Liberals Using ‘Crisis’ As Opportunity To Impose Failed Agenda

Remember Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s pitch to use the economic “crisis” as an excuse to impose a far-left agenda?

EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.

Maybe they “could not do them before” because the American people did not WANT that. But now, when Obama can fearmonger the American people to believe that, It’s either Barack Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s brand of far leftist socialism or else its, “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”

It’s interesting. Obama has proposed a massive government spending – on a scale never witnessed in the history of the human race – for a “stimulus” package that will ultimately cost $3.27 trillion dollars but won’t stimulate anything but way, way, WAAAAY bigger government; and then he proposed another $634 billion for a “down payment” on socialized medicine.

Democrats are now discussing a SECOND “stimulus” package because the first socialist porkulus plan had nothing whatsoever to do with actually fixing the economy.
And with all this spending, he STILL hasn’t even announced a plan to deal with the banking/credit issues, nor has he seriously moved to tackle the housing/mortgage issue. It’s almost as though he’s using the economic “crisis” to implement his agenda on health care, education, energy, and other issues before seriously moving to actually address THE ECONOMY.

Or as Obama himself put it:

“I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system.”

With that as background, we can turn to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of “crisis as opportunity” on March 9 to impose her radical leftist agenda:

There is no doubt in my mind that the energy security and climate change crisis, which I view as being together not separate, must be dealt with. That is why in his recent address to the Congress, President Obama said that we will present to our Congress and do what we can through executive authority to move toward a cap-and-trade system, something that we’ve learned about from your initial efforts. It is a learning experience for all of us about how best to design our climate – our global climate change regulatory framework and mechanism.

It will be difficult to convince some governments and the people that they represent that now is the time given the crisis. I think from our Administration’s perspective, this is a propitious time. If we approach it as an opportunity to make these investments through our stimulus packages, we can actually begin to demonstrate our willingness to confront this and have some positive experiences that we can take with us into Copenhagen.

Jonah Goldberg, in Liberal Fascism, writing of the tactics employed by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, notes that:

“The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency” (p. 43).

As Adolph Hitler came to power, the famous liberal/progressive W.E.B. DuBois supported dictatorial, fascist, totalitarian power-grabbing to solve “the crisis” of the times. In his article, “As the Crow Flies” published in Crisis Magazine (issue 40, September 1933, page 97) DuBois wrote that the formation of the Nazi dictatorship had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.”

So when I hear that Barack Obama used the word “crisis” more than twenty-five times in a single speech to fearmonger support for his “stimulus” bill; when I hear that Obama says, “The time for talk is over, the time for action is now“; when I hear that the filled-to-the-gills-with-liberal-socialist-agenda-spending stimulus bill passed in a “crisis” vote with not one single legislator having been able to actually read it, I have the historical perspective to know where we are headed – and it’s a scary, scary place.

Are there other indications to indicate this frightening new direction? Of course there are.

In one article I cite more than half a dozen prominent Democrats who give powerful support for a return to the euphemistically-titled “Fairness Doctrine” which specifically targets conservative speech. Obama, smelling the unpopularity and criticism he would invite, has backed away from supporting such a violation of free speech. But even he, as well as his chief of staff and his press secretary, have chosen to personally target a private citizen engaging in his free speech rights for attack. President Bush certainly never took such a drastic action to attack any of his numerous media critics. Republicans are being lambasted by the left-wing media for “hoping Obama fails” – as though Barack Obama is the living embodiment of the country, and that to hope Obama fails is somehow tantamount to hoping the country itself fails.

The fact is that Republicans – in spite of the fact that the media is overwhelmingly liberally-biased (as numerous studies have demonstrated) – have never called for such blatantly-partisan censorship. About the farthest they have gone is to demand that leftist-tilted but publicly-funded PBS be stripped of its federal taxpayer dollars. And with such obviously-biased liberals such as Bill Moyers on the taxpayer-funded network, it is only right that they should lose their federal funding. Or else be “fair” and fund Rush Limbaugh, too.

It doesn’t matter that most Democrats actually wanted President Bush to fail – and specifically to fail in Iraq, whereby our soldiers would presumably likewise have to fail and suffer and die in combat as a result. Republicans are depicted in the worst possible ways by a media that have proven to be leftist propagandists, as well as by elected Democrats and even by the president himself. It doesn’t matter: denounce and condemn them as traitors! It was interesting to read the comments of rank and file liberals responding to a conservative hoping Obama fails in his effort to reshape the country by implementing socialism.

Let me provide another quote from Goldberg, describing the original fascist and totalitarian leader, the French Revolution’s bloody leader Robespierre:

Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man” (page 12).

We don’t want to go where we’re going, if we’re wise. That said, history proves that the world is and has always been filled with fools.

Barack Obama is using the bad economy – or as he calls it – the “crisis” as an “opportunity” to implement every socialists’ dream in this country for the last thirty years. As I note in another article, none of the issues Obama is blaming the economic crisis on under “the last eight years” of Bush have any merit as being the cause of the bad economy – and in fact none of them can even be legitimately be said to have been Bush’s fault. Obama wants to socialize medicine; he wants to implement the “green agenda”; he wants to radically transform schools – all in the guise of solving the economic “crisis.”

Let’s just take the one which Hillary Clinton pitched: the “climate change crisis.” First of all, realize that liberals are using “climate change” now only because “global warming” has been so discredited. Global warming is a hoax and a myth that is being used to advance the socialist agenda (still ANOTHER example of the left creating “emergencies” to force their agenda on the people). But let’s ask the real question: will imposing “cap and trade” on the economy help resolve our “economic crisis”?

Not according to Obama’s chief financial adviser, Warren Buffett, it won’t:

Anything you put in that effectively taxes carbon emissions is–somebody’s going to bear the brunt of it. In the case of a regulated utility, the utility customers are going to pay for it. I mean, it’s going to become, in effect, a tax which we have decided is needed because the market system doesn’t really appropriately penalize something that hurts the future but doesn’t really hurt us tomorrow morning. But that tax is probably going to be pretty regressive. It’ll be determined by individual public utility commissions state by state what customers it gets passed through to. But if you put a cost of issuing–putting carbon into the atmosphere, it–in the utility business it’s going to be born by customers. And it’s a tax like anything else.

By the time Buffet finished answering the round of questioning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” the interviewer said, “Yeah. I’m going to take that as against cap and trade.” And when Buffett did not correct him, he affirmed that he was in fact opposed.

Warren Buffett also said:

BUFFETT: I think–I think a lot of things should be–job one is to win the war, job–the economic war, job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. So I would–I would absolutely say for the–for the interim, till we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are–you know are contentious, and I also–I also would do no finger-pointing whatsoever. I would–you know, I would not say, you know, `George’–`the previous administration got us into this.’ Forget it.

Warren Buffett – one of Obama’s most senior economic advisers – described the Obama economic message as “muddled” and admitted it was hurting the economy. He most certainly doesn’t believe in using “crisis as an opportunity.” Not at all.

Having put that dog to bed, let us ask another question: will imposing Obama’s “green agenda” create the 5 million new jobs Obama has promised?

In a word, no. For one thing, switching to alternative energies will necessarily result in a corresponding cut in jobs from the “traditional energy” workers. If we abandon oil and “dirty” coal as fuels, what will happen to those jobs?

For another, it turns out that the components of “green” technology are nearly exclusively manufactured overseas. Referring to a Fox News “Special Report” story from March 9, 2009, one blogger wrote:

But unfortunately for anyone counting on Obama’s plan to help create jobs, manufacturing jobs don’t seem to be part of the equation.Currently, as reported today on FoxNews show “Special Report with Bret Baier,” the majority of the components used in the creation of green jobs (building windmills, solar plants, etc.) are all manufactured over seas with the vast majority coming from the Philippines and Europe. Almost all of the technology was developed right here with American dollars, but the creators, like so many other companies before them, found it more profitable to build the products overseas.

So while Obama might indeed keep his promise of spending $15 billion of your and my tax dollars, the overwhelming majority of that money spent will be going towards building the economies of other countries, and the creation of jobs in other countries, but not in the good old U.S. of A.

And that’s exactly what the point of the story was. Wind power components are mostly made in Europe. Solar panels are mostly made in the Philippines, Malaysia, and China. A recent solar energy power plant in Arizona was built by a Spanish company, with all but one of the components made overseas. And Obama’s “five million jobs” talk is nonsense because fully 75-80% of the jobs in “alternative energy” are in manufacturing rather than in installation and maintenance.

And so – for all the “sending money overseas to buy foreign oil” talk (even as the people making this argument are doing everything they can to prevent us from drilling for our OWN oil and coal deposits), we’re right back to sending money overseas. Only this time we’ll be sending a lot more money for components that produce a lot less energy.

We’re in trouble, and the more we respond to “crisis” fearmongering to advance a socialist agenda, the deeper the hole we are going to dig for ourselves. The reason the market has tanked so far under Obama is because investors are terrified of Obama’s agenda, not because they are worrying over whether a near supermajority of Democrats in Congress will fail to impose his agenda.

Accessed via Colonial Warrior at Freerepublic.com