Crimes Against Liberty (30 page)

David Martin of the Media Research Center translated Kagan’s jargon: “So, if talk radio suffers from an ‘overabundance’ of conservative voices, government action to ‘un-skew’ this particular public discourse is acceptable according to Kagan.” Martin added that Kagan has also taken the position that “government can restrict speech if it believes that speech might cause harm, either directly or by inciting others to do harm.”
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Hmmmm . . . Tea party, anyone? The
Washington Times
also sounded the alarm on Kagan, noting her “First Amendment work repeatedly promotes the idea that speech rights are granted by government rather than inherent in the God-given nature of man.” Then again, to many liberals, government is a substitute for God .
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Under Obama, even the simple calculating of radio listenership has become a politicized issue requiring government involvement. In 2007 Arbitron adopted the Portable People Meter (PPM), a new, more accurate measurement system for radio listenership. But there was a problem, at least for the Left: PPM produced higher conservative talk ratings and lower ratings for urban and minority-owned stations. Unsurprisingly, just as leftists have squealed about the loss of their media monopoly with the advent of conservative talk and FOX News, they cried foul at the new ratings system. At the urging of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, Obama’s FCC ordered an inquiry into the PPM data collection process—in the name of “diversity.”

The Radio Equalizer
’s Brian Maloney opined that the Left’s goal was to “restore hip-hop’s ratings and undo the newly-precise measurement of Rush Limbaugh’s statistics. Combined with a White House-led effort to destroy the talk titan, ratings have recently gone through the roof.”
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Newsbusters’
Seton Motley aptly noted, “If [Obama] is willing to take on this most ridiculous of claims in the name of media ‘Diversity,’ we are naturally left to think that there is nearly nothing he won’t do to ensure that the broadcast world is remade in the manner he thinks it should be.”
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POLITICIZATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

The Department of Justice under Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder has been acutely politicized, from its appeasement approach to the war on terror to its denunciation of Arizona’s sovereign immigration law. But perhaps its most inexcusably politicized action was its dismissal of the voter intimidation case against New Black Panther Party members. The case arose when voters complained that nightstick-wielding Black Panthers were guarding the door of a Philadelphia polling station. The Bush Justice Department filed suit against NBPP leader Malik Shabazz and two other NBPP members, none of whom even filed an answer to the lawsuit. Rather than accepting a default judgment against the defendants, Obama’s DOJ dismissed the case against two of the three. Justice claimed it dropped the lawsuit “after careful review,” but was never forthcoming about its reasons.

A year after the dismissal, Todd Gaziano, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told the
Washington Times
he believes “a racist application of the voting rights laws may have been at play” in the decision to dismiss the case. Gaziano said he “wanted to believe” there were “wrongheaded but not racist reasons” leading to the dismissal, but “there apparently is a culture in the civil rights division” of the Justice Department where section chiefs and other supervising attorneys “don’t believe the voting rights laws should ever be enforced against blacks and other minorities.” If there were a “good reason for something (dismissal), and the reason has been called into question, a decent law enforcement agency . . . would want to provide the reasonable explanation—and they still haven’t done that.” Additionally, the DOJ refuses to allow the commissioners to interview key department employees they have subpoenaed and others.
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Chris Coates, the DOJ career voting section chief, reportedly shocked his coworkers at his going-away luncheon by reciting a written defense of his decision to file the case against the NBPP members. In the memo, Coates said he did his best “to enforce all our voting statutes for all Americans, and I leave here with my soul rested that I did the right thing to the best of my ability.” Republican congressman Frank Wolf, speaking before the Commission on Civil Rights, said, “Although the Attorney General will not allow the career attorneys to testify before this commission, I believe this anecdote helps to convey the ardent opposition of the department’s career attorneys to the dismissal of this voting rights case.” Wolf called on the Attorney General to comply with the subpoenas and permit the career attorneys to testify.
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Christian Adams, a trial attorney with the DOJ’s voting rights section, later resigned over the government’s refusal to prosecute the case or to allow him and his colleagues to testify before the commission despite being subpoenaed. In his resignation letter, Adams cited the “explicit federal statute” upon which the subpoena is based. He also invoked the increasing belligerence of the NBPP defendants toward the attorneys who brought the case, and his intimate knowledge of “the criminal character and violent tendencies of the members of the New Black Panther Party.”
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Adams later made the explosive allegation that the Justice Department had dismissed the case because under Holder, it simply refuses to prosecute voting rights cases when the victims are white. As Adams ominously noted, the dismissal “raises serious questions about the department’s enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.”
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The New Black Panther Party’s methods are hardly worse than those of the Obama administration. Though Obama doesn’t use a nightstick to intimidate people from voting, his subordinates protect those who do. Though Obama doesn’t shove a gag into his opponents’ mouths, he presides over agencies that are furiously searching for ways to silence his critics. He talks a good game of transparency while using secretive and corrupt methods to pass legislation; he speaks of openness, while avoiding questions and sometimes mocking the once starry-eyed White House press corps; and he insists on bipartisanship while White House operatives troll the Internet to malign and snitch on everyday citizens who dissent from his agenda. It is no wonder his cynical, ruthless administration has ushered in among Americans a seething discontent with the governing majority in Washington.

Chapter Eight

OBAMA THE IMPERIOUS

CRIMES AGAINST THE PRIVATE SECTOR, PART 1

O
bama’s assault on the private sector began early in his term. His main tactic was pitting people against people and groups against groups with unprecedented stridency. He couldn’t just push for a “fairer” tax system; he first had to vilify lobbyists, “special interests,” the wealthy, and corporate America. When he called for an end to tax breaks for U.S. corporations doing business abroad, he blamed “a broken tax system, written by well-connected lobbyists on behalf of well-heeled interests and individuals.”

While advocating almost any legislation, Obama identified some nefarious, private-sector villain he claimed needed to be put in line. Introducing his plan to revamp the student loan program, he said, “We have a student loan system that’s rigged to reward private lenders without any risk.” During his efforts to strong-arm a restructuring of Chrysler, he accused the firm’s secured creditors of 201 seeking “an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout”—when they were just trying to defend their legal rights that the administration was trampling in favor of Chrysler’s union. He accused credit card companies of dishonestly imposing “all kinds of harsh penalties and fees,” and he lambasted large U.S. companies for diverting some of their profits overseas. Jade West, a lobbyist for the National Association of Wholesale-Distributors commented, “It is traditional class-warfare rhetoric. It’s a little bit frightening.”
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DEMONIZING BIG PHARMA

When ObamaCare was being debated, Obama was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Clintons, who had been outmaneuvered by opponents of socialized medicine in the early nineties. One thing he would do more effectively was to shore up support, or at least nullify major opposition from, certain sectors such as the American Medical Association and pharmaceutical companies. He was willing to do whatever it took to pass healthcare, including resorting to the bullying and bribery described in previous chapters.

While campaigning, Obama talked tough against the drug companies, saying, “We’ll tell the pharmaceutical companies ‘thanks, but no, thanks’ for the overpriced drugs—drugs that cost twice as much here as they do in Europe and Canada.”
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But in summer 2009, he reached a mutually shameful deal with the drug-makers’ main lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), whereby drug-makers agreed to cut drug costs by $8 billion a year for ten years in exchange for Obama’s commitment not to further cut Medicare’s payments to them and not to push for importing drugs from Canada
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—directly contradicting his campaign promise. “It’s got to be a little awkward,” said Senator Tom Carper, in reference to Obama’s about-face.
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An unlikely source, the Left-wing website the
Huffington Post
, exposed the shady deal’s details based on an internal memo “prepared by a person directly involved in the negotiations.” The White House agreed to oppose any congressional attempts to push for lower drug prices or to import drugs from Canada. It also pledged “not to pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced reimbursements.” Both PhRMA and the White House denied the memo’s accuracy, but critics nevertheless accused Obama of reneging on his promises both to use government to reduce drug costs to Medicare and to conduct his negotiations in the open.
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Other mainstream media sources cast further suspicion on the White House’s denial of a backroom deal. The
New York Times
’ David Kirkpatrick reported that the White House “assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.” Reports that the White House wasn’t standing behind the deal led Billy Tauzin, a former congressman and PhRMA’s lead lobbyist, to publicly confirm a deal had been struck: “We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first you will have a rock-solid-deal. . . . Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.” The
Times
reported that White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina had confirmed Tauzin’s version of the deal.
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Tauzin was firm about the White House’s involvement in the deal. He said the White House had tracked negotiations from the beginning and had “assented” to the deal’s basic components: not negotiating prices or importing drugs from Canada in exchange for the $80 billion—“no more, no less. Adding other stuff changes the deal.” Tauzin even said he met twice at the White House on the matter with top Obama operatives Messina, Rahm Emanuel, and Nancy-Ann DeParle. “They blessed the deal,” said Tauzin.
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But another complication developed. House Democrats were miffed at being cut out of the negotiations, though their counterparts in the Senate Finance Committee (primarily represented by Senator Max Baucus) had been included. Raul M. Grijalva, the Democratic co-chairman of the House progressive caucus, called the deal “disturbing.” “We have all been focused on the debate in Congress, but perhaps the deal has already been cut. That would put us in the untenable position of trying to scuttle it,” he said.

Grijalva was concerned Congress was being ignored in favor of lobbyists, and that this might set a precedent for the Obama White House to follow on other issues. “It is a pivotal issue not just about health care,” said Grijalva. “Are industry groups going to be the ones at the table who get the first big piece of the pie and we just fight over the crust?” Adding further tension, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly asserted the House was not bound by any deals between the White House and the Senate.
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