Who's Shilling for Dictatorship?

As Americans we have an important, life or death, moral choice to make over the next few months. No one should shirk it, not you, not me, not our children; especially not politicians and other influential people. Are we to be a nation that enables morality through freedom or that suffers immorality through dictatorship?

A lot of people are demanding that President Obama should become a dictator. Some are insisting that he just take over. They would not be offended if he simply ruled by edict. To them this would be the right thing to do…because this is the only way to advance his agenda without political criticism and opposition.

I say we are already there and these shills for dictatorship have nothing to complain about.

March, 2009 – In an unprecedented move, President Obama fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner - when our new President turned his attention to ‘solving’ the pending bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. This interference into the hiring and firing practices of a private corporation represented the beginning of an ominous trend where the President calls his own shots.

May, 2009 – The Obama administration assigned complete authority to a “Task Force” made up of Obama administration officials and Wall Street veterans to restructure General Motors and Chrysler overstepping existing bankruptcy laws and Congressional oversight.

May, 2009 – The Obama administration, in negating the contracts between Chrysler Corporation and private investors, who should have received their investments back in full, set a precedent that threatens to invalidate any legal contract at any time purely on the basis that the President deems it necessary.

September, 2009 – The Obama Justice Department decided to dismiss a case filed against the Black Panthers for voter intimidation. The apparent, though not stated reason for the dismissal is that the Obama Justice Department believes that civil rights cases cannot be brought against the historical victims of racism. That intimidation did take place at the polling place, that election laws were violated, indicates disrespect by the administration for equal protection under the law.

December, 2009 - The Obama Treasury Department removed the $400 billion financial cap on the money it will provide to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac afloat, sidestepping Congressional oversight authority and further punishing the tax payer for a problem created by the government through the Community Reinvestment Act.

June 2010 – President Obama informs the American public that “Tomorrow I will meet with the Chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of this company’s recklessness.” Though we still don’t know what caused the explosion at the BP drilling station, even Fox News journalist Bill O’Reilly ranted on his television show that the President should do whatever he needed to make BP pay for the mess in the Gulf. He openly stated that the government should use whatever force it needed in order to accomplish this. It did not bother O'Reilly that the demand by President Obama violates the laws and judicial processes already in place to deal with issues of this type. Even after 234 years of freedom in this country, it now becomes proper, because Bill O'Reilly says so, to engage in open extortion of money from a private company.

June 2010 – President Obama declares a drilling moratorium on Gulf of Mexico deep water drilling operations for at least six months. To accomplish this, he used a forged document, and when the administration was asked what legal authority it had for the moratorium, administration lawyers brought up the "authority" of the President in an emergency. Yet, there was no law that gave the President the authority for the moratorium.

Each of these moves by the Obama administration, with the exception of the decision not to pursue the case against the Black Panthers was presumably the result of an emergency. Yet, each of these actions was “unconstitutional”. There was no legal basis for making them. But more importantly, each of them had a set of shills in the media and in Congress that declared the President's action necessary; because, presumably, people would suffer if the President did not act immediately.

None of these people cared to consider that there was something dreadfully wrong with their advocacy of dictatorship: they had forgotten the principles that they relied upon, principles such as freedom of speech, that almost every dictator in history has sought to eliminate. They were calling for dictatorship in the very nation built as a bulwark against arbitrary power and abusive government. For the sake of a short-term benefit to a few people, many of whom were corrupt and responsible for their own situation, they would advocate for the President's violating the Constitution that protected the rights and freedoms of all citizens. And they fell for the biggest shell game of all; the scam of government creating a crisis and then declaring itself the solver of the crisis. Where is the questioning here?

The Constitution gives the President the power to enforce laws passed by Congress. It does not give him the power to make laws, create regulations or otherwise legislate about the actions of private citizens or corporations. This is because of the separation of powers built into our Constitution.

These acts, and many others taken by the President, represent a power that few men in history have held. Those who have obtained this power are members of an elite group known as dictators. Their names include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Chavez and many others known for the devastation they wrought.

In “My Ignorant Fascism Rant”, I wrote:

“The rationale for the takeover of private activity was first propagated by some ancient Greeks. The Greeks held that democracy was ineffective during war and that a strong central control was necessary to get a city through an emergency of this kind. This required the establishment of a “tyrant” (who controlled everything) and the suspension of all freedoms until the war had been won. At that point, the city could once again reestablish democratic rule. This is the genesis of our modern day “tyrannies”.

Yet, even some of the Greeks wondered why people wanted to return to democracy when the “tyranny” had been so efficient. Couldn’t a tyranny work during peacetime? In fact, Plato’s recommended “Republic” was a tyranny of the philosophers where the most intelligent men controlled and planned all elements of society in order to advance a common and greater good. Plato’s ideas were forged out of the anger and despair he felt over seeing his beloved mentor and teacher Socrates drink the hemlock at the behest of “the people” who voted that he should die. Plato’s work has served as a blueprint for dictatorships ever since it was written so many centuries ago.”

In America, our revolution sought to eliminate dictatorial power by means of the separation of powers. The Founders sought to ensure that arbitrary power could not develop. They knew that such power by the King of England had necessitated the revolution, and they concluded that a government which governs less is the best government. All private decisions, even responses to emergencies, were to be made by free people without Federal government involvement.

The rule of law makes a civil, peaceful society possible. It facilitates trade, reason, free speech, safety and uniform rights. It declares that all men are equal before the law and strives to make it impossible for men of power to use the law for their sole benefit. The rule of law requires that laws be made by the people through an open legislative process. The principle starts with a Constitution that enumerates individual rights and prohibits government from violating those rights, and through the separation of powers, it makes sure that only the duly chosen representatives of the people can make laws, and, equally important, it requires that every member of government swear to uphold the Constitution.

The practices of our President in denying due legal process to the citizens of our nation are an affront to civil society and freedom. They are an affront to the intent of the Constitution. Are we to be a society where a single person has the authority to make all decisions, or one where the laws are passed through a legislative process controlled by the people? Are we to be a nation of laws or a nation of men?

It is clear that President Obama’s answer to this last question is that he has the wisdom and the authority to decide for us. It is clear that he wants to be a dictator. It is clear that, like all dictators in the past, he is not competent to rule our nation.

For instance, our financial crisis was caused by government’s effort to re-distribute income through the Community Reinvestment Act which forced banks to make bad home mortgages. This violation of property rights got so out of hand that it brought some of our financial institutions down. A private solution would have involved the bankruptcy of those institutions only. After a short period of time, an economic adjustment would have worked its way through the economy with little damage to the people whose investment funds were not involved. As it was, the government and President Obama, forced an additional re-distribution of money from investors and tax payers, prolonging the recovery and putting everyone’s future on the line. This is arbitrary power that collectivized the problem and made sure that everyone suffered, even those people who had nothing to do with creating the problem.

When President Obama declared that all debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government institutions that are responsible for the “meltdown”, would be covered by government, he made another unilateral decision that further enslaved the tax payers and their children. This is arbitrary power, exerted to “solve” a problem created by government, that harmed everyone except the contributors to the President’s political campaigns, the very culprits responsible for the meltdown. This is immoral, illegal and purely dictatorial.

Without a well-constituted legal system, nothing is illegal. We must understand why this is important. You may say that President Obama is merely trying to solve emergencies and that we should just get together for the good of all. But the important issue is that the President’s actions have the (possibly) unintended consequence of totally destroying our legal system; and this will destroy our society. This will make the dishonest person equal to the honest and release the dishonest to prey upon society. This includes not only the rich criminals who use campaign contributions to create massive money laundering schemes, but also the hardened street criminals who will be released to do the bidding of the government that wants their “services”.

This brings us to the Black Panthers, the unions and community agitators. With the President's coddling of criminal elements in our society, his unwillingness to prosecute these elements will give these power-hungry people the opportunity to use physical violence, riots, shakedowns and extortion; in other words, to create more emergencies for the government to “solve”. When we get to a point of no return, there will be nothing we can do except protect ourselves and hope to survive. We will be as animals not knowing what tomorrow will bring; our choice will be between survival by violence or death by violence.

Is this what we want? Or do we have the foresight of our Founding Fathers who sought to ensure that individual rights and the rule of law were preserved?

You may think that this will never happen. I hope I am wrong. But unless we start defending our freedoms against the assaults being made by President Obama against the rule of law, this very negative outcome of violence and revolution is highly possible. There are people who are ready for this situation and who know exactly what they will do when this period arrives. The result can only be concentration camps and slave labor.

“A society of laws and not of men” is a critical principle for our nation. It makes it possible for us to be moral men and women. It is the basis for our individual rights that make up everthing that happens in our lives, everything we think, say, own and create; the destruction of just one of those principles means the destruction of our entire society. Anyone who does not know this, or who routinely ignores it, is no friend of our nation – whether he knows it or not.

The idea of avoiding the courts to resolve legal issues is a hallmark of dictatorship. When a President routinely declares everything an emergency and then makes laws on the fly, it destroys the voluntary relationships in society, turns everything into a question of what the government will do next, and destroys people who have done nothing to deserve destruction (such as Gulf-area oil company employees). Dictatorship destroys everything in its wake.

We have to realize that the danger of full dictatorship will become even more palpable when the President begins naming judges who will refuse to challenge him in his abuses of power; or when he nominates Supreme Court Justices who will harangue other Justices into voting to support the President’s abuses – under the extra-legal justification of using “temporary” powers to deal with an emergency. The truth is that those arbitrary powers will not be temporary and the fight to restore a proper respect for law will be very difficult once the government gets control of all institutions.

We have an important choice to make in November, and we should make this choice with our eyes wide open. This may be the last election we have as a free people if we don't make the right decisions. Are we going to shill for dictatorship and allow the President to continue increasing government power or are we going to stop this madness and insist that the President follow the law?

Impeachment should not be out of the question.