I was out of pocket for the overnight hours. I’ll tell you about that later. In catching up, I find Bruce over at Q&O: [1]
When you hear either party denouncing “crony captialism” as an evil and something that government must not engage in, take it with a grain of salt. You remember this from Nancy Pelosi, parroting Barack Obama, I’m sure [2]:
She denounced AIG as “a ripoff situation” and unleashed a scathing attack on Wall Street financiers.
“All these sophisticated financial instruments that these ‘geniuses’ on Wall Street have come up with brought instability to our economy,” she said with disdain.
She denounced what she called “crony capitalism” — a phrase also used by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama in his statement on the AIG rescue.
But when it comes to the auto industry, now there’s a crony worth saving according to both Pelosi and Obama. It appears that there is “crony capitalism” and then there is “too big to fail (and unionized too)” crony capitalism.
Well, look, it doesn’t take much in the way of thought process to see what the cause of this is; Unions. Let me be clear, here:
Pelosi, along with many of the Congressional Democrats, is in the pocket of the UAW [3], being bought and paid for. As we have been saying for weeks now, this is not a bailout of the Big three… Democrats after all usually don’t care about American industry. Why should it be different now? Simple; If the Big Three fail, the UAW… a huge source of votes and money for Democrats, fails with it.
Pelosi will tell you, of course, that the difference in treatment is because she’s trying to help the average workers, and not Wall Street millionaires. Of course she ignores that the working people she’s supposedly helping are going to be hit harder by a Wall Street failure than those millionaires are. Clearly, Pelosi and the Democrats figure UAW votes and money are by far more important than is your 401k and mine.
Mind, I’m not happy about ANYONE being bailed out by the federal government. But the difference in treatment by the Democrats one case to another is instructive as to their intentions. Wall Street types tend not to vote for Democrats. Union types do. Do the math.