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.