Under the subterfuge of helping the economy, Barack Obama’s Stimulus legislates vast new spending programs to finance liberal policy goals that are unnecessary and undesirable. The flow of taxpayers’ money will be so gargantuan as to make Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society expansion of the welfare state look puny. Obama’s massive makeover of American government and society amounts to a second 9/11.
Barack Obama revealed his long-term goals in a radio interview on Chicago’s WBEZ-FM in 2001. Asked about the Earl Warren court decisions that started long lines of activist decisions in many areas, Obama argued that the Warren court didn’t go far enough: the Warren court changed the laws, but failed to address the economic issues to bring about “redistributive change.” Henry Kissinger called on the Obama Administration to use the current financial crisis to create a “new world order.”
Obama complained that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth” or “economic justice” and failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” The Stimulus is designed to break through those constitutional restraints on government action.
Here are some of the major “change” provisions of the 1000+-page Act that all admit no Member of Congress read before passage. This list doesn’t include any of the dozens of “porky” items that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) boasts Americans don’t care about (and usually don’t know about).
First, the Stimulus repeals the essentials of Welfare Reform passed by the Republican Congress in 1996. It was reluctantly signed by President Bill Clinton after he realized the public was demanding reform, and after it proved popular he tried to take credit for it.
LBJ’s Great Society welfare was probably the worst of all liberal policies because it was directly responsible for destroying marriage by subsidizing illegitimacy and divorce, thereby creating a matriarchy dependent on government handouts. It wasn’t poverty that destroyed marriage in the lower-income classes; it was the liberal policy of giving taxpayers’ money to women, thereby making the husband and father irrelevant and even an impediment to the flow of easy money.
By setting limits on government handouts, the 1996 Welfare Reform encouraged welfare recipients to get jobs or job training, to make themselves self-sufficient, and to end their long-term dependency on government.
The Obama Stimulus increases the taxpayers’ money that the federal government gives to the states for welfare, and reverses incentives by giving bonuses to states that put more people on welfare. The Stimulus is even worse than the Great Society policies of the 1960s.
That is a good example of the Obama goal to spread the wealth around (regardless of the harm it does).
Second, the Stimulus calls for nearly doubling federal spending on education, which means doubling federal control. This money gives Obama the opportunity to spread his friend William Ayers’s “social justice” teaching (i.e., that America is an oppressive and unjust society) throughout K-16 education. This goal will be facilitated by Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan for Secretary of Education who, like Obama and Ayers, is an alumnus of the Chicago political machine.
Third, the Stimulus calls for Obama “change” by giving government control over access to medical treatments plus surveillance over online medical records for every American. Giving bureaucrats the power to decide which procedures have “clinical effectiveness” (and may be used) means nationalizing the health care industry and rationing medical care.
Fourth, the Stimulus greatly expands by about $23 billion nearly every element of the welfare state, including food stamps, Medicaid eligibility, EITC, WIC, and child-support enforcement for single moms. The Governors have just awakened up to the fact that the Stimulus will require their states to raise business taxes if they accept this new free money.
Fifth, Obama’s claim that the Stimulus cuts taxes is a fraud. A large percentage of the alleged tax “refunds” is just another handout because it will go to people who don’t owe any income taxes. Every type of welfare handout is expanded, including food stamps, EITC, and Medicaid eligibility. The Stimulus makes it possible to give billions to leftwing groups such as ACORN.
Sixth, the announced purpose of the Stimulus is to create jobs, but Obama’s photo-op to illustrate this at Caterpillar Tractor in Peoria turned into a political donnybrook. National television showed Obama speaking to some of the 20,000 whose jobs have been outsourced by Caterpillar and implied that the Stimulus will enable them to be rehired. Minutes later, Obama was contradicted by Caterpillar’s CEO who warned that, on the contrary, more layoffs are coming. It looks like the Stimulus will create more government jobs plus an estimated 300,000 jobs for illegal aliens, but not much for anyone else.
The Democrats refused to include E-Verify in the Stimulus (even though the House voted last year to extend E-Verify by a vote of 407 to 2). E-Verify is the efficient, effective federal procedure that enables employers to verify whether job applicants are legal or not.
E-Verify is a real-time, web-based verification system run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. E-Verify can determine with great accuracy the authenticity of the personal information and credentials offered by employees and new hires. In most cases, verification occurs almost instantly.
Approximately 99.4 % of lawful workers receive immediate positive verification, while the other 0.6 % of lawful workers receive positive verification after a brief visit to their local Social Security office. E-Verify is inexpensive for employers to use, costing between $4 and $20 for each employee screened.
E-Verify has been proven to successfully verify employees queried through the system within five seconds. Opponents of this program, to date, have been unable to find a single instance in which legal, U.S. citizens have lost their jobs due to an E-Verify error.
Will jobs made available by the Stimulus go to Americans, or will they just expand the loss of U.S. jobs to illegal aliens?
What the Doctor Did Not Order
Obama’s Stimulus means a takeover of the U.S. health care industry. The Stimulus provides billions of dollars to an Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to monitor treatments and decide which are cost-effective and which will be permitted or denied. Currently, patients make these decisions without government interference as long as the care is safe and effective.
The bottom line is that the Stimulus creates a new system of rationing medical care. This moves health care away from the “safe and effective” standard and replaces it with what a bureaucrat thinks is cost-effective or has “clinical effectiveness.” Obama’s “change” really means government control over access to medical treatments.
Liberals love to control and ration as much as they love to tax and spend. The United States is different from Canada and England in an essential respect: here a patient can get a diagnosis and life-saving treatment within days, if not hours. Ted Kennedy (age 76) received immediate surgery for his otherwise inoperable brain cancer. That’s a use of scarce medical resources that rationing would not allow for an ordinary patient.
In Canada and England patients are deemed by the government to be unworthy of treatment due to age or severity of illness, and they die while sitting on waiting lists for rationed care.
The Stimulus also lays the foundation for federal surveillance over electronic medical records, with an online medical record for each and every American. The Act establishes a massive new “federal coordinating council for comparative clinical effectiveness research” to devise ways to ration care based on the bureaucrats’ review of patient data.
There can be no patient privacy in a national database of medical records because government, insurers, employers, ex-spouses and hackers will find ways to access it. Doctors will spend more time surfing the internet and typing in data than listening to patients. Doctors who resist government supervision will be controlled by slashing their fees.
Our medical system has long been the envy of the world. That’s why foreigners come to the United States for our superb medical care, spending more than a billion dollars a year here. A true stimulus bill would seek to multiply that revenue by encouraging more private enterprise in medicine rather than installing a new bureaucracy, controlling doctors’ decisions, and rationing care.
Obama Picks the ‘Same Old, Same Old’
President Barack Obama’s selections for his Cabinet and other top government offices make a mockery of his much publicized campaign promises to give us “the most sweeping ethics reform in history” and to “close the revolving door” to lobbyists.
Five of Obama’s major nominees caused much political embarrassment. Three withdrew their names from consideration, one sneaked through confirmation because Senators were still intoxicated with the Obama honeymoon, and Obama used a waiver to approve the fifth.
Funny thing, Americans don’t seem to like it when government officials evade the taxes that the rest of us pay, especially when they evade more taxes that most Americans’ entire tax bill. Apparently, that doesn’t seem to bother Obama.
After South Dakota’s voters defeated Tom Daschle for reelection in 2004, he pocketed some $5 million advising clients how to seek influence with the government while technically avoiding the label of lobbyist. Then, he failed to pay $146,000 in taxes on that handsome income.
It was not until Obama’s biggest cheerleaders, the big-city newspapers (which Bernard Goldberg says have a “slobbering love affair” with Obama), criticized this notorious lapse in ethics that Daschle withdrew.
Obama didn’t admit any mistake about Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who underpaid his taxes by $35,000 and also employed a housekeeper who stayed in our country as an illegal alien. Geithner only ponied up his unpaid taxes after being nominated for the Cabinet position (which, incidentally, has supervision over the Internal Revenue Service). Another embarrassment was Nancy Killefer, whom Obama chose to become the first Chief Performance Officer for the United States, a new Cabinet-level position probably as silly as it sounds. Her name had to be pulled because she failed to pay required employment taxes on her household employee. For the number-two official in the Pentagon, Obama chose William J. Lynn III, an ex-lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon. Obama gave himself the right to grant a waiver. Obama’s first pick for Secretary of Commerce was New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who had made news by endorsing Obama for President during the primary campaign (after being expected to endorse Hillary Clinton). Richardson suddenly withdrew his name because of involvement in an ongoing pay-to-play investigation.
Obama Rejoins the ‘World Community’
When Candidate Barack Obama declared himself a “citizen of the world” before thousands of cheering German socialists, and later pledged to “rejoin the World Community,” those weren’t just his usual platitudes about “change.” Those words sounded the trumpet for his specific and far-reaching globalist agenda.
Obama plans to use his presidential power to get the Democratic-majority Senate to ratify a series of treaties that would take us a long way toward global rule over our money, our laws, our military, our courts, our customs, our trade, and even our use of energy. Here are the treaties he says he wants.
The UN Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which Reagan rejected in 1982, is high on Obama’s list. LOST has already created the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica and given it total regulatory jurisdiction over all the world’s oceans and all the riches on the ocean floor.
Corrupt foreign dictators dominate LOST’s global bureaucracy, and the U.S. would have the same vote as Cuba. Likewise for LOST’s International Tribunal in Hamburg, Germany, which has the power to decide all disputes.
Even worse, LOST gives the ISA the power to levy international taxes. The real purpose of the taxing power is to compel the United States to spend billions of private-enterprise dollars to mine the ocean floor and then let ISA bureaucrats transfer our wealth to socialist, anti-American nations.
Next on Obama’s list is the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed by Bill Clinton but rejected by the Senate in 1999. It would prohibit all nuclear explosive testing and thereby allow our nuclear arsenal to deteriorate until the American people are defenseless against rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea.
A new Global Warming Treaty is starting to be written at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland in order to replace the Kyoto Agreement which George W. Bush and our Senate refused to ratify. The new treaty would force dramatic reductions in our use of energy, i.e., our standard of living, and impose the “strong international norms” that Obama seeks.
Obama is toadying to his feminist friends by pushing ratification of the UN Treaty on Women, known as CEDAW. It was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980 and persistently promoted by Hillary Clinton, but the Senate has so far had the good judgment to refuse to ratify it. This treaty would require us “to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women,” to follow UN dictates about “family education,” to revise our textbooks to conform to feminist ideology in order to ensure “the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women,” and to set up a federal “network of child-care facilities.”
Article 16 would require us to allow women “to decide number and spacing of their children.” Everyone recognizes this as feminist jargon for a UN obligation to allow abortion on demand. Like all UN treaties, the UN Treaty on Women creates a monitoring commission of so-called “experts” to ensure compliance. The monitors of the Treaty on Women have already singled out Mother’s Day as a stereotype that must be eliminated.
Another UN Treaty on the list is the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child, which was signed in 1995 by Bill Clinton but wisely never ratified by our Senate. This is a pet project of the people who believe that the “village” (i.e., the government or UN “experts”) should raise children rather than their parents.
This treaty would give children rights against their parents and society to express their own views “freely in all matters,” to receive information of all kinds through “media of the child’s choice,” to use their “own language,” and to have the right to “rest and leisure.” This treaty even orders our schools to teach respect for “the Charter of the United Nations.”
These Obama-endorsed treaties, every one of which would be a dramatic encroachment on U.S. sovereignty, would be supplemented by trade agreements negotiated by Obama’s Trade Representative, Ron Kirk. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the “global economic community” (which means open borders for “free” trade), of NAFTA, and even of the NAFTA SuperHighway, which he calls the “true river of trade between our communities.”
Every UN treaty would interfere with self-government over some aspect of our lives and would transfer significant power to foreign bureaucrats, many of whom hate and envy America. Obama’s UN treaties are the enemy of U.S. political and social independence, and Kirk’s global economic community is the enemy of good middle-class American jobs.
The Challenge for Americans
There is only one path to maintaining the political independence of America, and that is to defeat all efforts to invade our sovereignty through treaties, the United Nations, or globalism. There is only one path to economic and social prosperity: less and limited government and enforcing a level playing field for international trade.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President with big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. The liberals then overplayed their hand by trying to take over the entire health care industry.
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But then came the mid-term elections in 1994, and liberals were abruptly reminded how conservative America really is. In a tsunami we hadn’t seen in nearly 50 years, Republicans won both Houses of Congress by wide margins.
The people who elected Obama to bring about “change” surely expect a lot in return — and they just may be disappointed. Obama’s Stimulus, which imposes an additional trillion dollars in debt, will benefit special interests, not working Americans. That means heavy taxes for the average worker.
Obama’s proposed Stimulus promises to create three million new jobs, but will they be just government jobs, or jobs with a future? We need private industry jobs. We need the government to stop its overtaxation and micromanagement of the U.S. economy, and to stop the unfair trade agreements and unfair policies of foreign governments that encourage U.S. corporations to move their manufacturing overseas.
If Obama and the liberals controlling Congress repeat the Democrats’ mistake of 1993, it may be, as Yogi Berra famously said, déjà vu all over again.
But don’t count on it. Barack Obama is right now using his time-tested Saul Alinsky tactics of “community organizing,” combined with 21st Century technology, to pass incredible spending bills that will mortgage our entire future. To rev up support to pass his Stimulus, the Obama apparatus used its new political organization called “Organizing for America” to hold Economic Recovery House Meetings in all 50 states, including 1,579 cities and 429 Congressional districts.
The New York Times described how Obama’s technology is transforming “theYouTubing-Facebooking-texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government.” This plan is called “Retooling a Grass-Roots Network To Serve a YouTube Presidency.”
Americans must stop waiting for a savior to run for President in 2012. An acceptable candidate will not appear unless conservatives build an informed, activist, grassroots constituency. Conservatives demand a dedication to limited government (as proclaimed in our United States Constitution) and U.S. sovereignty (as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence).
But this won’t happen unless grassroots Americans make it happen, using grassroots organization and new technology. Our task is to make it happen!
