Barack H. Obama – President-Elect

Barack Obama unveiled his “President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board”, which is to be chaired by 81-year-old Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chair under Presidents Carter and Reagan.

Volcker’s Fed is widely credited with ending the United States’ stagflation crisis of the 1970s by limiting the growth of the, abandoning the previous policy of targeting interest rates. Inflation, which peaked at 13.5% in 1981, was successfully lowered to 3.2% by 1983.

However, we tend to credit the Reagan tax cuts with economic stimulus and the change in economic conditions during the 1980s.

Volckers change in policy contributed to the significant recession the U.S. economy experienced in the early 1980s, which included the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression, and Volcker’s Fed also elicited the strongest political attacks and most wide-spread protests in the history of the Federal Reserve, due to the effects of the high interest rates on the construction and farming sectors, culminating in indebted farmers driving their tractors onto C Street NW and blockading the Eccles Building.

Paul Volcker was the architect of the sky-high interest rates under the Carter administration that led to the misery index and Jimmy Carter saying the country was in a malaise, but today the press is linking Volcker to Mr. Reagan, which is nonsense conserning economic policies.

Ed Henry of CNN asked Mr. Obama a “tough” question at the press conference. Here is part of the transcript:

HENRY: Sir, you talked about John McCain was going to come back to Washington if he won and would just move people into different chairs. We got Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates –

OBAMA: Wait, wait, wait! Hold on! Ho’don! Wait a minute! Hold it. You hear that? First of all, that’s not the topic. We’re not talking about my cabinet because I haven’t made those appointments yet.

HENRY: We’re talking about Paul Volcker. He’s been around a long time, so he’s somebody who knows the ways of Washington. But what do you say, you know, to your supporters who were looking for change?

OBAMA: Actually Paul Volcker hasn’t been in Washington for quite some time. Uhhh, and that’s part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective. Austan Goolsbee, uh, from my understanding, you’ve never worked in Washington.

GOOLSBEE (Obama economic advisor during the campaign): Been on vacation.

OBAMA: This is about as fresh a face as you can get.

Fresh face? Censoring questions? Hasn’t been in Washington? Obama picks the topic?

So much for change, Obama is resurrecting the retreads of past administrations all the way back to Jimmy Carter. Now, when they say failed policy, we can say Barack Obama.

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The talk of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is sending a tingle up the mainstream media pant legs. We will now hear what an excellent choice this is, the great experience Ms. Clinton brings as the nation’s top diplomat.

Short on memory we forget the private and very secret meeting Obama and Clinton had before she dropped out of the presidential race. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that meeting was no more than a deal made for political expediency.

Hillary Clinton needed a promise to keep her from setting the dogs upon Obama at the Democrat convention. Ms. Clinton needed something big beyond money to pay off her huge campaign debt.

With Obama appointments we’re hearing what a genius he is, how lucky we are to have such a brilliant President-Elect, acting more like President with daily press conferences telling us how his “new” Clintonista regime will fix the markets and improve the economy.

Politicians love embracing a good economy as their own but always blame the other guy when it goes into the tank. Mr. Obama will take the credit for improvement, disregarding the natural cycles and the fact the small business runs the economic engine and the likes of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd play politics with our money and their lobbyists.

This now brings us back to Hillary Clinton and the State Department, woven with Liberals throughout its offices, and unelected positions working hard to stop Republican initiatives.

Remember how candidate Clinton staked her credentials on foreign policy experience? Remember Ms. Clinton and her entourage dodging bullets on the tarmac in Bosnia? What about Northern Ireland peace?

“I went [to Northern Ireland] more than my husband did. I was working to help change the atmosphere among people because leaders alone rarely make peace. They have to bring people along who believe peace is in their interests. I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants…”

–Hillary Clinton, Nashua, N.H. Jan. 6, 2008.

Clinton has demands on the table if she is to run the State Department so one more Obama promise is down the drain. So much for “change.”

• Hillary will staff her department with her own people. (Obama is following suit, using Clinton retreads himself);
• Hillary wants to bypass the traditional path through national security advisors and have a direct link to Obama.

Mr. Obama claims he wants different ideas and wishes to be challenged. So much for leadership and Ms. Clinton will certainly challenge him. How did Obama and Clinton differ on the campaign trail? And what about Bubba? Does anyone think Bill Clinton will not be an influence to his wife?

Ms. Clinton appointing her own top team at the State Department will be drawn from more hawkish thinkers. The Left is beside itself since Obama promised them he would move away from “the failed policies of George Bush.”

Chris Bowers of the OpenLeft.com blog complained:

“That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

Let’s look back to Iowa in November 2007:

Bill Burton, campaign spokesman for Senator Obama had this to say: (Emphasis LCs)

“Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and travelled to many countries as well, but along with Hillary Clinton, they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran. The real choice in this election is between conventional Washington thinking that prizes posture and positioning, or real change that puts judgment and honesty first.”

Obama argued during the primaries that it was time to move beyond the Clinton era and in particular belittled her claims to foreign policy experience as a first lady who circled the globe.

More interesting is Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal believes the president-elect now owns Mrs. Clinton’s past, and future, behavior.

“The Obama team is combing through the hundreds of thousands of donors to Mr. Clinton’s foundation. Those papers surely contain compromising conflicts. There was good reason the Clintons have always refused to make that information public.”

“Mr. Obama can now sit on those documents, renege on his pledges to be one of the most “transparent” presidencies in history, and endure the rightful outrage that will follow. Or he can release them, and guarantee a feeding frenzy. Either option will prove an unpleasant side story to his more pressing policy concerns. And that’s just the immediate issue. There are also the 1990s Clinton documents, which remain under wraps at the Clinton library, but not forever.”

Ms. Clinton doesn’t have the experience to be Secretary of State but Barack Obama needed to place her in a position that would possibly give him more control over her and to have the Clinton past as leverage to keep both Clinton’s on a short leash.

Stay tuned!

So the Big Three auto companies sent their CEOs  in private corporate jets to Washington D.C. to beg for taxpayer money. That’s nice, who cares, did we think they would commute on Amtrak?

Politicians used the opportunity to embarrass and ridicule the corporate executives. What politicians say and do are two different things and the word “perk” is what public servants get, in addition to their immense power, and use of taxpayer dollars as pork.

Let’s examine:

• A base lawmakers’ salary, for instance, is now $165,200 (a little higher for House and Senate leaders);
• There is a cheap but excellent federal health care plan and life insurance;
• There is an inflation-adjusted pension plan that’s almost three times as generous as the typical private sector pension;
• There’s a special thrift-savings accounts, a kind of 401(k) plan, that comes with a one-to-one match up to 5% of a member’s salary;
• They’re given a sizable budget of $2 million to $4 million a year for office administration and staff expenses;
• There is a furniture expense account, subsidized mass mailings to constituents (known as the franking privilege);
• There free income tax-return preparation assistance;
• They also receive a special tax deduction for maintaining a second residence;
• There are the numerous foreign trips (spouses included) often to exotic places hosted by nonprofit groups;
• House members, but not senators, can also keep frequent flier miles they rack up on official travel and use them for personal trips later;
• Members have exclusive use of the Congressional Research Service to do their legwork;
• There is free use of broadcast taping studios;
• There is free reserved parking at the office and at Washington-area airports;
• There is a free member-only gym and pool;
• There is expedited passport services;
• There are well-appointed and subsidized members’ dining rooms;
• Politicians routinely hop rides on company jets;
• The government keeps a fleet of military jets at Andrews Air Force Base to serve the travel needs of politicians and administration officials.

Membership has its rewards, at taxpayer expense. Indeed!