Terence P. Jeffrey doesn’t mince words in his new book about the Obama Administration’s goals for remaking America.
“Modern American liberals … would like to see the government exercise more control over our movement, our retirement income, our heathcare, our private property, our speech,” Jeffrey warns.
And he’s just getting warmed up.
No Area Safe
In Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life, the author breaks down the Obama Administration’s plans for curbing freedom in nearly every facet of society.
Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood is a prime example of the administration in action, and he’s a nominal Republican. LaHood has gone on record with his wish to tax people for every mile they drive, his plans to reduce urban sprawl whether citizens like it or not and how he’d like to free “hapless” Americans from their cars.
LaHood’s boss couldn‘t agree more.
“The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” the President once said. Who gave President Barack Obama the right to make such an assertion, the author asks?
Jeffrey weaves in stories of our nation’s earliest days to bring perspective to the liberals’ end game of total control.
Take Social Security, which Jeffrey, for many years the editor of HUMAN EVENTS and now the editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com, says is Congress’s greatest mistake in the 20th Century. Social Security helped pave the way for Americans to feel the government must coddle them in their golden years, in direct contrast to the pioneering spirit of the Founding Fathers.
And, as the near-bankrupt program stands today, it’s an unsustainable model demanding more federal debt and taxation to keep it afloat.
The same bloat threatens to overwhelm the country’s healthcare system, but that’s only part of Obamacare's problems.
Back in 1994, the Congressional Budget Office warned the country what would happen if an Obamacare-style plan came to pass. The federal government, CBO said, had never required Americans to buy anything, let alone health insurance.
Flash forward to 2010 and a plan that does just that is the law of the land. Even when the press, courtesy of CNSnews.com, tried to question members of Congress about the discrepancy, all they got was silence or spin.
One of the more frightening aspects of the new administration’s liberal impulses is the ability to take one’s personal property.
Jeffrey recalls the case of neighbors in Fort Trumbull, Conn., who had their homes condemned because they didn’t bring in enough tax revenue. That move was a vivid contrast to what the Founders envisioned.
“They believed redistributing property was beyond the legitimate scope of any government,” Jeffrey writes.
The administration's willingness to take taxpayer money and use it against their will came into sharper focus when Obama discussed plans to boost the windmill industry. Such “green jobs” measures provide tax credits for Americans who do the government’s bidding, even if it made little sense economically.
“These tax credits … were only for those willing and able to use their property the way President Obama wanted them to use their property,” he says.
Many of Obama’s appointments reflect his zeal for control. Take John P. Holdren, the President’s top science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Holdren once wrote of the need to limit populations to keep society sustainable—and that included plans for wealth redistribution. Holdren added that couples who want to raise large families are accelerating the planet’s demise.
Of course, doom and gloom predictions are commonplace in liberal precincts, and they often come with programs meant to control our lives to prevent the liberal catastrophe du jour.
These statists also want to regulate what we can say, hear and watch. Consider the recent Citizens United case involving a documentary with political themes. President Obama spoke out against the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the film to air during a State of the Union address, arguably the President’s loudest megaphone.
But the liberal movement’s angst over free speech dates back much further, to the start of radio’s “Fairness Doctrine.” That measure controlled the kind of content that could be broadcast, an FCC ruling struck down during the Reagan Administration.
Suddenly, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin could speak their minds without constraints. And that makes people like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi nervous. No wonder she wants the doctrine to come back into force.
Even if that speech-constraining doctrine cannot be revived, progressive forces are looking for other ways to shut Limbaugh and allies down, including the use of “diversity” rules and other unfair measures.
Obama’s zeal for control extends to the unborn—and even the just born. Consider his opposition back in 2001 to an Illinois law that would have declared any baby born alive as a “person.”
The Control Freaks Terry Jeffrey describes are steering the country toward disaster, one in which federal spending and the middle class are bound to collide. All the while, President Obama, Jeffrey warns, is there to “put the pedal to the metal.
