“We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million to be exact — and we’re proud of it,” Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, bragged in the May 10 Las Vegas Sun.
And as George Will points out in Thursday’s Washington Post, they’re getting their money’s worth — and at taxpayer expense — thanks to a corrupt, lawless Obama administration. He also delves into Obama’s corrupt bullying of Chrysler’s secured creditors, cowing them into accepting pennies on the dollar while the labor unions who spent millions to elect Obama got better deals despite being lesser creditors.
Click here to read Will’s full column, or if it’s offered in your area, pick up a copy of The Washington Post. Will writes, in part:
Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil — the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.
In February, California’s Democratic-controlled Legislature, faced with a $42 billion budget deficit, trimmed $74 million (1.4 percent) from one of the state’s fastest-growing programs, which provides care for low-income and incapacitated elderly people and which cost the state $5.42 billion last year. The Los Angeles Times report that "loose oversight and bureaucratic inertia have allowed fraud to fester."
But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money.
Such a federal ukase (the word derives from czarist Russia; how appropriate) to a state legislature is a sign of the administration’s dependency agenda — maximizing the number of people and institutions dependent on the federal government. For the first time, neither sales nor property nor income taxes are the largest source of money for state and local governments. The federal government is. …
…The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.
Click here to read George Will’s column.
