Category Archives: Barack Obama

Obama’s Hate-Your-Boss Hotline

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Individual Rights, Liberty, Regulation

“Get in the game,” the president instructed U.S. business leaders, in an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today. As Bloomberg.com reported, this audacious president urged business to “support their country by moving cash from the sidelines into the economy,” “hiring more American workers,” and, generally “investing in this nation.” This, as Obama carves greater and greater sections out of the hide of American businesses for the assorted, unproductive oink sectors.

Just the other day, this deeply silly man “launched a new program at the Department of Labor which will refer workers who have complaints about their bosses to a toll free number at the American Bar Association, where they can get a lawyer to work on their case on a contingency fee basis.” (Via Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business) Yes, litigation always reduces the costs of doing business, doesn’t it?! What’s not to like in a collaboration between “the federal government and private bar” to promote “worker rights,” already covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other legislation. This is how Obama is “doing his part to improve the business climate” in this country.

The meek reply to BHO’s demands from Johanna Schneider, “who directs external relations for the Business Roundtable,” will not do. “Jobs will follow demand,” she said. “Unless you see sustained demand for your product or your service, you cannot from a fiduciary standpoint invest in more employees.”

Business leaders will have to learn to speak the language of individual/natural rights, and link the rights of property and freedom of association to prosperity and peace. Unless they sound morally indignant about the violation of their rights, parasitical collectivists such as BHO will continue to make light of and mock the “incredible pressure to cut costs and keep margins up,” as the Idiot-in-Chief put it.

UPDATED: An Ass With Ears

Barack Obama, China, Economy, Education, Energy, Politics

OBAMA IS. You can coast to the presidency absent any understanding of economics. The rise of China Obama put down, in his pep-talk to the nation, to the child-rearing methods of the Tiger moms (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33597). Sinophobia notwithstanding (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=584), as American society is increasingly silhouetted by the State, China is undergoning considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class, and poverty levels that have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.

Obama thinks that a nascent China owes its increasing economic strength not to this liberalization, but to the fact that they “started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science,” and that the government is “investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer,” he added.

The truth is that the US is in the red and getting redder, not China.

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The central planner-in-chief also denounced his subsidies to the oil industry—he did a lot of denouncing of policies he had either put in place, or could have repealed—while, in the same breath, recommending that we “invest in tomorrow’s energy.”

In other words, state planning is a “subsidy” when it is applied to “bad” energy, but an “investment” when applied to the “good” energy source.

The Goods on Gas for Asses: The more efficient the source of energy, the less waste and pollution are involved in its conversion into energy. Think of the totality of the production process! The fewer resources expended in bringing a fuel to market, the cleaner and cheaper is the process.

Oil is the second most efficient, cheapest source of energy, Obama’s wish is our demise. For ordinary folks, the biomass-based economy means life without the basics.

UPDATE (Jan. 27): In reply to Bob’s comment: Neither do I hold China to be a capitalist society, if you read the article I cited. But neither do I think the US is capitalistic any longer; we just pretend we are. My comments spoke to a trend: China is growing because it is liberalizing its economy; we are shrinking because we are centralizing ours.

Politicians Pair Off For Their Big Night (Not Ours)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democrats, Ethics, Government, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Care about principles? Then the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat. What about sitting together at the biggest “Stalinist extravaganza” (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33815) of the season, the State of the Union Address? “More than 60 members have signed up to sit next to one of their colleagues from a different party,” reports CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/25/brazile.congress.sit.together/index.html?hpt=T2). Reporters are giggling and cooing over who’s dating whom. I could not care less about the seating silliness. Let the statists play at symbolism. It’s a matter of time before tea partiers, bar the Pauls, slip between the sheets with their big-spending profligate pals.

Watch the formations—the twosomes and the threesomes into which the pols pair. That ought to tell you something about future alliances.

UPDATE III: State of the Union: a ‘Disgusting Spectacle’ (Derb: Defeatist or Realist?)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, English, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Politics, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, Technology, The State, The Zeitgeist

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire describes the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'” (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=580).

John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).

Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (this year it’ll be the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).

Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”

The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

Prepare to puke. The antidote is “WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATE I (Jan 25.): Robert, have you even read “WE ARE DOOMED”? Derb is a paleo-libertarian and a bloody good writer at that.

UPDATE II (Jan. 26): Derb: Defeatist or Realist? Van Wijk: I did not know you were among the happy faced, cheery conservatives who eschew reality and insist that the band of fools plays on, as the Titanic goes down.

Almost all of Derb’s misery making factual survey of America, in We Are Doomed, is correct (bar his biological determinism, which is supposed to sunder free will, but is not convincing). In fact, it mirrors a lot of what I’ve said and written (why, I’m cited in the book vis-a-vis Robert Putnum). There is no getting out from under:

1) Crippling government debt

2) The layers of crap culture and cultural products (literally: did you know that the MOMA, or its British equivalent, stores bodily waste in hundreds of vials produced as art?)

3) Perverted intellectual and moral standards

4) Crops of affirmatively appointed leaders, in all fields of endeavor, which will be with us for decades, if not longer, because of (1) and (2), among other reasons.

What’s your problem with that (Derb’s) rational, reality based conclusion—an analysis effected over the years in these (my own) pixelated pages?

Isn’t it clear that freedom and mass society—unfettered democracy, mass immigration mainly of voracious tax consumers with a visceral hatred for the history and historical majority of this country, on and on—cannot coexist?

It does not mean that one doesn’t continue to fight (I do), but it’s a losing proposition. Talented, industrious, taxpayers—doing highly skilled work—will become less numerous and more burdened with the years. This shrinking tax-base will be working to keep the voracious racial Idiocracy, represented faithfully by the political and intellectual class, in the style to which they have become accustomed.

(As aside: My source in one of America’s most lauded corporations, brilliant in his performance and intellectual leadership, is forever being told to develop his sorry “emotional intelligence”—even given books about this crap—as he solves the most complex of technical and logical problems. Why? because the manly, forceful, algorithmic iteration of facts, without dissolving into tears and embracing the intellectually halt and lame and dysfunctional around you: that is BAD. Men like that are not dismissed, because few can replace them. But they are cornered and cowed. Wanna tell me that a society that disempowers and subdues talent will survive?)

Isn’t it idiotic to attack the messenger, Derb? In any case, I’m glad you don’t attack me for advancing a similar message for years.

UPDATE III: To the letter about his alleged taste in poetry, Derb has provided some references in the Comments sections below. What about Louis MacNeice? I’m a poetry primitive, but I quite liked MacNeice.