Trickle Down Tyranny

by Michael Savage

  Kickbacks for Obama’s Cronies

  When he announced his candidacy for president at the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln in February 2007, Obama said he was strongly opposed to “cynics, lobbyists, and special interests.” He couldn’t have sounded more high-minded. “They write the checks and you get stuck with the bill. They get the access, while you get to write a letter. They think they own this government. But we’re here today to take it back. The time for that kind of politics is over. It is through. It’s time to turn the page right here and right now.”

  Once in power, Obama began to reward those very same cynics, lobbyists, and special interests who wrote him checks. More than 200 of Obama’s biggest campaign contributors have won places of power inside the Obama administration or had their companies rewarded with federal contracts, according to a report by iWatch News.49 iWatch is a project of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group that does independent investigative reporting.

  Take the case of Donald H. Gips. I investigated him and found a rat. He is the Vice President of Level 3 Communications LLC, a Colorado-based telephone service provider. He raised more than $500,000 for Obama in 2008, and two other executives at his firm kicked in a total of $150,000.

  Gips’s reward?

  He was put in charge of selecting people to work in the Obama White House and later Obama made him Ambassador to South Africa. As for Level 3 Communications, it received $13.8 million in stimulus money. That’s a return 28 times greater than the firm’s total $650,000 investment. You can’t do that in the stock market, even if you are George Soros. But you can with Obama. It’s called Obamanomics.

  That’s how politics in Chicago works. Just ask former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was caught trying to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Wiretaps show how he played hardball with negotiations:

  If . . . they’re not going to offer anything of any value, then I might just take it. . . . Unless I get something real good for [the Senate candidate], . . . I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying. . . . I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. . . . [The Senate seat] is a [expletive] valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing. . . . I’ve got this thing and it’s [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.50

  Gips is not an exception. Almost 80 percent of those who raised more than $500,000 for Obama were given “key administration posts, as defined by the White House.”51

  The other major donors, who didn’t want to take a pay cut for working for the federal government, were rewarded with private meetings in the White House and invitations to its glitzy dinners. More than 3,000 White House visits have been linked to Obama campaign donors, according to White House records.

  Of course, President George W. Bush also gave jobs to donors, mostly making them ambassadors to South American and Pacific island nations. Overall, Bush gave 200 donors positions in the federal government. But Bush did so over eight years, while Obama rewarded more than 200 donors in just two years, according to Public Citizen, a left-wing watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader.52

  It’s the best administration money can buy.

  And selling sensitive government positions to Democratic donors is about to increase sharply. An Obama administration memo leaked to the Huffington Post reveals how they are going to handle a donor named Ed Haddock, who raised more than $200,000 for Obama in 2008. Haddock is the CEO of Full Sail University, a for-profit school in Orlando, Florida, that is under attack from Obama regulators. The memo notes that Haddock stopped being “helpful” in 2009 and may give to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for president. The memo was written by Jessica Clark, Florida Finance Director for Obama’s 2012 campaign, to top White House aides. The memo advised how the White House should treat Ed Haddock: “You should engage Ed on his concerns and tell him you want an ongoing relationship that seeks to hear his ideas and concerns, even if in the end we don’t always agree.”53

  The memo provides further evidence that Obama treats the White House as a cash register for political fund-raising. The memo itself may also be illegal. Under the Hatch Act, federal employees, including those who work at the White House, are banned from political fund-raising on the taxpayer’s dime and barred from engaging in partisan politics.54

  And have you heard about Siga?

  The company represents another example of how Obama uses stimulus money as his own slush fund to pay back donors. I’ll tell you about a number of Obama administration scandals in coming chapters, including the LightSquared scandal in chapter 7, “Tyranny of the Egghead Wars,” and the administration’s green energy scandals in chapter 9, “Tyranny of Green Energy.”

  But the Siga scandal may be the poster child for this administration’s corrupt crony socialism.

  Nicole Lurie is a former deputy assistant at the Department of Health and Human Services. Lately she’s been employed as an Obama appointee heading “biodefense planning” at HHS. What has she been investigating? Smallpox. That’s right, she’s been looking into the possibility that there might be a smallpox epidemic in the near future if terrorists unleash the vaccine as part of a biological warfare campaign.

  You might recall that smallpox was eradicated around the world in 1978.

  So Siga Technologies Inc., headed by billionaire and longtime Democratic Party donor Ronald O. Perelman, went ahead and developed a smallpox vaccine, then used its lobbying muscle to grab a no-bid contract for 1.7 million doses of a drug that prevents smallpox. In other words, a drug that has no practical use whatsoever. It also happens to be a drug that has never been tested on humans. And its estimated shelf life is a little over three years.

  Perelman has a lot of clout in governmental circles. Siga complained that the contract bid was being held up by HHS officials, so those officials were replaced. In May 2011, Siga was the only company to submit a proposal to deliver the vaccine. Nobody else was stupid enough to work on developing a drug for a disease that no longer exists. They didn’t realize what they were missing.

  Lurie was central in the negotiations, coordinating contacts between White House officials, HHS, and Siga. She also had a hand, allegedly, in making sure HHS replaced officials who were questioning the need for the contract with others who were open to Siga’s play.

  In the end, HHS agreed to pay $433 million to Siga. That amounts to $255 for each of the 1.7 million doses, doses that cost $3 each to produce. Lurie explained that the contract was awarded based on the estimated value of the benefit that might be realized from the drug, not the cost to produce it.55

  Nearly every time you turn over a rock in this most scandal-ridden of presidential administrations you find either an egghead trying to implement a radical agenda, an incompetent who is screwing up his vital duties, or an anti-American playing for the other team. And we haven’t even gotten to Obama’s Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder. That is such a deep mine of outrageous actions and unqualified dupes that it will take another chapter to begin to tell the story.

  Chapter 7

  Tyranny of the Egghead Wars

  When I was a kid in the 1950s and early ’60s, I would often help my father out in his antiques store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was a long ride in from Queens, but I went along with my father because it was like a passport to a different world, where I saw all types of strange characters. Everyone, rich or poor, wore a suit and a hat. I met lawyers and doctors, artists and sailors, stock traders and European art collectors. Once, I even met someone from the freak show at the Ringling Brothers circus.

  But, as far as I know, I never met an Ivy League professor.

  Of course, I heard about them. Respectfully. It’s hard to believe now, but back then, we looked up to them as great scholars, wise men.

  This wa
s before the Ivy League professors took over the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration and launched Medicare, which all of the sheeple thought would help the poor but instead is now bankrupting the government and the middle class.

  It was before the Ivy League professors put so many restrictions on our troops (“proportional response,” they called it then) that we lost the Vietnam War and under the Obama administration are now in the process of losing the war against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.

  It was before the Ivy League theorists wrecked the economy in the 1970s, causing the falling dollar, rising national debt, skyrocketing personal bankruptcies, and the worst unemployment rates since the Great Depression. At the same time, the auto and airline companies were going broke and demanding government handouts, while climbing gas and food prices ate up your paycheck—if you were lucky enough to have a job.

  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

  It took Ronald Reagan, a graduate of Eureka College in the tiny town of Eureka, Illinois, to fix the mess the Ivy Leaguers had made of the 1970s.

  Since Reagan, it hasn’t much mattered which party was in power. Ivy Leaguers have had a plan for everything.

  When they arrive at the White House, watch out.

  Ivy Leaguer George H. W. Bush (Yale) brought us the savings-and-loan meltdown, which cost taxpayers over $100 billion.

  Bill Clinton (Yale Law School) gave us Monica Lewinsky, attempted to pass socialized medicine in the form of Hillarycare—the precursor to Obamacare—and missed at least eight chances to take out Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

  From George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard Business School) we got the Iraq War—which he and his advisors almost managed to lose—and the economic crash of 2008.

  But the Ivy League superstar who puts the others to shame is Columbia University/Harvard Law School graduate Barack Hussein Obama.

  Obama brought us a recommitment to the war in Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have risen to record highs in the past year. He’s pulling the plug on our fighting forces in Iraq, very likely making sure that after our commitment of thousands of U.S. servicemen’s lives and billions of dollars, Iran will regress to become another in the growing number of Islamist dictatorships that are emerging as part of the Arab Spring that Obama has encouraged.

  Along the way, he committed the United States to war in Libya and to sending American troops into the central African country of Uganda. I’ll explain his reasons for doing this later in the chapter.

  Because neither Obama nor the fellow Ivy League eggheads he’s brought into his administration in record numbers have ever served in the military or know the first thing about what’s involved in deploying troops or making decisions in the heat of conflict, Obama dithered for weeks after the uprising had begun in Libya. During that time, Ghadafi sent tanks and machine gun-wielding soldiers against unarmed demonstrators in Tripoli. Soldiers followed fleeing students into stores and shot them in the head as they pleaded for mercy.

  Still, Obama refused to even make a public statement.

  The president was away on his midterm spring break in Brazil with his family when his administration finally came to a decision. That was shortly after he’d filled out his brackets for the 2011 NCAA men’s basketball tournament on ESPN1 and just before he promised the Brazilian oil company Petrobras $2 billion to drill for oil off their coast and that we’d be their “best customer” for the oil that was produced.2

  He briefly interrupted his Brazil trip to change course from noninvolvement, announcing that we would intervene in Libya in order to help the insurgents after all. The key to the U.S. intervention in Libya can be found in the president’s words when he revealed the change in plans: We cannot stand “idly by while a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy.”3

  Of course, that’s precisely what Obama had been doing for weeks.

  Don’t think that the president suddenly grew a spine, though.

  He wasn’t involved in the decision at all.

  All the President’s Women

  In the ivory tower occupied by the academics in his administration, real men are not welcome, so it fell to three women—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and leftist policy wonk Samantha Power—to actually decide that we should go to war against yet another country in the Middle East.4 The decision process reveals just how flimsy American foreign policy has become in the testosterone-free zone known as the Obama White House.

  In overriding the president and changing U.S. policy so that we could justify intervening in Libya’s internal affairs, Power, Rice, and Clinton based their rationale not on our nation’s vital security interests but on an obscure doctrine—championed by international leftist financier and political agitator George Soros—called “responsibility to protect.” It’s the way eggheads conduct military policy, and it shows how misguided America’s military priorities have become in the Age of Obama.

  In this case, their rationale was this: It was possible that civilians in Libya might be at risk for being killed by Moammar Ghadafi’s military forces when Ghadafi responded to the rebels who threatened his regime, so the United States needed to intervene to make sure that didn’t happen.

  That’s not the way I see it.

  Let me make it clear what the “responsibility to protect” doctrine really means.

  Here it is in plain English: America’s national interests aren’t about protecting ourselves or our allies, keeping the sea lanes open and the oil flowing for our economy, or even stopping dangerous radicals like the Iranian mullahs from getting the atomic bomb. What matters is preventing the deaths of people with whom we have no tie and no treaty.

  If we get any possible benefit from a military intervention, then the policy must be selfish and wrong. On the other hand, if it costs hundreds of millions of dollars and risks American lives for no long-term gain, then it is a “responsibility to protect” and we must do it.

  I told you that these Ivy Leaguers have everything backwards.

  In reality, the doctrine is a convenient excuse to selectively intervene in the internal affairs of our Middle Eastern allies in order to hasten their downfall and hasten the formation of Islamist governments.

  In other words, Obama doesn’t see our “allies” like I do.

  As I’ll explain in the next chapter, for Obama our old friends are now our enemies and our former enemies are our new friends.

  Getting back to the “responsibility to protect” and how it came to be the principle on which we entered another war: Samantha Power was a strong proponent of this misguided doctrine, and it was she who convinced Hillary Clinton to change her position on entering the combat in Libya. Like the president himself, the three women who declared war on Libya are all products of the leftist academic incubator that passes for an educational system in the United States.

  The first thing you need to know about Power is that she’s married to Cass Sunstein. I explained to you in chapter 6 about Sunstein. He’s the wacko leftist Harvard Law School graduate and former University of Chicago professor who was appointed by Obama to the position of regulatory czar. He hates gun owners and the Second Amendment, which protects the right of individuals to own firearms. He also opposes hunting, a legal pastime of some 12 million Americans. He’s described the suffering of animals inflicted by hunters as “morally equivalent to slavery and the mass extermination of human beings.”

  In a public speech in 2007, he dismissed the Second Amendment as a sign of the paranoia of the Founding Fathers against standing armies. He seems to imply that because the United States has a standing army and a national guard, it doesn’t need to have guns in the hands of ordinary citizens. He talks as if the meaning of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the rights of citizens to “keep and bear arms”—or in modern words, “own or carry” guns—has been twisted by the National Rifle Association and other civil rights groups. He argues that since the United States has a standing army of its own, the Second Am
endment is meaningless.5

  Samantha Power shares Sunstein’s and Obama’s leftist credentials and their political views. She also graduated from the bastion of leftists that Harvard Law School has become. Power was part of the Obama presidential campaign until she called Hillary Clinton “a monster” and had to resign. After the election, she took a position as an Obama foreign policy advisor.6

  She has been a longtime proponent of Soros’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine. In fact, her position on the issue won her a Pulitzer Prize. Her prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell, is an academic’s view of genocide. It was financed in part through a grant from Soros’s Open Society Institute. Power, as she explains in the acknowledgments section of her book, interviewed “hundreds of men and women” who had survived genocide. It is from this perspective that Power became a strong advocate of the “responsibility to protect” justification for intervening in the internal affairs of a nation despite the fact that there is no vital interest for the United States.

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another Ivy League law school egghead—she went to Yale—is the second member of this unholy trio. During her husband’s presidency, the Clintons requested that the subject of Hillary’s senior thesis not be made public. That’s because the thesis—titled “THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT—An Analysis of the Alinsky Model”—was highly favorable to the methods of radical leftist political organizer Saul Alinsky, who Hillary described as “a man of exceptional charm.”7