Is Obama the First Strongman of The United States?

More and more evidence is gathering that we have elected a fascist, a strongman. We may have elected ourselves a man whose secret desire is to become a dictator. Well, there were signs before the election and many people decided to focus on his physical appearance and his "charm" instead of his past and his words. We will pay dearly for this mistake as we seem to have already started to pay in fact. Judge Andrew Napolitano writes about how Obama is using the same strongman techniques he used with GM, now on the banks.

The Federal government committed extortion and they’re not being held accountable. What’s next? Listen to this: I recently met with the Chair and CEO of one of the country’s top 10 bank holding companies. His bank is worth in excess of $250 billion, has no bad debt, no credit default swaps, no liquidity problems, and no subprime loans. He told me that he and others were forced by Treasury and FDIC threats to take TARP funds, even though he did not want or need them.

There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry.

The FDIC — with Treasury backing — threatened to conduct public audits of his bank unless his board created and issued a class of stock for the Feds to buy. The audit, which he is confident his bank would survive, would cost it millions in employee time, bad press, and consequent lost business.

He pleaded with the Feds to leave his successful bank alone. He begged his board to let him tell the Feds to take a hike. But they gave in. The Feds are now just a tiny shareholder, but want to begin asserting more and more control. This is a classic extortion: Controlling someone’s free will by threatening to perform a lawful act. (Blackmail is the threat is to perform an unlawful act in order to control someone else’s free will.) There are no exceptions in the statutes prohibiting extortion for government persons.

This happened in September 2008, but the demands for more control are more recent. It sounds to me like Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and Sheila Blair have all read a biography of Benito Mussolini. I guess they skipped the last chapter.

There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry. ..(READ).

Rob Tracinski at TIA Daily writes: "In every dictatorship, there is a tradeoff between power and prosperity. Every strongman takes actions that clearly and obviously diminish his nation's ability to produce wealth, but which increase his regime's ability to control the lives of the people. Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, for example, are all notorious for exercising political control over oil production—their main source of wealth—even when that has resulted in a decrease in foreign investment and thus in long-term output. "

"No, we're not in a dictatorship yet, but it is ominous that the Obama administration is making the same tradeoff."