Argument Against Career Politicians
609.) Economic times are hard, and President Obama does have a tough job laid before him, how to best prevent the continuing collapse of the American Economy. President Obama is a progressive at heart and only knows one way to try to “stimulate” the economy, and he continues to rely on the failed policies of Kenesian Economics. One of President Obama’s “stimulating” measures was to give a $529,000,000.00 (529 million) dollars to Fisker Automotive, an electric car company. No suprise there, President Obama loaning a large amount of money to an electric car company, this is part of his “green jobs” push. No, where the suprise comes from is the fact that Fisker Automotive is now building their first line of cars in Rural Finland. Vice President Joe Biden heralded the Obama Approved Loan as a bright path to thousands of American Manufacturing jobs. Two years after the loan was announced though, the job of building the Fisker Karma has been outsourced to Finland. When asked about it, the Founder of Fisker Automotive said, “there was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle, they don’t exist here.” Henery Fisker did say that the money was used on design work that did stay in the United States, rather than the 500 jobs that went overseas. He then said, “we’re not in the business of failing; we’re in the business of winning. So we make the right decision for business. That’s why we went to Finland.” This is more evidence that President Obama does not understand the world of business, all he understands is the theoretical world of politics.
The $529 billion dollar loan to Fisker Automotive is just another example in a line of expensive blunders made not just by President Obama, but all carreer politicians. President Obama has spent his entire life in a world of theory, hypothetical, and politics. He has no experince being an executive, or in the real world. The founders of this nation where men who gave up their lives to make a better life for their children. John Adams was a lawyer, and a farmer before he ever entered the world of politics. He was a pacifist at heart and wanted nothing to do with war, yet he sided with the colonialist in their fight for freedom from the Tyranny and Oppession of King George. He said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to mathematics and philosophy, My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” He understood that for the future generation to be able to live the lives they wanted, he had to postpone his dream of being a farmer and serve his nation as a Statesman. When his time in office was up, John Adams retired from public life, he left the White House on a taxi, saying that he is no longer President Adams, he was a famer. He retired from public life and returned to being a citizen, nothing more. George Washington, the father of our country, wanted to run his plantation at Mount Vernon, after the Revolutionary War that is where he returned. Then the United States, under the Articles of Confederation, was falling apart. They came to his door asked him to come to the convention, he looked at them and said, “have I not yet done enough for my country.” This man had served his country from the age of 16, first as a surveyor for the King, then as a soldier, all the man wanted to do was retire and return to a private life. But he knew the convention would fail, his country needed him, so he returned to the asylum of politics. These men, the men who built helped to build a Republic, a Nation of Laws not of Men, these individual men gave up so much to serve not their nation, no, but the people whom they lived with. They gave up their lives of peace and tranquility to enter into the violent and treacherous world of politics, to help their neighbors, brothers, sisters, and those who had not yet been born. They made so many choices not because they wanted to, but because they had to. George Washington could have been made a King, lived a life of luxary, a life free of control, yet he gave up the opulence and omnipotent power, choosing instead to reside as citizen George Washington. Both Washington and Adams could have continued on in the world of politics, they could have run again for President, they could have used their past positions to leverage people into caving to their wants, but they didn’t. They died citizens. Todays Politicians do not know this sense of service, they do not hold to morally rightous princible, instead they favor caving to what they feel will keep them in power, what they feel will best allow them to accomplish their own personal goals. In the past elected officals were statesmen, men who exhibit great wisdom and ability in directing the affairs of a government or in dealing with important public issues, men whose wisdom and integrity won them great respect. Today our elected officals have become nothing more than a person seeking public office, more concerned about winning favor or retaining power than about maintaining principles. They are propelled not by desire to serve their nation, instead by personal greed, by a consuming desire for power. They lack the wisdom of the world to make hard decisions based on princible, rather than greed. I cannot, nor should you,try to blame them, most of them spend a life time in a world where no one is a friend, you only help someone if they can help you, morals are a dangerous possession that ultimatly leave you as refuse in the sewer. These men run for office, promise us the world, telling us how they are going to give us the nile if we will give them just one little vote. We demand so little of these people, who we give so much. Politicians do not go to Washington to serve, they go to Washington because they want power, because they want a say in how things are done. They forget that they are no more important, no more powerful than the neighbors who elected them to the position they occupy. President Obama, is a politician, this case with Frisk Automotive is proof positive of that fact. Frisk Automotive is a company building electric cars, and backed by Venture Capitalist such as Former Vice President Al-Gore. Loaning this company money, money that he has no attachment to, helps push his green agenda, and help one of his past supporters, someone who shares his same beliefs. His greed, his wreaklessness blinded him to the truth. If he had looked at the facts of the situation, rather than just the sales pitch, he might have noticed that giving Kirsk over half a billion dollars was a bad choice. He could have found that they could not build the car here. He might have found that the Kirsk Karma costs $100,000 dollars, putting it out of the reach of most of the population of our country. He might have looked at the fact that the EPA MPGe numbers that are released on these Electric Cars do not adequatly discribe the amount of fossile fuels it takes to opperate an electric car vs a gas car. Multiply the MPGe number by .365 to get a more accurate number, when this is done the Karma’s 52e MPGe looks more like 19 MPGe making it worse than a Ford Explorer. President Obama choose to back this company out of political greed. Yes he might believe in green energy, his princibles might call for him to give our money to this company, but that does not mean he is acting as the founding fathers did. The founders would have made the hard decision, they would have looked at Frisk Automotive and sighed, then deny them the loan, because loaning that money to the company would not help the American People, or even advance their goals. It is easy to make political decisions, it is hard to make the right decision. President Obama has lived in the world of politics, he does not see it as service, but rather as his chance to “change” things, his lack of real world experince, his lack of desire to exist in the real world is what causes him to make these decisions. No executive would make a decission without first understanding the situation he was entering. Yes it might take a long time to get that money out, but isn’t taking a long time and making a good investment better than rushing, and wasting $529 million dollars of someone elses money?
Progressive Watch 
So a company that got 2% of the loans of an alternative energy program approved by congress a year before obama was elected president outsourced some of it’s jobs to finland and this makes obama a bad president? Good logic.Obama is not god, he is not responsible for everything that ever happens in the world. He is not even responsible for everything that happens in his administration, any more than a CEO is automatically responsible for everything their employees do. You act as though he smirked and said “mwahahaha, only give out loans to companies that will outsource after they get them, mwahahaha!”
@agnophilo – Yes you are right he is not God, however, he is responsible for what goes on in his Administration. He appointed those people, he is repsonsible for their action. Does that mean he should be punished, not necessarly, but it does mean he needs to take action to remain ontop of what is going on in his administration. I am not saying that he intentionally lent them money knowing they are going to outsource, what I am saying is that one of his “gambles” as I believe he put it ended up costing the tax payers, you, me, and our children, 529 million dollars. He did not read into the situation enough, before he gave his approval to a loan. He saw the sales pitch and went with it. This comes from his lack of experince in the real world, he knows politics, how to give a firery speech, how to organize people around a cause, but what he doesn’t know is how to run a business, and as such he has no clue on which one to lend money too. Its not like this is the first time he has lent money to a company that the tax payers have had to eat. It will be interesting to see how he reacts to this situation, wether or not he accepts responsibility and changes direction or continues to push on trying to defend his “gambles”.
@obamawatch – Again you act as though obama personally signed the check. Yes he is responsible for what his appointed people do, but no administration is going to be without error, and this particular argument is not compelling. If you want to restructure future loans so that they are contingent on certain actions being done by their recipients like not laying people off for x amount of time or not sending jobs overseas for y amount of time then advocate that, but don’t pretend like obama is evil because 2% of a loan program dozens of people put together which wasn’t directly overseen by him may have partly not helped americans. If you loan 25 billion dollars to any set of companies some of those companies will waste money or go bankrupt or not pay the loans back on time or any number of things. If the worst you can say about his administration is that only 98% of the loans exclusively helped americans, that’s not so bad.People act like if the DMV fucks up their paperwork it’s obama’s fault. The reason conservatives single out stories like this instead of focusing on the broader policies that actually screwed up the economy is because they actively promoted most of them. Bill O’Reilly was on the daily show awhile ago and he was using a story about some government pencil-pusher who ordered food for a bunch of people and the muffins cost 16 dollars apiece, and he was citing that as why the budget isn’t balanced and he doesn’t want to pay higher taxes. Now while 16 dollar muffins is insane and that person should be reprimanded somehow, the real things that got us into this mess wasn’t civil servants stealing office supplies, it was trillion dollar wars, a trillion dollar prescription drug bill nobody even tried to pay for and various other massive spending increases accompanied by huge tax cuts and deregulating the banks which allowed them to do things that destabilized the economy. But at least about 80% of that was republican policy and the rest was bipartisan, so conservative pundits can’t talk about it without hurting their own party. So they single out anecdotal stories about relatively minor fuckups like a 16 dollar muffin or a fraction of 2% of one program’s money maybe being sent overseas which account for about one one hundredth of 1 percent of our problems even when you add them all up and campaign on that. In any country with a multi-trillion dollar budget you’re going to find corruption, misuse, waste etc, and in any system run by people you’re going to find mistakes and stupidity. If you want to argue that obama’s a bad president though, show me something he actually did himself, not just that government officials aren’t infallible. Because you can find this anecdotal stuff under any administration.The stuff people hated bush for were things he actually did himself with executive powers.
@agnophilo – You do realize that he is the man who said, Yes give them the money. He might not haved signed the check but he is the one who gave them the authority to do so.
@obamawatch – Those are opposite statements and you have no other comment?
Why is this blog numbered “609” and the previous one “606”? What happened to “607” and “608”?