Class warfare in America
We all know that
anger is a powerful emotion. Politicians know this well and often
work to deliberately fan the flames of anger in order to attain their
own goals. Some, such as Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Mao Tse Tung,
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, attain mastery of the art of
manipulating emotions to lead their countries into war, or campaign
against supposed internal enemies to increase their personal power.
There is another political figure who is showing that he is a master
of this art and is working to not only increase the power of the
State but, also, his own influence, prestige, and power. This man
has changed the aim of his country's internal politics and has
radically altered the economic and legal foundations of that nation
in less than a year in office. That man is none other than American
President Barak Obama.
Mr. Obama, for
all his veneer of impassiveness and his soothing speeches in which he
proclaims his desire for everyone to live in peace and harmony,
fails to match his actions to his words. He is accomplishing this by
fanning the flames of class hatred and resentment with his constant
repetition of what has quickly become the official myth of the
current economic crisis with which all of us are living. In almost
every speech, interview, and press conference which he gives the
President is at pains to repeat the same distortions, omissions, and
outright lies about the causes and course of our economic problems.
That in itself would be bad enough, but President Obama, as part of
his propaganda offensive, is urging banks and other financial
institutions to continue with many of the same policies that have
caused all this trouble in the first place. He is putting banks in a
damned of they do and damned if they don't position – for they will
be the first ones blamed, again, when the next round of economic
trouble comes our way, as it must when all of the hundreds of
billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has created out of thin
air begin coursing they way through the economy. Chances are good
that all of that new fiat money will trigger a round of inflation
that will make that of the the late 1970s and early 1980s look like
small potatoes. But I digress.
The President
has launched what amounts to a class war by repeating that the cause
of our current mess is attributable, in large part, to the actions of
grossly overpaid, greedy bankers, hedge fund managers, and other
banking and investment professionals. He goes on to compound the
deceit by asserting that those same greedy people are refusing to
loan money to supposedly deserving businesses and individuals in
spite of having received hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP
funds in order to avoid bankruptcies. According to what has become
the gospel according to Saint Obama, misguided Federal policies such
as the Community Reinvestment Act, the demand for more and more
mortgage backed securities on the part of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
combined with market distorting, artificially low interest rates set
by the Federal Reserve have nothing to do with our problems. Indeed,
the Federal government is cast as the hero of the drama because of
its selflessness in acting to provide untold billions of dollars in
taxpayer-backed funds to bail out the short-sighted greedy bankers
and financiers, takeover AIG, GM, and Chrysler and prevent what is
portrayed as an economic cataclysm. By acting as it did the Federal
government has supposedly protected us all from that dread phenomenon
– market instability, whatever that is – and enabled most
Americans to continue life as usual.
By making use of
a willing left-leaning mass media propaganda machine the American
people have been subjected to a nearly continuous barrage of
misinformation. This has resulted in many Americans becoming ever
more angry with the “greedy bankers” who are supposed to be at
the heart of the mess which has cost millions of ordinary citizens
their jobs. And President Obama has not been slow to take advantage
of the emotional storm which he has had a large part in creating. He
is proposing to slap a bunch of new regulations on banks and
financial markets. This is to be expected from a Democratic
President elected on a platform promising some sort of undefined
“change.” The new part of the proposed policy changes involves
using the power of a now nearly-unrestrained Federal government to
set limits on the pay of executives in the banking and financial
sectors whose companies partook of TARP funds. Little did these
people realize what a poison pill they were being handed when then
Treasury Secretary Henry “Chicken Little” Paulson brought them
the bailout money that he had frightened our spineless
Congresscritters into giving him. The President's new proposals are
certainly not part of any deal they thought they were signing up for.
This is not the
first time that a misguided economically-illiterate president has
imposed wage controls. It is the first time that wage controls have
been targeted at a single group of employees and certainly the first
time they have been introduced without even the poor excuse of
fighting inflation (which was used during WII and later by Richard
Nixon in the early 1970s). This move represents the opening shot in
a class war: carefully aimed at a group which has been painted black
by the State's propaganda machine for more than a year. Those cheers
you hear in the background are coming from the throats of American
citizens who have not only been unable to see through the State's
propaganda smokescreen, but are also unable to see that this
assertion of Federal power marks a precedent which will some day be
applied to them. President Obama is openly proclaiming that this
wage cap is being adopted only to punish an unpopular class. What
will happen to the next class that displeases him – say small
business owners who fail to provide whatever the Federal government
should decide is needed as part of the president's health care reform
effort? How about the doctors and other health care professionals
who “make too much?” After all, we've already been told many
times that those who make more than $250,000 a year are wealthy and,
by socialist definition, have too much money.
The Federal
government under President Obama has already shown that it does not
care about enforcing contract law – as is evident from the many
demands from both the White House and Capital Hill that bonuses,
contractually owed to former Merrill Lynch employees, not be paid by
Bank of America – which didn't want ML in the first place. (See:
http://www.ncbusinesslitigationreport.com/articles/fiduciary-duty/
partway down the page with the title “Threats and Secret Promises:
Bank of America's Merger with Merrill Lych”). This government has
no concern about passing what amount to ex post facto laws (forbidden
explicitly by the constitution) when it comes to dealing with the
economic crisis we find ourselves in, particularly when those laws
apply to those greedy bankers. President Obama and his team of merry
men, ably assisted by Congresscritter Barney Frank and his fellow
clowns on the House Financial Services Committee, have no problem
with unilaterally changing the rules of the game, after the other
side has already started playing by the rules as originally written
down. (See:
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2009/10/barney-frank-on-wall-street-pay-limits.html,
and
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/12/frank-willing-to-take-oba_n_157172.html)
Not content with limiting the pay of executives whose companies took
advantage of TARP funds the president and his allies are seeking to
extend these limits across the spectrum of financial service
companies.
Now, I'm not
defending the actions of the Wall Street bankers who helped bring
about the current mess, they do have a fair share of the blame for
not having had the sense to see that Federal government-induced
market distortions were bound to come back and bite them in the ass.
Nor am I defending the incredible salaries some of them have gotten
over the years, although there is at least some economic
justification for disbursing billions of dollars in bonuses for good
performance. The truth of the matter is that the bankers and
financiers are not blameless and, if they had any sense of honor, at
least some of them should be seeking to give back some of the money
they received for making decision which, in the long run, have turned
out to be horrible mistakes. If they can live with their consciences
I, as a good libertarian, am not going to try to coerce them into
doing anything they don't want to do as regards their levels of
compensation.
But I am
concerned with where Mr. Obama is taking this nation. In less than a
year in office he has made changes in this nation's economic
structure which would bring smiles to the faces of Karl Marx, V.I.
Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung – taking over large parts of the economy
directly with the takeovers of GM and Chrysler and making other
sectors dance to his tune, as with Wall Street and, soon enough,
health care. The changes that FDR wrought upon this nation's
economic structure are but pimples compared to those of a man who has
never run a business, has never had to adhere to a budget, managed to
vote “present” more than anyone else in Illinois history when he
held office in that unfortunate state, and now is in charge on what
was once a vibrant national economy. His continued calls for more
regulations to be placed on America's financial sector are meeting
with wide acclamation and, most likely, will be put in place –
complete with salary caps for executives in that arena. Little does
he realize that in doing so he will be adding costs to financial
transactions performed in this country – costs which are not found
in many other places which would love to have the business we will be
losing. Barak Obama has shown that he is a master at crowd
manipulation – especially when that crowd consists of people
convinced that life “owes” them everything from a place to live,
to food, to health care simply because they exist. Class warfare is
alive and well in the United States. We can only hope that it will
not become physical in nature.