What Has Barack Obama Wrought? Some Recent Writers Contemplate the Issue
In retrospect, the single most important admission Barack Obama made during the 2008 campaign was when he said that we were moments away “from a fundamental transformation” of the United States. That should have given every American pause, and should have led to the country demanding to know just what he meant by that. Most Americans want a nation that works, an economy that flourishes and provides jobs, and a government whose leaders protect our national security and stand firm against America’s enemies.
There were many reasons why Americans voted for Barack Obama, but I doubt one of them was that they wanted a “fundamental transformation” of a constitutional republic: it always needs improvement, but does not need to be made into something very different than our Founders intended.
What our country has become in the few years of the Obama administration was made evident in a few seminal articles appearing this past week. The November 21 issue of Newsweek performed a very useful service by running a major article about the work of author Peter Schweizer, whose new book Throw Them All Out is making tremendous waves, including a segment on 60 Minutes.
Schweizer, a conservative writer affiliated with the Hoover Institution, has managed to make a major breakthrough into the mainstream media. As Marc Thiessen wrote in his review for the Washington Post (also posted at the book’s Amazon page):
On Sunday night, CBS News’ 60 Minutes looked into this form of “lawful graft.” The 60 Minutes story exposed, among others, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for participating in a lucrative initial public offering from Visa in 2008 that was not available to the general public, just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies began making its way through the House (the bill never made it to the floor). And it showed how during the 2008 financial crisis, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) — then-ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee — aggressively bought stock options based on apocalyptic briefings he had received the day before from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have finally achieved bipartisan unity, when it comes to making millions through actions that would get average Americans a lengthy jail term. The term for what they are engaging in is “crony capitalism,” which conservatives and liberals should both demand be ended immediately.
One of the worst offenders is my own representative in the House, Rep. Shelly Capito (R), who sold between $100,000 and $250,000 in shares of Citigroup after leaving a briefing with Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke. She and her husband then accrued as much as $50,000 in capital gains from the Citigroup transactions made throughout the financial crisis. When she next appears at a town forum in my community — if she dares to — I intend to publicly confront her about her activity and see how she tries to defend herself. I will tell her that as a conservative and a citizen, I find her actions reprehensible, and a good example of everything that is wrong with our political system.
Newsweek also printed an excerpt from Schweizer’s book titled “Obama’s Lucky Friends,” which presents the details on how the president violated every promise he made after coming into office in 2008. Schweizer notes the following:
It would take an entire book to analyze every single grant and government-backed loan doled out since Barack Obama became president. But an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies. The grants were earmarked for alternative-fuel and green-power projects, so it would not be a surprise to learn that those industries were led by liberals. Furthermore, these were highly competitive grant and loan programs — not usually a hallmark of cronyism. Often fewer than 10 percent of applicants were deemed worthy.
He goes on to reveal how the Obama grants were a model of what we mean by crony capitalism. A large proportion of the winners had Obama campaign connections; 10 members of his finance committee and a dozen of his campaign bundlers got taxpayer money for their own firms, and some politicians who backed Obama launched alternative-energy firms that got grants. As Schweizer writes:
The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.
One firm, Kleiner Perkins, that had Obama financier John Doerr and Al Gore as partners, found a $16 million investment worth $69 million. But did it create jobs, as the administration promised? Schweizer’s answer:
Meanwhile, the $24 million grant created 40 jobs, according to the government website recovery.gov.
Isn’t it amazing how the taxpayer dollar works? I guess they weren’t shovel-ready jobs for the calling. As for why it is crony capitalism, heed Schweizer’s explanation:
The[Energy] department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants. Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was a bundler himself, was the campaign’s “liaison to Silicon Valley.” His responsibilities included fundraising, recruiting more bundlers, and managing Obama’s relationship with a cadre of very wealthy donors. After the 2008 campaign, Spinner joined the Department of Energy as the “chief strategic operations officer” for the loan programs. A lot of the money he helped hand out went to that same cadre of wealthy Silicon Valley campaign donors. He also sat on the White House Business Council, which is made up of Obama-supporting corporate executives.
You and others are doing a great job of connecting the dots and getting the info out into the public.
The last, and in my opinion most important dot, will be the one where Presidential candidates have these facts as distilled and well memorized talking points.
If that is done, I don’t see how Obama can survive it. He can blank out media interviews all he wants but he can’t censor a live debate with hard questions.
Fascinating article! From Herbert Croly http://www.amazon.com/Promise-American-Life-Herbert-Croly/dp/1555530621, to Angelo Codevilla http://www.amazon.com/Ruling-Class-Corrupted-America-ebook/dp/B0040JHNZW in a little over a century. In light of http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1878/article_detail.asp, are we about to rapidly enter a post-Progressive system? Some are calling for severing the symbiotic/Siamese relationship between corporations and government. Peter Schweizer shows what happens when we allow the Sun Kings of Solyndra and government gigolos to share closet space in their respective boudoirs. Perhaps if the government can be restrained from treating both citizens and corporations as ATMs, we can hope for a peaceful transition. All the Presidential candidates should step up and explain the hard numbers we face. The President to be inaugurated in Jan. 2013 will face perhaps the worst set of crises since 1942. A quibble about unions : Just IMHO, the inflated wage scales helped shove US jobs offshore, and their entry into the government/nomenklatura will doom them to diminishing effectiveness as revenues tighten. Hope for massive change in 2012. GBUSA
Attaboy, Ron. This is the kind of outrage that needs to rise in every American voter who isn’t knowingly committed to Socialism. Of course, it was not “wrought” by Obama, a mediocre mind, parroting on the teleprompter the words of his puppet masters, Howard Dean and David Axelrod. He was scammed, hyped, unvetted, into office in the greatest Sting in Chicago history, unchallenged by the mighty pipsqueek, John McCain. the feeble voice of the dim-witted dolts of GOP Hierarchy.
The thing that is truly infuriating is: why has it taken three years for these clever “voices” to find their voices? From the outset it should have been obvious to any person who looked beyond the complicit propaganda machine of the MSM, that the Reds (painting themselves Blue) were on a balls-to-the-wall charge to “fundamentally destroy” the Constitution, jam socialized medicine into our veins, stimulate the nation into poverty, and bring an end to free enterprise and the 2 party system. All the while, of course, paying off the Czars, the Kommissariat and the Nomenklatura. The louche and lavish manner in which The Transformer- in- Chief has preened in the White House is an indicator of how his cabal, his “Team” has been governing. No budgets. No limit to spending. Big increases in bureaucratic emplloyment and compensation. Big pressure for greater “entitlements” and “Social Justice”. These have been overt: the record is there, and it must be rubbed in the Democrat’s face over the next few months. Who cares about whether the conservative contenders are “fully qualified” on foreign policy? Just kick the bastards out, and make John Bolton Secretary of State.
The point about the T Party is important, and all GOP contenders should be keenly aware of it. It is the “Exceptionalist” spirit and movement which must be recognized as the major factor in the “conservative” resurgence and not treated dismissivelly by the crony GOP “stalwarts.” Thank you for keeping us informed on the rising tide of outrage against the Socialist Transformation.
Statism is upon us.7 trillion loaned to banks.28 million more on food stamps and 21 million new citizens. Trillions for every unneeded weapons system that won’t fly,shoot,or float.5 thou free to every college kid. Feds finance the mortgage market.Free loans to all and interest too none. That’s our class warfare. The party goes on while we spend the savings of our grandparent,parents, children, and grandchildren.The deficit accelerates who who cares. It’s not my money .
Although itemizing the shameless graft of the most criminal administration in history is an interesting and worthy task, I’m afraid it distracts from the more “fundamental” change that is going on, in plain sight.
This country is being changed from a free market economy to socialism, and the government is being changed from a republic to a marxist oligarchy.
Other than lining the serf leaders up against a wall and shooting them, that’s about as “fundamental” as it can get.
For once, little lenin wasn’t lieing…and what do we do about it? yep, critize Romney and Gingrich for not adhering to the letter of the Mark Levin laws of conservatism.
Wake up.
So Sklar considers himself “on the left.”
Terrific.
So do (did?) all those mega-rich wall street bankers who gave that communist SOB obama contributions.
those “on the left” who now realize they made a mistake; thank you very much for screwing over the citizenry of this country; you remind me of the jewish Kapos in the nazi concentration camps.
Well, the left needs to have conversations, too. I’m glad a leftist wrote the book. I’m glad Mr Schweizer is getting press-time. He’ll reach people who watch TV. The New York Times article will reach those readers, too.
This, to me, is not abstract- this is reaching my family. I’m the oddball right-winger. This Thanksgiving, my democrat dad went off on a bit about people campaining against health-care for old people, and that he’s old. And I said- “It’s your guys that do that. Not mine.” And I had facts and names and figures, which I couldn’t have had before the internet, and that I would not have had, except for leftist turning right ( that would be PJM writers) explaining all the little steps of their conversion. Otherwise- I couldn’t see the little suppositions and steps for each position.
So, thank you, Mr Radosh. Thank you for your essays and books.
One and done.
Nevermore.
In terms of revenue, DC is the largest criminal organization in human history. Sure, there are a handful of members of congress who are honest, sincere public servants; but the rest are thieves and/or members of the oldest profession.
And all of this, ALL OF THIS, shows why conservatives do not want to spend one more cent in taxes. Nothing, not even a dime. Why should we? It will simply get thrown into this rathole in Washington and be given away to yet another scandal involving crony capitalism, or to yet another bloated government project that does very little for the millions or billions it gets. Why should we pay anything, given all the money, our money, that is flushed down the toilet each year? How do the people in Washington expect us to react to something like this? Do they expect us to say, “Oh well, mistakes will happen?” These are crimes that would get any normal citizen thrown in jail, yet these Congressmen and Congresswomen simply smile and move on, especially that turd Nancy Pelosi. Sure, she’s the friend of the “common man,” especially when she’s getting kickbacks from banks. I’m just surprised people aren’t storming washington with pitchforks and torches. Who knows, much more of this and they just might.
Lindsey Graham calls for using military against American citizens
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-charles…
“The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.”
George Washington
An important result so far– Barney Frank, Dem Mass, arguably the biggest mouth promoting the banking policies that brought on the bubble, announced today he is not going to run again.
And that is because he knows the party will be over soon, so time to take his slimy rear end out the backdoor before the crash.
He and his little buddy Chris Dodd should be strung up from the highest tree in town.
Don’t worry about Barney. In addition to his lifetime pension, I have no doubt that he’ll soon be employed either directly by Fannie or Freddie or by a big lobbying firm pulling in at least a 7 figure income. That’s the way DC works – you go into government and then you cash in for the big bucks.
In Chicago, we call Obama’s rewarding of his supporters “Pay to Play.” It is the Chicago way, and Obama, Axelrod and the new “godfather” of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, are very well versed in it. How in the world did this country elect a politician from Chicago, of all places! At least 3 Illinois governors in my lifetime have gone to prison; one is still there, with another on his way…
Barney is just the tip of the iceberg … many will follow and/or world events –
Iran and Syria for example – will literally force the issue even further. Obama is already toast … he won’t dare appear in a live debate knowing that there are literally garbage trucks full of evidence of his corruption and lawlessness that an astute and fearless challenger could use against him. Besides; the real mercy would be for him to be let down easy and depart quietly, instead of being publicly flogged for his treasonous ways.
Our society was once great because people took care of their elderly and they took responsibility for their own children. Capitalism meant you could make it and you didn’t need anything more than a simple fifth grade education to do so.
When grandma or grandpa became too frail to take care of themselves, one of their children took them in and the grandchildren learned wise stories and respect for their elders and it was NOT a burden.
Government turns families into enemies unto themselves. The more Government intervenes into the core of our lives and our very souls as families, the more we disconnect from each other and our very roots and become slaves to the government to take care of ‘things’ we are ill-prepared to take care of or just too lazy to face up to.
What a sad state we are in that we would give up our freedoms so that we don’t have to feed, bathe, care for our own parents.
What a tragedy we are as a human race that we come so far and yet backtracked so much on such an evil, sickening, selfish scale.
NYT Outs Obama’s Class-Race Warfare
Sometimes the mainstream media merely substantiate common knowledge and sometimes the New York Times demonstrates a degree of journalistic ethics by publishing that common knowledge instead of always slanting the truth.
Such is the case with Thomas B. Edsall’s piece, “The Future of the Obama Coalition” which appeared in the Times‘ Sunday “Opinion Pages.”
Summarized, that future involves Obama abandoning hopes of again winning anything approaching the 43% of all white votes he won in 2008 “in favor of cementing a center-left coalition.”
According to Edsall, that coalition consists of people generally considered professionals, including everyone from professors to teachers to therapists plus “a substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic,” in other words, a coalition composed of two very disparate groups, the highly-educated and the largely uneducated poor.
What Edsall does not incorporate in his article is a recognition that all but Obama’s MSM idolators and those they influenced to vote for him were aware long before the last general election that Barack Hussein Obama was a radical, socialist racist for whom divisiveness and class warfare were tactics he and the Democrat Party would employ when the 2008 coalitions disintegrated.
Oddly, or not so oddly considering Edsall was writing for the Times, he omits any reference to the president’s support for the latest exemplars of socialistic class warmongers, the Occupy Wall Street nutzos.
Three years ago, candidate Obama succeeded in cashing in on white guilt, the oft-denied sentiment which motivated millions of white voters to cast their ballots for him as a form of reparations paid to African-Americans, to demonstrate they were not bigots, to show they were sorry for the national sin of slavery even though none of them had ever owned a slave.
By virtue of that sentiment, the half-black Obama managed to gain 2% more of the white electorate than did John Kerry in 2004. Those voters have witnessed Obama in action for three years now and the president’s handlers realize many of them, hopefully millions of them, refuse to fall for Obama’s charade again.
They have seen his incompetence, his lack of leadership, his rigid, leftist ideology but most of all they have seen through his pretenses of creating a new era of racial harmony. Beneath Obama’s mellifluous, telepromptered words, they have finally seen the black racism that both he and his wife proudly admitted years ago.
In her 1985 Princeton senior thesis, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson expressed her racial attitudes in numerous ways . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=7417.)
Fascinating article. Obama has taken corruption to another level. He tries to transform the US into an African republic.
Nice piece, Mr. Radosh.
As all know Bawney Fwank announced he’ll be pulling his best ‘Shaaane’ impression in regards to his political ‘career’.
Being a politician should have NEVER been labeled or allowed a ‘career’.
The ‘public servants’ with the longest political mileage are the biggest nepotists, as holes.
Remember the-late Robert Byrd being ‘congratulated’ as the longest serving Senator few years back? The dude should have been kidney punched and dumped in an abandoned WV coal mine.
Though do ANY of us believe term limits will be considered, acted upon by the very career politicians who speak of these ‘injustices’?
Tough times ahead.
Can we enlist Martha Stewart in this expose? She could reach many who are apolitical and self-absorbed.
I used to oppose term limits, because I argued that voting was term limits. Every once in a while, a true statesman who should be re-elected would be shut out, I would say. But we have plenty of people to take their term-limited place, and those true statesmen could involve themselves in other ways to mentor the next guy.
Human nature, being what it is, means that we have to impose limits. FDR made the danger clear, and now everyone is comfortable with term-limiting the president. The biggest danger of human nature is not that power corrupts, but is the passivity and lack of involvement of those eligible to vote.
Typically, when things are stable in free countries, the voting turnout is quite low. This is actually a good sign, in a way, that most people are busy living their lives under freedom, a good portion of them are growing their businesses, and the tax structure and other functions of the government are at least tolerable enough that most people have the luxury of being passive and apolitical. Voting turnout is extremely high (or at least that is the report from the government) in dictatorships that force and rig the vote, and it is high when freedom is threatened.
There was no one in Honduras who had the luxury of being apolitical during the attempted takeover of their presidency (which takeover was assisted by Obama and Hillary, I should add – I’m glad they failed). We have got to break through the MSM to wake people up and make them angry. This 60 Minutes coverage is a step in the right direction. Could it be that the light bulb ban would be the issue that reaches sufficient numbers of Independents? It is timely. Don’t forget that if we can maintain the House and gain the Senate, even if Obama retains the presidency, the damage will be limited.
Please, please, please. Call it what it is. It is NOT “crony capitalism”–there is no such thing. It is CORRUPTION.
Words have meaning, use them correctly.
Otherwise, a fantastic article, and I cannot praise you, Schweizer and others enough for finally getting on this. I have been screaming about it for years.
Years ago, I had a part time HR person that I fired for just not being very smart. Well meaning, just dim. She was in city politics, ran for Congress, her opponent died during the campaign and she is now a long term knee jerk leftist vote in Congress. And, a wealthy woman.
Crony capitalism is – by definition – corruption.
The best measure of corruption in government is the degree to which the path to wealth is connected to being in government employ. All governments are corrupt–in that being in government can give you access to wealth that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Harry Truman left the WH carrying his own suitcases. No pension–other than his Army retirement. No office expense account to scam. No security, nothing. He privately grumbled that most of his pension went to paying postage on letters he wrote responding to mail he got. He was offered lucrative Board positions, which he turned down–saying that they didn’t want Harry Truman, they wanted the POTUS, and that couldn’t be hired.
Clinton left office in debt over legal bills. Today, he is probably worth well into eight figures. Gore is probably a billionaire.
Yes, there were crooks in Truman’s time. Yes, it is a bipartisan deal–look at the sources of the Bush family fortune–probably eight figures again–and it started with Prescott Bush’s political connections and has been pumped up since.
There were wealthy people in the Communist Soviet Union–but they were ALL in government or military.
This will be the end of the US as we know it unless we “throw them all out”, which is theoretically possible but highly unlikely.
Looks like that may be one figure shy on the Clinton post-2000 income : http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/clintons-income-tops-109-million/
The question that has to be asked, answered, and investigated (obviously not by this DOJ) is, are the loans going to Obama cronies, being redirected back into the Obama re-election campaign. Or more bluntly, is the Obama campaign engaged in money laundering with taxpayer monies.
If there is a Republican President and DOJ in 2012, will there be the political courage to pursue an investigation into that possibility, and indict those responsible for such criminality, such the facts bear out such activities.
Generally a good article, but I disagree with your paragraph claiming “white guilt as a major factor in helping elect Obama.
I’m sure you’re correct that some people feel white guilt, but I would argue that most of these people are already on the left, and routinely vote Democratic. The people you’re talking about are voters in the uncommitted center. Undoubtedly, some of these people believed that electing our first black President would magically and fundamentally alter race relations for the better. But I wouldn’t call this white guilt. Rather, this was a politically unsophisticated and naive hope that we can solve serious issues without doing the hard work necessary to change individual minds.
I think other factors were far more important in explaining the shift of the uncommitted center. Those factors were: Obama’s soaring rhetoric, which sounded good enough on a superficial level to confuse some people as to his true aims; 8 years of constant propaganda demonizing the Bush Administration and Republicans from the leftist media; the frightening economic collapse in the fall of 2008; some sincere war weariness; Republican dissatisfaction with the lack of committment to conservative fiscal principles by Bush and the Republican controlled Congress prior to 2006 (let’s not forget that the Congress flipped from Republican to Democratic control in 2006, two years prior to Obama).
Politics is always a swinging pendulum. Obama and his radical Democrats and socialists have pushed too far for those who voted for him for the reasons I outlined. Now the pendulum pushes back, giving us the tea party, demands for more ideological purity from Republican candidates, hesitance to embrace so-called “RINO” Republicans, and the swift end to their brief and naive trust of Blue Dog Democrats. Another important response is that many principled citizens have finally recognized the leftist dominated media as partisan players to be suspected, avoided and even disbelieved.
The importance of this last response cannot be underestimated, in my opinion. A great part of our slow national drift towards statism has been driven by the incorrect acceptance of the leftist media as mainly centrist and mainstream by those for whom ideology and politics are less important aspects of their daily lives. And now much of that power to influence is gone. We’ll be better off for it.
Another pillar of our statist drift is our educational system, and now many people are awakening to the need to reform this aspect of our society.
Why do you and so many other conservative writers insist on labeling what Obama and his administration is doing as crony capitalism when you know it is fascism?
It began under Bush and it accelerates at alarming speed under Obama. And the worst part is that the laws made and constitutional rights destroyed under this administration are setting the groundwork for the even more tyrannical administrations to come. How are we to fight an enemy if we’re afraid to call it what it is?
Too bad Beck isn’t still on FOX TV to connect the dots on this outrage for his millions of viewers.
We have already seen how Obama has gone around congress, and in fact has stated he would like to be more like China so he can get things done. Another four years would be total disaster for this country. If Obama is reelected he won’t be worried about reelecetion and will do whatever he wants with nothing to stop him.
“Crony Capitalism”, how soon people forget – why invent a new word for a system that’s been around long enough to already have several better words to describe it?
“Crony Capitalism” used to be called “Corporatism”, which as Mussolini would explain to anyone willing to listen, was the basis of “Fascism”.
“conservatives and liberals should both demand be ended immediately” – What makes you think liberals are opposed to this? Their whole existence is based on gradually converting the US into a Totalitarian Socialist state. US ‘liberals’ are Statists. “Crony Capitalism”, ie “Fascism”, is absolutely essential to this system of government. One can’t exist without the other.