http://bit.ly/TWHHR - - -
Not to say that Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes to be president. He just doesn't have what it takes to be president of this country. Not this free country. He'd do a lot better in a place like Venezuela or Cuba. Or maybe a worker's paradise like North Korea or China. Or anyplace where an arrogant, self-important, autocratic tyrant is called for. In just over two months, Barack Obama has subverted more American institutions and principles than any president since the second Roosevelt. The change he promised has turned out to be the burning of the Reichstag. Day after day his administration takes America in directions completely counter to our Constitution and heritage. And the car deal is just the latest example. In the blink of an eye, without any congressional consultation, without sampling the public sentiment or seeking to make his case to the country, Barack Obama has decided he can dictate who will or won't be a CEO. The precedent has been set that the government rules in matters of business. And 30 years of service to a company, and a consensus among experts that he was taking his company in the right direction, all mean nothing. Rick Wagoner is the scapegoat, a high-profile, articulate businessman who was just a little too persuasive at explaining a worldview different from the president's. So he has to go. And take with him two fundamental aspects of the free-enterprise system. The first is that government is not to meddle in the internal affairs of business. The second is that companies are to be governed by the people who own them. That very important principle was kicked to the curb by Barack Obama. The owner of a private company is the boss. What he says goes. The same is true with a publicly traded company. The only difference is that in a publicly traded company, like GM, ownership is divided up among the stockholders. Stockholders govern their company by electing a board of directors. The board of directors then selects a chief executive and, in some instances, other senior officers of the company. If the CEO does poorly, the board can remove him. If the board does poorly, the stockholders can replace it. It is a system that respects ownership and demands accountability. And it is an underpinning of capitalism. If you buy stock and can't control your investment, you have been deprived of an aspect of ownership. Your right to your property - your share in the company - has been diminished. And that's what Barack Obama did. He didn't fire Rick Wagoner, he fired the owners of several hundred million shares of GM stock. He took away Rick Wagoner's job, but he took away the stockholders' freedom. He's done a lot of that lately. If you look closely at the various initiatives of Barack Obama, they all have two things in common: They make the people less free and the government more powerful. What Barack Obama did to Rick Wagoner sets the precedent that the president controls who sits in the executive suites. And you wonder how far that will go. If Exxon-Mobil has another year of big profits, will Barack Obama declare it a profiteer and decapitate its corporate management? Will he look at big communications companies and declare them operating in opposition to the public interest and get rid of their executives? The president's justification for essentially taking over GM is that it has received bailout loans. That seems to be, in the mind of Barack Obama, the same thing as ownership. GM was not improving in a satisfactory way on its welfare dole, so he intervened. Which is odd given that Barack Obama expects no improvement on the part of the tens of millions of individuals on the welfare dole. If you're an individual getting free money from the government, you can continue to screw up and they'll just give you more money. If you're a company getting a loan from the government, and you don't dance to their tune, you get fired. Which ought to make everybody who's got a Small Business Administration loan kind of nervous. Because, when you get down to it, what's the difference? A loan is a loan. And if a loan gives the government the right to review your business plan, judge it, and essentially take over, maybe that low-interest SBA rate isn't so appealing any more. Most amazing about this deviation from rule of law is its audacity and arrogance. Barack Obama, who never managed so much as a shift at McDonald's before becoming president, has reviewed the business plan of GM and found it wanting. Now, he and his advisors - some of whom are too stupid to figure out how to pay their own taxes - will chart out a business plan to success for GM. People with no background in business have cavalierly announced that in 60 days they are going to untangle the knot of American automobile profitability. Ironically, it is the philosophies of just this sort of big-government socialist that created most of the problems of GM, Chrysler and Ford. It was the Democratic Party most of all that demanded the big-union contracts which have essentially bankrupted America's carmakers. Further, it is the insane engineering-by-legislation of the Democratic Congress, with its global-warming emissions standards, which have hamstrung the engineers and consumers who should have been determining the makeup of the American fleet. The government, which corrupts and ruins everything it touches, has decided now to take over our automobile industry. More generally, Barack Obama has decided to take over everything he can. And soon the White House which decided who can or can't lead a car company will be deciding which vehicles can or can't be made by a car company. Barack Obama's war against petroleum and internal combustion - like his war against coal, gas and uranium - is going to be forced on the nation by a government that has just eliminated consumer choice and market demand from the equation of availability. Remember these days. They are the days that decide whether liberty lives or dies. All Rick Wagoner lost was his job. The rest of us lost our freedom. Welcome to the monarchial presidency. Long live Barack the Second. - - - Another galling aspect of yesterday's announcement is the "decision" by the government that Chrysler *must* merge with the European company, Fiat. Nobody is wondering: 1. On what basis did Barack The Decider decide this? 2. Who owns Fiat (I hear the Libyans own 2%), in other words, who benefits? 3. Where in the Constitution did Barack the Decider get this power? A man who never met a payroll outside of a political campaign and whose only job in the private sector was a brief stint as lawyer is now, somehow, the Uber CEO-in-Chief. Are any of you Obama supporters starting to have second thoughts, or worry that he is a far greater threat to our liberties than you imagined? - Bob _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
