As I write this, it is the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, a day when the sacred merges with the secular, when broadcast/broadband America becomes one guacamole nation. The Cardinals are underdogs. God bless ’em.
Today, as a working American, I am the underdog too. Underdogs know fear. What with wondering if the job will be there Monday morning, if the pension plan will lose value again this week, if Congress will really borrow from our unborn grandchildren’s paychecks to finance the biggest pork-laden political payoff in history – underdogs fear fear itself, and for good reasons.
Bush started this madness. His $750 billion bailout “abandoned free enterprise principles to save free enterprise.” This Bushism is accurate and Orwellian at the same time. While people occasionally rob banks, it is quite a spectacle to see the biggest banks robbing the people.
Just three months ago, the bank “bailout” was designed to unfreeze credit and prevent recession. Today, credit is frozen, businesses are laying off and the banks used the money to buy up competing banks, order new jets and remodel offices.
Now it comes out that the $750 billion was just the down payment. Banks now claim that bad loans now could reach $4 trillion, and look to the taxpayers to buy these bad loans to “unfreeze credit and prevent depression.”
I’m in a depression just thinking about this heistory (the big bank heist of the people’s money). Wave three of this heist is the tsunami of derivatives gone bad – some $80 trillion in side bets gone sour. Who will back these bad bets? If you said the underdog working American, claim your gold star. Congress is all too willing to borrow (and print) whatever money it takes to control the banking system, and through the banks, the formerly private sector. Freedom is the underdog in this fight.
Now comes Obama’s “stimulus” bill – nearly $1 trillion to grow government, increase welfare and finance a permanent campaign to cement Democratic Party control.
The bill is a liberal wish list that includes repeal of Clinton’s welfare reform, aid to the most irresponsible deficit spending state governments (like my own California), grants to ACORN and other “community groups” to make voter fraud a permanent feature of Democratic Party success at the polls and direct payments (called “tax cuts”) to illegal aliens. The smallest part of the bill is the infrastructure construction, and that has the most public support.
Taxpayers are the underdog in this debate. The Democrat majority in the Congress senses an historic opportunity to use the fears of underdog working Americans. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has openly declared that a crises is an opportunity for change. Obama has promised “change.” Is this the “change” you were hoping for?
In 1929, the federal government cost just 2 percent of the gross domestic product (the whole economy). Today the Feds are 22 percent of the GDP; Obama’s “stimulus” (and the follow-on takeover of health care, the financial system, the auto industry, etc.) will give the federal government more than 40 percent of the GDP.
You will go to the doctor you are told to go to, who will treat you to the extent and with the procedures and medications allowed by Tom Daschle. You will drive a car designed by Nancy Pelosi. You will get a loan based on your race/ethnicity and approved by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Or maybe not. The underdog is stirring. This may not be the “change” the majority voted for. The Senate is besieged with phone calls and e-mail denouncing the $1 trillion dollar heist. Even Democrat senators (Ben Nelson) seek to strip the pork and politics from the “stimulus.”
Obama and Congress are not giving up. The tax cheat (and whiz kid who was the architect of Bush’s big bank heist) is made Treasury secretary. To create a filibuster proof Senate, Judd Gregg, R-N.H., is offered the bribe of commerce secretary, so that the Democratic governor of New Hampshire can appoint a Democrat in Gregg’s place. Al (count all the votes) Franken declares himself the winner in the Senate race in Minnesota as soon as he is ahead in the recount and with many votes still uncounted.
In the coming crucial week, I’m rooting for the underdog working American taxpayer in the showdown over the biggest government power and money grab in our country’s history.
And today, I’m rooting for the underdog Arizona Cardinals.
Lost causes, or upset victories? By the time you read this, the Super Bowl will be decided. But the fate of our constitutional republic will still hang in the balance.
