I Cannot Wait

I will not be watching our President as he makes his much anticipated jobs speech tonight in a joint session before some of both houses of Congress. It is being predicted that his Majesty will be regurgitating parts of several past proposals that at one time or another, within divergent contexts and in different financial times, a few of his detractors might have endorsed.

Well, I personally am not so thrilled at what I believe will be his $450 billion worth of slush fund projects to get Americans working again. As we saw in his beloved bailout bill, much money will be channeled toward hard left union constituencies where the taxpayers get totally screwed. The money enters a narrow pipeline where the recipients of said funds will be providing to the taxpayers no more than a fifty cents on the borrowed dollar value.

I'm not so thrilled either about proposals that would supposedly reward businesses for hiring new employees or not laying off the ones that are already unjustified given current economic conditions. First of all, with the rising flood water of employment regulation just around the corner these tax credits do nothing but temporarily negate the inevitable higher cost of doing business under Obama. Secondly, if any company is ever rewarded for not letting go of unnecessary employees we toss the entire working apparatus of the free market system and capitalism out the window.

But lets look at the timing of this jobs speech in the current business context.

We have one company, Boeing, that has been told by the Obama administration that it cannot operate a factory in South Carolina because doing so, according to the NLRB, would be an act of punishment aimed at unionized labor. The Department of Labor has demanded that Boeing keep production at its union facilities in Washington rather than let right to work state South Carolina provide the several thousands of employees that would operate the factory.

Now, Boeing is not shuttering the Washington factory. In fact, since its announcement of building a plant in South Carolina became public, it has actually added hundreds of jobs in Washington.

Lets look too at Gibson Guitars, a company incidentally that is owned and operated by conservative supporting executives. The Justice Department raided two of the company's factories in Tennessee to investigate whether or not the company was in violation of foreign timber harvesting laws. The company is not even being charged with violating any American laws. Gibson's largest American competitor, Martin, is not being scrutinized in the same manner even though its instruments are manufactured using many of the same woods. Martin is owned by big Democrat political contributors.

Lets look too at the fossil fuel industries. Barack Obama has suggested that he wants to bankrupt the coal companies. He has said that, under his plan, electricity rates must necessarily skyrocket.

Yet, at the same time that he heaps huge piles of red tape in front of efficient energy sources, he rewards his solar panel buddies over half a billion dollars worth of federal subsidies. Now that the company has gone belly up, FBI agents have raided the company, Solyndra, and seized a huge cache of information. How this information will be used, whether to indict Solyndra officials (unlikely since they visited the Oval Office over twenty times) or to cover up whatever hazy relationship has existed between the administration and its corporate lap dogs is anyone's guess.

So, the Obama speech is being anticipated by many. I wonder, however, how filled with anticipation the executives at Gibson Guitars are, or how excited the executives at Boeing are. I wonder how excited the owners of big oil and big coal are over the prospect of listening to the US President tell them how he is going to create jobs.

They all know that this administration is using whatever means it has available to it to actually shut down companies unfortunate enough to belong either to an unfavored industry or to be unwise enough to believe in a political ideal that runs contrary to the one held in the White House.

Politics when fought within the political arena can be an ugly game. Politics, when fought in the private sector, is as revealing as it is ugly. It tells us a lot about those that try to use their political power to shape industries and companies into instruments of the state itself.

This is not liberty, it is tyranny. This is not freedom, it is fascism. This is not the free market, it is a cobbled together obstacle course designed to trip up all businesses that do not parrot the talking points of this administration.

Ya, I cannot wait to read tomorrow what the President will say in a few minutes.