Lauria represented one of the bondholder firms, Perella Weinberg, which initially rejected the Obama deal that would give the bondholders about 33 cents on the dollar for their secured debts while giving the United Auto Workers retirees about 50 cents on the dollar for their unsecured debts.

This of course is a violation of one of the basic principles of bankruptcy law, which is that secured creditors — those who lended money only on the contractual promise that if the debt was unpaid they’d get specific property back — get paid off in full before unsecured creditors get anything. Perella Weinberg withdrew its objection to the settlement, but other bondholders did not, which triggered the bankruptcy filing.

After that came a denunciation of the objecting bondholders as “speculators” by Barack Obama in his news conference last Thursday. And then death threats to bondholders from parties unknown.

The White House denied that it strong-armed Perella Weinberg. The firm issued a statement saying it decided to accept the settlement, but it pointedly did not deny that it had been threatened by the White House. Which is to say, the threat worked.

The same goes for big banks that have received billions in government Troubled Asset Relief Program money. Many of them want to give back the money, but the government won’t let them. They also voted to accept the Chrysler settlement. Nice little bank ya got there, wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.

Left-wing bloggers have been saying that the White House’s denial of making threats should be taken at face value and that Lauria’s statement is not evidence to the contrary. But that’s ridiculous. Lauria is a reputable lawyer and a contributor to Democratic candidates. He has no motive to lie. The White House does.

Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.

Michigan politicians of both parties joined Obama in denouncing the holdout bondholders. They point to the sad plight of UAW retirees not getting full payment of the health care benefits the union negotiated with Chrysler. But the plight of the beneficiaries of the pension funds represented by the bondholders is sad too. Ordinarily you would expect these claims to be weighed and determined by the rule of law. But not apparently in this administration.

Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

The Chrysler negotiations will not be the last occasion for this administration to engage in bailout favoritism and crony capitalism. There’s a May 31 deadline to come up with a settlement for General Motors. And there will be others. In the meantime, who is going to buy bonds from unionized companies if the government is going to take their money away and give it to the union? We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government. It is likely to be part of a continuing series.

By: Michael Barone
Washington Examiner Senior Political Analyst
05/05/09

Find this article at:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/White-House-puts-UAW-ahead-of-property-rights-44415057.html

Hat tip: Dave Amos

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Europe’s socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the Left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to sharia. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain, 14 percent approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13 percent supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20 percent sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.

Too often, such attitudes find their way into practice. Ubiquitous youth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews, and gays. In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims.

Non-Muslims aren’t the only targets of Muslim violence. A mountain of evidence suggests that the rates of domestic abuse in these enclaves are astronomical. In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “a disproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’s shelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56 percent of the women at Norwegian shelters were of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005 that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women’s shelters.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch advocate for democracy and women’s rights, would no doubt say far more than half: when she was working with women in Dutch shelters, she writes, “there were hardly any white women” in them, “only women from Morocco, from Turkey, from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women from Surinam.” When she and filmmaker Theo van Gogh tried to highlight the mistreatment of women under Islam in the 2004 film Submission: Part I, he was killed by a young Muslim extremist.

More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to their safety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment, which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begun voting for parties—some relatively new, and all considered right-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of the dimensions of this shift: owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.

The other major reason for the turn against the Left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowed economic growth. Timbro’s Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden, for instance, which in the first half of the twentieth century had the world’s second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to number 14, owing to enormous tax hikes.

Government revenues in Western Europe go largely to support the unemployed, thus discouraging work. Over the last decade or so, the overall unemployment rate in the EU 15—that is, Western Europe—has hovered at about 2.5 to 3 points higher than in the United States. In France and Germany, it has ascended into the double digits (and that was before the global financial crisis that began in 2008). Western Europe’s rate of long-term unemployment has consistently been several times higher than America’s, denoting the presence of a sizable minority either permanently jobless or working off the books, often for family businesses, while collecting unemployment benefits.

These two factors—immigration and the economy—are intimately connected. For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindus and East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthy incomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burden that governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services in order to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergency rooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and military spending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and so on. According to a report issued last year by the think tank Contribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth by two-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74 percent of immigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’s petroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oil that have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlays to immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last year indicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)

The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. (emphasis added) Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

The November 2001 general election in Denmark is the most decisive—and successful—rejection so far of a Western European left-wing establishment. Alarmed by a widely publicized study showing that their country would have a Muslim majority within 60 years if immigration rates didn’t change, Danish voters sent the Social Democrats down to defeat for the first time since 1924. The new Liberal-Conservative governing coalition, which voters returned to power in 2005, has introduced the continent’s most sweeping immigration and integration reforms, including rules designed to thwart the near-universal practice in Europe’s Muslim communities of marrying one’s children off to cousins abroad so that they, too, may immigrate to the West. As a result, the flow of new Muslim arrivals has decreased significantly, allowing the government to focus resources on the immense challenge of trying to integrate Muslims already living in Denmark. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen also defended free speech strongly during the 2006 Mohammed cartoon crisis, standing firm while Muslims around the world raged against Denmark and Western leaders begged him to back down.

The rightward shifts in Europe most widely reported in the U.S. have been those in Germany, where Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, and in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy took over the presidency in 2007. Those developments, as well as the third term that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi won in 2008, were grounded largely in public recognition of the need for economic liberalization. By French standards, Sarkozy’s campaign rhetoric was nothing less than stunning: arguing that “the revolution of 1968”—a sacred event for the left-wing French establishment—had not liberated France but “brought us into moral decline,” Sarkozy insisted that if the French wanted growth, they needed to spend less time in cafés and more on the job.

In brave little Denmark’s backyard, two more countries have moved to the right. In Norway, the Progress Party—which the political and media establishment has smeared for a generation as racist and fiscally unserious—now rivals the Labor Party, architect of the country’s welfare state, thanks to voter concerns about immigration and public services. Though the financial crisis had caused support for the Progress Party to slip a bit, recent Muslim riots and debates about hijab have sent poll numbers skyward again, and the party seems a good bet to come out on top in next September’s parliamentary elections—though it will be in trouble if, as appears likely, other right-of-center parties refuse to join a Progress Party–led coalition. And in Sweden, perhaps the ultimate symbol of social democracy, voters motivated largely by concerns over unemployment and other economic issues unseated the long-powerful Social Democratic Party in 2006. In its place they installed a center-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderates, who promised to help businesses and lower taxes.

But demonstrating a distinctively European species of schizophrenia, many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need for welfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if the philosophical leap required were simply too great. In Western Europe, after all, even the mainstream Right tends to be statist. “The concept of the cradle-to-grave welfare state is so deeply embedded in the Danish psyche that even the conservatives don’t dare touch it,” noted NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli in 2006. Ivo H. Daalder made the same point in a 2007 Brookings Institution report, writing that “when one talks about the right in Europe, you are talking about a very state interventionist political class that still believes that the government has a fundamental role in guiding how the economy is supposed to be run.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Europe’s new leaders have made relatively modest economic changes. True, Sarkozy has raised state employees’ retirement age (precipitating a transport strike) and ended France’s 35-hour workweek. But from the start, Social Democrats in Germany, whom Merkel’s slim margin of victory forced her to accept as coalition partners, have limited her ability to implement serious economic reforms. In April 2008, Judy Dempsey noted in the International Herald Tribune not only that the coalition had “run its course” but that Merkel herself had been “forced to move leftward,” hiking pensions and “rolling back radical labor reforms, ironically introduced by her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, which were designed to bring older people back to work by reducing social welfare payments.” And with the onset of the economic crisis, notes German author Henryk Broder, “there is even an ongoing discussion about Enteignung [expropriation] and Verstaatlichung [nationalization], which was unthinkable a year ago.”

As for Sweden, shortly after the 2006 victory, BusinessWeek writers Stanley Reed and Ariane Sains paraphrased Reinfeldt as saying that his “idea isn’t to dismantle the cherished Swedish welfare state. . . . That would be too controversial.” Reinfeldt’s one major innovation has been a “partially successful” effort “to force people off the welfare rolls and into the labor market,” University of Lund social thinker Jonathan Friedman tells me. Reinfeldt’s economic plan has also involved increased privatization, somewhat lower taxes, and encouragement of entrepreneurship—all policies, as Friedman notes, “that were started by the previous government.”

Meanwhile, with the notable exception of Denmark, the new nonsocialist governments have left their predecessors’ disastrous immigration and integration policies almost entirely intact. Sarkozy’s defiant campaign rhetoric about Muslim rioters in the suburbs raised hopes for major change. But though he announced last July that illegal immigration would be a major focus during France’s EU presidency, he has done little even about legal immigration, most of which, in Western Europe, involves the importation of new spouses in arranged, usually forced, marriages. Sarkozy seems to believe that job creation and other economic measures will resolve France’s colossal integration challenges.

Merkel, meanwhile, shone briefly when she insisted that the Deutsche Oper proceed with a 2006 production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that Muslim leaders condemned as offensive. But the heavily hyped “national integration plan” that she introduced the following year rested on such half-measures as an increase in the number of government-sponsored German classes, an effort to encourage immigrants to play sports, and (incredibly) a program that addressed wife-beating—permitted by the Koran and extremely common in Muslim communities—by offering advice on the Internet. Merkel actually described these pathetic gestures as a “milestone”; Broder, more accurately, calls them “make-believe action,” another way to avoid conflicts in her coalition.

In Sweden, says Friedman, Reinfeldt has pursued “a variant of politics as usual” on immigration and integration. Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, insists that Swedish efforts to encourage employment “will undoubtedly prove ineffective over the long haul” because “the fundamental problem is demographics. Sweden remains Europe’s main importer of Muslim immigrants who are unwilling to assimilate and whose imams order them to detest Swedish culture. So long as the current government is unwilling to tackle this basic problem, everything else will be for naught.”

Sarkozy has undertaken one high-profile initiative, which seems disastrously ill-conceived in a uniquely Gallic way: developing closer, more formal ties between France and the Arab countries from which it receives most of its immigrants. At one point, he even spoke of a “Mediterranean Union.” Haaretz writer Michalis Firillas summed up Sarkozy’s plan tidily in January 2008: “For some, his Mediterranean Union is a containment policy. For others it is neocolonial. But there is also a sense that Sarkozy is betting on French grandeur, that aura of greatness, to bridge the disparate Mediterranean with a new and serious political body. Unfortunately, he may find that there are others with similar visions of grandeur, from Ankara to Cairo, from Jerusalem to Tangiers, who have their own Mediterranean visions.” Indeed, Sarkozy’s scheme appears to be a continuation of his left-wing predecessors’ efforts to bring the Arab world under French influence—efforts that ended up subsidizing the colonization of French suburbs by Arabs who now consider them part of the House of Islam.

Not only has Europe’s move to the right not always had concrete results; it also hasn’t been an across-the-board phenomenon. In Britain, the Tories seem poised to resume power after Labour’s long, slow decline. Yet the ideological gap between the parties has narrowed so much in recent years, and the leadership vacuum is so pronounced, that it’s difficult to imagine a Tory takeover’s having an impact remotely comparable with that of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election. On the contrary, conservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently charged that nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of sharia in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.

And Spain, in a move widely seen as capitulating to Islamists, responded to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid by voting for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which had vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately. Zapatero narrowly won reelection last year. As libertarian columnist Antonio Golmar explains, the centrist consensus established after King Juan Carlos’s introduction of democracy in the seventies has been shattered by Zapatero’s hard-left initiatives. These include the Historical Memory Law—which portrays leftist mass murderers during the Spanish civil war as heroic freedom fighters, while stigmatizing many of their innocent victims as fascists—and the introduction in all schools of “citizenship” classes that teach scorn for capitalism and representative democracy.

In response, some Spaniards have lurched rightward toward the national-Catholic, proto-fascist ideology of Franco’s time and become increasingly vocal within the conservative Partido Popular. Consequently, says Golmar, “moderates in Spain are trapped between a far-left administration and their cronies and the revival of the extreme right disguised in conservative and even libertarian clothing.” While America struggles to move beyond the antagonisms of the 1960s, then, Spain has entered an ideological battlefield reminiscent of the years preceding its civil war of the late thirties. There seems little room for those who loathe both the neo-Marxists and the neoreactionaries.

The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.

For establishment politicians, journalists, and academics, these parties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: their existence makes it easy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascist brush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with the likes of Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. No party in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’s Progress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outraged that country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may call Europe’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanced itself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yet despite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed the leftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.

A seminal example was a March 2002 New York Times article by Marlise Simons about Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who, according to the article’s headline, was proudly gay, and marching the dutch to the right. Though Simons acknowledged that Fortuyn criticized Islam because it offered “no equality for men and women and because . . . the imams here preach in offensive terms about gays,” she nonetheless echoed the Dutch establishment’s characterization of him as a menace to Dutch values, making sure to mention that he had been widely compared with Mussolini and Haider. A few weeks later, Fortuyn was murdered by an environmental fanatic taken in by similar claptrap.

The same kind of incendiary rhetoric that Dutch journalists used against Fortuyn can now be seen in American left-wing coverage of any nonsocialist European party or politician. Typical was Gary Younge’s 2007 piece in The Nation: in europe, it’s the old right that’s full of hate. According to Younge, “the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamofascism’ . . . but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities.” This was nonsense on a breathtaking scale: though the rise of parties like the BNP is indeed distressing, the truth remains that for every act of anti-Muslim violence in Europe, there are—to make an exceedingly conservative guess—100 acts of Muslim-on-infidel violence.

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined.

The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in the international financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause a socioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and it seems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good. Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time of it at European cocktail parties—at least until sharia comes along and forbids cocktails entirely.

by Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer is the author of the upcoming Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom
He blogs at brucebawer.com.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_pim-fortuyn.html

Hat tip: Craig J. Cantoni

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"Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!"

An amazing thing happened on the way to America's socialistic demise...a revolution has fomented. Born of a righteous anger centered on wasteful and special interest government spending, lack of honest representation in government, a move toward transforming the United States Constitutional Republic into a Socialist Democracy, excessive taxation and many more constitutionally based grievances, conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans, as well as centrists, independents and Democrats, took to the streets of just about every congressional district to protest a behemoth runaway government run by an elitist and opportunistic political class.

From Chicago to New York, St.Louis to San Francisco, St. Paul to Austin and Miami to Portland, hard-working, taxpaying Americans, who aren't too often moved to taking to the streets in protest, took to the streets to redress their government. What makes this "protest" more important and more potent than any petition drive, any email, letter writing or phone campaign, is that it moved conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans to take to the streets, something that in most every instance and in every circumstance they are not wont to do. The question that is being asked now is this: Will this movement grow and gather strength enough to affect real, meaningful and constitutionally friendly "change" or will conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans fall prey to their traditional boogey-man, factionalism?

The Conservative Challenge

For decades - both in my political life and for as long as I have been writing and publishing - I have contended that conservatives and Republicans - the Right - aren't cohesive. Since entering into the new media publishing and non-profit educational venues I have come to understand that they don't financially support the organizations and publications that carry the water for them; who defend the traditionalist ideology from mainstream media and Leftist attacks. They employ ideological litmus tests for their prospective candidates instead of selecting candidates that would dedicate their public service to preserving their individual rights to pursue their special interests. And it is obvious to anyone but those walking around with eyes wide shut that it takes an act outrageous and egregious to motivate conservatives and Republicans to the streets in protest.

While this analysis may sound harsh (and with regard to the lack of financial support for those who carry the water for conservatism it is meant to be), for the most part there is an underlying philosophical reason for the differences between the pack mentality of the Left and the individualism of the Right. Where the Left leans more toward identifying our populace in the collective (what's good for the country is good for the individual), the Right identifies our populace as individuals who, together, make up the whole (what is good for the individual is good for the country). This individualist philosophy lends itself to self-sufficiency and individual responsibility which leads to a community of people who believe that solutions come from individuals and not government. This, of course, leads to a civically responsible community.

A vulnerability that exists in extreme individualism is that it leads to a community of individuals who always want to be the leader. We've all heard the phrase, "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians." When everyone believes that their way of achieving things is the best, factions develop that impede the whole of the community from being effective in achieving common goals. A prime example of this can be found in the ideological litmus test for political candidates. Instead of supporting candidates that would fight to protect an individual's right to pursue matters important to the individual, factions within the conservative community threaten to withhold support if their individual special interests, the subjects and issues most important to them, are not embraced by candidates.

Using the individualist philosophy in political pursuits instead of measuring candidates on their dedication to preserving and defending the individuals' rights to pursue their individual interests makes it next to impossible to not only come to a consensus on a candidate, but slate a candidate that can beat the Left's cohesive, pack-mentality voting style. Extreme individualism is also the main reason that the Right continually falls to the Left in establishing and funding political action and advocacy groups. It is the primary reason why, even though there are people on the right side of the ideological aisle who have even more money than neo-Marxist financier George Soros, there are no groups like MoveOn.org, America Coming Together, Media Matters, etc. Those ideological groups that do exist on the right side of the ideological aisle are almost always extremely limited in what they can do to combat the Leftists because they are so underfunded.

This is why the events of April 15th, 2009, are so incredible and important in and of themselves. It would seem that the acts outrageous and egregious have occurred at the hand of our government, so much so and for so long that - to borrow a line from a Bob Dylan song, "...the times, they are achangin'."

The Beneficiaries of American Political Apathy

The American Fifth Column - an association of one-worlders, neo-Marxists, Progressive-Leftists, Communists, Socialists and anarchists, to name some of the more notable groups - has successfully intruded into our daily lives by implementing a shadow set of societal laws in "political correctness"; a shadow set of rules antithetical to the United States Constitution. This is true to such an extent that elected officials are basing the creation of legislation on these tenets, tenets directly taken from the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. From hate crime laws, whose definitions are open to ideological interpretation, to the mass redistribution of wealth currently being perpetrated upon the American people by the Obama Administration, to the government funded indoctrination of our children into special interest ideology via the public schools system, the elements of our society that believe government is the answer have infiltrated every avenue of our lives and they have placed the importance of their ideology above even the proper execution of representative government.

But most disturbing is that the American Fifth Column has so successfully employed the tactics of Marxist "community organizer" Saul Alinsky to achieve their goal - the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure - that they have taken control of the US government. Nancy Pelosi's oligarchy in the US House of Representatives, combined withthe almost filibuster-proof Democrat majority in the US Senate, place the Legislative Branch firmly in control of the neo-Marxist wing of the Democrat Party.

President Obama - who has talked unabashedly about "economic justice" and the "arrogance" of the United States, and who is a self-declared"community organizer" in the mold of the Alinsky model, has populated his administration with far-Left ideologues - many from the Clinton Administration - including many members of the biased and agendized mainstream media. It can be successfully argued that the neo-Marxist Progressive-Left has become "the establishment" and traditionalist Americans - those who believe in the sanctity of the US Constitution, in freedom, liberty and personal and civic responsibility - have become the "counter-culture." Enter the tea parties...

Goebbels Would Be Proud

As real, hard-working Americans from all walks of life - rich, poor, religious, non-religious, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, white, black, yellow, brown, male and female - took to the streets to send a message to their elected officials; those elected to office to represent the best interests of their constituencies, not their political parties, perhaps the most organized and vicious threat to our Constitutional Republic took to the airwaves to discredit, diminish and otherwise smear 'We the People': the mainstream media.

Make no mistake, while the neo-Marxists elected to office are a threat to our liberty and freedom, and to our Constitutional Republic, they wouldn't be able to come close to the success they have seen so far if it weren't for the propagandists in the mainstream media. The mainstream media disingenuously and blatantly violated their constitutionally mandated responsibility to act as citizen's advocate by championing the Obama campaign in the 2008 elections. By refusing to ask the tough questions and selectively airing favorable coverage of the Obama campaign, while criticizing the McCain campaign for even the most benign faux pas, they ensured a victory for Barack Obama thus violating the public trust.

True journalism is dead in the mainstream media. It has been replaced by a propaganda dissemination mechanism that would have made Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels envious. With regard to the tea parties two examples stand out... Radio talk show host, Bill Press, on FOX News, April 14th, tried to float the idea that nefarious conservative organizations were behind theorganizing of the nationwide tea party assemblage, saying he "didn't see anything genuine or see anything real" about the protests. He advanced a ridiculous theory that because advocate organizations and politicians decided to get on board with the public outrage that they somehow were pulling the strings of the total of protesters from coast-to-coast.

Press may understand protests on the Left to be funded by nefarious political andideological forces - George Soros, MoveOn.org, America Coming Together,Media Matters, the Communist and Socialist Parties, etc. - but conservatives and Republicans aren't that adept at organizing "march-in-the-street"protests.

Another came from CNN's Susan Roesgen who displayed a level of elitism in her interviewing of tea party protesters in Chicago heretofore unseen throughout the history of journalism. Roesgen questioned one protester whose frustration with Barack Obama's totalitarian governmental style led him to equate it to the political stylings of a young, pre-holocaust Adolf Hitler. Forgetting that fascism exists on the left side of an accurate political spectrum, Roesgen chastised the protester for being "offensive." One must question how offended she was when the same thing was happening to President George W. Bush. Then Roesgen, under the guise of asking a question, lectured and entered into debate with another protester before cutting him off and declaring that the entire protest was orchestrated by FOX News and was, in fact, "anti-government," "anti-CNN" and "not family viewing." This blatant disregard for the public's genuine anger lends credence to the argument that the mainstream media is not only in the tank for the Obama Administration, but that they have reached such a level of elitism, possessing such an agenda-driven arrogance, that they have literally become not only an enemy of the Charters of Freedom but an enemy of the people.

Overthrowing Men Who Pervert the Constitution

According to the recently released DHS threat assessment titled, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic & Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization & Recruitment, my proclivity to actively defend the US Constitution, to actively question a reckless government that has strayed from the principles set forth by our Founders and Framers - principles born of Natural Law and Judeo-Christian values, principles that forged a Constitutional Republic, defines me as a threat to our nation.

According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (please tell me again what her qualifications for this post are?, because I am angry about the government's abdication of effective representative government, I am a threat to the nation, along with US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and each and every American who turned out for the tea parties across the nation. Both Napolitano and President Obama - for his silence on the matter - consider We the People "the enemy." As of this writing, there are 564 days until the 2010 midterm elections. The questions that remains are these:

Will this truly patriotic movement continue to grow?

Will those who took to the streets on April 15th, 2009, continue to do so until the totalitarian forces of the neo-Marxist Progressive-Left are vanquished once and for all?

Or will conservative, traditionalists, Republicans, concerned centrists and honest Democrats look at their singular achievement and say job well-done as they retreat to the status quo?

To be sure, if the mid-term elections had been held on the day of the teaparties I truly believe most incumbents would have been ousted from office. The anger is that concentrated. But the past holds the truth of the future and it shows that - traditionally - conservatives are hard pressed to maintain cohesiveness over a prolonged period of time. Truthfully, I hope I am proven wrong on this point. The fact is, our nation's future depends on me being wrong.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is credited with having said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." If the Left is smart - and that is truly being questioned by many Americans - they will form a new-found respect for the admiral's words with regard to the events of April 15th, 2009. If the Right is smart, and in their awakening it appears they are, they will realize this needs to be an ongoing effort, that there is hard work ahead, that everyone must act cohesively and that the revolution starts now!

"We, the people, are the rightful masters of both congress and the courts - not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert theconstitution." - Abraham Lincoln

Frank Salvato
april 17, 2009
http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/fsalvato/2009/04172009.htm

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The US auto business has always been cyclical, with booms and busts following each other on a something close to a seven-year cycle. What happened last October, however, was extraordinary. In the wake of the financial crisis that began the month before, consumer demand in the US suddenly collapsed and has remained very low ever since, with the auto industry especially hard hit. Not just GM but all 11 of the global automakers operating in the US have reported sales declines of anywhere from a third to a half in each of the past six months. Losing half their revenue has hurt all the automakers. But it pushed GM over the edge.

To be sure, GM’s managers have been aware for decades that their operating model is fragile. This is an enterprise that was built for steady long-term growth. Thus GM concentrated on staying large, even at the expense of profitability. They supplemented their capital by selling long-term bonds and now have trouble paying the interest. And they depended heavily on easy consumer credit to finance purchases of their vehicles.

Moreover, GM has never responded adequately to global competition. As they lost market share over the years to imports and “transplants” (foreign makes assembled in the US), they never figured out how to make money selling smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles. But as long as cash flows covered their obligations, they managed to postpone the day of reckoning. Adding to the company’s financial troubles, their labor union, Ron Gettelfinger’s United Auto Workers (UAW), has never been willing to allow GM to close antiquated factories and lay off the affected workers.

At the end of the September financial quarter, GM had about $11 billion left. At the time, they were losing about a billion dollars a month, and were planning to line up new capital or new financing in 2009. Their economists were projecting a strong improvement in demand for their products this year. Then the bottom fell out in October, and GM started losing nearly $5 billion a month. By the end of November, it was clear that GM would be out of cash by year-end. And that’s exactly what happened.

Was there another way out from the financial crisis? For instance, couldn’t GM file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and continue operating? Now-fired CEO Rick Wagoner consistently said no, asserting that customers would not buy vehicles from a bankrupt company out of fear that spare parts and warranty service would be unavailable. There’s certainly something to this, but it obscures the real reason that GM could not file Chapter 11: No bank would lend them the money to do so.

When you don’t have enough cash to pay your suppliers, they’ll generally force you to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Long-term debt holders can also force a bankruptcy, but they’re usually better served by cutting a deal to restructure the debt.) To operate in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, you usually will arrange so-called “debtor-in-possession,” or DIP financing. Your bankers will lend you money to stay in business, secured by the hard assets of the business. There was absolutely no way for GM to arrange DIP financing. They were literally staring at a Chapter 7 bankruptcy – that is, the liquidation of the business – starting sometime in January.

It’s impossible to overstate the gravity of this danger. Hundreds of thousands of people would be thrown out of work, and thousands of suppliers and dealers would face their own bankruptcies. At a time of pervasive crisis in the financial world, there wasn’t a penny of private money that could possibly be lent to GM to keep operating. There was also no time (and no financing) to line up a lightning-fast acquisition of GM by another automaker. Toyota Motor? Volkswagen AG? Those companies are in trouble, too. Because no one had any money, there was simply no way to avoid some government intervention.

Government intervention, however, is not a magic cure for the car industry’s troubles. The auto market has suffered from reduced overall demand. As recently as mid-decade, North Americans purchased nearly 17 million new cars and trucks each year. Demand in 2009 will barely reach 10 million units. We have the ability to produce far more vehicles than the market needs, and some of that overcapacity has to be eliminated. (To a small extent, you can mothball idle factories, but you have to stop paying idle workers.) Ordinarily, the free market takes care of this process in swift and brutal fashion. But in the auto business, there’s the UAW to contend with.

The whole point of a labor union is to protect the jobs, the pay, and the benefits of existing workers. (By resisting productivity improvements, they also artificially overprice labor, which has the side effect of increasing unemployment elsewhere in the economy.) In GM’s case, the union’s adamant refusal to give up anything, together with dyspeptic and incompetent management, has made it impossible for the company to adapt to changing market conditions.

That brings us up to the current crisis. GM is the weakest of the large automakers (Chrysler’s case is somewhat different). Parts of GM, such as the overseas operations, are healthy and worth keeping, but a substantial chunk of North American operations really ought to fold. A global recession, however, is no time to allow a messy liquidation of large chunks of a $200-billion company.

However, it’s delusional to suppose that GM can return to full health and profitability. It simply must become much smaller, because America is not buying the vehicles it makes. The proper role of government in this situation is to bridge the company through the process of partial liquidation.

This would have required five steps. First, making a deal to force the holders of GM’s bonds (more than $20 billion) to accept lower payments of interest and principal. Second, buying out and closing down several thousand dealers. Third, closing unneeded factories. Fourth, turning the company’s retiree benefit obligations over to the federal government. Fifth, and most critically, firing tens thousands of employees. The whole process likely would have required between $50 and $100 billion taxpayer dollars over perhaps 18 months. However unfortunate, this would have been the least-bad outcome, and a vast improvement over a rapid, forced liquidation of the company.

At this point, however, two factors come into the picture, one old and one new. The old factor is the protection extended to the UAW by Democrats in Congress, and now in the Obama administration. You can expect that the union will not be required to accept large cuts in pay, benefits, retiree healthcare and work rules. But that will not stop UAW president Ron Gettelfinger, perhaps with Barney Frank or Barack Obama at his side, from telling us, against all evidence, that the union has made deeply painful concessions, for the good of the country.

The new factor is actually quite a surprise, and a very unpleasant one: the Obama administration has decided that it wants to run General Motors in bankruptcy. From their statements so far, they appear actually to believe that they can bring a new management approach that will return GM to a robust profitability. They certainly have expressed little hope that the company’s existing management can do the job.

The right approach, as noted, would have been to bridge the company and to pressure it to downsize aggressively, with a bankruptcy judge imposing harsh concessions on the union as well as the other stakeholders. But the administration has signaled that it wants to do something completely different. They fired Rick Wagoner (for whom I shed no tears) and installed GM veteran and former chief financial officer Fritz Henderson in his place. Henderson immediately stated that he is responsible in significant measure to federal “car czar” Steven Rattner. An independent CEO, of course, is responsible primarily to his common shareholders.

At the same time, no less than President Obama announced the formation of an independent, government-financed entity that would honor the warranties of newly-purchased GM vehicles. That takes care of Wagoner’s original objection to bankruptcy.

But why is the president promising to fix our cars and trucks? Why does he think his people should be significantly contributing to the management of the largest US automaker? Surely, his job is big enough already.

The portents of the government’s new role are troubling. For one thing, government isn’t subject to market discipline. At the very least, a government-run GM will not be efficient. It will probably lose money and will certainly misallocate perfectly good capital. At a time of forced restructuring and smaller markets, nothing could be worse. Congress is intent on protecting the union from taking large cuts in pay or benefits, and the Obama people have made it very clear that they want GM to start making smaller vehicles, ideally with alternative power sources. You can’t operate a business at maximum efficiency if you make your marketing decisions in light of political goals, as opposed to what the market actually wants.

Also worrisome is the potential impact on trade. If the government props up a large failed domestic manufacturer, and preserves its overpriced labor contract, that will make the US less competitive globally, because vehicles produced abroad will be able to deliver better value for less money. Pressure will then rise to protect the domestic industry. The only way to make that work over time is to erect barriers to trade, which will impoverish the emerging world and lead to increased international tension.

But worst of all is the sense, born of hubris, that the federal government can and should undertake the task of manufacturing automobiles, or anything else. The reason the US economy has long been the world’s strongest and most flexible, is that our private sector has always made the decisions. In its attempt to change that model at GM, the Obama administration has lurched into dangerous territory.

By Francis Cianfrocca
4/8/2009

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D6A29A98-B672-4DE6-81CC-DFC0A13D522F

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