- The nationalization of two-thirds of the domestic auto industry. This includes the dismantling of personal property rights engineered by the Obama administration when it rendered worthless the bonds of secured creditors and gave 55% of Chrysler to the administration's union masters.
- The federalization of the student loan industry. This has all but guaranteed that college tuitions will keep rising unchecked. As academia, which has its first member in the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson, keeps raising the price of its product, the federal government compliantly will keep shoveling more and more money into student loan furnace. There will be no market force to push back. Pres. Obama will be able to keep its friends in academia fat and happy behind their ivy-covered walls
- The nationalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy represented by the so-called healthcare reform bill. Should this law ever go into effect, and we pray it doesn't, the end game will be a single-payer--the government--system of healthcare
This is a business with few exceptions (News Corp. properties like the Wall Street Journal or New York Post) that has, for the most part, been in the tank for Barack Obama since he began his improbable ascendancy to the White House. But newspapers are a dying technology. We need them to know what's going on about as much as we need buggy whips to get to the general store. Fewer and fewer people read newspapers on a daily basis, and those who do mostly focus on features and opinion content. And the number of people under the age of 30 who read a daily paper is miniscule.
What is not miniscule to the the 20 and 30-something crowd is the Internet--social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook; You Tube and the like. But the administration doesn't much like this social media stuff because they can't control it like they can the newspapers.
A conservative president like George Bush fails to visit Louisiana during the Hurricane Katrina clean up and every major daily editorializes on how out of touch the Republican president is with the troubles facing Louisiana. Barack Obama waits weeks before visiting the same state to view the site of the worst oil spill in the nation's history and the papers bury the story.
But the story's not buried on the blogosphere. Neither was Scott Brown's improbably takeover of what mainstream media poobah David Gergen sonorously pronounced "the Kennedy seat" in Massachusetts. Nor the stories of how administration policy is being shaped by policy payoffs to Friends of Barack.
But administration wants to keep its journo friends employed and writing nice things about Barack. So the FTC, acting as an agent of the Democratic National Committee, decides to re-invent newspapering to prop it up against the market forces that are sending it the way of parchment scrolls and quill pens. How? In two ways: First by making it easier for newspapers to assert rights over its product and charge the "Internet freeloaders" (read: conservative bloggers) for content. And second (this is the really the sneaky part), by federalizing the newspaper business through direct financial support.
That's right: take from your opponents and give to your friends. Tony Soprano would be proud. The FTC justifies confiscating your money through fees and taxes and giving it to the Friends of Barack this way: "The federal government has supported journalism through indirect means since the founding of the Republic."
Some of its suggestions? For one, create a "journalism" branch of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is the federal boondoggle that provides payoffs to Obama supporters to train their youngsters to be community activists. Not exactly the Hitler Youth, but nevertheless a subsidy whose ultimate goal is to skew public opinion the president's way largely by registering people most likely to vote Democratic, or by informing the public debate from the left.
For another, increase funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, the crown jewel of the CPB is National Public Radio, the dependably left-leaning news organization favored by liberals.
Other proposals include establishing a "federal fund for local news," and granting newspapers a tax credit for every journalist they employ. Is there a managing editor alive who would dare sic his journo-dogs on the Joe Sestak-take-an-election-dive allegation against the White House if his profit margin relied on the quarterly check from Uncle Sam?
And as for tax-credits-for-journos, who gets to decide who is a journalist and who isn't? Sounds like a new federal bureaucracy needs to be created. Would a senile embarrassment like Helen Thomas get her J-card, but the world's most powerful blogger, Matt Drudge, not?
The FTC goes on to cite what it calls precedents in having government support a private industry, as if that would be a justification. There is a difference between a fourth-class manuscript postage rate and the wholesale propping up of a superfluous industry about to fall.
This may be the most insidious of the Obama plans to remake the U.S. as a European socialist system. It's one thing to nationalize Chrysler. They were third in a three-horse race when the feds took them over, and they're still third. Student loans only affect students. But by economically weakening his opposition, and showering your tax dollars on newspapers whose policy is to fawn over the president and look the other way when he stumbles, President Obama is using the reins of government to tighten the leftist grip on the U.S. and shape public opinion by restricting the flow of information.
And the historical precedents for that are found not in the Postal Service or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as the FTC maintains, but in Germany, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela.
Just thought you might like to know.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment