- Search Cartoons
- Comic Archive
-
Payne
Store
Henry Payne RSS
Articles Blog
Payne: Obama’s War on Jobs (TheMichiganView.com 07.08.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 10, 2011
June’s backward slide to 9.2 percent unemployment – just 18,000 jobs were created – at a time when Americas is two years into recovery, should come as no surprise. The president of the United States is at war with American business.
A year ago, liberal journalist Fareed Zakaria – writing in The Washington Post – asked leaders among America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies why they were sitting on an unprecedented $2 trillion of cash instead of sinking it into new plants, equipment, and workers.
The universal answer: Barack Obama “is, at his core, anti-business.”
That hostility had manifested itself in “the myriad laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington. (The) government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. ”
“Almost every agency we deal with has announced some expansion of its authority, which naturally makes me concerned about what’s in store for us for the future,” one CEO told Zakaria. Zakaria continued: “Another pointed out that between the health-care bill, financial reform and possibly cap-and-trade, his company had lawyers working day and night to figure out the implications of all these new regulations.”
This relentless politicization of the economy through a barrage of regulation and taxation has frozen business development. The evidence is in headlines everywhere you turn:
– Obamacare’s War on Business
The restaurant industry is reeling from a double D.C. shock – sharply rising food prices (caused in part by the diversion of corn to meet federal ethanol mandates) and the looming Obamacare law that mandates expanded employee coverage.
For example, Chili’s 1,300-strong restaurant chain is girding for insurance expenses to rise under Obamacare.
“The looming changes in health-care law are one of the bigger cost clouds on the horizon for restaurant chains,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Under the new law, employers with 50 or more full-time workers would have to provide affordable health insurance (to employees).” As a result, big chains like Chili’s aren’t hiring – they are looking for areas to cut back on staff.
– The War on Oil Imports
Obamacrats – led by Henry Waxman and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – are holding up production of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada in the name of global warming. “Building the pipeline will create over 20,000 new American jobs in construction and manufacturing in the short term, and more than 250,000 jobs in the long run. . . . These jobs and revenue are critically needed as America continues its economic recovery,” writes Tom Donahue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in the Wall Street Journal.
– The Obama EPA’s War on Coal
EPA Green zealot Lisa Jackson – who told a religious convention in December that government and churches have a moral duty to fight global warming – is trying to shut down coal power production with a series of edicts from carbon and mercury reductions to new particulate restrictions.
The mercury rules have already forced American Electric Power – one of the country’s biggest utilities – to announce the closure of five plants and the loss of 600 jobs. The Detroit News reports that Michigan coal production is in the cross-hairs of a rule that even the EPA estimates will cost utilities $800 million. New reductionsannounced last week on sulfur and nitrogen oxides effect 1,000 power plants in more than two dozen states and threaten more job loss.
– The War on Light Bulbs
The Obama Administration’s support of a ban on the traditional light bulb – in the name of the global warming religion – has come at the cost of hundreds of American jobs from Virginia to Kentucky as manufactures have shut down plants and shipped jobs to China in order to produce more expensive CFL replacements (compact fluorescents cost ten times as much as 40 cent incandescents).
“The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing, ” reported the Washington Post in December. “Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who joined 200 fellow workers in the unemployment line.
– The War on Trade
Spurred by Big Labor, Obama’s team is holding up ratification of trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama.
In Columbia, for example, Caterpillar is losing sales to that country’s mines for bulldozers and other earth-moving machinery. Total U.S. soybean exports to Colombia dropped 51 percent in 2009 alone. The American Soybean Association tells the Wall Street Journal: ” As long as we delay (these agreements) we’ll continue to lose market share.”
– The War on Gulf Oil
A Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s report found “no evidence the decision to shut down an entire industry—at a huge cost to jobs and long-term drilling safety—was done with input from engineers, scientists, economists or anyone with day-to-day oversight of U.S. drilling,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
A study by LSU Prof. Joseph Mason found that 13,000 jobs were lost in the Gulf region due to the moratorium with national job losses estimated at 19,000.
– The War on Autos
Even in an industry where the White House intervened to save jobs, Obama has created a hostile climate going forward. The regulator-in-chief’s proposed 56 mpg edict for 2025 – effectively mandating hybrid-electric cars – could kill thousands of jobs, put a $55,000 sticker on ordinary family cars, and deliver only minor savings to consumers, according to a study by the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research CAR).
“There will be hundreds of thousands of job losses per year. What we’re arguing against is extremism,” says CAR economist Sean McAlinden.
-The War on Boeing
Obama appointees at the National Labor Relations Board have opened a new front against Boeing, one the nation’s key exporters, after it hired 1,000 workers in South Carolina to build its 787 airliner. The NLRB claims the plant violates labor law for locating in a Right-to-Work state.
“Since being approved as a Boeing supplier we have placed over 100 employees with them here in Charleston,” Neil Whitman, President of Dunhill Staffing Systems told a House panel in June. “If Boeing is forced to shut down . . . it would mean the loss of thousands of direct and indirect jobs.”
Struggling to understand why forecasts of job growth had given way to negative numbers foreshadowing a “prolonged slog for the United States economy,” The New York Times Saturday reported that “economists were stunned.”
The Times is talking to the wrong economists. Businessmen have been telling of this debacle for two years.
Obama’s tax breaks for fat cats (the Michigan View 06.30.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 30, 2011
President Obama went to class war Wednesday, marking budget talks as a clash between children and tax breaks for the wealthy. “Ask Republican constituents if they’re willing to compromise their kids’ safety so some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break,” said the demagogue-in-chief.
But Chevy Volt-owner and Democratic Senator Carl Levin won’t be giving up his sweet tax break.
Indeed, Obama and Washington Democrats have handed out an unprecedented basket of tax breaks and taxpayer subsidies to politically-connected fat cats since 2009 in the name of greening the planet. The $7,500 welfare that Levin — who makes $165,000 grand a year — got for buying a luxury, $41k Chevy Volt this spring is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Deficit hawk” Obama won’t be ending the gravy train of federal dollars for jet-setting millionaires like Elon Musk either.
Companies like Musk’s Tesla, GM, and South Korea’s LGChem have helped themselves to over $100 billion that Obama has doled out to green firms to make the green products he prefers.
Musk, for example, won’t miss his jet break pocket change after stuffing his wallet with taxpayer millions. Obama’s Energy Dept. handed the Silicon Valley mogul $456 million in low-cost federal loans last year. Washington frowned on Big Three execs’ traveling to DC on corporate jets to grovel for loans, but Musk flew to DC twelve times aboard his corporate jet (travel cost: $175,000 a year) to lobby for his loot.
The federal loan was made to finance production of Tesla’s $60,000 electric Model S sedan.
In fact, Levin’s Michigan colleague Senator Debbie Stabenow wants to do more for the celebrities and pols to buy millionaire Musk’s chariots. Stabenow has proposed expanding the break as a rebate so the rich can claim their cash immediately — instead of waiting around for their tax accountants to ring it up at the end of the year. Levin has done his part, too —introducing legislation that allows the credit to be claimed on 500,000 cars per automaker rather than the current cap of 200,000 (assuming there are enough swells to claim it).
When asked if this is the kind of investment taxpayers should be making in a recession Michigan Rep. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, said that it was important to spread the green to a variety of sources so that “they will have broad applications” and transform America to a green economy.
So much for deficit reduction. And the good news for wealthy buyers like Senator Levin? He can claim another $7,500 tax break when he trades up his Volt for a Model S.
It’s for the children.
Fatherless Day The Michigan View 06.23.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 23, 2011
“This is not the same as just the continuation of regular traditional district model,” said Governor Rick Snyder in Detroit Monday, announcing state-run school reform targeting Detroit’s worst-performing public schools. “The idea is how do you move as much of the resources into the school — really empowering the principal, the administration, the teachers, the parents right in that school to be successful. That has been what’s working across the country.”
What parents?
For the second time in a decade, a Republican Michigan governor has stepped up with a compassionate plan to help Michigan children overcome the dysfunction of city schools. And once again, that governor will encounter a tragically “compassionate” Washington welfare system that has destroyed Detroit families — 80 percent of Detroit births are out-of-wedlock — and put underclass children at an education disadvantage.
In a timely visit to Detroit, the Heritage Foundation’s brilliant poverty expert, Robert Rector, reminded Metro Detroiters at a Wednesday Birmingham luncheon that the federal welfare system has become not only a driver of unsustainable deficits — gulping down nearly a trillion dollars a year ion federal funds — but a poison in the bloodstream of American culture.
I interviewed Rector in downtown Detroit before his Birmingham appearance. In the late 1990’s, Rector, Michigan Governor John Engler, and the Gingrich-led Republican Revolution played a pivotal role in reforming the most destructive welfare program ever invented: Aid Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
By paying mothers that had children out of wedlock, the Johnson-era program gutted the once-solid black family and began an anti-family welfare trend that has cleaved America into two economic classes: the nuclear-family middle class and the fatherless underclass.
“The number one cause of poverty,” says Rector, “even greater than the lack of a high school graduation, is the lack of a married couple at home. And for 50 years, the federal government has been telling Dads that they are not relevant.”
The late ’90s reform — ultimately signed by a triangulating President Bill Clinton — temporarily stalled underclass family dissolution by removing the direct cash incentive for illegitimate births and encouraging work. But the trend has resumed its relentless upward climb thanks to a buffet of other welfare polices – most significantly, Medicaid.
Today, 40 percent of all American births are out-of-wedlock, dooming children to lesser achievement than children from married families. This is what accounts for America’s growing income gap.
Briefly shocked by the ’90s welfare reform, the fatherless culture was revived by the realization by young mothers that – AFDC aside – there were still government incentives to have children outside of marriage.
Pregnancy? Paid for by Medicaid (a program that now accounts for 50 percent of federal welfare spending and 25 percent of Michigan’s General Fund budget). Housing? Paid for by federal housing assistance? Food? Paid for by food stamps.
Who needs a father? Papa Government is there.
Rector proposes reforming the welfare Leviathan as he and Engler did in the ’90s: cap spending, give block grants to the states, and attach work requirements.
But he adds one more crucial element to get the lower class out of poverty: Relentless promotion of marriage by political leadership.
Rector notes the unique opportunity that Barack Obama has in this regard as a successful, married, black father. But he laments Obama’s silence. While Candidate Obama’s book, “Audacity of Hope,” outlined the importance of the black male in the family, President Obama has gone mute on the subject.
Rector blames this in part on “the extreme anti-marriage rigidity in the rank and file” of social services bureaucrats. Indeed, says Rector, the Obama Administration actually tried to gut the Healthy Marriage Initiative – a $150 million program that Rector and the Bush Administration put in place to promote marriage in 2005.
“Once Obama was in office, marriage was never mentioned again,” says Rector. “He should give speeches talking unequivocally about the key role of fathers. The (inner city) culture doesn’t know marriage. They need to know how to build it.”
By freeing the underclass from welfare dependency, it could be Obama’s greatest legacy.
Upton: The House will vote to bring back the bulb (The Michigan View 06.22.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 22, 2011
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., has finally agreed to support a bill this summer that means lights out on the looming 2012 ban on the common light bulb. Upton himself co-sponsored 2007 legislation making light bulbs illegal, a ban that has become a symbol of bipartisan Big Government run amok.
Upton has come under increased pressure in recent weeks, sources say, after failing to follow up on a promise he made after assuming the committee chairmanship that he would hold hearings on reversing the ban. After months of paralysis – and with the ban just six months from going into effect on January 1 – outrage was building among his own Republican committee colleagues and conservative activists, including a national petition campaign, FreeOurLight.org, sponsored by the influential Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Freedom Action’s Free Our Light campaign has demonstrated that there is widespread public opposition to the light bulb ban,” says Myron Ebell, Director of Freedom Action at CEI. “We’re pleased that Chairman Upton has seen the light and congratulate him on his decision. We look forward to the House passing the bill to repeal the ban and its eventual enactment later this year.”
After Upton scheduled hearings this week featuring rent-seeking corporate fat cats that stood to benefit from the ban, anger boiled over and the chairman agreed not only to cancel the hearings but to bring up a bill repealing the ban. The View’s source says that the bill will likely be brought up under “suspension,” which means no amendments will be allowed and passage requires a two-thirds majority.
E&E News reporter Katie Howell is also reporting that Upton “he is working with Texas Republicans Joe Barton and Mike Burgess on language repealing the light bulb standards.” (Link here, subscription required.)
“We’re very close to seeing an agreement emerge and happen,” Upton told reporters at a conservative blogger briefing hosted by the Heritage Foundation.
In keeping with Washington’s stealth energy policies on auto mpg and greenhouse emissions, Upton’s original 2007 bill – touted by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Bush – was not an outright repeal but a backdoor sneak play in the larger 2007 energy law that would have eventually phased out bulbs that use more than 40 watts.
This would have effectively banned Edison’s invention which is the choice of 85 percent of American bulb purchases.
The ban has been mostly covered up by the green mainstream media, and consumers were only just learning of the ban as bulbs have begun disappearing from shelves. In the meantime, bulb manufacturers had already eliminated hundreds of incandescent plants in the United States (the last plant closed in Winchester, Va. last year) in preparation for the ban – off-shoring the jobs to China where the more expensive, replacement compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) could be manufactured.
So much for green creating American jobs.
Republicans – led by Texas Rep. Joe Barton together with fellow Texan Michael Burgess and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. – introduced bulb restoration legislation immediately upon the GOP taking over the House this year. Republicans overwhelmingly support bringing back the bulb, while global-warming-obsessed Democrats say making bulbs illegal is crucial to saving the planet. Ironically, saving the earth has meant destroying union plant jobs.
In contrast, the ban had been supported by big corporations like General Electric and Philips who saw a an opportunity to use government to monopolize a new, more expensive market while transferring jobs to China to earn higher margins.
“Nobody has to buy a CFL, and that’s a common misconception,” said Randy Moorhead, vice president of government affairs for Philips, this spring. “This is a political controversy that’s undeserved.” The Philips rep’s’ slippery answer refers to even more expensive options than CFLs and ignored the fact that the banned incandescent is the cheap and overwhelming favorite of consumers.
“We don’t think the consumer needs to pay $4 a light bulb, and we don’t think the federal government should tell people what kind of lighting to use in their homes,” Rep. Barton told Fox News this week.
The House vote will finally bring light – pun intended – to an issue exposing how dictatorial Washington has become. Members will vote against the bulb at their peril.
Will Beckmann run? ( The Michigan View 06.15.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 15, 2011
“It would be darned exciting,” says Michigan political guru Bill Ballenger of a Senate race between WJR Talk Show personality Frank Beckmann and incumbent second-term Democrat Debbie Stabenow.
Yes, it would. And it would be a historic race at a pivotal time when the Senate’s balance of power may be the difference between another American century and an Obamacare-driven plunge into a Euro-style entitlement abyss. These are big questions of which Beckmann — well-read in history and economics — is all too aware.
But while the cheers from GOP insiders for Beckmann to “Run, Frank, run!” come cheap, a Senate race for the radio veteran would not. As Beckmann contemplates running for Senate, political experts say that his formidable obstacles are an illustration of how hard it is for “Joe Citizen” – even one as well-known as Michigan’s Number One Talk Radio host — to run for office in the modern, big-money, media age.
Whether Beckmann runs or not may largely come down to the simple fact that he is an employee — not an entrepreneur or a career politician.
Unlike a Rick Snyder (wealthy entrepreneur) or Stabenow (career pol), Beckmann would have to leave a company job. It is a day job that is not only highly lucrative but one he loves and has spent a 40-year career attaining. It would also mean he would have to abandon broadcasting for his beloved Big Blue football. And while Beckmann is Michigan’s biggest radio personality today — a fact that makes GOP recruiters salivate — the media market is fickle.
Lose his spot for an 18-month campaign and there is no guarantee that it would be there when he returned (should he lose in ’12). Employers and audiences may have moved on. And if he wins, he must uproot his life to six years inside the Washington moat.
Fundraising is also a key.
Beckmann’s notoriety would give him an instant edge — but raising cash is also a slog. “We just don’t know how he would do at fundraising,” says Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research (and a consultant for Senate candidate and Oakland County Drain Commissioner John McCulloch.
“You have to constantly ask people for their money,” says Mitchell, who adds that a 2012 Senate candidate will have to raise $2 million for the primary — and another $15 million for the general. That’s a lotta chicken dinners.
That was not an issue for millionaire Snyder in the 2010 governor’s race. It WAS an issue for his opponent Pete Hoekstra who found fund-raising tedious, hurting his ability to compete against The Nerd’s ATM. McCulloch, a certain Beckmann primary opponent, is not only a proven fundraiser — he is a wealthy entrepreneur.
Stabenow is vulnerable — she polls at a mere 46 percent — and a candidate as fluent in policy as Beckmann could quickly put Senator I-Feel-Global-Warming-When-I-Fly on the defensive.
“What he brings to the table — he could actually articulate an argument against Stabenow. That’s what the Republicans need,” says Inside Michigan Politics publisher Ballenger, referencing tongue-tied GOP electoral disasters like Spence Abraham and Dick Devos.
But the media spotlight can also be cruel to glib radio hosts who have a long podcast-trail of controversial statements. Stabenow and the Democratic Attack Machine will be ruthless in combing Beckmann’s library for damning sound-bites.
And for all the talent Beckmann brings to the table, Mitchell adds that presidential years are a crapshoot for down-ticket races — even the Senate. “You can’t control your destiny in a presidential year,” says Mitchell. If Obama starts to poll over 50 percent, his coattails lengthen, and the hill steepens against for down-ticket challengers.
Ballenger scoffs at the idea that Beckmann will run (and given his love of radio, I’d be surprised too). He says the rumors “are a sign that the GOP is getting desperate.”
Ballenger says the party should forget celebrities and work with what it has — candidates like McCullcoh and Rob Steele (he of the spirited, if doomed, race against John Dingell in 2010). The political vet points to Ron Johnson, a no-name who came out of nowhere to beat Wisconsin household-name-Democrat Russ Feingold last year.
A lot of people said “Ron Johnson — are you kidding me?” says Ballenger. “But he was disciplined, made no mistakes. . . and he won.”
Obama goes green, Detroit blacks out (The Michigan View 06.13.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 13, 2011
Since President Obama signed the stimulus bill in early 2009, Washington has spent over $100 billion of it “transforming” America to a green electric grid. In Michigan alone, hundreds of millions have been distributed to rich utilities to upgrade to “smart grid” systems to enable better power management to accommodate electric cars, to rich multinationals like Dow and LGChem to produce batteries, and to wind energy projects run by rich institutions like Dow Corning, Michigan Aerospace, and the University of Michigan
And on Thursday, the city of Detroit – one of the nation’s largest and poorest cities – lost power.
Is there a better metaphor for the Obama Administration’s Utopian transformation of America than the Detroit Power blackout of 2011?
Like Obama nationally, Michigan has ignored its biggest city’s power infrastructure and instead poured money into quixotic wind projects on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to feed the state’s Renewable Power Standard – as well as the ideological demands of Washington.
“A wind turbine has over 8,000 individual parts and they all can be made right here in Michigan,” said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow upon handing her state $1.9 million in wind pork in July, 2009. “I am pleased these grants will support the important research efforts happening across our state as we continue to lead the way in developing clean energy technologies in the 21st century economy.”
Meanwhile, Detroit’s antiquated, electric structure can’t even provide power through two 95-degree days before imploding. City officials said the blackout – which took down all of the city’s major municipal buildings including city hall, museums, and courts – was “caused by extreme power demand for air conditioning after two days of temperatures in the 90s.” Really? Just two days? And what happens when summer comes?
Vice President Biden told TIME magazine in 2010 about stimulus brainstorming sessions with “Obama about an all-in push for a smarter electrical grid that would reduce blackouts, promote renewables and give families more control over their energy diet: ‘We said, “God, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Why don’t we invest $100 billion? Let’s just go build it!”‘”
So how’s that working for you, Detroit?
The city’s antiquated electric lines from its 1927-vintage, natural gas-and-oil-fueled Mistersky power plant failed, plunging the city into darkness. But Green Obama doesn’t have time for these “20th century” sources of energy. He’s busy remaking the Rust Belt into the Green Belt – in the memorable words of his former green disciple in the governor’s office, Jennifer Granholm.
Why, you might ask while we’re on the subject, does Detroit have its own utility at all? Because city unions refuse to give up this public jobs bank and connect to the larger grid run by Michigan’s more efficient Detroit Edison utility (which produces power at less than half the cost per megawatt of Detroit’ Power and Lighting Department). Mr. Obama would be proud. Government, after all, is all about providing jobs, yes?
Obama could make a real difference in Detroit – not just in upgrading its power system (if you must spend federal money), but as a family-man model for a city with a crippling 80 percent illegitimate birth rate. But Obama has barely visited here. He has bigger ideas to pursue.
How ironic that Detroit is a model for Democratic policy – welfare, living wage, high taxes, city-run services – yet the collective havoc these policies have wrought on this city are so embarrassing the Liberal-in-Chief barely acknowledges its existence.
‘Snidely Romney’: Democrats’ cartoon version of auto history ( The Michigan View 06.09.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 10, 2011
It’s gonna be a looooong campaign.
After Palin-Syndrome-addled reporters made fools of themselves ridiculing Sarah Palin’s correct historical reading of Paul Revere (after all, the woman had just emerged from a Paul Revere House in Boston where she simply regurgitated what she had just heard from the tour), Suffolk University historian Robert Allison told WJR’s Frank Beckmann that the media have a “cartoon version of American history.”
Add Democrats and Thad McCotter to the list.
On Thursday, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney rolled into town and got the cartoon version of auto bailout history when Big Labor protesters and McCotter — a likely Republican opponent — caricatured him as Snidely Whiplash tying screaming autoworkers to the train tracks.
Romneycare may be the wrong prescription for health reform (McCotter at least got that part right in his press conference), but the former Massachusetts governor’s prescription for healing Detroit autos was good medicine.
“Detroit should go bankrupt” read The New York Times headline on Romney’s November 19, 2008 op-ed protesting a no-strings-attached-bailout advocated by the UAW and management at the time. If press and pols bothered to read the article they would know that headline was shorthand for a “managed bailout.” At a time when capital was tight, limited federal intervention would have kept Detroit’s supply tail healthy while investors and management restructured the company.
“A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs,” wrote Romney. “It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk. In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”
Only cartoonish pols could twist those words into Romney throwing Detroit under the bus. Indeed, the Democrats’ campaign is so dishonest that even the liberal Washington Post felt the need to intervene.
“What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen,” Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler said of the bailout cartoon drawn by Obama, John Dingell, Virge Bernero, Bob King, and the rest of the Democrat Disinformation Detail. “Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.”
In fact, Romney’s proposal was consistent with what most experts advised at the time, including Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. The Big Lie — perpetrated by Obama lackeys — is that Obamacritics were opposed to a bailout. In fact, no one in leadership was. The differences were over how it should be managed.
Ultimately, the Obama Administration took GM and Chrysler into a managed bankruptcy. The difference? Obama’s “UAW Bailout” used the bankruptcy process to gut investor interests and “put the finger on the scale” — as Romney put it in Michigan today — to favor his UAW cronies. After all, Democrats would starve without Big Labor’s union dues spigot.
Six months later, and the union payoff aside, much of Romney’s prescription was carried out by Obama’s team in bankruptcy including slashing UAW wages that added cost to Detroit cars “estimated to be more than $2,000 per car” (Romney’s words) and a revamp of management (“management as is must go”).
The “Romney solution” might have taken longer, but with government proving needed capital, the economy would have been saved a shock, GM and Chrysler would have emerged more competitive, and the fundamental rights of secured shareholders would have been preserved.
Akerson: Thanks for the bailout, you should pay higher gas taxes (The Michigan View 06.08.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 8, 2011
About the only thing less popular than GM’s $50 billion money-losing taxpayer bailout is high gas prices. So, naturally, Government Motors CEO Dan Akerson says he supports a hike in your gas taxes.
Someone gets this guy a PR department.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Detroit News, Loose Lips Akerson — a telecom exec who is the latest CEO to come through GM’s revolving executive suite door — let fly that he would like to see the “federal gas tax boosted as much as $1 a gallon to nudge consumers toward more fuel-efficient cars.” Akerson’s comments are more evidence of the cozy relationship between the Obama Administration and the Rentseekers Roundtable. From banning light bulbs for GE to giant green loans for Dow and LGChem, Green zealot Obama and his corporate henchmen have pursued policies aligned with corporate interests — not consumers.
“You know what I’d rather have them do — this will make my Republican friends puke — as gas is going to go down here now, we ought to just slap a 50-cent or a dollar tax on a gallon of gas,” Akerson said. Trouble is, that attitude will make Akerson’s customers puke too. Is this really good business?
Akerson might have sympathized with his customers at a time when gas prices are pinching incomes and unemployment remains stubbornly high. Instead of explaining the folly of Washington’s ideological 62-mpg-by-2025 mpg fuel economy mandates, however, the Government Motors chief colludes with Washington to siphon even more money from taxpayer wallets.
But Akerson’s outrageous comments are not just harmful for his customers — they make no sense for his company.
Akerson knows full well the reason GM and Chrysler have paid off their government loans early is because fuel prices have declined, boosting the SUV market and their high profit margins per vehicle. America’s low gas prices and high disposable income are why companies like Fiat are so desperate to enter the American market — because they make more money here on Jeep Grand Cherokees than on fuel-taxed, econobox Fiat 500s.
This kind of nonsense has earned Akerson scorn among auto insiders. “This is Dan Akerson live and in living color, folks,” writes veteran industry executive Peter De Lorenzo on his blog, “bringing his remarkable arrogance and nuanced cluelessness to bear on key product decisions that will affect GM’s competitive stance for years to come.”
By dragging America towards a Euro-Asian model, Akerson sets GM up for failure. Green may be politically-correct speak in Washington, but it is bottom-line suicide, especially for a company that is already at a disadvantage against foreign transplants with the UAW in its shop.
“People will start buying more Cruzes and they will start buying less Suburbans,” with higher gas taxes, says Akerson. But GM makes $8,000 per Chevy Suburban sold and only $1,500 per Chevy Cruze. Does an auto CEO really want to make less money?
One only need look at last month’s sales reports to see how misguided Akerson’s small car strategy is. Skittish over a stalling economy and high oil prices, customers went — not to GM for small cars — but to Hyundai, which saw its sales explode by 20 percent because it can make small cars cheaper than UAW-burdened GM
“Quite simply Dan Akerson is the wrong guy, at the wrong time, at the wrong car company,” adds De Lorenzo. But Ol’ Loose Lips laid one more goose egg before The News interview was over.
“Now, we need practical decisions,” Akerson said, bumbling into the debate over raising the federal debt ceiling. “I think you need to cut the hell out of the budget and you’ve got to increase taxes … on everybody — including the middle class and the rich people.”
Increase gas taxes AND income taxes? Maybe Government Motors CEO is a springboard to a Democratic Senate seat.
Payne: Weiner, Conyers, and personal judgment (The Michigan View 06.07.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 8, 2011
Last November, TheMichiganView.com received video and still photos of Rep. John Conyers, D – Detroit, reading an explicit article in Playboy while in-flight from Detroit back to his Washington, DC office. Like the pictures that have brought shame to Rep. Anthony Weiner this week, the photos were not illegal – but they provoked questions about the judgment of two leading U.S. congressmen.
Ready to put these guys in charge of national health care?
Significantly, both the Conyers and Weiner footage surfaced via social media. Welcome to the post-MSM media universe. Welcome to accountability, new media-style.
The Weiner episode – involving risqué, sometimes-sexual photos that the married congressman admitted sending to young women – was a story driven by the new alternative media. It is a story that would have been inconceivable fifteen years ago. Not only did Weiner send the news via Twitter, but the news organizations that broke the story – Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government.com – and the TV network that publicized it – Fox News – are recent phenomenon. Mainstream media like NBC News chose to ignore the story. Fifteen years ago that would have been enough to cover the story up. But today, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch have fundamentally changed the media landscape such that Weiner – one of the Democratic Party’s leading liberal voices – was forced to confront the allegations, his own lies, and his judgment.
In Michigan, TheMichiganView.com is one of the new media that are breaking news that otherwise would not see the light of day. Though Conyers’ perusal of Hefner’s finest is hardly a crime, his brazen reading of pornographic material on a commercial flight calls into question his judgment – and compelled a shocked bystander to record the moment.
Like the BigGoenment.com story, we came by the video on social media, via Charlie LeDuff – a Pulitzer Prize-winning, former New York Times and Detroit News reporter – who had received the video, confirmed it, and posted it on his Facebook page. Charlie at the time was between jobs (if he were to gain that footage today, he would likely air it on Fox 2 News where he is now one of Detroit’s best-known reporters). Social media was his news outlet.
Like Twitter, Facebook is a publishing medium that did not exist fifteen years ago. When we learned of LeDuff’s news, we verified his source and then made repeated calls to Rep. Conyers’ office to ask for comment. The congressman refused to take our calls and would not respond through a spokesperson.
Playgate – like Weinergate – created a national sensation when it was picked up by The Drudge Report. View page views reached record highs. Significantly however, the story got little traction in Michigan’s MSM.
Unlike national media, Michigan still lacks mass media TV alternatives like Murdoch’s Fox News and the Drudge Report. The Michigan media establishment ignored the story. It’s hard to imagine the MSM ignoring a similar story if involved a Michigan Republican – say, Rep. Tim Walberg.
Just days later, the questions about Conyers’s judgment were were back when the congressman was caught in a ethics breach involving the leasing of Cadillac SUV for his son on the taxpayer dime.
Leadership is sorely needed today in Washington and Detroit. Thanks to social and alternative media, the public knows better the human frailties of pols they’ve entrusted billions of their tax dollars to.
Weiner, Conyers, and personal judgment
Posted by hpayne on June 7, 2011
Last November, TheMichiganView.com received video and still photos of Rep. John Conyers, D – Detroit, reading an explicit article in Playboy while in-flight from Detroit back to his Washington, DC office. Like the pictures that have brought shame to Rep. Anthony Weiner this week, the photos were not illegal – but they provoked questions about the judgment of two leading U.S. congressmen.
Ready to put these guys in charge of national health care?
Significantly, both the Conyers and Weiner footage surfaced via social media. Welcome to the post-MSM media universe. Welcome to accountability, new media-style.
The Weiner episode – involving risqué, sometimes-sexual photos that the married congressman admitted sending to young women – was a story driven by the new alternative media. It is a story that would have been inconceivable fifteen years ago. Not only did Weiner send the news via Twitter, but the news organizations that broke the story – Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government.com – and the TV network that publicized it – Fox News – are recent phenomenon. Mainstream media like NBC News chose to ignore the story. Fifteen years ago that would have been enough to cover the story up. But today, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch have fundamentally changed the media landscape such that Weiner – one of the Democratic Party’s leading liberal voices – was forced to confront the allegations, his own lies, and his judgment.
In Michigan, TheMichiganView.com is one of the new media that are breaking news that otherwise would not see the light of day. Though Conyers’ perusal of Hefner’s finest is hardly a crime, his brazen reading of pornographic material on a commercial flight calls into question his judgment – and compelled a shocked bystander to record the moment.
Like the BigGoenment.com story, we came by the video on social media, via Charlie LeDuff – a Pulitzer Prize-winning, former New York Times and Detroit News reporter – who had received the video, confirmed it, and posted it on his Facebook page. Charlie at the time was between jobs (if he were to gain that footage today, he would likely air it on Fox 2 News where he is now one of Detroit’s best-known reporters). Social media was his news outlet.
Like Twitter, Facebook is a publishing medium that did not exist fifteen years ago. When we learned of LeDuff’s news, we verified his source and then made repeated calls to Rep. Conyers’ office to ask for comment. The congressman refused to take our calls and would not respond through a spokesperson.
Playgate – like Weinergate – created a national sensation when it was picked up by The Drudge Report. View page views reached record highs. Significantly however, the story got little traction in Michigan’s MSM.
Unlike national media, Michigan still lacks mass media TV alternatives like Murdoch’s Fox News and the Drudge Report. The Michigan media establishment ignored the story. It’s hard to imagine the MSM ignoring a similar story if involved a Michigan Republican – say, Rep. Tim Walberg.
Just days later, the questions about Conyers’s judgment were were back when the congressman was caught in a ethics breach involving the leasing of Cadillac SUV for his son on the taxpayer dime.
Leadership is sorely needed today in Washington and Detroit. Thanks to social and alternative media, the public knows better the human frailties of pols they’ve entrusted billions of their tax dollars to.
Michigan target of EPA carbon diktat ( The Michigan View 06.01.11)
Posted by hpayne on June 1, 2011
Despite voter rejection of Democrats’ radical cap and trade legislation at the polls last November, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hungrily eyeing the U.S. coal industry with backdoor carbon regulation.
And Michigan is first on the menu.
Wolverine Power, which serves northern Michigan, wants to build a new coal-fired power plant to satisfy Michigan’s future energy needs with more efficient technology. But in addition to running the usual gauntlet of federal regulations, Wolverine faces a formidable new hurdle: It must now satisfy carbon dioxide regulations stealthily drafted at the beginning of this year.
“We are venturing into uncharted territory,” says Wolverine Director of Community and Government Affairs Ken Bradstreet of the vague rule with no precedent for how to meet it.
Under Zealot-in-Chief Lisa Jackson – who told a gathering of the National Council of Churches last winter the U.S. has a “moral obligation” to heal the planet – the EPA based its carbon diktat on a 2007 Supreme Court ruling classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Jackson’s coal-plant licensing is just the first step in a religious crusade to regulate anything that emits carbon dioxide – placing unprecedented power in the hands of a federal agency.
“The (high court’s) ruling is a flagrant example of legislating from the bench,” wrote Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2007. “Unless Congress intervenes to overturn Mass v. EPA or negate its regulatory consequences, non-elected bureaucrats and litigators will end up dictating how Americans produce and use energy.”
That time has arrived.
Obama’s EPA activism has enraged the new GOP House majority. Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, led a bipartisan House revolt in April stripping the EPA of its power to regulate CO2 with the Energy Tax Prevention Act.
“At the end of the day, the EPA climate regime is all economic pain and no environmental gain,” said Upton. “Existing power plants will also be saddled with costly mandates that will further increase electricity costs for consumers,” added a press release issued by his committee after the House vote.
But the measure has died in the Democratic graveyard of the Senate, exposing companies like Wolverine to the EPA’s Green juggernaut and tying it up in yards of new red tape.
Wolverine’s Bradstreet says the EPA mandates that the company “submit the best available technology” to reduce CO2. Whatever that means. Wolverine is already in the green vise from former Governor Jennifer Granholm’s rules – reinforced by her successor Rick Snyder – that the utility meet a 10 percent Renewable Power Standard. To meet that edict, Wolverine hopes to burn up to 20 percent of locally-produced biomass in its new plant. The company will also use that technology to satisfy the carbon edict.
If Michigan green groups had their way, Wolverine wouldn’t even have the opportunity to argue its case before High Priestess Jackson. The Mackinac Center’s Russ Harding reports that Greens are hopping mad that Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality would give Wolverine Power a permit hearing at all.
Having cleared that hurdle, Harding writes, “there is little doubt that the CO2 permit requirements unilaterally imposed by EPA are designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, to construct coal-fired power plants.”
As Michigan industry tries to get up off its back after the Great Recession, green zealots from Lansing to Washington have mounted a multi-front attack to destroy its primary source of electricity: coal. The EPA’s assault makes clear that the 2012 election for president and Senate is crucial towards advancing legislation that would put a leash on the EPA – and return power to the people.
Green heist ( The Michigan View 05.31.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 31, 2011
More heavy-hitters are so convinced that electric cars are the future that they’re willing to bet. . . your money on it.
This time it’s the Christian Right – teamed with military vets – who have decided green is a “values” issues. “American Values President Gary Bauer and former Commandant of the Marine Corps General James T. Conway are teaming up in support of electric vehicles,”reports The Daily Caller.
Usually this is the territory of the Religious Left, but the Religious Right believes oil is the root of all wars, and so they have enlisted FedEx poobah Fred Smith and former Marine Corps Commandant P.X. Kelley to support far left Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts in support of something called the Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2011,
What’s it do? It spends your money to try to force consumers to buy products they don’t want. How generous of them.
“According to the bill’s sponsors, the legislation recognizes that infrastructure challenges are complex,” reports AutoBlogGreen.com. That is, consumers aren’t buying electrics because gas-powered vehicles are more convenient. “The act authorizes the Secretary of Energy to competitively award up to $300 million to 10 distinct communities across the nation. These communities will then serve as test beds for plug-in vehicle deployment.”
It’s fun to play with other people’s money. Unlike private investments on viable infrastructure – say, cell phones – this federal “investment” demands no return on your money or research into whether it is viable business model.
Imagine if your broker took $300 mil from you as a “test bed.”
Worse, your money is being given away to rich folks in rich neighborhoods that can afford $41k Chevy Volts as a third (or fifth) car. “The Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act. . . guarantees a plug-in vehicle purchasing incentive of at least $2,000 (beyond existing local and federal credits) for the first 50,000 buyers within each of the ten deployment communities. In addition, it extends, to the end of 2014, federal tax credits for the purchase and installation of charging equipment for individuals (up to $2,000).”
That is, in addition to their $7500 federal tax credit, green swells get an additional $4 grand to purchase an EV and home charging unit. Your face boiling red from all this green yet?
That businessmen like Smith are behind this only makes the heist more outrageous. These folks would better spend their time – and our money – by lobbying the Obama Administration to open up domestic oil production that they have shut down.
Pigs at the surplus trough ( The Michigan View 05.27.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 27, 2011
Your $428-million-in surplus-government-revenue ship finally came in last week. How much did you get?
Nothing?
After squirreling away a little for the rainy day find, the government class got plenty with Lansing divvying up the booty between public schools and public employees. These are the same public employees that have been largely shielded from Michigan’s Great Recession, suffering no income losses and 25 percent benefit gains while Michigan’s private employees hemorrhaged 25 percent in wages and 5 percent benefit losses according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Coming on the heels of increased individual tax rates, the move was further evidence of Governor Rick Snyder’s deaf ear when it comes to economic politics. But more than that, it is evidence that — even when Republicans control the Legislature — politicians’ first priority is to feed the screaming mouths of special interests rather than meet the desperate needs of the silent majority. As when Snyder effectively raised the income tax from 4.25 to 4.35 percent after his party protested closing the pension loophole, taxpayers were last in line for the surplus.
“The government class feeds first at the trough, not the Republicans’ taxpayer base,” laments Leon Drolet of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, the state’s largest pro-taxpayer organization. “But the embarrassing part for Republicans is that the government class is also their base. They are taking care of local schools. Behind the scenes, they are whining and the squeaky wheels always get the grease.”
The good news is that it could have been a lot worse under the hard hearts of Lansing Democrats.
Against cynical claims to the contrary, Snyder fulfilled his promise to deliver a balanced budget by Memorial Day — a refreshing change from the chaotic budget process that led to two late-fall shutdowns under his predecessor. His budget finalized the death of the dreaded “Frankenstein’s Monster” Michigan Business Tax (as View columnist Gary Wolfram likes to call it) — as perverse a job-killer as exists in the land. And though avoiding the better medicine of ending collective bargaining, the Senate (sure to be followed by the House) assured that future budgets will be more manageable by locking in 80/20 co-pays for public emplyee health benefits.
With $255 million of the surplus safely tucked away in the rainy day fund, state employees received $35 million against a scheduled $180 million in cuts. Another $30 million more surplus went to local government revenue sharing and $50 million was added to the Michigan Strategic Fund for economic development, brown-field redevelopment and historic preservation.
You say strapped citizens could better spend that money? Get in line.
The public school monopoly got the biggest lap of milk — $310 million — but even that wasn’t enough for greedy Democrats.
Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer protested that the K-12 distribution didn’t go to so-called “per-pupil costs” – that is, directly into the pockets of union paychecks. Instead, after $160 million is siphoned away to pay down union pensions costs — Republicans demanded that $150 million be used as incentives for districts to adopt Snyder’s “best practices” like privatizing or consolidating services.
“We had an agreement we would use some of the surplus for per-pupil — (now) they want to attach strings for best practices,” she raged.
Imagine that, accountability in government. Whitmer’s greed is representative of the Dark Ages Michigan is only just climbing out of. But its continued customer service failings — not a penny of refunds for its embattled taxpayer class — is evidence, says Drolet, “of how far we still have to go.”
Payne: SUVs saved Chrysler ( The Michigan Vies 05.24.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 24, 2011
Chrysler and the White House will celebrate the Detroit icon’s $5.9 billion repayment of government loans Tuesday in a ceremony that will be hailed by both sides for the same reason: The government bailout had become a liability for both entities.
In fact, government-free Chrysler is hardly off the debt hook, but is simply refinancing its debt with private rather than public debt-holders. For its part, the U.S. government will still have a 6.6 percent equity stake in Chrysler – but by removing itself as the company’s loan shark, the White House can boast of the unpopular bailout’s success in returning taxpayer loans 6 years ahead of schedule. That’s an important sound-bite in an election year.
But there is one inconvenient truth you won’t hear at the Sterling Heights, Mich. ceremony: Chrysler wouldn’t be here had it not defied its green White House masters. Chrysler’s return to profitability is a direct result of the fabulous success of its SUVs.
The White House hand-picked Fiat to shepherd Chrysler out of bankruptcy in June, 2009 because of Barack Obama’s obsession with remaking Detroit’s automakers in the image of their European peers. Convinced that Americans craved small cars to fight the warming scourge, the president demanded Fiat bring its best-selling 500 Eurobox to the States as part of the acquisition deal. Obama was convinced that Fiat could reform the immoral, gas-swigging, SUV-dependent Chrysler.
The exact opposite occurred.
Two years later, the little 500 is about to go on sale in dealer “boutiques” – but it is the resurgence of America’s appetite for trucks that has brought Chrysler back from the dead. Chrysler Group reported sales were up 17 percent to 1.1 million vehicles in 2010 on the strength of its wildly popular, redesigned Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango SUVs. For CEO Marchionne, the SUVs success in the U.S. market has been a revelation and he is planning to expand the SUV lineup into Europe with Alfa Romeo and Maserati-badged trucks. Marchionne is no starry-eyed green – he has realized that trucks like the Cherokee typically rake in twice the per-vehicle profit of cars (thus the beleaguered company’s speedy repayment of U.S. loans).
Chrysler’s truck sales – largely ignored by Obama’s green media parrots – has also been good to UAW workers as Chrysler’s Detroit assembly plant is now at full, three-shift capacity.
But there is one more inconvenient truth: Chrysler has been here before.
After it repaid its 1980s loans under the legendary hand of Lee Iacocca, Chrysler was unable to diversify into smaller vehicles.Today, as the truck boom fades before the specter of $4-a-gallon gas, Chrysler is still heavily dependent on truck sales.
Chrysler is back. But is it just 1980s déjà vu all over again?
Payne: Mighty Mitch strikes out ( The Michigan View 05.22.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 22, 2011
But there is no joy in Midwestville — mighty Casey has struck out.
Quietly, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels shocked the Republican presidential race late Saturday night with a decision not to run in 2012. Daniels was one on a short list of gubernatorial power players (Rick Perry, Chris Christie) that conservatives – especially industrial state conservatives – have been pining for with so much of the GOP field compromised by political missteps.
Daniels was a particular favorite of Midwesterners who covet governance from a political executive from the industrial heartland with a record of common sense. While Daniels departure will surely benefit another Midwesterner, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, it is notable that “Mitch the Knife” – a nickname gained from his bold stands on spending, unions, and tax policy – is the FIRST name on the lips of Republicans like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder when they point to a governor they most admire.
After a week that spelled the end to Donald Trump’s circus candidacy – and that saw Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich further alienate themselves from the Republican base – momentum seemed to build for Daniels’ sober persona.
Daniels’ long-rumored lack of family support was the deciding factor. But Daniels also has a few policy skeletons in his closet that may have also been a factor.
“The counsel and encouragement I received from important citizens like you caused me to think very deeply about becoming a national candidate,” Daniels wrote in openly apologizing to supporters for the Big Letdown. “In the end, I was able to resolve every competing consideration but one. . . . the interests and wishes of my family is the most important consideration of all. If I have disappointed you, I will always be sorry.”
“I love my country; I love my family more,” he added, confirming reports that his wife and four daughters had no stomach for a presidential bloodbath that might have re-opened old wounds of his rollercoaster marriage to his wife, Cheri.
But was family the only deciding issue?
In addition to his marital soap opera, Daniels has raised social conservatives’ ire for calling for a “truce” on social issues like abortion, and he has been assailed by some fiscal conservatives for implementing a state cigarette tax to expand Medicaid – a move heavily subsidized by federal taxpayers. In a time of fiscal crisis, the latter has drawn the most concern for its similarities to one aspect of Obamacare. And with the latest Rasmussen poll showing 81 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of independents wanting Obamacare repealed, Mitch – like Mitt – has an Obamacare problem.
Given the roasting Romney has received on the issue, could this have given Indiana’s CEO pause?
“Those voters will cringe when President Obama turns to Governor Daniels in a presidential debate and says: ‘Mitch, all your talk about repeal is just cynical politics. Your health-care plan is not that different from mine,'” writes Cato’s Michael Cannon in National Review. “‘You expanded Medicaid to people with higher incomes than my plan requires. You are implementing my plan in your state right now.”
Ouch. Still, Daniels’ offense is a minor speed bump compared to Mitt’s whole-hog Romneycare. Indeed, others at National Review disagree with the Cato critique. “On the contrary, (his) subsidized prescription-drug program and new health savings accounts (are) designed to get people off of Medicaid,” writes NR’s Mark Hemingway.
National Review editor Rich Lowry looked at Daniels’ record and cheered: “More than any other Republican officeholder, Daniels points the way ahead for his bedraggled party. He’s a fiscal conservative who believes not just in limiting government, but in reforming it to address people’s everyday concerns; he’s a politician of principle.”
Daniels was a home run, in other words. Until he struck out.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” wrote National Review’s Daniel Foster – quoting the poet W.B. Yeats and echoing conservative disappointment. They are back in the woods today, beating the bushes for leadership in a crucial presidential race that must defeat Barack Obama – and his Obamacare monster.
The ghost of Bob Dole in 1996 looms ever larger.
Victim of Romneycare ( The Michigan View 05.20.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 20, 2011
Donald Trump went out with a splash this week, finally announcing that his businessman-who-can-get-stuff-done candidacy was over. “People have a special place in their heart. . . for a guy who is a winner and gets things done and makes things work,” said Fox personality Bill O’Reilly in explaining the businessman candidate’s appeal. But don’t we already have a winning businessman with a reputation of getting things done? Wasn’t he the 2002 Olympic CEO? The successful captain of Bain Capital?
Wasn’t that the territory of Governor Mitt Romney? The Trump meteor is really the story of the failure of Romney to launch.
That’s not to say that this handsome, successful, Michigan favorite son won’t be competitive in 2012. But “competitive” is failure for a man who should have been the party standard-bearer by now. Instead, Romney’s gross miscalculation on Romneycare is choking his campaign and leaving his party desperate for alternatives—- Trump, Huntsman, Pawlenty, Daniels, Christie, Bachmann — anybody but Romney!
The once-Massachusetts governor stood alone after McCain-Palin crashed and burned in 2008. With a campaign under his belt, he was perfectly positioned to assume party leadership as the activist pol Barack Obama inevitably ran the ship aground with his radical, regressive, ’60s-style Keynesian agenda. Marooned on the beaches of Big Government, the nation — like Michigan before it — would scream for a captain of industry. Jennifer Granholm? Give me CEO Nerd! Barack Obama? Give me CEO Mitt!
But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. Romney stubbornly failed to evolve with the times.
Obamacare has changed everything, giving rise to a historic Tea Party movement that has led the GOP back to first principles — individual liberty and fiscal conservatism. Romney, meanwhile, seems frozen in time, boasting of his Massachusetts health reform even as its mandates and free-spending contradict the Republican principles of 2012.
Romneycare has been a disaster in Massachusetts — a harbinger of the future Obamacare nightmare.
“In 2006 (Romney) boldly stated: ‘Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the cost of health care will be reduced.’ Five years later, that prediction has proved false,” reports Sally Pipes at Forbes.com (a businessman’s publication!). “The Massachusetts experiment offers an ominous preview of what lies ahead for the rest of the nation under ObamaCare.”
Today, despite the hated individual mandate, over 100,000 remain uninsured. Patient wait lists are climbing. Costs are out of control. Massachusetts has leap-frogged other states to boast the highest premiums in the country. Massachusetts retailers report premiums have exploded 15 percent per year. And popular support for Romneycare is plummeting, down 200 percent since the law passed to 49 percent approval.
Romney, the savvy businessman, should have turned this to his advantage.
He had experimented with Obamacare in his own state (he rightly says states are incubators for reform) and found it wanting. Who knew better to tell of Obamacare’s flaws? Who better to proclaim universal coverage’s failure? Who better to warn of Frankenstein’s monster than Dr. Frankenstein himself?
Instead, Romney stubbornly clung to his creation.
For a potential president whose core argument is that he knows how to revive free market economic growth, this “mounts to a fatal flaw,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Returning home to Michigan’s warm bosom this month to jumpstart his campaign, Romney only muddied the waters further — strangely taking credit for Romneycare’s autocratic mandates while vowing to repeal its federal twin. His commendable federal answer to Obamacare — extending the corporate tax break to individuals and liberating them from employer-dependent coverage — got lost in the contradiction. Romney sounded foolish.
The reviews were brutal.
“Former governor Mitt Romney may very well have hoped he could put health care behind him with his major speech in Ann Arbor,” wrote the National Review’s Grace Marie-Turner, “but by a margin of about seven to one, (National Review) readers said they thought the speech hurt him. It’s hard to hate Obamacare and love Romneycare.”
“The debate over ObamaCare may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in a devastating editorial titled “Obama’s running mate.”
These views were repeated by a chorus of conservative heavyweights: Krauthammer and Steyn and Barone and Barnes and Investor’s Business Daily and so on. Indeed, the only audience applauding was Romney’s enemies.
“That work inspired our own health-care plan,” said Mr. Obama’s top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, gleefully echoing other Democrats. “I think it’s been a great boon. He ought to be proud of it and he ought to embrace it.”
These are not the allies that will win you a Republican nomination.
Ironically, Romney will never win the GOP nomination without ditching Romneycare. The process will demand it. Better to have sent it to the bottom of the ocean long ago. Instead, it looks increasingly like he will sink with it.
Payne: General Mao-tors? Nope (The Michigan View 05.19.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 19, 2011
“GM sponsors and celebrates soon to be released Chinese Communist Party propaganda film.”
Now that is a blockbuster headline about a company 33 percent-owned by the U.S. taxpayer. Government Motors, alleges Washington Times reporter Kerry Picket, is glorifying China’s brutal communist history with your money.
“In late 2010, General Motors agreed to sponsor a propaganda film celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” reports the Times. “The CCP-made film titled (translated to English) ‘The Birth of a Party’ . . . is set to premiere all over the Communist nation on June 15 reported China AutoWeb last September. The auto website adds: ‘According to an announcement posted on Shanghai GM’s official web site. . . Cadillac whole-heartedly supports the making of the Birth of a Party…'”
Shocking stuff. Trouble is, the story isn’t true.
“The sponsorship of the China Film Group was an independent decision made by Shanghai GM (SGM), one of the joint ventures that GM has with our Chinese partner SAIC,” reads a GM statement provided by Greg Martin, GM Director of Policy and Washington Communications. “It was part of a strategic alignment with the film industry, similar to alliances made by other companies. SGM sponsored the China Film Group that made this film. There are no Cadillac or other GM products featured in the movie.”
As in most Chinese automotive corporate ventures, GM is partner in Shanghai GM along with a government-owned company (SAIC in this case). It was Shanghai GM — a partnership with SAIC — that made the decision to sponsor a film festival in which “Birth of a Party” is being shown. Martin says that the Times reporter failed to contact GM to clarify these key distinctions.
To put the story in perspective: What if Opel were to sponsor a Nazi film festival? Now that would be a screaming scandal because the carmaker is a GM’s wholly-owned German subsidiary.
But while the Times story doesn’t pan out, it is nevertheless a warning for Government Motors.
Taxpayer equity comes with long strings attached — especially in the murky world of joint ventures with bad governments. Especially with bad governments that still harbor Nobel Peace Prize-winning as political prisoners. Indeed, China’s government structure today is closer to Nazi German fascism than ol’ Maoist communism.
There is no doubt that doing business in China involves some sticky government business. Such is the price of entry into the world’s fastest-growing consumer market. And increased scrutiny is the price of a federal bailout.
Posted by hpayne on May 18, 2011
AAALiving Magazine May/June 2011
Check out Page 14 for safe driving tips and an anmated cartoon by Henry Payne:
Granholm v. Engler: A tale of two portraits ( The Michigan View 05.09.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 9, 2011
A picture is worth a thousand words. Two portraits are worth a second look.
Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm unveiled her official portrait in the Capitol rotunda last week where it will hang next to the image of her predecessor, John Engler. Both are gorgeous, full body, oil-rendered depictions of their subjects. But in the details – what the respective leaders wanted included as symbols of their governorships – they could not be more different.
Advertisement
If Michigan is to learn the lesson why the state boomed under Engler and suffered a “lost decade” in the Granholm era, the devil is in the details.
Engler and Granholm represent the ideological poles of Michigan politics. A small government, free market advocate, Engler is an enduring hero to Michigan conservatives. Granholm, by contrast, was a liberal Democratic Socialist in the European tradition, who believed government dictated economic development. If Engler is Michigan’s Ronald Reagan, then Granholm is its Barack Obama.
Granholm’s portrait is a study in arrogant Big Government – its egoism testimony to a statist philosophy that helped double Michigan’s unemployment to 15 percent in her second term while putting its government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Rather than inspirations “for future and present generations,” the painting’s symbols are time capsule relics – alternative energy white (green?) elephants that have no future without massive taxpayer subsidy.
Wearing a commander’s jacket (Master and Commander Granholm!), the now-Berkeley prof ponders a small globe – ironic given her xenophobic habit of demonizing companies for doing business abroad. Not once in eight years did the Big Labor puppet visit China.
Though the window-lit painting echoes the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s style in “Woman with a Water Jug,” Granholm is no household servant: Governor Granholm alone knows what industries will take Michigan into the future. Next to the globe is a wind turbine – symbolic of this Green disciple’s pipe dream that the Michigan industrial colossus can run – like Vermeer’s 17th century Holland – on wind.
A small model of a plug-in Chevy Volt also rests by the globe, another reminder of her global warming preoccupation. The product of federal mandates forcing automakers to meet arbitrary mpg standards, the Volt is a federally-subsidized status symbol for Granholm’s wealthy new California neighbors.
Speaking of tax breaks for the rich, a third green symbol is a shovel, propped in the corner. It was used in the ground-breaking for LG Chem’s Holland, Michigan plant which will supply batteries for the Volt. Granholm coordinated some $300 million in public subsidy for the Big Green multinational.
The final piece of Granholm’s vision is a painting of the Ford Rouge plant – “transforming the state’s economy from rust to green,” she says. The plant represents the past for a governor who claims oil – who knew that a Harvard-trained lawyer could pick the commodities of the future! – is yesterday’s energy. Like Obama, Granholm is about “transforming” America to her new utopia.
The conservative Engler’s portrait – like his vision of government – is far more modest.
Engler’s symbols are ideas, not politically-correct monuments. There are no white elephants in his portrait, only a pachyderm representing his party. The most prominent icon is a bust of Abraham Lincoln, a man of liberty.
The most prominent symbol? Engler’s red and blue Adam Smith necktie, an homage to the philosophical father of free market capitalism.
Otherwise, Engler’s portrait is a celebration of books informing his belief that government’s role is not to dictate to entrepreneurs – but to provide them an unfettered climate in which to thrive. There are Martin Anderson’s biography of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs, and the minutes of a Michigan constitutional convention.
Disabused of Granholm’s grandiose notions of “transforming” the economy, Engler focused on what he could control – Michigan’s government. Unlike his successor – who ignored the growing cracks in the state’s fiscal foundation – Engler achieved significant structural change including tax, education, and welfare reform.
As a result of Engler’s hands-off, pro-growth policies, Michigan’s unemployment rate plummeted from 9 percent to just 3.4 percent during his tenure. While Granholm decrees an empty future, Engler presided over a “rust belt” state that – for five years in a row – led the nation in industrial expansion.
Fortunately for Michigan, the pendulum has swung again. Governor Rick Snyder has rejected Granholm’s utopia for a return to Engler’s tax fundamentals. Hopefully, his portrait will be as modest.
Washington’s fuelish clowns ( The Michigan View 05.05.11)
Posted by hpayne on May 5, 2011
Washington miles-per-gallon regulations do not work. Market price signals do. The evidence? April car sales.
Since 2007, when George Bush (applauded by one Senator Barack Obama) signed into law a 40 percent increase in federal fuel mileage standards mandating — mandating! — that automakers sell more small cars that average 35 mpg, the mix of vehicles in the U.S. market has gone in exactly the opposite direction. As America climbed out of the Great Recession of 2009, sedans owned a 55 percent to 45 percent market share advantage over light trucks. By February of this year, that percentage had nearly flip-flopped with SUVs outselling sedans with 53 percent of the market; sedans accounted for 47 percent sales.
Then last month it flip-flopped again. What happened? More regulation? A 50 mpg mandate? Nope. Four-dollar-a-gallon gas happened.
“Rising fuel prices have led many to rethink their vehicle of choice,” said Don Johnson, GM veep for U.S. sales.
But wasn’t Washington correct in foreseeing higher gas prices and forcing companies like GM to build electric hybrids? Aren’t Obama, John Dingell, and Jennifer Granholm vindicated in calling these the cars of the future? Nope again.
Customers flocked to GM for smaller cars in April. But they weren’t hybrids and electrics. Indeed, sales of the Chevy Volt actually dropped. And its hybrid Chevy Malibu sedan sold — wait for it — five cars. Meanwhile, Chevy sold 24,000 — that’s thousand — carbon-burning, gas-sipping Malibu sedans. And it was the Chevy Cruze — the $40k Volt’s platform-mate that sells for HALF the price — that was the General’s star soldier, selling a healthy 25,000 units. More than the vaunted Toyota Corolla. Nearly even with the legendary Honda Civic.
It turns out that Obama’s Volt is a nice — if expensive — piece of window-dressing designed to game Washington edicts. Meanwhile, actual consumers want cheap, gas-powered sedans to help them battle rising pump prices. Better yet, GM can actually make money on the Cruze thanks to its massive cuts in Big Labor benefits that have slashed the Detroit giant’s labor overhead.
Before the landmark, Democrat-defying labor agreement of 2009, it made zero business sense for GM to invest in small cars because — with labor costs at a staggering $70 an hour — the company couldn’t make a dime on them. Why did GM depend on SUVs? Because only they made a profit on Planet UAW.
Those days are gone. Labor costs are a Toyota-esque $58 an hour. But. . .
But the other lesson of the April sales figures is that the world doesn’t stand still. The Detroit Three all posted double-digit sales gains in fuel-conscious April, led by GM at 27 percent. But they were far from the market leader.
That honor goes to South Korean makers Hyundai and Kia which saw a dazzling sales increase of 40 percent — their market share humming to 9.4 percent, just shy of Chrysler’s 10 percent and Honda’s 10.8. In other words, while the Detroit Three have been using the Japanese as the competitive benchmark, they aren’t the benchmark anymore.
With labor costs at a mere $40 an hour — 50 percent lower than GM and Toyota — Hyundai is churning out very profitable SUVs and small cars with non-union, Georgia workers. That profit not only makes Hyundais and Kias cheaper than anything the Detroit Three and Japan can produce — it means more money to shovel back into R&D to make quality cars like the Hyundai Elantra.
While GM and its Washington owners were patting themselves on the back for finally making a competitive small car, Hyundai has come out of nowhere to sell its Cruze-beater Elantra at a stunning 22,000 units in April.
With gas prices, labor costs, and the Asian maulers, GM has plenty of reasons to stay a lean, mean fighting machine. Washington would do best by keeping its fat head out of the ring.