After I posted a story about how there is virtually no one in the Obama administration with private sector business experience, I began to further consider the practical implications of this.  Intuitively, one would conclude that a group of policymakers who don’t understand business and capitalism probably would not have a clue about making public policy that is friendly to business.  And indeed, this appears to be the case.  At every turn, the Obama administration is promoting legislative action that is harmful to businesses - new taxes, regulations and other economically harmful policies.

This ignorance of what drives the private sector was proven by Barack Obama himself this week, at his so-called “Jobs Summit,” where the POTUS stated:

Despite the progress we’ve made, many businesses are still skittish about hiring. Some are still digging themselves out of the losses they incurred over the past year. Many have figured out how to squeeze more productivity out of fewer workers. And that cost-cutting has become embedded in their operations and in their culture. That may result in good profits, but it’s not translating into hiring and so that’s the question that we have to ask ourselves today: How do we get businesses to start hiring again?

Heaven forbid! Productivity? Profits? Does Mr. Obama believe that businesses exist to hire people? I’m sorry, sir, but it is ALL about the profits. Productivity, and in turn, profitability, is improved either by enabling a constant number of people to produce more, or by reducing the number of people and maintaining constant production. New hiring may improve producTION, but not necessarily producTIVITY. Obama’s ideology, like that of his staffies, is disconnected from the realities of a capitalistic economy. And the policies he supports are similarly disconnected.

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Oh to be fickle and used. The gay rights movement must really like to be that girl (or guy as you might have it) that gets picked up at the bar, slept with, then kicked out before sun up without so much as a kiss.

Now, just like that girl who stands in the hallway of the apartment building knocking on the door demanding a bit more attention, the Democrats are going to open the door, give a peck on the cheek, then close the door again.

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It almost makes you wonder if Barney Frank isn’t just dating that dude from Fannie Mae, but Chris Dodd too.

Together, they brought us the financial crisis relating to Fannie and Freddie. Now they want to do the same to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They’ll greatly enrich Mrs. Dodd too.

Michelle Malkin notes there is placeholder language in the cap and trade bill. In other words, Congressmen are being asked to vote on legislation that will be written after the vote. Frank says this “will deal with regulations of financial derivatives market associated with reducing carbon emissions.”

Over at the Next Right, Ironman points out that Mrs. Dodd will stand to make a killing on this. Mrs. Dodd has business interests related to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that will profit from these new regulations.

It’s almost as if he doesn’t like people actually treating him as some sort of elected official, instead of His Excellency, Baron Massachusetts-Four.

(Via @BrianFaughnan)

How dare that commoner object to having what he said be corrected by his betters! Didn’t he know who he was talking to?

Moe Lane

PS: I almost imagine that Article I, Section 9 is beginning to grate upon certain of our legislators. To effectively have the thing, but not the name of the thing itself…

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Protein Wisdom) How fortunate the subjects* of MA-04 are to have as their overlord someone who can make certain that the collective pain of an automotive company bailout ends up collectively pain[ing] everybody else but them:

Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) won a stay of execution on Thursday for a General Motors plant in his district that the automaker had announced it would close.

No other lawmaker has managed to halt the GM ax. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Frank oversees the government’s bailout program, known as TARP. Frank’s staff said the lawmaker spokes with GM CEO Fritz Henderson on Wednesday and convinced him to keep the Norton, Mass. plant open for at least 14 months.

GM announced Monday in its bankruptcy and restructuring plans it would close of nine of its plants and idle three others. The automaker said it would also shutter three service and parts operations by the end of the year — one of which is in Frank’s district.

Bad luck for the folks in the yet-to-be-determined plant that thought that their jobs were safe, and now have to lose them because MA-04’s subjects are special - more accurately, because their overlord is special - but I’m sure that the Democrats will find a suitably Republican district to punish.  After all, once you’ve decided that some animals are more equal than others, why not go whole hog, as it were?

Moe Lane

PS: This would be the time where I would suggest that the subjects of MA-04 should make the decision that they want to be citizens, again: only, I can’t quite make myself believe that there’s any chance that the suggestion would work.

*That should be an insult that would start fights in bars in this country; but it’s not.  Alas.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Your laugh line of the day: “The party has grown by becoming the party of inclusion.”

…which is the worried reaction from a Lefty blogger who can’t quite understand why Barney Frank, head of the House Financial Services Committee, would say anything like the below in response to the way that the bankruptcy bill got shot down in the Senate (if only temporarily):

The reason that he said something like that, of course, is because the Democratic party is not the ‘party of inclusion:’ it’s the ‘party of expedience.’ The leadership (which is somewhat more liberal than its current Congressional roster, and very much more so than the rank and file) have been throwing this inclusion line around, with admittedly some success: but they have no intention of actually living up to it.

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Michael O’Brien over at The Hill is reporting that Congressman Barney Frank (D, Mass.) is backtracking on his previous support of Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s (R, Minn.) bill that would prevent federal money from going to the corruption plagued Association of Community Activists for Reform Now (ACORN).

Bachmann had initially gotten Frank’s support for a bill that would toughen regulations on community organizers preventing groups like ACORN from getting federal money if any of its employees came under indictment for voter fraud.

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We should not be surprised.

Goldman Sachs’ new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left Frank’s committee in September, will join Goldman as director of government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury Department.

The incestuous relationship between Goldman Sachs and government is as bipartisan as it is seedy, but it is particularly noxious that GS would hire the former staffer of a man committed to destroying the free market.

I wonder if, like General Electric, Goldman has decided if it whores itself enough to the Democrats, the Democrats might keep it in bed with them.

It’s dead during the term of this administration, and never mind what TPMDC thinks. I’d give credit for the Obama administration for at least not duplicating the public relations fiasco that the Clinton administration got itself into sixteen years ago, but do we really want to reward a lack of intestinal fortitude?

Frank: Democrats Punting on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Until 2010

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Thursday that Democratic leaders won’t push to repeal the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy governing gay service in the military until 2010.

“I believe we should and will do ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ next year,” said Frank, a co-chairman of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Equality Caucus. “We haven’t done the preliminary work, the preparatory work. It would be a mistake to bring it up without a lot of lobbying and a lot of conversation.”

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In one of the more memorable television moments yesterday, the lunatic Democratic fringe group known as Code Pink got smacked in public for being, well, Code Pink:

I understand that there are some people for whom rational discussion is not an appropriate means of expressing themselves. You are entitled to do that in general, but not in a way that interrupts those of us who are trying to have rational discussions… I do not know how you think you advance any cause to which you might be attached by this kind of silliness.

Who said it? Clearly a hardcore neoconservative or war hawk, yes? Bobby Jindal? Tom Coburn? Sarah Palin? Thad McCotter? Mark Sanford? Marsha Blackburn?

Nope. Barney Frank.

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The effrontery is utterly astonishing. Government, it now appears to be clear, is moving to take command of as many aspects of the economy as possible–all without any track record whatsoever that would give one confidence that government can, indeed, command the economy to anything resembling prosperity. In what parallel universe is it Congress’s business concerning what any company–let alone those that do not take federal bailout money–pay their executives?

I hope that this is a joke. If it is not, a comedy of errors–absent the comedy–will ensue quite soon. This entire enterprise is as insane as is asking a shoe cobbler to perform a quadruple bypass. The federal government is moving to meddle with things it does not understand.