Back to Basics

This fringe chump is wielding a disturbing amount of political power to silence free-market, limited government voices. What are you doing about it?

My column this week is a follow-up to last week’s piece on ALEC vs. the progressive mob/corporate appeasers. Be sure to read the entire column (plus my e-mail exchanges with several cowardly businesses that caved to the Van Jones crowd), click on all the links, get educated, educate others, and use this information to help fight back. The conservative movement needs all hands on deck.

Related: ALEC now faces a frivolous IRS complaint from longtime nemesis and anti-ALEC mob partner Common Cause.

Update: Color of Change is now targeting Amazon.

Get in the battlespace, people.

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Conservative consumers: Stand your ground
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Who is Rashad Robinson? And why has his fringe, race-baiting organization been able to pressure several major corporations into abandoning a pro-limited-government legislative association — all for a few cheap social-justice brownie points?

Conservative consumers need to get informed, get active and stand their ground against free speech-squelching progressive activists who have demonized the American Legislative Exchange Council. This isn’t just a battle over ALEC. It’s a war against the left’s shakedown artists taking aim at our freedoms of speech and association.

ALEC, as I reported last week, is the four-decade-old policy organization of state legislators and like-minded business people who believe in “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty.” They are under fire from a longstanding network of liberal groups — tied to the Democratic Party — that are unhappy with effective conservative opposition at the state and federal legislative levels.

Anti-ALEC hypocrites seized on the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida to blame ALEC and Republican lawmakers for their advocacy of Stand Your Ground self-defense legislation – even though the case does not implicate the policy and ALEC followed Florida’s lead on the legislation. Moreover, eight of the 15 states that have adopted such polices were helmed by Democratic governors at the time of passage.

Robinson is spearheading the anti-ALEC campaign, along with Soros-backed Progress Now and a MoveOn.org/Big Labor political action committee, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC). While they claim to oppose black “voter suppression” by working to undermine anti-voter fraud bills backed by ALEC, Color of Change’s true agenda is to chill and suppress pro-capitalist, pro-Second Amendment, pro-low taxes and pro-law enforcement lobbying and legislating in the political marketplace.

Robinson is in charge of “Color of Change,” a radical activist group founded by disgraced 9/11 Truther, anti-police agitator, Occupy movement promoter and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones. The group used Hurricane Katrina to condemn America as institutionally racist. Most shamefully, Jones and his fledgling group helped perpetuate director Spike Lee and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s wild conspiracy theories about government-engineered black genocide in New Orleans.

Before taking over Jones’ demagogue duties, Robinson previously lobbied for felon voting rights at the left-wing Soros family-backed Fair Vote. The group has repeatedly fought common-sense efforts to rein in voter fraud. Unsurprisingly, Robinson is close to the community organizer in chief’s administration.

Don’t Do Business with Progressive Appeasers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyrigh 2012

Let’s stipulate: Activists on the left are free to exercise their rights of speech and assembly to boycott businesses whose politics they oppose. Conversely, activists on the right are free to exercise the power of their pocketbooks and refrain from supporting businesses that shun their values.

So, what are you waiting for, conservatives? There are coordinated shakedowns taking place right now that involve some of America’s most prominent companies who’ve chosen to surrender to progressive bullying and race-card opportunism. Silence is complicity.

On Tuesday, McDonald’s told liberal magazine Mother Jones that the company had “decided to cut ties with ALEC, the corporate-backed group that drafts pro-free-market legislation for state lawmakers around the country.”

The fast-food conglomerate follows in the feckless footsteps of Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Intuit (maker of Quick and Quicken Books software) and Kraft Foods — which have all withdrawn support for ALEC after drum-banging from Color of Change.

That’s the minority community activist outfit founded by former Obama green jobs czar and radical Occupy Wall Street supporter Van Jones. Since leaving the White House, Jones has been occupied with railing against capitalism while cashing in on book sales from corporate media appearances.

But I digress.

For years, progressives have sought to take down the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a four-decade-old association of state legislators who believe in “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty.” ALEC’s veteran policy experts have successfully teamed with public officials and the private sector on crafting model state bills covering everything from education reform and health care to pensions, public safety and civil justice.

Among the group’s greatest heresies in the eyes of the left: support for voter ID laws to protect election integrity, immigration enforcement measures and self-defense legislation to strengthen Second Amendment rights.

The idea that private businesses and public servants could work together voluntarily on public policy is too much for Big Labor and Big Government racketeers. Last fall, leftists from People for the American Way, the Center for Media and Democracy, the Arizona AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, the Arizona Education Association and Progress Now (a militant group backed by billionaire George Soros) ambushed an ALEC meeting in Arizona to intimidate legislators and corporate backers. In February, the Occupy movement turned from demonizing Wall Street bankers to attacking the policy wonks of ALEC as wretched symbols of “profit and greed.”

And now ALEC’s race-hustling enemies are piggybacking on the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. They’re shamelessly blaming ALEC for the tragedy by claiming the group wrote the state’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. But as ALEC points out:

“(The) law was the basis for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s model legislation, not the other way around. Moreover, it is unclear whether that law could apply to this case at all. “Stand Your Ground” or the “Castle Doctrine” is designed to protect people who defend themselves from imminent death and great bodily harm.

Why should the government subsidize businesses? All these subsidies of course help one firm versus another, though this is a more concrete example. From the Politico:

Turning up the heat on Boeing Co., Sen. Tom Coburn wants Congress to bar the Export-Import Bank from financing aircraft sales to foreign airlines if the transactions do “substantial injury” to American carriers competing for the same international routes.
As drafted now, Coburn’s legislative language appears to stop short of a strict, “shall not” prohibition. But he specifically targets “long-range aircraft” akin to Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, which is heavily dependent on international sales supported by Ex-Im loan guarantees. . . .

The Fisker Karma is an over $100,000 “green” car that Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio and Colin Powell love to which the Obama Energy Department gave a $529 million loan only to have the company move their operation overseas and lay off US workers. I know… it all sounds too good to be true. But wait, it gets better.

The car more than makes up for all that downside in performance. Or maybe not.

From Consumer Reports:

Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.

We have owned our car for just a few days; it has less than 200 miles on its odometer. While doing speedometer calibration runs on our test track (a procedure we do for every test car before putting it in service by driving the car at a constant 65 mph between two measured points), the dashboard flashed a message and sounded a “bing“ showing a major fault. Our technician got the car off the track and put it into Park to go through the owner’s manual to interpret the warning. At that point, the transmission went into Neutral and wouldn’t engage any gear through its electronic shifter except Park and Neutral.

We let the car sit for about an hour and restarted it. We could now engage Drive and the same error message disappeared. After moving it only a few feet the error message reappeared and when we tried to engage Reverse the transmission went straight to Park and again no motion gear could be engaged. After calling the dealer, which is about 100 miles away, they promptly sent a flatbed tow truck to haul away the disabled Fisker.

We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.

The government’s reaction will be “clearly we didn’t throw enough taxpayer money at the project.”

Well done, Gorebots. These fools would be hilarious if they weren’t dragging down the US economy with them.

“Halftime in America” is a punchier version of Wag the Dog’s reelection slogan, “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream”. They might have tried, “The Best is Yet to Come”, but Bloomberg already took that one.

It’s one of those wonderful side benefits of socialism that the gap between corporate advertising and a campaign commercial blurs. What’s good for GM is good for America and what’s good for Chrysler is good for Obama. We may not have the pipeline, but we’re still pipelining taxpayer money to a few precious union jobs with car companies that look a lot like the UK’s car companies did in the seventies.

You can’t really blame Chrysler for trying to preserve its Motor City brand, even if it’s with a commercial that wasn’t actually filmed in Detroit. It’s much easier to put together some inspiring scenes of a Detroit recovery if you shoot it in Los Angeles, a place that has its problems, but which is much more likely to have cheerful couples waking up in apartments that seem to be entirely made of glass.

The Motor City brand is one of those things that doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore, but still stirs up sentimentality, like the immigrant experience or freedom of speech. That Detroit is as real today as the Chicago depicted in Sandburg’s poem which served as the hog butcher, tool maker and wheat stacker to the world. Today Sandburg might have called it a food stamp scanner, scammer and welfare taker instead.

American industry is a ghost of that former vigor, its hog butchering, tool making and wheat stacking done in by the progressive vision of a post-industrial society. Today it’s Shanghai that might qualify for a Sandburg poem and it’s also the only place to find that kind of aggressive industrial growth, but Halftime in Shanghai doesn’t sound the same even if Shanghaiing American industry is the name of the game.

Chevy, another government bailout recipient, eschewed the phony clip show patriotism and cut right to showing that their truck could survive an apocalypse. Unlike Halftime in America, that ad could have been filmed in Detroit, which has major apocalypse potential. If you have to choose between trying to convince Americans that Motor City is back or convincing them that the end of the world is near but that the right truck can help them make it out alive, go with the second one.

But Chrysler needs the Motor City brand, because it doesn’t exist anymore. After a brief two year period of being an American company again after its sale by Daimler-Benz, it is now owned by Fiat, which is as All-American as its CEO, Sergio Marchionne, who does not sound very much like Clint Eastwood. It needs that image of American industry, even if it’s an Italian company still employing some American workers and an American brand.

Everyone needs their myths, even if it’s the myth of a booming Motor City created in Los Angeles, starring a California movie star by a company headquartered in Turin, Italy. It beats the tawdry reality of Detroit. It’s not as if anyone confuses myths with reality, or commercials with substance.

Some of Eastwood’s most famous Westerns were actually filmed by Italian directors in Italy.

Fisker Automotive, which was granted a $529 million US Dept. of Energy loan guarantee and then announced they would assemble the first line of cars in Finland, has announced layoffs at a Delaware plant that has yet to produce a single car:

The company says 26 Fisker employees have been let go from the Delaware factory where renowned automotive engineer Henrik Fisker promised to one day begin producing affordable electric sedans. A Delaware newspaper also reported that subcontractors working on the car venture have been let go.

“It’s temporary,” said Roger Ormisher, a company spokesman. “We’re being prudent and sensible as a company.”

Because the initial phase sounds like it’s been such an unqualified success, the company is asking for terms of the federal loan to be altered so the company can have faster access to their line of time-released taxpayer-backed credit:

Accompanying the layoffs was an announcement that Fisker has approached the Department of Energy about revising the targets it had to meet in order to continue drawing money from the federal loan. Whether the Energy Department agrees to alter the terms, and invest more taxpayer [money] in the Fisker venture remains unclear.
[...]
To date, Fisker has received $193 million in government funds, according to a company statement. Back in October, the company acknowledged outsourcing Karma assembly to Finland, but said that the bulk of its government funds would be used to launch a second-generation electric vehicle, still under wraps, that would be assembled in a shuttered General Motors plant in Delaware. Some of those hired to prepare the Delaware plant for that effort were among those let go.
[...]
“We have temporarily delayed work at the plant based on ongoing discussions with the DOE regarding funding for the Project Nina program,” the company’s statement said. “As a result, we have laid off 26 people.”

This all sounds too familiar, doesn’t it? But since Leo DiCaprio, Al Gore and Colin Powell must not be denied warranty coverage, it’s important for the DoE to help keep Fisker afloat.

Related madness:

Obama’s green robber barons

Eleven other Solyndras

Stimulus-backed “green” bankruptcy of the week: Ener1

In December, Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the dusty relic who’s been in Congress so long his length of service can only be determined by carbon-14 dating, claimed the Chevy Volt is “selling like hot cakes.”

What Dingell didn’t mention is that the hot cakes in question are being sold to macrobiotics.

The Detroit News has the January sales figures for the Volt:

Washington- General Motors extended-range electric Chevrolet Volt had its worst sales month since August, as negative publicity over fire risks hurt vehicles sales in January.

GM sold just 603 Volts – above its sales in January 2011, but far below GM’s best-ever sales month in December, when GM sold 1,529 Volts.

Last week, GM North America President Mark Reuss said sales of the Volt have been hurt by bad publicity.

“Bad publicity”? Please. The Volt sales are low because there wasn’t demand for it in the first place!

Sometimes I’m inclined to believe that somebody invented the circumstances surrounding the recall (er, I mean “call back” — sorry) so they’d have an excuse to justify lousy sales on a car that has cost taxpayers a fortune.

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) explains how big government is making it harder for Americans to find jobs and more difficult for small businesses to succeed. When big government puts too many burdens on America’s economy, it forces jobs and investment overseas instead of here at home. It also makes it harder for middle class small business owners to compete against large corporations, discouraging real competition and job growth.

Here’s a list of some of the obstacles that big government has created that make it harder to achieve success in America:

- $1.75 trillion regulatory costs
- $15 trillion national debt
- $2 to $3 trillion in state and local debt (http://bit.ly/zQwqfb)
- $100 trillion unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs
- ObamaCare taxes and regulations
- More than 75,000 pages of IRS tax rules & regulations (http://bit.ly/ejX73Z)

Liberal-progressive-socialist state planners are not as successful as private investors in satisfying consumers’ wants.

The collapse of Solyndra and Kodak’s bankruptcy filing illustrate the difference between a socialistic planned economy and capitalistic free enterprise. Under state planning, uneconomic companies can be created and failing ones propped up by the state. Under free enterprise, only companies that have a good chance of prospering will be bankrolled by investors, and those that don’t prosper will be left to fail.

Kodak for generations was an international icon of private technological success. Solyndra never even got off the ground.

In the first decades of the 19th century, when the doctrines of socialism were being codified, the concept of social engineering emerged. Belief in the possibility and effectiveness of a planned economy is the central economic doctrine of liberal-progressive-socialism. Presumably disinterested, state-appointed managers would do a better job delivering a more abundant supply of socially useful goods and services than putatively greedy, profit-oriented businessmen.

President Obama’s administration is firmly rooted in that early socialistic vision, modified by Lenin’s Gosplan 5-year programs. Examples are take-over and re-structuring of the banking system and imposing a car czar and labor union ownership on General Motors.

Obama’s penchant for socialistic state planning is particularly evident in federal financing for economically unsustainable “green” energy companies, none of which could survive without direct subsidies, tax breaks, and punitive regulation of private business competitors. More than $1.5 billion has been funneled down the rat hole of green energy projects, of which Solyndra is one of the more notorious.

Contrast Obama’s state-planning with a free-enterprise system in which companies must satisfy consumer desires, while supporting themselves and making sufficient profit to finance equipment replacement and growth. State-planned investment is channeled by political favoritism for special-interest groups and by ideology disconnected from the real world.

Under our original constitutional government, individuals were permitted to keep as much as they could save from the fruits of their labors and to invest their savings in any way they chose. Most people, having worked hard to save some money, are careful about where they invest it. The intermediaries in which they invest their savings — banks, mutual funds, life insurance companies, and pension funds — have a fiduciary duty to invest their depositors’ funds in prudent business ventures that can be reasonably expected to grow and prosper.

The critical point is that the capital necessary to start and to run a business is separated from the business people. Businessmen want money to create or expand their ventures. Lenders and investors want to lend money to businesses only when they can be reasonably sure of getting it repaid, plus a profit reflecting the risk incurred in lending and investing. Capitalism thus has a built-in regulator, a system of internal checks and balances.

To get money, businesses must first convince hard-eyed lenders and investors that a market exists for their products and that they can satisfy that market’s demands. Lenders and investors have strong incentives to avoid bad loans and investments: they lose their jobs and their own money if they don’t.

In liberal mythology capital and business are lumped into one evil mass that is dominated by a single-minded lust to plunder society.

Here is the way the New York Times in an article entitled “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” describes the interaction between Obama and Steve Jobs:

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. . . .

The Times then goes on to quote Jared Bernstein to argue that this is a really difficult problem for the administration to fix.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.” . . .

So it seems pretty clear from the Times that Jobs didn’t really blame Obama for driving American jobs to China. But there is a significant problem with that story:

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.

Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 544). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.