Author: Mark Levin
Publisher: Ben Bella Books – 337 pages
Book Review by: Nano Khilnani
This book by Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity points out how President Obama is using his power and influence by appointing liberals to numerous government agencies that issue regulations that violate, subvert or override existing laws as well as provisions of the Constitution.
He examines – through research and facts – some of the specific major ways Obama is “implementing his radical agenda unilaterally through his regulatory agencies and czars…and exactly what makes his methods unconstitutional.” Among them are:
- the EPA’s assault on affordable energy
- the FCC’s Internet takeover
- the secret plan to force you into a union.
Kerpen points out such actions need the approval of the American people through the U.S. Congress. He presents a plan to stop Obama from violating the Constitution and disregarding the people.
In nine chapters of this book Kerpen shows at least in as many ways how Obama is imposing his socialist ideas upon the people through regulatory rulings that are in effect legislative in nature. Legislative power – the power to make laws – resides solely with Congress – the legislative branch of the U.S. government, which is Congress, and not with the executive branch headed by the President. This is clearly stated in the very first section of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, right after the Preamble.
What are those nine ways in which Obama is going over his limits of power to take away your freedoms supplant your individual rights with his own ideas to transform the United States into a socialist country? Read the whole book and open your eyes to how Obama wants the U.S. government to control your economic behavior.
We mentioned that the first way Obama is bringing in his brand of socialism into the U.S. is through illegally using legislative power to change things conforming to his own ideas. Another is his “cap-and-trade system.” He is quoted in the book as saying: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
The third chapter describes how your online rights may be taken away as the Federal Communications Commission takes over your use of the Internet.
In the fourth chapter Kerpen explains how labor unions – who are “fighting for survival” – spent tens of millions of dollars to make Obama president. Now they want their “payback” by forcing, with Obama’s help, all workers in companies to join unions.
In this review, due to space limitations, I am not going to mention the rest of the ways Obama is trying to transform the American way of life to his own imagined fashion. I urge you to read Phil Kerpen’s Democracy Denied in order to save your freedoms.
Abuse of executive power can force people to live in ways freedom prohibits. That is why the founding fathers protected our freedoms by ensuring separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the new U.S. government they envisioned.
Separation of powers is a key governing principle of the American constitution. The framers of this basic law of the land ensured that this principle be held sacrosanct by placing it right in the very first article. They foresaw that there may be a president in the future who may want to exercise more power than is allocated to him. Kerpen points out that with Obama that is exactly the situation America is facing.
I not only believe that a democracy is strong where there is a free press, but a press must be impartial and diligent in reporting in a balanced way, all facts that affect well being of the people. That is an important duty of the press. And in this regard, the U.S. press (now referred to as mass media with the advent of electronic communication) has failed the people in fulfilling that duty.
The ways in which Obama is taking away the basic freedoms of the people as detailed in this eye-opening book by Phil Kerpen, has not been reported by major U.S. news organizations. It took a book like this one to do that. And when people in a democratic nation are ignorant of the ways in which their president is furtively stealing their freedoms, that nation is in peril of becoming a dictatorship.
Have you ever wondered why there is not much news reporting and analysis by major U.S. TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines and web-based news media on the severe financial problems that beset America, as though they did not matter at all?
If you knew that since January 2009 (when Obama was sworn in as president) some 2.5 million jobs have been lost, most of them permanently, would that shock you? With so much media coverage of Obama’s speeches and appearances about “creating jobs” you may have been brainwashed by him that jobs have been “saved.” Nothing could be further than the truth, with statistics available from the US bureau of labor statistics.
You may also have the impression that the $787 billion borrowed, allocated and now probably almost totally spent in Obama’s bill meant to “stimulate” the U.S. economy only stimulated a larger government bureaucracy on Federal, state and local levels and added greater ongoing liabilities to taxpayers.
You may also believe that the “stimulus” program stimulated job creation, but nothing again could be further than the truth – job loss continued even after expending those hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars.
What that huge and costly initiative falsely labeled as “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” was mainly a government aid and welfare program that paid people temporarily for limited construction/repair projects involving public buildings. What that “stimulus” program did stimulate was growth of U.S. government debt along with interest cost that future generations of taxpayers would be burdened with.
The major U.S. media have also failed the public in reporting the true extent of U.S. government debt growth and putting it in proper perspective by relating it to debt increase and decrease under previous presidents.
If you knew that Obama’s three fiscal years of Federal government budgets have added nearly $4.5 trillion or a whopping 42 percent to the debt in less than three years from January 2009 would you be shocked? The US debt was $10.626 trillion when Obama became president. It is now (December 16, 2011) at $15.127 trillion, an increase of $4.501 trillion. That averages to $1.5 trillion debt growth per year, more than three times the $482 billion deficit spending added to U.S. debt during the last fiscal year of former President George W. Bush.
