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…
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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…
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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…
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