Trickle Down Tyranny

by Michael Savage

  Obama is threatening to veto any legislation that would prevent those automatic $60 billion annual additional defense cuts from kicking in, too.

  Even leftist Defense Secretary Panetta, who backed some of the most devastating defense spending cuts in U.S. history during the Clinton administration, has said that the United States could become a “paper tiger” if further cuts are made.

  Obama either doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that we are at war. We face continuing danger in Iraq and Afghanistan because of troop drawdowns and ongoing state-sponsored terrorism. Iran and North Korea are closer than we acknowledge to being able to deliver nuclear strikes through their missiles. Al Qaeda is still actively seeking nuclear and biological weapons capabilities. China and Russia are becoming more defiant and threatening in the face of the weakest U.S. president in our history.

  Obama’s already reduced defense spending and his threats to allow draconian defense cuts to kick in benefit our enemies. He’s determined to cede our military superiority to Russia, China, even Iran, in order to hasten the formation of a new George Soros-defined world order, where national borders disappear and the rule of the international mob becomes a reality.

  We are at war on many fronts, and the next president must increase defense spending as a percentage of GDP to wartime levels. That means returning defense spending, not including funding for military actions, to at least 5.2 percent of GDP—that’s the 45-year average—while making sure that the drawdown in troops Obama has implemented is reversed and the buildup of new weapons, warships, and military aircraft is restarted.

  Reversing the Obama Energy Policy

  Here’s something Barack Obama will never admit: Despite his efforts to cripple it, the oil industry is booming in the United States. The oil industry has accounted for more than 20 percent of the new jobs in the United States in the past seven years. Texas—which Obama is trying to give away to Mexico—has accounted for most of the rest of them.

  What is the president’s energy policy?

  Obama and his bought-and-paid-for secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, have done everything in their power to keep America dependent on foreign oil. They’ve all but permanently banned offshore drilling in the United States, and they’ve managed to kill the Keystone XL pipeline so we can’t buy and ship more oil from our ally, Canada, directly through to Gulf Coast refineries.

  Obama’s energy policy is also compromising America’s electric grid and putting Americans at risk of not being able to afford electricity—if there’s even enough to go around. After the freak October snowstorm in 2011 that knocked out power to millions in the New England states, some homeowners were without electricity for as long as a month before their power was restored. And Southern California has experienced rolling blackouts that are an omen of future electricity shortages throughout the Southwest.

  Obama’s assault on coal-fired electricity generation has meant that, even in the short span of three years, he’s making sure that no new electric production facilities will be brought online. Obama has weakened the grid in many areas of the U.S. because he’s bent on shutting down coal-fired electricity production, not in the name of making life better for humans but of making it better for plants and animals.

  Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, has lied shamelessly to Congress and the American public about the threat of global warming. He’s perpetuating the myth that our continued use of carbon-based fuels threatens the planet. He couldn’t be further from the truth, as I’ll show you in chapter 9. Like Obama, he favors windmills and electric cars and forcing energy prices high enough to make green technology viable.

  Obama concurs: “I share the view of . . . most scientists in the world that climate change is a real problem and that human activity is contributing to it, and that we all have a responsibility to find ways to reduce our carbon emissions.”

  The fact is that he doesn’t share the views of “most scientists”; he’s parroting the party line about a phenomenon that has been in decline for the past decade and poses no real threat whatsoever—except that rising temperatures make things better for all forms of life on earth. He’s spouting Stalinist science in the face of evidence he does his best to suppress that global warming is not a threat to our way of life. The real threat is a false belief that we have to protect ourselves from global warming. In fact, the path Obama is taking us down weakens our economy and our national security.

  I’ve understood for a long time that the whole global warming debate should have ended in 2009 when it was revealed that so-called “scientists” who supported the idea that the earth was in a disastrous warming period had phonied up the numbers and corrupted climate science irrevocably. It didn’t end there. In November 2011, more than 5,000 new e-mails sent back and forth among top climate “scientists” reveal that they’re still fudging data, trying to intimidate those who disagree with them into silence. Despite the collapse of the evidence they themselves invented, they’re still spouting the party line.12

  Climate change is still the rationale behind this administration’s push to close down the U.S. oil industry. Leftist Lisa Jackson still controls the future of the oil industry in the U.S. She can single-handedly dictate whether or not taking oil out of the ground goes ahead. Now she’s even taken over the design of U.S. automobiles. A new diktat by Jackson’s EPA will drive up the cost of automobiles and reduce their safety dramatically in an effort to meet artificially set CO2 emission standards.13

  What this administration hasn’t been able to do is completely shut down the expansion of the oil industry. Across the country, more than 440,000 people are working in the oil industry. That’s up from 200,000 less than a decade ago. North Dakota now has an unemployment rate under four percent because of the oil boom in that state. They’re producing nearly half a million barrels of oil a day. In Pennsylvania, natural gas production from the Marcellus shale formation is turning around that state’s economy. Nationwide, more than 200,000 people now work in the natural gas industry.14

  It’s new oil and gas technology—not green technology—that’s driving this expansion.

  Hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—and horizontal drilling technology have made the extraction of oil and natural gas easier and safer than it has ever been. Fracking involves pumping a mixture of sand and fluid at high pressure into shale rock formations that contain oil and gas. This fractures the rock and frees up the oil and gas for recovery. It means that tens of billions of barrels of oil and virtually limitless supplies of natural gas in U.S. fields can now be taken out of the ground.

  Horizontal drilling means that from a single well we can expand horizontally in several directions to remove the oil over a large field. We no longer need to drill many new wells to exploit the oil in a large field. This means that there is less environmental stress than ever before. And U.S. oil companies adhere to the strictest safety standards.

  The new president must make sure that we can go ahead with the exploitation of our enormous oil and natural gas reserves. The next president must bring the EPA under control. He must make sure it relaxes its stranglehold on new offshore oil development, and he must reverse what Obama has just done and let the Keystone XL pipeline project go forward. He must combine that with allowing offshore drilling and the exploitation of known U.S. oil reserves.

  This would make us energy independent before the current class of kindergartners graduates from high school.

  Don’t believe that?

  If the United States announced tomorrow that it was allowing oil production to go forward in the Gulf of Mexico, off the California and Alaska coasts, and in other now undeveloped areas where we have the world’s largest proven reserves,15 the price of oil would stabilize—immediately and permanently. The markets would understand that, given our vast reserves of oil—enough to carry us through to the next century—a U.S. commitment to exploiting those reserves would stabilize the oil market.

  When the next
president gives the go-ahead to the Keystone pipeline, he’ll insure that the oil will start flowing from Canada within a matter of years, not decades.

  The positive effects would go way beyond what I’ve just mentioned.

  Simply by relaxing the EPA stranglehold on oil and gas production, the next president would begin to economically isolate rogue regimes in the Middle East in a way no vague, weak-kneed “economic sanctions” of the kind Obama has talked about but never instituted could ever do.

  If the next president goes ahead with what I’m calling for here, within as little as a decade, we would be able to supply not only all of our own oil and gas needs, but those of our European allies as well.

  Opening up the U.S. oil industry would mean that our European allies would not have to remain dependent on Arab oil. If we’d relaxed these regulations even two or three years ago, the NATO nations would not have needed to oust Ghadafi in order to make sure they continued to receive Libyan oil.

  I’m telling you that it is not out of the question to think that Obama’s energy policy, because it has kept us beholden to Middle Eastern oil, was one of the primary causes of the chaos that’s now unfolding as the Arab Winter wears on and Islamist forces advance their assumption of power.

  The next president must change our energy policy to open up our oil industry as I’ve explained here. The policies and practices I’m calling for would solve many of our immediate economic problems.

  Fixing the Global Economic Mess

  I’ve explained to you that freeing up oil and natural gas production in this country would begin to turn our economy around almost immediately. That’s because it would reintroduce real production back into the U.S. economy, real commodities on a scale large enough to dramatically increase U.S. GDP.

  The broader problem that has infected the world economy—and the one that we must begin to address immediately—is that our economic and financial system is no longer tied to real commodities, services, and industrial production. Instead, the value of our currencies is at the mercy of fiscal and financial policies that have no intrinsic economic value.

  Big banks and sovereign governments still carry hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of the same worthless securities that caused the 2008 financial crisis on their balance sheets. They’re trying to continue to finance their debt and cover up the huge holes in their balance sheets by issuing bonds that they buy from each other. This only exacerbates the problem, because they have to pay higher and higher rates of interest on these bonds in order to sell them, so they print more money in order to pay the interest on the debt.

  The debt spiral will ultimately become a death spiral for the global economy.

  The European economies that are about to collapse are in the shape they are largely because Europe has been, since the end of World War II, dominated by socialist governments. In order to finance the welfare states and the corruption that those socialist economies breed, they’ve had to rely more and more on debt, and the debt they try to sell to the rest of the world is essentially worthless.

  More than half a century of European socialism is coming to the crisis point now, and the next president must act decisively to prevent a catastrophic global economic meltdown.

  The European Union is in dire economic straits. At least three—and as many as seven—EU countries are on the verge of defaulting on their sovereign debt. In the near future, they’re in danger of not being able to pay interest to the investors, the banks, brokerages, and other national governments that have bought their bonds. In order to prevent that from happening, the EU, along with the International Monetary Fund, is promoting a scheme for other countries to come together and pony up enough money to buy even more of these countries’ debt—so they can avoid defaulting in the short term. The United States committed to helping fund this in late 2011.

  The banks and federal agencies being called on to do this already hold much of this essentially worthless debt on their balance sheets, and adding more only makes it increasingly likely that these countries will downgrade the debt even further, making future default more likely.

  There’s not enough money in the world to prevent it.

  Let me give you some concrete examples.

  In late 2011, Italy—one of the countries about to default—managed to sell three-year sovereign bonds, but only after they were forced to pay nearly eight percent interest in order to get other financial institutions to buy them. That’s an unsustainable rate. The European Central Bank continued to buy Italian and Spanish debt, but even their purchases were not at high enough levels to prevent what looks like a coming Eurozone financial crash. At the same time, the sale of sovereign bonds by Germany—the strongest and safest European economy—was a flop, with less than two-thirds of the offering purchased by investors. One analyst described the failed German bond auction as “a vote of no confidence against the entire euro zone.”16

  By the end of 2011, the euro was about to disappear as the currency of the European Union.

  It goes without saying that the next president needs to get rid of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. What he needs to do next is more difficult.

  He needs to extract the federal government from the clutches of the international financial elite, the banks and brokerages and sovereign governments that now dictate economic policy. The current administration is filled with former financial industry players, especially, as I’ll show you in chapter 4, former Goldman Sachs executives. It’s going to be very difficult to remove them from power, but it must be done.

  The next president must stop the irresponsible printing of money that we’ve been engaging in in order to pay for our own and the world’s borrowing. If possible, the next president needs to find a way to link our currency to a commodity like gold or to a group of commodities, so that the runaway inflation is slowed and the collapse of the debt bubble is avoided.

  Cleaning Up Health Care

  I’ve studied medicine and health and nutrition extensively, and I’ve written many books on the subjects. I understand what few medical doctors and no government bureaucrats do: that individuals—in almost every case—are responsible for their own health and the health of their children. Most of the diseases and conditions that kill us are the result of lousy choices we make about diet, exercise, and drug and alcohol use. Most of the maladies that are increasing at such alarming rates these days—from obesity to autoimmune disorders—are preventable. But not by the government telling you what you should and should not eat and determining what medicines you can and cannot take.

  I won’t repeat what I’ve said in Trickle Up Poverty about Obamacare. I will say this, though: Fixing the health-care mess is one of the easiest jobs facing the next president. If the Supreme Court doesn’t shut down Obamacare by the summer of 2012, the next president needs to shut it down by executive order. Mitt Romney has said that’s one of the first things he would do if he’s elected.

  Then the next president must do the following things, either through getting legislation passed or through executive orders:

  • Repeal government requirements that dictate what treatments health insurance policies must cover, then offer smorgasbord insurance policies that let individuals tailor their health insurance to their own needs and control their own health-care spending. In other words, take it out of the hands of government.

  • Legalize health insurance sales across state lines to let the market function to encourage competition that lowers prices.

  • Make the cost of health insurance paid for by individuals tax deductible, as it is for corporations.

  • Reform our bankrupt Medicare system to remove the threat of health-care rationing and encouraging market-driven choices for retirees. Gradually wean future retirees off this outmoded health insurance system through means testing and privatization of Medicare insurance.

  It’s the job of the next president to reverse the government takeover of one of our most importan
t industries. It’s the job of the next president to make getting the government out of the health insurance and health policy business his highest priority.

  Securing Our Borders

  Listeners to The Savage Nation know that one of my most important focuses is on our border security. They also know that the three people primarily responsible for securing our borders—Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Janet Napolitano—are abdicating their constitutional duty to do so. In fact, they’re not only failing to secure the borders, they’re actively involved in just the opposite: They’re opening them up so that illegal immigrants can cross them at will. They’ve sent assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels that have been used in hundreds of murders in Mexico, and at least three killings of U.S. citizens. And our own Drug Enforcement Agency has laundered drug cartel money!

  The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have quit trying to keep our borders secure, and they have attacked states like Arizona and Alabama that have passed their own illegal immigration and border security laws, taking them to court in order to stop them from defending themselves.

  Did you know that under Barack Obama, the money we spend on border security has been cut in half? In 2008 we spent more than $1.3 billion to keep our borders safe, in 2011, that amount has been cut to $573 million. Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security ended the Secure Border Initiative Network—the virtual border fence—because it did not meet “cost-effectiveness and viability standards.” At the same time we’re reducing the amount of money we spend on border security, the Obama administration—particularly Napolitano—keeps telling us the borders are more secure than they’ve ever been.17

  It’s not just that Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Napolitano are determined to eliminate our southern border with Mexico and give up Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. They have lied to Congress and the American people about their intentions and their methods. In doing so, they’ve put our national security at risk. As I’ll show you in chapter 10, they’ve compounded the felony by shutting out congressional investigators, withholding subpoenaed documents, lying under oath, and attempting to intimidate those called to testify in matters related to immigration and border safety.