Italian Corporatism

Powerline has more on the GM... control?


The United States may have taken a major step toward corporatism today--an economic philosophy more reminiscent of Italy in the 1930s than of American free enterprise (although, to be fair, there were significant corporatist elements in Roosevelt's New Deal, too). I'm not sure whether Barack Obama ever ran a lemonade stand as a child, but if he did, it would be his most salient business experience. Nevertheless, in his apparently boundless self-confidence, Obama evidently thinks that he knows better how to run an automobile manufacturing company than the management of GM or Chrysler. I found this passage from his speech today striking:


Don't worry the President reassures us: "If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired just like always. Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been because, starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warranty."

That's right. Obama honestly thinks that the goverment can do a better job in the automotive sector than private industry.

Much has been made of Obama's firing of the Chairman of General Motors, Rick Wagoner. My guess, for what it's worth, is that this was mostly misdirection. Months ago, we and many others wrote that what General Motors needs is bankruptcy. Its legacy obligations, especially to retired UAW members, are simply unsustainable. Until those contracts are broken, bailing out GM was pouring money down the drain. It was not so much bailing out GM as it was bailing out the United Auto Workers. Obama more or less admitted as much today.

That's right. Your money was used to pay off Unions and keep these companies around just long enough to be snapped up by the government.


Goldberg explains the Bargain:

The state says to the industrialist, “You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with—and help implement—our political agenda.” The moral and economic content of the agenda depends on the nature of the regime.

See what's wrong with that? Check the link to read the... details.

Auto Diplomacy

Jennifer Rubin: "You’d think the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran would require at least the same level of robust action and no-nonsense pressure being applied to a domestic car company."


Why? Pushing Iran like that doesn't help further Obama's plans to give a “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government.”

Hmm... odds that such a tectonic change will decrease government interferance in your life or help the economy run better with less corruption?

Roger Kimball continues

A “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government.” Time was, the role of government in a capitalist society was primarily to secure an environment in which private enterprise could thrive. Today, the role of government is increasingly to nationalize private enterprise, i.e., destroy it in the name of a “higher” good, a “new era of responsibility” in which government bureaucrats tell you how to run your business and whom to employ.

Obama gets questions from Plants? Blame Bush!

What are the odds?

Hope and Change: All Five Questioners So Far Identified at Obama's "Open" Town Hall Were Obama Campaign Backers

President Obama has promised to change the way the government does business, but in at least one respect he is taking a page from the Bush playbook, stocking his town hall Thursday with supporters whose soft -- though far from planted -- questions provided openings to discuss his preferred message of the day.

How is this "from the Bush playbook"? Yes, I do remember that his appearances were tightly controlled, but he didn't portray them as open to everyone, either. And fairly high-ranking Republicans and campaign donors were not "randomly" chosen to ask questions of him.

It's from the Bush playbook because every bad thing Obama does EVERY one is Bush's fault.

Ace continues

How on earth does the WaPo reporter here have enough information to reassure readers -- based on their own supposed authority -- that the questions were "far from planted"? Given that all of the people so far identified were in fact Obama supporters, doesn't this raise serious questions about how Obama was so fortunate as to just happen to call on friendly forces for his questions?

The reporter simply asserts this offering no evidence for it. Ashamed, it seems, of his own report.

Because Obama > Truth.

It's the power of Hope. THey're hoping the public doesn't notice their lies.

Which Side are you on?

For Earth Hour the environmentalists want to have you turn off the lights for an hour. "Lights will go out around the world."


On the other Human Achievement Hour celebrates humanity and what we've done.

Watch and see all that humanity has done.

There are some that look to the past and spurn advancement and see humanity and freedom as the problem. For just a small example banning black cars.

One group wants you without choice and literally in the dark. Which side are you on? Where do you want humanity to go?

O'S Foreign Failures

Here we go on the Foreign Policy front.

Ralph Peters lists the massive bungles with China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Poland and Russia.

Clearly, the quesiton of do you "Want him to fail" is academic. As Obama is full of failure.

Will he Fail? Has he already failed?

Prospect Magazine circumvents the "I wish he fails." with the article "No, He Can’t"

They show in many ways that Obama has already failed.

Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water.

But few expected the wheels to come off the new administration so quickly. Just weeks into its existence, the Obama White House is in trouble. The US stock market has lost a quarter of its value since Obama’s election. While a Rasmussen poll in early March had his approval rating at 56 per cent, his net approval (the number of people who strongly approve of what he’s doing subtracted from the number who strongly disapprove) had contracted from 28 per cent the day after his inauguration to around 6 per cent for March—worse than Bush at the same time in his first term. The administration is in a fully fledged staffing crisis: having lost a record ten high-profile picks, it has scores of senior executive jobs unfilled—including every single treasury position below the department’s top job. The head of Britain’s civil service, Gus O’Donnell, has complained about the trouble he’s had finding key administration personnel ahead of the G20 conference in April. “There is nobody there,” he said. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.” Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner looks terrified before executives and television cameras alike. Five months after the election he has yet to deliver a plan for the banking system, much less restructure a single financial asset.

Even the sympathetic press is starting to speak of an “incompetence” crisis. Abroad, North Korea, Russia, China and Iran have all turned up the heat, as have Hamas and Chavez. At home, Obama’s Trojan horse agenda—using the economic crisis as an excuse to advance radical social change in areas unrelated to returning growth to the economy—threatens to pull his government into ideological quicksand when all the public really want are jobs.

This is why the left is pushing comments of "I hope he fails" so hard. They want to distract from the President's existing failures both in performance and to his own promises. It also paints the Republicans as mindless obstructionists and traitors and hypocrites.

This is helped by how inept the Republican response to Obama's bungles is.

The Republican party is in such disarray that it is letting Obama’s crisis go to waste. The 37-year-old Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star, delivered a wooden speech in response to the president’s congressional address. The new head of the Republican national committee, Michael Steele, recently had a public spat with conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are dividing the working class and religious right between them and Mitt Romney is staying quiet for now. A few congressmen, senators and governors have begun to make hay out of the natural antipathy of their constituents towards huge increases in welfare, debt, and state interference, but none has so far managed to stand out from the crowd.

One would think a good dodge to the "Do you hope Obama fails?" question is to point to where he has already failed.

The way to take away your rights? Fear and Lies!

About the Assault Weapons Ban from the Examiner

Actually, the term "assault weapon" is made up. It is a derivative of the real phrase "assault rifle" which is a selective fire (can switch between automatic and semi-automatic) rifle or carbine firing ammunition with muzzle energies intermediate between those typical of pistol and high-powered rifle ammunition. If you look at the above pictures again, only one of the above is an assault rifle, and that is "B", a M-16. Both the AR-15 (A) and the SIG 556 (C) are semi-automatic only. But the gun grabbers want to ban them because they are evil looking black rifles.

Since there is a very specific definition of an assault rifle, the gun control crowd needed something that sounded similar and scary so that they could apply that label to this scary looking class of firearms. So, they made up "assault weapon". Sounds close enough.

That's right, they made up a type of weapon because the existing name covered guns that were fully-automatic and thus already illegal.

The truth is that most of the firearms they designate as assault weapons are less powerful than many hunting rifles. They can't be fired any more quickly than other guns semi-automatic firearms that happen to be a different color or configuration and don't look as evil. But this isn't about reality, it is about disarmament. If they can play on the public's fears and get them to turn on a group of guns for no reason other than looks, that is one step closer to getting rid of guns altogether. As was pointed out by Kurt Hofmann, the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner yesterday, an assault weapons ban depends on those lies in order to succeed.

That's the core of it. They are using lies and fear to disarm you.


And where are all those "evil guns" that are destroying Mexico coming from?

And once again they lie. Mentioning machine-guns, grenades and rocket launchers, things that are already illegal in the US and not sold to civilians as reasons to ban other weapons.

The enhanced weaponry represents a wide sampling from the international arms bazaar, with grenades and launchers produced by U.S., South Korean, Israeli, Spanish or former Soviet bloc manufacturers. Many had been sold legally to governments, including Mexico’s, and then were diverted onto the black market. Some may be sold directly to the traffickers by corrupt elements of national armies, authorities and experts say.

And note that threats of mass amounts of drugs and people and even guns flowing over the border are not used to build a fence or try to secure the border. Instead they're being used as an excuse to take away your rights.