Crimes Against Liberty Read online

  The lynchpin of ObamaCare is the “individual mandate”—a constitutionally dubious law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance whether they want it or not. This is the mechanism that is supposed to allow health insurers to remain solvent while complying with Obama’s mandate to cover pre-existing conditions. At a New Hampshire townhall meeting on February 3, 2010, Obama stumbled into admitting as much. “You can’t [demand] insurance companies . . . take somebody who’s sick, who’s got a pre-existing condition, if you don’t have everybody covered,” he said. “And the reason, if you think about it, is simple. If you had a situation where not everybody was covered but an insurance company had to take you because you were sick, what everybody would do is they’d just wait till they got sick and then they’d go buy insurance. Right? And so the potential would be there to game the system.” 49

  Thus, Obama tacitly admitted that without the individual mandate, health insurers could not survive financially if they were required to cover pre-existing conditions. Yet for an entire year, before the individual mandate was passed, Obama demonized insurance companies for denying exactly that coverage—when by his own admission they could not afford it.

  ATTACKING DOCTORS

  At his news conference on July 22, 2009, Obama unleashed a stunning indictment of medical practitioners, revealing his profound ignorance and ill-will toward the medical profession. He declared, “Right now, doctors, a lot of times, are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and—and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat, or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I’ll make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”50

  In case anyone mistook that for a solitary gaffe, he made a similarly malicious claim against surgeons the following month. At another townhall meeting in New Hampshire he said, “Let’s take the example of diabetes.... If a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance, but if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s thirty thousand, forty, fifty thousand dollars immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Why not make sure we’re also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation?”51

  Consistent with his usual divide-and-conquer methods, Obama has favored general practitioners while penalizing medical specialists who, in President Obama’s Washington, “are slightly more popular than the H1N1 virus,” as the Wall Street Journal noted.52 The Obama administration is using Medicare regulations to increase payments to general practitioners, internists, and family physicians, but there would be an 11 percent overall cut in the field of cardiology and 19 percent in radiation oncology. The Wall Street Journal editors pointed out these cuts were made on cost considerations alone, because they couldn’t be based on sound medical judgment. The editors wrote, “Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease.”53

  Obama’s war on specialists is also reflected in ObamaCare. Obama’s distant cousin, Dr. Milton R. Wolf, writing in the Washington Times, described a financial penalty “aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently—no matter how valid the reasons—he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medical reimbursements for the entire year.” This “scheme,” wrote Wolf, “is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist.”54

  Beyond that, experience in government-run healthcare systems shows that access to medical specialists is severely reduced. Stanford University Medical Center professor Scott W. Atlas says that independent, peer-reviewed studies show there are far longer waiting times for patients seeking care from cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and neurologists “under government-run health systems.”55

  Obama and his supporters glibly dismiss accusations that the president harbors socialist goals. But looking at the short record he’s compiled as president, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. While most United States presidents of our lifetime have reserved their harshest rhetoric for our foreign enemies, Obama delights in bashing American businesspeople—corporate executives, insurers, drug-makers, and even medical professionals. Incessantly denouncing companies for generating “excess profits,” he clearly believes making a certain amount of money is immoral. In his view, that money doesn’t rightfully belong to those who earned it, but to the government, in other words, to Obama himself, who is responsible for spreading that wealth around to those who supposedly deserve it.

  There’s plenty of room to debate which branch of socialism he adheres to, but one thing’s for sure: Obama can’t abide the free market.

  Chapter Nine

  OBAMA THE IMPERIOUS

  CRIMES AGAINST THE PRIVATE SECTOR, PART 2

  Shortly after he took office, Obama initiated a campaign that would become a major theme of his presidency: castigating Wall Street bankers. On January 29, 2009, he called them “shameful” for giving themselves $20 billion in bonuses when the economy was dragging and the government was giving them bailout money. “There will be time for them to make profits, and there will time for them to get bonuses,” he imperiously declared. “Now’s not that time.... That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show discipline and show some sense of responsibility.” Not to be outdone, Vice President Biden exclaimed, “I’d like to throw some of these guys in the brig. They’re thinking the same old thing that got us here, greed. They’re thinking, ‘Take care of me.’”1

  But the following year, Obama told Bloomberg he didn’t “begrudge” bonuses worth $17 million and $9 million for J. P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, respectively. It wasn’t hard to figure out why Obama was suddenly singing a different tune. As he stated, “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”2 But more than that, Blankfein has given more than $100,000 to Democrats, while Dimon, though donating less, has given exclusively to Democrats, plus he’s from Chicago, and he’s Obama’s personal friend and “favorite banker,” as the New York Times called him.

  Naturally, it is the prerogative of a potentate to treat his friends differently, but Obama’s double standard still raised some eyebrows. New Hampshire Union Leader editorial page editor Andrew Cline pointedly observed, “As Obama has accidentally admitted, taking a big bonus during a recession is not shameful. Pitting Americans against each other for purely political purposes is.”3 Despite forgiving his rich buddies, Obama made clear he hadn’t softened his animus toward free enterprise when, at an appearance in Quincy, Illinois, he proclaimed Democrats don’t begrudge success that’s “fairly earned,” but “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”4

  It’s not clear exactly how much money is “enough,” but apparently it’s quite a lot—at least for certain special people; the Washington Post website reported that in 2008, as he campaigned for president, Obama reeled in a cool $2.5 million just on his book royalties.5

  FIGHTING OFF THE PITCHFORKS

  At a March 2009 townhall meeting in Costa Mesa, California, after defending the government bailout of AIG, Obama went on to compare AIG and big banks to suicide bombers. “It’s almost like they’ve got a bomb strapped to them, and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” he said. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”6 Obama also savaged AIG for its “recklessness and greed” as he promised to try to block its executives from collecting multi-million dollar bonuses. “Excuse me,” he muttered, “I’m choked up with anger here.”7 And like our wealth, Obama seemed determined to spread his a
nger around. “I don’t want to quell anger,” he said angrily. “People are right to be angry. I’m angry. What I want us to do is channel our anger in a constructive way.” Obama later deflected an uncomfortable question about whether he regretted his campaign having accepted in excess of $100,000 from AIG executives8—perhaps he was too angry to muster an answer.

  Obama next summoned bank executives to the White House to make them justify their salaries and bonuses. When J. P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon told Obama his company wanted to pay back the TARP money as soon as practical and asked him to “streamline” that process, Obama insisted that government money remain in the system to generate growth—a position that belied his later, phony condemnation of banks for not repaying TARP monies. Obama said, “This is like a patient who’s on antibiotics. Maybe the patient starts feeling better after a couple of days, but you don’t stop taking the medicine until you’ve finished the bottle.”

  Obama worried that paying the money back too quickly could send a bad signal. But some CEOs at the meeting disagreed, arguing it was their duty to repay the funds now that they no longer needed them and that doing so would inspire the market’s confidence. 9 Eventually the administration instituted a “test” to determine whether it would permit banks to repay their TARP loans. If banks had plenty of capital and demonstrated an ability to raise fresh money, they would ostensibly be permitted to repay—providing the administration deemed that repayment would be in the wider economic interest.10

  There was no mistaking the president’s harsh tone toward the bankers. One attendee commented, “The only way they could have sent a more Spartan message is if they had served bread along with the water. The signal from Obama’s body language and demeanor was, ‘I’m the president, and you’re not.’”11 Sounds familiar, does it not?

  When the subject turned to the salaries and bonuses, one CEO explained, “We’re competing for talent on an international market.” But Obama, the self-described “listener,” was uninterested. He interrupted them and warned with his signature haughtiness, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” If that was true, it was only because Obama had stoked the flames against banks and corporate executives in the first place.

  More than a half year later, in December 2009, Obama was still blasting Wall Street bank bonuses, declaring on CBS’s 60 Minutes, “I did not run for office to help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street. The people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They’re still puzzled why it is that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down $10 (million), $20 million dollar bonuses after America went through the worst economic year in decades and you guys caused the problem.” He also accused the banks of “fighting tooth and nail with their lobbyists” to oppose financial regulatory control .12

  But once again, “excessive CEO salaries” were only a problem for certain bankers unconnected to Obama; it came to light in February 2010 that government-run GM was providing its CEO, Ed Whitacre, a pay package valued at $9 million—a package approved by U.S. Treasury pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.13

  SQUEEZING THE “FAT CATS”

  In a December 2009, meeting with the CEOs of large banks, Obama all but ordered them to increase their loans to small businesses and their assistance to troubled homeowners. In a statement, he again referred to the financial collapse being “a predicament largely of their own making, oftentimes because they failed to manage risk properly.”

  But in fact, with its myriad regulations and programs pressuring banks to offer mortgages almost regardless of the recipient’s ability to repay, the government was a greater contributor to the crisis than “Wall Street.” Both parties, though Democrats far more than Republicans, embarked on this loose lending policy, placing their “good intentions” above good financial sense, and forced banks to make uncreditworthy loans in the name of compassion.

  But when the Bush administration warned as early as 2003 of the systemic risks posed to the entire economy by the expansion of Fannie and Freddie and recommended the creation of a new federal agency to regulate them, Democrats, such as Congressman Barney Frank, would have none of it. Frank said that critics “exaggerate a threat of safety” and “conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.” Frank sneered at the idea that the government’s lending policy had been too liberal, saying it had “probably done too little rather than too much . . . to meet the goals of affordable housing.”

  In June 2004, seventy-six House Democrats, including Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, sent President Bush a letter defending Fannie and Freddie and insisting that “an exclusive focus on safety and soundness” would likely come “at the expense of affordable housing.” Similarly, in 2007 when the Bush administration discovered some $11 billion of accounting errors on the books of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and demanded a “robust reform package” for these companies as a condition to their expanding their mortgage portfolios, Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Banking Committee, scoffed that Bush should “immediately reconsider his ill-advised” demand. Dodd continued this reckless obstinacy into July 2008, when he pronounced that Fannie and Freddie were “on a sound footing.”14

  An analysis by George Mason University economics professor Lawrence H. White found the financial crisis and ensuing recession were not the result of “financial deregulation and private-sector greed,” but “misguided monetary and housing policies: . . . the expansion of risky mortgages to underqualified borrowers . . . encouraged by the federal government.” Additionally, “the government-supported mortgage lenders, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, grew to own or guarantee about half the United States’ $12 trillion mortgage market.” This caused monumental distortions in the mortgage market because the guarantees artificially eliminated the risk of purchasing bad mortgages, thus catalyzing their rapid expansion. Congress exacerbated the problem and virtually guaranteed a meltdown by pushing Fannie and Freddie to continue to “promote ‘affordable housing’ through expanded purchases on nonprime loans to low-income applicants.”15

  However, Obama not only refused to acknowledge the government’s role in the collapse, but he took credit for rescuing the dastardly banks from it: “We took difficult and, frankly, unpopular steps to pull them back from the brink, steps that were necessary not just to save our financial system, but to save our economy as a whole.”

  With that predicate, he told bankers they owed it to the country to help lift the economy out of crisis. He leaned on them to show their gratitude for his magnanimity by making loans he wanted them to make, as opposed to those consistent with managing risk properly. In other words, he pressured them to do more of the very kind of politicized, irresponsible lending for which he was condemning them. Obama said, “So my main message . . . was very simple: that America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry, and now that they’re back on their feet we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy.”

  “We expect?” The Central Planner in Chief concluded, “That starts with finding ways to help credit-worthy small and medium-size businesses get the loans that they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs.”16 The next week Obama met with CEOs and other officers of a dozen community banks to pressure them to increase their small-business lending and lobby them to support his regulatory overhaul plans. 17

  Obama continued the executive branch assault on the banks into 2010. In January he unveiled a proposal for a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee—a euphemism for a bank penalty tax, a version of which he had first suggested months before. The tax would apply to the nation’s largest financial institutions (banks, thrifts, and insurance companies with more than $50 billion in assets) for the ostensible purpose of “recover[ing] every single dime the American people are owed” for bailing out the economy. Obama said it would remain in e
ffect until the TARP losses, estimated at $117 billion, were recovered, in ten or twelve years. As if working in tandem with Obama, a number of congressional Democrats proposed a 50 percent tax on bonuses above $50,000 at banks that received bailout money.

  After Obama announced his tax proposal, even the New York Times admitted he “spoke in some of his harshest language to date about the resurgent financial industry.” Obama said, “My determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people—who have not been made whole, and who continue to face real hardship in this recession.”18 He further claimed,We’re already hearing a hue and cry from Wall Street suggesting that this proposed fee is not only unwelcome but unfair. That by some twisted logic it is more appropriate for the American people to bear the cost of the bailout rather than the industry that benefited from it, even though these executives are out there giving themselves huge bonuses. What I say to these executives is this: Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. 19

  It couldn’t have been more disingenuous for Obama to frame this retroactive penalty as an effort to “recover” money “owed” to Americans, when most of the affected banks had already repaid their bailout debts with interest. When the banks protested, the White House responded that the measure was aimed at the institutions whose risk-taking had caused the financial crisis, which was tantamount to an admission that it was, in fact, a retroactive penalty.20