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February 26, 2009
Exclusive: FSM's Keep the Change (TM) Awards - February, 2009
How’s that hope and change coming? Find out as FamilySecurityMatters.org continues the new tradition of the Keep the Change™ Award, bestowed monthly on deserving recipients who, under the guise of “change,” are really undermining fundamental American values in one or more of the following categories:
· National security
· National sovereignty
· Fiscal responsibility
· Ethics in government
· Education of children – the leaders of tomorrow
· Limited government, as defined by our Founders
· Tarnishing the Constitution
And now, the runners up for February:
SECOND RUNNER UP: The Clintons, as we discover who’s really been lining their pockets since Bill left office. Compelled to release the list of donors to his presidential library and foundation when his wife was being vetted for the position of Secretary of State, it’s easy to see why he hesitated to release it while his wife still had a chance of becoming President.
More than $500 million has been given by donors from all over the world. Some of the more interesting donors include:
Between $10 million and $25 million from:
-- The government of Saudi Arabia
Between $1 million and $5 million from:
-- Friends of Saudi Arabia
-- The Dubai Foundation
-- Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid
-- Saudi tycoon Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi
-- Former Lebanon Deputy Prime Minister Issam Fares
-- The government of Kuwait
-- The government of Qatar
-- The government of Oman
-- The government of Brunei
-- The Zayed Family, rulers of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates
-- He also received between $500,000 and $1 million from Saudi businessman Walid Juffali.
Those who think that these donors simply gave out of the goodness of their hearts are probably big Pollyanna fans. How exactly is Hillary Clinton supposed to impartially negotiate sensitive conflicts with the Middle East when her husband has been the recipient of so much petrodollar largesse? Your guess is as good as ours.
Meanwhile, she’s been sent hat in hand to China to beg for a handout – er, to ask them to purchase U.S. debt. Perhaps President Obama knew what he was doing when he picked the wife of Bill for the job after all.
FIRST RUNNER UP: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. We have both President Obama and Congress to thank for putting a man in charge of our treasury despite his inability to keep track of his own taxes. And he wasn’t the only Obama nominee with that problem. But there’s a lot more to Tim Geithner than meets the eye.
You may remember Obama’s pledge during the campaign to keep lobbyists out of his administration. Well, not only has he appointed a number of them directly, but Tim Geithner’s chief of staff is a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. And the hits just keep on coming:
Geithner's new deputy secretary is a former CEO of Citigroup. Another CFO from Citigroup is now assistant to the President...and one of his assistants also came from Citigroup. To finish out the roster, a member of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board...yeah, he used to work at UBS.
But wait; there's more.
Geithner's "Brain Trust" of unofficial advisors includes John Thain - who formerly worked with both Goldman and Merrill Lynch - Gerald Corrigan (another former Goldman exec) and Hank Paulson (yet another former Goldman Exec). The icing on the cake here is Alan Greenspan, who exploited his own disastrous mismanagement of the Federal Reserve in a brief stint with Pimco last year, who's also got Geithner's ear.
Can you blame us for asking: is the tail wagging the dog? We’ll have to wait and see, but from where we sit, this looks like politics as usual, with the American people getting the short end of the stick.
AND THE WINNER OF THE FEBRUARY KEEP THE CHANGE™ AWARD IS: Congress, for passing the so-called “stimulus” bill. Congress moved from second runner up in January to the winner’s circle this month. Special thanks go to Republican Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins for making this a “bipartisan” effort.
The wheels of government turn slowly – except when it comes to ramming through legislation that won’t hold up under the light of day. The same holds true with how the newly-minted stimulus bill will actually work, as only $110 billion of the nearly $800 billion will be spent by the time 2010 rolls around. As Thomas Sowell notes,
Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire.
If you cut taxes tomorrow, people would have more money in their next paycheck, and it would probably be spent by the time they got that paycheck, through increased credit card purchases beforehand.
If all this sound and fury in Washington was about getting an economic crisis behind us, tax cuts could do that a lot faster.
But this is government, and the bigger government gets, the more it wants – in money and power. Are we supposed to feel confident in our elected representatives when we hear about how they voted for a bill none of them possibly had the time to read before rushing to Capitol Hill to raise their hands? A bill that doesn’t necessarily create the jobs it promises and at the same time puts our children and grandchildren into hock to Communist China? A bill that contains not just political pork but the social engineering that liberals have been dying to enact for decades?
Pardon us if we seem less than thrilled. And just think: it’s early days yet.
Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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