The threats Obama made recently, to use “public humiliation” against
Chrysler executives if they resist his plans to manage the company’s
debts, is appalling but unsurprising. Talk of turning the White House
press corps into a weapon against recalcitrant executives is
particularly chilling when it comes from someone who smiles upon the
kind of “public humiliation” that involves busloads of angry
“activists” camping out on your front lawn. Nice life you have there,
Chrysler executive. It would be a shame if something bad were to
happen to it.

Obama has developed a nasty habit of using aggressive tactics against
private citizens. The AIG bonus debacle, with its threats of
punishment by tax laws and angry mobs… banks forced to accept TARP
money and federal controls, then told they would not be allowed to
return the former or escape the latter… and an election campaign that
featured Democrat officials abusing their power, to destroy an
inconvenient private citizen, are among the lowlights. Obama’s
background includes decades in a church whose pastor specialized in
racist tirades, scapegoating whites for the problems of blacks, along
with mentors who advocated “personalizing” political debates – and
then destroying those persons. His behavior signifies more than just a
young politician doing as he was taught, however, and it’s going to
get worse.

Collectivist politics of any stripe requires enemies, because they
rely upon coercion. Socialist utopias don’t come into existence
spontaneously. There would be no need for confiscatory tax rates on
the wealthy, if the wealthy voluntarily used their money to buy cars
and houses for everyone in the lower income brackets, without
requiring them to work in return. Nobody would be talking about
nationalizing health care if doctors and hospital staff were happy to
work eighty hour weeks for minimum wage, and pharmaceutical companies
were run as giant charities that cheerfully sank billions into
developing drugs they resell at cost. Few people would leave a sizable
chunk of their estates to the government, if the government didn’t
seize the money through death taxes. No large group of people on Earth
has every freely chosen to peacefully organize themselves into a
socialist collective – they either slip into it through small losses
of freedom that seem relatively painless as they happen, or they are
forced into it at gunpoint. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed
Obama’s current budget and regulatory plans at the outset of the New
Deal, he would have been laughed out of office, and if he had
attempted to impose Obama’s policies by force, he would have needed
infantry platoons and tanks.

The basic premise of socialist government, as Obama famously explained
to a plumber in Ohio last fall, is to take wealth away from the more
successful people in society, and “spread that wealth around.” This
will always be a more attractive proposition to the people serving as
the bread, than the people being used as the peanut butter. The
creators of wealth must be forced to participate in the system, far
beyond the point where a sense of civic duty or compassion for the
downtrodden would keep them in line. After all, nearly half the
country currently pays no income taxes, and they’re not all
“downtrodden” people deserving of charity. In fact, the socialist
dream is to reach the point where over half the population pays no
taxes, and will thus be inclined to support all expansions of
government power. You can’t get to the magic 51% of tax dependents
just by using hungry orphans as props.

Increasing levels of coercion are necessary to expand the socialist
system, and keep wealth producers trapped within it. To maintain
popular support, the socialist needs voters to stay angry at
designated class enemies. The Obama style of total government control
over private businesses tends to turn feral with frightening speed,
because it attempts to preserve the illusion of private enterprise,
even as the “entrepreneurs” are enslaved to the total state. The
employees and executives of Chrysler are not spoken of as government
employees, and we still pretend that AIG is a “private corporation.”
All those banks forced to accept TARP funds are still supposedly
private companies, not official branches of the Treasury Department.
This has the advantage of giving politicians a measure of distance
from the fate of the corporations involved. When GM announced that it
would be going bankrupt anyway, after billions of dollars in bailout
money, not a single person in the Obama Administration resigned in
disgrace, or was even reprimanded. When the subprime mortgage industry
blew up, the politicians who designed the system and controlled Fannie
Mae were able to mutter that the crisis was caused by “fat cats on
Wall Street.” In fact, it is the official position of the Democrat
Party that not one single member of the Party did anything wrong in
the financial-sector crisis… and to the lasting cost of the American
people, the Republican presidential candidate did not dispute this
position.

To keep controlling, bleeding, and blaming those private corporations,
the Democrats will need to keep threatening and demonizing them. They
cannot afford to allow the voters to start wondering if the
corporations are being treated unfairly, or asking why no politician
ever seems to be at fault for anything that goes wrong with these
government-controlled industries. The Party’s media allies will be
happy to help them with this project. Can anyone doubt the media would
have been pleased to help Obama carry out his threats to those
Chrysler executives? Did you see any touching human interest stories
about any of the AIG traders that had to give their bonuses back to
the government? Do you think any of them was caring for a sick elder,
or working to raise a family, or reaching the peak of a career they
built with the help of hard-working parents who sacrificed everything
to put them through school? Did we ever hear any of their names?
In order to keep the “partnership” between his Administration and the
private sector working the way he wants it to, Obama will periodically
need to remind captive corporations which side of that “partnership”
has the upper hand. He can’t very well afford to have Chrysler
executives publicly opposing his plans for the company, or banks
shoving their bailout money back into his hands. He won’t allow
himself or his party to be held responsible for the damage they have
done to the nation’s financial system… any more than he will take
responsibility for the first people to die under his national health
care scheme. Businessmen will receive increasingly unpleasant
reminders that their new government “partners” have nothing to bring
to the arrangement except force, coupled with a highly developed
instinct for escaping accountability.