Embodied in our founding documents is the promise of unparalleled "Opportunity For All". This is what makes America unique. In no other country can children of poor immigrants rise to the pinnacle of wealth and power. Talent, education and hard work are building blocks of the American success story, not birthright or ethnicity.
Have we done enough to preserve our special heritage - Have we been good custodians of our patrimony? As the son of bootblack I know firsthand the opportunities that can arise when you mix education and hard work. The American system has certainly worked well for this boy from the Bronx as well as for a half African-American lawyer who recently became President of the United States and countless tens of millions of others who have risen from…
Continue reading | 14 Comments
The U.S. must join the rest of the Western world and ensure that every American has access to modern healthcare. We will however accomplish nothing worthwhile if we provide universal healthcare insurance and don't have a real plan to deliver healthcare to the 46 million Americans who are now uninsured. Liberals, conservatives and moderates in Congress have developed innumerable insurance schemes, electronic medical record systems, a cliché or two about living healthy lives, tax mechanisms to pay the bill but have no plan to actually deliver healthcare the day after they congratulate themselves on reforming the "healthcare system". Maybe they can borrow George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" sign.
Those of us who have worked with dozens of differing universal healthcare systems throughout the world come to the problem with a very different…
Continue reading | 8 Comments
Start small: dispose of a pesky corporate CEO, who is not compliant and objects to your grand design for the U.S. automobile industry. Who could object to the summary dismissal of the unpopular Mr. Wagoner, after all he was just getting in the way of the grand plan. Never mind that President Obama had no such legal authority. By simple fiat, he fired a sitting corporate CEO, and overrode those with the legal authority to make such decisions, the GM board of directors.
Like so many politicians before him, he instinctively knows that in an opportune economic crisis, it is only a small step from being the duly elected "President" to being transformed into a charismatic leader with the power to bend the will of the people to his own. It…
Continue reading | 113 Comments
Despite the soaring rhetoric to the contrary, President Obama has amassed an impressive record of caving to every Democratic special interest group in America. Not once, has he stood up to the special interests. The critical question is - will he find his manhood before he gives away the national store?
We were promised shovel ready infrastructure projects by President Obama, but only a miserly 8% of the $787 billion stimulus plan was allocated to this use, and very little of that will be spent in 2009. The left of his party held sway and President Obama sheepishly, albeit with great fanfare, signed on.
With great oratorical flourish we were introduced to President Obama's choice for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, the man who would bring real change to a failing inner-city…
Continue reading | 11 Comments
Through coercion and fiat His Royal Highness (HRH) Obama has forced the senior-secured lenders to take a secondary position to unsecured lenders in the "pre-packaged" Chrysler-FIAT bankruptcy plan. President Obama characterized the 20 or so lenders who were opposed to the plan as "a small group of speculators". His left wing "nut job" ally Representative Dingell characterized them as "vultures" and warned that they "will be dealt with in court". Their crime one can only assume is being moneylenders, but they are not the ones on trial.
Until this week senior secured lenders, those that held a contract that gave them first lien on a companies assets, had a preferential position in any bankruptcy proceeding unless of course they "voluntarily" give up that right. HRH Obama has by simple royal fiat…
Continue reading | 7 Comments
As a matter of morals, ethics and political philosophy, I support gay marriage. But as an ardent proponent of separation of Church and State, I would prefer civil unions, in which homosexual couples have identical rights and obligations as married heterosexual couples. I'm certain of only one thing; this distinction will be will be too subtle for both the fervent supporters and opponents of gay marriage.
When the smoke clears from the obfuscating rhetoric, gay union speaks solely to constitutionally guaranteed rights of gay couples to enjoy the benefits accorded to married heterosexual couples. Gay marriage, on the other hand, opens a discussion of how deeply we should allow religious beliefs to color our civil discourse. For the opponents of gay marriage, it is simple. Their religious beliefs trump constitutional and…
Continue reading | 16 Comments
"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty" - Albert Einstein.
I grew up in the Bronx where the public school system, with a few exceptions, was at best second-class. We who were fortunate enough to be born Irish, Italian, German, Polish and Hispanic Catholics were sent by our parents to "parochial school." The nickels, dimes and quarters thrown into the Sunday collection were used to build a parish school next to virtually every church -- just as the Emperor Charlemagne, the putative founder of public education, had once commanded. As a group, we eschewed public funding in order to ensure the proper education of our children.
The Irish priests and nuns of my youth dedicated themselves to ensuring that…
Continue reading | 5 Comments
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The right to bear arms, like the right of free speech, is a limited right and not an unalienable (absolute) right such as life, liberty and property.
In striking down the District of Columbia's law banning handgun possession (
Columbia ET AL. v. Heller) even the most conservative of the justices had to concede: "Like most rights, the
Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." In his opinion Justice
Scalia reaffirmed Cruikshank (1894): "The second amendment ... means no more than that it shall…
Continue reading | 32 Comments
No institution, including city and state governments, should be permitted to grant a new
defined-benefit pension. A defined benefit plan is a plan in which the benefit on retirement is determined by a set formula, rather than depending on investment returns. We do not have Nostradamus's ability to prognosticate and we can't know if today's iconic companies will be mere shells when those pensions come due 30 years hence. Do we need to be reminded of those great icons of the Airline industry like TWA, Pan Am and Eastern to understand how empty those pension promises can become?
Yesterday it was the Airline industry today it is the Automotive industry. GM's pension system had a $20 billion shortfall as of Nov. 30, 2008, based on numbers the company provided the…
Continue reading | 25 Comments
Treasury Secretary Geithner's toxic asset plan appears to be a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. On the surface this pari passu public-private
partnership seems simple enough. The
government puts up $75 to $100 billion of TARP funds matched by an equal investment from five major investors and then the brew is levered six times and voila $700 billion to $1 trillion worth of toxic assets disappear from bank balance sheets.
Financing for these purchases is to come from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve. The FDIC, which regulates the banks, has an even more important role: It will act as the hammer to pressure banks into participating.
The devil is in the details -- specifically, pricing. Up until now the banks have been required…
Continue reading | 2 Comments
