Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2012

GM: the re-Volting face of corporatism

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Redmond Weissenberger on the decline of GM from world-class manufacturer to crony capitalist shell:

General Motors was once the Jewel in the crown of American Capitalism. By many, it was considered the greatest manufacturing company in America, if not the world. The company was destroyed by the insidious nature of the Neo-National Socialism that has infected the USA for well on 80 years now, when the merger of state and corporate power that swept across Europe was aped first by Hoover and then by FDR in the disastrous New Deal. The unions that were encouraged to eat away at GM from the inside were bailed out and the US Federal government took a 25% ownership in company. In the 2009 deal to “restructure” GM, the bondholders were wiped out, and the Unions were given a free pass to continue their destructive behaviors.

Built by what is now a de facto state-owned corporation, the Volt was the child of the green-washed brains of the Obama administration. The Volt was built for no-one, but a vision of the perfect, “New eco-Socialist Man”. Who is buying the Volt? According to Bill Visnic, senior editor of Edmunds.com, “The Volt appeals to an affluent, progressive demographic” General Motors itself stated that the average income of a Volt buyer is $175,000 a year. This trend does of course line up with the type of individual who has been at the forefront of the environmental movement since day one. A rarefied elite, righteously indignant, statist in nature, ready to have the government force eco-correct behavior on all who inhabit the land. The classic example is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who once opined that “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation”.

The Volt is a very good example of what happens when the means of production falls into the hands of the State. The system of profit and loss that can only operate when prices are set by the private owners of the materials and the means of production. The Chevy Volt can only exist within the sphere of the state wherein there is no rational economic calculation possible.

[. . .]

It is estimated by Tom Gantert that the Volt has received up to $3 Billion in Local, State and Federal Subsidies. And if you believe that GM has indeed sold 6,000 Volts, then the total subsidy per car can be estimated anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000. All of this for a mid-sized 4 door sedan that retails for $39,828 (eligible for a $7,500 federal rebate of course).

March 1, 2012

American involvement in Afghanistan: the pessimistic view

Filed under: Asia, Military, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

Steve Chapman recounts the arguments against staying the course in Afghanistan:

When Afghans erupted in rage over the careless burning of Korans at Bagram Airbase, the upheaval was not just about Muslim holy books. It was also about the grossly dysfunctional relationship between us and them — a product of the huge cultural gulf, our outsized ambitions and the irritant of our presence.

Afghanistan is a medieval country that we can barely begin to understand. Yet we presume that with all our money, technology, weaponry and wisdom, we can mold it like soft clay.

Things don’t work so well in practice. Only one out of every 10 Afghans who sign up to join the army or national police can read and write. The military’s desertion rate, an American general acknowledged last year, approaches a staggering 30 percent.

Many if not most Afghans have never heard of the 9/11 attacks. Even the deputy chairman of the government’s High Peace Council told The Wall Street Journal he doesn’t believe al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center.

So what can we expect ordinary people to think when they see the country overrun with armed foreigners who sometimes kill and injure innocent civilians? Or when they hear that those infidels are burning Korans?

The war in Afghanistan is now the longest in American history, and if hawks have their way, we’ll be there for years to come. Alas, we have demonstrated the force of two things we already knew: Some mistakes can’t be undone no matter how you try, and every guest eventually wears out his welcome.

In Afghanistan, we originally failed to make the needed commitment to destroy the enemy, because President George W. Bush was distracted by his eagerness to invade Iraq. As a result, the Taliban survived and eventually mounted a major comeback. Barack Obama decided to pour in troops and funds, but by that time, Afghan patience was nearing exhaustion.

February 2, 2012

A textbook case of how PR should not be conducted

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Ben Smith recounts the public relations moves the Obama White House used in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Jodi Kantor’s not-particularly damaging book The Obamas:

One can argue that the once-dominant writing exercise known as the book — a collection of words roughly 4,000 tweets long — is increasingly difficult for the modern media to digest.

But a skillful promotional campaign can help such a weighty work get traction even in today’s blink-and-you-miss-it news cycle. The White House recently showed how it’s done; the problem is, the Obama administration had hoped to bury this book, not praise it.

[. . .]

But now that the dust has settled and the shooting war between Kantor and the White House has waned, it’s clear that the decision to go to DEFCON 3 may well have been a tactical goof for the White House, which wound up largely validating — in caricature — the very themes of the book that it wanted to discredit: Michelle Obama’s continuing adjustment to her role as first lady and the reactive and sometimes hair-trigger political operation around her.

The White House air war also may have been good for sales: Kantor’s title remains on the best seller lists. The book, which is deeply reported and nuanced, also has been well-reviewed.

“What was so surreal was watching what looked like a classic political attack play out — except that some of it was directed at me,” Kantor, a reporter for The New York Times, said in an interview. “I got a lot of support from other reporters who felt they had been attacked or treated harshly by this White House. It’s not like this came out of nowhere.”

January 28, 2012

Sonny Rollins honoured, but Kennedy Center misses an opportunity

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

One of the best jazzmen of the 20th century was recognized in an event at the Kennedy Center recently:

Was there a single jazz musician in the audience for the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony last month? Besides Sonny Rollins, that is, who was one of the five honorees. From what I saw on the CBS telecast of the ceremony, the only jazz musicians in the house were those hired hands who were on stage playing in Sonny’s honor. Is it possible that no other jazz players were there? It’s more likely that the show’s producers wouldn’t recognize a jazz musician even at close range, so all we got were long shots of the Obamas and movie and pop stars. At least the President and First Lady looked like they’d heard jazz before they got to the Center, and surely they appreciated Bill Cosby’s irony-laced introduction. But how many people in that bejeweled crowd had ever heard a note by the Saxophone Colossus?

Granted, it was great to see Sonny getting the honor, to watch the montage of images from his career and hear the narrative voiced by Cosby. Cos described his own surprise encounters with people in far flung places abroad who in the midst of their daily routines were listening to Rollins, then concluded his remarks by welcoming Sonny “home” to his native land. But notwithstanding the primacy of jazz in American performing arts, the music long ago lost its appeal for the masses, and even the curious may know little about its history and Newk’s place in it. Thus while Cosby’s comments spoke to his personal admiration for Rollins, the occasion called for something more, the kind of critically-grounded statement that a Stanley Crouch or Gary Giddins or Bob Blumenthal could have provided. But a teaching moment like this was squandered, while the most resonant image may have been the sign of Rikers Island displayed among Rollins’s personal landmarks.

How a long-dead activist’s ideas influenced Barack Obama

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:52

In an article from 2009, Jim Geraghty traces the influence of Saul Alinsky (who died before Obama went to high school) on the President’s early days in office:

Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was 11 years old. But three of Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first “community organizers.” Ryan Lizza wrote a 6,500-word piece on Alinsky’s influence on Obama for The New Republic, noting, “On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.”

In a letter to the Boston Globe, Alinsky’s son wrote that “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. . . . Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.”

As a tool for understanding the thinking of Obama, Alinsky’s most famous book, Rules for Radicals, is simultaneously edifying and worrisome. Some passages make Machiavelli’s Prince read like a Sesame Street picture book on manners.

He also took advantage of the innumeracy of many people:

When Obama announced a paltry $100 million in budget cuts, and insisted this was part of a budget-trimming process that would add up to “real money,” he clearly understood that the public processes these numbers very differently from the way budget wonks do. Alinsky wrote: “The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.”

That’s the same sense that Mark Steyn captured recently.

Alinsky sneered at those who would accept defeat rather than break their principles: “It’s true I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers.” He assured his students that no one would remember their flip-flops, scoffing, “The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.” If you win, no one really cares how you did it.

[. . .]

Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

January 27, 2012

Megan McArdle finds the right word to describe Obama’s vision: Nostalgianomics

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

In her column in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle points out the extremely ahistorical nostalgia that seems to infuse President Obama’s vision:

Surely Obama’s economic advisors have not told him that they know how to replicate the growth of the 1950s — and if they did, surely the last three years have given the lie to this belief.

I think the speech made it even clearer that other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships. Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice people like Obama at the reins — all the inventions coming out of massive government or corporate labs, and all the resulting products built by a heavily unionized workforce that knows no worry about the future.

There are obviously a lot of problems with this vision. The first is that this is not what the fifties and sixties were actually like — the government and corporate labs sat on a lot of inventions until upstart companies developed them, and the union goodies that we now think of as typical were actually won pretty late in the game (the contracts that eventually killed GM were written in the early 1970s).

And to the extent that the fifties and sixties were actually like this, we should remember, as Max Boot points out, that this was not actually the day of the little guy. Big institutions actually had a great deal more power than they do now; it was just distributed somewhat differently — you had to worry less about big developers slapping a high-rise next to your single-family neighborhood, and a whole lot more about Robert Moses deciding he wanted to run a freeway through the spot where your house happened to be.

The military model of society — employed by both Obama, and a whole lot of 1950s good government types — was actually a kind of creepy way to live. As Boot says, “America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.” If you want the 1950s except without the rigid conformity and the McCarthyism, then you fundamentally misunderstand what made the 1950s tick.

January 26, 2012

A good soundbite, but a very bad idea

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Here is one of the proposals President Barack Obama mentioned in the State of the Union speech that must have played well in the White House, but would be a terrible idea if it really was implemented:

Many soundbites sound good, but have very harmful consequences in the real world. That’s the case for President Obama’s proposal in his State of the Union Address to not allow anyone to leave school until age 18 or graduation. This proposal originated with “the National Education Association, which stands to gain from the idea a measurable boost to its dues-paying ranks, and which has in fact proposed mandatory schooling for nongraduates up to age 21.” This proposal could result in an increase in school violence by bored and frustrated 17-year-olds who hate school but are forced to attend. It would also make it even harder for teachers to maintain order in dangerous schools, contributing to an exodus of talented teachers who would rather teach than be babysitters or policemen. And it could result in truancy charges and arrests for parents who fail to get their stubborn, fully-grown offspring to attend school.

As one commenter notes, “If the union is really pushing something like this, I wonder how many of the members actually welcome it. How many teachers really want to deal with a 17 year old who doesn’t want to be in school? The type that drop out can’t be a joy to teach.” Commenting on the NEA’s ultimate desire to keep people in school until age 21 (Obama wants every American to attend college or at least get “more than a high-school diploma”), another commenter notes, “I suppose Obama would send the cops after those notoriously unproductive dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.”

January 25, 2012

The Cato Institute response to the State of the Union 2012

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Gary Johnson responds to the State of the Union address

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

This was sent out from Gary Johnson’s campaign in response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night:

“If the idea tonight was that the President would fulfill his constitutional duty to give us ‘information of the State of the Union’, we should be able to expect some truth. I didn’t hear much truth. Truth is that the real unemployment rate is probably still above 10%. Truth is that after all the hand-wringing and deals of the past couple of years, instead of cutting spending, the President and Congress are going back to the well for another $1.2 Trillion debt limit increase. And the truth is we are seeing nothing from either the President or the Republicans that will really change any of those unacceptable realities.

“Only in the twilight zone that is Washington could a President who has bailed out and stimulated our economy to death stand in the Capitol and declare there should be ‘no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs’. Can anyone spell GM or TARP or Solyndra?

“The President said we deserve a government that plays by the same rules as millions of hard-working Americans. Perhaps that should begin with the government not borrowing and printing 43 cents of every dollar it spends — something hard-working Americans can’t and don’t do.

“Until we see a real plan — not a Washington smoke and mirrors plan — that puts a stop to deficit spending and really puts America back to work, all of this rhetoric is just wasted breath.”

Gary Johnson’s campaign website is www.garyjohnson2012.com.

January 9, 2012

Calling it “austerity” doesn’t make it so

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Nick Gillespie provides a reality check on some particularly imaginative use of “austerity” in describing the end of the Bush administration and the start of the Obama administration:

In constant 2010 dollars, the federal government spent about $2.3 trillion in 2001. By 2010, the total was around $3.6 trillion. And though the federal government has not passed (and will not pass) a budget for a third straight year, the two plans currently on the table envision spending either $4.7 trillion or $5.7 trillion in 2021. The lowball figure comes from the budget that passed the GOP-controlled House last spring. The higher number comes from President Obama’s budget proposal.

If austerity is the new black, the news has yet to reach the people who actually wield power in the capital. And if the Washington elite aren’t serious about cutting spending, they sure aren’t hell-bent on cutting red tape and regulations either.

For self-evident reasons, George W. Bush and the Republicans soft-pedaled the fact that, over the course of his presidency, he hired 90,000 net new regulators, signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill that radically complicated corporate accounting practices, passed a record number of “economically significant” regulations costing the economy $100 million or more and, says economist Veronique de Rugy, spent more money issuing and enforcing federal regulations than any previous chief executive.

Obama is continuing the trend by increasing employment at regulatory agencies by more than 13 percent and issuing 75 major rules in his first two years.

All this happened during what Frank calls “the golden years of libertarianism.” So I have problems understanding what he is talking about when he issues dicta such as “free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.”

January 3, 2012

Gary Johnson tops ACLU campaign report, beating Barack Obama and Ron Paul

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The American Civil Liberties Union is doing something different this year to assist voters in finding the candidates who most clearly support civil liberties. This “ACLU Campaign Report Card” highlighted the good and bad aspects (at least in the ACLU’s view) of each of the current GOP candidates and President Obama:

We may surprise some people in that the scores in the report card — which is viewable here — don’t divide along party lines. In fact, the report card reveals a deep ideological rift in the GOP.

Our experts found that Republicans Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman earned solid scores, with four, three and two torches across most major categories, although both received one torch on marriage equality and none on reproductive rights.

President Obama also achieved solid scores or better across most categories, including four torches for ending the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. However, he received just one torch and none for keeping Guantanamo Bay open and continuing unconstitutional surveillance under the PATRIOT act, respectively.

Republican-turned-Libertarian Gary Johnson scored even better than Paul, Huntsman and Obama, earning four and three torches on most major issues. They stand in stark contrast to the other major GOP candidates, three of whom — Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum — didn’t earn a single torch in any of the seven major categories.

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich received torches in only one category: two torches each for promoting a humane immigration policy, including their support for a path to legal status for some long-term residents.

Ultimately, the good news from the report card is that genuine support for our constitutional values and freedoms has no partisan boundaries. Indeed, Ron Paul’s recent surge in Iowa has been attributed to his adherence to the Constitution and civil liberties.

January 1, 2012

Bargain hunting: pay only $103,000 for a car costing $2.2 million

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

They’re pretty exclusive: so far they’ve only made 239 of them, and they start at $103,000 per unit. They have, however, taken on a bit of US federal government funding:

It’s another example of USA tax dollars at work — in Finland:

From ABC News, Oct 20th, 2011:

    With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

    Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the company’s manufacturing jobs are still limited to the assembly of the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car in Finland.

Let’s do the math.

239 cars produced for 2012 model year.

$529,000,000 USD in Government loans

That works out to $2,213,389 (2.2 million) per car.

Selling price $103,000 USD, that leaves only $2,110,389 in taxpayer funded overhead per vehicle. And, they’ve only sold 50 so far.

Such a deal.

Of course, when your promotion strategy revolves around a sitcom based on Charlie Sheen, such things are bound to happen

The “progressive” view of Ron Paul

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Glenn Greenwald on how the Ron Paul campaign is viewed from the other side:

That’s fairly remarkable: here’s the Publisher of The Nation praising Ron Paul not on ancillary political topics but central ones (“ending preemptive wars & challenging bipartisan elite consensus” on foreign policy), and going even further and expressing general happiness that he’s in the presidential race. Despite this observation, Katrina vanden Heuvel — needless to say — does not support and will never vote for Ron Paul (indeed, in subsequent tweets, she condemned his newsletters as “despicable”). But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

December 10, 2011

Barack Obama and Teddy Roosevelt: the economic parallels

Filed under: Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Jim Powell looks more deeply at the similarities between Barack Obama and Theodore Roosevelt:

President Obama is a smart man who believes great wealth is a social problem, and ordinary people would be better off if wealth were substantially taxed away. Recently he drew inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt, another smart man who had a similar view, completely misinterpreted what was happening in the economy, and actively disrupted it.

Theodore Roosevelt was the man who, in 1906, encouraged progressives to promote a federal income tax after it was struck down by the Supreme Court and given up for dead. He declared that “too much cannot be said against the men of great wealth.” He vowed to “punish certain malefactors of great wealth.”

Perhaps TR’s view was rooted in an earlier era when the greatest fortunes were made by providing luxuries for kings, like fine furniture, tapestries, porcelains and works of silver, gold and jewels. Since the rise of industrial capitalism, however, the greatest fortunes generally have been made by serving millions of ordinary people. One thinks of the Wrigley chewing gum fortune, the Heinz pickle fortune, the Havemeyer sugar fortune, the Shields shaving cream fortune, the Colgate toothpaste fortune, the Ford automobile fortune and, more recently, the Jobs Apple fortune. TR inherited money from his family’s glass-importing and banking businesses, and maybe his hostility to capitalist wealth was driven by guilt.

Like Obama, TR was a passionate believer in big government — actually the first president to promote it since the Civil War. He said, “I believe in power … I did greatly broaden the use of executive power … The biggest matters I managed without consultation with anyone, for when a matter is of capital importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only … I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”

December 7, 2011

Harsanyi: Obama is “the mighty slayer of infinite straw men”

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

While the GOP hopefuls are busy avoiding confrontation with Barack Obama, David Harsanyi is under no such restriction:

In Teddy Roosevelt’s era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, “some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress. … But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”

And he’s right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They’re called Democrats.

Yet the president, uniter of a fractured nation, the mighty slayer of infinite straw men, claims that some Americans “rightly” suppose that the economy is rigged against their best interests in a nation awash in breathtaking greed, massive inequality and exploitation. Or I should say, he’s trying to convince us that it’s the case.

The middle-class struggle to find a decent life is the “defining issue of our time,” the president went on. And nothing says middle-class triumph like more regulation, unionism, cronyism and endless spending. Hey, Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican!) built the interstate highway system, for goodness’ sake. Ergo, we must support a bailout package for public-sector unions — you know, for the middle class.

Update: Monty goes a few steps further to criticize Obama:

It often strikes me how much Barack Obama looks, talks, behaves, and (apparently) believes like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel. Rand always wrote of statist Socialists more as caricatures than characters, but Barack Obama could have stepped whole and breathing right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Which shows you the shallowness and unthinking obeisance to leftist cant the man displays — there is precious little subtlety to Barack Obama. You sometimes find hidden depths even in your ideological enemies, surprising pockets of common ground. But in Barack Obama, there is only a hollow vessel filled up with the thoughts and opinions of leftists he has associated with in his life. He speaks (and apparently thinks) only in platitudes, bromides, and cliches. Barack Obama is, in short, the end product of the grand “progressive” experiment since the early 1900′s. Ecce homo!

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