Catastrophe

Introduction:
Take Back Our Country

I
How Obama is Causing a Catastrophe

 
1
Obama’s War on Prosperity

 
2
The Bank Bailout That Bombed

 
3
Obama’s Mortgage Plan That Won’t Help You

 
4
Obama’s Health Care Catastrophe

 
5
Obama’s Blueprint for Political Domination

 
6
Obama Sends Message: The War on Terror Is Over

 
7
The United States Sends Aid to Hamas…. Yes, Hamas!

II
How Congress Causes Catastrophe

 
8
Christopher Dodd and Charles Rangel: From Idealistic Reformers to Privileged Insiders

 
9
There Is Nothing like a Name…Ted Kennedy, Jr., the Senator’s Son

10
Stealth Lobbyists: The Former Congressional Leaders Who Secretly Influence Federal Policies and Spending

III
How Special Interests Cause Catastrophe

11
The Sheer Chutzpah of Countrywide Financial Executives

12
Pay to Play: No-Bid Contracts Exchanged for Campaign Cash

13
Slow Surrender: How Our Banks and Investment Firms Are Opening the Door to Shariah Law and Muslim Extremist Domination

14
How Bill Clinton Goofed…Costing You $60 Billion

15
Tarmac Hostages: How Airlines Imprison You on the Runway

16
The Silent Catastrophe: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Our Military

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Complete List of TARP Recipients

Notes

About the Authors

Other Books by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Take Back Our Country

It’s time to take back our country.

Now.

It’s that simple. It’s that urgent.

It’s time to take it back from President Barack Obama, before he fully implements his radical political agenda—one that threatens our liberty, endangers our livelihood, and jeopardizes our very safety and security.

Obama has canceled the war on terror and declared a war on prosperity.

It’s a catastrophe.

Make no mistake about it: We now have a socialist in the White House. Barack Obama firmly believes in government control of our major industries, a hallmark of European socialism. Watch him. First it was the banks, then the auto industry. What’s next? He’ll keep going until the federal government owns or dominates every major American business and sets the salaries for all employees.

Using the global economic crisis as an excuse to revolutionize our economy and institutionalize pervasive and perverse changes masquerading as
“reforms,” Obama wants to change our way of living, working, and even thinking.

He’s committed to orchestrating an extraordinary redistribution of wealth, significantly raising taxes on those who make more than $200,000 a year while providing tax credits and other advantages to those who don’t. He intends to create a dual tax system: on one side there will be those who pay an enormous amount of taxes, and on the other there will be those who pay nothing at all but are regularly and directly subsidized by the increased taxes of those who do. Think France.

Obama plans to expand the role, size, and cost of government vastly and to regulate each and every aspect of corporate and commercial conduct. It’s only a matter of time before political correctness, too, will be legislated, and the policing of acceptable personal conduct will become yet another role of the government. Everything is on the table. Remember that both his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, have warned that we shouldn’t “waste” a good crisis like the one we’re in.

“Waste” a crisis? What do they mean? Well, apparently the Obama administration sees the current atmosphere of economic turmoil and uncertainty as a great opportunity to make sweeping changes that wouldn’t otherwise be acceptable to the American public. Changes the American left has been dreaming about for years. So now, under the guise of solving the crisis, Obama can pass and fund just about anything. Just take a look at his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus bill—and all of the outrageous earmarks that were wedged into it by Congress as the price of passage.

And it’s not just the economy: Obama has virtually ended the war on terror. His administration doesn’t even utter the words. In recent testimony before Congress, Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano actually referred to “man-caused” disasters, pointedly avoiding the word “terrorism.”
¹
Obama’s appointments to the Justice Department have been people who are determined to root out, investigate, and expose not the terrorists themselves but those who protect us from them. Guantánamo has become a resource center for terrorists; a new one is freed every week. And Obama is reversing our long-term commitment to Israel—and instead giving almost a billion dollars to Hamas.

Let’s face it: his policies are a catastrophe, and we need to stop him.

It’s also time to take our country back from the Democratic Congress,
which has undergone an embarrassing transformation from a do-nothing body into a rubber-stamp annex of the Obama White House: 535 elected officials who didn’t even bother to read the details before they authorized almost a trillion dollars in stimulus spending that their constituents will have to pay for. A Democratic Congress that, in the middle of the gravest financial disaster since the Great Depression, bargained for billions in additional outrageous earmark spending programs to please their contributors and lobbyist friends, without a look back at the needs of their constituents. Just to whet your appetite (or, should we say, spoil it), here are a few of the worst expenditures of taxpayer money contained in that stimulus bill:

$200,000   to fund a tattoo removal clinic in California
²

$190,000   for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming
³

$2,192,000   for the Center for Grape Genetics in Geneva, NY
⁴

$1,791,000   to fund Swine Odor & Manure Management Research in Iowa
⁵

The malfeasance of the Congress is in itself a catastrophe. We need to clean house (and Senate) and replace the self-serving automatons with elected officials who genuinely understand that their job—their only purpose—is to serve the people who elect them, not the people who pay for their campaigns. People who understand that they, too, will be thrown out if we see more of the same. It’s about time we had representatives in Washington who root for the people back home, instead of conspiring against them with their generous lobbyist pals.

On a recent episode of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, an organizer of a tea party protest in St. Louis indicated that members of Congress had been invited to the event in order to give them a chance to meet with their “board of directors”—the voters who elected them and who should be able to advise them about the needs of the district. She had it right. That’s how it should be, and it’s a good way to think about Congress: we hire them, we pay them, and they should be accountable to us. Unfortunately, most of them don’t think that way at all. The only boards of directors that our representatives routinely meet with are the corporate ones, who decide who their political action committees will contribute to.

We desperately need to take back Congress and make it accountable to
us, the voters—not the banks, credit card companies, defense contractors, and other special interests that have been running the show for way too long.

Can we do it? Well, to quote our president: Yes, we can!

There’s a lot more we can do to make Congress more accountable and more constituent-friendly. One important step would be to work hard to keep the political dynasties from taking up space in Congress. It’s not just that it’s usually their family name recognition that gets them elected; it’s that the dynastic politicians come with a special kind of baggage: generations of hangers-on, people who have been given favors and jobs over the years who watch out for them and make it difficult for insurgents to take them on successfully at the polls. You know the names we’re talking about: Kennedy, Dodd, Clinton, Dole, to name a few.

While we’re at it, we should look at the growing number of spouses of members of the House and Senate who are invited to sit on corporate boards—and paid very well for doing so. Is this a backdoor way of paying the members?

But that’s not all. It’s also time to take back our country from the Wall Street masters of the universe, whose insatiable greed led them to create a dangerously unstable environment for American businesses and investors—until their house of cards crashed, taking the wealth of millions of shareholders, investors, and average Americans with them…and they turned to the government for a bailout.

The AIGs, the Citibanks, the Lehmans, and the rest of the unfortunately familiar Wall Street roster of shame created an unprecedented catastrophe—with the help of many in Congress, who contributed to that catastrophe by recklessly deregulating banks and financial institutions and ignoring the growing signs of economic catastrophe because they did not want to offend their patrons.

Those same institutions that are now broke poured millions into the campaign coffers of those in Congress who should have been watching out for the investors who needed protection instead of watching out for their donors. Is it any coincidence that the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, was the number one recipient of AIG money and that company executives aggressively urged
top-level employees to contribute to him as soon as it was clear he would be the next chairman of the committee? Within three days, the group had raised $160,000. Now questions have been raised about whether Dodd returned the favor when he agreed to insert language into an amendment to the stimulus bill to permit the retention of bonuses that had already been awarded. It’s a legitimate question: at first Dodd vehemently denied that he had had anything to do with the language that was so favorable to AIG, but he later admitted that he had reluctantly agreed to the change after the Treasury Department asked him to do so.

That’s the way things work in Washington, and that’s why we have to take it back.

It’s our country. It’s our Congress. It’s our government. We can’t simply cede them to the people who want to destroy our values or follow instructions from their corporate patrons.

We’ve seen what happens when greedy companies like Countrywide Financial lure customers into unconscionable mortgages that they know they can’t afford. Many believe that Countrywide’s unscrupulous practices—the writing of hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages that were doomed to end in default and the baiting of customers with initially low interest rates that eventually ballooned into unaffordable notes—was the detonator that triggered the financial meltdown that we are now witnessing. Now those unfortunate people are lining up in foreclosure court and losing their homes by the thousands. Meanwhile, the Countrywide executives, who walked out with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, have found a new business. Many of the former top executives at Countrywide (except for CEO Angelo Mozilo) have started a new company. Guess what it does? Buys up notes from failed financial institutions and then sells them again.

Having profited in the glory days of the subprime mortgages, these scoundrels are now buying many of them out—and exploiting the failure of the mortgage market for their own profit.

We need to take our country away from these predators, who have caused so much emotional and financial pain. They should be banned from having anything to do with mortgages. Forever.

When we take our country back, that should be high on our agenda.

Now is the time, as we reclaim our country, our Congress, and our right to determine our system of government, for us to join together to prevent an Obama-inspired class war. Because that’s where we’re headed.

It is the cruelest of ironies that, at this time and place in our history—when America desperately needs a president committed to reigniting economic growth—instead we’ve elected one who is more interested in dividing us by class and redistributing our wealth than he is in creating more of it.

Because now is not the time to govern by ideology. Not in the middle of an unprecedented economic meltdown.

And now is not the time to accept or reject solutions based only on whether they fit an extremist political agenda. Not while we are drowning in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, with record unemployment rates, staggering numbers of home foreclosures, decimated 401(k)s, and rising numbers of tent cities and shantytowns for the homeless.

And now is especially no time to accept or reject solutions based on whether they fit or don’t fit a particular philosophical agenda. The trendy economic populism we hear from the White House will do nothing but turn neighbors, families, and friends against one another. Americans don’t want that. We can’t afford that. It may sound tough for President Obama to say he’ll take every legal step possible to get back the AIG bonuses (the ones his administration initially okayed), but do we really want to encourage populist vigilantes to hire buses to bring ACORN community organizers and the press on a tour of the homes of the AIG employees? That’s what happened in Connecticut after Obama made his remarks. What does this do to the children of these people when they see protests outside their homes, their previously safe havens?

It’s not going to help us to condone this vigilantism. We can face our problems only by coming together as a nation and facing, with confidence, the storms that surround us. But our president would have 95 percent of us turn on the other 5 percent in an economic civil war, making class conflict the engine of our economic and tax policy.

Obama may speak eloquently about working together, but he doesn’t really seem to understand the fundamental necessity of support and respect for
all
sectors of our economy. Not just those who are at the core of the
Democratic Party, not just those who are union members, not just those who are the poorest among us, but all of us.

Thus far, Obama’s behavior in office suggests that he has a flawed—and sometimes arrogant—approach to government. He needs the cooperation of business, yet he spurns it because of his class bias. He is desperate for more investors in our nation’s stocks and bonds, yet he hounds these potential investors, overregulates them, and taxes them because they have too much money. Does he really think that this will work?

Anxious to stimulate consumer spending, Obama would raise taxes on the most prodigious consumers—the wealthy—by almost 50 percent. Eager to return to the days of prosperity and opportunity, he leads us, instead, into his notion of entitlement.

We want to make capitalism work. He wants to replace it with socialism.

But Barack Obama is only our president, not our dictator. Even armed with top-heavy majorities in both houses of Congress, he cannot get around the fact that we still live in a democracy. We are still a free people. The more we understand what he’s doing to us—and why he’s doing it—the more we can defend ourselves and reverse his disastrous course in 2010, when the congressional elections will offer us the next opportunity.

But we need to start today—by remembering that it’s our country and taking it back.

Right now, in the darkness of the recession, that might seem difficult, even impossible. At the moment, reemerging into the light of prosperity is our primary concern. We all have immediate worries: our jobs, our families, our homes, our future.

But the very policies designed to extricate us from this hellish economy are those that will keep us in the darkness. Obama’s spending—his massive, massive spending—will not hasten the end of the recession. What it will do is ensure a period of rampant inflation and, likely, yet another recession after that, before the inflation can be cured.