06.25.10
Posted in Corporate acquiescence to the left, Uncategorized at 12:51 pm by Administrator
A couple of days ago, I put up a short post that was basically a link to the Busness Roundtable CEO’s remarks on the growing evidence of TCM / FHer hostility to the private sector.
In today’sWSJ, Kimberly Strassel looks at how his new-found alarm is symptomatic of the moral and logical blindspot so many in the business community when it comes to the relationship between politics and their own self-interest. This obsequious cozying-up on the part of large corporations (You don’t see it so much among smaller businesses. They tend to band together into trade associations for the purposes of ferociously combatting statism.) to the FHer agenda has a long pedigree.
I guess a late wake-up call is better than none.
In the 60s, there was a pop-R&B song about a lady who befriended a cold and lonely snake that turned around and bit her. The last verse comes to mind in this situation:
“Aw, shut, silly woman,” said that reptile with a grin / “You knew darn well I was a snake the day you brought me in.”
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05.21.10
Posted in Corporate acquiescence to the left at 7:44 pm by Administrator
The main point of this American Thinker blog post about TCM’s Rose Garden announcement of his totalitarian decree that trucks will now have to meet drastic new fuel efficiency standards is that it once again shows the facility with which he arrogates power to the executive branch. That is indeed chilling stuff. Right now, though, I’m more focused on the obsequiousness with which the sector of the corporate world affected by this is handling it.
I live in the small midwestern city that is world headquarters to Cummins, Inc., the world’s premier diesel engine maker. Today, I glanced at the headlines of my local paper (something that increasingly frequently causes my teeth to grind, as I noted in my own American Thinker piece on “Healthy Community Initiatives” back in March). The CEO of Cummins, Tim Solso, was due to be front and center at the White House for The Most Equal Comrade’s pronouncement. According to the article, he’s quite excited because his company is ready to meet these stringent new targets. Cummins has prided itself for several years on its leadership in the emmission-controls and fuel-efficiency standards push.
I have a question for Mr. Solso, though: If there were no government pressure, either in the form of generalized nudging or actual mandates, on your customers, the truck makers, to pour all these resources into squeezing every last drop of fuel out of every last inch of road traveled, would it be their first priority when conveying to you what they wanted out of your engines?
Cummins has long been at the forefront of various forms of nicey-nice “social progress.” Its corporate foundation decided in the mid-twentieh century that Modernist architecture would ennoble the populace of the city, and enticed such names as I.M. Pei, Harry Weese, and Kevin Roche, as well as sculptors such as Henry Moore and Dale Chihuly to town and paid the design fees for the community’s schools, library, post office and city hall. The man who was board chairman in the 1960s was, at the same time, the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, as well as a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Diversity” is a big deal around these parts. All Cummins employees go through a “treatment of others” training program as part of their orientation.
Cummins is big on joint ventures in China and Vietnam, too. Engineers from those communist countries come here to work, and Cummins plants can be found over there. I suppose it could be argued that this is merely the marketplace at work. Some company in some country would snap up those sharp young engineers. After all, the company is deeply involved in Brazil India, Mexico and the UK as well.
Still, there’s something creepy about seeing this great American manufacturing concern with a long, distinguished history staking its strategic commitment on this vision of a borderless, patty-cake world where expenditure of resources is determined by pointy-headed uber-planners from the Ivy League and the capitols of countries that maintain gulags for those who dare question the Grand Vision. And then to have our local paper (disclosure: I write for several of its magazines) get all excited about said concern’s genuflection before the overlord who says, “You will make this kind of product.”
Orwell on the prairie.
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10.10.09
Posted in Congress, Corporate acquiescence to the left, Environment policy at 11:20 am by Administrator
An alarmingly large number of large corporations are actively pushing for cap-and-trade, partly because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking it’s the altruistic and visionary thing to do, and partly because there are goodies in it for them, like subsidies and exemptions.
Two organizations are instrumental in corraling American business into this suicidal fervor: the Apollo Alliance and CERES.
Read all about it.
It’s the banking industry and the Community Reinvestment Act all over again.
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07.09.08
Posted in 2, Corporate acquiescence to the left, Culture, Culture war heroes, Ideology at 8:19 pm by Administrator
Barack Obama’s embarrassed about the number of Americans who don’t know any other language besides English. Let that sink in. He’s comparing us to the the Europeans, portraying you and me as rubes and the morally relative, post-Judeo-Christian, dhimmitude-infected citizens of the continent with the fastest-shrinking population on Earth as the sophisticates we should emulate.
The benefits of being multiligual are beside the point. Of course, it would be advantageous to our society in myriad ways if more of us knew more tongues. The significance of Obama’s remark, however, is that it must be added to the list that includes his arugula moment in Iowa, his characterization – made in San Francisco – of small-town Midwesterners as religion-and-gun clingers, and his wife’s assertion tha she’d never been proud of her country until her husband’s campaign got going.
This is what I was talking about in my Independence Day post. We may be past the tipping point. We have so decimated the idea of a common culture and a sense of what makes America great that we not only confer legitimacy on an arrogant-yet-empty charlatan like the Marxist From Chicago but we make him a rock star – inded, a messiah.
And the fact that we’ve made messiahs out of our rock stars for decades paved the way for this phenomenon. When people slobber all over the memory of drunkard and wife beater John Lennon as if he were some man of vision, a prophet of peace, or canonize a polygamist like Bob Marley as some kind of modern-day Moses leading “his people,” whoever they are, out of some kind of imagined bondage, or confer sainthood on cocaine-and-masturbation freak Marvin Gaye just because he recorded the song “What’s Going On,” which, upon examination, is a a defense of urban troublemakers, a condemnation of the US attempt to save South Vietnam from Communism, and an apologetic for long hair on males, we soften ourselves up for a con job with truly serious consequences.
Remember when Michelle Obama said that her husband would require things of us? Keep that in mind. He’s already talking about some kind of national service for young adults. He’s already said, in that speech in Oregon, that thermostats set at 72 degrees wouldn’t cut it. Do you think he was just trying to suggest we become more multilingual?
Have you really focused your powers of envisioning on what a Freedom-Hater monopoly on elected power in Washington would look like? Who will stop them from wealth redistribution, mandating adherence to junk science, finishing off Christianity and Judaism once and for all, destroying the notion of family that has been the bedrock of Western civilization – indeed, every civilization that’s contributed anything to the world – for thousands of years, marginalizing our native tongue, and establishing a protected status for a privileged class that congratulates itself on its refined tastes and ability to discern nuance?
Of course, such a society could not long survive, especially when its leaders hold manliness and self-preservation in disdain. A brief period of totalitarian rule would be followed by our conquest by some combination of our external enemies.
I wish I could be light about this, leave it at the level of what’s amusing about it, maybe find something clever or even sardonic about it andthen move on to some interesting distraction. The thing is, I remember when this country had a chance.
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03.06.08
Posted in Corporate acquiescence to the left at 1:54 pm by Administrator
Michelle Obama reveals yet more of what America would be in for if she became its First Lady: http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGY4MThiZTE4OTQzNzM1ZjI1MDMxYzRjYzQyOTdmYzk=
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02.29.08
Posted in Corporate acquiescence to the left at 5:13 pm by Administrator
We’re giving Michelle Obama her own category here at BN, because she’s becoming the proverbial gift that keeps on giving. Every time He Who Walks On Water says something astoundingly wacky, about a day later she tops him:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTViZjhhNGI1Y2QxYjE0ZDc0YmMwMjJiNmUyZjQ3MmU=
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