Business and Obama: be careful what you wish for

The New Neo Posted on by

It sounded so tempting back in the fall—a government bailout. Maybe there was a free lunch (and free dinner, and free bedtime snack) after all for failing corporations, provided by the hand of government.

It’s hard to remember, it seems so long ago. Bush was in charge at the time, along with a slightly Democrat Congress. The outcome of the 2008 election was as yet unclear, with the candidates pretty well tied. Obama was a cipher who didn’t seem all that radical to most.

What could go wrong no matter who was at the helm? The panic was on, help was needed, and the government could provide.

There were some warning voices, of course. But they were drowned out in the rush to get help. Unfortunately, the strings that came attached have become cords of iron, ties that bind too tightly.

Why should anyone be surprised at the following phenomenon:

“They’re making business decisions in a way that is political,” John A. Allison IV, chairman of BB&T Bank (BBT), told BusinessWeek at a Beltway gala on June 11. BB&T was cleared this past week to return $3.1 billion in federal bailout money. “Where does it stop? The people making the decisions don’t have the knowledge of the industries, of the institutions, to make good business decisions.”

There’s an attempt being made to block and/or limit it. But although I support that endeavor, my guess is that it’s too little, too late. Obama is now president (in case anyone hasn’t noticed), and his hostility to the creation of private wealth seems mitigated only by his desire to exploit the rich as cash cows for the expansion of the federal government.

The forces arrayed against him appear rather puny at the moment in comparison:

…[T}he U.S. Chamber of Commerce””perhaps the business lobby’s most persistent voice against government regulation””picked this week to launch its “Campaign for Free Enterprise.” Declaring that “capitalism is at a crossroads,” Chamber officials called the effort to “defend and advance America’s free enterprise values in the face of rapid government growth and attacks by anti-business activists”¦one of the most important and necessary initiatives in [the Chamber’s] nearly 100-year history.” Two days later, the Chamber sent an open letter to Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) supporting a “transparent exit strategy to ensure the timely withdrawal of the federal government from these most extreme and unusual forms of intervention.”

Thune and other Republicans are sponsoring a bill designed to put a time limit on the government takeovers. It will be interesting to see how the blue dog Democrats respond. My guess is that the bill has no hope of passing; the forces arrayed against it are too strong and too numerous.

And I wonder whether the American people as a whole are paying attention, and what the prevailing attitude is if they are. Obama has tapped into a powerful populist anti-business, anti-wealthy strain in this country. Of course, there is another powerful strain that favors individualism, private enterprise, the opportunity to create wealth and profit by it, and the idea that government has no business running businesses.

At the moment the first group seems to be winning, but will a backlash become strong enough to overwhelm them? And if so, when? And how difficult will it be to undo the damage that has occurred in the meantime?

Catch the waves

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to see some astoundingly beautiful photos of waves, please go to this site (the photos seem to be protected from copying, so I wasn’t able to put a sample here).

[ADDENDUM: A very helpful friend, far more computer-savvy than I, has remedied the difficulty. So here’s one:

waver.jpg

The UN finally gets in touch with me

The New Neo Posted on by

From the inbox. I guess I’ll have to check on that spam filter:

United Nations Organization.
United Kingdom Department of Humanitarian Affairs
Baley House, Har RoadSutton, Greater London SM1 4te.United Kingdom.

Congratulations Beneficiary,

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws of United Nations Organization Trust Funds.

United Nations Organization draws was conducted from an exclusive list of 47,000,000 e-mail addresses of individual and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer ballot search from the internet as part of our international promotions program which was conducted this year. No tickets were sold.

After this automated computer ballot, your e-mail address attached to serial number 06-3434 drew the lucky numbers 154/4456/011 which consequently emerged you as one of the lucky winners in this category.

You have therefore been approved for a lump sum payout of Six Hundred And Fifty Thousand Five hundred Great British Pound Sterlings(£650,500.00).

[yada yada yada, send us your yada yada yada…]

Regards,
Mr Ban Ki-moon.
(UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL)

I took me out to the ball game

The New Neo Posted on by

The Red Sox are doing very well against the Yankees this year. Very well indeed:

…[I]t might be many years — probably even decades — before the Red Sox open their season series against the Yankees with eight straight wins.

This is the first time they have done so since 1912.

And I was there for one of them. This past Tuesday I went to Fenway Park for the first time since the major refurbishments of the last decade.

The park is now much spiffier, with more seats and a dizzying array of food choices. There are new pennants that declare the Sox’s recent World Series wins, to go along with the century-old ones. The traffic on the way in and on the way out is the usual Boston mess, squared.

Instead of a balmy June night, though, it was in the low fifties, and the cool mist that sprayed us for the entire game made it feel even colder. But Fenway was full anyway—and I mean there was scarcely an empty seat to be seen. The fans were decked out in proud regalia; one young woman in front of me had on not just the hat and the shirt but carried the backpack and the blanket and the umbrella. The latter came in handy, especially afterwards when the sky opened and the deluge came just ten minutes after the end of the game.

The winning outcome seemed a foregone conclusion that evening; the Sox were never behind and the Yankees never even threatened. So the crowd was at its happy raucous best, with cries of “Yankees suck!” and”A-Roid” ringing merrily through the chill night air.

I noticed once again how handsome baseball players are, and how graceful in their movements. Of all the team sports I know, baseball is the one where the athletes most resemble dancers in their combination of enormous strength, agility, flexibility, and fluidity. It seems that the best way to deliver a ball as fast as possible from third base to first tends in nearly all cases to be the most graceful way as well. Funny thing, that.

I take a try at being Instapundit

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually offer a list of links, but there is so much interesting stuff out there that I thought I’d do just that today:

Obama gets away with what would have once been called a scandal.

Megan Mcardle takes a long look at federal government deficits over time. And remember, she supported Obama.

Robin of Berkeley is at it again.

This rabbi doesn’t pull his punches.

Obama’s actions have been troubling enough. But here’s a troubling one you may not have heard about yet.

Please note what an apologist for anti-Semitism David Squires of the Daily Press is. He was so very happy to score an interview with the kind and gentle Reverend Wright that he isn’t able to judge anything he said; that would be “taking sides” (and, what’s more, it would be standing in the way of future interviews).

Welcome to the table, Ununbium

The New Neo Posted on by

The Periodic Table, that is.

The new element, Ununbium, is number 112 on the list, and one of six highly unstable elements created in the same lab since 1981 (the last naturally occurring element is uranium, number 92).

To mark the occasion, I think it’s time for a reprise of one of my favorite essays, originally posted in September of 2006:

When I was in junior high school there was a huge poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.

I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:


That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.

But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally (and reluctantly) about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.

I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”

I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table (actually, it taught many lessons, although some of them I did forget). But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.

And now (via Pajamas Media), I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates:


If you follow the link to the poster at its source, you can click on parts of it to enlarge them and see more of the detail. And then you might say with Keats:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,””that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Captain Obama: full speed ahead

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Promethea writes:

It’s so creepy that Obama is able to do so many things that we can see are horrible. A short list: messing with bondholders, favoring auto unions at the expense of other auto people, giving money to ACORN, favoring “green energy” in a scam to benefit GE, planning to make tiny little cars in a country where millions drive long distances (the Plains States, for example”“has he ever driven in one of those?), pressuring Israel, blabbering about N. Korea, planning “hi-speed rail” (I love that one, cuz you still have to have a car after you arrive at the station, duh!).

Not to mention that the stimulus legislation was so all-fired important to stave off imminent collapse that it had to be passed immediately, before it could really be debated or even studied or in most cases even read. That was no accident; it is a basic part of Obama’s m.o. to attempt to effect changes with such dizzying speed that it is difficult to appreciate what’s really happening.

I’ve been blogging for over four years now. There’s usually been no scarcity of news, and rare is the day that I have to search for a topic. Usually, there are one or two that cry out to me. But about a month into the Obama administration, events started to come so fast and so furiously that it became hard to keep up with them, much less write about all the ones that seemed important. You might say that Obama’s strategy resembles the old carny game of whack-a-mole, and the opposition is trying frantically to keep up—and mostly losing.

The guy who wrote this Esquire piece comes from the opposite side of the political fence from me. He clearly can’t stand Republicans or Bush, and thinks the people who demonstrated at the April 15th tea parties are a lunatic fringe, yada yada yada. But he and I agree on one central thing—that Obama is working with unprecedented and disturbing speed, and that it’s intentional.

The title of the article that author Pierce (who, by the way, is mostly a sportswriter) wrote is “What If Obama’s Out of His Mind?” and it begins “Seriously. And don’t act as if you haven’t wondered.” I’m not so sure that Pierce is entirely serious in his speculation; he clearly admires Obama and what he’s doing, has utter contempt for the American people, and thinks that they—and especially the Republicans among them—are the truly crazy ones.

But I do believe that some small part of him is serious, and really does wonder if there’s something not quite right, something not entirely trustworthy and above-board, about Obama’s haste. It’s passages such as these that make me think that, for all Pierce’s hatred of the Right, he’s onto something when he writes:

Say what you will about the policy implications of seeming to do everything at once. Politically, it came onto his opponents like Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers pouring out of the forest at Chancellorsville. The basic, important subtext…[is] that, Jesus, this guy’s liable to do anything.

Well, not just anything; the things Obama is likely to do trend radically to the Left of what was expected by most people who weren’t paying a whole lot of attention during the campaign—which is most people.

And then there’s this, which makes me wonder whether Pierce isn’t tapping into a vaguely uneasy feeling that even some Obama-supporters are starting to get:

…[A]s we find ourselves at present in the maelstrom of the Obama Revolution, we can only hope that the president is as sober as he appears to be. For he may have campaigned on hope, but he’s governed with implacable audacity.

Remembering Topper

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not exactly sure how I got to this photo:

annejeffreys.jpg

I think the whole journey began here, at a blog I sometimes go to when I’m seeking some light fluffy reading and a good laugh. Some photos I found there led to some Googling, which somehow brought me to the photo above. It was captioned “Anne Jeffreys,” and the elegant lady was said to be around eighty-three at the time.

She looks pretty darn good, don’t you think?

The name “Anne Jeffreys” rang a faint and very distant bell for me. It took only a moment’s reflection to recognize the sound as emanating from the earliest days of my childhood and the infancy of television: Anne Jeffreys had been the female lead in “Topper,” the sitcom featuring Leo G. Carroll as the staid Britisher beset by ghosts Marion and George Kirby. Only he could see the twosome, who had occupied his house before he’d bought it, and had been killed in a ski accident along with their St. Bernard Neil, who liked the booze (you still with me?)

“Haunt” never seemed to be exactly the correct word for what the Kirbys did to Topper. It was far too gloomy for the effervescent couple, who were heavily into teasing Topper by appearing and disappearing and making it seem as though he was nuts for talking to the air.

To the tiny child I was at the time, “Topper” was the most magical thing on TV—which was itself already a magical thing. The special effects—mostly involving, as I recall (and believe me, this is a retrieval from the dimmest and earliest reaches of memory; the show aired from 1953 to 1955) disembodied cigarettes (Camel was the heavily-promoted show sponsor) that moved about in the air, and highballs that floated past the beleaguered Topper.

The humor lay in the fact that the staid banker was constantly having to make up stories to cover his propensity to talk to nothing at all. Since I have not seen a single episode since 1955, I have no idea whether the jokes hold up. But I know that, at the time, it was my favorite half-hour of television, immensely looked forward to.

I still got a reminiscent shiver of anticipation when I heard, for the first time in fifty-four years, courtesy of You Tube, the theme from the show. Those of you old enough to remember may share the pleasure (note, please, the always-elegant Ms. Jeffreys’ long gloves—first disembodied and then occupied by her gracious self—and the focus on the cigarettes):

The couple was a delight, and I’m delighted to learn for the first time, after all these years, that they were married in real life, and that their marriage lasted till the death of Mr. Sterling at the age of eighty-eight in 2006.

The new head of GM: let’s hear it for on-the-job training

The New Neo Posted on by

The newly appointed chairman of GM admits he don’t know nothin’ ’bout makin’ cars.

But he vows to learn.

The Treasury Department thinks Edward E. Whiteacre Jr., who spent his 43-year career at AT&T, is just the ticket for the new GM. And who knows, maybe he is. He’s got a good track record for bringing his previous company into the modern era.

However, I can’t help but imagine that there must have been someone in the auto industry who would have been a lot better, and who wouldn’t have to take a cram course in the entire auto industry. And I also can’t help but think that the Obama administration is purposely avoiding anyone with such expertise.

Why, I’m not sure: revenge on the automakers? The idea that they can control Whiteacre better than someone with more knowledge?

[ADDENDUM: Great minds think alike.]

Deficit wars and common sense

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times offers this article by David Leonhardt that purports to prove that Obama isn’t responsible for much of our projected deficit problem—although it does admit that he hasn’t done much of anything to fix it.

Is anyone the least bit surprised that, when the Times “analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II,” it came up with the idea that Obama’s programs will be responsible for only “a sliver” of it?

I’m certainly not surprised. Nor do I—or, I would wager, most people who read the article—have the economic chops to figure out for certain whether the article is the usual slanted stuff offered by that newspaper (previous experience in areas in which I am more conversant have led me to a deep distrust of the Times) or whether there’s some—or even quite a bit of—truth there.

One thing of which I am certain: the Times piece fits in quite nicely with the Obama narrative of “I inherited this so don’t blame me,” and with the general Obama-supporter mantra of “everything that goes wrong or will go wrong during the entire Obama adminstration will be by definition Bush’s fault.”

Here’s an example of some arguments for the other side (also see this). The latter piece offers a quote that rightly points out that Senator Obama supported “nearly all policies and bailouts that created” the supposedly “inherited” Bush-era debt. Hmmm.

It’s also very difficult to reconcile the conclusions reached in the Times piece (supposedly based on analyses of Congressional Budget Reports going back about a decade) with this more recent report from the Congressional Budget Office itself saying that not only did the Obama administration underestimate the deficit projections for 2010 and 2019 by about a third, but that:

…Obama’s projected deficits are more than double what they would be if the president had merely stuck with the current spending and taxation proposals left by the Bush administration.

That sure doesn’t sound to me like Obama is only responsible for a “sliver” of the projected debt. And that much stronger critique of Obama was arrived at by the very same group the Times is citing.

However, I have little doubt that, as the Times states, a great deal of the projected deficit will come from entitlement programs that were many years in the making, and to which both parties and many administrations have contributed. That’s hardly a secret; we’ve known for quite some time that things were going to get worse with the entitlement programs, and neither party has had the courage to do much about it because it’s been political poison until now.

Such reform hasn’t been accomplished in part because, until recently, we haven’t seen ourselves as being in a financial crisis. But now we are, and we have been since shortly before President Obama took office. That, to my way of thinking, is one of the huge differences between the (smaller) deficits piled up by President Bush—whose fiscal policies I believe to have been insufficiently conservative, by the way—and the much larger deficits Obama is proposing: unlike Bush, the current president is doing this in the teeth of a clear and present fiscal crisis.

The stimulus package is an excellent example. It was both expensive and unnecessary, a huge bouquet tossed by Obama and the Democrats to their favorite constituencies under the pretense of saving the economy. It was a perversion of the help it was purported to offer, a cynical ploy designed to reward Democrat special interest groups under the guise of helping us all, fast-tracked because of the emergency but most of which hasn’t even been paid out yet (some emergency, eh?)

In the latest Rasmussen poll, America seems to agree with the “expensive and unnecessary” description: more people than not now say that the rest of the stimulus ought to be canned.

Of course, all of these deficit projections are so fraught with unknowns that partisans can spin them and make of them what they will. I’ll just attempt to use what I hope is some common sense here: if a ship is taking on water and threatening to sink, you don’t help things out by adding buckets and buckets more of the stuff. That is exactly what Obama has done, and it’s not over yet.