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Payne: Levin’s JP Morgan scapegoat
Posted by hpayne on May 13, 2012
“(This) is an exact description of the type of risk-taking that got us into this financial crisis and recession,” said Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley in a joint news conference with Michigan Senator Carl Levin this week jumping on a $2 billion loss by JP Morgan as evidence that banks caused the 2008 financial crisis and that they need even more federal regulation.
That’s rich.
Actually, Carl Levin and his fellow Washington meddlers caused the 2008 financial crisis with years of excessive intervention in the U.S. housing market. Their actions since then – echoed by a clueless mainstream media – have been to try and rewrite the history books even as their renewed attempts at regulation are only further deepening America’s economic crisis.
Yes, a ticking time bomb of recklessly-bundled, credit-challenged mortgage securities eventually went off, cratering the housing market and crippling the taxpayer-backed U.S. banking system. But those mortgages would not have been issued in the first place were it not for Levin’s relentless push to weaken mortgage lending standards by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a regulatory poison pill prescribed by Dr. Levin himself, is at the root of the 2008 financial collapse – and proof that less Washington, not more, is the key to a healthy American economy.
Using the CRA, say experts, Democrats and housing activists had long ago planted the seeds for the next decade’s housing debacle. “Both ACORN and the Clinton administration were working together to impose large numerical targets or ‘set asides’ (really a sort of poor and minority loan quota system) on Fannie and Freddie,”reported National Review’s Yuval Levin (no relation) in 2008. ” Eventually ACORN got what it wanted. In early 1994, the Clinton administration floated plans for committing $1 trillion in loans to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, which would amount to about half of Fannie Mae’s business by the end of the decade. Thissweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis.”
Republican critics of this reckless practice read the tea leaves of disaster and attempted to strengthen lending standards. Levin would have none of it.
“I rise to speak about the Community Reinvestment Act (that encourages) banks to serve the credit needs of the entire community including low and middle income areas.,” said Levin in 1999. “I oppose the provisions weakening the CRA.”
The rest is history as subprime lending institutions made bad loans under lax federal standards, pols like Levin basked in the warmth of increased American home ownership, the lenders quickly turned the bad loans over to Fannie and Freddie, who in turn handed them to the secondary mortgage market where they were bundled into financial instruments waiting to explode.
“ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers (that’s Carl) to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards,” concludes NR’s Levin.
And now Michigan’s senior senator has the gall to lecture JP Morgan on risky financial practices.
“The enormous loss J.P. Morgan announced today is just the latest evidence that what banks call ‘hedges’ are often risky bets that so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks have no business making,” asserted Levin on Thursday (“enormous” is an overstatement as $2 billion is a mere 0.1 percent of the bank’s assets). Levin is now pushing amendments to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation, regulation that Michigan businessmen tell me has dried up capital markets and is one of the key reasons the economic recovery has been so slow.
Wall Street Journal financial writer Holman Jenkins sneered at Levin’s presumption: “Uh huh. Banks that refrain from risk aren’t banks. And expecting regulators to distinguish good hedges from ‘risky bets,’ as (Levin’s new regulation) requires, is to expect regulators to be better bankers (for a lot less pay) than one of the best bankers, (JP Morgan’s) Dimon, has shown himself to be.”
Indeed, The Journal reported this weekend, the intention of JP Morgan’s (ultimately disastrous) hedging was aimed at making “bets aimed at shielding the bank from the market fallout of Europe’s deepening mess.”
And why is Europe in a mess? Because of massive debt created by excessive government spending and unsustainable public sector union pension liabilities. And who is planting the seeds for similar future debt implosion in the U.S.?
Yes, Senator Carl Levin and his fellow Democrats.
Payne: Obama echoes Cheney
Posted by hpayne on May 11, 2012
America may be startled at the intensity of coverage of President Obama’s gay marriage vows. It is an issue, after all, which has hardly been on the front burner of policy – and seems a diversion from the massive economic issues facing the nation. Indeed, the pressing family issue in this country is the lack of it in places like Detroit. The city’s 80 percent black illegitimacy rate drives every inner city pathology – from school dropouts to adult illiteracy to crime.
But the media ignores the black family crisis (a crisis of class that also wreaks havoc on my home state of West Virginia) – a crisis ignited by government welfare programs. To admit the crisis would be to admit the failure of liberal welfare. And so the MSM prefers to knock the conservative War on Gay Marriage. It is a perennial issue in America’s liberal newsrooms on par with racial preferences and abortion rights.
It is also an issue I happen to agree with. I’m not convinced government sanctioning only heterosexual marriage is important. I default to choice.
There was a collective cheer in American newsrooms Wednesday as the media ssees the president’s advocacy as the culmination of years of press advocacy. But that begs the question: Why didn’t the media cheer when former Veep Dick Cheney took the exact same position in 2009?
“People ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish,” said Cheney who has a lesbian daughter.
Part of the answer, obviously, is that Cheney was an ex-veep by then. And his boss, President Bush, had never touched the issue while in office (though Cheney was also outspoken while in office against the federal Defense of Marriage Act).
But the bigger reason is simple partisanship. Party always trumps principle. Just as “liberal” newsies have thrown the Catholic Church under the bus on Obama’s contraception mandate – a clear violation of the First Amendment – they hated Darth Vader too much to acknowledge his progressive views.
Better to trumpet the words of their man Barack Obama – even if it took him three years to finally catch up with Dick Cheney.
Payne: Mourdock, scourge of Lugar. . . and Obama’s Auto Task Force
Posted by hpayne on May 9, 2012
Who is Richard Mourdock?
He is the bold Indiana state treasurer who brought suit against Chrysler in 2009 to try and protect state teacher and firefighter pensioners from the Obama Auto Task Force’s illegal grab of their investments to benefit the UAW. Mourdock’s ultimately futile suit was the last line of defense against a thuggish White House that had threatened New York bondholders into taking the White House’s ruthless, 29-cents-on-the-dollar deal to benefit its labor cronies.
But you wouldn’t know that from Wednesday’s MSM coverage of tea party favorite Mourdock’s upset win over Senate fixture Richard Lugar. The New York Times, for example, only mentions Mourdock’s Chrysler fight in the 16th graph of a sidebar story – headline “Many Pursuits, but Bipartisanship Isn’t One of Them.” As that loaded headline suggests, the Times’ coverage is decidedly anti-Mourdock (the story doesn’t even mention Mourdock’s flesh-and-blood plaintiffs ” dismissing them as “state funds”).
If the establishment press lived its credo of watching out for the little guy, then Mourdock’s David-like defense of pensioners in the face of the Goliath-like armies of Big Labor, Big Auto, and Big Government should have made him a national hero. Instead, his is but a footnote in Washington’s troubling Chapter 363 bankruptcies that stripped first-in-line secured credit holders of their rights to favor politically-favored Big Labor. An accurate portrait of Mourdock would clash with the MSM’s caricature of conservative upstarts as tea party extremists.
“As fiduciaries, we can’t allow our retired police officers and teachers to be ripped off by the federal government,” said Mourdock in U.S. district court on May 26, 2009. “The Indiana state funds suffered losses when the Obama administration overturned more than 100 years of established law by redefining ‘secured creditors’ to mean something less.”
“It’s improper, because creditors are not getting the legal procedure allowed to them by Congress,” UCLA Law Professor Lynn LoPucki told CFO magazine in June, 2009.
But Mourdock’s fight was a footnote in the MSM in 2009. Its coverage of White House kneecapping of New York investors? Non-existent. They were inconvenient speed bump in Obama Washington’s rush to save the UAW.
In his campaign against Lugar, Mourdock once again played David against a six-term incumbent Goliath. But The Times sniffs at the underdog for dislodging “a collegial moderate who personified a gentler political era.” Presumably a pre-tea party era when pols collegially ignored sky-rocketing debt and the trampling of the rule of law.
Now the electoral beast has been awakened. By the UAW bailouts. By trillion-dollar deficits. By Obamacare and the fear that America is following Europe over a debt cliff.
Does he regret sanding up for Indiana pensioners in 2009, the Times demands at the end of its article? “Absolutely not, replies Mourdock. “The law matters. And the fact was out retirees and teachers had their property stolen.”
Those crazy conservatives. They care about such things.
Payne: Twins
Posted by hpayne on May 8, 2012
America, meet Michigan.
Mitt Romney paid a visit to Governor Rick Snyder’s state Tuesday to — as local CBS Radio put it — defy the “popular wisdom” that Michigan is lost. In fact, Romney would do well to visit Michigan more often. Michigan is America. Failed governor Jennifer Granholm was Barack Obama. New governor Snyder is Mitt Romney. And Michigan’s resurgence under former Gateway Computer Corporation CEO Snyder and his Republican legislature is dramatic evidence of how a businessman can return fiscal sanity to a government run off the rails.
“I believe we are a role model,” said Snyder as he introduced Romney in the state capital of Lansing. “It wasn’t four or five years for us — we had a decade of tough times. It’s about ‘Relentless Positive Action.’ We are the comeback state in the U.S.A. Do what we have done — fix your tax system, fix your regulatory system.”
Indeed, a simple change in leadership has brought dramatic change to Michigan. Granholm’s assive tax breaks for politically connected corporations from Big Green to Big Hollywood have given way to a broad-based, simplified, flat tax system. Businessman Snyder often rankles movement conservatives by shying from partisan battles and adopting corporate language instead of Smithian principles to justify his fiscal policies. But in a state wrecked by eight years of Obama-esque mismanagement, his focus on the fundamentals has been refreshing.
He has brought balance to a once-chaotic budget process and has tackled the state’s long-term liabilities head on after years of neglect from Granholm — an attractive, Harvard-trained, Democratic ideologue with no management experience.
Sound familiar? Obama meet Granholm. America meet Michigan.
Romney echoed Snyder’s themes in his speech. “I am increasingly optimistic about our future,” said Romney, doing his own version of Snyder’s signature ‘Relentless Positive Action,’ miles from the divisive rhetoric that has become Obama’s trademark. “Businesses will spring up across the country by instituting pro-growth regulations, pro-growth taxes, pro-growth intellectual property protections, and pro-growth labor policies.”
From Obama to Romney. From Granholm to Snyder. It’s working in Michigan.
Payne: Please, Mr. Holder, stop helping
Posted by hpayne on May 7, 2012
“This is unacceptable,” Attorney General Eric Holder said of the bloodbath that is killing two black men a week in Detroit. Obama’s top cop told the NAACP’s annual dinner in Detroit Sunday night that the statistics were “shocking” and his administration is directing “unprecedented” resources to reducing young people’s exposure to violence.
Please, Mr. Holder, stop helping us.
Federal policies from public housing projects to welfare payments paying for children out of wedlock have set the table for today’s urban violence – violence bred by 80 percent birth illegitimacy rates that leave young males growing up fatherless, uneducated, and poor.
Indeed, as Holder spoke, The Detroit News told the tale of The Martin Luther King Apartments near downtown Detroit – a sprawling, federally-subsidized, 481-unit, low-income housing compound that’s been taken over by drug dealers and other criminals.
“We’re the forgotten people of Detroit,” MLK resident Sharonda Hawkins – a gun strapped to her belt – told The News. Her husband was gunned down there last year – a nameless statistic among in the hundreds of Detroiters murdered every year even as the city’s establishment trumpets each downtown restaurant opening as evidence the city is “coming back.”
While not as violent as infamous public projects like now-defunct Cabrini Green in Chicago, MLK-like apartments have also become federally-funded breeding grounds for violence, says Bill Johnson, a Michigan View columnist and veteran Detroit writer. Such complexes, explain Johnson, house concentrations of welfare moms and their children who are preyed on by drug dealers as both clients and drug couriers. Like the giant Cabrinis of old, such compounds are easily controlled by territorial gangs.
Such single families are the result of decades of federal welfare programs – expanded under President Obama – that have displaced the father in the home. Single parenthood, the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector writes, is a leading cause of poverty – and fuels every young male dysfunction, from school dropouts, to adult illiteracy, to criminal behavior.
Yet, incredibly, the Obama administration has just produced an ad celebrating single parenthood in the form of Julia – a mother who is dependent on cradle-to-grave government handouts. In this Obama campaign vision of the American family, a male never enters Julia’s – or her son Zachary’s – life. In this fairy tale, Julia starts a government-funded “web business.”
In urban reality, the odds are the Julia and Zach wind up in MLK apartments, terrorized by drug lords, her son a potential victim (over 100 Detroiters have been killed this year already) or recruit (60 percent of inner city black high school dropouts will spend time in prison).
Faced with these truths, Holder seemed to be speaking from another planet Sunday. “Across the administration, we’re working in a range of other innovative ways to achieve fairness and expand opportunity ” from successfully advocating for the reduction of the unfair and unjust 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses – to launching a new, Department-wide Diversity Management Initiative,” Holder said. And this will stem the violence how?
Maybe next time AG Holder comes to Detroit, he’ll get out more.
Payne: Anti-Voter ID Democrats require Voter ID for Michigan Caucus
Posted by hpayne on May 5, 2012
Detroit – Attorney General Eric Holder says that voter ID laws – requiring a government-issued form of identification to guard against vote fraud – are discriminatory. He has accused Republicans of trying to “suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success” and has called for an aggressive federal review of Republican-sponsored state laws – including South Carolina and Texas, whose statutes have not yet been approved by Holder’s department.
Does he plan to investigate his president’s party?
This weekend, the Michigan Democratic Party will be holding its caucuses to formally nominate Barack Obama as president. What do Democratic caucus voters need to vote? A photo ID.
“Even though we already know that President Obama will be our nominee, it’s important that we let him know we’re standing with him, now and this November. Commit to caucus now, and look up the caucus location in your neighborhood,” reads an email from Democratic Michigan Field Director Erin McCann (the email was sent to The Frank Beckmann radio show in Detroit from a listener. See nearby).
“Here’s everything you need to know,” continues the email with voting requirements:
– Who can caucus: You must be 18 or older and registered to vote (or, if you’ll be eligible to vote by November, you must pledge that you’ll register by then).
– What to expect: Bring proof that you live in the area served by the caucus location — photo ID is required.
– When and where to caucus: Registration starts at 9:00 a.m. — and you must be in line by 11:00 a.m. to participate in the caucus. You can look up your local caucus location here.
A link then takes caucus-goers to a webpage (pictured nearby) on BarackObama.com which reads: “Thanks for pledging to caucus for President Obama in Michigan. Don’t forget to bring a photo ID that shows you are a resident of the caucus district.”
By Mr. Holder’s standards then, President Obama’s party is engaged in voter suppression, targeting heavily black voting precincts like Detroit and Pontiac. Will Holder allies like the NAACP and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center, who claim without evidence that voter ID laws hurt minorities, protest the Democratic caucuses? Will the NAACP petition the United Nations as it did in December for a human-rights ruling on what its President Benjamin Jealous called a “tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote”? Will the American Civil Liberties Union sue the Democratic Party as it has Wisconsin to protests its voter ID law?
“Speak out. Raise awareness about what’s at stake,” Holder said last December in a speech decrying voter ID laws. “Call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, encourage and work with the parties to achieve this success by appealing to more voters. We must be honest about this.”
Yes, we must. Or at least must be consistent. We look forward to Mr. Holder’s Detroit appearance this weekend.
Payne: Veep Nerd?
Posted by hpayne on May 3, 2012
Governor Snyder for veep? Now you know the presidential silly season is in full swing.
With the Republican race over and the Final Two set, journalists have to cool their heels until the political conventions in (gasp!) late August. With Obama’s veep set (though, you watch, the rumors of ditching Biden will soon start flying), that leaves only the suspense of Romney’s pick for #2.
There’s nothing more comical than political pros/jos with too much time on their hands. “My bet is (Snyder’s) Romney’s man for vice president,” wrote Chris Ingram, a Tampa Republican political consultant, in a Tampa Bay Online op-ed.
Huh? Spend any time with Snyder and you know he is allergic to politics. At the GOP’s political conference in Mackinac last year, he could barely muster the enthusiasm to tell the faithful to vote Republican for Senate in 2012. His endorsement of Romney for the Michigan primary came with just days to spare – not because he was on the fence (everyone knew one biz nerd would endorse the other biz nerd) – but because he wasn’t interested.
“Pure fantasy,” says one Michigan GOP insider when asked about Veep Nerd. “The numbers crunchers know that Snyder is no conservative, which is the one constituency Romney cannot afford to burn right now. If he’s making a geographic pitch, then Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers would be a much better choice (a Midwest conservative with foreign policy/intel cred out the wazoo).”
And one more thing: Snyder is a CEO. CEOs don’t do deputy. So how did Mr. Ingram put Snyder on the veep short list?
“Access to the convention site, proximity to the best restaurants and bars, being inside the security zone, and not having to ride a bus (a really big deal if you’re a Republican) are almost as important as fighting over abortion and gays in the party’s meaningless platform,” Ingram writes. And, he has found, Michigan’s convention delegation won the next best hotel spot to Massachusetts.
Because Snyder is from Michigan? A more logical conclusion: Because Romney is from Michigan and Massachusetts.
Payne: Chen and Elian
Posted by hpayne on May 2, 2012
Forget Monica Lewinsky. The biggest scandal of the Clinton presidency was its throwing young Elian Gonzalez back into Castro’s shark tank after his mother had sacrificed her life to get him to freedom. Now another Democratic president, President Obama, seems determined to betray a Communist dissident to realpolitik.
What is it with Democrats sacrificing civil liberties to communist thugs?
“The blind Chinese dissident who boldly fled house arrest and placed himself under the wing of U.S. diplomats balked Wednesday at a deal delicately worked out between the two countries to let him live freely in China, saying he now fears for his family’s safety unless they are all spirited abroad,” reports AP.
How is this possible? Did the Obama administration really take the word of one of the world’s most notoriously brutal regimes and turn over a dissident hero – a BLIND dissident hero – who had taken refuge in a U.S. Embassy because he actually believed America stands for the principle of freedom?
Barack Obama’s troubling silence when asked about Chen’s situation Tuesday now speaks volumes. “America’s first black president” is apparently unaware of the symbolic power that moniker carries. Why didn’t he demand that Chen’s family be reunited with him? Why didn’t he hold a news conference highlighting Chen and his cause – the forced sterilizations of women as a result of China’s one-child policy? Now THAT is a War on Women.
Like Clinton before him, hoever, Obama appears naïve about dictatorships – and more than willing to sacrifice civil liberties for diplomatic face.
After six days holed up in the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. released Chen today – spinning hard that a deal guaranteed his safety and a new academic life. We’re not making this up. The Obama Administration actually believed them – the same fascist government that has beaten Chen for years under house arrest and even followed a CNN cameraman and tried to wrestle his camera away when he visited Chen’s town. Hillary Clinton’s State Department spun reporters that she spoke with an enthusiastic Chen after his release back into Chinese hell.
“After saying in Chinese how grateful he was that she had mentioned him in the past and supported his case, he said in broken English, ‘I want to kiss you,'” a senior U.S. official said.
The story started to fall apart within hours as a shaken Chen told AP from his hospital room (yes, to treat injuries received escaping from the very thugs Clinton had just handed Chen back to) that Chinese authorities threatened to beat his wife to death if he did not leave the U.S. embassy.
“I think we’d like to rest in a place outside of China,” Chen told the AP, appealing for his freedom. “Help my family and me leave safely.”
Clearly, the U.S. had mishandled – or worse betrayed – Chen, concocting a cover story to get him out of the embassy. Why? Because – strategic and economic meetings (were to) start Thursday between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts,” says AP. “I’m guessing US officials were eager to get rid of him,” one Chinese expert told The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.
Don’t want to let human rights get in the way of government relations. Human rights groups (don’t “liberal” Democrats talk to these people?) are enraged. “I’m somewhat surprised by the U.S. government’s willingness to accept the Chinese government’s assurances or even to get Hillary Clinton to work for Chen’s safety in the long term,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. Then again, should Mr. Bequelin be surprised after the Elian debacle?
I recently had the privilege of meeting Dayanna Delgado, a young Cuban doctor who had bravely escaped Castro’s tentacles for American freedom. I asked her about Elian Gonzalez – who the Clinton Administration had ripped from American relatives in a 2000 nighttime raid to send back to Castro (despite reports that Elian’s father, like Chen’s family, had been threatened unless he asked for his son’s return).
Delgado told me Elian lived life in a public cage in Cuba. His family had been given a nice house. The government knew his every move. He was both Castro’s prisoner and propaganda prize for Castro. Which is why his mother took him to the U.S. Democrats haven’t learned a thing.
Payne: Dr. Lutz’s Gas Tax Snake Oil
Posted by hpayne on April 30, 2012
Like President Barack Obama, Chevy Volt designer “Maximum Bob” Lutz yearns for Euro-style high gas prices. “People say politically it can’t be done. . . in the United States,” said Lutz on the Frank Beckmann Show Monday, holding up high-gas tax European nations as leaders in the fight for oil independence from OPEC.
But despite $8 a gallon gas prices, Europe today is more dependent on foreign oil than ever.
Since 2001, gas prices in Germany, for example, have more than doubled, from $3.60 a gallon to over $8 a gallon. Yet European dependence on oil imports has grown from 74 percent of consumption to 84 percent of consumption according to Eurostat (Germany is 97 percent dependent on foreign oil).
Lutz’s campaign is no doubt a self-serving ploy to increase demand for his pet Volt — but he also wraps himself in the moral imperative of, not global warming, but national security. He claims high gas taxes will wean America from oil. True? Again, Europe is instructive.
The doubling of gas prices should, by Lutz’s logic, have dried up European demand for oil — but it has not. Gas and diesel-powered cars remain the dominant form of transportation despite more than a decade of hybrid vehicle availability. Why? Because internal combustion engines remain the most cost-effective technology for consumers even in congested European nations.
Meanwhile, all that taxation — and its twin brother, regulation — have strangled European productivity with per capita income now just 70 percent of the U.S. as less-efficient government takes 45 percent of gross domestic product (compared to the 25 percent (and rising) in the U.S.).
No wonder raising the gas tax is, as Lutz puts it, “the third rail of politics.” Even President Obama and his Europhile sidekick, EnergySec Steven Chu, have backed off on their previous calls for higher gas taxes this year, saying: “Do you think the president of the United States going into re-election wants gas prices to go up higher?”
Trumped by facts and political reality, Lutz then got REALLY Obama-like. “When (gas) gets to $4 a gallon for market reasons, when it starts creeping down again, you don’t let it go down” he told Beckmann in describing how a gas tax might work. “You make up the difference in taxation. That would be one way to sneak it in where the public wouldn’t be aware of the fact that you’ve added taxes.”
Kinda like the EPA killing coal via sneaky carbon regs, get it?
At this point, the WJR phone lines exploded with fury against Lutz, whose reputation as Detroit’s car guy won’t survive many more of these interviews. A better solution? Let the market work. If there’s a better alternative to gasoline, the engineers will figure it out. And those evil OPEC countries? Boycott them. Just like we’ve done with an embargo on Iran the last 30 years.
Payne: General before King
Posted by hpayne on April 26, 2012
Wednesday morning, Democratic Party bigwigs called off UAW President Bob King and his union pit-bulls from protesting Obama corporate ally Jeffrey Immelt and his General Electric shareholders meeting held in Detroit’s Renaissance Center, the headquarters of Obama-bailed out General Motors.
Powerful Detroit Democratic leaders from Senator Debbie Stabenow to Rep. John Dingell reportedly pressured King to stand down for fear of besmirching Detroit’s already tarnished image. Recruited to Detroit by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm before she left office in 2010, the GE shareholder’s meeting is part of a broad campaign to sell Detroit’s struggling business district to trade conventions, tech companies, and other business interests.
But a UAW president leading a 99 Percent protest against an Obama-approved green corporation inside Government Motors’ headquarters also promised an image disaster for Democrats.
GE and GM, after all, are glaring examples of the “One Percenters” that has benefited from Obama’s largesse, and the sight of King – also an Obama BFF ” tearing down these corporations in the name of the “working man” would have made for delicious Republican campaign commercials.
King had been planning the “99 Percent Spring” protest ” a merging of the Big Labor and Occupy movements – since February to dovetail with Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, and his decision to pull out looks very last minute. The UAW website still carries the banner headline: “Just taxes for all: Tell GE to pay their fair share.”
The article that follows is full of red meat.
“As the poster child for corporate tax-dodging, GE has made billions off the 99 percent while cutting jobs, stashing money in offshore tax haven accounts, and employing an army of lobbyists to buy political influence and stay ahead of its tax bill,” reads King’s screed.
In fact, GE is a poster child for Obama’s polices. Those “lobbyists” brought home billions in Obama stimulus money and green tax breaks. For example, GE’s $2 billion Shepherd Flats, Oregon wind turbine boondoggle is largely financed by taxpayers loans. And that tax bill? GE pays a 35 percent tax rate like every other American company ” a rate so much higher than other industrialized nations that it has driven earnings offshore to avoid U.S taxes. And Obama wants to punish corporate America with even higher taxes?
“While American families struggle to pay a higher tax rate than General Electric, the corporation lavishes millions on its top executives. In 2010 alone, the top five GE executives raked in $75.9 million. Over the last three years, GE executives collected $234 million,” continues King.
Remember, one of the executives King is attacking here is the chairman of the president’s own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness!
King himself is a walking son of government privilege as a key player in Obama’s $60 billion bailout of UAW-staffed GM. The so-called “UAW Bailout” has hardly endeared King to the 88 percent of Americans who are not in a union ” but the UAW’s money is key to underwriting Obama’s class war campaign this fall.
But some Obama toadies are more important than others. On this day, it was Mr. Immelt. He is a key Obama intermediary to a business community that has soured on the president. A UAW protest against GE would have been a black eye to Immelt. It would also be a “black-eye” to Detroit business, said Deputy Mayor Kirk Lewis, a Democrat. Without King, the protest largely fizzled, with SEIU employees bused in from Wisconsin making up the majority of the 300-odd protestors. They briefly disrupted the GE meeting before being chased away from GM HQ to a nearby park. By noon, they were gone.
Obama One Percenters 1, Obama 99 Percenters, 0. Bob King’s 99 Percent Spring will live to fight another day.
Payne: What the font?
Posted by hpayne on April 26, 2012
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers deadlocked 2-2 on party lines this morning, killing a Big Labor-backed ballot initiative to end the emergency manager law because Republican canvassers said petitions carried the wrong font size.
Stand Up For Democracy, the group representing EM law opponents, immediately jumped in the GOPer’s faces shouting “shame” and “fascists” (ah, that Democratic civility) and vowed to appeal the decision.
But, says Leon Drolet, this is how the canvassing system is supposed to work.
Drolet should know. He headed perhaps the most controversial ballot proposal of the last decade – the 2006 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative banning racial discrimination in government hiring and admissions. MCRI was defeated by canvassers but ultimately won on appeal – and on election day.
Ballot initiatives, says Drolet, are supposed to be hard. After all, they change the state constitution.
“Either enforce the rules, or no one complies,” says Drolet about the font details which are one of many that canvassers are asked to enforce. In the case of MCRI, says Drolet, the canvassers threw out the initiative on purely political pique – 3 of 4 petitioners wanted to continue racial discrimination in university admissions, claiming “diversity” trumped color-blindness.
But MCRI ultimately won, says Drolet, because the Appeals court not only approved their petition’s language – but because they were careful to abide by the rules. For example, MCRI threw out thousands of ballots because they either contained too many signatures per page or because they were photo-copied – both potential red flags to Democratic canvassers itching to defeat the proposal.
By contrast, anti-EM law petitioners refused to submit their ballots to canvassers beforehand in order to ensure that their font sizes, etc. were up to code. Big mistake, says Drolet. Rules is rules. Welcome to the ballot wars.
Payne: The Obama Coalition train wreck
Posted by hpayne on April 24, 2012
It began Monday, with protestors chanting “We are the 99 Percent” in front of WDIV-TV, the Detroit affiliate of NBC which is owned by General Electric. By Wednesday, Obama Big Labor ally and UAW President Bob King hopes his organization of the Obama-supported Occupy Wall Street movement, the “99 Percent Spring,” will reach its crescendo against Obama Big Business ally Jeffrey Immelt and his GE shareholders meeting at the Obama-bailed out General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit.
Call it the Obama Coalition train wreck.
While President Obama has fashioned his 2012 reelection campaign as a fight for the middle class against the wealthy elite, this weeks intersection of Obama toadies illustrates that his presidency has been all about favoring a politically-connected, privileged few: Big Labor, their unionized industries, and Big Green corporations like GE.
“It is morally wrong – it is absolutely wrong – that (GE makes) billions and billions and billions of dollars and pay not a single penny in taxes. Enough is enough. We’re the 99 percent who want 100 percent fairness for everyone,” King raged in February against a company that has aggressively reduced its tax bill by pursuing tax shelters abroad to avoid the onerous 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate as well as domestic tax breaks for its green energy projects.
King’s anti-GE campaign is thick with irony. GE will hold its shareholder’s meeting in the Renaissance Center on Detroit’s waterfront, the headquarters of General Motors – better known as Government Motors for its $60 billion federal rescue in 2009 that unfairly whacked GM investors in order to favor President Obama’s UAW friends, who were given 18 percent ownership of the company. The White House’s managed bankruptcy allowed the UAW-owned corporation to write off up to $45 billion of old losses going forward – good for a $15 billion tax break.
Moreover, GE Chairman Immelt is, like King, a close ally of the president having been appointed head of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Like King’s UAW, GE has benefited from its privileged political status. If the UAW is the White House’ model of labor, then GE is the Democrat’s idea of a good green corporate citizen.
GE received 88 stimulus grants and contracts worth $123 million, including millions to develop off-shore wind energy. Immelt himself was invited by the Obama’s as a guest at the 2011 State of the Union address. King, who hosted Obama at the UAW annual conference in DC this February, has himself has been an outspoken supporter of federal green handouts to unionized- automakers like Ford.
Meanwhile, King’s UAW has also underwritten the Occupy movement against Big Business, in particular Occupy Detroit which paraded through downtown Detroit last October 14 in opposition to federal bailouts. Conspicuously missing from Occupy Detroit’s list of corporate evildoers was GM , which was playing host that same day to President Obama and King at its federally-bailed out Lake Orion plant north of Detroit.
Now , however, this Coalition of the Privileged is about to blow up as King seeks a high-profile target for the launch of Occupy 2.0, the “99 Percent Spring” movement coordinated with the Obama 2012 campaign to mobilize the union grassroots.
The rally has horrified a Detroit Democratic establishment which fears a black eye to a near-bankrupt city already struggling to attract business. Though King’s antics have been telegraphed for weeks , a top Democratic source says that the party is frantically trying to discourage King’s 99 Percent Spring troops (which last week occupied Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s speech in Troy). Funny, though – the party raised nary a peep last fall when the Occupiers marched on Comerica Bank and DTE Energy, Detroit’s largest utility. The image of the UAW rampaging in front of Democrat-friendly corporations like GE and GM, apparently, hits too close to the bone.
OWS and UAW vs. GE at GM HQ. OMG. What has POTUS wrought?
Payne: Granholm was for stand-your-ground before she was against it
Posted by hpayne on April 20, 2012
From under a hoodie, ex-Governor Jennifer Granholm has been outspoken on the need for “justice” in the Trayvon Martin killing, including attacking the NRA for pushing Florida’s so-called “stand-your-ground” law that allegedly encourages folks like George Zimmerman to wield a gun when threatened.
Left unmentioned in Granholm’s attack, however, is that she herself was an NRA-supported advocate for passing Michigan’s own stand-your-ground law in 2006.
“Tonight on ‘The War Room’ we’ll examine . . . the National Rifle Association’s push for self-defense laws that have allowed Trayvon Martin’s killer to go unpunished,” previewed the March 29 website of her Current TV program, “The War Room.”
In one of two segments on the stand-your-ground issue and gun rights run amok, Granholm guest, Joseph Marshall, an activist and radio host, exclaimed “that’s a bad law.”
“Of course,” replied Granholm.
But in 2006, the NRA applauded Granholm for passing a stand-your-ground law (also known as a “castle doctrine”) as governor of Michigan.
“Today Governor Jennifer Granholm signed into law a package of six self-defense bills backed by the National Rifle Association, bringing ‘Castle Doctrine’ protections to law-abiding Michigan citizens,” read the NRA press release.
“I want to thank the Michigan Legislature and Governor Jennifer Granholm for working together in making this victims’ rights bill into law,” said Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist. “When you’re confronted by a criminal, you don’t have the luxury of time. This Castle Doctrine package states that if victims choose to stand their ground and fight, their decision will not be second-guessed by the State of Michigan.”
Granholm’s Michigan joined Florida, Texas, Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, and others states, reports Awr Hawkins at Big Government.com, “where governors and state legislators have tried to restore the people’s right to use a gun to defend their own lives and the lives of their families. . . . It is the height of hypocrisy for her to talk and act otherwise now.”
We look forward to the next edition of “The War Room” in which talk show host Jennifer Granholm and her guest, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, debate the issue.
Payne: Obama schmoozes Oakland One Percent, ignores Detroit 99 Percent
Posted by hpayne on April 19, 2012
Bingham Farms – “Mr. President, please drive through Detroit,” beseeched The Detroit News editorial headline Wednesday before Barack Obama’s visit to Michigan.
He didn’t.
Obama ignored Detroit, skirting its border to raise money in the tony suburb of Bingham Farms where Democratic One Percenters live safely in Republican Brooks Patterson’s Oakland County far from Detroit’s crime and dysfunction. Indeed, Oakland is the very antithesis of Barack Obama. Its chief executive loathes Obama. Patterson’s conservative government eschews Obama’s seat-of-pants budgeting. Its low tax, low regulatory environment sucks business from Detroit – the high-tax, Big Labor model of Democratic politics.
Detroit is a model of 40 years of Democratic malpractice. Of billions wasted on fanciful liberal programs that have failed to stem record murder rates. Of welfare programs that destroyed the nuclear family, dooming generations of kids to fatherless homes- the #1 driver of poverty in America. Of unions that have brought the city to the brink of insolvency.
Improbably, Obama took his anti-entrepreneur message – he is regarded by America’s top businessmen as anti-business – to the home of Denise Ilitch, the daughter of one of Metro Detroit’s most successful entrepreneurs, Mike Ilitch, presumably one of the reviled One Percenters whose greed the president says has exacerbated America’s wealth gap. The irony was rich as Obama lounged in Ilitch opulence.
“The room the guests were in included a grand piano, a sweeping staircase leading to an overlook and tables filled with gold-rimmed dishes, Waterford crystal and centerpieces of purple hydrangeas and peonies,” reported The Detroit News.
Earlier, Obama spoke at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn (made possible by another loathsome, wealthy industrialist), basking in the glow of his Detroit bailouts (more irony since Ford was not bailed out). With the Other Two’s resurgence, however, Obama deserves the accolades. But as usual he overplayed his hand. He continued the fiction that Republicans would have “let Detroit go bankrupt.” In fact, Obama himself took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. Mitt Romney too advocated bankruptcy for the automakers, but objected to Obama’s illegal stripping of bondholders’ rights in tilting the field to his UAW political allies.
Ultimately, however, it is Obama’s avoidance of Detroit that bruises his legacy.
His failed national policies – more spending, more welfare – echo Detroit’s failed solutions. Even more importantly, Obama has wasted a historic opportunity to do profound good. Even in recession, no corner of America has suffered more than urban areas like Detroit because of the implosion of the black family. Bill Cosby laments it. So does Mayor Dave Bing. Major academic studies rue its effects.
As a black male role model and father to two children, Obama could have preached the fundamental importance of family to a culture’s success. He could have changed the game. He didn’t.
Payne: Obama’s War on Union Jobs
Posted by hpayne on April 17, 2012
The fruits of President Obama’s UAW Bailout of GM and Chrysler was on loud display in Troy, Michigan Tuesday night as UAW President Bob King launched his $70 million, dues-funded, Astroturf, “99 Percent Spring” protest against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at a Republican fundraiser to fight Big Labor’s recall war chest. Obama and his party are heavily dependent on Big Labor dues to stay in power and saving the UAW was a crucial piece of the 2009 federal takeover of the Detroit auto industry. So is recalling governors like Walker whose public employee pay reforms also threaten to reduce the dues take of labor leaders and their Democratic puppets.
But look outside union strongholds like the upper Midwest, and Obama’s claimed support of the working man is highly selective. Indeed, Obama’s ideological war on the oil and coal industries is breeding angry union enemies as Obama’s green theology gets the better of his blue-collar empathy.
It is a hostility that may well cost him the election.
Obama has made Michigan his second home, particularly the offices of UAW Chief Bob King with whom he hails the rescue of the auto industry and, by extension, the U.S. economy. No wonder – he is increasingly unwelcome elsewhere.
“With United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts likening EPA head Lisa Jackson’s treatment of the coal industry to the Navy Seals taking out Osama bin Laden and hinting the UMW may not endorse President Obama for re-election, it is considered certain that West Virginia’s five electoral votes will be in the Republican column this fall,” reports Human Events’ John Gizzi about the Obama EPA’s latest greenhouse emissions rules that effectively eliminate new coal plants – endangering blue-collar employment in coal states like West Virginia that were once reliably in the Democratic column.
Some 40,000 residents work in coal-related jobs in the Mountain State. As a result, Republican electoral chances are looking up from the governor’s race to a contested U.S. Senate seat.
“In large part, what’s spurring all of this,” explains state GOP Rep. John Overington, “is what we refer to as ‘Obama’s war on coal.'”
Obama is at war with another 20,000 jobs – an estimated 5,000-7,000 of them union construction jobs – in his campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline carrying oil from Canada right through America’s heartland to the Golf coast.
The president’s opposition to satisfy Greens’ anti-carbon agenda led two union leaders, Laborers’ President Terry O’Sullivan and Building Trades Department President Mark Ayers, to blast the decision, reports The People’s World, a union publication.
“The score is job-killers, two, American workers, zero,” said O’Sullivan. “We are completely and totally disappointed. This is politics at its worst. Once again the president has sided with environmentalists instead of blue collar construction workers, even though environmental concerns were more than adequately addressed. Blue collar construction workers across the U.S. will not forget this.”
Tough stuff. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
“The administration and environmentalists have blown the whistle on workers trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. Instead of celebrating their victory by hugging a tree they should hug a jobless construction worker because they’re the ones who are going to need it,” O’Sullivan continued.
“With a national unemployment rate in construction at 16 percent, it is beyond disappointing that President Obama placed a higher priority on politics rather than our nation’s number one challenge: jobs,” Ayers added.
The UAW’s King, by contrast, has embraced Obama’s radical green agenda – apparently convinced that billions in electric car subsidies secured in the auto bailouts will create union jobs. Those billions will also feed Democrat-bound, union political coffers to protest governors like Walker and Rick Snyder.
“We are the 99 Percent,” chanted union protestors outside Governor Walker’s speech at Troy’s San Marino Club Tuesday. But in other industrial states., union leaders are tired of Obama polices that benefit green One Percenter boondoggles at Solyndra and Evergreen Solar -while shutting down jobs in the oil and coal fields.
Payne: No. 99
Posted by hpayne on April 15, 2012
Detroit claimed its 99th murder victim of 2012 on Friday, April 13.
Calvin Ross was a 26-year old black man who worked for a Detroit auto repair shop. He was slaughtered in broad daylight by a hail of gunfire – 44 shell casings were found at the crime scene. But unless you were watching Fox 2 News, you can be excused for missing the grim statistic.
The news did not make The Detroit Free Press or most Detroit media. Neither Al Sharpton nor Jesse Jackson held a news conference condemning this tragic life of black life. There were no demonstrations. There was no outrage from Detroit’s Congressional delegation.
But there was plenty of outrage over the alleged racial killing of a Florida youth 1,200 miles away in Sanford, Florida. The Free Press continued daily coverage of the case, including Page One play on the arrest of Trayvon Martin’s shooter. But it was The New York Times’ front page picture of defendant George Zimmerman, a person of color, that dramatically illustrated how the racial narrative of Martin’s tragic death – another Emmett Till lynching, we’re told – is quickly unraveling.
Zimmerman, a brown-skinned, unshaven Hispanic, looks nothing like the caricature that Al Sharpton shopped to a willing media a month ago. Sharpton & Co. profiled Zimmerman from his white-sounding German name to incorrectly assume that Martin had been killed by a white man whose crime was covered up by white police. Civil rights leaders quickly equated the Marin shooting with Emmett Till’s 1955 Mississippi killing for talking with a white woman. When Zimmerman’s true racial background came to light, MSM outlets like The Times invented the term “white-Hispanic” to keep the racial narrative going. Sharpton threatened civil unrest if Zimmerman was not charged – an echo of the deadly “Kill the Jews” riot that erupted in Crown Heights, New York after a Jewish man, Yosef Lifsh, ran over and killed a seven-year old black child, Gavin Cato. Attorney General Eric Holder stoked the Martin racial fire by praising Sharpton’s poisonous career, President Obama (a white-African?) called attention to Martin’s race, and the New Black Panther Party called for vigilante justice against Zimmerman. All ignored Zimmerman’s claims – backed by his Hispanic brother in an interview with Piers Morgan – of self-defense.
That these alleged defenders of civil rights would rush to judgment and deny a Hispanic his civil liberties is profoundly ironic (imagine if it were Trayvon Martin claiming self-defense against George Zimmerman).
On Friday, Florida prosecutors eliminated yet another Sharpton & Media red herring – that Zimmerman has uttered a racial slur on tape. As history should have taught us of Sharpton’s accusations against New York cop Steve Pagones as Tawana Brawley’s rapist, there are two sides to every story.
In Detroit, meanwhile, we rarely even hear the stories – much less get the names – of the steady stream of homicide victims. Calvin Ross. Or nine-month old Delrick Miller. Or 12-year old Kade’jah Davis. Or. . . . They don’t fit neatly into the Race Industry’s narrative.
Payne: The Sharpton Show
Posted by hpayne on April 12, 2012
In 1987 when I was but a pup newspaperman, Tom Wolfe’s classic “Bonfire of the Vanities” captured Al Sharpton’s race circus antics in the person of the novel’s fictional Reverend Reginald Bacon, a New York race huckster exploiting a complex crime scene for racial purposes. Wolfe’s novel was remarkably prescient about events that unfolded that same year as Sharpton became a household name for his accusations that a mob of cops led by New York assistant DA Steve Pagones had raped a black teenager, Tawana Brawley. What Wolfe brilliantly displayed in fiction was not only the race hustler’s tactics but also his use of a willing media.
Twenty-five years later, not much has changed.
Sharpton, now a national figure and employed by the same broadcast media that made him famous, travels the country – not just New York – looking for cases that fit his race theater. Like Sharpton shows before it – Goetz, Brawley, Crown Heights (“Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” ranted Sharptons’ mob before an innocent Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed) – the facts of the Trayvon Martin case have little relation to Al Sharpton & MSM’s narrative. But they make great theater, and rally Sharpton’s base from Orlando to Detroit
Hyped by the Sharpton Playbill as a white guy shooting a baby-faced teen in cold blood, the reality of the Martin case is that George Zimmerman is a Hispanic neighborhood watchman in a diverse neighborhood who got in a confrontation with a tall, troubled, black 17-year old. Zimmerman says – with alleged witness support – that he took a life to save his own.
Given Sharpton’s past, the MSM should be wary. Instead, much of the media have parroted Sharpton’s lines – their coverage a shameful display of journalistic malpractice. From NBC to ABC to CNN, reporters and anchors have refused to provide context, doctored transcripts, and stuck to a race narrative – contradicted by facts – by inventing the “white-Hispanic” adjective for Zimmerman (was Barack Obama the first “white-African” president?).
Like alleged-rapist Steve Pagones before him, George Zimmerman has been tried and convicted in the media. Sentence first, verdict later. Now comes the trial. The facts should now determine Zimmerman’s fate – and, like Sharpton’s accusation against Yosuf Hawkins’ attackers in Bensonhurst, that may mean a verdict of guilty. Or, as in the case of Steve Pagones, innocent. The Brawley grand jury fined Sharpton $350,000 and he was branded a liar by the court for his outrageous conduct.
Sharpton refused to pay the fine and, to this day, claims that Brawley was raped. He threatened violence after the Brawley verdict and will threaten the same if Zimmerman isn’t hung. The show must go on.
Payne: High hybrid divorce rate
Posted by hpayne on April 11, 2012
Even greenies are defying Papa Obama’s forced marriage to electric vehicles.
“A study released Monday by Southfield, Michigan-based auto research firm Polk shows that 35 percent of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when returning to the market in 2011,” reports Dave Shepardson at The Detroit News.”If repurchase behavior among the high-volume Toyota Prius owners isn’t factored in, hybrid loyalty drops below 25 percent.”
In other words, after driving a hybrid-electric car, 65 percent of buyers – a high, income, self-consciously green demographic – reject them. That helps explain why hybrid sales have flat-lined at just 2-3 percent of vehicle sales after over a decade on the market – and despite huge buyer tax incentives and a doubling of hybrid model offerings since 2007.
The Prius divorce rate is significant too as the iconic Toyota makes up 50 percent of sales. So a staggering 75 percent of non-Prius buyers reject hybrids after owning them – no doubt because they can’t justify their $5000-plus markup on a standard gas model, a markup they don’t get back in gas savings.
Meanwhile, Obama has mandated that all cars be hybrid-electric – or electric – by 2025 with his 56-mpg efficiency edict. Just as federal light bulb standards eliminated the traditional light bulb by dictating a 20 lumens per watt efficiency standard (thus eliminating, for example, the 17 lm/W, 100-watt incandescent), no current gas-powered car comes close to meeting Obama’s 56-mpg standard. Not one.
Indeed, only electrics like the Nissan Leaf currently meet the standard – even the vaunted 2012 Prius, at 50 mpg, falls short.
Americans were nearly caught blind-sided by the bulb ban (postponed by GOP House action late last year). But had it gone into effect, the effect wouldn’t break the bank. CFL bulbs may cost more than four times a traditional bulb – but that is still “only” a difference of, say, $21 for a four pack of CFLs. By mandating electric cars, however, consumers will suddenly be facing sticker shock of $7000 (if you must buy a Ford Fusion hybrid over a gas Fusion) to $20,000 (if you mandate the Chevy Volt over its sister gas-powered Cruze).
Eighty percent of the light bulb market is incandescents by choice. Imagine the outrage when the 97 percent of vehicle buyers that prefer gas-power have to enter shot-gun electric marriages.
Payne: Not Romney ends campaign
Posted by hpayne on April 10, 2012
Not Romney, a former senator from Pennsylvania, suspends campaign.
That’s how every headline should read in today’s news that Rick Santorum has thrown in his sweater vest. This GOP nomination was never about Santorum vs. Romney. It was about a conservative party desperately searching for someone other than pre-race favorite Mitt Romney to ride its 2010 tea party momentum to the presidency. Why? Because Mitt Romney is a seriously – if not fatally – flawed party nominee.
It is an irony of history that at a pivotal moment when the GOP needed a general to lead the country against government-imposed medicine – it got a general who had fought for government-imposed medicine.
And so Republicans searched for Not Romney. The two most serious Not Romneys – Governors Mitch Daniels and Rick Perry – disappointed. Daniels ran away. Perry ran like a newborn filly.
Bachmann, Pawlenty, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum. All fell short. My favorite Santorum moment came during the Michigan primary, when Romney was scrambling to win his birth state despite a massive ground game including endorsements from every major GOPer in the Mitten. Not-Romney – er, Santorum – came into the state three weeks before the primary leading in the polls but with no ground game. When I called around to get a MIView column from a Santorum surrogate, a state legislator, or businessman, somebody. . . I was told there was none. Only Chuck Yob came to Santorum’s aid. And he was stolen from the Gingrich campaign because Newt declined to campaign here! That was how fly-by-night the Santorum campaign was. And how weak a GOP candidate Romney is.
Santorum was simply the last man standing. Now he has taken his seat on the bench to cheer for Mitt against the Obama machine. “Mitt, Mitt, that’s our cheer. How the hell did we wind up here?”
Payne: American soul
Posted by hpayne on April 5, 2012
“I think it represents the soul of the company,” said Chrysler executive Ralph Gilles Wednesday in introducing a resurgent Chrysler’s newest vehicle at the New York Auto Show.
He was not referring to the 40 MPG Fiat 500, but the fire-breathing, 640-hp, 8.4-liter SRT Viper.
Gilles’ nod to the iconic muscle-car is a slap in the face of President Barack Obama, who recruited Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne to come to Detroit as a missionary teaching the savages how to make proper, fuel-sipping Euro-econoboxes. Indeed, one of the key benchmarks that Marchionne had to meet to assume ownership of the Rochester Hills-based automaker was to bring a 40 MPG car stateside.
Yet, instead of converting America to the green religion, Marchionne has gone native. Auto website Jalopnik calls the Viper “straight up car porn.” The Snake has tempted Marchionne and he has eaten the apple whole. His conversion is the untold story of Chrysler’s remarkable turnaround from bankruptcy just three years ago.
Marchionne has not only resurrected the gas-guzzling Viper (which was doomed in 2008), he has doubled down on making SUVs, a model scorned by Obama and his environmental base. The result is Chrysler returning to profitability — not by selling tin cans (the 500, with profit margins of less than $1,000 a copy, disappointed in its first-year sales) — but tens of thousands of Jeep Grand Cherokees with profit margins in the neighborhood of $3,000-5,000 per vehicle. That light-truck demand now employs three full shifts at Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant in Detroit. Those are blue-collar jobs. UAW jobs.
Save the planet? Marchionne’s bumpersticker should read: “SUV the planet.”
In short, the Grand Cherokee and Viper prove that an Italian auto executive is more in touch with the American people than their own president. What Marchionne & Co. realized is that SUVs and muscle cars are what Americans do best. And they are exporting them to the world. The Viper will go on the international sports car racing circuit against the best from Ferrari and Porsche. And Jefferson North will soon be building Maserati SUVs — yes, Maserati trucks — on a modified version of the Jeep platform.
“The car is a rock star all by itself,” thrilled Giles to the mob of reporters that came to the Viper’s unveiling Wednesday. The car’s debut has created more excitement than any other model this year. Try that with a 40 mpg compact. While Washington Democrats dream of marching American onto trains or forcing them into look-alike, soap cake-shaped compacts with their 56 MPG mandates, the Viper is an affirmation that cars are an expression of individual freedom. And Americans want a diversity of options to express that individualism — whether in muscle cars, SUVs, or the occasional Fiat 500.
Fuel economy? Fuhgeddaboutit. This car doesn’t save the planet, it eats its resources with a shovel. The talk at the news conference was about the Snake’s 640 horsepower, 600 pounds of torque, and 206 miles per hour — 5 mph faster than the previous version.
“It makes more torque off idle than most cars make at full power,” Gilles panted. “Here it is duking it out with some of the best brands in the world. There’s a little bit of this Rocky Balboa story in there that people just love.”
And the Obama Left just hates.