War on Women
Hell,
There’s a War on Business
There’s a War on Business
And business is
losing: the American economy suffered a nasty recession from December 2007
through June 2009 and its “recovery” has been the most anemic ever. The first
three 2014 quarters of GDP crawled upward at 1.9%, 2/6% and 2.7% versus an
average of 4.6% over the 1960s. “[O]ur single most serious economic problem,” according to Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup is the
lack of new startup companies, long the leader the U. S. now comes in twelfth.
“But even more dangerous there are more failures
of American companies than new ones starting for the first time in 35 years…when
free enterprise dies, America dies with it.”
An article in the January 2, 2015, “Wall Street Journal”, “Endangered
Species: Young U. S. Entrepreneurs” told of the drastic drop in people under
the age of 30 who own private businesses, roughly 3.6% of them plummeting from
10.6% in 1989. Productivity, the foundation of U. S. growth has dropped over half
since 2011 to 1.1% compared to 2.5% for the decades after 1948. But why is all
of this happening now? While Journal article
mentioned several causes including a long hangover from the recession, a dearth
of starting jobs, lower bank lending, and fear of these kids of failure, these
seem a result. Others have blamed: new burdensome regulations, including from
the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank Act (enabled by high “whistleblower”
bounties), accelerated federal and tort litigation, higher capital gains and
personal income taxes, and massive negative publicity about “business
corruption.”
I would add that
there has been a relentless war on business by the Obama administration. As
President Obama famously said at a campaign stop in Virginia , June 2012: "If you got a business, you didn't build
that – somebody else made that happen." That is a severe misunderstanding
of and antipathy toward private sector business. The sole job President Obama
ever held in the private sector – the only time in his life he actually touched
private enterprise – for a New York
international consulting group, in his autobiography “Dreams from My Father” he
called himself “a spy behind enemy lines.” In those words he
identifies the private sector as the enemy. Mr. Obama left that company to move
to Chicago and
begin his government work, initially in community organizing.
But even more than words, the president’s actions are the tell.
DOJ. Obama’s former attorney
general, Eric Holder, through the United States Department of Justice has
engaged in an unprecedented assault on banks, businesses, and individual
businesspeople. With virtually unlimited taxpayer money, he has deeply
investigated – with extravagant media coverage – the financial services
industry about “abuses” which he said led to the so-called 2007 sub-prime
mortgage loan meltdown and accompanying Great Recession. Many of the largest
and most prosperous financial institutions have been charged with a grocery
list of assertions of abusive behavior in issuing mortgages, packaging them
into collateralized debt obligations, errors in servicing, even in alleged
“abusive behavior toward homeowners” and of banks not adequately disclosing
risks to other large, powerful financial institutions and finally, the
all-encompassing “predatory lending,” whatever that means. It is exceptional
Monday morning quarterbacking by the DOJ attacking businesses including
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust, PNC,
Sovereign, Ally, U. S. Bank, MetLife Bank, HSBC Holdings, Royal Bank of Scotland , UBS,
BNP Paribas. As Justice clearly understands, most companies, fearing
reputational and competitive risk, settle such allegations rather than
investing millions of dollars and tens of thousands of executive and employee
hours and years of negative media coverage to defend themselves. In
settlements, DOJ doesn’t even have to define “abuse,” since the media has
already defined it for it. Around $65 billion was paid in fines and settlements
in 2014 up 40% from 2013’s previous record $46 billion. In winning settlements,
the DOJ’s power and reach increases, with higher settlement demands. And other
agencies jump on. All the media publicity from settlements cause average
Americans to distrust big business and banking institutions, which seems to be
an Obama administration objective. That it isn’t the money is explained
by a September 18, 2014, “Wall Street Journal” article entitled “Billions Going
Unrecovered” telling that the DOJ has failed to recover $97 billion “won” from
these sorts of enforcement actions.
NLRB. Three of five members
of the National Labor Relations Board and its powerful general counsel are
progressive Democrats with roots in labor unions. The NLRB
remade a thirty-year-old
rule by redefining
“employer” to make one company (McDonald’s, a franchisor) the employer of other
companies’ employees (each of its 14,000 franchisees) ruling that it “co-employs” workers together with its
franchised local small businesses. More than three dozen unfair labor
practice charges have been filed against other franchisors including Taco Bell,
Subway, Burger King, Panera Bread, and Jack in the Box. This decision
completely alters the business models of the eight million small business
franchisees and eight hundred thousand franchisors making them easier to
unionize. Other NLRB anti-business initiatives include requiring businesses to
post an 11-by-17-inch poster essentially explaining that employees have the
right to unionize to improve wages and working conditions; to form, join, and
assist a union; and to bargain collectively with their employer. The NLRB filed a complaint against Boeing for opening
a new plant in South Carolina ,
a right-to-work state. It was acting on its May 10, 2010 internal memorandum
that the NLRB wants to grant union bosses power over employers’ investment and
management decisions, forcing companies to
negotiate their investment plans with union bosses. It later withdrew the
complaint and the poster requirement was overturned by the courts, in which the
McDonald’s rule presently resides.
DOL. Über-Activist Secretary
of Labor, Thomas Perez’ department ruled that home-care workers, including
family members caring for their loved ones, must be paid, overturning a 1974
amendment to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and enabling the easy unionizing
of tens of thousands of innocent family helpers. At this point, a federal judge
said “no,” and DOL has appealed. Perez himself was Ted Kennedy’s special
counselor on labor.
EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency halted all oil and gas
projects on public lands, delayed (apparently forever) the Keystone XL
pipeline, and devoted fifties of billions of dollars to “alternative” energy
sources from windmills, solar panels, ethanol and high-end electric vehicles.
On January 14, 2015, the EPA proposed regulations to slash methane emissions in
the oil and natural gas industry. It crippled mining from West
Virginia to Alaska .
The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was
abandoned, thus killing all future nuclear energy. Along with his Department of
Transportation, EPA arbitrarily required a presently-impossible 54.5 miles per
gallon corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) for
cars and light trucks by 2025, adding $5,000 to the price of each vehicle.
DOI. In a video message,
December, 2015, President Obama announced that his Department of the Interior
was blocking all oil and gas drilling in Bristol Bay, Alaska, virtually forever
and on Sunday, January 25, 2015, DOI proposed to preserve as wilderness
nearly 13 million acres of land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
including 1.5 million acres of coastal plains that is believed to have rich oil
and natural gas resources. Later in the
week, the department also is slated to propose a draft offshore leasing plan
that is expected to include more limits on future oil and gas production in Alaska .
EEOC. The Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission has greatly stepped up investigations and
lawsuits, including a class-action sexual harassment claim against CRST Van
Expedited, a Georgia nursing home, where a judge found EEOC’s FBI-like raid and
conduct a “misuse of authority” and “frivolous, unreasonable or groundless,” ordering it to pay $4,694,442.14 in
attorneys’ fees, expenses, and costs in the largest loss ever against the EEOC,
illustrating the strong lawless anti-business approach of the agency. It also
arbitrarily pregnancy to be a workplace disability.
DOE. Through
a provision passed in the health-care reform of 2010, the Department of
Education became the originator of roughly ninety percent of U.S. student loans with taxpayer
obligations soaring past $1 trillion. The president has coerced indebted
students OUT OF working in the private sector by forgiving student loans if
they work for non-profits or government for ten years. If they work in the private sector it takes
twice as long. Also, the Department
of Education is purposely destroying for-profit educational companies by
eliminating government funding for students through new regulations applying
only to for-profit school businesses, not non-profits, such as President Obama’s
alma mater, Harvard. These
regulations took down 81,000-student Corinthian Colleges, one of the country’s
largest for-profit companies whose students tended toward minorities, older
persons and the poor. All U.
S. schools will be closed or sold.
FDIC. In 2011, the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation classified gun-selling as a “high risk activity,” along with thirty
other industries the Obama government doesn’t like. In 2012, the Justice Department adopted the
FDIC’s “high risk” list into official guidance it provides to banks under
Operation Choke Point. While there has been no definition proffered of “high
risk” or “high risk activity” by either agency it warns financial institutions
and payment systems such as PayPal, Intuit and Square from servicing such
companies. Other targeted industries include: ammunition sales, coin dealers,
credit repair services, debt consolidation services, fireworks sales,
government grants, home-based charities, money transfer networks, pay day
loans, telemarketing, tobacco sales and travel clubs. And in conjunction with
this, it shut down a company it deemed to be an illegal direct-sales “pyramid
scheme.”
In the president’s 2015 State
of the Union address he said, “and no challenge – no challenge – poses a
greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Of course, in the first part of December,
2013, the growing income gap “income inequality,” was “the defining challenge
of our time” he said.
He is wrong. The greatest threat to future American generations is his war on business, some examples of which are briefly described above. Popular opinion is negative toward business, capitalism, and free enterprise, undermining the foundation of innovation, growth and jobs which has brought unprecedented prosperity and high standards of living to Americans. Unless politicians can clearly spell out with clarity this war, interpret how it will adversely impact most Americans, and broadcast it to convince the American voter, the hope of Barack Obama to change
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