was supposedly abolished or reduced under the phony name of free trade.
Dr. Corsi explains that the globalists know that free trade necessitates regional and ultimately global governance, and that economic integration inherently begets political integration. Ultimately, free trade is an assault on American sovereignty and independence.
Corsi entitled his book America for Sale because a bankrupt business is essentially a business for sale, and the Obama Administration is spending our country into bankruptcy. The foreigners who hold so much American cash are ready to switch to a new global currency and use their dollars (before they lose all their value) to buy U.S. tangible assets.
The result will be that foreign interests will end up owning important segments of U.S. private corporations and public infrastructure. Corsi asks some troublesome questions, such as how will we protect ourselves against technological espionage if foreign nations are permitted to own controlling positions in important U.S. technological firms?
Corsi reminds us that Obama’s bailouts are not just a way for private companies such as General Motors to survive, but a way for government to take over management of our private economy. We know the word for that: it’s Socialism.
In Corsi’s book, you will “meet the globalists” who are behind the plans to control our economy, and model our future on the European Union. When President Obama traveled to the G20 meeting on April 2, 2009, he proclaimed a “declaration of interdependence” and insisted that global solutions are required to bring us out of the recession.
Corsi wants Americans to understand that globalism will end up dismantling the American constitutional republic created by our U.S. Constitution. If the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are raised to the level of global governance, U.S. sovereignty will be treated as an obsolete concept.
Corsi ends his book with constructive solutions for resisting the global New Deal, reversing our dependence on foreign oil, and strengthening our middle class. Americans must stand up and say “No” to attacks on our sovereignty, spending our nation into bankruptcy, plans to destroy the dollar, the insourcing and outsourcing of any more jobs, and allowing foreigners to buy our assets.
