At Big Government, Peter Schweizer writes, “Okay, it’s time to finally admit it: Barack Obama hates businessmen. Not just certain businessmen, mind you, but the entire profession:”
Of course President Obama will deny this. He told Businessweek magazine in a recent interview that he is not anti-business and that he believes in the private sector. But the evidence is overwhelming, and it helps explain why he is pursuing kamakazi-like economic policies that will damage the private sector in America.
Obama has demonized just about every business sector in America. Through the 2008 campaign to the present, he has gone after credit card companies, the coal industry, mortgage companies, real estate companies, steelmakers, utilities, drug companies, doctors, oil companies, Wall Street, defense contractors, and health insurance companies, just to name a few. In each case he has dinged them for greed, taking excessive profits, and failing to put people first. His criticisms have not been over minor matters but over their basic core functions, and their values or lack of them. [His demonization of talk radio and Fox News also constitutes a front in his attack on business -- Ed]
Obama demonstrates almost complete ignorance about the private sector and it’s no wonder: he has so little experience in it. He has spent his adult life in college, teaching college, and organizing communities. The one private sector job he has held, for a consulting firm in New York, he recounts as a terrible experience. In his memoirs he describes the experience as working for a private business “like a spy behind enemy lines.” He also recounts in his memoirs that the multinational corporations in the Indonesia of his youth were propelling the average worker “into deeper despair.” He likened the presence of corporations in his native Africa to a form of “neocolonialism.” Michelle Obama has beseeched young people, “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we are asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers, work for the community, be a social worker, be a nurse….move out of the money-making industry, into the helping industry.”
This is, of course, the Obama Cosmotology. The private sector is largely populated by devils, who are self-oriented, concerned about personal gain, and unconcerned about others. The government, on the other hand, is made up of people bathed in altruism, whose only concern is you. Thus it is quite easy for Obama to recall the divide between the private and public sector as “enemy lines” even though he would never call the Iranian Mullahs, Hugo Chavez, or Vladimir Putin an “enemy.”
All of this begs the question: does Obama’s demonizing of business simply reflect his lack of experience in the private sector or is it based on a well-thought out analysis? In short, is it based on ignorance or ideology?
When it comes to Obama’s domestic war, why can’t the answer be both?
Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers, work for the community, be a social worker, be a nurse….
Sez the lady who held down a no-show $312K/year job at Univ. of Chicago Hospital care of her politically-connected husband and his earmarks for her employer.
Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers, work for the community, be a social worker, be a nurse….
Sez the lady who held down a no-show $317K/year job at Univ. of Chicago Hospital care of her politically-connected husband and his earmarks for her employer.
“Yuppie Parasites” doesn’t begin to describe these people.
The Solution is Simple
The following comment by Joe Y is eloquent. It is an insight into the simplistic view that many intelligent people have of the world, an explanation of why hope and change is so attractive, and an evaluation of President Obama’s abilities.
========
[edited, excerpt] The oddest thing about this election, was the continual leitmotif of Obama’s genius, from people that should have known better. People like Obama, of which I know and am related to far too many, are unable to seriously consider that there is any job (oil company CEO, football coach, running the local post office) that they cannot do as well or better than the person currently in the role, should they ever exert the effort to do so. It’s not a matter of faith, as faith requires a conscious effort; rather, it is a prejudice in the true sense of the word.
They believe that the government is better at running the country, because the solution to the problem, whatever the problem, is just so obvious. Deeper considerations are foreign to them, not because they are stupid (quite the opposite), but out of a prejudice that the they can see the solution to any problem. That is why they attack people who disagree with them as stupid, morons, and idiots.
Like most Ivy leaguers, Obama is a smart operator and a dedicated hustler obsessed with accomplishment. Like almost all Harvard men and women, he lacks an aptitude for self-doubt and humility, which people usually, and a bit unfairly, mistake for Harvard arrogance. He is superb at his chosen field; but that field is not being President, it is becoming President.
========
“Cosmotology”, you say? You might want to try turning that lemon into lemonade.
Howdy Neil
I wondered about “cosmotology” vs “cosmology” myself, but I decided “cosmetology” (based on appearances alone) was about right.
The widow’s mite was a wonderful gesture that fed no one and bought no oil for the altar lamps. The rich woman’s drachma may have been a pittance to her, but it fed the poor and it kept the lamps lit.
How kind a society that relieves the distress of the poor. How much better a society that reduces poverty itself! The lifestyle available to Americans of the 15th-30th percentile in income is not lavish by American standards, but it’s adequate compared to real poverty around the world, or the 15th-30th percentile lifestyle in most of the world.
Obama is worse than my worst nightmare of him as President – but at least I knew he’d be a nightmare. In himself, he is nothing to worry about. He is a talentless, no-count, never worked, shiftless liberal high-maintenance, fraud. He is Eliot’s Hollow Man to a T.S. In short, Obama is not the problem.
The problem that we quite possibly will never recover from is the 66m+ who voted for him.
That’s impossible if America is still America, and Americans are still a majority decent people.
They aren’t. Not any more. We have to admit that. It’s the truth. We have a rotten person as President because we have a majority of rotten people in our country. It’s been brewing for a few decades and that pot is finally ready. Either we fight this one out in the streets, metaphorically of course, or the grand experiment is finished and our generation would be the ungrateful louts who lost it to the tyrants and slobs.
Period.
…In his memoirs he describes the experience as working for a private business “like a spy behind enemy lines.”…
Err, well, Bill Ayers described it as such. YMMV.
‘Native Africa’?
Way to marginalize yourself with one poorly-chosen word.
There is a very simple reason why Obama hasn’t dropped much below 50% in the polls.
This 50% is the people on the receiving end of all the new largesse from the government. Money CAN buy happiness, especially if it is someone else’s money! This is entirely by design. If you aren’t one of that 50%, you are just a source of money to be tapped.
Happy Days!
I suspect Obama’s problem with the private sector is that during his brief experience he actually had to produce something of value and was rated on what and how he did. Anything less than a superlative rating would be unacceptable to a narcisist.
Pipedreams,
Well, two, actually.
but good point — mainly I was looking for an essay to tie the Photoshop in with.
Ed
Mike Mc: I think you’re really on to something there. It is the problem when people perceive that all they have to do is vote for something, like more broadband internet, and the government has to take it from Peter to logon Paul. The politicians don’t see the issue is really about individual rights. Like… you know…redistribute my income and make them cop an IRS Form 1099-Gov for getting it. Tooooo simple. Tooooo direct. And failure to report because you’re too high to remember is still a crime!
Obama is reminding me more and more of the two Reverends, Sharpton and Jackson who use the race hustle and politics to blackmail business and whole professions of money by the truckload. When he went after banks, did he and his cronies prosper, did the Democrat Socialist Party gain, you bet. Think how much money pours in if he demonizes a particular group like the latest when he blackmail the insurance business. Its called blackmail my friends using the the Presidency as a cudgel. He makes politics pay for his friends and himself, he’ll make Al Capone look like a cheap stick up man in comparison before he gets out of office.
Mike Mc: you have completely captured the ongoing conversation that I and a good friend have been having for nearly a year. We were never fooled by Obambi’s bullshit, but watched in horror as friends and acquaintances were bamboozled. How did this happen?
There is no explanation that works for me other than Americans are increasingly lazy–both physically and intellectually–and softened by decades of liberal battlespace preparation. For Christsakes! An arrogant, no-account little dick won the presidency of the U.S.A.!!
This is simply inexplicable unless one accepts that, to a greater degree than we want to admit, the American people are dipshits. At times, I’ve tried to soften this in conversations by allowing people to claim that they were fooled by Obama’s soothing rhetoric. Bullshit. They were too lazy to find out about the little prick’s background, they bought the white guilt trip, they were tired of being a bad guy who caught shit from liberal friends for believing in the need for a war against islamic terrorists. Or–worst of all–you thought you’d teach the GOP a lesson by staying home.
Well, America, you bought both the cancer and the car crash. This country may not be recognizable by 2012, and I have serious problems with 66 million of my countrymen for enabling this state of affairs. Some of them are fellow travelers, most were just fools. Period.
Andrew M Garland: that comment is indeed interesting and illuminative. There’s a well-known issue of cognitive psychology called ‘illusory superiority’. It manifests itself in something called the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’ (Google it). In summary, there is an inverse discrepancy between actual intelligence or competence and perceived intelligence or competence. This has the effect of really, really smart people underestimating their skills (because they are so smart they know how complex the world is in general) and dumb people overestimating their skills (because they are not cognitively gifted enough to grasp the ramifications of a problem). Scott Adams makes a lot of money via this trope: q.v. Pointy-haired boss vs. Dilbert. The effect in politics is, I believe, to promote arrogant self-belief at the expense of introspection. Obama is the Peter Principle made flesh. He’s not stupid, of course (no stupid man can rise to become President of the United States of America, and anyone who holds up the Ivy League MBA fighter pilot George W. Bush* as a counterexample is merely beclowning himself.) The problem is that this is the first time that Obama has had to make serious executive, rather than legislative, decisions, and he’s not up to it. He’s been constantly showered with accolades, but has never been proven in the forge of reality. He’s one of those drones at the fuzzy interface between government and corporatism, suddenly and prematurely thrust into the limelight. He’s smart, but not nearly as smart as everyone has told him he is (or as smart as he has come to believe himself to be.) I’m probably more intelligent than Obama (from a raw IQ standpoint, for what that’s worth), which might be why if someone offered me the Presidency on a plate, I’d run away screaming. Really au fond, the problem is that anyone who thinks they can handle the job of President should likely be disbarred from public office. But Obama acts as if to the manner born. The greatest service Rahm Emanuel could do is to stand behind him and whisper, “memento mori: remember, thou art mortal!”
* deeply disappointing as a President though he may have been, he was emphatically not stupid
The worldview Andrew Garland describes is common to many, maybe most, people. When they are teenagers. For most of us, it is gradually replaced by humility that results from the confrontation of our narcissistic fantasies with the real world. We fail a lot, because most of us actually try to do things, produce things. And the real world shows us, continuously, that we are all too fallible, all too limited.
Obama, as all of us who voted against him knew, and as increasing numbers of the formerly enchanted are finding out, never encountered such real world “push back.” He has been allowed by life to live on in his adolescent delusions about his own vast intellectual superiority. Being a somewhat smart, “clean” (Biden’s word) black man has meant that in the precincts he has frequented, no one dared challenge him seriously or inform him that he wasn’t quite as wonderful as he thought. So, I don’t know if it is “prejudice” or simply lingering narcissism plus developmental arrest.
PD Quig is of course right about the Left’s prepared battle space. But I think at least as big a factor is the celebrity/media culture we have surrendered to. As we know, the media also made John McCain, the “maverick.” But it was Obama, a man who had literally produced nothing in his entire career except self-promoting verbiage (and we wonder how much of that was ghost written), who was promoted into a super celebrity of messianic stature. This is a degenerated culture populated by more people who follow American idol and WWF than read books, or study history or politics. We are drunk with media, drunk with celebrity, drunk with groupthink delirium. We got the president we deserve. And we will now reap the consequences we deserve. Our cushy little fantasy life will now be stripped from us.
It’s amazing how much Obama is like his mother with regard to hating the private sector…
JamesJust is claiming that Hussein Obama never graduated from Harvard law school- keep this in mind because in due time JamesJust will be proven right that he predicted that Hussein Obama never accumulated the required coursework credits to have graduated from Harvard law School.
A Democrat was probably going to win in 2008. Not on merit (unless GOP demerit counts as merit), but that’s another question. Point is, tho commenters above rightly blame the country’s moronic body politic, the best place for the most blame to rest is in the major political party (one of our two) which somehow –apparently, since so little ideology ever actually emits from their congresspersons, out of moneylust and cowardice, –gave itself over to a very small but global cabal of transnazi billionaires whose game plan for their picked & packaged president could be as mild as a massive growth of federal government power over private industry, or as severe as a conspired (unretaliated) thermonuclear ICBM strike on the 80 some-odd targets that soviet doctrine sees as the minimum necessary to permanently end the threat from the West. In neither case, nor at anything in between, should anyone be surprised. The nation has enemies and this presidency is their time to act.
A lot of the blame has to be on the GOP — by 2006 it was tax cuts, torture and bash gays uber alles. Where was the vision? What happened to the belief in small government? It disappeared down the path of bribing the electorate. So if both parties are big government, big spenders, the people decided to at least go with the big spenders who really meant it.
Anthony, right –sins of omission vs sins of commission –either way, the wages of –well, you know.
Answer to your question: Yes.
@David Gillies: nice post; read about the D-K effect. The internets! You can larn stuff on it!
17. Victor Erimita:,
No, it is not a surrender to the media culture. It is something that happened in Illinois before. The chance to elect the First Black xxxx. In the case of Illinois the First Black Female Senator: Carol Moseley Braun. I caught that fever. I did not catch Obama fever.
You write, “All of this begs the question: does Obama’s demonizing of business simply reflect his lack of experience in the private sector. . .”
With all good will, no it doesn’t. To “beg the question” doesn’t mean “to ask a question, or to ask for that question to be posed”.
This is a specialized idiom of logic. It means “to support an argument by assuming the correctness of a statement which hasn’t itself been logically demonstrated.” Such an argument is often circular in form. A sample:
“Our rabbi is so holy that every night he talks to God.”
“Oh? How do you know he’s telling you the truth about such a thing?”
“Don’t be silly. Would someone who talks to God be a liar?”
Loki1,
I didn’t write that; that’s still part of blockquote of the post written Peter Schweizer of Big Government.
Ed