The Beginnings of Socializing Our Economy

$920 Billion More to Bail-Out the World


AIM COLUMN BY CLIFF KINCAID
SEPTEMBER 28, 2008
(article condensed)

With one socialist “bailout” bill apparently on the way to passage by Congress, two more are pending―both of them sponsored by Senator Barack Obama. One is the Jubilee Act, which would cancel as much as $75 billion worth of Third World debt, and the other is the Global Poverty Act, which would cost an estimated $845 billion. Total potential cost: $920 billion.

Meanwhile, in an appearance on the Fox News Channel on Sunday, Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan called the $700 billion plan now before Congress “Fleece in our time,” a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” appeasement deal with Hitler that eventually plunged the world into a World War. The House is scheduled to vote on the measure on Monday.

Calling the deal “Wall Street socialism,” McCotter added, “Now the Wall-Street crony capitalists have put a 700-pound billion dollar bag of dung on taxpayers’ doorsteps, rung the bell, and expect you to thank them when you answer it. I think the American people will believe otherwise.”



But consider what’s going to happen when the American taxpayers realize that more and larger bailouts are on the way.

Commentators such as Andrew C. McCarthy have pointed out that Obama’s Global Poverty Act (S. 2433) would cost even more than the $700 billion that is being proposed as part of a socialist takeover of the U.S. financial sector. Obama’s bill passed the House and Senator Joe Biden’s Foreign Relations Committee and now awaits full Senate action.

But the Jubilee Act (S. 2166), which is co-sponsored in the Senate by Barack Obama, has also passed the House and awaits Senate action.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain is not an official sponsor of the Jubilee Act or Obama’s Global Poverty Act. But the pressure is mounting on McCain, as well as running mate Sarah Palin, to endorse the legislation.

While the Global Poverty Act has started getting more serious attention, the implications of passage of the Jubilee Act have been generally ignored. Yet, a representative of the Treasury Department, Assistant Secretary For International Affairs Clay Lowery, testified at a Senate hearing in April that “The Jubilee Bill represents an unfunded international mandate to fully cancel roughly $75 billion worth of debts owed by the potentially eligible countries to official bilateral and multilateral creditors.” This is on top of the $110 billion in debt reduction already being granted to various countries, he said.

Also bowing to the left, before he came to Washington, D.C. to work on the $700 billion federal takeover plan for the U.S. financial sector, McCain had taken time to attend and speak at the “Clinton Global Initiative,” a campaign underwritten by big companies and rich individuals to promote the pet causes of the disgraced former president. One of these causes has been an international tax on airline tickets to generate funds to fight HIV/AIDS.

Obama, as well as Bono, also spoke at the Clinton event.

On September 25, after conversing with McCain and Palin, Bono and his collaborators were scheduled to hold a “United Nations emergency summit on the Millennium Development Goals.” Bono’s ONE organization described them as “eight goals” that were “drawn from the targets contained in the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 189 nations―and signed by 147 heads of state and governments during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.”

Similar language is incorporated in Obama’s Global Poverty Act, which has passed the House and Senator Joe Biden’s Foreign Relations Committee, and now awaits full Senate action. As AIM has documented repeatedly, a careful analysis of the legislation, as well as the follow-up 2002 U.N. Financing for Development Conference, which was designed to make the “goals” into a reality, leads to the conclusion that the U.S. will have to provide $845 billion in increased foreign aid spending, generated if necessary by a global tax on the American people.

At the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, Obama reaffirmed a “commitment” to “embracing the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.” He added, “This will take more resources from the United States, and as President I will increase our foreign assistance to provide them.”

Once again, observers say, the McCain staffers seem to have tried to strip the Alaska Governor of her conservative core beliefs.

For his part, if McCain backs a financial bailout of the rest of the world, on top of an endorsement of the $700 billion Wall Street socialist scheme, some conservatives are saying that they may start looking elsewhere for a presidential ticket to support.

One place some may look is Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party, who has already been endorsed for the presidency by Rep. Ron Paul. Baldwin, calling the Wall Street plan a “fraud” on the American people, has called for “No Amnesty” for the Wall Street “banksters.”