In its waning days, the Obama presidency is baring its socialist fangs. Over the past several weeks, the regime has bullied schools into unisexing their bathrooms, pardoned violent criminals and terrorists, put Black Lives Matter militants in charge of police retraining, forced suburbs to diversify neighborhoods, apologized (in so many words) for Hiroshima and even tried to outlaw a legitimate $10 billion industry just because it doesn’t like it. To wit:

Capping interest rates: Earlier this month, Obama’s powerful new consumer watchdog agency proposed a devastating new regulation that will effectively drive legitimate small-dollar lenders out of business.

The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau explained he’s lowering the boom on “high-cost” “predatory” payday lenders because they target communities of color and “trap” them in a cycle of debt. “Borrowers are set up to fail,” contended Richard Cordray, whose term as CFPB director won’t expire until 2018.

But studies show payday lenders are not more likely to locate in markets with disproportionate minority populations, and they actually charge less expensive fees than alternative options.

What’s more, independent surveys show the vast majority of payday customers are happy with their loans, don’t feel ripped off and don’t think the government should limit their access to such tide-you-over loans.

CFPB is also cracking down on car lenders, threatening them with discrimination suits if they don’t cap interest rates. It’s all part of the left’s long-held dream of controlling private capital.

Transgender bathrooms: The Politburo of Potties, aka the White House, has decreed that all public schools must allow students to use whatever bathroom and locker room they choose — based on their “internal sense of gender” — or face federal lawsuit or loss of funds.

Under the new mandate-posing-as-“guidance,” Obama’s potty police want schools to open up girls locker rooms to any boy who “does not conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity,” not just female-looking transgender students.

The national central-planning policy also covers dorm rooms, which means students may no longer be able to pick a roommate of their own biological sex. That’s right: It states that a “school must allow transgender students to access housing consistent with their gender identity and may not require transgender students…to disclose personal information when not required of other students.”

Apology tour: No, the president did not explicitly apologize for the US decision to use the A-bomb to end World War II when he made history last month (just days before Memorial Day) as the first president to visit Hiroshima. But he implied America was wrong to unleash the “terrible force” and lamented “how easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” Then he mau-maued the West about the need for a “moral awakening” over nuclear weapons.

While laying wreaths, hugging survivors and other apologetic gestures, Obama failed to mention Pearl Harbor or the torture of our troops in the Pacific theater. Nor did he note the millions of Japanese lives spared by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which forced the emperor’s surrender.

Deincarceration: Obama has now commuted the prison sentences of more convicted felons than the past six presidents combined — 250 and counting. And that’s on top of the 44,000 felons he’s releasing early from federal prison, not to mention the dozens of al Qaeda leaders he’s freeing from Gitmo.

Our lawless president justifies the mass pardons by claiming all of the offenders are nonviolent. But that’s “just crazy talk,” says Steve Cook, president of the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys.

Many pardoned under Obama’s clemency program in fact were armed drug traffickers with long rap sheets. One had eight prior felony drug convictions, while another was caught with 40 firearms.

“When they say nonviolent drug offender and that’s who’s in our federal prisons and needs to get out early, they’re misleading the public,” Cook recently told the Center for Security Policy, adding that Obama’s program will get both cops and citizens killed.

De-Policing: Speaking to Howard University grads last month, Obama let it slip out that he’s appointed a Black Lives Matter activist — Brittany Packnett — to a White House task force to help retrain police departments across the country to go easy on black suspects. Her “recommendations are now being adopted across the country,” he gushed.

Obama’s police reforms are based on the notion that cops are violently biased against blacks, but a new study from Washington State University finds “officers took significantly longer to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects.”

Diversifying suburbs: Obama’s housing chief plans this fall to implement a new rule giving Section 8 welfare recipients enough money to afford rent wherever they choose, with the goal of driving them into affluent suburbs. Section 8 tenants who choose to stay in the city will lose subsidies.

The regime is gearing up for a massive resettlement of urban poor — more than 350,000 initially, followed by as many of the rest of the 2.2 million Section 8 tenants as they can push out of cities — all to end what the left calls “American apartheid.”

If landlords fight the massive social experiment to racially and economically — not to mention politically — integrate the suburbs, they’ll be sued for discrimination. And if counties and municipalities fight it, they’ll lose millions in federal funding.

Obama is showing his radical roots in his final days in office. But if you think this is bad, just wait. His most dangerous days are yet to come.



Paul Sperry is former Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.