The Left's War on the Economy

Daniel Greefield

Obama may be losing the War on Terror, but his War on the Economy is headed full speed ahead. The joblessness, the unemployment rolls and an economic in which the only people still making money are in the government, in public sector unions or on Wall Street is no accident. It was the intended result all along. What Obama and the Democrats miscalculated is the mobilization of populist opposition and the speed with which the public turned to the Republicans for solutions, instead of treating Obama as the Great Savior for extending their unemployment benefits.In little more than a year, Obama's soothing words lost their magic, his telegenic grin stopped connecting and his antics ceased to interest anyone, but the political opposition. The public proved to be much less interested in the bread of his social services doles or the circuses of his media presence. Obama and the left threw in their final effort, convincing congressional Democrats to stand at the barricades for ObamaCare. But that didn't break the flood, it made it worse. Contrary to the liberal worldview, most Americans didn't want to be on the dole, they wanted a working economy. And the popular wisdom among them today is that Obama is a well-meaning failure. Most Americans will go to the polls and vote based on that popular wisdom. They generally don't hate Obama, yet they don't think that he or his party are up to the job either.

But Obama didn't fail. Obama succeeded. He succeeded at doing exactly what he was supposed to do. Damage the American economy in order to undermine the country's status as a Great Power and the independence of the average American from his government. The goal of this party and this man was never to oversee an economic recovery. And why would it have been? Obama and his allies on the left believe that a prosperous economy is the root of all evil, and the chief obstacle to the people embracing a government mandate for socialism.

An economic recovery would have made 90 percent of his legislative priorities irrelevant. It would have made it impossible to take over companies in order to "save" them, run up an impossible national debt in the name of "stimulating" the very economy they were bankrupting, and use the money to promote the left's agenda. The economy made it possible for him to do everything from trying to nationalize health care to shutting down NASA. It became a blank check crisis to be used to perpetuate the crisis in order to bring down the entire country into a more easily manageable state.

The feverish fight over Proposition 23 in California, shows how far liberals will go to destroy jobs. The point of Global Warming fever was not to fight an imaginary crisis. It was to control and shrink the economy, smash what was left of America's manufacturing sector, push the lower middle class down into social services cases and make sure they can never get up again. And pass the cash over to Wall Street and a few Dot Com whiz kids who discovered an even bigger scam for making money than going public with companies that have no business plan except to pump up their own stock and then dump it on unsuspecting investors. That in a word is the "Green Economy".

The left has always viewed the American economy as an evil, the sordid engine that turned a country of colonizers and imperialists into a great power. That is why it has gone for labor unions, not because it supported the rights of workers (worker's rights and unions are as incompatible as Al Capone and the Better Business Bureau) but because that gave it a chokehold on the economy. A chokehold that it was open about using to damage the economy, rather than to help workers. When enough of the manufacturing and industrial sectors were choked off, that unions lost their power-- environmentalism took its place. Like the union, environmentalism was good not only for driving up the price of production, but also for randomly shutting down production out of spite and malice. What the unions didn't destroy, the environmentalists did.

Companies fled, and liberals celebrated. The lost jobs in cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit created slums where African-Americans who had moved to to find work now found themselves stuck. And of course the government and groups which had created the problem, were more than happy to help. The jobs had left, but they were happy to keep them on the dole, as long as they pushed the right lever on election day. Former booming manufacturing cities bred lightless ghettos, with social problems courtesy of the government. And what had once been the heart of a booming American economy, instead became the source of its malaise.

Global Warming is the final bullet to the head of the economy. It gives the left a blank check to destroy it wholesale, to tax everyone and everything in the name of a fictional crisis that they themselves invented. Environmentalists had previously settled for phony attacks on specific targets such as DDT. But Global Warming is the culmination of their work. A blank check for destroying any and every part of the economy, and funneling the money to themselves through Cap and Trade. Had they just broken into Fort Knox and cleaned it out, the resulting robbery would look like a pittance compared to the grand economic rape they are working to perpetrate right now.

But this is not just about money, it's about power. The power to rule over people's lives. For all its faults, America's booming economy allowed for class mobility and individual independence. Economic prosperity meant an expanding middle-class that didn't need to be "saved" by the progressives anymore. Which is why the left is so determined to shut it down, in favor of their alternative, yet another social experiment in which everyone works for government controlled industries for next to nothing, and feels good about contributing to the public good. It worked in the Soviet Union, why not here?

Money is a form of power, but it only goes so far when there is a generally high standard of living. On the other hand when you push 90 percent of the country into the gutter in the name of the public good, then power and even a little money makes you king. That is the way it is in the Third World and the wonderful Communist People's Republics that the left openly says we should be imitating. And there's a simple reason for that. Deny it as they like, they want to be that 10 percent. And they want us to be in that 90 percent. What's more is that they're already acting that way. The smug Time and Newsweek covers. The liberal pundits once again talking about how stupid and childish the American people are, echoing their own rhetoric from 1994. Obama casually mentioning all those ignorant people clinging to their religion and their guns. They already see themselves as the enlightened elite. Their goal is to turn their perceptions into an enforced reality. For the good of that ignorant public of course.

American Liberalism was not the preoccupation of the poor, but of the idle rich. Of people who had never worked for a living, or those who had once worked, but now needed another outlet for their energies. Liberalism has traditionally been the upper classes deciding what to do with the pesky lower classes. They flirted with eugenics and sterilization. They tried re-education and spiritual enlightenment. But what has really troubled them is the gush of the lower classes into the middle class, to create a group that they considered ignorant, vulgar and devoid of higher qualities. Socialism is supposed to fix all that. Squash the lower and middle classes together into one homogenized and wealth-redistributed lower class. And teach them that social immobility and rationing are a sign that spiritual values and moral ethics are triumphing over their sordid materialism.

George Orwell's vision of 1984 was of socialism used as a means by the political and cultural elites to permanently squash down all the other classes in place, creating permanent social immobility. That is the goal today. While immigration is deliberately calculated to expand the lower classes using populations that they can fix in immobility through social welfare and economic segregation, businesses are driven from the country as fast as possible. Spending increases and the National Debt becomes irredeemable, both because it can never be paid back, and because the spending is tied to entitlements that are not likely to be repossessed by career politicians. Economic crisis feeds a need for government control. Which feeds the elements that cause the crisis. The end result is no economy and government control.

This phase of the project has hit a bump in the road. The Tea Party movement meant that a populist American response kicked in unexpectedly. That alone would not have stopped it, had it not turned out that most Americans agreed with the basic criticisms. What we're seeing now are tantrums by political and cultural elites who had the brass ring in their grasp and are infuriated that what they consider to be "an anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes" are likely to cost them the election and their death grip on power. Just as in 1994, they are openly airing their contempt for the population of the country that somehow turned out not to be as pliable as they thought. But the upcoming election will not dissuade them. There is too much money and power at stake. And they have dug in too deep to let go now. If they cannot work through elected officials, they will work through the bureaucracy. If they cannot work through either, they will create NGO's and coordinate international efforts. They will form phony citizen's groups and activist organizations. They will brainwash the next generation, enlisting children and teenagers to chant their slogans. They will not give up. They will do absolutely anything to carry on.

This is not merely about an idea or a set of ideas for them. It is about power. Absolute power over the lives of every man, woman and children in America-- and beyond it the world. That is the hideous energy that we are fighting against. That is where our struggle lies.