Pelosi's pork and Prevarication

Pelosi's Pork and Personal Prevarication
by Rense Johnson, Chairman
Citizens for Term Limits … for a fresh Congress!
May 14, 2009

Readers of these pages know that before President Obama showed up on the scene our nation was not only dead broke, but eighty trillion dollars upside-down.

Can we blame Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid for this?

Well, not exactly, because the spending that bankrupted our nation was by a huge succession of spendthrift members of Congress (both parties) going back over many decades. Things like this don’t happen overnight.

Example: Speaking of the goodies crammed into the Stimulus Plan by Nancy Pelosi, the Associated Press says, “This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.”

The Wall Street Journal says “We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.”

And, as we now know, after the Stimulus Plan was passed in a hurry without anyone having a chance to read it, yet tinkering with the language continued, illegally of course, for days after passage, which is why President Obama delayed signing it.

And you can bet that the language in the final, doctored version was sufficiently ambiguous to be subject to any interpretation the Democrat bureaucrats want to give it.

But what we can blame Pelosi, et al for is what we could blame any fire department for that would rush to the flames with gasoline in its hoses.

With President Obama aiming the nozzles.

It seems to me that any incoming president, as one of the first orders of business, would be to ascertain state of the nation’s financial resources.

But not if that president is determined, in the words of his Chief of Staff “not to let a good crisis go to waste.”

If that “good” crisis means spending additional trillions upon trillions of dollars we don’t have, loaded upon the backs of unborn generations as far as the eye can see (or imagine);
if that “good’ crisis means trying to spend our way out of a recession, it is a sure way to bring on a full-blown DEPRESSION.

No nation in history has been able to spend its way to prosperity.

Sunday morning, April 26, 2009 During an appearance on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump asserted, “The worst thing that can happen [in this economy] is everybody has to pay double and triple the taxes, and that’s what [President Barack] Obama is looking to do.”

Barack Obama is trying to be another Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Spades. Obama and his crew want the nation’s private sector to become its public sector. One definition of socialism is “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community [country] as a whole.”

A more Marxist definition of socialism is “the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.”

Which of these definitions applies in our nation today? We won’t know for a while. But with the socialist behavior going on in Washington today it won’t be a free market capitalist solution. We see every indication of history repeating itself, with Obama’s approach the same of that attempted by Roosevelt, who magnified the 1930’s recession into The Great Depression by continuously spending money the nation did not have.

Read what FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary after years of New Deal spending:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot.” (From Great Myths of the Great Depression, by the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy)

Sound familiar? It was George Santayana who said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

One wonders whether there is anyone in the Obama administration – or our liberal Democrat Congress—who has ever given five minutes’ thought to history. To ask the question is to answer it.

I am not a Republican fan, because they have a history of shooting themselves in the foot every chance they get. But are there no Democrats in Washington who are careful with the truth?

Most recently, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to defend herself against indefensible assertions that she is lying when she says she never heard of the enhanced interrogation techniques (such as “waterboarding”).

We have had too many decades of self-serving lifetime careerist members of Congress (both parties, both chambers) who have been setting their own Pay, Perks, and Pensions (and Pork, Big Time), and who have legalized their own bribery as they accept arm loads of cash from armies of lobbyists, then obediently deliver their votes as purchased.

Obama recently announced that our nation’s unemployment is in the worst in over twenty years. What self-serving politicians and pseudo-economists have never thought about is what may likely be the greatest four-letter word in the dictionary – “JOBS.”

It is JOBS that are needed in any economic slowdown, and there are too few statesmen who can appreciate and implement that fact. Creation of JOBS should be the most important task of any government in a recession. Sadly however, not if that government is determined “not to let a good crisis go to waste.” Please see our JOBS article on this website.

What is needed is a Congress made up of statesmen who can recognize and act on the dangers to our nation.

What is needed is a Congress made up of citizen legislators who come to Washington not to selfishly serve themselves, but rather to serve their neighbors and their country, as our Founders intended.

What is needed is a Congress that has been term limited by constitutional amendment, as the American people demand.

Time is our enemy.


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