Food for thought…
Exclusive: Roger Hedgecock asks, 'Is Mitt Romney the bad guy?'
Bernie Madoff is in jail for life for using other people’s money under false pretenses in a Ponzi scheme that fooled some of America’s most sophisticated investors. This is an example of fraud, not capitalism.
Raj Rajaratnam is in jail for 11 years for insider trading of securities of Galleon Group, the hedge fund he founded. This is an example of violating a law passed by Congress restricting capitalism. If Raj had been a member of Congress, which exempted itself from that insider trading law, he would not be in jail today.
Steve Jobs will be remembered forever as the American who envisioned products that didn’t exist and the world later found indispensable. His was American capitalism in the Edison, Bell, and Ford tradition. American innovative capitalism has changed the world. Jobs made Apple Inc., which he famously started at home, into a worldwide giant with a net worth greater than the country of Greece.
Mitt Romney and the investors in his private equity firm made a boatload of money buying risky failing companies and turning them around to profitability. Many companies failed anyway. Others became household names. Many employees lost jobs they were going to lose anyway; many more Americans found jobs in Staples, Domino’s Pizza, Brookstone, Sports Authority, etc.
What Mitt did goes by many fancy names today in MBA courses and in the business media, but it is still old-fashioned capitalism. Private investors risking their own money to make a profit.
To critics, it’s called “vulture capitalism.” This losing leftist rant has been validated by its adoption by Romney’s rival Republican, Newt Gingrich. (Perhaps something that the party as well as the country based on free market economics should seriously think about.)
If you are one of those critics (Republican or Democrat), what do you call what Barack Hussein Obama is doing?
Obama took money from Americans by force (did you think the IRS was voluntary?) and borrowed money from the Chinese when taxation did not yield enough money. Obama then applied the money to create/subsidize companies to make products he knew people didn’t want at prices they could not afford.
Bought a Volt yet? Not only more expensive (at $42,000) to the consumer than comparable hybrid cars from both domestic and foreign companies, the Volt’s real cost is estimated at $250,000 each when all the costs/subsidies are counted. Do you think the $56 billion “invested” by Obama in the Volt’s maker, General Motors, was really worth it?
Unless you are the United Auto Workers union, which received 17 percent of GM for nothing, the answer is no.
The irony here is that the total CO2 emissions from the manufacturing of the Volt, including the fire prone battery setup, are about the same as any other vehicle. Mother Gaia is not amused.
Then there were the green energy start-up companies.
Obama has been on a spending spree with you as the forced partner. Solyndra, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Spectrawatt and Eastern Energy are just a few of the dozens of companies that have received more than $6.5 billion in grants and loans to create the green energy of Obama’s fantasy future. Every one of these companies has either failed or is on the verge of failing, taking your money with it. Thousands of “good-paying, middle-class jobs” promised by Obama are evaporating.
Obama was hell bent on creating a brave, new, green world. By choking off the use of America’s natural bounty of coal, oil and natural gas, and by promising an even greater bounty from a world of “alternative energy” supposedly more pleasing to the planet, Obama embarked on the same government-knows-best program that has impoverished countries from Zimbabwe to Cuba to North Korea.
Afraid that Americans are catching on to his “vulture socialism,” Obama is already running TV ads for his re-election touting the creation of “2.7 million jobs” from “America’s clean energy industry.” Many of those jobs were already in place before Obama took office, and many more are now endangered by the fact that the market is not buying what Obama is selling. As happened in Spain, for every green job created, 2.5 jobs in existing manufacturing have been lost.
In a final irony, the same TV ad also brags that America’s foreign oil dependence has declined to below 50 percent of our daily need. That is true and has nothing to do with Obama’s force-fed green-energy program. The recession made worse by Obama’s policies has reduced consumer gasoline demand. The U.S. still uses twice the oil it produces and still tolerates a federal government that spends nearly twice what it takes in.
Using government force, Obama spends $10 billion per day (and borrows more than $4 billion of that per day) to keep the federal Leviathan on course to “utterly transform” our economy and erode American freedoms.
And Mitt Romney, the guy who specializes in turning around failing enterprises and would apply that expertise to the failing federal government, is the bad guy?
by Roger Hedgecock - a nationally syndicated talk-show host. Prior to his broadcasting career, he worked as an attorney and political leader. Hedgecock is a strong supporter of the military and founded Homefront. – Posted at WND
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