America's Ruling Class

The Highjacking of “Government By the People”

November 9, 2009

by Jack Curtis - A Woodward Report Columnist

Washington rejected royalty; Lincoln was a backwoods lawyer; any American stood up and looked foreign royalty in the eye because an American was as good as anybody. Our aristocrats paid for their privileges and lost them when the money ran out. Getting ahead wasn’t easy but your gains were yours and nobody interfered with what you did. We lived with opportunity that pulled people from everywhere. Our watchwords per Alexis de Toqueville (Democracy in America) were equality and liberty.

Government paid less than industry but was secure, you didn’t work as hard and benefits were better. Smart politicians assumed public humility, avoiding ostentation as befit democrats who weren’t royalty. The public face of government was: a servant of the people.

April 2nd, 2009 our President who likes to bow low before Arab kings, attended a G-20 one-day economic meeting in London with: 500 staff, including 200 Secret Service, 6 doctors, the White House chef and his staff with food and water, 35 vehicles, 4 speechwriters and 12 teleprompters, Air Force One, Marine One (a large helicopter) and a fleet of look-alike decoy helicopters as reported by Scripps-Howard. Not cheap and not too humble a day’s work.

May 30th, our First Couple flew to New York City for dinner and a show, a “private” event leaked in advance exclusively to the NY Daily News. They, the press and White House staff needed 3 planes. A Presidential motorcade took them to the cordoned-off restaurant and the cordoned-off theater where the show started 45 minutes late; a cancelled harbor ferry stranded commuters for two hours while streets closed for the motorcade. Reports said military and secret service groups flew in earlier wih vehicles to set up, plan security etc. The Daily Mirror (UK) estimated the cost at a humble $1 million.

More seriously, the Administration is pursuing life-changing legislation crafted with most Congressmen and the public excluded; then, with Congressional leaders, demanding immediate passage of complex bills without time to understand them, using misleading pressure campaigns to do it. The “Stimulus,” health care and global-warming are examples; immigration is warming up in the wings. Besides high-jacking Congress, this government has seized major U.S. corporations regardless of their owners or Constitutional due process, handing them off to supporters in some cases. Kings used to dispossess out-of-favor nobles, giving their property to favored friends; it seems strange under the rule of law.

The Treasury and the Fed spend beyond all experience refusing to account to the public or even Congress for some of it; Inspectors General at the Treasury and the Fed are stonewalled. The banks too hid their uses of bail-out funds; our rulers take our money; what they do with it is not our business.

And today, unproductive government work pays better than wealth-creating private industry in a sweeping reversal reflecting the Devil’s bargain between politicians and unions that you pay for.

You can’t plant your fields, practice a profession, modify a home, control what your kids learn in school, open a business, hunt or fish, drive a car, smoke a cigar, hire or fire at will, pay any amount someone will accept or rent to your choice of tenants; those and many other previously free choices are foreclosed by our rulers, who also confiscate our property on suspicion without due process; at times, only because we may be carrying more cash than they have decided to allow.

Everyone knows Congress has exempted itself from the health care it is prescribing for us; you likely know their retirement doesn’t depend on Social security. Though Social Security retirees get no raise this year (for the first time in history) and probably won’t for the next three years (according to the Kaiser Family Foundation) the monthly Medicare deduction from Social Security pensions is set to go up $93.60 a year in 2010 and another $192 in 2011. But President Obama signed a 2% salary increase for federal employees next year while Congress receives automatic pay increases every year, pretty nice for folks that don’t bother to read the bills they vote for.

The Christian Science Monitor reported the Obama White House with a $5.1 million a year larger staff than Bush had; Mrs. Obama’s White House staff is listed at 15 people earning $1,263,000 a year.

The only major media outlet and one major talk show host opposed to Administration policies have been regularly attacked from the White House; Fox News so much that its competitors have protested. Direct attempts by government to suppress legitimate disagreement, backed by pending regulation and legislation to impose “fairness” by force are common with dictators but new in the U.S.

Finally, facing adverse polls, protests and heavy negative mail, the Administration has publicly dismissed the legitimacy of all opposition and pushed harder to impose its will, updating the famous quote of William H. Vanderbilt: “The Public Be Damned” sounds no better from today’s White House than it did from the railroad baron in 1882. Worse, actually; the baron didn’t pretend to be serving the taxpayers.

Assembling all this doesn’t show a servant of the people; it’s a portrait of arrogance; governors behaving as entitled rulers. We made this; we swallowed the entitlements offered from our own money, forgetting that: “If you take the King’s shilling, you become the King’s man.” Or updated: Who entitles himself to other peoples’ money through government, entitles government to rule him. And perhaps forgetting too that rulers don’t practice equality and are no source for liberty.