According to Newsweek magazine, we’re all socialists now, and it’s a good thing. The mainstream media are celebrating the destruction of the world’s greatest country, its system of beliefs, it ideals and personal guarantees. They proudly trumpet the sad fact that we now join the ranks of ’sophisticated’ socialist states such as those in Western Europe. This, as the rest of the world struggles to throw off the chains of socialism where it exists. As president Obama waxes eloquently about impending doom, clueless citizens rejoice at the news that Congress has passed a monumental spending bill masquerading as relief for the economy. The morons who support Obama are shedding tears of joy, convinced that they no longer have to pay for their gasoline or make their mortgage payments. Obama will make that all go away. Hallelujah. Let’s dance in the streets.

The ‘economic stimulus’ package contains very litte in the way of economic stimuli, and lots in the way of future payoffs for organized labor and other government-centric constituencies. It goes a long way toward making Democrats voter-proof at every level of government, with generous handouts focused on those groups that can deliver Congressional votes two years from now and for Obama’s re-election bid four years out. But handouts, pork, growing government to 30% of GDP and the usual Democratic shenanigans aren’t the most troubling part of this legislation. It’s the darker, scarier stuff buried in the fine print.

Tom Daschle may not be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, but his dreary vision of nationalized healthcare will be implemented to the letter. He advocates the establishment of a national policy review board that literally holds life and death power over every American, regardless of their insurance coverage. This is important - regardless of their insurance coverage. This review board will distributed ’scarce’ healthcare resources on a ‘fair and equitable’ basis whether you have insurance coverage or not. In other words, a small, unaccountable, unelected group of federal bureaucrats will now decide whether or not you get a badly needed heart bypass operation, even if you can afford to pay for it out of your own pocket. Oh, but there’s more: If you don’t fit their demographic of a ‘deserving’ recipient for that bypass, your insurance premium dollars are confiscated and used to pay for that other person’s more politically correct bypass. You, the working stiff who paid for all this, can just go and die.

This is not exaggeration nor hyperbole. Al Gore is not writing this article. The above-mentioned mechanism to ration and direct healthcare resources is in the economic stimulus package Congress just approved. The federal government now has direct control of your life, your health and therefore, your economic output. Why it’s there is anyone guess. But, that kind of monstrous legislation is why Obama and the Congressional Democrats are in such a big hurry to get it passed. By invoking the potential for calamity, by spreading fear and rattling the economy, Obama and his puppeteers will turn us away from a free-market democracy and put us firmly into the clutches of socialism. And, according to Newsweek, it’s a good thing…

The last 6 months of 2008 will be marked as a turning point in America’s history and its status as an economic superpower. The real estate crash could have been contained had it not been for Wall Street’s unethical packaging of questionable home loans. Those loans were resold to other banks and governments as secure, rated investments. As housing prices corrected in the US, which does occur occasionally, those multi-trillion dollar investments became suspect. Once banks and investors lost confidence in these shaky loan packages, they were effectively worthless. No one wanted to buy them or guarantee them. Trillions of dollars evaporated overnight.  As a result, the global financial system was severely damaged and the world economy nearly collapsed. Someday it will be revealed how near the brink Wall Street pushed us for the sake of a sales commission.

The George W. Bush administration and Congress acted swiftly (pork-barreling nothwithstanding) to shore up the American side of the ledger sheet. Whether the initial $1 trillion was well spent is a matter for economists to debate. It provided a badly needed confidence-booster  and signaled to the world that America would attempt to clean up its mistakes. Since September 2008, trillions more have been pumped into the financial system. As of January 2008 that number stands at approximately $7 trillion. Just to provide some perspective: At 3% interest, that $7 trillion demands almost $1 billion in interest payments per day. At 1% interest, it will take almost a 1,000 years to pay off the debt based on our government’s past performance for loan repayment. America had already piled up $40 trillion in national debt before this most recent debacle.

Given the gravity of the situation and the magnitude of the destruction, it’s outrageous that no one’s been arrested, investigated or even pilloried in the press. Of course, Bush administration officials have been grilled endlessly, but what about the clowns on Wall Street who created this mess? What about Obama’s housing advisor Franklin Raines, who was a key player in the mortgage meltdown as CEO of Fannie Mae? The press has diverted attention away from the people who created this mess to an intense scrutiny of the people trying to clean it up.

What gets lost in all the noise is the hard fact that someone’s going to have to pay down this debt. It doesn’t appear that Wall Street honchos are going to cough up a nickel. Franklin Raines isn’t going to return his $45 million bonus. That leaves average working Americans to pick up the tab. That means a century or more of diminished economic growth, personal opportunity and personal wealth. It means more taxes, more inflation, a drop in the dollar’s value and a drop in our standard of living. And, adding insult to injury, Barack Obama wants to add an astounding 600,000 new government employees to the federal payroll. That’s insane. With pensions and benefits, it instantly adds another trillion dollars to this year’s federal budget, which is already a trillion in the hole. And it adds another trillion every year going forward forever. At what point do the wheels come off this gravy train? It appears that the only thing that can stop our government from spending money it doesn’t have is for the rest of the world to push our government into bankruptcy. And even then, our politicians and bureaucrats won’t be suffering one bit. That will be left to the taxpayer.

Obama’s surrogates and spokespersons are out on the news talk circuit, re-setting expectations for the Anointed One’s first year in office. The massive socialist spending spree promised during the campaign is now being repackaged as an economic stimulus and ‘infrastructure investment’ to quell fears on Wall Street and the world banking system. As before, they blame the ‘failed Bush policies’ for the current economic problems, but there’s a new twist - they’re now openly condemning our entire economic system. That’s right, Obama’s people are attacking free-market capitalism and the concept of private business. They’ve called free-market capitalism a ‘failure’ and they mean to change it. The $800 billion Obama intends to blow in 2009 is a down payment on a brand spanking new socialist economic system, complete with quasi-governmental corporations (remember Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?), oversight boards loaded with government union representatives, and thousands of politically connected ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’.

Where are the media folks on this one? In fact, where are the Republicans? There is no doubt that Obama will be setting the agenda - he wants his marxist vision implemented quickly, before the masses understand what’s happened to them. This isn’t a matter of hyperbole or reactionary zeal. This man and his backers fully intend to take America down an irreversible path to socialism with a uniquely American twist. Wealthy liberals like the Kennedy’s, Kerry’s and much of the East Coast’s social elite will be protected from confiscatory income and capital gains taxes with rifle-shot exemptions and loosened regulation of private foundations, which are overwhelmingly pro-liberal. Read Phil Kent’s Foundations of Betrayal to get an eye-popping overview of how private foundations influence political discourse and shape national policy.

Working under the premise that repeating a lie often will find it accepted as truth, Obama’s people will relentlessly pound the ‘free-market failure’, drumming this nonsense into the heads of unwary and unsophisticated Americans simply looking for a handout in troubled times. Our fellow citizens will give away their economic freedoms and hope for the future in exchange for a government handout that will be gone in a week. Obama’s counting on it.

Republicans will sit back, shake their heads and pronounce that nobody’s stupid enough to give away economic opportunity in exchange for some cash, and this couldn’t possibly happen. They’re wrong. American voters have proven gullible to a breathtaking degree and demagogues like Obama have taken full advantage of it.  Never underestimate the shortsightedness of parasites or their champions.