Election day

Today is election day.  We will soon enough know whether we have corrected the horrifying mistake of electing a President who was not raised in our American culture, who has openly disdained many of our traditional beliefs and customs, who has governed in the tradition of third world dictators, and who on top of everything else is not a pleasant person.  And he also wears the crown of the single biggest liar ever to occupy the WH, although he had very big shoes to fill in those of FDR and Bill Clinton.  For many of us these last four years have been one long nightmare.  What will it be like if Obama is returned to office?  Since he will win, if he wins, by the smallest of margins, and he will most likely not have control of the House of Representatives, Obama will be forced to deal with all of the failed policies and programs before hostile committees headed by relentless bulldogs like Darrell Issa.  Of particular interest will be the failure represented by Benghazigate and the death of four Americans who were abandoned by their government.  He will also be forced to deal with the runaway budget which cannot be swept under the rug for another four years.  And he will have to deal with a wildly unpopular socialized healthcare disaster appropriately named after himself.  All in all he's probably better off losing and not having to deal with the messes he helped create and then made much worse in four years of the most partisan destructive leadership this country has ever experienced.  For a devastatingly accurate and damning picture of Obama's four years of power go here.

Crony Capitalism at work

Mitt Romney has been excoriated by the Obama reelection team for refusing to back a government "bailout" for GM.  In reality Romney proposed a "Managed" bankruptcy in which the government would guarantee the warrantees on new cars while the company was restructured to alleviate the crushing burden of union work rules and excessive wage-benefits packages.  What we got was a classic crony capitalism solution where Obama backers and bundlers from Wall Street were big time beneficiaries along with the UAW, another core constituency of the democrat party.  Nice work if you can get it.  Meanwhile retirees of ACDelco, a GM owned supplier subsidiary, were robbed of their retirement benefits and GM bondholders were also stiffed because neither is a core democrat party interest or voting group.  Yet another example of government meddling in the free market to benefit favored constituencies.  A brief synopsis of these events from Powerline:

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2012 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AUTO BAILOUTS, CRONY CAPITALISM

THE AUTO INDUSTRY BAILOUT — A CLASSIC CASE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

Peter Schweizer, in the Washington Times, helps expose the auto industry bailout for what it was — “a classic tale of cronyism, in which the well-connected sped away with big bucks.” In this instance, the “well-connected” can be found mainly in the world of Big Finance:

In his recent book “Bailout,” the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, points out that when it came to the bailout of GM, no one with auto-industry background was involved in the decision-making process. “Led by Steven Rattner, the head of a Wall Street private equity firm, and Ron Bloom, a former investment banker and head of collective bargaining for the United Steelworkers Union, the auto team had plenty of Wall Street firepower but did not include in its ranks anyone with experience in the automobile industry.” Likewise, when it debated the question of closing auto dealerships, the task force consulted “a bevy of Wall Street analysts.” Little surprise then that the winners are largely relegated to the world of Big Finance.

The GM bailout was handled by Evercore Partners, an investment firm in New York headed up by former Assistant Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. Before the bankruptcy, GM paid Evercore $46 million in advising fees to help GM find a buyer. Then, when the government came in and bailed out GM, Evercore turned around and asked for an additional $17.9 million “success fee.” Never mind that Evercore never found a purchaser or a funder — the company still called it a “Government Funded Sale Fee” in court documents.

Indeed, Evercore also took over the lucrative position of handling the General Motors Special Hourly-Rate Employees Pension Trust and the General Motors Special Salaried Employees Pension Trust. Those new pension funds were financed courtesy of more than 60 million shares of common stock, diluting the taxpayer stake in the company. The trustee for both of those new pension funds is Evercore Trust Co., a subsidiary of Evercore Partners.

Mr. Altman is also an Obama bundler, bringing in up to $500,000 so far. Evercore Partners CEO Ralph Schlosstein hosted a $38,500 per plate fundraiser at his home, raising a total of $2.1 million for President Obama and the Democratic National Committee.

The other big winners were the lawyers and government bureaucrats who handled the bailout. Mr. Bloom has returned to the investment house of Lazard Freres as vice chairman of U.S. investment banking, where he worked from 1985 to 1990. “I do think that my time in government can help to open that door a little bit,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s now advising mail carriers as the U.S. Postal Service undergoes restructuring.

When it came to making financial decisions affecting the automotive bailout, insiders and favorites made out well and outsiders were left outside. Nonunion workers saw their pensions go bust. The financiers on the Auto Task Force in Washington shafted 22,000 salaried retirees out of their pensions. Why? Those salaried retirees of the former Delphi Corp. (a longtime GM parts supplier) had a fairly solid pension fund, which was 85 percent funded. What they didn’t have was the political clout of the United Auto Workers. The Treasury Department urged the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. to seize the Delphi pension plan. This was not a financial decision — it was a political decision.

But can’t the bailout be defended nonetheless as having saved GM? Not according to Schweizer. He argues that it merely “kicked the GM can down the road and left taxpayers to pick up the tens of billions in bills.”

GM continues to hemorrhage market share and controls just 17.7 percent of the auto market, a 90-year low. When GM made a public offering in November 2010, the share price was $33 a share. It’s now trading at around $25 a share. The federal government owns 500 million shares of GM, or about 32 percent of the company. The stock price would need to get to $53 a share to break even. At its current market price, the government is sitting on a $14.5 billion loss.

Despite claims that GM is selling a lot of cars, a lawsuit filed by investors who bought into GM’s initial public offering in June alleges that the books are being cooked. The investors feel hoodwinked because GM was “predicting revenue based on production rather than actual sales.” (What business does that?) The lawsuit references a Bloomberg article that states, “GM may have been unloading excessive inventory on dealers, a practice known as ‘channel stuffing,’ in order to create the false impression that GM was recovering and sales and revenues were rising.” The problem is that although GM is stocking more and more cars in its dealers’ lots, few cars roll out of the showroom. So while GM is being touted as a successful turnaround story, the all-American car company is incentivizing its dealerships to take more product and counting that as sales.

General Motors is selling more vehicles in China, not creating jobs in this country. GM is planning hundreds of new dealerships in China and also expanding production there.

Not very good, even for government work.

The influential affirmative action duo

Two major public figures,  General Powell and Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, have announced their support for Barack Obama for a second term.  Powell is a Republican Party member who served as the armed forces Chief-of-staff under Bush I and Secretary of State under Bush II.  He is black and he is a supporter of affirmative action, the single most un-American Executive Order ever signed by a President in this case JFK in 1961.  Lyndon Johnson took the concept to another level in 1965 by extending affirmative action to employment in the private sector.  Those in the private sector of business, and those in the higher education like Ward Connerly former member of the California Board of Regents, the governing body of the California higher education system,  know how and why affirmative action is counter productive no matter  what its supporters like Powell and Obama say.

In his autobiography, Powell attributes his successful military and government careers to affirmative action.   In his educational path Obama unquestionably received several boosts along the way from affirmative action.  These two guys want people to continue to be judged and promoted based on their skin color, rather than the content of their character, as Martin Luther King asked.  It bears pointing out that both Powell and Obama have spent almost all of their careers employed by the government.  It is obvious they view themselves as beneficiaries of big government.  Sadly they have an influence on many who cannot and do not think for themselves.  Such influence does not bode well for the Republic and free enterprise going forward.

Crazifornia-- formerly Valhala

Ah yes, California is in such good hands.  Herewith a few of the reasons the sun has set on this now benighted state, from Victor Davis Hanson:

Did California’s redistributive elite really believe that they could all but shut down new gas and oil production, strangle the timber industry, idle irrigated farmland, divert water to the delta smelt, have 37 million people use a highway system designed for 15 million, allow millions of illegal aliens to enter the state without audit, extend free medical programs to 8 million of the most recent 11 million added to the population, up taxes to among the highest in the nation, and host one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients — and not have the present chaos?

The California schools — flooded with students whose first language is not English, staffed by unionized teachers not subject to the consequences of subpar teaching, and plagued with politicized curricula that do not emphasize math, science, and reading and writing comprehension — scarcely rate above those in Mississippi and Alabama. Did liberals, who wanted unions, a new curriculum, and open borders, believe it was good for the state to have a future generation — that will build our power plants, fly our airliners, teach our children, and take out our tumors — that is at the near-bottom in national test scores?

Do Bay Area greens really believe that they that will have sufficient water if they blow up the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir?Did Barack Obama think that the Keystone pipeline or new gas and oil leases in the Gulf were superfluous, or that we do not need oil to make gasoline, wheat to make flour, or to cut timber to produce wood?

Did liberals (and their hand-in-glove employer supporters who wished for cheap labor) think that letting in millions from Central Mexico, most without legality, English, or a high school education (and in some sense at the expense of thousands waiting in line for legal admission with capital, advanced degrees, and technological expertise), was not problematic and that soaring costs in law enforcement, the criminal justice system, the schools, and the health care industries were irrelevant?

What, then, are the motivations that drive so many to such absurdities? Note here that I am talking of the architects of liberalism, not of those who receive generous entitlements and whose desire for bigger government is thus existential and elemental.

Equality of result

The entire VDH article is here.

Yea, Schuyler -- left footed no less!

This is an athlete in action.

The Peoples' Republic of California

Anyone looking for reasons California is losing businesses and jobs to neighboring states, especially Texas, it's all here in this City Journal article..   Essentially the article confirms California as  "a state that has the highest corporate income-tax rate in the western U.S.; that the Tax Foundation ranks as 48th in the nation for its business tax climate; that the American Tort Reform Foundation ranks second from the top in its list of “judicial hellholes”; and that CEO Magazine has named for eight years running the worst state in the nation in which to do business".  Not exactly a calling card list of pluses for attracting job producing companies to  the state.  Bottom line, California has a dysfunctional political system at all levels; it has a corrupt and inept media; it has runaway public employee unions; it has a broken education system; and an inadequate infrastructure.  That's the short list.  It does have the best weather in the country and maybe the world.

The dubious "firsts" president

A partial ist of "firsts" for Obama:

• "Quit Trashing Obama"
  
  Quit trashing President Obama's accomplishments. He has done more than any other President before him. He has an impressive list of accomplishments:
  
  First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
  
  First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
  
  First President to preside over a cut to the cr
  edit-rating of the United States.
  
  First President to violate the War Powers Act.
  
  First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
  
  First President to spend a trillion dollars on 'shovel-ready' jobs when there was no such thing as 'shovel-ready' jobs.
  
  First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
  
  First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
  
  First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
  
  First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
  
  First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
  
  First President to terminate America 's ability to put a man in space.
  
  First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
  
  First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
  
  First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
  
  First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
  
  First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
  
  First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
  
  First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
  
  First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
  
  First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
  
  First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
  
  First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.
  
  First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 102 to date.
  
  First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.
  
  First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
  
  First President to go on multiple global apology tours and concurrent insult our friends tours.
  
  First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
  
  First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
  
  First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
  
  First President to repeat the Holy Quran & tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
  
  First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences. Then he was the first President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.
  
  First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states ( Mexico vs. Arizona ).
  
  How is this hope and change working out for you? THERE'S AN ELECTION COMING UP...I HOPE YOU REMEMBER THIS LIST WHEN YOU VOTE!