According to reports, ailing U.S. automakers are already lobbying the Obama transition camp for a taxpayer-financed bailout, and they’ve turned up the dial on doom and gloom in recent weeks to make government action appeal all the more pressing. General Motors, for one, says it will run out of cash around the end of the year unless something big happens — like an immediate economic rebound that boosts sales of its autos (unlikely) or a major infusion of government money. These efforts are showing signs of success. In a letter …
There was no bigger media cheerleader for Barack Obama over the past year than MSDNC. Hardball host Chris Matthews famously admitted that Obama sent “a thrill going up my leg” and Keith Olbermann’s over the top boosterism was even recently parodied by Saturday Night Live. MSDNC could have tried to relegate these two to their respective hour long opinion shows, but instead they chose to make them hard news anchors for MSDNC’s election coverage. Now that MSDNC has gotten its wish, and Obama is president, their parent company General Electric …
Could the current crisis usher in a new “New Deal”, with a new brand of corporatism to replace the free market system? Certainly European leaders are arguing that case. The current economic “crisis,” may itself have been caused by bad policy. Yet, is provides a great pretext for an expansion of government. During the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalized banks, set prices, wages and work hours, and promoted public works programs to employ the unemployed. The New Deal, or the National Industrial Recovery Act …
