Strong Arm Tactics

While reeking of appeasement abroad, the Obama administration is cutting a wide swath here in the US with Obama firing the head of a car company en route to nationalizing two of the former Big Three to vest control of them with the unions who broke them while essentially robbing the common shareholder who beyond a mostly meaningless proxy vote had no say in how companies were run. The government regulators across industry and finance did less than nothing to protect the small individual investor who the last President Bush and Secretary of Treasury Paulson so falsely maligned as "speculators". There were and are certainly speculators, but so many hurt in the Bush recession which is becoming the Obama depression, were buy and hold investors, not looking for quick profits by way of a trade but specifically seeking out blue chip shares to derive an income from dividends. They were given a false sense of security by company assurances, words they falsely believed had meaning such as fiduciary responsibility that was supposed to keep those running the companies on the straight and narrow, and the government regulation regime that continued to instill confidence in investors that their interests were being protected by government when there should have been none. The government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with laws against supposed discriminatory lending known as "redlining" actually started the "sub prime" avalanche that collapsed the economy. The government created the mess, caused an artificial sense of security that investors' interests were being looked after, and now is rewarding labor which destroyed management in what used to be the largest industrial companies. American hospitals have now been essentially extorted to provide $155 billion for the coming national health care scheme. They were told to contribute now to funding uninsured care and look like team players and good guys or have your government reimbursement for care provided cut much more deeply and the accompanying bad p.r. of being called out as working against the interests of taxpayers and your own patients. This is Daley Chicago Machine style legal blackmail. The government threatens banks to take TARP money whether they need it or not, then uses the rationale that they took said money to exert control over them, from making them buy failing brokerages against the fiduciary interests of their common shareholders (who were after all the presumptive owners) as was the case in Bank of America being forced to acquire Merrill. The banks, many of which were cajoled into taking the government's money, now find themselves subject to the new "compensation czar". Some banks have not been permitted to pay the government back and may not be allowed out from under the new regulatory regime that they never needed to place themselves under in the first place as they had relatively strong balance sheets but were forced by the government to take over weak or failing institutions and given TARP funds with strangling strings attached for their trouble which they were told was necessary by said government regulators to preserve the US financial system. So from our largest corporations to the government telling you what vehicle you may drive and which light bulb you must use, we have a sweeping loss of freedom, not to mention, little anti-Constitutional measures like the test case roll out of door to door gun searches with one hundred extra Federal agents gathered from all over the country in Houston, Texas, as has been widely reported. So project weakness abroad, appease enemies, threaten friends, stand against freedom seekers in Honduras with a nascent dictator, blow kisses to Iran, give platitudes about "restraint" to China, quaking at North Korea, all the while bullying, to extract concessions from capital (management) while throwing unprecedented sops to labor which had outlived its usefulness as a movement and was on its way to dying a natural death were it not primarily for government workers, including teachers. Give in to foreign enemies, unnecessarily pressure friends abroad to make them adversaries, rise above media scrutiny-after all the media except for a few bastions like talk radio, some elements at Fox, and a few conservative bloggers here and there on the Internet are with the team, just as car makers, banks, and hospitals have just been cajoled to be. In America, it's risky and expensive to be seen to be against Obama.