Karl's Weekend Reading

We are dedicating this week's Weekend Reading post to Capitalism's martyr, the victim of envy politics and liberal progressive communist ideology, GM's recent CEO Rick Wagoner.

It took two weeks for our fellow right wingers in the new media to find their voice on Mr. Wagoner's dismissal by key shareholder Barack Obama. There are some acting like this is a "sideshow", to quote Charles Krauthammer (link). But we think the Wagoner dismissal is part of a planned all-out attack on capitalism. We think it is the main course of what could be our nation's last supper.

Victor Davis Hanson touches on this. President Obama's First 70 Days: It Really Does All Make Sense.

If you had little idea of how businesses are created, how they are run, and why they sometimes go broke, and if you thought that the truly talented and sophisticated never go into business but instead gravitate to the Ivy League to be trained as lawyers, professors, writers, and organizers, then you would assume that our present problems are largely the fault of the former, and can best be addressed by putting as many of the latter in your government as possible.

George Will states the obvious in his Townhall article, Car Designer in Chief.

Barack Obama displayed reality-denying virtuosity last week when, announcing the cashiering of General Motors' CEO, and naming his replacement, and as the government was prompting selection of a new majority of GM's board of directors, and as the government announced the next deadline for GM to submit a more satisfactory viability plan than it submitted at the last faux deadline, and as the government kept the billions flowing to tide GM over until, well, whenever, the president said: "The United States government has no interest in running GM."

Actually, his administration prefers to do that rather than allow bankruptcy to infuriate the United Auto Workers union, which was pre-emptively grateful to Obama's administration with lavish contributions to candidate Obama. The president supposedly showed "toughness" in sacking a conspicuous member of a particularly unpopular little cohort, CEOs of big corporations. He will need more grit if, as his administration hints, this time it is serious, that its patience is wearing thin, that someday GM could face "controlled" or "prepackaged" or "surgical" bankruptcy. One suspects that those adjectives intimate that it will be faux bankruptcy, gentle in dealing with the UAW.

Laura Hollis assesses the threat to America and offers some recommendations in her Townhall article Corporation, Sell Thyself. Read it all!

This is the worst climate I can remember for American business in my whole life. Yes, the oil crisis of the 1970s was bad, and yes, the car companies’ reputation at the same time was not much better. But it was viewed as an economic crisis, not an identity crisis. Never have I seen such worldwide antipathy for business and commerce generally.
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The presidency of Barack Obama is deplorable, and it is contributing devastatingly to American malaise. It’s long past time that American corporations take matters into their own hands, and take their message directly to the American public. So this, American corporations, is my message to you: STOP PARTICIPATING IN YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION, AND FIGHT BACK!
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Stop funding gutless politicians who take your money, and then get on national television and blame you for the problems they themselves brought on. No more campaign contributions, no more lobbying as under the rubric of “special interests.” NOTHING. Cut them off. Deprive them of their lifeblood (which is really your blood). Starve them.

Will they listen?