Trickle Down Tyranny (21 page)

The bottom line: Obama will continue to pay his czars claiming his tyrannical presidential prerogatives. So much for his “agreement.”

The prerogatives Obama claims are expressly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution: “The President . . . shall nominate, and by and with the advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.”
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Writing in the Federalist Papers on this very subject, Alexander Hamilton, President Washington’s first secretary of the Treasury, said this in Federalist 69: “The President is to nominate, and,
with the advice and consent of the Senate
[italics in original], to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers, judges of the Supreme Court, and in general all officers of the United States established by law, and whose appointments are not otherwise provided for by the Constitution.”
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Hamilton contrasted the checks and balances placed on U.S. presidents with the prerogatives of the tyrannical kings of England: “The king of Great Britain is emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor. He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can confer titles of nobility at pleasure, and has the disposal of an immense number of church preferments. There is evidently a great inferiority in the power of the President, in this particular, to that of the British king.”
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President Obama has rectified this “inferiority of power.” He now claims the prerogatives of kings.

Obama’s Cabinet: Tax Cheats, Dupes, and Double Agents

And then there is Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, whose job is to enforce all federal laws—including tax laws. He too has a problem paying the taxes he owes. When he was caught failing to pay property taxes on his childhood home in the New York City borough of Queens, which house he and his brother had inherited when his mother died, he said he “wasn’t aware” that he had to pay taxes. He owed more than $4,146 in property taxes.

When Holder was caught trying to duck out on his tax bill, his Justice Department spokesman blamed the Attorney General’s dead mother. Apparently Holder missed the tax payments “in the last months of [his] mother’s life, when she was battling illness.” In fact, it took him almost a year after his mother’s death to pay the borough of Queens the property taxes he owed—and he only paid up after he was outed in the
New York Post
.
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It’s hard to believe that Holder simply forgot about his boyhood home on 101st Street in the Queens neighborhood of East Elmhurst. Holder often talked in public speeches and media interviews about the home where he grew up, saying that the neighborhood was a hotspot for black entertainers and personalities. “Jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie lived there, and civil rights leader Malcolm X was a neighbor,” the
New York Post
reported.
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He even bragged about his famous neighborhood in his Senate confirmation hearings for the Attorney General post. But when the taxes came due, he went silent and blamed everyone but himself.

I’ll have more on Holder’s treasonous tenure as attorney general in chapter 10, “Tyranny of the Anti-Justice Department.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is another of the Obama tax cheats. He owed a small fortune in back taxes and only agreed to pay up after he was caught by investigators for the U.S. Senate. He realized that he would never be confirmed as Treasury Secretary if he didn’t pay his debts to Uncle Sam.

The question became, “Was Obama concerned about putting a tax dodger in charge of the U.S. Treasury, which prints America’s money and supervises the Internal Revenue Service itself?”

The answer came out fairly quickly: Not really. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, dismissed the tax problems as “minor” and said that Geithner’s “service should not be tarnished by honest mistakes, which, upon learning of them, he quickly addressed.”
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Here are the “honest mistakes” the Treasury Secretary—the guy who’s in charge of handling the nation’s money—made. Geithner failed to pay taxes in 2003 and 2004 while he worked at the International Monetary Fund. The IRS caught up with him in 2006, finding that he owed $17,230 in back taxes and interest. Later, Senate investigators discovered that Geithner also failed to pay taxes for 2001 and 2002, in the total amount of $25,970.
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Geithner had all types of excuses. He said that he was entitled to deduct his child’s time at overnight camps in 2001, 2004, and 2005 as child care expenses. The IRS wasn’t amused. He also tried to deduct the cost of a housekeeper for the three and a half months after her right to legally work in the U.S. had expired.
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In other words, he was trying to deduct the costs of illegal labor. Finally he claimed there were problems with the software he used to calculate and file his taxes. The software in question was TurboTax, a popular program used by tens of millions of Americans every year without any mysterious “software problems.”
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Leon Panetta may share more than just a first name with Leon Trotsky, the infamous communist who helped form the Soviet Union in after the bloody revolution of 1917. Disturbing new evidence has surfaced that Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director and now Secretary of Defense, may have had a decades-long relationship with Hugh DeLacy, a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party USA with known connections to Soviet agents, “including Victor Perlo of the infamous Perlo spy group, and Frank Coe and Solomon Adler of the equally infamous Silvermaster spy group. DeLacy is also associated with suspected Soviet agent John Stewart Service, of the ‘Amerasia’ spy case.”
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Trevor Loudon went through the archives of the University of Washington and discovered evidence of a “cordial, long-term relationship in the 1970s and 1980s” between Panetta and DeLacy. At the time, Panetta was a Democratic congressman from California, known for his liberal voting record, and DeLacy was notorious for his Communist Party USA membership and his fierce anti-Americanism. Loudon discovered that “DeLacy was in regular contact with Leon Panetta, grilling him and regularly asking him for military, defense and foreign policy related information, which Panetta heavily supplied him.”
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Panetta was also tied to the Institute for Policy Studies, a well-known pro-Soviet think tank based in Washington, D.C. The Institute for Policy Studies vigorously opposed President Ronald Reagan’s plans to topple the Soviet-backed Sandinista junta in Nicaragua. Panetta strongly agreed with the institute and even pushed in Congress for a “normalization” of diplomatic relations with communist Nicaragua. Indeed, Panetta as a congressman had a disturbingly pro-Soviet record. He pushed measures to make the USSR and its Eastern European satellite countries into most-favored nations in trade agreements. He voted in favor of turning over the Panama Canal to the government of Panama, which was then an ally of the Soviet Union. He even opposed America’s defense pact with Taiwan on the ground that Taiwan acted as a check against communist China.
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And what did Panetta think about DeLacy, who met with a string of notorious Soviet and Chinese communist spies? He stood up at DeLacy’s 1993 funeral and gave a long speech praising DeLacy. He even saw to it that favorable remarks about DeLacy were placed into the
Congressional Record
.

All of these facts would have been turned up in Panetta’s White House background check—and can easily be found by anyone with an Internet connection. We can only conclude that Obama
knowingly and deliberately
put someone who cavorted with communist spies for decades, and who took a hard-line pro-Soviet foreign policy stance throughout his long tenure in Congress, in charge of the nation’s secrets and the CIA and the nation’s security at the Defense Department. It simply cannot be an accident.

Transportation secretary Ray LaHood may be a former Republican congressman from Illinois, but he is a bought-and-paid-for member of the Chicago political machine. He seems to have two main tasks as Obama’s transportation secretary: to get a third runway built at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at federal taxpayer expense and to oversee the TSA, which gropes grandmothers, inspects infant diapers, and eagerly scans the bodies of attractive young women for hints that they might be terrorists conspiring to blow up commercial airliners. While the TSA is excellent at detecting toenail clippers and bottled spring water in your carry-on luggage, it hasn’t been able to catch any terrorists on domestic flights since it was founded. Instead, it is a government jobs program that employs more than 44,000 people, whose union dues to the American Federation of Government Employees go to the reelection efforts of President Obama.
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LaHood’s biggest accomplishment has been to rob millions of Americans of their time, privacy, and personal space, while rewarding Obama with millions in campaign cash.

While Obama has appointed a cabinet of tax cheats, dupes, and double agents, he has a hard time managing them. Obama asked White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley “to repair badly frayed relations between the White House and the Cabinet.” Cabinet secretaries who have important constitutional responsibilities to manage wide-ranging portfolios, from defense and foreign affairs to energy and the environment, complained that the White House and the crowd of czars that Obama appointed have kept them in the dark. “The White House loops people out. The czars keep people from getting in,” a senior Democratic official told the
Washington Post
. That official said he has received complaints from at least three agency heads and that the “level of frustration is pretty high.”
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Cabinet secretaries complained privately to the
Post
that the White House was a “fortress” that micromanaged their agencies and refused to consider practical objections raised by their bureaucracies while “senior administration advisors rolled their eyes at staff meetings at the mention of certain cabinet members.”

The solution? To create a czar to manage the cabinet! Obama created a new position of Cabinet Communications Director to “better coordinate with and utilize members of the cabinet.”
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Usually presidents manage their own cabinets or ask their chiefs of staff to do it. When Obama sees a problem, the answer is to create another level of bureaucracy.

Maybe he doesn’t have the time or the patience. President Obama, like many tyrants before him, prefers the trappings of state rather than being trapped into actually making hard decisions. Like spoiled kings who prefer sycophants and fantasies to real governance, Obama prefers his agreeable czars and golf outings to doing the business of state. While Obama meets with his czars weekly and plays golf nearly that often, he can’t seem to find time to meet with his cabinet. Obama’s history of avoiding any real work and his dislike of hearing views that don’t support his own have created a big problem.

Obama plainly doesn’t like Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Shortly after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico created the largest environmental crisis in a generation, Obama told Salazar that he couldn’t talk to the press any longer. Salazar’s Interior Department manages tens of thousands of acres of fragile saltwater swamps and marshlands on the Gulf Coast and those protected federal lands were directly affected by the oil spill. Instead, Obama insisted that environment czar Carol Browner would talk to the press.
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As I’ve explained to you earlier, Browner is an environmental zealot serving in an unconstitutional position with no direct responsibility for the Gulf Coast ecosystems ravaged by the spill.

Obama also didn’t get along with his first Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, who he later demoted to Ambassador to China. When Obama held meetings with CEOs and other top executives in December 2010, he didn’t bother to invite Locke. Nor was the Commerce Secretary invited to attend Obama’s speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in February 2011. As a result, one senior official commented that Locke is “not a player.”
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Locke became just another cabinet secretary sidelined by Obama.

Is it any surprise that Obama has not met with many of his cabinet secretaries in more than two years? He does see his czars on a regular basis, and he always has time for union bosses. As I explained in chapter 5, in Obama’s first year in office SEIU boss Andy Stern was the single most frequent visitor to the White House. After Stern left the union, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka visited the White House nearly every day and met with the president on a weekly basis.
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Or consider this little item that I dug up. The union-approved head of General Motors, Dan Akerson, knows how to please Obama. The head of America’s largest carmaker—which is now 26-percent owned by the federal government thanks to Obama’s nationalization of it in 2009—is actually calling for higher gas taxes. Here’s what Akerson said: “You know what I would rather have them do—this will make my Republican friends puke—as gas is going to go down here now, we ought to just slap a fifty cent or dollar tax on a gallon of gas. People will start buying more Cruzes and they will start buying less Suburbans.”
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