This'n'That; July Eleventh [SinkingShip]

Rats Leaving 'Sinking' Ship-Of-State!
[General Electric]
Jeff Immelt, General Electric's CEO, formerly one of the "Clown Prince's" most ardent supporters and largest contributors to the 'Campaign of Fluff' has recently changed his tune!!  Speaking in Rome at a gathering of Italian businessmen, Mr Immelt's comments:

• He warned that the world’s largest manufacturing company was contemplating better prospects elsewhere in resource-rich countries and that those nations did not want to be “colonised” by Chinese investors.
• “ We [the USA] are a pathetic exporter… we have to become an industrial powerhouse again but you don’t do this when government and entrepreneurs are not in synch.”

Mr. Immelt also had harsh words for U.S. President Barack Obama, lamenting what he called a “terrible” national mood and expressing concern that over-regulation in response to the global financial crisis would damp a “tepid” U.S. economic recovery.

• Business did not like the U.S. president, and the president did not like business, he said, making a point of praising Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, for her defence of German industry.
• “People are in a really bad mood [in the U.S.],” the 54-year-old executive told an audience of somewhat surprised Europeans who had seen higher levels of U.S. growth as a beacon of recovery.
• Mentioning a meeting with Jean-Claude Trichet, he said the president of the European Central Bank “worries about inflation everyday”, in contrast to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who will keep interest rates “at zero” as long as necessary.

Coming off one of the most challenging years in GE’s long history, Mr. Immelt voiced many “worries” on his mind, including the prospect of persistent low growth in Europe and listing Greece, Spain and Ireland for their “volatility”.

• “They don’t all want to be colonized by the Chinese. They want to develop themselves.”
• Mr. Immelt acknowledged the importance of the Chinese market, which contributed $5.3-billion to the group’s revenues last year, but declared that GE was encountering its toughest business conditions there in 25 years.
• “China and India remain important for GE but I am thinking about what is next,” he said, mentioning what he called “most interesting resource-rich countries” in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America plus Indonesia.

Speaking about GE Capital, its finance arm that generates about half of total group revenues, Mr. Immelt said some kind of global homogenization of banking regulation was inevitable, adding: “It is impossible for countries to like growth and hate banks.”   Having taken over GE just four days before al-Qaeda’s strike against the U.S. in September 2001, Mr. Immelt was also worried about what he called “tail events”. He mentioned the 9-11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in 2005, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and, finally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster.   “How do you run a company when a one in a million chance can happen?” he concluded.
[Verizon]
[Verizon was the single largest contributor to obama's "Campaign of Fluff," and now they're pissed?!?!  Didn't they realize what they were 'buying??'  In all fairness, it's certain that George Soros and the 'obama Handler Group' weren't mentioned.]
    Corporate chieftains complain that the Obama administration is anti-business and is crushing free enterprise with the heavy hand of government. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses,” said Ivan Seidenberg, the chairman of New York-based Verizon Communications, speaking for the Business Roundtable, a group that represents corporate chief executives.
    When business leaders complain about the occasional populist rhetoric, the White House reminds them of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched broadsides against “money changers,” or John F. Kennedy, who, after the steel industry raised prices in 1962, said: “I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country, and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.”

After Mr. Seidenberg’s broadside, the "Clown Prince" had the director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, complain to him. One of the White House rejoinders is that none of the administration’s top economic advisers — Mr. Summers; the secretary of Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner; or the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel — is anti-business or a liberal ideologue.

     There also is a healthy dose of hypocrisy. Mr. Seidenberg complained about huge budget deficits and, at the same time, advocated corporate tax cuts that would add billions to the shortfall.  The U.S. corporate tax rate is the second-highest among major industrial countries, the Verizon chief executive noted.

Last year, a sophisticated Wall Street leader privately complained about anti-banking demagoguery in Washington; he exempted the president, though he said Mr. obama should rein in obamacRATic lawmakers the way Lyndon B. Johnson did. That is a misreading of history as well as of contemporary politics.

    Among Mr. Seidenberg’s other complaints was the provision in the financial regulation bill on proxy voting for corporate boards that he said goes “a step too far.” This would allow stockholders who meet a high threshold to offer candidates for the board for a shareholder vote. Currently, some directors get their posts with as little as one-third of the shareholder votes.
    More than a few nonpartisan business leaders have reservations about the health care and financial regulation initiatives without the exaggerated charges. There’s a solid business case to be made against the administration for dragging its feet on trade, tempered only by the recent embrace of the pact with South Korea.
    Moreover, this is the first administration in memory not to have a corporate chief executive in its senior ranks: Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers notwithstanding, that sends a message. With Mr. Obama’s initial economic team breaking up, there ought to be a substantive spot for an articulate, credible chief executive, like the former Xerox chairwoman, Anne Mulcahy.  The administration’s economic message, to business and others, remains muddled. Some prominent Democratic business leaders believe the president is privately disdainful of the business community.
    The fiscal crisis offers an opportunity. The Business Roundtable has promised “constructive suggestions” about the need for deficit reduction and overhaul of ALL entitlement programs.

And there are important signals the president should be sending or changing. In appearances before the Business Roundtable, he gave canned speeches and then declined to take questions. Business leaders resent that, and they have a point.

It's about the Aspen Ideas Festival at the Aspen Institute. It's out there in Aspen and it's run by Walter Isaacson who used to be at TIME Magazine and then he went to CNN. It's interesting that this thing goes on at the same time a bunch of media moguls are gathering in Sun Valley at a media summit held annually by Herbie Allen of Allen & Company.

   Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News and US News & World Report, real estate baron and billionaire in his own right, said:

"The real problem we have,  are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country."

This is Mort Zuckerman speaking to a cavalcade of liberal Democrats, Harvard professors at the Aspen Institute.  Now, how is what Mort Zuckerman said there any different than us saying we have a regime governing against the will of the American people?  obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, and his departing budget director, Peter Orszag," are going to show up at this thing later in the week.

Lloyd Grove says they "can expect heavy weather when they land in Aspen later this week to make their case to this civic-minded clique of wealthy skeptics. 'If you're asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I'd say it's actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we've already experienced in Western Europe,' Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday's kickoff session, offering a withering critique of obama's economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness."

"The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they'll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time. Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy."

Both Ferguson and Zuckerman lambasted Obama's trillion-dollar deficit spending program -- in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown -- as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power. Mr Zuckerman also said:

• 'We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,"
• "The real problem we have ... are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country."
•  Zuckerman added that he detects in the obama White House "hostility to the very kinds of (business) culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.'"

 The damage that's being done to this country purposely, and that we have to come to grips with it -- finally, they're saying it.

[FUBO and "Don't Tread...." images from www.FUBOwear.com]
Til Nex'Time.... obama's policies are encouraging laziness. The Harvard business and history professor continued: