The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (34 page)
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Authors: David Limbaugh
BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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As the Heritage Foundation reported, “This ‘coordinated /files/04/24/73/f042473/public/ private effort’ appears to be just another head-fake in the direction of capitalism with the intention of growing more government.” In analyzing the program’s goals, Heritage concluded that the entire effort is another opportunity for the government to pick more winners and losers. The government would “strengthen commercialization,” i.e., use taxpayer funds to take market share away from private banks and venture capitalists; it would “expand entrepreneurship education and mentorship programs that empower more Americans not just to get a job, but to create jobs” (which is fine in theory, but the government cannot create jobs, except perhaps those that consume more taxes than they generate); and it would “expand collaborations between large companies and startups,” which the government has no business doing.
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In short, it’s just another government spending program that doesn’t increase demand for goods and services but merely redistributes demand and resources within the economy.
OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST SMALL BUSINESS146
In short, it’s just another government spending program that doesn’t increase demand for goods and services but merely redistributes demand and resources within the economy.
While Obama maintains a quid-pro-quo relationship with certain corporate cronies, his agenda has been devastating for small businesses, the primary drivers of job creation and economic growth. Small businesses create 70 percent of new jobs in America, but Obama has targeted them across the board, making many small business owners, as well as business and political analysts, wonder whether he’s doing so on purpose or through an ideologically based learning disability.
For example, Obama wants to remove the cap on FICA taxes, which would amount to an enormous tax increase on, among others, small business owners, and which would destroy many of those businesses and the jobs they provide. Obama forced through ObamaCare, which will increase taxes and other small business burdens. His financial regulation bill would make it much more difficult for small business owners to raise capital without jumping through government hoops. And finally, Obama has accommodated a climate that encourages employees to sue small businesses and others under various pretexts, just as he has steadfastly resisted even modest efforts at tort reform. All these factors and others are making it increasingly difficult for the entrepreneurial risk takers to create and expand businesses and increase employment.
In another potential blow to small business, the administration, in line with its continual focus on identity politics, got behind legislation that would require American businesses to provide the government information about the comparative salaries to employees based on sex, race, and national origin. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which has been re-introduced in Congress after previously passing the House but stalling in the Senate, includes expansive workplace rules, such as training female employees how to better negotiate pay and benefits, and also calls for the establishment of a database for American workers in both the public and private sectors.
The National Association of Manufacturers contends that while purporting to prevent race and gender discrimination, the bill could outlaw many benign, legitimate practices employers use to set employee pay rates.
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The Heritage Foundation’s labor policy expert James Sherk claims the law “could transfer billions of dollars from employers to trial lawyers, bankrupting businesses and costing jobs.” Under the law, says Sherk, a woman earning less than a more experienced man could insist that her employer provide her training and thereafter pay her the same wage as her male counterpart. It would invite extensive lawsuits, including class action suits, and would result in the government injecting itself into the daily operations of businesses that it knows nothing about.
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The Heritage Foundation’s labor policy expert James Sherk claims the law “could transfer billions of dollars from employers to trial lawyers, bankrupting businesses and costing jobs.” Under the law, says Sherk, a woman earning less than a more experienced man could insist that her employer provide her training and thereafter pay her the same wage as her male counterpart. It would invite extensive lawsuits, including class action suits, and would result in the government injecting itself into the daily operations of businesses that it knows nothing about.
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In 2012, apparently wanting to appear more small business-and corporate-friendly leading up to the election, Obama rhetorically proposed reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, which sounded inviting on the surface. But he would exclude from this proposal specific industries he opposes, such as oil and gas, insurance, and small aircraft manufacturers, whose “loopholes” he would close. Meanwhile, he would lavish upon industries he favors—green energy concerns—various tax incentives and lower rates. The Heritage Foundation pointed out the absurdity of the administration, with this ostensible proposal to cut taxes, planning on raising $250 billion in revenues over ten years.
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About a year after his deceptive announcement that he would streamline the regulatory process, Obama tried it again. In January 2012, in another effort to project himself as business-friendly, he pressed Congress to give him authority to consolidate six agencies that deal with trade and business development “to make it easier to do business in America.” As
Investors Business Daily
‘s editors noted, his idea misses the point, which is that businesses aren’t complaining about duplication among multiple agencies, but about having to deal with the federal government at all.
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This mirage would do nothing to relax the onerous regulatory structure Obama has exacerbated for the last three years.
Investors Business Daily
‘s editors noted, his idea misses the point, which is that businesses aren’t complaining about duplication among multiple agencies, but about having to deal with the federal government at all.
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This mirage would do nothing to relax the onerous regulatory structure Obama has exacerbated for the last three years.
As usual, Obama talks a good game about helping American business, but his policies betray an abiding ideological hostility to them; he seems to resent his inability to control them like an executive branch agency. To his chagrin, despite all his coercive regulations and his cultivation of numerous Big Business dependants, business still frequently acts independently of his will. Far too many businesses still won’t hire new workers just for his idea of the common good, and far too many won’t shift their production in accordance with his industrial planning. His frustration with this state of affairs fuels his attacks on business as well as on the GOP. But ultimately, simply lashing out isn’t enough to achieve the fundamental transformation he wants to effect. He’ll need to exert even more control over the economy to do that—and unhindered by election concerns, that’s what Americans can expect if he wins another term in office.
CHAPTER TEN
THE WAR ON AMERICA’S NATIONAL SECURITY
O
bama’s foreign policy flows from his belief that America has been too nationalistic, aggressive, imperialistic, exploitive, and arrogant in world affairs. That worldview explains why he bounces around the world apologizing for our past “sins,” why he wants to scale down our War on Terror, believing we’ve brought on ourselves much of the Islamists’ wrath, and why he approaches foreign policy in a way that seems maddeningly inconsistent. It’s why he’s obsessed, in his way, with improving our image around the world. It’s why he has jumped at the chance to intervene in foreign conflicts, even internal ones, when we have no compelling national security interest in doing so, or when such intervention is contrary to our national interests, and why he sometimes resists interventions when our national interest is more compelling.
“SERIOUS RESERVATIONS”bama’s foreign policy flows from his belief that America has been too nationalistic, aggressive, imperialistic, exploitive, and arrogant in world affairs. That worldview explains why he bounces around the world apologizing for our past “sins,” why he wants to scale down our War on Terror, believing we’ve brought on ourselves much of the Islamists’ wrath, and why he approaches foreign policy in a way that seems maddeningly inconsistent. It’s why he’s obsessed, in his way, with improving our image around the world. It’s why he has jumped at the chance to intervene in foreign conflicts, even internal ones, when we have no compelling national security interest in doing so, or when such intervention is contrary to our national interests, and why he sometimes resists interventions when our national interest is more compelling.
Obama’s leftist foreign policy is exemplified in his vow to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center, a promise he made without first conducting due diligence as to the feasibility of doing so. On his second day in office, he dramatically issued an executive order to shutter the facility within a year. He later learned the hard way that it simply could not be done. He eventually backed down amidst opposition from Congress and the public to the astronomical costs and national security implications of closing Guantanamo, but he reiterated his ambition to close the facility some day—showing that there’s no embarrassing a liberal with self-professed good intentions.
Obama followed the same careless pattern in his commitment to try international terrorists in American domestic courts, and he achieved the same pathetic results when the government got al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed Ghailani convicted on only one of 285 charges for the 1998 African embassy bombings.
1
Without acknowledging any egg on his face, Obama announced in March 2011 that the government would resume using military commissions to prosecute terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, though he remained committed to closing the detention center.
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Without acknowledging any egg on his face, Obama announced in March 2011 that the government would resume using military commissions to prosecute terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, though he remained committed to closing the detention center.
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And for all his previous posturing over Bush-era policies providing for the unlimited detentions of terrorism suspects, he reversed course here, too; in March 2011 he tacitly conceded the government’s authority to such detentions by issuing an executive order calling for periodic reviews of these cases, reneging on his 2009 promise to work with Congress on the issue.
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Even though his order was an about-face, Republicans objected to Obama granting more rights to terrorists and imposing more obstacles to prosecuting them. “The Gitmo detainees already enjoy unlimited access to attorneys and are able to take full advantage of the federal courts,” noted Congressman Tom Rooney, a former Army JAG Corps member. “We do not need to create yet another layer of review so that their lawyers can drag their cases through endless litigating during this time of war.”
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To the chagrin of his leftist base, Obama conceded total defeat on the unlimited detention issue on January 2, 2012, when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which formalized our right to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial. Obama claimed he signed the bill “despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
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Despite Obama’s bluster about secret detentions, the administration secretly detained Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali terror suspect, for two months on a U.S. Navy ship and, without formal charges or affording him an attorney, extensively interrogated him. Perhaps the administration wanted to have it both ways, avoiding the use of Guantanamo but hypocritically denying Warsame a lawyer and withholding his rights to habeas corpus on a Navy ship at sea. Then, showing total policy incoherence, the administration transported Warsame to New York for trial in a civilian criminal court. “The administration has purposefully imported a terrorist in the US and is providing him all the rights of US citizens in court,” observed Senator Mitch McConnell.
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Maybe Obama had his way in the end over Guantanamo; while he may not have succeeded in shutting it down, his administration treated its detainees to a $750,000 taxpayer-funded soccer field. The U.S. military created the field—part of a new recreation yard—at Camp 6, which holds some 80 percent of the facility’s 171 prisoners. Soon the prisoners would also get a walking trail and exercise equipment.
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Mainstream conservatives typically oppose America’s involvement in foreign conflicts unless a strategic national security interest is at stake. Reasonable people may disagree as to what constitutes such an interest, e.g., in Iraq, but that is the driving principle. Even so-called Neoconservatives, who more readily advocate military force to spread democracy, do so on the basis of that principle.
President Obama, on the other hand, subscribes to a much more ambiguous foreign policy vision, often appearing to favor U.S. military intervention even when no national security interest is in play. His policy sometimes seems more directed at catering to the wishes of the international community and the United Nations than safeguarding American interests. Sadly, America’s security interests are the last thing the international community wants to protect.
Just as he chafes under constitutional limits to his domestic authority, Obama seems to lament that the Constitution does not vest the president with unfettered power over foreign policy. At one point he bemoaned that it would be much easier to be president of China. As one official explained, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”
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When Congress frustrates his foreign policy agenda, Obama often circumvents it administratively, through executive orders, or just by outright ignoring it and behaving as though he occupies the sole seat of power in Washington. In marked contrast to President George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq only after it was authorized by Congress, Obama initiated military action against Libya without so much as consulting Congress, much less getting its approval. This snub was all the more remarkable in that Obama went through strenuous efforts to secure the endorsement of the Arab League and the UN for the Libya operation—suggesting he values their approval above that of Congress or the American people.
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