You can’t make this stuff up. The titled quote comes from a Bloomberg story today about new GM Chairman Ed Whitacre. You also can’t make up most of the media’s calm acceptance of yet another person heavily involved with running General Motors, aka Government Motors, who knows next to nothing about cars except as a consumer who drives them.

At least it’s refreshing that this guy has experience running a business, which is more than you can say about the other two architects of the company as it currently subsists.

On May 31, the New York Times put out a fawning portrayal of the a Mr. Brian Deese, the guy who was the only full-timer on President-elect and then President Obama’s car team from Election Night until mid-February.

Fasten your seat belts, this guy’s lack of any kind of pedigree will have you death-gripping the steering wheel, as will the smug dismissiveness of a business system that has been the most successful in human history:

The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

…. “There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

…. Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.

Of course, why do all that boring stuff when you can just jump in and pretend?

To Deese’s luck (I refuse to give anyone “credit” for making a decision that had no basis in experience), he did figure out that GM and Chrysler were heading inevitably towards bankruptcy because of falling revenues. But there’s no evidence that he saw the plunge as anything but a continuation of their current problems, when in fact the two companies faded faster than their competitors earlier this year because of their bailed-out condition, not in spite of it. If this weren’t the case, why has Ford’s situation improved dramatically to the point where its worldwide sales outpace GM’s?

Read the whole thing, if you can stand it. Would any newspaper have given such a lightweight a free ride if he worked in a Republican administration?

Then of course there’s the car czar himself, Steve Rattner. Rattner’s post-journalism career consists of about 10 years as a private-equity investor (I guess some of them are more equal than others) and as a dealmaker. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the same as actually operating a business that makes things. Rattner also has hints of a shady past in his dealings with the New York State pension fund that may yet come back to haunt him. And, of course, Rattner has great Democratic Party political connections.

Whitacre rounds out the list. Though his resume is clearly the strongest of the three, and an outsider’s perspective is likely quite welcome in this case, it remains a fact that at AT&T he was ran what was a service business that happened to sell some products, not an outfit like GM which does the opposite, and was of necessity and by strategy more focused on mergers and acquisitions than day-to-day operations.

That said, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins today astutely pointed to Whitacre’s unique pedigree, and how it may fit into the brave new world of government ownership:

What the company needs more than anything else is a political strategy. Its loss of political clout has been catastrophic, leading to (among other things) devastating new CAFE regs. But he has one big leg up on his GM predecessors: A Democratic administration now owns GM and needs it to succeed financially. The voice of reason will be heard because it’s in Democrats’ interest to hear it. He can surely expect, for instance, to find Team Obama amenable to a certain amount of quiet fudging of its new fuel mileage rules to keep GM’s pickup and SUV profits flowing.

Make no mistake. Mr. Whitacre’s task won’t be selling cars (somebody else can do that) but reshaping the policy environment in which GM must operate. His model should be another Ed — Ed Jordan, who as chief of the nationalized Conrail never received the credit he deserved for rescuing the carrier by leading the charge for regulatory reform on Capitol Hill.

His braintruster was Leo Mullin, who went on to lead Delta Air Lines, and who as a young Conrail veep built the case that Conrail would become a permanent drain on taxpayers unless the rail industry were free to design and price its services with the sole object of making a profit for investors.

But Whitacre’s task makes Mullins look like child’s play. For GM to survive and ultimately break free as an independent entity like Conrail, you have to start with the assumption that the government wants to get out of the car business. His platitudes to the contrary, I don’t see how anyone can reasonably think that this is the Obama’s intent. And even if he changes his mind, I don’t see how his party will let him carry through with it.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Thank you, Rabbi Chaim Richman (direct YouTube link):

Watch the whole thing.

Darn it, when I see things this good, I feel compelled to transcribe them, because the vid may go away. So here goes (ellipses are breaks built into the video, not breaks in the video’s text):

President Barack Obama: We cannot impose peace. Two peoples, with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. …. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. (Applause) ….. This construction violates previous agreements, and undermines efforts to achieve peace.

Rabbi Chaim Richman: These statements indicate that unfortunately President Obama now fully subscribes to the Arab revisionist version of history. By this he is undermining the very right to Israel to exist in her own land. Our very presence here in our own land is now being deemed illegitimate.

….. Illegitimate? Is the will of the God of Israel illegitimate? Our right to be here is based on one thing and one thing alone — that this land was bequeathed to us by the God of Israel, and nothing else is necessary. ….. As if the settlements are the only obstacle to peace. The fact is that there were no settlements in 1948. The Palestine Liberation Organization, (the) bloody terrorist organization which has turned in the Palestinian Authority, the same organization responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, that organization was founded before there was any Israeli presence in the West Bank. It has nothing to do with settlements. The issue is the existence of Israel.

Obama: When Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together, as in the story of Islam ….

Richman: What is this sudden interest by the whole world in the internationalization of Jerusalem? And furthermore, what is this Moslem interest in Jerusalem? Where does Jerusalem figure in Islam? Jerusalem was never holy to the Moslems. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Moslems bow down and they face Mecca and they their turn their backsides up towards what the Jewish people consider to be the holiest place on earth the location of the Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount.

Jerusalem is not even mentioned once in the Koran, but yet mentioned over 700 times in the Torah. Jerusalem was the seat of the monarchy of Israel. Jerusalem was reigned over by King David and King Solomon. There was Jewish presence in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem 1,600 years before Mohammed ever appeared on the scene.

Obama: Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. I saw it first-hand as a child in Indonesia. ….. People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based on the persuasions of the mind and the heart and the soul.

Richman: You know, you say that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance”? Let me tell you what goes on here in Jerusalem at the place of the Holy Temple, the Temple Mount. If Jews or Christians try to pray there, they are prevented by the Moslems who control the Temple Mount from praying to God. They are physically prevented from praying. They’ll be dragged off the Mount; they’re observed, they’re watched; they’re searched first before they enter to make sure they don’t have any Bible, any sort of paraphernalia.

The expression of any other religious sentiment other than Islam is forbidden at the Temple Mount by the Moslem authorities.

That’s tolerance? Thats’ the “proud tradition of the tolerance of Islam”?

Obama: This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Richman: Linking the right of Israel to exist in this land with the Holocaust is obscene. It’s a perversion of history, and such a cynical manipulation of the tragedy of the Holocaust — which was a great tragedy but was not Israel’s original tragedy. Israel existed in this land long before the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a tragedy. The original tragedy was our exile from this land, which enabled a thing such as the Holocaust to happen.

But we are not here out of compassion or pity for what recently happened to us. We are here because we are entitled to this land.

This was the land of King David and King Solomon. In summing up the rights to Israel to live as a sovreign nation in her own land, why start history from the Holocaust? What happened to King David? What happened to King Solomon? What happened to the fact that Israel is the land of the Bible? What happened to the fact that Israel had a glorious commonwealth here? That Israel brought to the entire world the message of the one true God?

Starting history from the Holocaust — Is that not an obscenity?

Obama: Tomorrow I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews ….. And any nation, including Iran, should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Richman: So what is the idea here of on the one hand telling us that Holocaust denial is a crime, going to lay a rose a Buchenwald, but yet welcoming Iran to the arena of nuclear power — the same country whose official government policy is one of anti-Semitism to the point of calling for the extermination of the state of Israel, the same country which officially hosted a conference on Holocaust denial? I want to know if President Obama was thinking about that when he laid the rose at Buchenwald.

Obama: The Holy Koran tells us “All mankind, we have made you into nations and tribes, so you may know one another.”

The Talmud tells us, “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Richman: President Obama is not a Messiah, he’s a marauder. He’s a robber, and he’s robbing the Jewish people of everything in one fell swoop. He’s robbing the Jewish people of their legacy, of their heritage, and of their connection to the land.

…. Well, you’ll notice that at the conclusion of his speech, that he quoted from the “Holy Koran” and the “Holy Bible.” But he brought the Torah down a notch. Instead of calling it “the Holy Torah,” he informs us that “The Talmud teaches us that the Torah is all about peace.”

….. But what about the order? Judaism is the mother of all religions. And just as the Torah preceded the Koran, and just as the Torah preceded the New Testament, the Jewish people’s presence in the land of Israel precedes Islam and precedes Christianity.

….. President Obama, perhaps you would be well-advised to consider this verse from the Holy Torah, and this one from the book of Jeremiah, where the prophet tells us, “Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of his crop. All who devour it will be held guilty. Evil shall come upon them. The word of the Lord.”

I guess we need to add Obama’s naive rich and famous Jewish and other supporters of Israel to the list of elites who are now “shocked.”

__________________________________________

UPDATE, June 24: Meant to get this posted sooner. The following is an e-mail I received from someone shortly after the Holocaust Museum murder that succinctly sums up how the Left has distorted the story –

Hi Tom,

Just wondering why we couldn’t put forth the idea that the man who unloaded in the Holocaust Museum yesterday was emboldened by Obama’s anti-Israel actions and rhetoric- and NOT the right–it simply doesn’t add up that the left is claiming he was influenced by the right. They simply are lying–no basis for their BS. It’s amazing how they now discard facts and logic at will. For that matter, why are we hearing now from Wright? (Can’t bring myself to calling him Rev.) Has he too been encouraged to speak against Jews because of Obama’s clearly anti-Semite behavior?

Well, though it’s somewhat late, it’s at least here for the record and for future reference.

(I know; it almost doesn’t count, because it’s in the lefty-despised Wall Street Journal Opinion section.)

As yours truly noted a month after the presidential election (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Barack Obama’s handlers and his teleprompter began telling the president-elect to begin using variations on the term “create and/or save” in speeches about jobs and the economy within days of his electoral victory. During the campaign, I found no example of where Obama used any variation on that phrase; it was always “we will create X number of jobs.”

Until now, no one in the press of note has paid any attention to this “clever” abandonment of logic and accountability. After all, by the new “create and/or save” non-logic, Dear Leader has “saved” over 130 million jobs since his inauguration — even though, on a seasonally adjusted basis, almost 2.2 million Americans lost theirs from February through May:

Finally, someone in the establishment media has done a serious call-out of Team Obama’s risible ruse. Here are excerpts from William McGurn’s hard-hitting column in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The Media Fall for Phony ‘Jobs’ Claims
The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction.

….. “Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs — and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could “save or create” an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will “save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years.”

….. “We would never have used a formula like ‘save or create,’” he former Bush administration communications team member Tony Fratto) tells me. “To begin with, the number is pure fiction — the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being ‘saved.’ And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it.”

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama’s jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one — not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics — actually measures “jobs saved.” As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama’s jobs claims are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision.

…. Now, something’s wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It’s true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn’t tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

If the “saved or created” formula looks brilliant, it’s only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don’t expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration’s line that the stimulus has already “saved or created” 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

“You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama’s jobs claims that they did toward President Bush’s tax cuts,” says Mr. Fratto. “But I’m still waiting.”

So am I.

How much higher does the unemployment rate have to go before Team Obama’s apparatchiks at the Associated Press, the New York Times, and elsewhere — who, as noted, rightly would never have let the Bush administration get away with a similar move — stop repeating the President’s patently obvious “created and/or saved” nonsense without challenging it?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The former P&G Vice President and now “change agent” in the real world recently sent a letter to the NY Times that wasn’t printed or published online (to be clear, even though bandwidth is cheap, that failure in and of itself is not an outrage).

Apparently he was determined that his sentiments be heard. Though I don’t agree with him on every point, he has more than enough good ones that I am pleased to assist in that effort (copies are also here and here):

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
By Lou Pritchett

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don’t understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and ‘class’, always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the ‘blame America’ crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer ‘wind mills’ to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use ‘extortion’ tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O’Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

Note: Lou Pritchett is a former vice president of Procter & Gamble whose career at that company spanned 36 years before his retirement in 1989, and he is the author of the 1995 business book, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat.

Yours truly wrote this at PJM on January 7, mirrored here on January 9:

If it becomes clear in Washington that consumers have shut their wallets on GM and Chrysler, that bailout effort will be forced to an ignominious end. It will send the two companies into bankruptcy, where they can figure out how to emerge as viable, baggage-free entities.

Well, I was right and wrong.

As predicted, enough consumers to make a difference have shut their wallets on GM and Chrysler. Many have reopened them to Ford.

As predicted, despite a total of roughly $30 billion in taxpayer money (with much more to be dumped in shortly), enough consumers to make a difference forced the ignominious end known as bankruptcy on each company.

Sadly, the Obama administration has engineered exits from bankruptcy that, even if they occur (Chrysler is not yet a done deal, as yesterday’s news shows), are anything but baggage-free.

A new Rasmussen poll, if accurate, tells us that barring a major psychological shift, these exits will be in deep trouble coming out of the gate:

Just 42% of GM Owners Likely to Buy GM Again

Only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car. That figure includes just 30% who are Very Likely to do so.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% of current GM owners are not likely to buy another GM car, while 16% are not sure.

….. Overall, among all adults, 16% say they are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM. That figure is slightly below the auto giant’s current share of the domestic auto market.

Another 10% of all adults are somewhat likely to buy from GM while 60% are not likely to do so.

The government bailout and takeover of General Motors remains very unpopular among the public. Just 26% of Americans believe the bailout was a good idea, and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products.

It looks like Rasmussen has reduced GM’s official market share of 19%-20% by taking out Saturn, Pontiac, and Hummer — which is a correct and very astute catch.

The first bolded paragraph wipes out the significance of the second. That because the company has lost all but 42% of its customers. That would lead you to conclude that only about 6.7% of the 16% who claim they will likely buy a GM car represents current GM customers who will stay loyal (16% market share times 42%). (Update: Zheesh — I cut and forgot to paste a sentence saying that the % is more like 8% or so, because some of GM’s now-former buyers have already made their presence felt in the sales numbers during the last five months.)

The point is that just to maintain its market share, over about half of GM’s buyers coming out of bankruptcy will have to be new customers. Rasmussen says they are potentially there (if they mean what they’re saying), but they will still need to be won over and turned into closed deals. Anyone in sales knows that this is no easy task.

Then add in the following financial negatives: at least 60-90 days of significantly reduced advertising, which has already occurred during Chrysler’s bankruptcy, reducing the company’s consumer visibility and mindshare at the worst possible time; more car czar meddling and micromanagement; political cave-ins; and the Obama administration’s hostility towards light trucks, which make up well over half of the vehicles GM sells. Yikes.

And of course, GM’s competitors aren’t asleep. Ford, which itself foolishly sustained a two-year boycott by a pro-family organization until March of last year that probably cost it $1 billion or more, is now a bigger company than GM, is increasing production (i.e., isn’t sitting on months of unsold inventory), and is probably lengthening its lead on a daily basis. The Japanese transplants have stumbled a bit, but I don’t expect that to last.

So remind me: What are we getting for our tens of billions in bailout money?

The Supremes wouldn’t DARE cross Dear Leader, would they?

Well, maybe (copied in full because the AP will certainly expand the report between now and when I can get back to this):

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has temporarily delayed Chrysler’s sale to Fiat.

Ginsburg says in an order Monday that the sale is “stayed pending further order.”

The action indicates that the delay may only be temporary.

Chrysler has said a delay could scuttle the deal.

A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until 4 p.m. EDT Monday to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene.

Ginsburg issued her order just before 4 p.m., when Chrysler would have been free to complete the sale of most of its assets to Fiat.

Ginsburg could decide on her own whether to extend the delay or ask the full court to decide. It is unclear when she or the court will act.

Tick tock. As noted last week, Fiat can walk away on June 15 if there is no deal.

That’s a “clever” sentence (“The action indicates that the delay may only be temporary”). How does Ginsburg’s action indicate anything? Given that Ginsburg didn’t have to grant a stay at all, it would seem to mean a bit more than nothing. The “clever” sentence also conveniently overlooks the fact that “One judge on the three-judge panel suggested the Supreme Court should have ‘a swing at this ball.’”

My guess is the AP’s framing is an attempt to tell the TV networks and others who might use this report that “Hey, this really isn’t that important. We don’t want readers and viewers to know that the Dear Leader’s Chrysler deal is shafting teachers and construction workers, and why it might get stopped. So don’t mention it, OK?”

Thought: I haven’t seen or heard of any of the usual “expert” suspects predict the outcome of this matter. Instinct: This would lead you to believe that an Obama victory here is not a slam-dunk.

Exit question: Will the administration be able to resist the urge to directly or indirectly contact (i.e., pressure and/or illegally tamper with) one or more of the justices?

___________________________________________

UPDATE, June 9: dscott in comments has noticed Fiat saying it won’t walk away. Instinct: This is what you say when you believe the Supremes are going to give the matter due consideration and extend them to near, at, or past the June 15 deadline. Instinct II: “Don’t worry, Barry. We’ll hang with you” (said by Fiat’s biggies before booking one-way flights back to Turin). Overconfident Instinct III: Fiat may back out to SAVE Obama from what would be a disastrous ruling by the Supremes, who I think would probably then drop the case.

UPDATE, JUNE 9, 11:15 p.m.: The pension funds have lost —

Late Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned down the opponents’ last-ditch bid. The court issued a brief, unsigned opinion explaining its action. To obtain a delay, or stay, someone must show that at least four of the nine justices find that the issue raised is serious enough to warrant hearing a full appeal and that a majority of the court will conclude the lower court decision was wrong.

“The applicants have not carried that burden,” the court said.

The court did not consider the merits of the opponents’ arguments, only whether to hear their full-blown appeal.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the failure by the litigants to “carry the burden” may be more related to the size of the funds in proportion to the total debt involved $42 million compared to $6.9 billion) than the substance of the case, and that a course with more dollars involved might have been heard. I would hope that GM debtholders will test that proposition. The continuation of contract law as we know it may depend on it.

In the second half of his op-ed in the Washington Post today, former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev entirely credits himself and fellow countrymen for the end of his country’s Communist dictatorship, and claims that it’s the Western capitalist model that is currently failing.

In the process, he espouses positions that seem to have been copied from the Democratic Party’s past few platforms, as well as from U.S. Dear Leader Barack Obama’s governing model.

Following Gobachev’s ridiculous rewrite of the Soviet Union’s final decade (you know it’s ridiculous because the name “Reagan” never appears; he doesn’t even believe that the break-up should have happened), here are key passages from the former dictator’s admonishments of the West (the most obvious direct lifts from Obama and Dems are in bold):

(After the fall and break-up of the Soviet Union) The “Washington Consensus,” the dogma of free markets, deregulation and balanced budgets at any cost, was force-fed to the rest of the world.

But then came the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and it became clear that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. Statistics show that the poor and the middle class saw little or no benefit from the economic growth of the past decades.

The current global crisis demonstrates that the leaders of major powers, particularly the United States, had missed the signals that called for a perestroika. The result is a crisis that is not just financial and economic. It is political, too.

The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable. It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources and on social and environmental irresponsibility.

….. The time has come for “creative construction,” for striking the right balance between the government and the market, for integrating social and environmental factors and demilitarizing the economy.

Washington will have to play a special role in this new perestroika, not just because the United States wields great economic, political and military power in today’s global world, but because America was the main architect, and America’s elite the main beneficiary, of the current world economic model. That model is now cracking and will, sooner or later, be replaced. That will be a complex and painful process for everyone, including the United States.

But if all the proposed solutions and action now come down to a mere rebranding of the old system, we are bound to see another, perhaps even greater upheaval down the road. The current model does not need adjusting; it needs replacing. I have no ready-made prescriptions. But I am convinced that a new model will emerge, one that will emphasize public needs and public goods, such as a cleaner environment, well-functioning infrastructure and public transportation, sound education and health systems and affordable housing.

….. In our time, we faced up to the main tasks of putting an end to the division of the world, winding down the nuclear arms race and defusing conflicts. We will cope with the new global challenges as well, but only if everyone understands the need for real, cardinal change — for a global perestroika.

Other points:

• As to Gorbachev’s allegation of no poor or middle-class benefit from a quarter-century of capitalistic expansion, at least in the U.S. from 2003-2007, income inequality did not grow, and every economic quintile gained. With the onset during the second half of 2008 of the POR (Pelosi-Obma-Reid) Economy aka the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Recession as normal people define it, that may no longer be true, as the less-skilled have historically been more likely to lose their jobs. Gorby also somehow missed the growth during the past two decades of solid middle-class populations in India and China, to name just two.
• “Unrestrained exploitation of resources” — we should be so lucky. The fact is that the U.S. has locked up trillions of dollars worth of oil and natural gas in the name of environmental purity. This refusal to use God-given resources, perhaps unprecedented in human history, has arguably contributed to worldwide economic instability.
• “Environmental irresponsibility” — Please. The worst environmental offenses, from Chernobyl to seriously polluted rivers and streams, occurred in the Soviet Union, in a system that simply didn’t have the means to clean up after itself.

The media bias angle in all of this is seeing whether the Post gives anyone from the Reagan Era a chance to respond to Gorbachev’s massive assemblage of falsehoods and false prescriptions. I’ll bet not.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The Lefty response to Friday’s Obamanomics Graph of the Day has been pathetic, even considering the sources.

Here is that graph, as a reminder (from Michael’s Comments; HT BizzyBlog commenter dscott):

The Left’s retort to the Obama administration’s utter failure to predict what has really happened thus far in response to their centerpiece “stimulus” is, in essence, “Well, the Bush team also blew their predictions in early 2008.”

Even if they’re right, it’s an immature, crybaby excuse (“Mommy, Billy was bad and he wasn’t punished. So I can be bad too, and you can’t punish me. Wahhhhh!”), but let’s go with it anyway.

Let’s admit it. The Left is correct on this one. The Bush team blew it. There’s no point in denying it.

Bush’s econ guys and gals utterly failed to consider the effect of all the factors that might influence the economy, such as these I cited in April. What follows rephrases, updates, and adds to them for current effect.

First, the Bush team failed to consider that starting in June 2008 and all the way through to Election Day, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid, the founders of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, would repeatedly tell the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to starve the country of the conventional sources of energy it needs to keep its economic engines running, regardless of the consequences, bowing before what may be the greatest hoax in human history. They failed to foresee that enough high producers to make a difference would believe them, and that these high producers would abandon their previous guarded optimism.

Second, they failed to consider that starting in June and all the way through to Election Day, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid – but especially presidential nominee Obama — would tell the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to punitively tax the 5% of the nation’s most productive, increasing their marginal tax rates by up to 17% (12.4% Social Security plus 4.6% federal income tax), so they could redistribute money to everyone else. Even in the fall, when it was clear that the economy was struggling, the POR Economy’s architects continued to bitterly cling to their tax-increase promises. Bush’s team failed to foresee that enough high producers to make a difference would believe them, and that these high producers would abandon their previous guarded optimism.

Third, they failed to anticipate that in September, the decades-in-the-making, Democratic Party-driven housing and mortgage-lending mess would come to a head at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that Washington would then allow itself to be blackmailed into a series of financial sector bailouts. They didn’t foresee that the bailouts would expand to other industries, and that this money, often forced on recipients with a (figurative) gun to their heads, would contain shackles designed to prevent repayment and ensure government control of corporate decision-making, and in some cases control of the corporations themselves. They failed to foresee that enough high producers to make a difference would head for the lifeboats and stay there, abandoning what little optimism remained.

In sum, they failed to anticipate that enough high producers to make a difference would abandon their spring optimism, not because of then-current economic conditions, which were at worst mediocre, but because of their assessments of what economic conditions would be in the not too distant future, based on the perilous pronouncements of Pelosi, Obama, and Reid. They didn’t foresee that many of those who didn’t catch on during the summer would do so after observing the reckless September-October actions of the Washington establishment.

As a result, they failed to anticipate that businesspeople, entrepreneurs and investors would take steps they ordinarily take when a serious recession takes hold — not hiring, not expanding, letting people go and not replacing them, making worn-out equipment last longer instead of buying new, and others — before the serious recession took hold. The failed to foresee the deliberate downsizing that would take place in response to stated promises by powerful government officials Pelosi, Obama, and Reid to penalize and punish them, and the economy as a whole, if and when they gained power.

Finally, they failed to anticipate that at crunch time, with a serious recession staring them in the face, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid would ignore options that could have worked and historically have worked with near-immediate positive effect (tax cuts, opening up domestic drilling, etc.), in favor of an inherently time-delayed, ineffective “stimulus” plan that, like its historical predecessors in 1930s America and 1990s Japan, hasn’t stimulated anything.

How could the Bushies be so stupid? (/sarc)

The Bush Administration’s intrepid economic prognosticators didn’t anticipate that for the first time in American history a political party would take positions and actions destined to take down the economy in the name of electoral victory. The only question that remains is whether the named Democrats and their party did so out of ignorance, or did so deliberately. I lean strongly towards the latter.

I saw this about 10 days ago, and have been meaning to get around to it since.

The excerpts are from HillBuzz (warning: R-rated content is at the linked page), a Hillary Clinton-supporting site that bitterly opposed Barack Obama after he won the Democratic nomination last year.

Though I obviously can’t vouch for it, what’s below  — but not necessarily the rest of the link’s content — contains observations that ring true based on what I’m also hearing, and seems too specific in its details to be made up (some paragraph breaks added by me):

The Economy Is Much, Much Worse Than Dr. Utopia Wants You to Realize

….. On the streets of Boystown and Andersonville (neighborhoods on the North Side — Ed.) in the last several days — we kid you not — we saw nicely dressed people, just a little dirty, but wild-eyed and desperate looking, digging through trash bins on the street or dumpsters behind restaurants.

One man yesterday looked like one of the random, slightly overweight, middle-management accountant types indigenous to every cubicle farm in America (and obsessed with red Swingline staplers on occasion).  He still had the ubiquitous nylon badge holder/key ring straight out of central casting dangling around his neck, the kind his ID used to be on when he swiped in at Aon every day (the name of the insurance giant on the nylon, given to him at orientation his first day or as some worthless prize at a training seminar or other event, we’re sure).

And, there he was, in The Golden Age of Hope and Change, in dirty khackis (sic), excited to find a styrofoam cup with a lid still on it in the trash outside Potbelly’s. Feral-like, he scooped that cup right up to his mouth and slurped up its contents, savoring it as the only food he’d had that day, most likely.

It was stunning and sickening and heartbreaking and TERRIFYING all at the same time, because when we were kids and asked our grandparents what the Great Depression was like and how they first realized there was inescapable trouble coming, THIS IS WHAT THEY SAID THEY NOTICED FIRST.

….. People who never heard the word “No” for anything are being rejected for jobs that are three or four levels below what they’d typically be paid fortunes for are being reduced to taking unpaid internships to diversify their resumes and make themselves more marketable.

Some people are just giving up on finding work and have moved back in with their parents while they go to law school or go get MBAs, deciding to ride out the new depression in school while the gilded world around us implodes on itself in this the most historic and excellent Golden Age of Hope and Change.

….. The MSM and White House continue to tell us, every day, how historic Dr. Utopia’s presidency is and how happy we all must be that we have a black president now.

….. Hope!

Change!

Middle-management slurping old chili out of the garbage!

People losing their homes!

Talented professionals going almost a year without finding jobs!

Welcome to Dr. Utopia’s America, people.

Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

The idea of “being more like Europe,” a favorite mantra of the Left, looks a bit more desirable this morning – ”Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe’s largest economies Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere.”

Note the “clever” bias in this later sentence in the just-referenced AP report: “Fringe groups could use the EU parliament as a platform for their extreme views but were not expected to affect the assembly’s increasingly influential lawmaking on issues ranging from climate change to cell-phone roaming charges.” Sure, AP — Anyone who criticizes what may be the greatest hoax in human history is “fringe.” Plus the lawmaking isn’t “influential”; it’s “authoritarian.” Reporters Constant Brand and Robert Wielaard appear unhappy with the result. Too bad, so sad.

Related — In what the BBC called a “historic defeat,” Gordon Brown’s Labor Party got their butts kicked in the UK’s EU parliamentary elections. The UK Independence Party’s 17.4% share of the vote outdid Labour’s third-place share of 15.3%. This is first and foremost a pushback against globaloney, as Benny Peiser noted in his daily CCNet e-mail — “(The result) suggests that any party promoting unpopular climate policies and green taxes that will further increase the cost of energy, transport and travel for ordinary families risks being punished in future elections. As far as Britain is concerned, the Labour government and its green agenda is finished. Let that be a warning to President Obama and other would-be salvationists.”

Tapper Channels Allahpundit — It’s nine days old, but it’s too good to let go without notice. Jake Tapper, who may the only network news reporter not waving pompoms every time Dear Leader speaks, had a great headline at ABC’s Political Punch that instantly made a great point: “First President in US History to Have Voted to Filibuster a Supreme Court Nominee Now Hopes for Clean Process.” Ouch.

CBS’s expose of companies disguised as not-for-profits (big HT to an e-mailer) that have benefitted greatly from John Murtha’s ability to generate military contracts on their behalf never mentioned Murtha’s party in its audio, revealing his Democratic Party ID once in a caption that was visible for all of 3 seconds. The network’s text story at the link has a few “D-Pa” references, but no variation on “Democrat” is present. The brief intro by Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News — not visible at the CBS link, but visible here — also didn’t mention Murtha’s party. So the network got the party-ID thing partially right at best for thousands of online readers, and almost totally blew it for 5.5 million or so viewers. Big whoop. Real truth to power there, guys. Contrast that with the nine Republican references in the text of this 2006 CBS story about Jack Abramoff, who was not and is not an elected politician. The word “Republican” appears six times, along with three “R” affiliations. CBS’s interpid reporters were also able to find Democrat Howard Dean to criticize Abramoff in 2006, but “somehow” couldn’t find a Republican to criticize Murtha (oops — given the linguini spines seemingly dominating the national GOP, that may actually be possible).

Here’s Wesley Pruden, the take-no-prisoners editor emeritus and now occasional columnist at the Washington Times, on Barack Hussein Obama’s Cairo speech (transcript here; since Dear Leader mentioned his middle name there, I can assume I have his royal permission to do so as well) – “Mr. Obama’s revelation of his ‘inner Muslim’ in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA.” Exactly.

Wall Street Journal reporter Mei Fong wrote a report Friday about how some families in China, perhaps with the help of criminals, are marrying off their daughters with no intent of having them honor their vows in order to keep the “bride price,” an amount a groom’s family typically pays the bride’s family.

This development is just one of many perverse side-effects of resulting from the Chinese Communist government’s one-child policy (image at top right was found at this web address), which has now been in place for three decades. Because of that policy and the country’s male-preferring culture, far more pre-born girls than boys have been aborted, leading to a serious male-female imbalance.

Despite the history, Fong somehow managed to get through her 26-paragraph report without mentioning the terms “abortion” or “one-child.”

Here are the relevant paragraphs, with euphemistic words in bold after the title:

It’s Cold Cash, Not Cold Feet, Motivating Runaway Brides in China
Surplus of Bachelors Spurs New Scam

With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China.

Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

….. Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

Now some of these men have reached marriageable age, resulting in intense competition for spouses, especially in rural areas. It also appears to have caused a sharp spike in bride prices and betrothal gifts. The higher prices are even found in big cities such as Tianjin.

….. In the 1980s, before the start of China’s economic reforms, cai li (bride price) sums were small.

….. In the 1990s, cai li prices rose to several thousand yuan (about $200 to $400 at today’s conversion rates), mirroring the country’s growing prosperity. But it was only starting in 2002-03 that villagers noticed a sharp spike in cai li prices, which shot up to between 6,000 to 10,000 yuan — several years’ worth of farming income.

Not coincidentally, this was also the period when the first generation of children since the family-planning policy was launched in 1979 started reaching marriageable age.

While there are no nationwide statistics, wedding scams have occurred before, but usually isolated cases. Mr. Tang, Xin’an’s Communist Party secretary, says he has never before seen such clusters of cases. Most of the 11 families involved lost an average of 40,000 yuan.

Fong used the correct term (“population-planning policy”) in the fourth excerpted paragraph, but in the second-last slipped into the clearly incorrect “family-planning policy.” Sadly, it’s the government, not families, that is doing the “planning” in China.

Those who are not already aware of China’s one-child policy, a human-rights abuse of the highest order, with its tragic three-decade toll of aborted females, will remain unaware of it after reading Fong’s report.

Additionally, the sub-headline and content references to the ”surplus” of 32 million males is more than a little twisted, given that the situation really involves a shortage of females, because so many more of them have been aborted.

It’s also odd that Fong chose a British study covering 20 years without attempting to extrapolate its full implied impact. As of 2003, other studies indicated that the shortage of females in the 24 years since the inception of the one-child policy was already 40 million. Projecting that 40 million over 5-6 more years pushes the number of females lost to government-enforced brutality to well over 45 million.

Given the realities of journalism in China, it may be that even a Wall Street Journal reporter such as Fong had to keep from mentioning “one-child” and “abortion” to stay in good graces with government censors. If so, that’s unfortunate, and demonstrates that the Internet censorship apparatus built by US-based high-tech companies for the Chinese government in early 2006 may be having a chilling effect — perhaps conscious, perhaps not — on establishment media reports coming out of that country. But if Fong held back from describing why the bride scams are occurring because of not wanting to mention certain supposedly words considered politically-charged words in the West, shame on her.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

More perspective on what I wrote about here (“GM, Chrysler, and Uncle Sam Have Already Failed”) from the esteemed columnist:

The government’s $50 billion — so far — acquisition of the shadow of GM will injure, with unfair financial advantages, the surprisingly healthy U.S. auto company, Ford. Of course, the government does not intend that injury, any more than it intended to cause protests in Mexico over the high price of corn tortillas, a result of Washington’s mandate that Americans burn corn (ethanol) in their cars.

Washington’s “rescue” of GM began because GM is “too big to fail,” and bankruptcy is (well, was) “unthinkable.” Big? GM’s market capitalization, $375.8 million on Wednesday, is about the size of California Pizza Kitchen’s ($340 million) — is it too big to fail? — and one-eleventh that of Harley-Davidson ($4.3 billion). Fail? If GM has not already failed, New Coke was a success.

The administration is determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes. This frenzy will intensify as the administration’s decisions deepen the debacle.

Even the “jobs program” aspect of the government’s bailout effort has failed. Ask workers at five Chrysler plants in four states, who were told by Obama, administration officials, and the company executives that their jobs were safe just before its bankruptcy filing, only to see them saw them disappear when the filing took place, how much of a success it has been. Also ask GM workers at 14 plants to be closed in the wake of that bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Ford’s capitalization as of Friday’s close was $17.8 billion — almost exactly 50 times GM’s. Those investment gurus at Uncle Sam’s place really know how to pick ‘em.

If it weren’t for the Obama Fear Factor, Ford might be worth double what it currently is.