I’m talking about the LightSquared scandal.
Are you aware of it?
In that one, Obama tried to convince four-star U.S. Air Force general William Shelton, who heads the Air Force Space Command, to change his testimony so that it would be more favorable to LightSquared, a company that was developing a broadband network service and trying to place it on frequencies right next to those of the GPS. The Pentagon had been worried since it heard about the project that it might interfere with military GPS.
When General Shelton gave a classified briefing to senators and congressional representatives and staff, he dropped a bombshell: The White House had asked him to change his testimony so that it didn’t jeopardize the LightSquared project!
The general was asked to falsely testify that the proposed LightSquared satellite broadband project would not interfere with U.S. military GPS technology. Never mind that the safety and security of our troops on the battlefield might be endangered—the important thing was that the LightSquared project be allowed to move forward.
Shelton refused to give in, instead testifying that the White House had tried to make him lie before a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing. In his testimony, Shelton said that to approve the project would be like letting LightSquared “put a rock band in the middle of [a] quiet neighborhood.”36
More specifically, preliminary tests of the LightSquared product proposal indicated that even using a small portion of the band the company was granted a license to in 2004 would cause significant disruptions to GPS. CEO Sanjiv Ahuja complained that the company had been “forced” to spend upwards of $100 billion to figure out how to avoid the interference.
Let me fill you in on some of the details I’ve dug up.
The reason Shelton was told to change his testimony to favor LightSquared? The company’s majority owner is an investment fund run by Philip Falcone, and Falcone is a very big contributor to Democratic candidates. He and his wife gave more than $60,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2009.
Falcone’s story is important here, because it follows a common pattern of patronage and reward in the Democratic Party. Falcone grew up with eight other siblings in Chisholm, Minnesota. He was a good student and a hockey player, and he earned a scholarship to Harvard. After graduating with a degree in economics, he worked at the junk bond desk of Kidder, Peabody & Co. and spent time at Wachovia and Barclays as well. Like the other hedge fund managers who tanked the equities markets in 2008 and enabled Obama to be elected, Falcone bet against the markets and made a killing. He’s worth about $2 billion and is number 540 on Forbes’s list of billionaires.37
He’s one of Obama’s crony billionaires, and he expects to be treated like one.
It looks to me like Falcone and Ahuja felt they weren’t getting their money’s worth from the Obama administration. You see, Ahuja had committed a substantial amount of money to the Democratic Party in the past two years, too. LightSquared complained that the testing was taking too long, and in order to speed things up they tried to enlist Anthony Russo, director of the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, to insert the demand for a 90-day window for testing into his testimony before the House Science Committee. Russo refused, then compounded things by telling the committee what he’d been asked to do.38
Here’s what he has said on the subject: “The GPS community is concerned because testing has shown that LightSquared’s ground-based transmissions overpower the relatively weak GPS signal from space. Although LightSquared will operate in its own radio band, that band is so close to the GPS signals that most GPS devices pick up the stronger LightSquared signal and become overloaded or jammed.”39
LightSquared had already more than doubled the size of its lobbying team by 2011, leading up to its confrontation with Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It spent $830,000 in the first half of 2011 with the nine K Street lobbying firms it now employs. LightSquared executives have also been exchanging e-mails with White House aides in order to promote the company’s interests.40 The company’s primary lobbying firm is owned by Norman Brownstein, one of Obama’s biggest fund-raisers. In addition, on the advice of another of his big donors, George Haywood, Barack Obama at one time invested $90,000 in SkyTerra, the company that has since changed its name to LightSquared.41
Where there’s the smell of a scandal, there’s Obama’s puppetmaster, George Soros. A group known as the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition filed a petition with the FCC in April 2010 in support of Harbinger Capital Partners in its attempts to enter into competition with AT&T and Verizon in the broadband network business. The Public Interest Spectrum Coalition is made up of four other groups—Free Press, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and Public Knowledge. George Soros has contributed millions of dollars to these leftist activist groups: $1.4 million to Free Press, $1.7 million to Media Access Project, $3.8 million to New America Foundation, and $855,500 to Public Knowledge.42
Harbinger Capital Partners is Philip Falcone’s company, the one that owns LightSquared. Soros Fund Management LLC is reported to have invested in Harbinger Capital Partners as well.43
Do you understand the extent of the corruption that this administration is involved in? Barack Obama was prepared to risk compromising a fundamental military system and the safety of American soldiers in order to protect his fund-raisers and promote their businesses.
U.S. soldiers’ lives were put in jeopardy so Obama’s cronies can continue to live the high life.
The U.S. military is being sacrificed on the altar of political donors.
I see Barack Obama’s corruption and his support of the Islamist radicals at the heart of the so-called Arab Spring as amounting to war crimes. But they’re not war crimes against our enemies. They’re war crimes against the United States. They’re war crimes against one of our most important allies, Israel.
What Obama and the left have done to undermine the U.S. military falls into the same category. Our armed forces have become a hotbed of political correctness toward gays, women, and Muslims that is rapidly destroying morale and fighting readiness.
Former U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman, who was a carrier-based Navy pilot during his military career, didn’t waste words in an article he wrote excoriating military officials for giving in to political correctness. In his words,
The political correctness thought police, like Inspector Javert in “Les Miserables,” are out to get [Navy pilots] and are relentless. . . . Those attributes of naval aviators—willingness to take intelligent calculated risk, self-confidence, even a certain swagger—that are invaluable in wartime are the very ones that make them particularly vulnerable in today’s zero-tolerance Navy.44
Lehman explains that career military men now walk around in fear that they’ll be reported for a homosexual slur or an “indecent” remark and be disciplined—or dismissed—for something unrelated to their military responsibilities, and the environment has become one in which the good of the country is subverted in the name of the good of minority groups.
The military carries its political correctness well beyond punishing what should be inoffensive behavior against social minorities, to failing to punish life-threatening behavior on the part of Muslim religious minorities. Even in the wake of Major Nidal Hasan’s “alleged” murder of 13 military personnel in 2009 at Fort Hood, carried out in the name of Allah, the military remains afraid to stand up to this real existential threat. Another avowed Islamist militant, Private Naser Abdo, still faces trial for his attempts to purchase weapons that he intended to use in a Hasan-like attack. Prior to that, the army was weighing his request to be granted “conscientious objector” status for his Muslim religious beliefs, another way this administration grants validity to a religious belief whose core principle is the elimination of infidels.45
Since the ban on gays in the military has been lifted, the radical gay activist group OutServe is demanding that the armed forces targ
et gays for recruitment in the military. For its part, the military has completed sexual “sensitivity training” that is the final step for the repeal of the gay ban.
What you don’t know is that the results of a study that indicated that the military was ready to let gays in were phony.
The administration circulated the false information that 70 percent of military personnel surveyed felt there would be no problems connected with the repeal of the ban, in order to falsely convince senators and congressmen to agree to lifting the gay ban.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, found that exactly the opposite was true when the results were finally tabulated and published, long after the vote had been taken: “Nearly 60% of respondents in the Marine Corps and in Army combat arms said they believed there would be a negative impact on their unit’s effectiveness in this context; among Marine combat arms the number was 67%.”46
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has been training and shaping the officer corps of the U.S. Army for more than 200 years. The stone and brick campus on the Hudson River does more than turn cadets into officers and produce men who lead other men into battle. West Point serves as a guardian of the army’s most precious traditions and mentor to its highest-ranking generals until the day they retire. Throughout its long history, West Point has played a fundamental role in guiding the army as it evolved to meet new threats and adapted to new social realities. So positions on the U.S. Military Academy’s Board of Visitors are highly prized and surprisingly powerful.
The Board of Visitors functions like a corporate board of directors that provides direction to the army’s most sacred citadel. Under law, the U.S. Congress gets to appoint nine members of this powerful board and the president gets to appoint another six. So who did Obama appoint to this critical board at a time when the army is in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the shores of Africa?
Obama appointed former Captain Brenda S. “Sue” Fulton, an openly gay former army officer. Fulton was not a believer in “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She is a gay activist. She is a founding board member of OutServe, a group of active-duty military officers who are openly gay, and is a co-founder and executive director of Knights Out, an alumni group of gay West Point graduates.47
While she graduated from West Point in 1980 in the first class to include women, commanded a military intelligence unit, and was honorably discharged in 1985, Fulton has been a vigorous opponent of the U.S. Army’s regulations and laws regarding homosexual conduct while in uniform. It is not her private life that concerns me here; she can do what she wants. It’s that she went to war with army regulations year after year and is now in a position to implement a gay rights agenda in the military.
I don’t care that she is gay, but I don’t want her to turn our army into a social program at the same time it is trying to win wars on two continents.
Obama also appointed Patrick Murphy to West Point’s Board of Visitors. Murphy, a former Democratic congressman and an Iraq War veteran, is a favorite guest of Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show. What’s his big issue? As a congressman from Pennsylvania, Murphy championed the House program for recruiting more gay soldiers into the U.S. Army.48
Whatever you think of the president’s executive order and recent federal court cases requiring the military to open its doors to active gays and lesbians, designing, writing, and enforcing the rules of conduct for homosexual and heterosexual soldiers is going to be complicated and difficult. It is going to require balance and patience. Putting two gay activists into power means that the Board of Visitors will not command the trust of the troops or be able to debate the fine points of regulation with distance and sobriety. Instead, I expect Fulton and Murphy to be pounding the table for the most wild-eyed, politically correct rules possible. Soldiers in combat who use the wrong words might see themselves brought up on charges and their careers ruined. Subordinates who receive gay advances from their superiors will find a chain of command that looks at their plight with coldness and even hostility. Morale will suffer.
Obama just put the gay agenda on the table at West Point.49
Obama is also guilty of attempting to weaken our military by such actions as defunding the development of the F-35 fighter jet and shutting down our NASA space exploration program. As I’ve explained in chapter 4, he’s banking on the debt ceiling junta not being able to find the necessary budget cuts so that the automatic cuts to the military of $600 billion kick in, guaranteeing that our military is further weakened.50 He’s bowed to Chinese pressure and agreed to cut weapons sales to our ally Taiwan at a loss of more than 16,000 jobs and nearly $800 million in revenues for the U.S.51
He’s guilty of perpetuating the lie that there can actually be anything resembling “free and fair” elections in Middle Eastern countries when he knows, as the rest of us know, that a free election is an open invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups to intimidate the population and take over control of countries in turmoil. The invitation to hold “free elections” in Middle Eastern countries with no history of democracy and no democratic infrastructure or culture in place is nothing less than a naïve invitation to Islamist radicals to step in. The transition from a feudal Islamist theocracy to a modern democracy must be made very gradually, if it can be made at all. People with no history of establishing and maintaining democratic institutions must be led into their formation.
The Obama administration has no intention of leading that process. In fact, as I’ll explain to you in the next chapter, Obama has reversed American foreign policy completely. Countries who have been our traditional allies we now treat as enemies, while those who have been our enemies are now our new friends.
Chapter 8
Tyranny of Treating Our Friends Like Enemies and Our Enemies Like Friends
In the 1950s, when I was growing up, they were called eggheads. Today they’re called nerds. We’re all familiar with them. They’ve got an excess of IQ and a shortage of testosterone. They spend most of their lives inside the academic incubator with no real-world experience. They’ve never met a payroll or responded to anything more urgent than a fire drill, and they’ve never dealt with anyone who challenged their leftist politics.
After they graduate, they shuffle from campus to Washington and back. They’re our cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and presidential advisors. They bring along a “globalist” perspective that is an absolute danger to the United States’ position of economic and military supremacy in the world. Beatle John Lennon called them “college pudding.” It’s these people who advise Obama on how to conduct his foreign policy.
In the previous chapter I told you about how they decided which wars we would fight and which ones we would ignore based on the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Now I’m going to tell you about how they decide which dictators to support and which to oust.
These Ivy Leaguers, especially President Obama, have trouble telling our friends from our enemies. They tend to get it all backwards—more trickle down tyranny. They ignore or attack our old friends and give aid and comfort to our former enemies and eventually hope to get them to switch places.
The “Soros Doctrine” in the Middle East
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the phrase “international community” used by the Obama administration. The reason is that the term is code for “global government.”
The interna-a-a-ational community. You have to make it sound like the bleating of a sheep when you say it, because that’s how the people who are pushing for global government view everyone else on the planet. As sheep.
Global government is nothing more than warmed-over Marxist-Leninist communism on a planetary scale.
Did you think that what happened all over the Middle East during the “Arab Spring”—which has now become the “Arab Winter”—was somehow a spontaneous uprising of freedom-loving young people wearing blue jeans and carrying cell phones and determined to promote democratic government
in their countries?
In fact, the whole situation has been carefully orchestrated from behind the scenes by George Soros, the same man who helped engineer Barack Obama’s rise to power in the United States.
It starts with the fact that America is a rudderless, leaderless nation. Weak, inexperienced leaders like Barack Obama are easy prey for international power brokers like Soros. I explained in Trickle Up Poverty how Soros was instrumental in bringing about Obama’s election by working to cause the financial meltdown that enabled Obama to win. Obama had been behind in all the polls up to the time of the September 2008, financial crash, but he never trailed after it.1
Soros’s influence didn’t stop with getting a malleable schoolboy elected president. It continued to significantly affect the president’s foreign policy, from the fact that we now treat our friends like enemies and our enemies like friends, right down to how the administration conducted the war in Libya.
It means that everything is upside down and backwards in Obama’s foreign policy, just like George Soros wants it to be.
I’ll make it very simple for you. The Obama foreign policy can be summed up like this: Treat your sworn enemies like friends and your longtime friends like enemies. It’s the Ivy League way.
When a genuine democratic uprising against an illegally elected Islamist government in Iran began in 2009, Obama stood mute as Iranians were murdered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s military in order to quell the uprising. Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called Obama’s inaction “maybe one of the biggest betrayals of people’s freedom in modern history. . . . At the moment when millions were deciding whether to go to the barricades, the leader of the free world said ‘For us, the most important thing is engagement with the regime, so we don’t want a change of regime.’ ”2
Trickle Down Tyranny Page 20