Conservative Principles Now

Last night President Barack Obama held a behind-closed-door dinner with 17 chief executive officers from major U.S. corporations including Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Verizon Communications’ Ivan Seidenberg, and General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt. According to Bloomberg, the President made the case to his select guests that his administration is “fundamentally business-friendly.” This comes almost two weeks after the President told BusinessWeek: “[T]he irony is, is that on the left we are perceived as being in the pockets of Big Business. And then on the business side, we are perceived as being anti-business.”

What the President fails to understand is that there is no irony here. It is entirely consistent for big government policies that favor select and politically connected big corporations to hurt the economy as a whole. In fact, almost all well-intentioned government interventions in the market place do exactly that.  In a July 2009 interview with BusinessWeek, President Obama spoke of an earlier behind-closed-door meeting he had with top corporate executives:

The last lunch that I had, I guess we had the CEOs of Xerox (XRX), AT&T (T), Honeywell (HON), and Coke (KO). We talked about the fact that, in the 1980s, when everybody was afraid Japan was going to eat our lunch, a lot of companies did a 180 in terms of quality improvement, efficiency, increasing productivity. There was a change in corporate culture that significantly boosted corporate productivity for a long time and helped create the boom of the ’90s. What they pointed out was, there were a couple of sectors that were resistant to that: health care, education, energy, and government.
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[What we're saying] matches up almost perfectly with what those CEOs were saying: Can we introduce the same sort of productivity in the health-care industry, which we know is going to be a growing sector because of the aging population? Can we use the need to transition our energy economy in such a way that it ends up being a huge engine for economic growth? Can we revamp our education system so that it’s producing the kind of workers we need? … we need to get beyond this notion that somehow government is always just the problem.

But as others have pointed out, the reason the health care, education, and energy sectors all failed to improve quality, efficiency, and productivity in the 80s is because those sectors were, and continue to be, the sectors most dominated by government intervention: our education system is a near total government monopoly; the federal government controls the majority of health care spending in this country, and our environmental laws make new energy development in this country virtually impossible. But President Obama seems completely oblivious to these facts. He is supremely confident that his government “pro-business” interventions will be ahistorically successful. And so he confidently tells BusinessWeek: “You would be hard-pressed to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses.”

Never mind that President Obama’s cap and trade proposal would be worth billions to select power companies but cost the U.S. economy as a whole trillions of dollars. Never mind that his health care plan would turn health insurance companies into public-utility like monopolies at tremendous cost to small businesses. Never mind that the President’s big labor-friendly tax hikes would cripple American competitiveness. President Obama’s “pro-business” TARP related actions helped lower the United States rank in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, from “free” to “mostly free.”  The President must stop having behind-closed-door meetings with his favorite CEOs and start pursuing an economic agenda that helps everyone.

Quick Hits:

• According to the Associated Press there is one point on which Democrats and Republicans agree on health care: “President Barack Obama’s much-touted televised summit has virtually no chance of breaking the political logjam.”
• In a sign that Democratic congressional leaders are beginning to face the reality that they may not be able to pass the comprehensive health care overhaul sought by President Barack Obama, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told the AP: “We may not be able to do all. … But having said that, if we can’t, then you know me — if you can’t do a whole, doing part is also good.”
• A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 56% of U.S. voters oppose Obamacare while only 41% support it.
• Despite his push to rein in special interests, President Obama’s aggressive domestic policy agenda sparked a boom on K Street with with the average payout for health care, energy and financial interests lobbyists reaching as high as $177,000.
• Led by Greece’s two biggest unions, tens of thousands of Greeks walked off the job Wednesday as part of a 24-hour nationwide general strike protesting the Socialist government’s deficit reduction efforts.

Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report today:

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.

Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.

We are in no way the first to point this out, but this Obama administration strategy is taken directly from the pages of Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It identifies thirteen rules for progressive activists including, “The thirteenth rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Explaining just how far progressives must be willing to go to marginalize their “enemies” Alinsky explains a few pages later:

Many liberals during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 percent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard but then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as, “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.

And then in his final chapter, Alinsky reveals what progressives really think of the average American: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right.”

Contempt for average Americans, and the desire to marginalize their common sense questions, is both at the core of the Progessive vision for governance and completely antithetical to the values of our Founding Fathers. Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, explains:

The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.

The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
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The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.

This is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of  “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like, “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies use more expensive alternative energy sources?”, and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage?” can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced. That’s what the White House campaign the Politico identifies today is all about.

Quick Hits:

• Neil Barofsky, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), warns that the $700 billion bailout program has damaged the government’s credibility, won’t earn taxpayers all their money back and has done little to change a culture of recklessness on Wall Street.
• President Obama raised between $2 million and $3 million for Democrats during a $15,200-per-plate dinner in new York last night.
• According to a new Washington Post poll, 63% of Americans say the Obama administration does not have a clear strategy for Afghanistan.
• Government Reform Chairman Ed Towns (D-NY) locked Republicans out of the committee room after the minority tried to force a subpoena vote in the committee regarding a Countrywide Financial investigation.
• According to a new study by the University of California, Berkeley, the children of Hispanic immigrants fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older.