Trickle Down Tyranny (20 page)

Use the left’s treatment of racial and ethnic minorities against them.
Following Alinsky, the left uses minorities for only one reason: to help solidify its power. At the same time, it continues to work to make sure that minorities are held down. In fact, if minorities were to be given their freedom from Democratic oppression and encouraged to freely exercise their rights and bring their dreams into realization, the Democratic Party would simply disappear. It would have no group on whose shoulders it could climb to power.

We’re in the fight of our lives for the survival of our nation. The policies of the left, including many Democrats now in positions of power in our government, are designed to do nothing less than eliminate the principles articulated in the U.S. Constitution as the foundation of our legal system by abrogating the rights of the individual and replacing them with the authority of the state to intrude into every aspect of our lives and determine how we must live, speak, and behave. What the Obama administration is attempting to do represents the most insidious abrogation of human rights in our nation’s history. We have to stand up against Obama and the people who want to Occupy the United States, before it is too late.

Chapter 6
Tyranny of Obama’s Corporate Cronies

One of the things I have learned watching the
Godfather
movies is that every tyrant needs accomplices, a band of brothers to carry out his dark designs. Running a mafia is simply too big of a job for one man alone; even a talented type-A overachiever can’t do it by himself. Michael Corleone needs his consigliere and his henchmen.

So Barack Obama needs his merry band to run the alphabet soup of bureaucracies from the Agricultural Research Service to the Veterans Health Administration. And as president, he can appoint many of them. The president has the constitutional authority to appoint up to 3,000 senior government officials and put thousands more into positions like those of special envoys, special assistants, commissioners, task-force members, and members of other unelected bodies.

Czars Belong in Russia

Not that that was enough for Obama. In typical tyrannical fashion, the president immediately went beyond the bounds of the Constitution and started appointing czars, unvetted cronies chosen to do the left’s dirty work without congressional approval. He brought in more than 40 czars, with unpublished salaries and secret agendas.
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I could write an entire book just about the often criminal and unconstitutional activities these guys engage in. They were appointed extralegally, and almost all of them are convinced that they’re above the laws that you and I have to obey.

Take the case of Obama’s environment czar, Carol Browner. She claims to love the environment, but the only things she really loves are regulations that don’t apply to her. I did some checking into her background and I found something the major media wouldn’t dare to report. When she was nominated, but not yet confirmed as head of President Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), she wanted to cut down a 120-foot-tall oak tree in order to widen her driveway. But she lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, one of the most liberal bastions on the East Coast.

Takoma Park has one of the toughest tree protection laws in the United States. Even putting a flagstone path near a tree can result in a $1,000-dollar fine, as Takoma Park residents S. Craig Alexander and Amy Wasserstrom learned in August 2009. While the fine was later reduced to $250 plus court fees and a scolding from the presiding judge, they got off lightly for their indiscretion. In fact, putting anything on the ground
within 50 feet of a tree
in Takoma Park requires a tree-impact statement.
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Cutting down trees is strictly forbidden.

Takoma Park is legendary when it comes to enforcing its strict tree laws. Even TreeWorld.info, a website devoted to tree regulation around the world, notes how strict Takoma Park is: “You may want to do the right thing in this place because the city is proactive at busting people.”
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What’s more, Takoma Park employs an arborist named Todd Bolton to roam the small city looking for the tiniest of violations.
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Repaving a driveway within 50 feet of a tree requires permission from Bolton. Even pruning a tree requires an almost impossible-to-get permit from the city. So Browner knew there was no way she was going to get a permit to cut down a beautiful, healthy oak that had spread its branches for more than 80 years, giving shade to passersby and a pleasant green glow to Browner’s neighbors.

So she cut it down in the middle of the night, under cover of darkness. Or she had someone cut it down for her. The one thing we know for sure is that the 120-foot tree disappeared one night, leaving only a stump and a sprinkle of sawdust.

Of course, one of Browner’s neighbors turned her in. She had to appear before the city council on more than one occasion, but eventually she was given an after-the-fact permit.

Neighbors say it is the only time they have ever heard of anyone in Takoma Park getting permission to fell a large, live, healthy oak.

Browner is typical of Obama’s accomplices: She doesn’t believe the laws and regulations apply to her—but only to the “little people.”

Years later, Browner was forced to admit to being a tree killer in a little-noticed online discussion with the
Washington Post
: “Before I was at EPA, my husband and I did take down one tree that was
threatening
the sidewalk, driveway, other trees in area.”
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Did you get that?

The tree was
threatening
the sidewalk!

And the fact that she planted some three-foot saplings to “replace” the downed oak doesn’t make it right. She destroyed a 120-foot giant, whose branches saw Henry Ford’s Model T’s rumble underneath. While the Takoma law might be wacky, the intent of it is clear: to preserve the city’s oldest residents, its trees.

But Browner got a pass for the liberal-run city. They didn’t want to hurt one of their own.

Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “pay czar,” wants to set the salaries and bonuses of bankers. Sure, some of these bankers didn’t do much except ruin the economy and buy expensive purses for their wives to put their dogs in. And write campaign checks to Obama. But I’m worried about the principle and the precedent.

If a banker is paid too much, the only people he is hurting are the people dumb enough to buy shares in his bailed-out bank. Let’s not forget the principle at stake here: Once the government begins telling banks how much they can pay people in private industry, it won’t be long before it starts telling building contractors, business owners, and manufacturing companies how much to pay their employees. Once the government thinks they have the right to do it, they will do it everywhere.

Now I come to the precedent. If anyone objects to the “pay czar” setting private industry salaries, that unelected czar can point to the banks and say the legal precedent is already established. Every office has a guy who works hard and another guy who is just coasting. You know what I mean. Do you want a pay czar—who’s never met either one of these guys—saying they should make the exact same amount, no matter how hard they work? That’s how the Obama tyranny works.

I’ve got something to say about Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar, in the next chapter, but I want to introduce him to you now. You think you know all about him? Well, I uncovered some new material that will outrage you and any thinking American.

This unelected panjandrum is supposed to supervise all the regulations issued by the federal government. It’s a big job. The federal agencies put out several hundred thousand pages of new regulations every year. The new rules—and just the new rules, not the old ones—take up 11 times more pages than the New York and Los Angeles phone books put together.

And it is a complex job. Regulations are not laws, but rules based on laws. They are supposed to fill in the blanks in laws. And laws, which can only be passed by Congress, are supposed to be based on the Constitution. So you’d think that Cass Sunstein would be a big defender of the Constitution.

But you would be wrong.

Sunstein doesn’t like the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects free speech. He actually wrote a book called
Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech
. In that book, he says that many forms of speech should not be protected at all, including commercial speech—advertising, product presentations, billboards, and so on. He’s also against speech that invades privacy—no more embarrassing stories about politicians and movie stars—and what he calls “hate speech,” which amounts to criticizing anything that liberals don’t want criticized. In the book he calls for a “large-scale reassessment of the appropriate role of the First Amendment in the democratic process.”
⁶

But the form of speech that Cass Sunstein dislikes the most is political attack ads on television and radio—the very ads that go around the mainstream media and educate voters about the records of liberal politicians. Of course, if politicians supported what the majority wants, there would be no attack ads. But when politicians support something that five or ten percent of special interests want against the will of 80 to 90 percent of the public, those political positions make politicians unpopular. And politicians don’t want the public to know anything that would make them unpopular.

When Congress was debating campaign finance laws that would forbid people from putting political signs on their lawns fewer than 60 days before an election and banning people from spending money to buy independent political ads, Sunstein came to the defense of people who wanted to ban free speech. He said, “A legislative effort to regulate broadcasting in the interest of democratic principles should not be seen as an abridgment of the free speech guarantee.”
⁷

It shouldn’t?

So he thinks that this kind of “hate speech” should not be protected by the First Amendment and that all political speech should be regulated by campaign finance laws. He likes the idea of banning political ads by independent groups 60 days before any federal election—the very point in time when voters start to get curious about the political records of candidates.

Instead he calls for a “New Deal” on speech that would give free air time for political candidates, strictly regulate what can be said about political issues, and deny access to the airwaves by citizen groups or principled individuals.
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And it is not just Obama’s czars who flout the law and the Constitution. At least two of his cabinet secretaries have trouble paying their taxes.

None of these czars are poorly paid. While most sources list “salary unknown” for positions such as the Great Lakes czar, most czars earn north of $100,000, and some, like intelligence czar Dennis Blair, earn as much as $197,700. Poor Joshua DuBois, the faith-based czar who acts as a liaison between faith-based and secular community groups, couldn’t break the 100K mark, earning just $98,000 a year. But he is the exception. Then there is the “pay czar,” who is widely reported to have worked as an unpaid government employee. Turns out the pay czar should have been called the Pretty Well Paid Czar. He received a salary of $120,830 annually according to U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. Office of Personnel Management documents obtained by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act request.

When the news broke, his spokesman told the
Washington Examiner
that Feinberg received paychecks “every two weeks, but as soon as he got it, he endorsed it over and returned it.” Yeah, right. Judicial Watch tried to get clarification from both Feinberg and Treasury officials, but neither would comment. Thus, said the
Examiner
, “[a]s a result, it could not be learned if Feinberg has been cashing the government paychecks, returning them to the Treasury Department, forwarding them to a charity, or otherwise not accepting them.”
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Congress has tried to rein in Obama’s unconstitutional czars. House Speaker Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and President Obama struck a budget deal back in April 2011 for funding the remainder of fiscal 2011 that eliminated funding for four czars: Health Care, Climate Change, Auto Industry/Manufacturing Policy, and Urban Affairs.
¹⁰
Eager to blunt the Republican victory, the White House told Politico.com that three of the four positions were already vacant anyway: “Over the last several months, the White House has undergone a reorganization that involved the consolidation of several offices and positions. Included in that larger reorganization, earlier this year the Domestic Policy Council assumed responsibility for health care, as well as energy and climate change policy coordination and development in the White House. The agreements reflect those changes.”
¹¹

The “agreements” didn’t stay agreed to for long. Three days later, Obama issued a “signing statement,” a written comment printed with a bill when a president signs it into law that makes some claim about the legislation’s constitutionality and states whether the administration plans to ignore the legislation or implement it in ways they believe are best. In the signing statement he attached to the spending bill, Obama claimed that the passage about defunding the czars had a meaning
opposite
of what the words actually say. He wrote: “Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President’s ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Therefore, the executive branch will construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.”
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