Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Obama Keeps Shoveling

And over the past few months, he's been shoveling it against the tide. The biggest pile he succeeded in shoveling was his plan for socialized medicine and bureaucratic control of America's health care needs, but everything since has been washing back over him.

The most deliciously ironic shoveling act was when he finally had to admit that all those projects he wanted to pay for with taxpayer money weren't exactly "shovel-ready." After pushing a nearly trillion dollar "stimulus" program, it turns out that the administration is all dressed up with nowhere to go. As Americans suffer from high unemployment and stagflation, Obama used his girlish giggle to cover up his apparent ignorance of what business does and how it does it.

I don't agree with my fellow conservatives who thought that Obama was heartlessly laughing at Americans who are the victims of his grandiose socialist schemes. I think it was his version of whistling past the graveyard. He can't laugh at people he doesn't even consider worth a passing notice. A missed one-foot putt, now that's something worth laughing about.

Somewhere in the mix, Obama managed to get unions involved in the shovel conspiracy. You know what I mean--those "workers" who have one person shoveling with six supervising, all with high-pay, low-performance guarantees and cushy benefits and pensions. Early on, he managed to push two major automobile corporations into bankruptcy, screw over the creditors and bond-holders, while handing over ownership to the joint venture of big government and big labor unions. I'm still looking for the constitutional authority for that maneuver. Also, if you think that Chrysler Corporation has paid back the taxpayers and made the bondholders whole, I have a big orange bridge in San Francisco I'm willing to sell you, cheap.

Other ventures haven't been quite so shovel-ready. Several airlines, most noticeably Delta, have conducted multiple unionization votes, and the unions have been rejected each time. Teams of federal investigators are checking into how such a thing could possibly happen. It is self-evident that every American worker deeply desires union membership, so it must be some sort of capitalist conspiracy against them.

Before you can have airline workers being denied their Constitution and God-given right to be members of a union, you first have to have airplanes for them to fly. And there the capitalist conspiracy goes even deeper. Big Boy Boeing is now under attack by the Obamist-controlled National Labor Relations Board for daring to open a non-union plant to build the "Dreamliner" in South Carolina. It was rather amazing to see how quickly a well-run company could make a place truly "shovel-ready" without first demanding huge sums of the taxpayers' money to pay for the shovels.

Being continues to build airplanes in unionized Washington State, and is even expanding its operations there. But the room for expansion is limited, so without costing a single union job, Boeing found a place that it could shovel without union labor, to add to its Washington-based union plant. "Not good enough" say the unions and the NLRB. In their inimitable illogic, creating jobs in South Carolina ipso facto automatically means the loss of union jobs (and union dues--no small matter).

It must be retaliation for union strikes in the past, so that is nothing short of an "unfair labor practice." The Obamists aren't satisfied with telling Americans who should own businesses, who should run them, and how much profit they should make, but it now wants to make sure that it controls where those facilities can exist (and more importantly, where they can't exist).

The Democrats got shoveled-under in some formerly Democrat states in the last general election. In Wisconsin, the unions cried "foul." They know they have the exclusive right to shovels in Wisconsin, so when the governor and the legislature commandeered their shovels, they first mobbed the capital, then sued to get their shovels back (writ of replevin for a shovel?). They found a union-owned judge to agree with them, but the state Supreme Court reversed the decision and found that the shovels belonged to the people.

Failing to get his way on so many of his shovel-ready projects, Obama needed to deflect attention from his growing record of failure and onto something positive. How about shovel-ready foreign trade agreements? That should fool the rubes into thinking that The One is actually in favor of letting the markets work. The Master of Business first discovered that our trade problems center on poor performance in exports. So as far back as his 2011 State of the Union address, the nation's economist-in-chief announced that he would increase our exports to double their current level by 2014 (optimistic about that re-election thing, isn't he?).

How to do that? Implement the Bush-inspired free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea and take personal credit for it. It's part of the overall strategy of "blame Bush, take credit for his achievements." But once again, those capitalist conspirators ruined his plans. Or did they? The shovel he got hit in the back of the head with came not from the capitalists, but from the unions. You must remember that in Keynesian thinking, every success means somebody else has to fail. In Marxist thinking, every success is based on exploitation of the workers. Obama has been getting cross-eyed trying to figure out which of those two theories to use.

The unions helped him to reconcile the two modes of thinking by demanding that in any free-trade agreement with the three nations, there must be a guarantee that no union worker in America will lose his job without compensation. So Obama has decided that he will support the agreements only if there is a massive expansion of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. "What's that?" you ask. It's your tax money above and beyond unemployment benefits to be given to "workers displaced by foreign competition." Now there's no such program for workers displaced by domestic competition, but we're dealing with rotten furriners here.

So now we know that even foreign trade agreements are not shovel-ready. Clearly, we could have increased our exports if only we paid union employees for being out-produced by foreign competition. OK, I'm getting lost in the logic myself. But one thing you can count on. If, as seems likely, the free-trade agreements are rejected by the Senate because of the Trade Adjustment Assistance union payoffs, the Obamists already have their shovels ready to bury the Republicans who queered the president's brilliant double-our-exports plan.

19 comments:

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

"there must be a guarantee that no union worker in America will lose his job without compensation"

Typical fuzzy Democrat/Marxist/Socialist thinking. Just, how in the hell can they expect to prove it? Oh, wait a minute, in Obama's world, you don't have to prove that, just claim it. After all, only the greedy capitalist has to pay for it.

Nice job LawHawk. I hope unions do go the way of the dinosaur.

T-Rav said...

"Writ of replevin"? Okay, you lawyers are just making terms up now.

Oh well, I fully expect all these problems to disappear once we implement high-speed rail and stuff.

Tehachapi Tom said...

Hawk
You certainly have a way of opening up a nerve and the abrading it to total rawness. How this post turtle got up there will never cease to amaze me.

Unknown said...

Joel: It truly is amazing how much power and money the unions can use to buy a President when you consider that only 6% to 7% of the working population still belong to them (many of them involuntarily). And yet it's the Democrats who are always blabbing incessantly about "special interests."

Unknown said...

T-Rav: You caught that, huh? Some things stick with you your whole life, for no apparent reason. In law school, we studied a case in which a farmer sued another farmer because he sold a cow without giving full disclosure of the condition of the cow. The old common law expression for return of goods bought and sold under circumstances where one side knew something the other didn't is "replevin." The name of the cause of action, therefore, was "writ of replevin for a cow." For some reason that stuck in my head all these years, and I still get the giggles when I think of it.

And you're right, of course. We will be able to move those phony cows in mass numbers on high-speed trains.

StanH said...

Barry the Blithering Bolshevik, only knows what he’s read in a book, or he’s been told by idiot leftist economics professors, who couldn’t successfully operate a fruit stand. In my opinion, he simply doesn’t give a damn either. This incompetence will not end until he’s gone, and all his czars, come on 2012.

AndrewPrice said...

The really ironic thing about Obama's spending is that he spent so much early on on wasted paybacks that now he can't afford to spend money to help his re-election and the Dems are desperate to do something. Oh well, them's the breaks.

Unknown said...

Stan: Thanks for the update. I thought Obama only "wrote" books, I didn't know he had actually ever read one. It's possible, of course, because we know he can read a TelePrompter. I tend to think of him as a Menshevik rather than a Bolshevik, because he's so prissy about guns. We should thank God that he's so incompetent, because anyone with his socialist views who is also competent would be an even greater danger to the Republic.

Unknown said...

Andrew: At the rate he's hiring corporate socialists, eco-freaks, and big money do-gooders, he may have found a really good source of new campaign money. He's already got GE and GM, and now he's working on bringing Boeing into the fold. For the champion of the little people who hates big corporations (he says), he sure knows how to co-opt them.

Tennessee Jed said...

he can shovel all the bullshit he wants, and continue to blame Bush until his dying day, but as Debbie Wasserman said "we own the economy." People are appropriately realizing he is A FAILURE and it is becoming increasly clear to the electorate. This despite the lol funny two minute Robert Reich video on moveon.org that keeps popping up on facebook.

Huntsman trying to channel the gipper? Nice try. What a loserboy.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: You forgot the de rigueur hyphen in Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. LOL

There doesn't seem to be a real groundswell for Huntsman, does there? I didn't know whether to laugh or get snarky over Huntsman picking RR's announcement spot.

T-Rav said...

LawHawk, when choosing between laughing and snark, I always say, why not do both?

Unknown said...

T-Rav: I will keep that in mind for future reference.

patti said...

i'm beginning to think that if he opens a state-run shovel manufacturing plant, he may finally have a hit.

*smacks forehead* D'OH! Shovels!

Unknown said...

Patti: With as much crap as he's piled up, there's going to be a serious need for shovels. Just remember, though, I still have the monopoly on wheelbarrows (that should test the memories of those who've followed us over from Big Hollywood).

darski said...

as a border agent - I demand to know what is in that wheelbarrow.
... I loved that joke.

Obama could fit that position nicely

Unknown said...

Darski: Sorry, the answer to that question is privileged information. I hate to say it, but Obama is such a jellyfish that he could fit any position--if he could ever pick one. So without revealing a confidence, I can tell you that Obama is full of what's in the wheelbarrow.

Joel Farnham said...

I know LawHawk. The problem I am seeing right now is the local police are acting up. Arresting people for questioning the police.

Do we really want the police to have this much apparent power? I think the writer might have exaggerated things a bit. But, I am starting to hear more and more of these "incidents" occurring all over. Not all of them are exaggerations. The comments below readily acknowledge the local police "union" will effectively stop the cop's boss from exacting a punishment to curb misbehavior.

I think part of it is the general knowledge that unions protect TSA agents from punishment. They also protect police from punishment. To me, it is just another reason unions have no place in government.

Unknown said...

Joel: Remember the line from Godfather 3: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"? Right now, I'm involved with a local problem (not in Caliente, but nearby) in which the Police Chief has threatened certain political candidates with fines and/or jail for putting up political candidate signs and distributing candidate literature in "disallowed" locations. OK, except he had relatives and friends in the same race who were in clearer violation but received no such threats. It may end up in litigation or at least local discipline for the chief, but seeking the assistance of the Attorney General (state or federal) may be an exercise in futility since the threatened candidates belong to the "wrong party." The chief does not have union protection simply because of the size and location of his force, but if he were to be found culpable of acting improperly under color of authority, he always has that Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) to give him a comfortable retirement.

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