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The Obama Record
The Obama Record: The president has made Mitt Romney's Bain Capital a target of his re-election campaign. That's one way to divert attention from poor performance. It's also a way to undermine capitalism.
At a New York fundraiser Monday night, Obama called the free market "the greatest wealth generator ever devised by man." Those are fine words for a campaign stop among the moneyed set. But those words aren't backed by the actions of a president who only months ago claimed the free market "has never worked."
The same day Obama flopped back to his "capitalism is good" position, his team set out to taint Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney co-founded and ran as CEO.
In a campaign video, Romney is described as a "vampire" and "job destroyer." The Obama camp charges him with taking profits "at great cost to American workers and their communities."
That's the work of the real Obama, who's just another of those malcontents who has become a success, thanks to capitalism yet rants regularly about its evils.
During Obama's 40 months in the White House, he has undermined capitalism and impugned business as a matter of routine.
The former community organizer had just entered office when, in the summer of 2009, the federal government gave General Motors $49.5 billion in aid, including a $6.7 billion loan, to finance its bankruptcy. The result: Washington, not private shareholders, took roughly 61% ownership of GM.
The Obama Record
The bailout wasn't to save capitalism; it was a payback to the United Auto Workers union that gave Obama and his party more than $4 million. The UAW's pension fund was given 17.5% of the new GM, worth about $7 billion.
GM wasn't Obama's only trophy. Chrysler was bailed out in 2009 as well, receiving $30 billion from Washington. Once again, the UAW was rewarded, this time with a 55% share of the company. In both bailouts, those with nonunion financial interests in the companies, from bondholders to creditors, received third-class treatment.
While it's comforting to think the bailouts ended with GM and Chrysler, Obama has ominously said, "What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries."
It's reasonable to think he was signaling he might bail out/take over other industries.
Obama has continued his capitalism-wrecking, union-favoring campaign by naming members to the National Labor Relations Board who tried to block Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina to build the company's 787 Dreamliner.
The NLRB accused Boeing of locating in a right-to-work state as a reprisal against union workers who organized strikes at the company's Washington plant — one of which delayed production of the long-awaited 787 and cost the company $1.8 billion.
The NLRB has since relented, but only when Boeing agreed to build its 737 Max, due for 2017 deliveries, in Washington.
In his first State of the Union address, Obama already was attacking free enterprise. His to-do list from that 2009 speech was so appalling that columnist Lawrence Kudlow claimed the president had declared "war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds."
Other decisions that define Obama's contempt for capitalism and business include:
• Trying to put private insurers out of business and taking over one-seventh of the economy through ObamaCare.
• Seizing, in effect, the bank industry and nationalizing the student loan program.
• Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline.
• Delaying approval of the South Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals.
• The sharp spike in costly regulations.
• His hope of hiking the tax burdens on oil companies by stripping them of the same tax breaks available to all industries.
Remember, this is the president who said in "Dreams From My Father" that he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines" when he worked briefly as a researcher for a "consulting house to a multinational corporation." He's the same guy who promised that the price of electricity, the lifeblood of business and capitalism, would skyrocket if the industry used fuel he didn't approve of.
Candidate Obama vowed to transform America. The record shows he tried.
Now he needs to be thrown out of office before he does more damage.
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