Obama is using the power of government, effectiveness of demagoguery and the obvious power or wealth redistribution in order to stack the deck in his favor for re-election.
As clearly stated in the article below:
Obama's potential for a "near lock" in the Electoral College shows the political power of "income redistribution" in combination with an ever-larger, all-pervasive government that (including state and local) controls and spends nearly 40% of GDP in a discriminatory manner …
Members of Obama's potential coalition receive disproportionately large amounts from government but pay little of the cost of government.
With the help of fellow Progressives in government and an irresponsible fawning far left news media … combined with our money stolen away in usurious taxation, he is close to achieving a stolen and manipulated election victory.
Riding Income Redistribution Back To White House In 2012
Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins 04/20/2011
How can Barack Obama be about the worst president in history — and at the same time the "best politician" in America, according to some experts?
Simple answer: Being president is about substance; being a politician is about theatrics. Sometimes, the twain meet and — as in the case of Ronald Reagan and others — produce a statesman.
But not in Obama's case. Just the opposite!
Being a good president involves competence, integrity and making Americans better off, often by stopping government from doing things that make people worse off. (Rep. Paul Ryan's trailblazing blueprint for reducing the deficit and downsizing government is a prime example.)
To Obama, politics is about bamboozling people into thinking that he's making them better off when he's making them worse off.
The trick is to expropriate money from people who work hard and pay their taxes — and use the loot to scatter around enough political lagniappe to piece together a majority of bought-and-paid for votes strategically placed in the right locations to yield an Electoral College victory.
Obama never lets a cynical political ploy go unexploited. He blares away about raising taxes on the "rich." He knows that high taxes ruin the economy and hurt everyone who depends on a nongovernment job for a living.
But so what?
The sotto voce Obama plan: Get rid of pesky Republicans; get re-elected; raise taxes through the roof starting in 2013; knock smug middle-class Americans off their high-earning perch; crash the economy; catch everyone in a new "safety net" where all have the same modest government-controlled income and live under federal supervision.
In his "now you see it, now you don't" speech at George Washington University on April 13, the president of the United States declared war on mainstream America and common sense.
Obama insulted Rep. Ryan for trying to save and reform Medicare. How dare Ryan defy King Barack and stand in the way of ObamaCare and the government-run health care rationing that Americans hate?
Among other cost-cutting priorities, repeal of ObamaCare should be a condition for any increase in the federal debt limit.
Obama's latest phony "solution" to the Obama debt crisis is to appoint a committee to run in circles and gum up Congress sufficiently to delay a Budget Resolution that cuts spending.
Obama is funding a new political imperium built upon a massive voter turnout of government-oriented constituencies. These include government employees (about 17% of total employees); the roughly 60 million people who depend significantly on government assistance; and a large portion of the three rapidly growing "minority" groups who, according to census data, will soon constitute an arithmetic majority in America.
In 2008, African-Americans favored Obama by 95%. Overall, he got 67% of the Hispanic vote and 62% of Asians. In key locations, his percentages were sufficiently enormous and concentrated to tilt the electoral vote count. Obama got 67% of the electoral vote with 53% of the popular vote.
Members of unions vote heavily (60%) for Obama in exchange for favors. So do abortion supporters (73%) and members of the GLBT community (70%).
Obama will get the "kiddie" vote on campuses, the anti-American left, the hard-core environmentalists, the brass-collar Democrats and a lot of nice people who cannot bring themselves to vote against America's first black president.
Obama's potential for a "near lock" in the Electoral College shows the political power of "income redistribution" in combination with an ever-larger, all-pervasive government that (including state and local) controls and spends nearly 40% of GDP in a discriminatory manner among an increasingly diverse and balkanized population.
Members of Obama's potential coalition receive disproportionately large amounts from government but pay little of the cost of government.
A small minority of Americans (roughly one-third of eligible voters) already pay nearly all the personal income tax — and Obama will whip the "tax slaves" into paying more and more until they collapse.
Originally, the disparity in treatment between "net payers" and "net takers" was to help people who were actually poor (instead of merely less well-off than someone else) — but Obama and other levelers have made broad scale "redistribution" the main mission of government.
Jeffrey Miron at Harvard points out that in 2007 — before the recession — Washington was already spending about 50% of the budget on programs designed to redistribute money from the better-off to the less well-off.
The Heritage Foundation's Index of Dependency shows that dependency on government has increased by about 15% since 2007.
In Obama's un-American America, a modest standard of living will become both the minimum and the maximum.
Thanks, but no thanks.
• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.
Through previously secret clauses in Obamacare, Obama and the Democrats are corruptly buying votes with billions of our taxpayer dollars. It’s an outrage that should not be tolerated by the American public.
The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP), buried deep within the leviathan legislation, provides $5 billion to private companies, states and labor unions that is to be used for the payment of health insurance for those who are retiring and are under age 65. Not surprisingly, a significantly disproportionate amount of the money is going to unions, and companies and states that are strong supporters of the Democrats. Some is even going to the "mainstream" media (the Left) which, of course, doesn't hurt with regard to even more positive, gushing press coverage of Obama and the Democrats.
Such a slush fund is corrupt, intolerable and a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with the need for healthcare reform and everything to do with influence peddling.
This is yet more evidence of the depravity and duplicity of too many of our politicians (largely Democrats), the inherent problems of a large government and why it needs to be radically downsized, and the wasteful spending of the government. It adds another reason why Obamacare must be vaporized.
Washington Post and CBS receiving money from Obamacare slush fund
Matthew Boyle The Daily Caller 04/06/2011
Two mainstream news organizations are receiving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars from Obamacare’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP) — a $5 billion grant program that’s doling out cash to companies, states and labor unions in what the Obama administration considers an effort to pay for health insurance for early retirees. The Washington Post Company raked in $573,217 in taxpayer subsidies and CBS Corporation secured $722,388 worth of Americans’ money.
“It is fine with me if they continue covering the ObamaCare debate,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, in an e-mail to The Daily Caller. “When NBC used to cover energy issues, they identified themselves as a subsidiary of General Electric. CBS and Washington Post just have to disclose that they are subsidiaries of the Obama Administration.”
The ERRP, which Republicans call a slush fund, provides taxpayer money to Obama administration-selected states, companies and labor unions with already-in-place early retiree health insurance programs, and aims to make certain that their employees who retire early still have health insurance coverage before they reach Medicare eligibility age. Almost $2 billion of the $5 billion fund, which was supposed to last until 2014, has already been distributed to corporations. New projections expect the funding to run out before the end of 2012, if not sooner.
At a Friday morning hearing, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Rep. Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, asked Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight (CCIO) official Steven Larsen for how the administration decides who gets a slice of the $5 billion pie – and how the application process works. In his response, Stearns referred to the fact that corporations like General Electric, Verizon and AT&T in addition to several labor unions were getting taxpayer funding.
Stearns was not impressed. “This program is providing ‘free’ money to corporations, states, unions, and pension plans,” the Congressman said in an e-mail to TheDC. “In addition, the Washington Post and CBS received funding under this program. How can the Washington Post and CBS be impartial on the issue of health care when they received funding under the health care law?”
CBS Corporation spokesman Gil Schwartz told TheDC that newsroom employees, like any other CBS employees, are indeed allowed to take the taxpayer subsidies.
“Yes they are,” Schwartz said. “Why wouldn’t newsroom employees be allowed access to that money like all other CBS employees?”
CBS gets the money from the government, then provides early retirees with health insurance.
Though no current newsroom employees can benefit from the ERRP funds, they could retire early and still benefit from the money – or any newsroom employee who has retired since Obamacare became law could benefit from it too.
The Washington Post declined to comment. “We have no additional information to provide you other than what you have,” Post spokeswoman Rima Calderon told TheDC.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told TheDC she couldn’t disclose information about applications or disbursements for specific companies.
In addition to CBS Corporation and the Washington Post Company, recipients of ERRP funding include the United Auto Workers union, which secured $206,798,086 in taxpayer money, AT&T, which took in $140,022,949, and General Electric (GE), which raked in $36,607,818. GE has made headlines recently for not paying any U.S. taxes last year. IBM got $12,989,690 in taxpayer money.
Verizon pulled $91,702,538 in taxpayer cash, too, and General Motors received $19,002,669. More than $6 million went to different Teamsters groups nationwide, and millions more went to the United Mine Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
In another one of Andrew Klavan’s creative tongue in cheek political commentaries, he explains and exposes the real issues and factors regarding public unions in an entertaining and quite informative fashion.
The supportive arguments regarding the pay, rights, importance and contributions of public sector workers have been presented in a highly over exaggerated, asymmetrical fashion to almost a chimerical degree by the news media, labor bosses, members and Democrats. Meanwhile, the other side of these issues, that is, the one where the interests of the taxpayers and the financial viability of the States are concerned, has received sparse and denigrating reportage.
Ann Coulter’s editorial below simplifies, elucidates and places into perspective the issues involved in this “controversy”. It is quite eye opening particularly since this information is conveniently ignored by the Left.
Six-Figure Bus Drivers & Other Working-Class Heroes
Ann Coulter 03/09/2011
Can we stop acting as if people who work for the government are the heroes of working people?
Fine, we understand that Wisconsin public sector employees like the system that pays them an average of $76,500 per year, with splendiferous benefits, and are fighting like wildcats against any proposed reforms to that system. But it's madness to keep treating people who are promoting their own self-interest as if they are James Meredith walking into the University of Mississippi.
This isn't how we usually view people fighting for their own economic interests.
When Wall Street opposes financial reforms or a tobacco company opposes new cigarette taxes, no one hails them as "working men and women" who "deserve a decent pay and decent retirement." We're not told Wall Street has a "fundamental right" not to be regulated, or tobacco companies promoting their own interests are just trying to "help working people and middle-class people retain a good job in America." People on the other side of the issue aren't said to be "just trying to kick the other guy in the shin and exterminate him."
And yet all that was said by the Democratic governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, on MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, about government workers fighting to preserve their own Alex Rodriguez-like employment contracts.
Yes, we understand that public sector employees got themselves terrific overtime, holiday, pension and health care deals through buying politicians with their votes and campaign money. But now, responsible elected officials in Wisconsin are trying to balance the budget.
MSNBC is covering the fight in Wisconsin as if it's the 9/11 attack -- and the Republicans are al-Qaida. Its entire prime-time schedule is dedicated to portraying self- interested government employees as if they're Marines taking on the Taliban. The network's Ed Schultz bellows that it is "morally wrong" to oppose the demands of government employees.
Yes, and I guess pornographers are noble when they launch a full-scale offensive against obscenity laws.
Public sector workers are pursuing their own narrow financial interests to the detriment of everyone else in their states. That's fine, but can we stop pretending it's virtuous?
Because of the insane union contracts in Wisconsin, one Madison bus driver, John E. Nelson, was able to make $159,000 in 2009 -- about $100,000 of which in overtime pay. Jackie Gleason didn't make that much playing bus driver Ralph Kramden on "The Honeymooners." Seven bus drivers took home more than $100,000 that year.
When asked about the outrageous overtime pay for bus drivers -- totaling $1.94 million in 2009 alone -- Transit and Parking Commission Chairman Gary Poulson said: "That's the contract."
It's ludicrous to suggest that these union contracts were fairly bargained. Only one side was at the negotiating table. Ordinary people with jobs were not at the meetings where public sector compensation was discussed.
Union hacks play on our heartstrings, weeping about the valuable work government employees do: These are the people who educate our children, run into burning buildings and take dangerous criminals off our streets!
Politicians who do not immediately acquiesce to insane union demands are invariably accused of hating teachers, nurses or cops. In California, this has been standard operating procedure for decades. The voters never seem to catch on.
In 1972, E. Richard Barnes lost his re-election campaign to the California state Assembly after being accused by cops and firefighters of coddling criminals.
In fact, Barnes, a conservative Republican, had one of the toughest records on crime. But he had voted against fringe benefits and better pension benefits for public employees.
Years later, in 2005, Don Perata, Democratic state senator from Oakland, suggested that the legislature reconsider the requirement that 40 percent of the entire state budget be spent on public schools. The teachers' unions instantly plastered his district with fliers calling him anti-education. Perata is a far-left Democrat, who had himself been a teacher for 15 years before entering politics.
Fine, we like teachers, firemen and police officers. We appreciate them. (And for the record, it is statistically more dangerous to be a farmer, fisherman, steelworker or pilot than a cop or fireman. Soldiers also have pretty dangerous jobs, and they don't get to strike.)
Does that mean we should pay them $1 million dollars a year? How about $10 million? After all, these are the people who educate our kids, run into burning buildings and take dangerous criminals off our streets!
Assuming the answer is no, then apparently we're allowed to discuss government workers' compensation -- even though they do important work. As George Bernard Shaw concluded his famous quip (often attributed to Winston Churchill), "Now, we're just negotiating over the price."
Why do public sector employees have absurd overtime rules? Why don't they pay for their own health insurance? Why do they get to retire at age 45 with a guaranteed pension of 65 percent of their last year's pay -- as state police in New Jersey do?
This is asymmetrical warfare. Seven percent of the population cares intensely about public sector union contracts -- and nothing else. The remaining 93 percent of voters can't be bothered to care.
Meanwhile, state after state spirals into bankruptcy.
Despite the lying and the intentional misrepresentation of the situations regarding the public unions by Obama, the news media and the labor unions, it it the public unions who are the Goliath seeking to continue to exert their dominance over the States and their taxpayers. Their
The following article elucidates the involvement of the White House and the Democratic Party in supporting the public union in Wisconsin and how their choice to battle here might have been a major blunder that can have a domino effect.
Richard Pollock stated it succinctly and definitively:
“The decision by the Democratic Party and its allies to draw a line in the sand in Wisconsin was the wrong strategy, in the wrong state, at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and executed in the wrong way.”
Let’s hope that is the Lexington and Concord of a revolution of crucial changes regarding the public unions and their relationship with State governments and to their benefactor taxpayers.
Why Obama and the Dems Blundered in Wisconsin
Richard Pollock February 21, 2011
It is becoming clear that the Wisconsin battle was a strategic political blunder for President Obama and the Democratic Party. The decision by the Democratic Party and its allies to draw a line in the sand in Wisconsin was the wrong strategy, in the wrong state, at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and executed in the wrong way.
The White House, which for the last two years seemed so tone deaf over health care, jobs, and the economy, may again be displaying a stunning political miscalculation. Unless the Democrats pull the plug on their ill-conceived Wisconsin campaign, the statewide and national backlash now beginning to emerge may continue to resonate all the way to the 2012 presidential elections.
It will take time to unearth exactly who designed and sold the Wisconsin strategy to the president. But what is emerging is that the White House may have developed two strategies for 2011, not one. The first track, clear to us all, was for the president to tack to the right on the national stage, seek the statesmanlike high road, and negotiate deals with national Republicans.
The second strategy, now emerging, was to pick a target outside the beltway that could serve as a broad political narrative, attack it, nationalize it, and use it to rally Obama’s demoralized political base. It was a bold strategy. They chose Madison, Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-tightening initiative, and his effort to rein in public employee unions. They further decided to let loose angry union members serve as shock troops. Wisconsin would be the first test case, which would be replicated in other states, including Ohio, Indiana, and Idaho.
The plan seems to have been born both within the war room of the Democratic National Committee and within the Oval Office. The overall coordination for the operation was the remnants of the president’s 2008 political campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA). The strategy would be launched by the DNC and by the president, who, during the height of the Egyptian crisis, incongruously granted an exclusive interview to a Milwaukee TV reporter over union policy. While Cairo burned, he took time to decry a Wisconsin governor’s effort to rein in the budget and limit union benefits. Shaping the narrative for the attack, he said that Gov. Scott Walker’s effort “seems like more of an assault on unions.” [1]
The Wisconsin political blitzkrieg on Gov. Walker was not a spontaneous eruption. It is now clear that it was a highly organized operation planned in Washington, D.C., to unleash a national counterattack on the gains made by Republicans and Tea Party activists. Getting OFA and the president to act in close coordination was itself no small feat. The plan included busing in thousands of government employees, arranging for Democratic lawmakers to flee to an adjoining state, flying speakers and political organizers into Madison, organizing thousands to leave their jobs in public safety and in classrooms, and staging rallies inside and outside the statehouse. They even enticed sympathetic doctors to draft bogus doctor excuses for government workers.
It all worked like a charm. Except that it struck all the wrong notes and portrayed all the wrong images. There is nothing more unseemly that to see a president serve as healer in Tucson and a political hack in Madison.
For in the end, the images and messages tell the story. The showdown in Madison pits pampered public employees against hard-pressed taxpayers. It portrays union workers as an angry mob against those seeking orderly legislative deliberation. It paints Democratic lawmakers as outlaws on the run, undermining the democratic process. It launched a national debate about the generous salaries and benefits for government workers during a time of economic shortages. And it showcased school teachers who abandoned their children in favor of narrow, partisan political gain.
This is a bad unraveling of a political campaign.
The miscalculation by Democrats is understandable. They still believed Wisconsin was one of the key populist centers for Midwest radicalism. Living on history long past, they envisioned Madison as ground zero for a resurrection of progressivism. It was, after all, the home for progressives’ champions, whose heroes included the La Follette family, led by former Governor Robert La Follette, Sr. The La Follette family has been a radical left Wisconsin political dynasty for the last century. Robert Sr. ran for president under the Progressive Party; his son succeeded him as governor. His other son, Robert, Jr., served in the state Senate for 22 years and led the pre-WWII isolationist movement, a precursor to the present day anti-war movement. In 2010, Doug La Follette was the only surviving Democrat to win statewide office in the November election.
But there also is the lure of Madison, Wisconsin for radicals, many of whom populate the political leadership of the Democratic Party and the unions. Madison was the Midwest home for the far-left counterculture and for the violent, revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, an anti-war van loaded with six barrels of explosives detonated outside the Mathematics building [2] [2]at the University of Wisconsin, killing a physicist who was working late at night. The bombing became a sensation for SDS, and overnight the four suspects were put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. During one of the many Madison political protests, there was a three-day riot that led to the arrest, twice, of a student activist named Paul Soglin. He was later rewarded by being repeatedly elected mayor of Madison [3].
Surely behind this long history of progressive left politics, Democrats and union organizers might have thought Madison would be the first place to strike against the belt-tightening moves of a new, untested Republican governor. A line was drawn in the sand, and Madison would become ground zero in the unions’ effort to turn around their political prospects.
But they perhaps were tone deaf about Madison, just as they have been tone deaf nationally. They forgot that Wisconsin has been turning from blue, to purple, to bright red. In the 1990s it was former Republican Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson who drew another line in the sand over welfare reform. He won, and President Bill Clinton signed into law a sweeping change that sought to reward work over welfare. Thompson also was a champion for school choice, a campaign bitterly fought by the same teachers’ union that abandoned their classrooms last week for partisan gain.
Then came the latest 2010 election in Wisconsin in which there was a statewide sweep for Republicans [4]. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), long considered safe, was defeated. The governor and lieutenant governor swept to power. Today, five of the eight members of the state’s U.S. congressional delegation are Republicans. The sole Democrat in the government is Doug La Follette, who is secretary of state. The legislature is in Republican hands. And the architect of the victorious 2010 Wisconsin campaign was GOP Chairman Reince Priebus.
So the showdown in Wisconsin may assume national proportions. Priebus now will aim a national campaign against President Obama and the Democrats. And the Democrats chose Priebus’ state as their launching pad to smash Republicans.
The Wisconsin battle is not over. But it could be the beginning of a moment of clarity in which a small but entrenched special interest — government workers — is dislodged by fed-up taxpayers. And it could be a contagion that spreads to other states across the country.
UPDATE: Politico’s Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman report this morning [5] on how the unions’ high-risk Wisconsin strategy may come at a potentially steep cost: “Some strategists and labor officials watching the protest conflagration from the outside are beginning to fret that a large-scale defeat in Wisconsin [6] will have a devastating ripple effect, weakening labor state by state throughout the rest of the country.”
Despite the rhetoric from unions, Democrat politicians and the far left news media, this is a metaphor for the real situation. The greedy unions are raping the taxpayer with salaries and compensation packages far in excess of comparable jobs in the private sector. And that is still not enough!
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