Having computers and Internet access would enable them to e-mail their relatives, even see them on their computer screens. It would change their lives.
Gross couldn’t refuse.
In the fall of 2009, Gross made several visits to Cuba on a tourist visa, bringing computer equipment with him and helping to set up an intranet so the Jews scattered across Cuba could talk to each other without the communist authorities listening.
In December 2009 before he was able to make the next step—linking the Cuban Jews to the outside world—he was arrested. The Cuban authorities phoned his hotel room and asked him to come down to the lobby to pick up a message. Instead, the secret police picked him up.
For the next 14 months, he was held in a maximum-security prison. He kept asking what crime he had committed or what the charges were against him. There were none. They were simply holding him.
The little food he got in prison was tainted, and Gross became very ill. When Judy, his wife of 40 years, was finally allowed to see him, in July 2010, she was shocked. In seven months, he had lost 90 pounds. He wasn’t heavy to begin with. Only when the Cuban authorities believed that he would die soon was he moved to a military prison hospital, where he received some help.
In February 2011, Gross’s Cuban attorney came to visit him. He was surprised and grateful that the American was still alive. He said he had good news.
You will never guess what that “good news” was.
The Cuban communists had decided to put him on trial. He was charged with being a spy and committing “crimes against the state of Cuba.”
Why was that good news?
There was a slim possibility that he might be found innocent and released. Could that happen? His Cuban attorney, perhaps wanting to be kind, said, “It could.”
But it didn’t. In a trial closed to the American press, the prosecutor said Gross was a “mercenary” sent to Cuba to wage a “cyberwar” against the Cuban revolution. Ordinary Cubans are not allowed access to the Internet and giving it to them was a “counterrevolutionary” act.
The judge sentenced Gross to 15 years in prison. Gross is now 61 and will likely die before he is released. After his arrest, his 26-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. He may never see her again.22
Where was Barack Obama when all this was going on?
Playing golf, going on vacations, and ignoring what was going on in Cuba.
Throughout Gross’s long ordeal and travesty of justice, Obama didn’t utter a single word in his support.
To do that would be violating two of Obama’s strongest positions: his anti-Semitism and his support for communist dictators.
The only thing we heard from our government came from the press spokesman for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor. Vietor complained mildly that the communist judge’s ruling “adds another injustice to Alan Gross’ ordeal.”23
That’s it? Where is the outrage against an American unjustly held?
Why does Obama and his team have so much compassion for the terrorists held in a U.S. Navy base on one side of Cuba and no compassion at all for an American held on the other side of the same island?
Let’s cut to the chase: For Obama, Alan Gross is just a pawn in a bigger game. Obama doesn’t want to help this innocent American, because he has another agenda. He wants to improve relations with Cuba and its cruel dictator brothers, Fidel and Raul Castro, and he wants to make sure he doesn’t offend his Islamist “brothers” by supporting a Jew.
Obama has lifted restrictions on Americans’ sending money to relatives in Cuba. He wants to eliminate travel restrictions to Cuba. And he eventually wants to lift the embargo on Cuba. He wants to the Cubans to be our new friends, even if Alan Gross is left to rot in its prisons and his American family is relegated to staring at an empty chair where Dad used to sit. Imagine the pain of that empty chair on Thanksgiving Day or his wedding anniversary night.
That’s the Obama doctrine: Turn our old enemies into our new friends, no matter what the human cost.
Venezuela
The story goes like this: As the president was flying home from a trip to Spain in November 2010, he stopped by the cabin where members of the press are sequestered and made a joke. He explained that he was returning to Washington by way of Venezuela so he could pay a visit to his friend, Hugo Chavez. CBS reporter Mark Knoller tweeted this: “Obama joked he’d have AF-1 fly home via South America so he could see Hugo Chavez. Some joke.” Ed Henry of CNN had this to say: “POTUS a little punchy—comes to press cabin on AF-1 and jokes he’s stopping in South Am on way home from Europe to see Chavez. . . .”24
Chavez was fine with the president’s impromptu plan. He responded that he would “embrace” the president and “eat socialist arepas” with him.25
Hundreds of people responded to news of the incident when it was posted on the website The Blaze. One commentator had this to say: “Mr Obama will try to take America down with him and turn us into a Soros communist puppet. I for one will not let her pass into the night without giving my all to keep her free.” Another one wrote, “Who thinks he wasn’t kidding? Sounds like he just wanted to so see his friend and dictator . . . for some pointers on fixing the next election (if he ‘allows’ it at all) or taking over another private enterprise. WAKE UP America!”26
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is a dictator in the mold of his mentor, Fidel Castro. He has seized and shut down virtually all of the independent newspapers27 and his broadcasting Gestapo, Conatel, has closed more than 200 TV stations and 34 radio stations that opposed him.28 When judges dare to defy him, he has them removed.29 Chavez has also seized the assets of nearly two dozen American companies—including Cargill, Coca-Cola, Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, and McDonald’s, among others.
Let me give you an example of how this works. On October 26, 2010, Chavez said in one of his speeches, “The expropriation is already ready of this glass company.” Then he acted like he forgot the name of the American company he was about to seize. “What’s it called? Owens-Illinois. Expropriate it.”
Within hours, soldiers arrived at Owens-Illinois’ Venezuelan plant. If Owens-Illinois was part of one of your mutual funds, Chavez just reached into your retirement account and stole a piece of it. The company lost millions in market capitalization that day.30
Got any of those stocks in your retirement plan? Well, Chavez just stole from you. This isn’t small change. The price tag for seizing land, farms, sugar mills, and industrial facilities totals at least $23.3 billion, according to Ecoanalitica, a Caracas-based economic research outfit. If one counts the value of deposits seized in banks, Ecoanalitica says the total loss is more than $27 billion.31
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because Barack Obama is trying to do the same thing here in the U.S. In many cases, he’s succeeded.
No wonder people didn’t think the president was joking when he talked about detouring so he could visit his friend Hugo Chavez.
Let me explain it to you.
Obama has been trying to shut down Fox News and conservative radio talk shows since he took office, through his appointment of an FCC transition czar, Henry Rivera. Rivera is a radical leftist lawyer, a former FCC commissioner who’s working to try to eliminate commercial talk radio.
What’s Obama going to replace talk radio with? I’d say that his test of the nationwide Emergency Broadcast System on November 9, 2011, should give you a pretty good idea of Obama’s idea of good radio programming.
Obama has already seized two private auto companies—General Motors and Chrysler—and turned those assets over to the labor unions. He’s taken over the student loan business so he can exert near-total control over what students learn and how they pay for it. And he’s taken over the health insurance industry.
Maybe Obama doesn’t feel too outraged because he has acted just like Chavez. As one commentator put it, “Of course, the Obama administration has engaged in some nationalizations of its own, with little or no compensation paid. Jus
t ask the Chrysler bondholders or the shareholders in what is now officially called ‘old GM.’ So perhaps the administration has little sympathy for the small investor.”32
You don’t think we’re on our way to becoming Venezuela?
You’re not worried that Hugo Chavez is one of Obama’s “friends?”
So Chavez is making war on your retirement and what does Obama do?
Nothing. No speech, no trip to the United Nations, no warning that the U.S. will seize Venezuelan assets in America if he doesn’t return our property in his country. He does absolutely nothing.
In fact, the Obama administration couldn’t care less. When a reporter finally worked up the nerve to ask the then State Department spokesman, P. J. Crowley, about the theft of American property in Venezuela, here was Crowley’s rambling response: “Well, you know—statements are one thing. We’ll see what actual actions, you know, take place. But, you know, we would expect Venezuela to provide prompt, adequate, and effective compensation for any expropriation of the investments of Owens-Illinois in accordance with international law or any other, you know, private business doing—present in—in Venezuela.”
The only other Obama administration official to even mention the pocketing of U.S. assets by foreign dictators was Assistant Secretary of Commerce Walter Bastian. Here’s what he said: “We have no problem with expropriation [theft by a foreign government], as long as those affected are paid.”33
No problem with theft? And Bastian certainly knows that Americans are not paid fair-market value for their holdings. They get whatever Chavez feels like paying that day. Most are not even paid at all.
Behind the scenes, Obama administration officials are telling executives not to worry. By being nice to Chavez and not protesting the thefts, they hope that Chavez will eventually see his way clear to pay the American investors something. These Obama wimps are like the kids on the playground who tell the victim not to report the bully to the teacher and not to fight back. Be nice, they coo, and he will be nice to you later. Well, it doesn’t work in the schoolyard and it doesn’t work in foreign affairs.
Obama’s approach to Latin America is the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt’s. Obama’s motto: Speak softly and carry no stick.
Guess what? It hasn’t worked.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, two big energy companies with millions of American investors, gave up on Obama. They have decided to go to the World Bank’s Center for Settlements of Investment Disputes. They are seeking tens of billions of dollars in relief for their lost oil facilities in Venezuela. It will take years before they even get a hearing. And even if they win, Venezuela can always ignore the World Bank.34
When Chavez isn’t stealing from Americans, he is impoverishing his own people—that’s why they keep sneaking across our borders.
Everyone knew that Chavez’s takeovers of private industry would make Venezuela poorer, hungrier, and less democratic. Today Venezuela has the highest inflation rate in South America. Once a food exporter, Venezuela now has to import more than 70 percent of its food and shortages are common. The little food available is at the end of the long line at a government-controlled store. Crooked government bureaucrats—Chavez has his capitalist cronies just like Obama does—make the shortages worse by selling food in the black market at huge profits for themselves.
What isn’t lost to corruption is lost to government incompetence. Some 130,000 tons of food was left to rot on ships in Venezuela harbors because the bureaucrats could not arrange a profitable enough black-market deal for themselves.35 When this was reported by one of the country’s few remaining independent newspapers, Chavez was forced to arrest the head of his food police.
His replacement is just as corrupt, according to local papers.
Before Chavez, there was no black market in food. The stores were full of fresh produce and local meat. Now there are ration cards and sad walks home with no food to be found.
Why don’t the people of Venezuela do something?
They’re trying.
In the September 2010 parliamentary elections, voters overwhelmingly supported the opposition, which was called the Coalition for Democratic Unity. The coalition won half of the popular vote, and when they were sworn in on January 5, 2011, they controlled 40 percent of National Assembly seats, up from just four percent the year before. Other opposition parties grabbed another ten percent of the seats.
The opposition probably would have swept all electoral offices if it wasn’t for Chavez’s thugs—who might have taken lessons from the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia during the 2008 elections here—openly intimidating voters and manufacturing fake ballots.
But still the people did the best they could and won working control of the national parliament.
What was Chavez’s response? He stole the parliament’s power.
Days before the opposition parties were set to be sworn in, Chavez asked the old parliament—where his United Socialist Party controlled 83 percent of the votes—to give him the dictatorial right to rule by decree until the 2012 presidential elections. They voted overwhelming in favor. Chavez only had to make announcements on television and they became law.
Forget elections, legislative debates. The maximum leader simply mumbles something on television and it is law.
And the parliament is powerless to stop him.
After he received this dictatorial power, he bragged to a state-run newspaper that the newly elected opposition was now powerless: “Let’s see how they are going to make their laws now.”36
With Chavez starving his country and mocking democracy, there can only be two results: more seizures of American property in Venezuela and more migrants slipping over our border.
Again Obama does nothing and says nothing.
State Department spokesman Crowley managed only a lukewarm response: “What he [Chavez ] is doing here, we believe, is, you know, subverting the will of the Venezuela people.”
And that’s it. Except for that stray remark by Crowley, you will find no response by the Obama administration. Pore over the transcripts of the State Department briefings and read all of its reports. You will find nothing—not a single line—that is critical of Chavez’s takeover of democracy in Venezuela itself.
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sees right through Obama’s game.
The president might act like he’s not taking sides, but he is. And he is siding with a socialist dictator rather than Americans who are losing their retirement money and Venezuelans who are losing their freedoms. Ros-Lehtinen was dead on when she said, “Choosing to take no side in the battle between tyranny and democracy in Venezuela only helps the tyrannical side.”37
The good news is that Chavez will almost certainly be dead before the next election. His cancer—the cancer he claims has been cured—is accelerating, and his medical team gives him no more than six months to live. Apparently the advanced treatment for the disease that he received in Cuba didn’t do the trick.38
The only questions now are, “Will the Chavistas who support the dying dictator be able to hold on to the power and the wealth they have stolen from the Venezuelan people?” and “Will Barack Obama intervene on behalf of those people to insure that Venezuela becomes a free country again?”
My advice? Don’t put any money on Obama coming through for the Venezuelan people.
Brazil
I mentioned the Obama trip to Brazil in the previous chapter. When President Obama got invited to a summit meeting in Brazil, he decided to take the whole family. A little vacation in the sunshine while icy rains fell on Washington in March 2011. Of course that little trip cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
Why not?
He felt completely at home with the Socialist Party leaders of that rainforest nation. They spend their days criticizing the United States in the halls of the United Nations and blaming America in the local newspapers for their problems.
Just like
Obama.
Once there, Obama announced that U.S. taxpayers would loan the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras some $2 billion to drill for oil off their coast in the deep waters of the Atlantic. As I’ve told you, he backed that up with a promise that America would be Brazil’s customer for the oil they produce.
Of course, the president has blocked American oil companies from drilling in a number of offshore areas and in many inland oil fields. Obama’s drilling moratorium costs the American economy some 100,000 jobs and billions in revenue per year, according to the American Petroleum Institute. That might be the reason he promised that America would be Brazil’s “best customer.” When he got back to the states, Obama whined about America’s dependence on “foreign oil imports”—the very ones he had just agreed to subsidize in Brazil with our tax dollars.
I have a lot more to say about Obama’s energy edicts in chapter 9, “Tyranny of Green Energy.”
Our New Enemies
Government brutality is a fact of life in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Islamist dictator like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or an old-fashioned third-world tyrant like Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Ghadafi. Middle Eastern countries have since World War II generally been held together by force. Now that the Obama administration has found a “principle”—“responsibility to protect”—to stand on, it has a rationale for extending its policy of reducing U.S. influence in the region by promoting the rise of Islamist governments “of the people.”
It’s the Soros Doctrine at work.
I’m the only one who saw what was really going on in the Middle East as Barack Obama turned a blind eye to the violence of dictators against their citizens and supported the overthrow of U.S. allies in order to pave the way for the takeover of their countries by Islamist radicals.
I’m the only one who understood that Obama was implementing his new foreign policy, the one that says, “Our former friends are now our enemies.” It’s the second part of Obama’s new foreign policy doctrine.
Israel
Trickle Down Tyranny Page 22