Elites got rich before wrecking the global economy

FPI / June 7, 2021

Before unleashing the "great reset" amid the Covid pandemic, which devastated the global economy, leftist elites exploited the power they were given to get rich enough to shrug off lockdowns, riots, and economic catastrophes.

"Most of our familiar reset left-wingers — the Clintons, Newsom, and Obama — long ago became multimillionaires by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking," Victor Davis Hanson noted in a June 2 op-ed for American Greatness.

"Yet a cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until as good capitalists they first got filthy rich — allowing them not to live like, think like — or listen to — the rest of us."

The anti-democratic elites' "rules of prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask-wearing, or violent protesting hinged on political grounds," Hanson wrote. "Their spending bills on 'infrastructure' and 'health care' were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements."

Conservatives, meanwhile, "moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy Left bragged it was true."

After the 2008 economic meltdown, Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the country. After the 2020 pandemic, Obama is back weighing in on the panic-driven, massive multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion:

Obama pontificated: “There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government. Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering — maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”

California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom on April 20, 2020, boasted about leveraging his own statewide quarantine: “There is opportunity for re-imagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism, a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps. So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

At about the same time, Hillary Clinton gushed: “That this would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice.”

Hillary’s “old saying” was actually a recycled quote from old Clintonite Rahm Emanuel who was Obama’s chief of staff. He too bragged of the 2008 panic that would empower the Obama transformation project: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

In other words, Hanson wrote, "a few anointed elites will seek to override local laws, referenda, and voting."

Polls show average Americans are worried about the massive borrowing, don’t like open borders, and fear government gaining new powers under the pretext of a pandemic.

"Our elites are anti-democratic," Hanson wrote. "They talk of forcing change down the throats of scared citizens by federal or state edicts, executive orders, court decisions, or bureaucratic new directives. Neither multimillionaires Obama, Newsom, and Clinton nor the Great Resetters want to put up their agendas for discussion and votes before the people and their elected legislative representatives."

Hanson continued: "Behind the fancy slogans like not wasting crises, 'teachable moments,' and 'resets' is the panic porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they are mostly absurd and defy common sense.

"If Americans tried Obama’s new economics with their own family budgets they would either go broke or go to jail — after piling up tens of thousands of unpaid debts. Only elites, with security guards and the money and influence to keep safe, talk of resetting or defunding the police. Few of the woke who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. Fewer have Obamacare health plans. None live near an open border."

Free Press International