The administration insists it’s in favor of eliminating the differences between the haves and the have-nots, but every one of its policies has exactly the opposite effect. They create outrage among the have-nots against the haves. The have-nots see real estate prices in many cities rising to the point where only the wealthy can afford them. While the president talks in platitudes about how much he supports the poor, at the same time he consorts with the Hollywood power brokers and financial behemoths who fund his campaign and to whom he sends billions in taxpayer money for projects that result in bankruptcies from which they walk away richer and unscathed. There are no more telling examples than in the fraudulent green energy companies like Solyndra, whose principals reaped millions through their failure.
It’s a certain way to ensure the collapse the U.S. economy.
China has been the world’s largest buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds and holder of U.S. dollar reserves. I’ve explained that China and several other nations are beginning to settle their foreign oil purchases in their own currencies, a trend which threatens the position of the U.S. dollar as both the world reserve currency and the petrodollar, the standard currency in which oil sales are settled.
Vladimir Putin is using the decline of the U.S. dollar as the currency used to settle oil sales as a weapon in his confrontation with Barack Obama over Ukraine. After his annexation of Crimea, he explained that Russia would move to settle oil deals in rubles and not in U.S. dollars in order to protect its interests. The decline in the value and power of the dollar that the Fed’s QE has created is limiting and weakening our bargaining power in international relations.
China has for a long time tried to hold down the value of its currency, the yuan (also known as the renminbi), against other world currencies. If the value of the yuan remains low relative to the U.S. dollar and other world currencies, foreign exports from China remain less expensive and more attractive to nations, such as the U.S., that are importing them.
In order to do keep the value of its currency low, China has amassed some $3.5 trillion worth of other nations’ currencies. Rather than let those currency reserves remain idle, it has used them to purchase foreign debt, including U.S. Treasury bonds and other securities. In doing this, China has amassed holdings of more than $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China is the largest holder of our federal debt, with Japan close behind at nearly $1.2 trillion.36
The Fed’s policy of quantitative easing devalues the U.S. dollar and upsets the favorable trade balance that China is bent on maintaining. In response, and because China sees itself as a challenger to the United States for world economic and military domination, China has said that it is “no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves.”37
Which may also mean that China will look to decrease its purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds as the value of the yuan increases relative to the dollar. This may signal that China is in fact moving to enable the yuan to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency.
Both of those moves could result in the United States’ moving further into recession and increasingly losing economic power and influence in the world.
That’s not the only bad news on the horizon.
The decline of our economic status in the world is mirrored by our loss of economic freedom here at home. One of the most disturbing pieces of news is that, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, the United States has, for the first time, dropped out of the top ten in the list of the most economically free societies in the world. We’re now only the twelfth-freest economy of all the countries in the world, behind Mauritius and Estonia, among others.38
The increase in regulations—more than thirteen thousand in Obama’s first term39—and taxes on everything from energy production to tanning salons to medical devices has discouraged our citizens from starting new businesses.
The Affordable Care Act’s reduction of the full-time workweek to thirty hours has caused a devastating loss of true full-time jobs in this country. Add to that the fact that the United States, at 40 percent, has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and it begins to become clear what this administration’s economic policies are really aimed at accomplishing: diminishing the power of capitalism as economic activity is increasingly taken over by an overreaching central government.
The president’s economic philosophy—to the extent he has one at all—has always been characterized by the blind insistence that the only way to create economic “fairness” is to redistribute a static amount of money.
As economist Lawrence Kudlow puts it, “Obama comes from a long line of liberals whose guiding star is the equality of result, i.e., income leveling, rather than the equality of opportunity, which is the heart of free-market capitalism.”40
I’ve told my radio audiences about the influences on our president’s economic philosophy. He listened approvingly while Reverend Jeremiah Wright preached the tenets of liberation theology in his Chicago church.
And now even the Catholic Church is reinforcing that philosophy.
Recently, Pope Francis came out basically calling for income redistribution. He ripped trickle-down economics and an unfettered free market. The Pope said he was sympathetic to the tenets of liberation theology, which combines the teachings of Jesus Christ with those of Karl Marx.
I want to go into some detail here to show you what the implications of the Pope’s politics are.
The association of the Catholic Church with socialism began and flourished in Latin America in the middle of the last century. Not coincidentally, Pope Francis is the first Pope from that region. The new Pope is spouting the Catholic Church’s version of liberation theology, the same thing Reverend Wright preached to the president for twenty years.
Pope Francis has signaled several times that he is a believer in liberation theology. He has strongly indicated that he would like the Church to act as a spearhead for economic change in the world.
People who think like the Pope believe that unfettered global capitalism is unjust and leads to social, political, and economic oppression of the poor. And they want to punish the successful, which, by their logic, will create equal opportunity for those less fortunate. It amounts to nothing less than Christianized Marxism.
The Pope has made it clear that he wants to hold capitalism accountable for the problems of the world. He wants to punish the haves simply for having more than the have-nots. According to his way of thinking, this is a sin.
Here are his words:
While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by the happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.41
The Catholic Church had all but eradicated this ideology nearly a quarter century ago under Pope John Paul II. But although Pope Francis, who was originally from Argentina, had never practiced liberation theology, he was certainly shaped by it.
In early 2014, the Pope named nineteen new cardinals, sixteen of whom are under eighty years of age and considered cardinal electors. They’ll be charged with electing the next Pope after Francis either retires or dies.
So why is this so significant to the resurgence of liberation theology in the Catholic Church?
These new cardinals are from predominately poor countries, including Nicaragua, Ivory Coast, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Chile, Burkina Faso, the Philippines, and Haiti. It signals yet another move by this Pope to reduce the influence of wealth and money on the Church.
But there is another, more long-term impact of this move: the ability of these cardinals to elect the next Pope should serve to ensure the continuation of this liberation theology, which is rapidly becoming official Church policy.
As the redistribution-of-wealth crowd has been mainly fractured and rudderless, the emergence of the Church as a leader in this kind of thinking is a new and dangerous trend. It represents nothing less than Papal-sponso
red Marxism. The economic struggle has mass appeal, and it will soon be co-opted by those who seek to destroy the world, if that hasn’t happened already.
Before the advent of liberation theology, though, Catholicism hated communism. Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical condemning it. Let me give you some quotes from his Encyclical on Capital and Labor, written more than a hundred years ago:
The socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things [the gap between the rich and the poor] will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But… [were these plans] carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.… Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.
Pope Leo then asks and answers an important question:
Is it just that the fruit of a man’s own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by anyone else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor.… The authority of the divine law adds its sanction, forbidding us in severest terms even to covet that which is another’s: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife; nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.”… And in addition to injustice, it is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.
He finishes with this:
Neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another… under the futile and shallow pretext of equality.42
In the face of what the Catholic Church has stood for for the past century, Pope Francis is now embracing the very socialistic principles Pope Leo XIII decried.
He believes our system of running a business should be discarded, while the right of states to control the economy for “the common good” is laudable.
Lenin could have written the words of Pope Francis.
The Pope has joined the current administration in declaring war on free markets and capitalism.
He’s a popular man, and I have no reason to believe he isn’t a good man. But his naïveté in world economics is very, very concerning.
Look at how another powerful person who claims to support income redistribution actually redistributes our money.
Our president spent nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money on a stimulus plan for the rich. He gave General Motors $50 billion so the labor contracts that had caused the automaker to face bankruptcy wouldn’t destroy the company. He lost half a billion of your dollars on the Solyndra green-energy debacle, while his cronies who ran the company lined their pockets and walked away.
You’ve got to understand what happens when leftists are allowed to take over governments at any level and redistribute wealth that rightfully belongs to the people who earn it: Those economies collapse.
The bottom five states in terms of economic stability and performance are New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and California.43 Notice what those states have in common? Every one of these Democrat-controlled state governments has allowed public pension plans and labor union activism to expand unchecked. They got that way because they engaged in the same corrupt crony statism that now infects the U.S. government.
The employment figures released by federal government agencies are fraudulent. Real unemployment in the United States is not under 7 percent; it’s closer to 37 percent, despite what the White House, the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury try to tell you. The Misery Index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is over 14 percent, not at the 8 percent level the government claims.44
Food and energy prices are rising dramatically, while wages remain stagnant. While the administration tries to push climate change as the most critical danger to the United States, Americans can’t find jobs. It’s getting harder and harder to disguise what’s really going on. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices are up 9 percent since June 2009. That’s caused by increases in the price of pork (14 percent), poultry (12 percent), eggs (27 percent), and milk (20 percent). During the same time, energy prices have risen by 18 percent, and the gas you need to operate your car is up 27 percent, not to mention a 23 percent rise in what it costs you to send your kids to college.45
As I’ve said, you’d have to be an idiot to believe that most wars are started by anything other than economic factors. We’re facing an economic crisis that not only holds the possibility of driving more and more American citizens into poverty, it may well mean the decline of U.S. economic power globally; and it is most certainly the main wedge with which Obama is driving us apart—and into civil war.
CHAPTER 6
The War on American Medicine
As incompetent as this administration appears to be, it may well be engaging in purposeful incompetence. Like the phrase planned obsolescence, used to explain the 1970s automobile industry in Detroit, years from now they’ll be using the phrase purposeful incompetence to describe the Obama White House. The administration’s missteps in rolling out Obamacare could actually be part of a devious but ingenious plan that would reduce the best, most advanced health-care system in the world to one that rivals Venezuela’s.
When U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts folded and cast the swing vote that upheld most of the “Un-Affordable Care Act,” he may have signed the death warrant of the best medical system in the world.
It didn’t matter that the Obamacare website was nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It didn’t matter that Henry Chao, the Health and Human Services official who was in charge of developing the Healthcare.gov software, set the project’s bar so low that he once admitted he hoped it wouldn’t be “a third-world experience.” And it didn’t matter that former Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius displayed a level of incompetence that was hard to believe, even if it was on the part of a federal government appointee.
All that mattered to the administration was that the legislation remained the law of the land. All that mattered was that they’d pushed us further down the road that leads to socialized medicine.
The Un-Affordable Care Act forever changes the way medicine is practiced in America. And in the most devastating ways you can imagine.
Don’t believe the avalanche of positive news stories generated by the administration’s crony journalists.
Ultimately, should things continue the way they’re headed, “ObamaScare” will deny tens of millions of Americans even the opportunity to receive health care. This will be especially true of the elderly and the poor, who, thanks to the ACA, are being refused health care because doctors are no longer paid enough to cover their expenses. They’re simply refusing to take patients on Medicare, while those too poor to afford health insurance are shunted to Medicaid, where they were already overwhelming hospital emergency rooms with their need for treatment.
Which might have been the plan all along.<
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Is it too farfetched to believe that the real purpose of the Un-Affordable Care Act is to remove undesirables like the sick and the elderly from the rolls of the insured?
Well, consider this: Medicare Part D was passed into law under George W. Bush. It let the insurance companies compete for the business of insuring the cost of drugs for those over the age of sixty-five. It’s the one federal program I know of that didn’t cost as much as it was projected to cost. Part D offers seniors a choice of from twenty-eight to thirty-nine different plans, depending on which state they live in. Upward of 40 million seniors and disabled people signed up. More than 90 percent of them are happy with their plans.1
So what does the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the lead agency of Obamacare, plan to do with Part D? It plans to block seniors from enrolling in the most popular programs, the ones that charge them less for patronizing pharmacies that offer the lowest cost for their drugs.2
When Healthcare.gov, the website that Americans were supposed to use to sign up for their government health-care plans, was revealed to be a catastrophic failure, the anti-Obamacare chorus was louder than ever.
But I have news for you: Obama and his minions are ten steps ahead of the screaming anti-Obamacare chorus. Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and the others may actually have wanted the website and the system to fail.
Why? So that the people who want free health care will demand a government-run, single-payer system. Call it “Government Medical Insurance, Inc.”
One state already has single-payer health care. Vermont passed the first single-payer health-care law in the United States. It’s known as Green Mountain Care. Vermont is known as the Green Mountain State because of the Green Mountain Boys. They were a militia group headed by Ethan Allen, and they were organized to help control a boundary dispute in what would become New England. Allen’s group served in the Revolutionary War, and his name has become synonymous with independence of spirit and commitment to freedom. That’s why it’s so devastating that his state has become a hotbed of statist government activities. Green Mountain Care was supposed to provide health care for all Vermont residents. Now the state’s lawmakers are calling for the repeal of the law. It’s estimated that the cost of the program will be as high as $2 billion annually. That’s the equivalent of the entire tax revenue of the state of Vermont.3
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 10
