Puzzled by politics these days? No need to be. Just follow the wink-winks and the click-clicks, and keep in mind that modern politics is a legalized con game in which politicians and bureaucrats are the scammers and we taxpayers are the marks.
Click-clicks are heard more frequently these days, especially if you drive in the District of Columbia or Maryland, thanks to the red light and speed cameras that are proliferating like rabbits because politicians smell easy cash to be had.
These cameras automatically photograph vehicles running red lights or exceeding speed limits, then issue tickets to the owners. Guilt is presumed, not because the owners were actually driving, but because their names are on official vehicle registration records, making them more easily intimidated.
Advocates claim cameras make our streets safer with minimal inconvenience. You don’t get points, so it doesn’t hurt your driving record, and, besides, if you aren’t breaking the law, what’s to worry, right?
In fact, all these cameras do is generate revenue for the companies that make them – an estimated $5,000 per month per camera – and for the politicians who plant them beside the road in return for a big cut of the surging revenues.
Once in a while, a politician inadvertently reveals the scam, as Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett did recently when he was challenged to admit his county is getting more cameras because it needs the money.
“No … we wouldn’t do that,” said a grinning Leggett in his best mocking tone of shocked innocence. There’s your wink-wink.
Such scamming is particularly widespread at the national level, though, because trillions more tax dollars are involved and only the cream-of-the-crop professional scam artists make it to the nation’s capital.
Take Barack Obama’s Sunday firing of GM’s now former-CEO, Rick Wagoner. Wink-winks were flying on that one. Click-clicks, too, like the heavy executive- suite doors closing behind Wagoner as he left GM’s once-mighty Glass House in Detroit.
Obama delivered the biggest wink-wink Monday, declaring: “We cannot, we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. What we are asking is difficult. It will require hard choices by companies. It will require unions and workers who have already made painful concessions to make even more. It will require creditors to recognize that they cannot hold out for the prospect of endless government bailouts.”
That’s truly a world-class wink-wink because everybody who knows anything about politics and cars knows Wagoner’s execution was all for show. Lots of smart people believe that not even the United Auto Workers (UAW) union removing the boot it has had on GM’s neck for decades could save the company now.
Firing UAW president Ron Gettelfinger, however, is another matter entirely. He and his faux blue collar colleagues guiding the UAW doomed GM’s promising efforts to compete effectively against Toyota and Honda by cutting production costs, improving assembly quality and freeing ultimate car guy Bob Lutz to revamp the product line, beginning in 2001.
Sadly, GM’s fate was sealed when Gettelfinger boasted that the 2007 labor pact delivered “more than $13,000 in economic gains for a typical UAW member, including a $3,000 signing bonus, two three percent lump sums and a four percent lump sum.”
Plus, GM had to keep funding the UAW’s gold-plated pensions and health care benefits for active workers and retirees. Thus, GM was already crippled when the economic crisis struck last year and auto sales tumbled.
But Gettelfinger’s job is safe because the unions own Obama, and nobody believes he has the political cojones to tell the UAW the con game is over. That’s why Obama’s tough-sounding rhetoric about concessions from management and labor were the ultimate wink-wink.
By the way, did you know Great Britain once had a thriving, technologically sophisticated auto industry? Then the politicians and unions fixed it. It’s déjà vu all over again, folks, and that’s no wink-wink.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
