Trickle Up Poverty (3 page)
This woman is so intoxicated with her own power that she runs around Washington like a despot. Don’t get me wrong. My intention isn’t to tarnish Madame Pelosi’s reputation. She’s already done a first-class job of that. Her behavior speaks for itself. Take, for example, the matter of her commandeering military jets for her family’s use in which she flew her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to a private event. Okay, if that had happened one time because there weren’t seats left on a Southwest flight, fine.
But it wasn’t once.
Not twice.
Not three times.
Amazingly, in just a two-year period, Pelosi’s family flew on military jets thirty-one times! Details of this corruption are staggering. According to records obtained by the Judicial Watch organization, Nancy Pelosi was repeatedly misusing U.S. Air Force aircraft for personal use to the tune of $2,100,744.59 in just two years.3 That price tag includes $101,429.00 for in-flight expenses such as food and alcoholic beverages. You might want to read that again. This autocrat is running an open bar in the sky—at your expense.
One particularly outrageous trip happened on May 15–20, 2008, in which Madame Pelosi and friends flew from Washington, D.C., to Baghdad via Tel Aviv. Just look at the beverages Pelosi, several members of Congress and their spouses ordered: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Crème, Maker’s Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewar’s scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer, and several bottles of wine.4 What the hell was she throwing?
A Mardi Gras party?
Judicial Watch reported that this trip cost American taxpayers $17,931 per hour—and that was just for the aircraft. Are you beginning to get the picture?
Not only does Madame Pelosi expect the sheeple to pick up the tab for her exorbitant, wasteful, and improper spending, which is dishonorable enough, but let’s not forget that members of the U.S. Air Force were being forced to serve as personal escorts for her and her kin instead of engaging the enemy! They should be flying reconnaissance missions over Teheran instead of flying babysitting missions over Akron.
Isn’t the country at war with Muslim fascists who want to convert us or kill us? People understand this. Not Pelosi. She’s cavorting in the skies in military jets without regard for the troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Tell me that’s not the epitome of elitism.
Somewhere a marine dies while Pelosi flies.
The people are angered by her sheer arrogance.
When it comes to health care, as you’ll see in chapter five, Pelosi’s prescription was to ram a government plan down our throats whether the American people wanted it or not. The fact of the matter is that the majority of Americans—a full 61 percent—think Obama’s plan should be scrapped, you know, dumped into the Potomac River.5 There’s a number of reasons why they want Congress to go back to square one. They want lawyers stopped with caps on medical lawsuits.
They don’t want the feds telling them which doctors to use.
They don’t want the feds nosing around in their medical files.
They don’t want the feds telling them which medical procedures to have.
They don’t want illegal aliens getting free medical care.
And they most certainly don’t want to be fined for noncompliance. And yet, the voice of the people has fallen on deaf ears where Madame Pelosi is concerned. Listen to how this harridan thinks:
We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.6
If Pelosi had as much passion for killing al-Qaeda as she has for killing our freedom of choice with her healthcare bill, the Democrat’s approval rating would have soared 30 percent overnight. Her passion is misplaced. It’s backfiring. Her zeal to pass socialized medicine has awakened the middle class who see healthcare premiums rising 20 percent or more and the destruction of the finest doctors and hospitals in the world!
Do you see why people are seething at the abuse of power by their elected officials? According to a liberal CBS/New York Times poll, a paltry 8 percent of Americans think members of Congress should be reelected.7 They can’t take this anymore. In fact, 75 percent disapprove of the job these false “representatives” are doing. Furthermore, in what was the lowest assessment of congressional incumbents in eighteen years, the survey found that 81 percent of those surveyed said, “it’s time to give new people a chance” to represent them in Congress.
The more we learn about the way Pelosi is running Congress, the more we see we’re living in an oligarchy, not a democracy. This is why the Tea Party movement is ready to throw the bums out. They know the local undertaker could do a better job representing them than Madame Pelosi, a monarch in her own mind, who’s hell-bent on passing a socialist agenda that doesn’t resemble the America they know.
The America they love.
The America they must now fight to defend.
From J. Crew to Screw You
When Michelle Obama was on the campaign trail with her husband, the press fawned over her thrifty, budget-conscious attire. Much was written about her contentment with a J. Crew wardrobe and the fact that her husband Barack wore suits right off the rack—as if they were an average American couple watching every nickel to make ends meet. You know, the kind of frugal people just living paycheck to paycheck who’d clean up the pork in Washington.
What’s more, Michelle gave us the “I’m-no-different-than-you-I-wasn’t-born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-my-mouth” speech when she told a crowd on the campaign trail, “There’s a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that. But let me tell you who Barack and me are, so that you are not confused. Yeah, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working-class upbringing.”8
That charade lasted maybe five minutes after Michelle’s husband landed in the White House.
Virtually overnight, as if she were suddenly royalty, Michelle was sporting a handmade Naeem Khan dress and a pair of Bochic earrings valued at more than $5,000. Five grand for earrings? My first car cost less than that. And, what does the Empress of America spend on a staff of twenty-six personal assistants?! The First Lady wasn’t elected and has no official duties, and yet she certainly enjoys the trappings of royalty; or should I say the life of a Czarina?
Let’s set aside the cost of her full-time personal makeup artist and hairdresser. If she feels the need for some help in that department, fine. But let’s look at the list of servants: there’s Michelle’s Chief of Staff who, at $172,200 a year, makes more than some bank presidents. Add to that a Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady at $140,000, a Director of Communications at $102,000, a Deputy Chief of Staff to the First Lady at $90,000, and a Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady who makes $84,000. Should I go on?
How about $75,000 for a Director of Scheduling, $70,000 for a Deputy Director of Policy and Projects (since when is the First Lady involved in making policy decisions?), another $65,000 for a Deputy Director/Deputy Social Secretary—she’s got two of them, $62,000 for someone to coordinate her events, $60,000 for a trip director—again, she’s got two of them probably because she’s planning lots of trips at your expense—and that’s just a partial list.
When taken together, Czarina Michelle’s twenty-six-person staff costs taxpayers $1.75 million dollars, excluding the cost of their elite benefits package.9 You might wonder what benefit you’re getting for that. But wait, there’s more. Much more. That figure doesn’t include the necessary Secret Service detail or the White House staff of servants who must cater to her every whim—whether she’s serving wagyu steak valued at $100/pound at a White House cocktail party,10 or motoring around Paris in a twenty-car caravan with her daughters for a weeklong European vacation while visiting all the “must-see” sites.11
I imagine she’s proud for the first time in her life to be an American tourist.
Look, I understand how things work. Laura Bush was no penny-pincher, either. She had a sizable staff as well, although not as large and her tab was about $700,000 less than what Michelle is dropping. But both are out of line to spend taxpayer money to that extent while the economy is in a tail-spin, that’s all. As one commentator pointed out, “Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary.”12
Where’s the fiscal restraint from our First Lady?
Why aren’t the Obamas leading by example?
Whatever happened to president-elect Obama’s call to Americans to make personal sacrifices? While on national television, Obama proclaimed, “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.”13 Remember that one? Or, how about this: President Obama, having just tripled our national debt, had the audacity to say, “After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant about exploding deficits. What’s hard is getting deficits under control—but that’s what we must do.”14
We must do?
“We” who?
We—not he, obviously.
Of course, this nice little teleprompted speech begs the difficult question: If the Spender in Chief can’t get the First Lady to pare down her bloated budget, how can the man be taken seriously when he claims he wants to cut wasteful government spending? What happened to walking the walk? He’s lecturing us about fiscal responsibility while tripling the federal budget deficit and increasing our national debt by $1.9 trillion. In fact, according to the Economics Editor of the United Kingdom Telegraph newspapers, Edmund Conway, “under the Obama administration’s current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015—a far steeper increase than almost any other country.”15
But there’s a much more insidious dimension to all of this.
I’m talking about Michelle Obama’s vision of the future, which, no doubt, has been shaped by the man she married—along with the indoctrination of her leftist professors at Harvard and Princeton. As I’ll document in the next chapter, Barack Obama is a Red Diaper Doper Baby (RDDB); a full-fledged Marxist-Leninist. As such, he and Michelle are moving us toward a two-class society common in socialist nations: the ruling class and the workers. This explains why Michelle will never cut her staff or spending. As a newly arrived member of the ruling class, she believes she’s entitled to it.
Her extravagance and hypocrisy haven’t gone unnoticed by the people. America is breaking under the weight of one of the deepest recessions in our history and they wonder how Michelle can take a pleasure jaunt to the Eiffel Tower. How can she have the audacity to take a million-dollar vacation when people all across America are losing their jobs and their homes? In the end, this, too, will backfire. The taxpayers don’t like seeing their hard-earned money being wasted.
The taxpayers don’t consider themselves second-class.
The taxpayers don’t like being lied to.
The taxpayers don’t want a First Lady who fashions herself as Czarina.
This Land is His Land
As I write, Obama’s czars are eyeing one of the largest federal land-grabs in history. Their target? That depends. A confidential internal government document stamped “NOT FOR RELEASE” somehow found the light of day. In it, Obama’s henchmen identified fourteen sites in nine states spanning millions of acres primarily in the west. With the stroke of a pen, bypassing both public and congressional consent, Obama plans to designate thousands of square miles as “National Monuments.” This Soviet-style mandate by fiat would prohibit any development of millions of acres rich in timber, clean coal, gold, minerals, natural gas, and other vital resources.
Translation: States and local communities will lose jobs and tax revenues.
Can Obama do that?
Can Barack the Buccaneer use the powers of government to shutdown the natural resources of individual states? Technically speaking, yes. Hiding behind the Antiquities Act, this president—who promised an open and transparent government—can use his executive power to hijack and yank the land out from underneath a state and turn it into a national monument in the name of “conservaaaaation.”
As you well know, this seizure of property deprives ranchers, miners, and others in the energy development business the opportunity to make a living. How will they support themselves when energy production, ranching, and mining grind to a halt? What does Comrade Obama think they’ll do for work?
Become community organizers?
The pirating of public land has been done before, most notably by Bill Clinton in 1996. President Clinton took a break from getting a Lewinsky in the Oval Office long enough to place 1.3 million acres in southern Utah in a federal lockbox, permanently making the land off-limits to current or future exploration and development. Almost a decade later, the people of Utah are still furious and, upon hearing about Obama’s plans, have further reason to distrust and fear their government. Gary Wilcox, a resident of Utah, remembers what went down the last time around: “I keep thinking about what President Clinton did to us … came in here, snuck in here, did the land-grab. I can see that happening right now.”16
Obama’s land-grab by the feds is another example of what he must have been thinking when he announced, “We are going to roll up our sleeves and we are going to remake this country, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, state by state.”17 Remake the country? By the looks of how he’s operating, Obama’s real agenda is to “take over the country” acre by acre.