Saturday, December 10, 2011

So, what's on our mind?

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We are kind of behind the curve on this one but before the week expired, we wanted to say a few things about the President's campaign speech in Osawatomie, Kansas where he was apparently channeling his inner Teddy Roosevelt who made his "New Nationalism" speech there back in 1912.


The President said the following:

"some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress. ... But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can."

That's odd because his Occupier buddies seem quite OK with the confiscation of others wealth in order to pay off their student and home loans.



And this with respect to those who oppose his economic vision:

In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

In the meantime, we'll pitch a tent at the Civic Center downtown and just wait for him to outlaw "self-reliance", "initiative" and "self-interest" by Executive Order since the do-nothing Congress won't play by the rules and do it for him.



And not to be outdone, here's another one of Team O's economic illiterates, Jay Carney.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Roosevelt's speech "set the course for the 20th century in terms of ensuring that the free market system operated under rules of the road that gave everyone a fair share and a fair shot and ensured that everyone also paid their fair share."

Please give us an operational definition of "fair share"? We have no idea what "fair share" means but credit Team O to come up with a perfectly vague and shape-shifting term that similar to "Hope" and "Change" allows the voter to project onto Team O whatever it wants because god knows he can't run on his record.

We will, however, commend the President for his honesty, veiled as it was. He has cast aside any centrist window dressing he ran on in 07/08 and replaced it with the Big Statist/Corporatist warrior ideals we always knew him to be in favor here in 11/12.

Again, here's a guy who effectively shut down construction of an oil pipeline that would provide jobs as well as friendly oil from our neighbor, Canada, thus increasing our energy independence and decreasing our dependence on dirty oil. And here's a guy whose NLRB bullied Boeing when they made the decision to open up an additional plant in right-to-work South Carolina.

He's interested in jobs and growing the economy only in the respect that if it can be centrally-formulated and operated by the government, private enterprise be dammed. A regulatory-based economy where the bond between Washington, rent-seeking Wall Street and the labor unions is cemented into place, expanding and locking in the existing crony capitalist power structure.

He's no more interested in fully private non-subsidized job creation than he is in dunking his head into a bucket of ice water.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I fully exPect the word "fair" to be in play for the reelection campaign. Just like hope and change, not providing context enables people to project their own definitions into the presidents platform.

It was bullshit then. And it worked. Not sure if it will work this time around because Obama actually now has a history.

Dean said...

It may work by default because the (R)s are not mustering candidates that anyone including myself is terribly interested in.