Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
U.S. President Barack Obama’s labour secretary says she’s proud to drive a Chevrolet Equinox and support American workers.
Only problem is, the Equinox is built in Canada.
Hilda Solis told a breakfast meeting of the Christian Science Monitor in Washington on Wednesday that she has visited vehicle assembly lines in Michigan and Ohio and met “some very proud workers.”
“I’ve always been an advocate for small, efficient vehicles and I thought, what better example could I set if I encouraged my staff to go purchase and seek how we could acquire a vehicle that would, for me, send a signal that we’re for supporting our American workers, American-made products,” she said in a YouTube video posted by Fora.tv. “I’m just delighted, it’s a good product.”
She’s even nicknamed her new car “The Bullet.”
But the Equinox is actually built in two Ontario plants, in Ingersoll and Oshawa. General Motors noted earlier this year that both plants are running at full capacity.
Critics immediately pointed out Solis’s error in believing her car came from the hard work of Americans.
But a labour department spokesman said the modern automobile industry is “global.”
“Cars assembled here in the U.S. are made from globally sourced parts, just as cars assembled in other countries utilize parts made in America,” Carl Fillichio told the Washington Post. “Not only is the Equinox the second fastest selling SUV in America – a good sign for the overall health of the U.S. auto industry – 66% of its parts were made in the United States. That’s up from about 50% just a few years ago.”
Three things:
1) It took a reporter like 20 seconds on his smartphone to know something that the idiot Obama appointed to run the Labor Department should have known before she picked her car (or at least started blabbing about why she picked it). There’s something called “due diligence” that these Obama “geniuses” clearly do not comprehend.
3) What is wrong with Obama and all his minions that they can’t just admit they were idiots and try to move on? I mean, yes, we live in an age where at least some part of anything halfway complicated was probably made somewhere else. But beyond that mindboggling triviality, Hilda Solis obviously screwed up in a very major way.
I remember when Obama mispronounced “corpsman” three times (repeatedly calling Corpsman Brossard “corpse man”). I’m actually surprised that Obama didn’t proceed to issue a presidential directive that from now on all Navy Corpsmen would henceforth be referred to as “corpse men.”
Jeffrey Immelt is Obama’s handpicked chairman of Obama’s jobs and competitiveness council. He is clearly NOT a rightwing anti-union reactionary.
But get this: even Immelt thinks Obama’s war on Boeing for daring to create jobs in a non-union plant is utterly ridiculous. From USA Today:
Asked about the fuss over the National Labor Relations Board investigating aircraft maker Boeing for opening a plant in South Carolina, Immelt said he was totally supportive of Boeing in the matter, given that the company is a major jobs creator.
“I can’t see one reason why we’d want to go down that road,” he said. Immelt added that he felt his company has worked on improving relationships with unions, saying, “They are hungry for jobs.”
Getting good union-employer relationships requires an adjustment, he said. “It’s taken change on both sides.”
The NLRB sued Boeing in April, saying the aeronautics giant illegally retaliated against unionized Washington state workers when it opened a 787 passenger jet manufacturing line in South Carolina, a right-to-work
state.
Boeing hopes more than 1,000 non-union workers will eventually build three of the aircraft per month at the $750 million South Carolina plant, the largest industrial investment in the state’s history.
But Obama would rather see a Great Depression than allow non-union jobs.
Let me simply provide a single quote from the Seattle Times:
“The Machinists union has struck Boeing’s Puget Sound-area factories four times since 1989, most recently in 2008.”
Boeing has contracts to build the plane they are building at this South Carolina plant that specifically guarantee delivery of aircraft by specific dates. They simply cannot play games with work-stoppage, which the union is documented to have done repeatedly. The 787 Dreamliner has already had more than enough problems, and the last thing Boeing needs is a bunch of pampered union workers having a hissy-fit and stopping production because even though they get FAR more in salary and benefits than they deserve, it still isn’t enough for them.
Strike and its aftermath The next major delay in the Dreamliner program came largely as a result of a 57-day machinists strike. The strike, which ended on November 1, 2008, according to Reuters, forced Boeing to delay the plane’s first flight and first delivery yet again, this time until well into 2009.
And then, just a month later, Boeing again announced delays, blaming them on supply shortages due to the strike, as well as problems with assembly. “The new schedule reflects the impact of disruption caused by the recent Machinists’ strike along with the requirement to replace certain fasteners in early production airplanes,” Boeing said at the time.
The problems continued to mount after that, and not all were due to the strike. In June of 2009, Boeing once again announced a delay in the first flight and the first delivery, this time “due to a need to reinforce an area within the
side-of-body section of the aircraft,” it said. “The need was identified during the recent regularly scheduled tests on the full-scale static test airplane. Preliminary analysis indicated that flight test could proceed…as planned. However, after further testing and consideration of possible modified flight test plans, the decision was made…that first flight should instead be postponed until productive flight testing could occur.”
On December 15, 2009, the first Dreamliner finally took air, lifting off from Payne Field in Everett, Wash., in front of a crowd of thousands of Boeing employees, fans, and journalists.
But that didn’t mean Boeing’s problems with the Dreamliner were done.
In August 2010, National Aviation Co. of India, the Indian-state-owned company that runs Air India, announced it was demanding compensation of $840 million from Boeing for delays in the 787 program. The company said the delays were hampering its growth plans, according to Bloomberg.
Boeing said at the time that it was negotiating with carriers over costs related to the delays.
As someone who has been in management, I can well-understand Boeing’s dilemma. They can’t admit that the union has them by the balls and it really hurts when they squeeze, I mean strike. That would be tantamount to an open invitation for the union to strike every time there was a significant deadline. At the same time, these work stoppages are like cancer, and they have to do something to try to innoculate themselves from the cancer of unions even while they carefully try to avoid saying that the unions are bleeding them like particularly nasty leaches. And the effects of strikes are far worse on the bottom line than they appear on paper; because after a lengthy strike, it takes workers some time to recover the groove they had been in (it’s like that famous Polock joke: “Why is it so expensive to give union workers hour lunches? Because they have to retrain afterwards”).
So – without laying off so much as a single union worker – Boeing expanded its operation to a right-to-work state, and specifically, to a plant that HAD been union, but voted the union out as a bunch of trouble-making losers.
And that’s when Obama took off his incredibly foul-smelling loafer and began to slam it on the table shouting, “We will bury you!” at Boeing.
Barack Obama would rather see jobs go overseas to China than he would see them go to South Carolina. That’s the bottom line.
Barack Obama is a fascist. He is the Cloward and Piven president. He doesn’t want a thriving America; he wants to control it no matter how small it has to become for fascist progressivist-liberalism to dominate it.
Allow me to give you a rather clear example of how Obama thinks. As the following video of Obama in a Democrat debate will show, Obama would raise the capital gains rate EVEN KNOWING IT WOULD HURT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND RESULT IN LOWER INCOME TAX REVENUES. He would do so in the name of “fairness.”
But we don’t need the success of Republican policies, do we? We don’t need to have unemployment rates of 3 and 4 percent like North Dakota and Nebraska. We don’t need to have the incredible job creation of a Texas. We certainly don’t need to ever balance a budget. We’ve already slit our throats by voting for Democrats, and we really might as well just keep sawing until our heads fall off so that we can end up the way we’ve already basically been since 2006 when we started electing Democrats: completely brainless and therefore completely clueless.
The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:
WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.
Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.
After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.
Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.
[…]
But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:
— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.
— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.
— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.
[…]
Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.
[…]
Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.
“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”
Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.
The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.
How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.
Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:
“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”
The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???
WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s? WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?
And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama??? And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:
Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
[…]
”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared. So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.
These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums. Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology. There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.
I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather. And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.
Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???
It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure. It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.
The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.
The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”
The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.
There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading. Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements. The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford. And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes. Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs. Folsom provides the official data to back it up.
In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%. Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues. By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%). Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected. Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits. And they created millions of jobs in doing so.
And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN. Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations. They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money. And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone. Just like they did with FDR.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. What did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.
I stand by that sweeping statement. People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people. As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan
That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle. This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office. And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.
Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:
Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.
I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.
Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.
Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations for their own industry because they know that they can handle all of the rules and paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can. After all, a large corporation with an accounting department can easily handle filling out a few thousand more forms, but for a small business with only a handful of employees that kind of paperwork is a major logistical nightmare.
When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has made the process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses that it is hardly worth it anymore. Things have gotten so bad that more small businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.
So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time employees.
And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help? Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.
A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011
In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.
That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.
The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.
While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.
“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.
“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.
So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?
And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.
An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs. That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits. And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden. Just to name a few. The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.
Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too. Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008. Did Obama make it better? Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.” Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.
The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job. Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.
Start Thinking Right 