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The Perfect Socialist Storm

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DON WALTON Guest columnist

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 31, 2009

The New York Times recently reported that "the Obama Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are already dancing around one of the most politically delicate questions" of our day.

Namely: "Is the president prepared to nationalize a huge swath of the nation's banking system?" In private, our new president's economic team is said to have already resigned themselves to the fact that the nation's rapidly worsening economic crisis demands a government takeover of "a vast portion of the financial sector of the world's largest economy." Yet, what the new administration may be plotting in private it has been reluctant so far to utter in public.

In an interview this past Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was asked if nationalization of the nation's largest banks was a good idea. "Well, whatever you want to call it," Ms. Pelosi cryptically responded. "If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization."

She then added these telling words, "I'm not talking about total ownership." Then, as if catching herself before letting too much of the socialist cat out of the bag, she diverted attention away from any upcoming socialist coup de tat by asking a question: "Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we'd be using that terminology? 'Nationalization of the banks?'"

The late Senator Jessie Helms once said, "The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginning to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism. They didn't call it socialism, of course.

It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society." Garet Garrett, one of the most ardent opponents of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, once warned in an essay a day would come when the American people would be "looking up the road" for a coming socialist revolution that had already occurred "behind them."

In his first televised interview after winning the presidency, Mr. Obama told "60 Minutes" that he was reading "a new book out about FDR's first 100 days." It turned out that the president-elect was actually reading more than one book about the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No sooner had Mr. Obama been elected, when his fellow-Democrats began promising America a new "New Deal." As Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times, "Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; FDR is in."

Our new president's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has counseled his new boss in regards to our country's current economic crisis, "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste." Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the patron saint of today's liberal Democrats, who attempted to parlay economic crisis (the Great Depression) into a socialist takeover of America, the new Obama Administration appears poised to use our current economic crisis to accomplish what Roosevelt merely attempted.

Roosevelt's socialist coup de tat failed for several reasons. To begin with, the United States Supreme Court struck down the heart and soul of Roosevelt's New Deal - the National Industrial Recovery Act. According to the Supreme Court, the federal government had grossly overstepped its constitutional authority in the implementation of a myriad of Roosevelt's socialist programs. Enraged by the Court's ruling, Roosevelt proposed to add a justice to the Supreme Court for every justice who reached 70 years of age.

Although he explained his proposal as nothing more than an attempt on his part to lighten the workload of elder justices, no one was fooled by the president's thinly veiled attempt to pack the Court with justices who would rubber stamp his socialist programs and pave the way for the country's transformation from capitalism to socialism.

Even members of Roosevelt's own Party rose up in staunch opposition to his court-packing proposal. As a result, the New Deal became a "No Deal" and Roosevelt was handed one of the most crushing defeats of his political career. Outraged by Roosevelt's brazen coup de tat, Democratic Representative John O'Connor accused FDR of "arousing the people of this country as they have seldom been stirred up before." O'Connor went on to add, that the people saw in their president's proposal "the strength of a dictatorship ... and the people of this country want no part of a dictatorship."

Caught with his hand in the socialist cookie jar, FDR tried to explain it away by insisting that he was capitalism's friend, not its foe. He was, he argued, only doing what needed to be done "to assure the survival of American capitalism."

His attempts at nationalizing our economy were put forth by him as mere reforms of the free enterprise system; all of which, Roosevelt insisted, were necessary to preserve its viability for generations to come.

Sounding eerily similar to the late FDR, former President George W. Bush explained his $800 billion bailout of Wall Street banks and brokerages as an abandoning of capitalism for short-term socialism in order to save long-term capitalism. On Dec. 16 of last year, in a televised interview on CNN, President Bush said, "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." He added that the reason he made such a drastic decision was "to make sure the economy didn't collapse."

Although they've always hesitated to fly their true socialist colors - with the lone exception of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders - Democrats are finally beginning to slip up the pole their beloved skull and crossbones.

Emboldened by their new legislative control over the federal government, Barack Obama's election to the White House, former President Bush's abandonment of free-market principles, our country's current economic crisis, and the willingness of today's Americans to surrender more and more control to the federal government in exchange for more handouts from government coffers, Democrats are at long last beginning to publicly fault capitalism as the culprit and to tout socialism as the cure for all of our country's economic woes.

Don Walton is the founder and director of Time For Truth Ministries and is senior pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in Zephyrhills.

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