My View

It’s the year 2017, the first year of Barack Obama’s third term as president of the renamed United Socialist States of America.

What’s the state of the union? And how did Obama ascend to omnipotence, with his statue gracing the White House lawn and his countenance on the $10 bill?

Late in his second term, Obama suspended by emergency executive order the federal and state constitutions. He did it, he explained, to extract the country from the second Great Depression, begun in 2008. The constitutional suspension was quickly affirmed by a U.S. Supreme Court he’d packed with compliant “progressives.”

With the First Amendment right peaceably to assemble suspended, the government’s Blue Shirt Brigade squelched Tea Party protests across America. With the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms likewise shelved, the Blue Shirts confiscated firearms door to door.

The FCC further dampened dissent by a directive, based on congressional authorization, requiring diversity of ownership in radio and television stations and dictating that conservative-talk programming is not “in the public interest.” The directive drove Fox News off the air, along with Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage and O’Reilly.

The constitutional suspension, including as it did the 22nd Amendment limitation of a president to two terms, enabled Obama to serve a third term. As a prelude to the 2012 election he had appointed ACORN the exclusive poll watcher and vote tabulator in all federal elections.

The 2012 election also ensured a “progressive” supermajority in the U.S. House and Senate, leading to the nationalization of numerous industries, including banking, manufacturing and airlines. The government’s single-payer public option so underpriced private-health insurers that it drove them out of the market. With universal coverage that included illegal immigrants, subsidization and payment for everyone making less than $88,000 a year and payment for elective abortions, health-care costs and premiums soared and seniors’ access to procedures and drugs was rationed.

The Federal Reserve limited the pay of bank executives and the federal Pay Czar did likewise to doctors and executives of hospitals, universities and government contractors like GE.

So, what’s the state of the union? The country is mired in a deep depression. Inflation and unemployment have hit 20%. Incentives to work and invest have evaporated. And the value of the dollar has plunged, while government spending and debt have soared.

As the president contemplates how his visage will be added to Mount Rushmore, his audiences fervently hope for change — change back to the way things once were. That’s the state of the union in 2017.

Edmund Adams is a retired attorney living in Columbia-Tusculum, Ohio, and a part-time Longboat resident.