Obumbledore

Bonfire of the Vanities

Oh, to be able to wave a magic stick and make everything right. President Obama must be starting to get really frustrated about now. Almost everything he attempts to do increasingly has the aura of hamfistedness and bumbling about it.

There is a reason for this. It is a deeply religious reason. For Obama is a deeply religious man. He appears deeply and passionately to believe in the omnicompetence of the State to put things right. He believes in the ultimacy of educated, rationalistic Man.

Now, of course, he is not alone in this view. It is the dominant and established religion of the United States. In fact, Obama is merely reflecting this religion back to the people. But, for whatever reason, President Obama appears to be a true believer, almost a fundamentalist zealot. Not only does he truly believe the great lie, he actually wants to put it into practice so that the history and course of the United States is forever changed. He wants to make a difference, a big difference. He wants to use the power of the State to remake the world.

He is being set up for abject and dismal failure. The reason is straightforward. The Living God is a jealous God, and will not tolerate idols in His presence. He extends His hand to bring them down, so that the vanity of idols will be publicly displayed. He rules and overrules through the providential ordering of the affairs of the world to ensure that this will be the case. It is part of the reign of our risen Lord as He carries a host of defeated abject captives in His train.

When a man--particularly one who has allowed his devotees to attribute Messianic motifs and claims to him, without his definitive repudiating or rejecting them--when such a man attempts to make "things right" by the powers of government, everything he attempts ends up having the opposite effect and consequence. It is not just that it fails. The Lord insists on displaying its foolishness, its emptiness, and its vanity for all to see. That is why we fear the Obama presidency will be seen in retrospect as as a Carteresque bumbling failure.

Below are some examples to illustrate the point. Obama has railed against US companies becoming global; he has insisted in stentorian tones on the need to set up business at home--that is, in the United States. Sending "jobs overseas" he declares is evil, unpatriotic.

So he has jumped boots 'n' all into using the largesse of using public (borrowed) funds to save bankrupt car companies which everyone in the business community knew to have been in deep trouble these past twenty years. Saving great American companies; saving and protecting American jobs. Billions of dollars have been poured down the plughole. But Obama was smarter than the average bear. He has insisted on these businesses restructuring, and coming up with a credible business plan for the future, in exchange for the public's money.

They have. And the result--more jobs going overseas. This is "change" Obumbledore won't believe in. Here is the headline in the Washington Post: "Under Restructuring, GM to Build More Cars Overseas."

The U.S. government is pouring billions into General Motors in hopes of reviving the domestic economy, but when the automaker completes its restructuring plan, many of the company's new jobs will be filled by workers overseas.

According to an outline the company has been sharing privately with Washington legislators, the number of cars that GM sells in the United States and builds in Mexico, China and South Korea will roughly double.

The proportion of GM cars sold domestically and manufactured in those low-wage countries will rise from 15 percent to 23 percent over the next five years, according to the figures contained in a 12-page presentation offered to lawmakers in response to their questions about overseas production.

As a result, the long-simmering argument over U.S. manufacturers expanding production overseas -- normally arising between unions and private companies -- is about to engage the Obama administration.

Yes, the vanity of it all. We are going to save GM, pouring billions of taxpayers' money down the plughole, so that GM can set up more business overseas.

Essentially in control of the company, the president's autos task force faces an awkward choice: It can either require General Motors to keep more jobs at home, potentially raising labor costs at a company already beset with financial woes, or it can risk political fury by allowing the automaker to expand operations at lower-cost manufacturing locations.

"It's an almost impossible dilemma," said former labor secretary Robert B. Reich, now a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. "GM is a global company -- so for that matter is AIG and the biggest Wall Street banks. That means that bailing them out doesn't necessarily redound to the benefit of the U.S. or American workers.

"More significantly, it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of bailing out these big companies. If GM is going to do more of its production overseas, then why exactly are we saving GM?"

Precisely. Explain that to us again. We did not catch it the first time.

So, here is the dilemma. GM is a multi-national corporate that builds cars. If it is locked in to US unionised autoworker wage rates, it will rapidly become more of a global commercial failure, since it is competing against companies that design and build cars very efficiently in lower wage countries.

Thus, either the US government continues down the track of Obumbledore naivety and pours in billions upon billions of dollars so that GM can expand its investment in countries outside the US, or GM goes bankrupt, or both.

This is just one example. Here is another: Obama's self-righteous hectoring of investors in failed Chrysler, accusing them of blatant self-interest at the expense of the national interest and Chrysler employees, will only serve to drive private capital out of co-investing with the government. From now on, if Obama wants to save private companies in the national interest, he will likely do it alone. The price to the government just went up significantly.

A third example of bumbling has been Obama's reversing his decision to release pictures of ill treatment of US captives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Initially ordered by a court in response to a suit brought by the notoriously blinkered ACLU, Obama publicly supported the court's decision. It fitted nicely with his strategy of creating a line-in-the-sand between the Old World (Bush) and the New World (Change for the Good). Now, he has been made to realise how pointless and dangerous releasing the photos would be. He has backtracked. Full marks for backtracking--but it was his naive world-view which took him there in the first place.

A fourth example of foolishness and naive wishful thinking has been his very public love affair with that notorious woman, Rosy Scenario. Having grandiosely committed the government to the biggest deficit in the country's history (not just incrementally larger, but a quantum increase), he also, at the same time, has fudged the figures--understating the spending, and overstating the revenue. With each passing report, the deficit is rising, as reality bites. Yahoo news carried the following piece:

The White House on Monday raised its forecast for this year's U.S. budget deficit by $89 billion due to the recession, millions of new unemployment claims and corporate bailouts.

The new estimate predicted a deficit of $1.84 trillion, or 12.9 percent of gross domestic product, for the fiscal year ending September 30. It updated the White House's February forecast of a $1.75 trillion deficit, or 12.3 percent of GDP.

What is killing Rosy and with it her romance with the Chief Executive is that the Obumbledore and his Obamakins have completely overlooking the thumping reduction in tax revenues.



Note the estimated 40 percent decline in April. The blog Maenianum comments:

In September 2008, many people saw the writing on the wall, and began preparing for a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Democrat in the Oval Office. Unlike the Carter dormancy period (the months leading up to his win and the months before he took the Oath of Office), business had no experience with which to forecast how a Democratic Congress and President would behave. This time, we knew.

In those months before Carter took office, it was as if no one could see that the train wreck was about to happen, but this time, especially since Obama’s Chicago-style ideology was clear to anyone who’d read more than one book in their lives, businesses (and individuals) had a warning of the future train wreck.

Business began shedding workers immediately, and moving their investments/cash in preparation. The only thing that has been surprising is how quickly the train wreck occurred, and how large the death toll.

This was a much bigger train, and the conductor wasn’t simply asleep at the wheel, he was purposely running the engine at full throttle.

Knowing that Obama was most likely to drive the country into a fiscal quagmire, producers and the productive sector began hunkering down. The result: the tax take has reduced drastically. The outcome: either Obumbledore must humble himself and sharply curtail his big spending extravaganza, or he will continue to fiddle while whilst the country conflagrates under the nuclear fission of his exploding debt.

Remember Reagan's quip: the most terrifying words in the English language are, "I am from the Government, and I am here to help you." Obumbledore--your legacy awaits you, and it will not be a pretty sight. He who believes himself smarter than the average bear and most certainly smarter than the Living God will end up a desiccated leaf, twisting in the wind.