Pelosi Motors, Inc. II

Here we wait, with baited breath, as to whether the Detroit auto makers will be bailed out or will have to file chapter 11.  If GM has any sense, it’ll take chapter 11.  Because if it doesn’t, it will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party.  

As things stand now, GM (I use GM as shorthand for GM, and Chrysler) is a welfare agency funded by the manufacture of expensive luxury cars, large SUV’s and trucks.  And, as a bone to be tossed to the environmentalists, also manufactures small cars at a loss.  It provides lavish health care benefits and pensions for a retired workforce that outnumbers the number of UAW workers actually on the production line.  Through the “job bank” it runs a de facto unemployment agency.  Essentially, GM runs a social security agency, a medicare agency and unemployment agency.  Car manufacturing is just a side line activity.

The whole shell game worked as long as there was cheap gas.  But, the environmentalists over-reached, when their nirvana of four-plus dollar gasoline hit last summer.  Then the whole game of selling large cars to subsidize small cars and a welfare agency fell apart when the environmental wing of the Democratic party decided, in the name of global warming, to declare a jihad on the internal combustion engine.

And, “bankruptcy is not an option” Pelosi is trying to have her cake and eat it.  She wants to prop up GM Welfare, Inc. as payback to Big Labor.  And, she wants to appease the green crowd with “fuel efficient” cars.  What this bailout will do, especially with a “car czar” in Obama’s administration will result in is subsidization of UAW membership, working and retired, and diktats for econoboxes that you’re going to have to give away.  The Trabant comes to America!  Maybe each should have a bust of Nancy as a hood ornament.  We could augment the Pelosi car lineup with the Lada and the Skoda.  Back in 1992, I drove around in a Skoda in Iceland; it had a manual choke.  Manual choke, like the one on your lawn mower.  Never saw one in a car?  I thought so.

And, all the assumptions that drive the green agenda are suspect to say the least.  Global warming is in the process of being debunked.  And, Dr. Chu, our new Energy Secretary, doesn’t impress even waving his gold bauble he got in Stockholm.  Also, with economic growth, jobs and a recession, possibly a depression, this green agenda is going to be a real loser at the polls come 2010.  

It’s not that GM makes bad cars.  They make good trucks, SUV’s and large cars.  These big cars are more comfortable, have greater utility and are safer.  You’re going to make ten trips in a smart car if you’re going to get enough groceries home to feed your family; I’ll pass on that fuel economy.  While you may use said car as a single passenger for a good deal of the time; there comes many a time when you indeed need the extra space for, say, the hockey team and their attendant massive duffles of equipment.  And, yes, I know.  Your not supposed to have a family because of each child’s massive carbon footprint.  ”Enlightened” Americans realize that abortion is so much more environmentally sensitive.  

Big cars are safer, because mass is greater structural rigidity.  You can put all the airbags in you want; add one hundred pounds of structural steel and it’s just safer.

And, given a choice most people prefer them to any tin bucket with pie-pan wheels. Start with Obama; he’s got an SUV for his family.  His new presidential limo is based on a Chevy 2500 chassis.  Also, watch, all of his Hollywood celebrity friends pulling up for the inauguration in their 10 mph limos (after arriving in their private jets).  You’ll see the typical elitist conceit that all of this “sacrifice” and “save the earth claptrap” is for other, lesser people.

Over in Europe, manufactures such as BMW and Mercedes Benz make very substantial cars for rich customer who can afford and otherwise don’t care about $9 per gallon gas.  Somehow, when given a choice, this claptrap of global warming, carbon footprints seem to go down the drain.

Any bankruptcy court will immediately see the value of GM and its American counterparts.  All three of these American manufacturers make light trucks and SUV’s that are very much desired.  Stripped of its money-losing domestic small car operations all three of these companies can make motor vehicles that will attract customers.  Also, there will still be a vast market for spare parts and service.

If Pelosi has any smarts, she’d best dump her green crowd since $4 per gallon gas is going to lose more elections than win them.  She’d also be well served to abolish CAFE standards and drill, drill, drill. 

Obama’s Legacy; It Ain’t Nancy’s Problem

The Democratic overreaching begins. It looks like Waxman is going to oust Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. What we have is the hard left of the Democratic party driving policy; in this case energy policy with complete obeisance to the environmentalists. Translation, global warming with cap and trade.

So, just when the economy is tanking, we’re going to be faced with artificially high energy prices to “encourage” us to switch to “alternate, green” energy. This encouragement will be in the form of the return of four-dollar plus gasoline. If this represents a pattern we’ll see more killer tax and spending policies coming out of other parts of Pelosi’s Congressional Empire.  

Obama’s, like pirate Jack Sparrow, has just been tossed up on a desert isle with a pistol and one bullet. He’s all alone. What Obama will have to realize is that his getting into subsidized housing on 1600 Pennsylvania is all and the entire bone that the Democratic leadership is willing to give to its black constituency. As far as they’re concerned, the legacy of Obama is getting elected. Whether he’s successful in his own right is not their problem.

From Pelosi’s and Reid’s point-of-view, picking off enough Republican Senate and Congressional seats and putting Obama in the White House was to give them the running room to pass their agenda. And, in particular, before any backlash in the 2010 mid-term elections, jam as much stuff through this two-year window of opportunity. For Pelosi in particular, and her power barons in the House leadership, being almost immune to any voter backlash, they will have their agenda and to hell with the other rats, Democratic and Republican, on the sinking ship. Obama’s going to have to realize he’s one of those rats that Pelosi could give a rat’s ass about.

Obama’s no longer from a safe seat. His legacy, if he wants a positive one, will require more that being a first in the form of high melanin content. He will need a track record of accomplishment to secure a real place in the history books. A record of accomplishment that will secure him a second term. A record of accomplishment that will allow him to retain running room with regards to working with congress. A record of accomplishment that will allow him to pull a country out of a recession and not degenerate into a depression; and not have his one-term presidency tarred as Hoover II (or Carter II).

In short, Obama will need to realize that he no longer lives in the bubble of pre-ordained elections of the Chicago Democratic machine. He needs to truly in the center and start playing football between the 40 yard lines. Frankly, he need Senator McConnell, his GOP caucus and enough blue-dog Democrats to form a governing coalition. Reid, Pelosi, Dodd, Schumer, Frank, Rangell are not his friends. 

The Economic as Political

Now, we have the prospect of all sorts of federal interventions into the private sector. The latest is a proposal to bail out Detroit’s Big Three automakers. And, in this red-hot political climate, it looks like the tax payer may be on the hook for yet another economic disaster. Yet, for all of the valid arguments about the moral hazard of such interventions, we enter the conundrum of greater economic interventions into the private sector engender more and render simple economic activities political. A phenomenon alluded in the The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. 

Detroit’s problems are to some extent a product of their own making. But, some of these problems are because of events and situations created by situations that are political. In many respects, many of the problems that the Big Three auto makers were facing were being solved until the latest gas price crunch. And, four dollar gas was a situation created in Washington D.C.; not in the free market. Energy production has been a political football for the last several decades. The result is no meaningful expansion of energy production. Off-shore drilling, ANWR, new refinery construction, nuclear power all no, no, no and no. Do the thermodynamics, wind and solar aren’t going to be major players–ever.

The sudden rise in gas prices suddenly upended a recovery plan, particularly for GM, by rendering the very vehicles GM planned to sell untenable in this market. And, for many who in the name of global warming (er, now change) this was exactly the plan. So what Detroit planned to sell and what, with cheaper gas prices, consumers wanted was suddenly upended by political decisions and activities designed to specifically thwart such free market exchanges of such goods. What was an aesthetic on the part of some people who felt that others shouldn’t have access to such horrible goods as SUV’s and full-sized pickup trucks became reality by convoluted government fiat. Government fiat that systematically constrained domestic energy exploration driving up energy prices.

In the end, the simple act of pulling up to a gas station and paying money for a simple commody such as gasoline now becomes a political statement. And, as government intervention becomes even more omnipresent, with taxpayers holding the bag for even more economic activities, suddenly everyone’s private economic choices become everyone’s business; they become political.

Smoking in private establishments was once a decision by the bar owner to weigh the economic consequences of whether it was more profitable to allow smoking or not. It now morphs into laws in Southern California to ban the construction of new fast-food emporiums because of the “unhealthy” food served. In Chicago, it becomes a ban on foie gras. Or, for the Democratic convention last August, ridiculous requirements on the types of food to be served–including the color. Or, Palin mentions nary a word on abortion or guns, yet her actions draw the rage of the bi-coastal elite.  The mere act of knowingly giving birth to a Down’s baby, her private decision, is political.

It frankly becomes tedious to live each day having to somehow justify private decisions to every nit-picking activist who lose sleep nightly worrying that somewhere, someone is having a good time and I have to stop it. Wouldn’t it be nice if what we eat, drive, pump or shoot would be regarded as our own business; and none of your damn business.

And, wouldn’t be nice to recognize that there is enough creative energy out there to insure pleantiful and cheap energy without the belief that government has to somehow conjure up that creativity with taxes and regulation.

Drill for oil and watch gas prices drop. Detroit problem solved without a penny of tax money committed.

 

 

 

Ethanol, Morality and the Inhumanity of Environmentalism

There’s a recent story of a woman in Britain who had an abortion, followed by sterilization so as not to burden the earth with her consumption of the earth’s finite resources; or reduce her carbon footprint; I can’t remember the precise reason.  Apparently, she didn’t care enough to eliminate herself as well.

Then, there’s information that a tankful of ethanol consumes enough corn to feed a person for an entire year.  Also, the creation of that gallon of ethanol consumes enough energy so as to create no net gain in energy available.   The ultimate farm program–grow corn and then burn it.

Then, we have the situation of a resurgence of insect borne diseases, particularly malaria in the third world.  It seems that the enforcement of our ban on DDT is being enforce world-wide.  These poverty stricken countries, unable to afford the more expensive substitutes, elect to do nothing since they cannot.  Now malaria, on the wane, has claimed a toll of tens of millions of lives.  Is it that the lives of raptors exceeds the value of the lives of our dark skinned brothers and sisters in the third world?  Oh, no, such politically incorrect thoughts would never cross the minds of the melanin-challenged directorate of the Sierra Club.

Same said environmentalists will do everything to block any logging activities in our public lands.  The result is fuel chocked forest stands that burn with a ferocity that makes firefighting so lethal that lives are now routinely lost fighting those fires.  And, somehow, clear cutting is the most horrible fate to befall any forest.  Yet, burnt out stands of forest, moonscapes sometimes occupying hundreds of square miles, are somehow more attractive.

A distinction needs to be drawn between the conservation of Teddy Roosevelt and modern-day environmentalism.  The former is good stewardship.  Use what you need, but don’t waste what you don’t.  It is an ethic that recognizes that our natural resources are there for human beings.  Human beings are part of the ecosystem.  That the one species, made in the image of God, does have a priority and that we have a moral obligationto use those resources to aid and preserve human life.

Environmentalism, however, looks upon man as some alien interloper to be somehow banished.  At least those humans that live in fly-over country.  Not the ones that assuage their guilty consciences by eating free range chicken at some tony San Francisco eatery on some environmental foundation expense account. Never mind that factory-farm Tyson chicken is, for some families, the only way to afford reasonable priced protein.  It is not science, but an aesthetic only of individuals who have the economic wherewithal to spin loopy theories of social ordering.  Then have the clout, courtesy their foundations, to buy their way into the halls of power and impose such since their theories will never intrude into their insulated lives; but will wreck devastation upon those less fortunate (and less enlightened) who don’t have the decency to know their places in the environmental new world order.  

Scores or more of these troglodytes are rendered unemployed because logging operations are completely shut down for some environmental aesthetic.  Never mind that any forest needs to be culled.  And, those trees culled can become wood for peoples homes.  No, it is far preferable to allow those some fuel chocked woods to burn to the ground rather than allow human benefit in the form of jobs or forest products such as shelter for fellow humans.

Then, we get to the ultimate burning.  Corn for ethanol.  The ethanol craze is leading to the conversion of crop land to the cultivation of crops merely for the purpose of ethanol distillation.  Even rain forests (remember that vogue cause) are being leveled in the name of ethanol.  Now, food shortages are leading to food riots in the third world.  And, in those same areas, where hope of economic progress was lifting millions out of abject poverty, we are seeing those dreams flattened by rising food prices driving those same-said people back into extreme privation.  It is one area where environmentalism has crossed a bright moral line.  It is a practice that needs to be stopped because it is literally stealing food from the mouths of fellow humans.  Conservatives, like myself, once decried farm price supports.  Now, I pine for the good old days of farm subsidies–subsidies that at least lead to farm production that produced food.  Food for people to eat. 

Finally, we come to the role of pseudo-science, myth, in the role of extending the reach of the environmental aesthetic.  DDT is the index case.  Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it turns out, played fast and loose with the facts.  There is a considerable group of counter-arguments that call into question the validity of Carson’s conclusions.  Eagle populations were, in fact, recovering long before the DDT ban because of other legislative measures going back to the 50’s that were successfully protecting our national bird.  The DDT ban was a contest of wills and the marker of a committment to the cause of environmental aesthetics, not a regulatory policy scientifically designed to address a specific problem.  Yet, the precedent was set.  Namely, a green light for any environmental “problem” to given credence with out any evidence to support such a charge.  It became the practice to level an environmental charge and force the target to prove the negative.  The latest is the fraud known as global warming (or now climate change since warming isn’t quite hold water anymore).  

Yet, while this latest pseudo-scientific fad, global warming is finally wilting under data that is implying the opposite (and finally going the way of the such fads as eugenics), it has already left a wreckage of public policy that will take years to sort out. Maybe four dollar gasoline is a God-send to the environmental set, but it has had a devastating impact on the lives of “bitter” America.  The plumber that installs your $1500 designer faucet as the tile man installs your granite counter top in your gourmet kitchen comes to your house in full-size pickup because they need them to carry the tools and materials that are part and parcel of their trade–no, it won’t fit in a Prius.