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Obama Attempts To Pull Off Greatest Rip-Offs, Con Jobs In History
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
As an old-time consumer reporter, I can tell you when a salesman says you have to do the deal right now, chances are he’s a rip-off artist, and a good general rule is to walk away — or better yet, run away.
The old now-or-never routine is generally regarded as a red flag flying. When a president tells Congress and the nation you have to do a trillion-dollar deal immediately or catastrophe is in the wings, you should be skeptical. When he says we’ll get into a recession we’ll never get out of, you know he’s just blowing smoky hot air, and has found a way to repeal the age-old business cycle. And after more study of the proposal, you may conclude as I did that President Barack Obama is pulling off one of the great rip-offs of history. Jamming a trillion-dollar deal down the throat of Congress and the American people without proper hearings, study, and consideration. I suspected from the beginning he was a fraud, and now I can add rip-off artist and con man to that message.
With all that talk of permanent catastrophe, someone ought to be asking whatever happened to the politics of hope. Perhaps Mr. Obama is modifying the immortal lines of FDR to now say, “We have nothing to sell, but fear itself.”
To use the president’s slogan, slightly modified for the sake of truth, if we pass that trillion-dollar boondoggle, it will be a catastrophe. It will not be a stimulus. As Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., pointed out, the bill is 7 percent stimulation and 93 percent pure spending. It is just a bill to transfer power to the federal government and please most of the special interest groups that are the Democratic Party.
It will sink us into hopeless debt and deficits, and place a stranglehold on generations yet to come. It will weaken the economy in the long run by sucking up money for investments and lessen our liberty. As the government gets bigger, the freedom and liberty of its citizens get smaller. This is a step in the Obama plan to convert America into a European-style socialist country. He wants to spread the wealth around and, in his first weeks, he’s made a dramatic move toward doing just that.
There’s no excuse for going along with this fast shuffle. We were told the world was coming to an end if Congress didn’t pass the $700 million bailout of the banks. Give me a break. Now another trillion dollars, with the message that another trillion is on the way. To borrow a phrase from the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., a trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there add up to real money.
President Obama says we’re heading toward a catastrophe unless Congress rubber-stamps his stimulus package. I say again we are heading toward a catastrophe if Congress passes that package. And I regret to say that three Republicans have to assume joint responsibility for one of the great rip-offs and con jobs of history. The three include our own Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. Perhaps this is his not so subtle way of saying he doesn’t want to be re-elected after all come next year. They have joined the Democrats to prevent a filibuster and give the bill at least a filibuster-proof 60 votes. The three perhaps should be called the traitorous triumvirate. With many Republicans like that, you’d have to say the Party is over.
There’s no emergency that requires this kind of reckless haste and abandonment of the most basic of checks and tests. This is like a doctor who says surgery is so urgently needed that he pulls out his pocketknife and starts operating on you in the examining room without bothering to take the minimum precautions that go with surgery … and without anesthesia.
President Obama is committing a fraud pure and simple, along the lines of the traditional consumer rip-off I’ve reported on for many years. And there’s another aspect to his fakery. He talks bipartisanship, but he really wants jackboot saluting without consideration and thinking. He uses his usual ploy of characterizing any question about his trillion-dollar boondoggle and catastrophe as a delay, a distraction and all that jazz. I’m surprised he didn’t say that’s the old politics, too. Any criticism during the campaign, however valid, was dismissed as a distraction. In Obamese, a distraction is any criticism of Mr. Obama.
Take a look at the speech he gave in Williamsburg, Va., to the Democratic caucus, and see if you can find even the faint whiff of bipartisanship. It was a highly partisan rant. Read his speech and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And read the speech as delivered, with a jigger of truth accidentally slipping in via Obama ad libs, not the speech as prepared.
Mr. Obama, full of sarcasm and not bipartisanship, said, “So then you get the argument, ‘well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill.’ What do you think a stimulus is?” As the audience cheered, hooted, and hollered, he said, “That’s the whole point.”
That’s not the whole point and the statement shows Mr. Obama’s profound lack of both understanding and bipartisanship. He thinks that spending equals economic stimulation. That’s totally wrong. All spending is not stimulation. Some may go into bank accounts and not get the economy going.
Stimulation requires a certain kind of spending that increases spending, investment, and economic growth. His own economic adviser, Larry Summers says a stimulus should be targeted, timely and temporary. The Obama stimulus is scattershot, not targeted; much of it will take years to generate economic activity, so it is not timely; and it will result in many permanent government programs, so it is not temporary. If Mr. Obama’s misconception was correct, all Congress would have to do is to wildly appropriate money, which is what it is doing.
Then he warned Republicans not “to come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.” He said that America “did not vote for the false theories of the past, and they didn’t vote for phony arguments and petty politics.” Translated that means the Republicans are just proposing “tired arguments,” “worn ideas,” “phony arguments” and “petty politics.” He’s not reaching out for compromise, he’s trying to poke them in the eyes.
He said, “critics say the bill is full of pet projects. When was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it? Not one.” But he never answered one to the basic criticisms on the merits —that the bill is just a Christmas tree of every liberal spending idea the Democrats have been dreaming about for 30 years.
Mr. Obama has made his views clear. As he told Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., “We won.” Translated we have the power so we’ll do anything we want. He also betrayed his blind partisanship by turning over the writing of the original House bill to Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who he knows would write a straight Democratic party-line bill and freeze the Republicans out altogether. That’s exactly what she did. During the Senate debate, she derided the quest for bipartisanship as a “process argument” and claimed the Senate cuts “will do violence to the future.” Ms. Pelosi, in other words, views bipartisanship as just some sort of debate maneuver that is unneeded in the legislative process.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the so-called moderates attempting to work out a compromise in the Senate were trying to hold the president hostage. What this all boils down to is that Mr. Obama and company define bipartisanship, as agreement with their agency and partisanship is any disagreement. As the old saying goes, their approach is to say, “jump” and expect you to reply, “How high?”
How did he respond to the cable news critics who have been so effective, so specific, and so extensive in putting forth criticism of the stimulus package? He referred to that as just “cable chatter.” Webster’s New World Collegiate Dictionary defines chatter as follows: “to talk fast, incessantly, and foolishly.” How’s that for reaching out to critics and how’s that for encouraging the robust debate on which democracy depends? This chatter-matter was not in the prepared text. It was an Obama ad lib, and suggests what he really thinks about his critics when his speechwriters and handlers are not speaking from the teleprompter.
When he finally gets specific, he’s wrong. For example, he said, “Well, you know, you want to replace the federal fleet with hybrid cars. Well, why wouldn’t we want to do that? That creates jobs for people who make those cars. It saves the federal government energy. It saves the taxpayers energy.”
The first thing you learn about buying cars is that you pay through the nose if you replace cars early on, because of the heavy front-loaded depreciation on cars. You save by running cars longer, and I’m speaking as a man who is driving a 1995 Ford. Just because you save energy doesn’t mean you save money. You could buy anything, and say you were creating jobs, and you could replace every electric appliance owned by the federal government and probably find more energy efficient units. That doesn’t mean you’re making a wise buying choice.
How about tearing down all federal buildings and replacing them with more energy efficient ones. That would put a lot of people to work. That would stimulate economic activity. But it would also stimulate bankruptcy. And replacing the federal fleet, for reasons indicated, makes no sense as a stimulus measure or for any other good reason. His package is not a road to economic stimulation, but to national bankruptcy.
To slightly readjust Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, we’re heading toward the edge of a cliff with this stimulus package. So start calling your senators and representatives and tell them you oppose the Obama stimulus bill. It’s obvious that Congress and the president won’t deliver what the country needs on their present course. So if we’re going to have a good outcome it will take citizens coming to the aid of their country, and saving the president the Congress from a catastrophic mistake.
You might even call the White House, and ask the president what happened to his frequently repeated campaign promise to go over every budget and bill line-by-line to get rid of the pork, the fat, the earmarks, and the rest of the legislative garbage.
On his most important piece of legislation, he is already breaking one of his most important promises. Just one item of proof that the man is a phony, a fraud, and a hypocrite par excellence. He has served up his most important legislative proposal, and it is pure pork, pure hypocrisy, pure fraud, and the work of a pure phony and con man. The only Obama change is more spending, bigger deficits, bigger government and less liberty.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
The old now-or-never routine is generally regarded as a red flag flying. When a president tells Congress and the nation you have to do a trillion-dollar deal immediately or catastrophe is in the wings, you should be skeptical. When he says we’ll get into a recession we’ll never get out of, you know he’s just blowing smoky hot air, and has found a way to repeal the age-old business cycle. And after more study of the proposal, you may conclude as I did that President Barack Obama is pulling off one of the great rip-offs of history. Jamming a trillion-dollar deal down the throat of Congress and the American people without proper hearings, study, and consideration. I suspected from the beginning he was a fraud, and now I can add rip-off artist and con man to that message.
With all that talk of permanent catastrophe, someone ought to be asking whatever happened to the politics of hope. Perhaps Mr. Obama is modifying the immortal lines of FDR to now say, “We have nothing to sell, but fear itself.”
To use the president’s slogan, slightly modified for the sake of truth, if we pass that trillion-dollar boondoggle, it will be a catastrophe. It will not be a stimulus. As Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., pointed out, the bill is 7 percent stimulation and 93 percent pure spending. It is just a bill to transfer power to the federal government and please most of the special interest groups that are the Democratic Party.
It will sink us into hopeless debt and deficits, and place a stranglehold on generations yet to come. It will weaken the economy in the long run by sucking up money for investments and lessen our liberty. As the government gets bigger, the freedom and liberty of its citizens get smaller. This is a step in the Obama plan to convert America into a European-style socialist country. He wants to spread the wealth around and, in his first weeks, he’s made a dramatic move toward doing just that.
There’s no excuse for going along with this fast shuffle. We were told the world was coming to an end if Congress didn’t pass the $700 million bailout of the banks. Give me a break. Now another trillion dollars, with the message that another trillion is on the way. To borrow a phrase from the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., a trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there add up to real money.
President Obama says we’re heading toward a catastrophe unless Congress rubber-stamps his stimulus package. I say again we are heading toward a catastrophe if Congress passes that package. And I regret to say that three Republicans have to assume joint responsibility for one of the great rip-offs and con jobs of history. The three include our own Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. Perhaps this is his not so subtle way of saying he doesn’t want to be re-elected after all come next year. They have joined the Democrats to prevent a filibuster and give the bill at least a filibuster-proof 60 votes. The three perhaps should be called the traitorous triumvirate. With many Republicans like that, you’d have to say the Party is over.
There’s no emergency that requires this kind of reckless haste and abandonment of the most basic of checks and tests. This is like a doctor who says surgery is so urgently needed that he pulls out his pocketknife and starts operating on you in the examining room without bothering to take the minimum precautions that go with surgery … and without anesthesia.
President Obama is committing a fraud pure and simple, along the lines of the traditional consumer rip-off I’ve reported on for many years. And there’s another aspect to his fakery. He talks bipartisanship, but he really wants jackboot saluting without consideration and thinking. He uses his usual ploy of characterizing any question about his trillion-dollar boondoggle and catastrophe as a delay, a distraction and all that jazz. I’m surprised he didn’t say that’s the old politics, too. Any criticism during the campaign, however valid, was dismissed as a distraction. In Obamese, a distraction is any criticism of Mr. Obama.
Take a look at the speech he gave in Williamsburg, Va., to the Democratic caucus, and see if you can find even the faint whiff of bipartisanship. It was a highly partisan rant. Read his speech and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And read the speech as delivered, with a jigger of truth accidentally slipping in via Obama ad libs, not the speech as prepared.
Mr. Obama, full of sarcasm and not bipartisanship, said, “So then you get the argument, ‘well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill.’ What do you think a stimulus is?” As the audience cheered, hooted, and hollered, he said, “That’s the whole point.”
That’s not the whole point and the statement shows Mr. Obama’s profound lack of both understanding and bipartisanship. He thinks that spending equals economic stimulation. That’s totally wrong. All spending is not stimulation. Some may go into bank accounts and not get the economy going.
Stimulation requires a certain kind of spending that increases spending, investment, and economic growth. His own economic adviser, Larry Summers says a stimulus should be targeted, timely and temporary. The Obama stimulus is scattershot, not targeted; much of it will take years to generate economic activity, so it is not timely; and it will result in many permanent government programs, so it is not temporary. If Mr. Obama’s misconception was correct, all Congress would have to do is to wildly appropriate money, which is what it is doing.
Then he warned Republicans not “to come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.” He said that America “did not vote for the false theories of the past, and they didn’t vote for phony arguments and petty politics.” Translated that means the Republicans are just proposing “tired arguments,” “worn ideas,” “phony arguments” and “petty politics.” He’s not reaching out for compromise, he’s trying to poke them in the eyes.
He said, “critics say the bill is full of pet projects. When was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it? Not one.” But he never answered one to the basic criticisms on the merits —that the bill is just a Christmas tree of every liberal spending idea the Democrats have been dreaming about for 30 years.
Mr. Obama has made his views clear. As he told Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., “We won.” Translated we have the power so we’ll do anything we want. He also betrayed his blind partisanship by turning over the writing of the original House bill to Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who he knows would write a straight Democratic party-line bill and freeze the Republicans out altogether. That’s exactly what she did. During the Senate debate, she derided the quest for bipartisanship as a “process argument” and claimed the Senate cuts “will do violence to the future.” Ms. Pelosi, in other words, views bipartisanship as just some sort of debate maneuver that is unneeded in the legislative process.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the so-called moderates attempting to work out a compromise in the Senate were trying to hold the president hostage. What this all boils down to is that Mr. Obama and company define bipartisanship, as agreement with their agency and partisanship is any disagreement. As the old saying goes, their approach is to say, “jump” and expect you to reply, “How high?”
How did he respond to the cable news critics who have been so effective, so specific, and so extensive in putting forth criticism of the stimulus package? He referred to that as just “cable chatter.” Webster’s New World Collegiate Dictionary defines chatter as follows: “to talk fast, incessantly, and foolishly.” How’s that for reaching out to critics and how’s that for encouraging the robust debate on which democracy depends? This chatter-matter was not in the prepared text. It was an Obama ad lib, and suggests what he really thinks about his critics when his speechwriters and handlers are not speaking from the teleprompter.
When he finally gets specific, he’s wrong. For example, he said, “Well, you know, you want to replace the federal fleet with hybrid cars. Well, why wouldn’t we want to do that? That creates jobs for people who make those cars. It saves the federal government energy. It saves the taxpayers energy.”
The first thing you learn about buying cars is that you pay through the nose if you replace cars early on, because of the heavy front-loaded depreciation on cars. You save by running cars longer, and I’m speaking as a man who is driving a 1995 Ford. Just because you save energy doesn’t mean you save money. You could buy anything, and say you were creating jobs, and you could replace every electric appliance owned by the federal government and probably find more energy efficient units. That doesn’t mean you’re making a wise buying choice.
How about tearing down all federal buildings and replacing them with more energy efficient ones. That would put a lot of people to work. That would stimulate economic activity. But it would also stimulate bankruptcy. And replacing the federal fleet, for reasons indicated, makes no sense as a stimulus measure or for any other good reason. His package is not a road to economic stimulation, but to national bankruptcy.
To slightly readjust Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, we’re heading toward the edge of a cliff with this stimulus package. So start calling your senators and representatives and tell them you oppose the Obama stimulus bill. It’s obvious that Congress and the president won’t deliver what the country needs on their present course. So if we’re going to have a good outcome it will take citizens coming to the aid of their country, and saving the president the Congress from a catastrophic mistake.
You might even call the White House, and ask the president what happened to his frequently repeated campaign promise to go over every budget and bill line-by-line to get rid of the pork, the fat, the earmarks, and the rest of the legislative garbage.
On his most important piece of legislation, he is already breaking one of his most important promises. Just one item of proof that the man is a phony, a fraud, and a hypocrite par excellence. He has served up his most important legislative proposal, and it is pure pork, pure hypocrisy, pure fraud, and the work of a pure phony and con man. The only Obama change is more spending, bigger deficits, bigger government and less liberty.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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