Without doubt, the election of Barack Obama is historic because he is the first Black American selected by voters for the highest office in the land. Indeed, the election of an African-American to the presidency by a nation with a majority white population may be unprecedented, and the fact that this is possible should be a source of pride for all of us, regardless of whether Obama himself was a good or bad choice.
An articulate and confident young man, Obama’s presence in the White House will be welcomed by many. Along with his oratorical skills and appealing vitality, his family will remind older Americans of the John F. Kennedy era when a telegenic and appealing wife and two charming youngsters accompanied the newly elected president into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
What will the Obama presidency be like? Throughout a campaign stretching back for almost two years, the Illinois senator regularly employed the word "change," and the word even morphed into "change we can believe in." The posters, oratory, television ads, and pronouncements of several Obama staffers repeatedly issued unspecified pledges that this new and different candidate would alter the course America was following.
"Blueprint for Change"
But how would America’s course be altered? Even though the American people could have read online what an Obama-Biden administration promised, most failed to do so. Much of the agenda, albeit without a lot of detail, is contained in Blueprint for Change, the 83-page document subtitled "Plan for America" issued by the Obama-Biden team. As we shall see, the "change" envisioned by the Blueprint includes more government at home and a continuation of our interventionist foreign policy abroad.
Of course, America has been moving in the direction of more and bigger government for decades, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat has been in the White House. Obama hopes to move us even further in the big-government direction. What kind of change is that?
Even many Americans who recognize that Obama will push for more government at home believe that he will end our interventionist foreign policy because of the opposition he has expressed to the Iraq War. But this conclusion flies in the face of his proposal to transfer troops to Afghanistan (in essence transferring the Iraq War to a different theater) and his support for international arrangements, including expansion of NATO.
Please consider the following positions as they appear in the pages of the revealing "blueprint" document and judge for yourself how much change there will be and whether the recommended "change" would be a good thing. (Comments following each quoted item are ours.)
• "Emergency Economic Plan to Inject Immediate Relief into the Economy." Both Obama and Biden voted for the $700 billion bailout (along with John McCain). More bailouts will likely follow.
• "Provide a $1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate to American Families." Government giving money to everyone, as was done with the 2008 rebate, doesn’t solve any problems. These funds either have to be printed (the root cause of inflation) or borrowed, likely from China, which puts our nation’s neck in a noose. The interest that is compounding on our already enormous debt is a toxic time bomb. The government will eventually resort to massive inflation to pay the debt or collateralize the debt with American assets; in which case, those now holding our bonds will end up owning America.
• "Invest in the Manufacturing Sector." America’s manufacturers need relief from the stifling array of taxes and regulations, and from the steady erosion of the dollar brought on by debilitating inflation, not government handouts that are always followed by government control. A 2006 study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute entitled "Ten Thousand Commandments" found that the federal regulatory burden on U.S. businesses amounted to $1.13 trillion. This burden is killing American businesses, productivity, innovation, and jobs.
• "Create 5 Million New Green Jobs." This will be done, says the Blueprint, by investing "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy," etc. In other words, politicians and bureaucrats would create government jobs and subsidize private-sector jobs that should be financed by the private sector (and would be if they were economically viable). Government should get out of the way and let free Americans create jobs.
• "Create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank." This promise includes an infusion of $60 billion more in federal spending.
• "Give the Federal Reserve Greater Supervisory Authority." The Federal Reserve, which already wields enormous, unconstitutional powers, is a destructive engine of inflation and should hardly be given greater authority. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has recommended, it should be abolished, not enhanced.
• "Pressure the World Trade Organization to Enforce Trade Agreements." Granting the UN’s WTO even more authority is another step toward global governance. The WTO is already exercising judicial jurisdiction over sovereign nations, overruling national laws and legislatures, including the laws and the Congress of the United States. Congress and President Bush have weakly protested these usurpations — and then meekly accepted them.
• "Guarantee Affordable, Accessible Health Care for Every American." Healthcare costs have risen dramatically because of already existing government intervention. A national healthcare system would swell the cost while making healthcare hard to obtain, as such plans have done everywhere they have been instituted.
• "Barack Obama has fought for comprehensive immigration reform." Ultimately, what this means is amnesty for as many as 20 million illegal aliens in our nation.
• "High Quality Zero-to-Five Education." The Obama plan actually calls for "early care and education for infants in a Zero to 5 Plan," more government for K-12, federal support for afterschool programs, and more grants for those who move on to college.
• "Double our annual investment in foreign assistance … to $50 billion…. Invest at least $50 billion [annually] by 2013 for the global fight against HIV/AIDS." With record deficits and a soaring National Debt, America is, in effect, giving away borrowed money.
The above constitute only a sampling of the pledges for more programs, more spending, and more government powers contained in the 83 pages of the Blueprint for Change. And the official Obama-Biden Internet website provides several hundred more pages of details, all pointing toward plans for a vast expansion of the federal government. Less than a week after the election, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun (R) told an audience in his district the president-elect shows "signs of being a Marxist." Perhaps Broun had read the Obama-Biden Blueprint, a rather obvious call for socialism in the United States. And perhaps Broun knows that, in addition to Marx’s well-publicized association with communism, Karl Marx is also the godfather of socialism.
Although he didn’t mention his own party, we should point out that Rep. Broun’s criticism of Obama’s apparent Marxist bent applies also to many Republicans. In fact, in October, President Bush and many Republican members of Congress rolled out the Socialist Express to push through the bailout package. Take it from Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, a self-proclaimed socialist, who congratulated Bush for joining the socialist club, and then chided him and his allies for applying a double standard. "How many times have they criticized me for nationalizing the phone company?" he asked. "They say, ‘The state shouldn’t get involved in that.’ But now they don’t criticize Bush for having nationalize[d] … the biggest banks in the world. Comrade Bush, how are you?"
Expanding the UN
The United Nations Association of the United States is the most determined promoter of the UN within our nation. Early in 2008, its leaders sent a questionnaire to all presidential candidates. Barack Obama displayed his strong commitment to the world body and to its various sovereignty-compromising programs in his responses, some of which follow:
• "No country has a greater stake in a strong United Nations than the United States."
• "I have pledged to create a [UN-promoted] cap on carbon emissions in the United States."
• "I fully support the [UN] Millennium Development Goals."
In the year 2000, the 189 member nations of the UN adopted the Millennium Development Goals, a program of eight goals to aid developing countries. Our share of funding these goals could total hundreds of billions of dollars in just a few years. Senator Barack Obama introduced S. 2433 in 2007. Labeled the "Global Poverty Act," this proposal seeks to require our nation to "achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of the people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than one dollar per day." Five months later, Senator Biden offered minor amendments to the bill as he co-signed it. Obviously, these two senators — and the handful of others they have enlisted to back their proposal — believe the American people should pony up enormous sums of money sought by the UN in another program that would empower the world body and further enrich corrupt foreign dictators while doing little to improve the plight of the world’s poor.
Based on their stated positions and track records, it is reasonable to expect that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the team they will select to staff the new administration won’t even consider less government and a mind-your-own-business foreign policy to be options. Their agenda, if implemented, would speed the growth of the federal government, accelerate the surrender of America’s independence, and hasten our nation down the path toward submergence in what internationalists euphemistically refer to as "global governance" by various supranational institutions, of which the UN, the WTO, and the IMF are among the most noteworthy. For more information about the power brokers who have helped formulate Obama’s agenda and who will be running the Obama-Biden administration, see "Behind the Obama Agenda."
Photo: AP Images
