Trickle Down Tyranny

by Michael Savage

  LaHood’s biggest accomplishment has been to rob millions of Americans of their time, privacy, and personal space, while rewarding Obama with millions in campaign cash.

  While Obama has appointed a cabinet of tax cheats, dupes, and double agents, he has a hard time managing them. Obama asked White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley “to repair badly frayed relations between the White House and the Cabinet.” Cabinet secretaries who have important constitutional responsibilities to manage wide-ranging portfolios, from defense and foreign affairs to energy and the environment, complained that the White House and the crowd of czars that Obama appointed have kept them in the dark. “The White House loops people out. The czars keep people from getting in,” a senior Democratic official told the Washington Post. That official said he has received complaints from at least three agency heads and that the “level of frustration is pretty high.”26

  Cabinet secretaries complained privately to the Post that the White House was a “fortress” that micromanaged their agencies and refused to consider practical objections raised by their bureaucracies while “senior administration advisors rolled their eyes at staff meetings at the mention of certain cabinet members.”

  The solution? To create a czar to manage the cabinet! Obama created a new position of Cabinet Communications Director to “better coordinate with and utilize members of the cabinet.”27

  Usually presidents manage their own cabinets or ask their chiefs of staff to do it. When Obama sees a problem, the answer is to create another level of bureaucracy.

  Maybe he doesn’t have the time or the patience. President Obama, like many tyrants before him, prefers the trappings of state rather than being trapped into actually making hard decisions. Like spoiled kings who prefer sycophants and fantasies to real governance, Obama prefers his agreeable czars and golf outings to doing the business of state. While Obama meets with his czars weekly and plays golf nearly that often, he can’t seem to find time to meet with his cabinet. Obama’s history of avoiding any real work and his dislike of hearing views that don’t support his own have created a big problem.

  Obama plainly doesn’t like Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Shortly after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico created the largest environmental crisis in a generation, Obama told Salazar that he couldn’t talk to the press any longer. Salazar’s Interior Department manages tens of thousands of acres of fragile saltwater swamps and marshlands on the Gulf Coast and those protected federal lands were directly affected by the oil spill. Instead, Obama insisted that environment czar Carol Browner would talk to the press.28 As I’ve explained to you earlier, Browner is an environmental zealot serving in an unconstitutional position with no direct responsibility for the Gulf Coast ecosystems ravaged by the spill.

  Obama also didn’t get along with his first Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, who he later demoted to Ambassador to China. When Obama held meetings with CEOs and other top executives in December 2010, he didn’t bother to invite Locke. Nor was the Commerce Secretary invited to attend Obama’s speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in February 2011. As a result, one senior official commented that Locke is “not a player.”29 Locke became just another cabinet secretary sidelined by Obama.

  Is it any surprise that Obama has not met with many of his cabinet secretaries in more than two years? He does see his czars on a regular basis, and he always has time for union bosses. As I explained in chapter 5, in Obama’s first year in office SEIU boss Andy Stern was the single most frequent visitor to the White House. After Stern left the union, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka visited the White House nearly every day and met with the president on a weekly basis.30

  Or consider this little item that I dug up. The union-approved head of General Motors, Dan Akerson, knows how to please Obama. The head of America’s largest carmaker—which is now 26-percent owned by the federal government thanks to Obama’s nationalization of it in 2009—is actually calling for higher gas taxes. Here’s what Akerson said: “You know what I would rather have them do—this will make my Republican friends puke—as gas is going to go down here now, we ought to just slap a fifty cent or dollar tax on a gallon of gas. People will start buying more Cruzes and they will start buying less Suburbans.”31

  Akerson says that higher gas taxes would force Americans into smaller, more fuel-efficient cars and might help boost GM’s money-losing electric car business. Akerson doesn’t have much sympathy for the average motorist. His proposal to hike gas taxes by as much as a dollar a gallon came at a time when gas prices were north of $4 per gallon in the Detroit region. As for people with large families or large toolboxes to transport, too bad.

  What about Obama’s large ownership stake in GM? “I have nothing but good things to say about them,” Akerson told the Detroit News.32

  A Modern-Day Dreyfus Affair

  Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a dashing young artillery officer in the French army in 1894, when he was accused of being a spy and handing over French military secrets to their German enemies. The French officer protested his innocence, but his Jewish origins made prosecutors and the public dismiss his pleas. In shackles and leg irons, he was shipped to the tropical penal colony known as Devil’s Island off the coast of France’s South American colony of French Guyana, and left to languish in solitary confinement. Devil’s Island was notorious for its brutal guards, harsh conditions, and malarial mosquitoes. Life expectancy for prisoners held there was barely four years. Most died from a combination of starvation, overwork, beatings, and the tormenting fevers of malaria.33

  But the Dreyfus Affair, as it was known, was a setup and the young captain was actually innocent. When the real spy was caught, senior French military officers hid the evidence and a military court acquitted the guilty man. The French army brought a second round of charges against Dreyfus based on fake documents created by a crooked French intelligence officer.

  By 1898, France’s most popular writer, Emile Zola, smelled a rat. He wrote one of the most famous articles in journalistic history, “J’accuse!” In it, Zola demanded that the government reexamine the evidence that had been used to wrongly convict Dreyfus. That same year, Dreyfus was brought back to Paris for the biggest and most controversial trial in French political history. The case dragged on for 12 years, but Dreyfus was eventually found innocent and restored to a position of honor in the French military. He fought bravely in World War I and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.34

  So why am I telling you this bit of ancient history? Simple. As I have been saying on my show from the very beginning of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, President Obama and underlings have created a modern-day Dreyfus case against Strauss-Kahn.

  Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the head of the International Monetary Fund in May 2011 when he met a housekeeper at the Sofitel New York hotel in midtown Manhattan. Hours later, he was taken off the plane of a Paris-bound flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport by New York City police officers and made to walk in handcuffs before the television cameras of the world. To his shock, he was accused of raping the hotel maid, an immigrant from the West African country of Guinea. When he was arraigned before a New York judge, he pleaded not guilty. Bail was set at $1 million and he was put under house arrest in a friend’s condo in Greenwich Village.

  Soon he had to resign as head of the IMF and spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend himself against criminal charges that could put him in a federal lockup for the rest of his life.

  So far Obama’s plan seemed to be working. With Strauss-Kahn out of the way, the new head of the IMF was Christine Lagarde, a Chicago lawyer who had given the maximum legally allowed amount to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

  But by July 2011 the case was falling apart, just as I predicted. And just like the case of Captain Dreyfus.

  I had been predicting this since the moment Strauss-Kahn was arrested on May 14, 2011. Here’s what I predicted on my radio show on May 16: That the maid was down-and-out and that after Strauss-Kahn soli
cited her for sex, she consented. But then the maid cried “rape” in order to make fame and fortune. I repeatedly reminded listeners that in America, people are innocent until proven guilty. I also reminded listeners that as the front-runner for the presidency of France, Strauss-Kahn has political enemies including the current president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants to keep his job.

  Since Sarkozy knew Strauss-Kahn’s well-known weaknesses for women, he knew perfectly well how to set him up. Then I played a clip from The Godfather Part II in which mafia boss Michael Corleone sets up a U.S. senator by putting a dead prostitute in his hotel room. Now the senator can be blackmailed into doing what the family wants. This is exactly what the Strauss-Kahn setup smells like, I said.

  If you were a rich and famous guy staying at a New York hotel, I said, a girl could have been “delivered with his morning orange juice.” There is no reason for Strauss-Kahn to risk his freedom, his fortune, his reputation, and his future by raping a chunky hotel maid from an impoverished West African backwater. He could have had a sleek model sent up just like former New York governor Eliot Spitzer did.

  On July 1, again I was right. Here’s what I said on my radio show:

  Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, was released today on his own recognizance. No doubt the case is going to fall apart. When you read the details, it becomes clear that I was right that this was a setup from the get-go. So who set him up? He was the head of the IMF, and was about to become the president of France, running against Sarkozy, who was falling in the polls. I speculated, as did many others with a brain, that Strauss-Kahn was set up in the hotel room. No doubt this was consensual sex and then she screamed rape. They knew his proclivities and that Strauss-Kahn could not control himself.

  So who did it? Well, you can guess who did it, you could say Sarkozy’s people did it, but you will never prove it. You could say that this woman Christine Lagarde was involved. She is the new head of the IMF and a protégé of Sarkozy. In fact, if you investigate Christine Lagarde, there are many interesting details in her past. For example, there’s a scandal in France where she arranged a questionable 285 million euro payout to a French businessman, Bernard Tapie, in 2007.

  Also, she worked for William Cohen. Remember him? Senator from Maine. Later Defense Secretary under Bill Clinton. Also well-known as a good friend of Timothy Geithner. Lagarde also rose to the head of a top Chicago law firm. Very interesting for a woman born in the United States, but from France, really. How did she rise to the top of a Chicago law firm? Let’s use Chicago now as a starting point. Chicago: Rahm Emanuel, Barrack Obama, and now the head of the IMF? It seems to me that Chicago is running the world and the world economy. Like I say, this is bigger than the Dreyfus Affair and it is worthy of a movie.35

  And I have been repeatedly vindicated by events. Here are some details you haven’t heard from the mainstream media. The hotel maid has admitted to lying and fabricating evidence on her application for asylum to the United States in 2004, making her essentially an illegal immigrant.36 Next the hotel maid phoned her boyfriend, who was held in a federal detention center pending a long list of charges, including possession of 400 pounds of marijuana.37 The New York Times made it seem like the guy was just being held for “immigration violations.”

  Next, I found out that the maid’s phone call was in a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a tongue of her native West African country of Guinea, in the hopes that the prison guards would not be able to translate her words. But all phone calls to federal prisoners are recorded and the New York district attorney was motivated enough to hire a special translator. A few days later, the translator brought back shocking news. The maid had told her jailed boyfriend, “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing.”38

  Then it emerged that she had lied about being raped before. She said that she had been gang-raped in Guinea and that is why she deserved asylum in the United States. That story turned out to be false and cribbed from another West African immigrant who had used the lurid tale to win asylum in the United States. So she decided to go with the lie that worked before, and witnesses told prosecutors; she would often use a tape recorder to play back the details of her fake gang rape so that she could tell the false tale in her sleep.

  While prosecutors initially believed the maid’s story and sheltered her under a fake name in a Brooklyn hotel, her activities in that hotel raised disturbing questions. She entertained a string of men, ranging from wealthy businessmen she had met at the Sofitel to “counterfeit merchandise hawkers and livery cab drivers,” the New York Post reported. While some of her clients paid her in cash, others gave her expensive jewelry, which is easier to hide from the prying eyes of the IRS. “While she was under our supervision, there were multiple ‘dates’ and encounters at the hotel on the DA’s dime,” a source told the New York Post. “That’s a great deal for her. She doesn’t have to cover her expenses.”39

  When prosecutors would ask her hard questions about details that didn’t check out, she would spontaneously start crying and even roll on the floor. And sometimes she would disappear for days, refusing to answer her phone when prosecutors called and failing to answer the door when they knocked.40

  Next, it turned out that she had lied on her federal and state income tax returns and had unexplained cash deposits of $100,000 into her bank account while she worked as a hotel maid under a union contract that, even with overtime, does not pay $100,000 a year.41 The New York district attorney now suspects that that nest egg was generated by “proceeds from sex for money exploits.”42 The New York Times concluded: “Little by little, her credibility as a witness crumbled—she had lied about her immigration, about being gang raped in Guinea, about her experiences in her homeland and about her finances, according to two law enforcement officials. She had been linked to people suspected of crimes. She changed her account of what she did immediately after the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn.”43

  While the case against Strauss-Kahn was falling apart in New York, the damage was still being felt in Paris. He was no longer head of the IMF and his ability to win an election in France was in doubt. Le Parisienne, a Paris-based daily newspaper, surveyed French voters about the possibility of Strauss-Kahn returning to electoral politics. Strauss-Kahn’s support among Socialist Party members (his political party) has fallen from near unanimous support to 55 percent. Among French voters of all political parties, only 49 percent of voters believed that Strauss-Kahn should run for office, while 45 percent did not. Before the hotel incident, polling for Strauss-Kahn was so strong that he was considered to be a shoo-in for the French presidency.44

  Days after the U.S. case started to publicly fall apart, a young Frenchwoman, Tristane Banon, announced she would be filing a lawsuit alleging attempted rape ten years ago during a 2002 book interview with Strauss-Kahn.45 You want me to believe this woman waited a full decade to seek justice, but couldn’t delay more than a few days after the collapse of the New York rape case to announce her intention to press charges? Strauss-Kahn can look forward to an endless string of false accusations as long as he remains a potential rival to Sarkozy.

  And let’s not forget about Christine Lagarde. As I said, I dug into her weird background, too. Remember, she is the new Managing Director of the IMF. She is the first woman ever to head the IMF and has held a number of cabinet-rank posts in the French government, including Minister of Economic Affairs, Finances and Industry, Minister of Agriculture and Fishing, and Minister of Trade. While she was born in Paris into a family of left-wing academics, she went to a pricey prep school in Bethesda, Maryland, the Holton-Arms School. While in that elite high school she worked as an intern for then-congressman William Cohen, who was later handpicked by President Clinton to be Secretary of Defense.

  After college and graduate school in France, she returned to the United States to work at Baker & McKenzie, a global law firm based in Chicago. She made partner in 1987, joined the law firm’s executive committee in 1995, and be
came the law firm’s first female chairman in 1999.46 She is a yoga-practicing vegetarian who never drinks alcohol, according to Paris Match.com. The divorced mother of two “is said to enjoy being depicted as a dominatrix who whips bankers.”47

  Tax cheat Timothy Geithner has nothing but good things to say about Lagarde, such as that “her lightning quick wit, genuine warmth and ability to bridge divides while remaining fiercely loyal to French interests, have been a source of admiration.”48

  So, at a time when the falling dollar and rising oil prices mean that Obama badly needs a friendly voice at the head of the IMF, he’s got one. Strauss-Kahn, as a guardian of the IMF’s finances, was reluctant to sanction Obama’s wild printing of money. Under Obama, the Federal Reserve Bank went from holdings of $800 billion in 2009 to more than $2 trillion in 2011. That’s why central bankers and large investors around the world have been dropping dollar-denominated debts and exchanging dollars for more secure currencies—they believe that the U.S. dollar is about to collapse.

  The job of the IMF is to maintain the stability of major global currencies, especially the U.S. dollar. Strauss-Kahn did not like what Obama was doing with the American money supply and repeatedly said so. Now he is gone. In his place is a friendly French-born Chicago lawyer who, we cannot forget, donated the maximum amount allowed to Obama’s 2008 political campaign and who has ties to the inner circle of Obama’s Democratic Party, including Treasury Secretary Geithner, and to former Defense Secretary William Cohen. Lagarde, so far, has been pointedly silent about Obama’s dangerous increase in the U.S. money supply. An early test of Lagarde’s loyalty to Obama will be the president’s demand for millions of dollars to be sent to the Egyptian government, which is jointly run by an Egyptian army junta and elements of the radical Muslim Brotherhood.